I still remember listening to Blackstar when I heard he passed. There was something so weird and ethereal about that moment I tend to agree thats when things went from bad to shit.
Basically at long as taco is in the office it will be miserable.
The bad things is that in first term there was that there were still competent people around him. This time he fired everyone and replaced with lackeys. Unless he is stopped, US might not recover from it.
Just looking at the recent meeting in Bejing shows how quickly USA is losing its power. And it's been only 7 months.
It was kind of a meme that 2016 sucked. Then Trump got elected at the end and everything magically got better for everyone and we all lived happily ever after.
It was 2014. That was the final year of that Obama high where things really felt like they were turning a corner before we were slowly confronted with a world where Donald Trump might actually be president, and the only one standing in his way was somehow Hillary Clinton, a woman that Republicans had been preparing to beat for literally 20 years.
This is actually the right answer. Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, and we're all still in the middle of what is essentially a no-declared-sides WWIII now. 2015 was good, but things had shifted in the world a bit. Countering China was starting to become a huge deal suddenly for the US, and China moved into the South China Sea and did some currency revaluation that was all aimed at their 2029 and 2049 CCP anniversary goals.
You may not have been paying close attention. Obama was astoundingly better than Trump, but invasive spying on citizens was allpwed to remain legal under his watch, and he extended what was allowed. Drone striking questionable targets started under him as well. There's more, but those two are the highlights usually brought up.
The worst the obama administration got was a typical couple of weeks of the Trump administration. It is so much worse now it's unthinkable it could have gotten this bad when looking from the perspective of 2015.
Trump is a unique magical monster. There isn't anyone else that can act the way he does. He has a personality disorder that cannot be copied by any average intelligent person. There isn't anyone else with near that type of wealth and social immaturity. No other adult has ever acted like he does that didn't have a mental disorder.
Others try to copy him but are easy to see through as they cannot bring themselves to act like he would. Ramaswamy tried but is just too mature and of normal intelligence. You need a child(with a disorder) in an adult body with 100% total and complete confidence in itself. A complete narcissist.
There has never been anyone like him before as anyone with his type of childlike behavior would have been dismissed.
An orphan with limited education became a successful military leader who spoke intelligently. About the opposite of Trump. Both are clearly evil yet one is childlike while the other is not.
if you want to bring up warcrimes, the world has never been normal, especially not the US, they've been up to some heinious shit since before we were born
I think in 2010 or so someone said that if you were US Marine and were involved in every single action that the USMC took part in, you would take part in around 2 events every year.
Trump did more drone strikes in his first term than Obama did in both his terms. And that is only of the strikes we know. At one point trump declared that strikes dont need to be reported and they didn't count the number of strikes afterward.
Biden actually fully ended drone strikes... and he did it quietly without much fanfare.
Right, Obama didn't snap his fingers and fix every problem in the world or country, but it really felt like we were finally getting to a point where we had a new liberal voting coalition which would start to push US politics left, so that we could finally unwind a lot of those underlying legacy issues.
Fixing the core issues which created this "obligate imperialism" in the first place were never going to be fixed in the span of one decade, but Obama arguably set us up to grind out more progress in the next administration.
That's why this whole thing is so frustrating. We were on the path to a supreme court majority and burying a lot of old school conservative ideas in the coming decades, and now we are farther away than ever, because so many people can't see the long game.
I think part of the issue is that after winning on the platform of "change", Democrats veered hard into "establishment status quo". They won so hard that most people don't even recall the few bad parts of the Obama presidency at all (the point of my last comment, that it wasn't all sunshine and roses), and then threw that lead in the trash.
They had a chance with Sanders, but threw away an absurd amount of public goodwill by very openly pushing him out of the running in favor of Clinton. That effectively left Trump as the only candidate carrying the "change" flag, and a lot of people were too dumb to see he was full of shit.
When Democrats had a chance again, they went with another "establishment safe" choice and only won with Biden due to an immense outcry against Trump. Then they lost again because they wouldn't platform someone people were willing to get out to vote for.
If we get out of this shitshow, I'll be very interested in what history says about the last few presidential races.
Steve Bannon gave birth to GamerGate through WoW guilds.
Insert small to large dominos meme where the small domino is some disheveled guy playing WoW at 3 AM talking about how women suck and the large one is Donald Trump recreating concentration camps, J6, or whatever dystopian bullshit else that has happened in the last few years.
The terrorists ended up winning the long game in the end. They caused America to tear itself apart from within and made it a pariah on the world stage.
9/11 also marks the end of western hegemony as the West destabilized the world and ruined its reputation as a force for good in its pursuit for revenge, leading to the rise of BRICS and other anti-imperial coalitions.
