Asklemmy

2016 US elections was a ridiculously sobering moment for realizing that we had not progressed nearly to the extent that I nievely thought.

COVID-19. People simply refused to do the absolute minimum to stop the spread of the virus. At least in my community, everyone was still socializing with friends and family (without a mask, of course), going out to eat, taking part in recreational activities with other people. Something as simple as "stay away from other people until we get this under control" was too hard for the American public. It certain changed my view of the people around me.

I mean this is a pretty big one for most people, but march 2020 COVID lockdowns. My family and I were bunkered down like the family in the movie Signs, just trying to figure out what was going on and keeping each other safe.

The 2008 bank bailouts. Watching our government spend nearly a trillion dollars to bail out some unelected bankers who made some bad decisions and were "too big to fail (true)". Watching them spend that money on bonuses for their execs, while none of them went to jail. Watching the social response to that (occupy) and then watching a coordinated federal crackdown of those protests across the country. And then watching bailouts happen again and again since then. Meanwhile in Iceland, they overthrew their government over it. The global financial system has deeply rooted flaws, and bailouts are an inevitability in it. We will inevitably, every so often, make another huge wealth transfer like that because so longs as lending exists, particularly private lending, and all banks are interconnected so that if one fails they all fail, there will always be bank runs and bailouts. Even the most well-intentioned bank cannot hedge against all risks and market shocks. And the government will just turn on the money printer every time it happens while you watch your hard-earned money lose its value.

Covid. I used to think people were basically good and caring, trying to do the right thing. I also used to think that everyone besides me was better at dealing with stress.

Turned out my life really is so bad that a global pandemic actually reduced my stress level. And when other people are stressed, they use that as an excuse to treat everyone else abominably. People are fundamentally selfish and self-centered. Kindness is at best a veneer for the vast majority.

I might not have been a raging, bleeding-heart, anti-capitalist liberal had Trump not gotten elected in November 2016. Until then I might have considered myself apolitical with no strong political ambitions. Seeing the post-election riots/protests opened up the world to me, his election wasn't a stupid joke but an injustice on all the people Trump essentially campaigned on fucking over.

Another crazy moment was the second time I got high on weed. I was super panicked at first, but when I went to bed, all of a sudden abstract art made sense to me as I had visions and felt a connection to their work even if I didn't know their name. That high had residual effects the next day and I had felt changed somehow.

GWB publicly condoning torture.

I grew up during the tail end of the cold war. Torture was something the Soviets did. We were better than that.

And sure, I knew the CIA did stuff like that under the table, but it was never OK.

It's what got me interested in politics, and why I feel that we shouldn't try to hide the bad things we've done when we teach history. Knowing what we're capable of is necessary to keep ourselves from repeating the mistakes of the past.

Snowden file leaks lead me down the path to privacy and to reading books like Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky. Lead me down the path to degoogling and linux and now decentralized services like Lemmy.

It seems like every week some article comes out with big tech abusing their rights. This week was Philips hue and last week or so it was a mom getting 2 years in jail because Facebook gave up information about her giving abortion pills to her daughter.

I am using all these foss services myself and making my friends and family use them and be aware of these events. It's a slow car crash and if people are apathetic and say "I have nothing to hide" and eventually "I have nothing to say", soon we'll be stripped of more rights until it's too late.

• 9/11
• Bush v Gore
• GWB re-election (despite war, recession, etc.)
• Trump election
• COVID

All chipped away at notions of stability, fairness, and sanity.

Still have hope, but tend not to believe the hype so much.

I'll throw one out for COVID, but not just the lockdowns or the immediate work changes. It was more about how the deaths kept happening. And happening. And happening. Yet people still failed to take it seriously, even to the point of rebelling against seemingly common-sense safeguards like vaccines, masking, and staying the fuck home.

In the US, we lived through about 4 years of shenanigans and bullshit and lies from an incompetent federal government leading up to the pandemic. But surely that wouldn't fly for long. You can lie about the number of people at a rally (because who the fuck cares), you can apparently lie about where a hurricane is projected to go (because it's jUsT a PrOjEcTiOn or something), but surely you can't bullshit your way out of a pandemic. Hospitals at capacity. Bodies piling up. Loved ones lost. Visible, real, tangible impacts of poor leadership and poor decisionmaking.

But, turns out you can. Even in the most dire of circumstances, you can still convince people that reality isn't real. Or even if it is, it doesn't really matter and it's not their problem. And there are enough people out there who will buy into that message that it will ruin things for everyone else.

Edit: To the original point of the question... I guess I had a little more faith in humanity before all that happened. More faith that real-world consequences would win out against rhetorical bullshit and tribalism.

