AMUSING, INTERESTING, OUTRAGEOUS, or PROFOUND
This is a page for anything that's amusing, interesting, outrageous, or profound.
♦ ♦ ♦
RULES
① Each player gets six cards, except the player on the dealer's right, who gets seven.
② Posts, comments, and participants must be amusing, interesting, outrageous, or profound.
③ This page uses Reverse Lemmy-Points™, or 'bad karma'. Please downvote all posts and comments.
④ Posts, comments, and participants that are not amusing, interesting, outrageous, or profound will be removed.
⑤ This is a non-smoking page. If you must smoke, please click away and come back later.
Please also abide by the instance rules.
♦ ♦ ♦
Can't get enough? Visit my blog.
♦ ♦ ♦
Please consider donating to Lemmy and Lemmy.World.
$5 a month is all they ask — an absurdly low price for a Lemmyverse of news, education, entertainment, and silly memes.
view the rest of the comments
I fear the long term damage to the US will be irreparable. I'm amazed at how many people don't see it.
No empire lasts forever. Usually, it gets soft and rotten in the center while the edges are still strong. Without any reduction in military or economic dominance, the center collapses and hollows out, some precipitating event throws the festering weakness into harsh undeniable relief, and the members of a long list of external enemies start to pick off chunks from the edges, like crabs feeding on a carcass.
America is so different from every other empire that it's hard to say exactly how it will play out. But that's the normal pattern, and we seem to be following it pretty well so far.
I've noticed a couple of videos on my YouTube feed by historians discussing this topic and a couple making the case for this being the begining of the end for the US. I guess it's just human nature and we can help ourselves.
Yeah. I think Trump 1 was the real beginning of the end. Clinton and Obama upheld the empire fine, and even under Bush 2, yeah he was a hell of a dope, but there was no question at all that if you fucked with us something really bad would happen to you. Biden kind of kept it going and actually had some really good intentions, but he wasn't mean enough to do what really needed to be done. It is a heartbreaking fact of American politics that the people who have any amount of good nature in their personality simply don't do that well. Maybe the people who are telling me about Reagan setting Israel straight with a weapons pause when Biden wouldn't do it kind of have a point.
So anyway, now you can shell American troops in Irbil and Al Asad, you can fuck up our elections, you can hack our phone systems or have the NRA bribe our politicians on a nationwide scale, and nothing will happen to you. Our president just shuffles around shitting his pants and clearly has dementia, you can't trust us to get basic stuff right. You can't cooperate with our intelligence agencies or you might get exposed and killed, or if you're another state agency, our president might tweet your secrets. We can't keep any of our software systems secure against you, and we don't attempt to retaliate even if we do catch you breaking into them. We don't bother to do public health, there's a deadly pandemic loose like wildfire in our farm animals and we simply don't care and are waiting for it to figure out humans. You can't come here on a visa and help us maintain our educational and technological edge, or you might get randomly attacked or deported. We're not going to have any world-leading scientific agencies, once Trump is done with them. The face of war is changing, into drones and cyberwarfare and sabotage and propaganda, and we're not even trying to keep up. There's almost no sector of our world-leading success that won't be either destroyed or severely damaged by the next few years, and a lot of them are pretty damaged already.
We're not special. It just feels that way because we've been riding on a hundred years of equal parts hard work and oppression by proxy. We're just a big juicy cruise-ship filled with money and land at this point, floating between the Atlantic and Pacific, with the captain drunk off his ass and open for anyone to come on board and rob us and toss the passengers into the water for fun, if they feel like it, and then speed away after the captain has a little tea ceremony with them. Even our theoretical military dominance right now is largely based on alliances, and those can all evaporate literally in a week with the right kind of geopolitical fuck-up.
Dude, I have to get the fuck out of here. What am I doing? I thought about trying to get a job in the UK or something, when Trump won, but I haven't acted on it or anything. I've just kind of been going on autopilot. The scale of it just kind of hit me all at once as I was typing this out though. I'm sort of torn between "stay and fight for real, this is my home" and "get the fuck out, fuck these people" but either way I think this is maybe going to be really bad. Way worse than anyone's really envisioning in their mind right now.
Don’t fight for the American empire, fight for your local community.
Well said, and depressing as fuck.
I have enough gumption to fight to the death against one random idiot, but not against so many, so mean and stupid. In the Reagan and then Bush2 era, I remember thinking their stupidity was sort of a saving grace, like, we'd be in real trouble if they weren't so stupid.
Turns out stupid is the secret weapon.
The beginning of the end was 2016. This is the continuation of the rot.
America had a single chance to change course, and threw it away for a charlatan
Honestly you could see this coming in 1980. Even as a kid, just seeing Reagan, it was immediately obvious he was evil. Also the overall response to stagflation, tax changes, and the Dems were stupidly corrupt at the time.
Taken as a whole, the shift of the religious right coming in, while the currency and regulatory set up collapsed. It very much looked like the beginning of the end.
Reagan may have been a low point but we had an upward trend going. The Bushes were never as far right, and well counteracted by Clinton, Obama, and yes, Biden. There were rising stars for a better future, The Squad, Pete Buttigieg, etc. we were getting the payoffs from investments in efficiency, cleaner energy, building a new EV industry, a new Space industry, pandemic preparedness and public health, the hope of continued medical care reform. Acela was a game changer, cities finally started to build transit, and it finally seemed like high speed rail was coming. Society had never been more accepting of all sorts of non-traditional people. By so many measures our environment was getting cleaner, our health and nutrition getting better, we were kicking cigarettes after a long struggle, etc. we were a healthy influence on the world improving, acting together (ok, the Iraq thing is debatable)
https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/jy1708-Figure1.png
Yeah, I'm not seeing that upward trend. And there's a thousand other similar charts with various measures. The left has at best slowed our downfall for the past 50 years. There's never been an actual improvement. This is why there's decades and decades of Bernie videos warning us how a public policy is going to hurt the public, and then we do it anyway. It's not like Bernie is some oracle, it's just really damn obvious where we're screwing up.
It can be fixed. We started this place with owning people and you only vote with a white penis. I'm worried that we'll give the next generation less than what I or my parents had.
I have two kids in college now. Helping them grow up has been a fantastic experience and totally changed the way I look at the world. I definitely grew more hopeful, more progressive, more optimistic about the long term prospects of the world they would inherit.
Trumps first term was quite a shock, especially discovering there were so many toxic people seeming to want to wreck all of our future. And somehow it happened again?
One of my kids is “non-traditional “, now they’re talking about being afraid to travel in most of the US. How did all that “Hope and Change” come crashing down so fast?
Was it ever there?
Sundown Towns. Ugly Laws. Banana Republics. I’m sure if you asked any minority group, they’d show you a very different America.
There are two versions of the US: the one sold to immigrants on the Statue of Liberty, and the one that’s really there. White folk were just privileged enough with such a system that we never saw it, or if we did we looked the other way.
Maybe, but there’s clearly a huge difference among regions/states/cities, and we always have the hope of everyone acting like the best places rather than the worst