AMUSING, INTERESTING, OUTRAGEOUS, or PROFOUND

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.