Being treated for cancer in hospital (in remission now, thank you) during COVID lockdowns gave me lots of time to reflect on my life. Realised that probably I was the asshole all these years; and also came to the realisation that I’m autistic and socially awkward. Reading David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs helped me to understand all the corporate games and garbage that I’d been part of for most of my career.

When I think about my life, it’s divided into pre-cancer diagnosis, selfish workaholic and part of corporate life; and post-cancer remission, unemployed, living off my savings, kinder to the people and the world, but unable to find a job that resonates with the new me.

For me it was when I was watching Soul with some friends and eventually came to some emotional realizations. I realized that I only had a superficial understanding of how to communicate. I could discuss ideas in the abstract, but I had trouble with expressing myself emotionally and personally because I was always conditioned to repress how I feel. I guess like 22 in the movie I only saw myself as a casual observer. It took a couple rewatches for me to process the difficult emotions I was feeling into something I could explain but when I did it really helped my overall mental outlook on life.

Trump ~~winning~~ getting carried by the EVs made me a bitter, jaded, hopeless husk. I lost faith in the republic, in america, in people, in common sense...

I don't know if I ever truly recovered.

Come to think of it, i've lived through at least two instances where the direct opposition of the public's will have lead to death, suffering, and the collapse of represenative democracy: Bush v Gore, and the Trump Presidency. Odd how that's a common trend.

The left wing party of Australian federal politics decided that treating refugees inhumanly was acceptable.

That moment changed how I view politics and how I view people. It made me realise just how irrelevant empathy for others was in most public and political discourse. It made me more cynical about "the system", changed the way I voted, and transformed the face of my own advocacy to put empathy for others at the forefront.

Not how I view the world, but how I view USA and "citizens of the free world".

In 2016 my girlfriend and I visited New York - for me, first time visiting USA. I had a co-worker who lived in USA for most of her childhood, so I asked her if she had some advice for me to get along with people I met on my way.

"Never underestimate the stupidity of Americans".

I thought that to be rude as I had "talked" with many Americans on Reddit and sure, there were idiots, but that didn't define a person from USA for me.

We arrived in New York and took a cab to the hotel. The driver asked us "So, is Donald Trump making headlines in Europe?" (This was during the 2016 election).

I laughed and told him "Yeah, can you believe people will vote on such a moron"...

Oh no I didn't... He was furious, as Donald Trump was the Saviour of USA and he was singlehandedly going to "clean up the swamp" or whatever his catchphrase was.. and then he said one of the stupidest things I have ever heard.

"90% of Muslims are terrorists and if you don't kill them, they will kill you"..

I know not all Americans are this dumb, but I learned my lesson.... Never underestimate the stupidity of Americans.

COVID. Really never understood before how little of a shit the U.S. government has for its people. But they straight up let us fucking die while telling teenagers they needed to get back to work for minimum wage so they could get their shit Mcdildos and mochafuckaccinos and add gold spinning rims to their yachts. I can't wait until these old fucks start dying off, I don't care what political leanings they claim to have, we need a fuckin overhaul.

Losing everything. My family wasn't rich but it was well off, and in my young stupidity I thought we deserved to live better than others did because we worked hard (had a family business).
Turns out hard work means almost jack shit. I mean, I'm good now because I have very marketable skills and I do work hard at a job not many want to do, but it takes me around the world and I can tell you, fucking everything in life depends on luck, starting from where you are born.

I dropped everything in my twenties to look after a dying family member.

Thought my family would support me when all was said and done. I left a very promising career to do this.

Everyone just kind of went their seperate ways and I almost ended up homeless. While my dad immediately found another woman, took all his money and fucked off.

I'm just starting to recover almost a decade later.

I'm kind these days, I think. But I'm not nice.

The whole "the world will end in 2012" hysteria back then. It was my first glimpse into conspiracy theories, which I've spent a lot of time learning about ever since. It made me realize that nothing is ever too idiotic to not have an alarming number of people fall for it. It's why I wasn't surprised by the rise of the Q-movement or the resistance against the absolute bare minimum of COVID measures because of microchips in vaccines etc. All of that were just yet additional "of course people believe that shit"-moments for me.

Like Tommy Lee Jones said in Men in Black "A person is smart - people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals."

I haven't been surprised by how stupid people can be in a long time.

In retrospect, was probably the Battle of Seattle in 1999. Not that I wasn't aware of the issues before, but that really ripped off the mask to show me that the U.S. is fundamentally rotten at its core: The police are not the good guys, they don't serve and protect, they are there to visit violence on the enemies of capital. And if innocent people in their homes or going to work get caught up and harmed, fuck 'em, they're not wealthy enough to matter. The media will flat-out lie to maintain the good-cops-vs.-evil-protesters narrative. Our leaders will eagerly sell out American citizens to the interests of global capital, with only lip service to democratic traditions. And Americans are too disengaged to really question any of it.

For me, it provided the keys to understanding the events since, from Bush v. Gore to today. At least now the rot has become so obvious that the younger generations are forced to notice.

For me, it wasn't a global event, but a personal one. I had a conversation on reddit with a Texan piano teacher who had the fantasy of murdering and eating people. Her view was that if it was OK to kill any sentient beings, as there was no legitimate reason to draw a line between farmed animals and people. She argued her point well, and I couldn't come up with a counterargument that didn't also imply we shouldn't eat animals.

It was a bizzare conversation, but it made me really reconsider my personal morals, and totally changed the path of my life.

For me it was an array of events.

The war in Afghanistan (I was a kid but this was one of the tipping points that sent me down a hard leftist path).

GWB… just collectively. Freezing when told the towers were hit; lying about WMDs so he could start an illegal war.

Watching Obama get elected and then turning out to be a fucking fraud that built the drone program and carried on the US legacy of being the worldwide terrorist organization.

A big one though was watching the police continue to terrorize the Black community over and over. Years ago on Facebook I had a couple of old high school friends that argued with me that you should do whatever a cop tells you. My response was to tell them how utterly fucking idiotic that was and that cops will violate your rights if it means they don’t have to do any paperwork. They’ll illegally search your vehicle (like they did mine one time), harass you (like they did to my friends and I when we were skateboarding), and if you’re Black, they’ll shoot you in the back if you run.

Needless to say, I am not friends with either of them anymore. I think that’s when I really started to solidify who I was and have rejected absolutely everything that America is and does on the world stage. I’ve become known as the white guy that hates cops. I’ve worked with Black revolutionary groups, activist groups, written articles and tons of thoughts on police violence in America, and have marched against the police on multiple occasions. Hell, the police have surveilled me for who knows how long a few years ago, and I know people that have been under surveillance by the FBI. As an aside, you’d be amazed at the lengths this country will go to to keep eyes on peace activists.

Everything America does as a collective has brought me to the conclusion that we are in a failed state, capitalism-in-decay freefall that I’m afraid we will never recover from. We no longer innovate; we continue to loot other countries; we are all a captive audience hitched to whatever whims the capitalists and other ghouls want.

I’ve been laid off, had companies fuck me over for money and control, harassed by cops (all the way back to when I was 15 in the 90s), tracked by my own government for having a voice… there is nothing anyone can say that will convince me that the United States isn’t the enemy of the world and it’s citizens are nothing more than a disposable capitalist resource.

I hate to be a downer but my view of this country is a product of what it has done to both its own people and people around the world. I feel like a prisoner in the US.

Once computers went online. It was fascinating to experience in real time.

I think the closest is when i discovered Not Just Bikes, that unlocked the whole "people are affected by how their environment is designed" thing in my brain and since then i've just kept on down that road and now i'm a turbosocialist who thinks 95% of cars should be immediately scrapped.

2016 elections and then covid. Now nazis rising to power again.

Losing my best friend / business partner. He died in March. A lot of things stopped making sense after that.

Tripping too hard on mushrooms. I realized that the mind is powerful, and under the right conditions, can show you and make you believe that reality is absolutely anything. And I mean anything. You could be anywhere, anyone, become an inanimate object, have your world become pure geometry and sensation, completely lose sense of the scale and passage of time. There are almost no limits.

I got glasses. That definitely changed the way I saw things. Everything suddenly became more focused.

Witnessing a downtown metro area go dead silent, years of ecological damage reversed and folding at home accidentally out computing the world's fastest supercomputer in the first 2 weeks of 2020 lock downs and all it took was giving 10 days PTO to all non-essential workers (I was essential btw but yes I'll fucking survive Starbucks being closed one fortnight a year)

Surely, people will see this as worthwhile and positive tradition and we'll collectively decide to avoid commuting for 2 weeks every March; taking PTO if offered or job hopping at the new market rate created if not, right... Right...?

2016 Brexit referendum -> Turkish coup-> trump presidential win

It reinforced all my feelings about what was important in this world and simultaneously made very clear we are actually living in an age of sliding back, not of Progress. I was already very interested in politics by that point but with just about the knowledge to grab the weight but no proper explanation this summer half of 2016 felt like falling into chaos and uncertainty 3 times. In retrospect the outer two likely had much more influence on my life thereafter, but the middle one was the more jarring to watch unfold at the time.

9/11.

I didn’t think much about the dangers of religion and “faith” in general until then.

2020 george floyd protests

even during protests about police brutality they did even more police brutality

it's never going to stop. the system has too many meaningless pressure valves that they've convinced people are actually valuable [writing a letter to a local official, voting (depending what state), clever chants during protests, etc]