9/11 also coincides with peak imperialism, the final stage of capitalism, which marks the point when increasing exploitation abroad has diminishing returns so capitalists must begin devouring the imperial core, leading to stagflation, enshittification, rent-seeking, and other parasitic activities. This in turn leads to an economically struggling population of former petit-bourgeois, which is a class condition that is especially susceptible to reactionary propaganda, leading to the rise of fascism.
Historians will almost certainly mark 9/11 as the beginning of the end of the American Empire.
It says 2019 to trick the viewer into commenting "no 2012" or 2016, since no real human thinks everything was great until 2019. It's bait for interactions.
In a way it's fair to say that every moment changes every moment that happens after. The entire global economy is still reeling from Reaganomics ffs.
I lived through all these. 2001 and 2008 were horrible, but sort of felt like a normal kind of horrible. Recessions and terrorism were things I'd seen before. It was only the scale that made those anomalous.
From my (American) perspective 2016 was when shit started getting very weird. We were relatively stable, relatively prosperous, foreign wars were tapering off... And half the country decided that a game show host was her best bet going forward.
Then it started snowballing... Bill Cosby's a rapist, there's a global pandemic, Kanye put out a pro-Hitler song, Pete Davidson is a sex symbol that no starlet in Hollywood can resist, The secretary of health had his brain eaten by worms, everything you own or use became a subscription service, The fear Factor guy became a political king maker, The first lady has a crypto scam that everyone's kind of okay with, we created AI but it's only good for spam and rule 34 tweets, we decided political corruption isn't a crime if you brag about it, America's war machine is being turned on its cities... Oh and the US is building full on concentration camps.
It's a very strange time even compared to occupy, The tea party, or Bush riding out 9/11 Reading a children's book in an elementary school.
To me it was 9/11 that started the insanity.... Either way, if you look at movies from the 80s and movies from today, you clearly see the humanity lacking from todays movies.
Let’s be real- it was the US’s response to 9/11 that started the insanity. There was absolutely a way forward, but no- some shitheads gave the Americans a bloody nose and the US decided to try to stop the bleeding by stabbing itself in the heart for two decades while threatening anyone who pointed out that this was a bad idea.
Legit but let's be even more real. It's the US's imperial insanity that caused 911. That insanity has always been fundamental to USA from its founding.
Trump was president in 2019 and I remember him cutting massive amounts of food aid (means on wheels) for elderly people during Christmas time. It was some serious Scrooge shit, except he didn't get three ghosts to make him mend his ways.
The old people who run the world feel the weight of their impending deaths, but in their narcissism they have mistaken it for the oncoming end of the world.
In their mind the world will end with their deaths, so they are only doing what nature bids them to do. If they had it their way they would detonate every nuclear weapon in existence within a few seconds of their final demise to take everyone with them.
The real insanity stems from everybody having a random lingering covid symptom that's just annoying enough to drive you insane, but not bad enough to kill you. 5 years later, I still get phantom burning smells that I can't even compare to anything I've ever smelled before. It's torture.
It’s absolutely social media to blame imo. 10 years ago they were only just starting with the aggressive algorithms we know today. This combined with the rise of TikTok and its own algorithm has lead to a resurgence of the right. I believe this was a direct response to how progressive we seemed to be getting in the 2010s. The wealthy right were getting scared. I occasionally accidentally see YouTube “recommendations” and it’s usually unhinged right wing shit with millions of views.
I occasionally accidentally see YouTube “recommendations” and it’s usually unhinged right wing shit with millions of views.
As someone who regularly watches my youtube recs, I never see this. Maybe it's because youtube knows my preferences from watching their recommendations....
On the other hand youtube is definitely trash that promotes fascism. So I'm not doubting you either.
Oh yeah I’m never logged into an account; so I when I see it, I see what it’s pushing as trending and popular. These days I use Freetube and only see what’s “recommended” by accident when I occasionally use YouTube on my iPad.
When I used to use an account I also didn’t see any fascist shit either, so at least that’s a way to avoid it!
"I just got a great idea for a new novel! It's about the end of humanity, but with a twist, because the humans don't even know they are done for yet. They think it's just a bit more aggressive flu, but in fact it's highly contagious and each time you get it, it damages your brain a slight bit more. Everyone keeps getting infected and so they slowly get dumber and more aggressive until civilization collapses in wars and economic chaos."
"That's stupid, something like that could never happen."
The flu is one thing, all of the toxins we are exposed to from companies trying to save a buck is everywhere as well. This is like some 1984 shit we are heading right now. More dangerous chemicals than ever being allowed into our water, our air, and our food. The flu and the covids are just icing on the cake. And I think I have noticed people getting Dumber from the 90s. Not starting in 2020 starting before that.
"With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created."
We were saying this elsewhere, and someone posted a link claiming the real cause was like a week before Harrambe, a rat I think it was crawled into the Hadrian collider I think while on, in switzerland I think they are accelerating particles to study Physics bullshit, higgs boson something.
There was a theoretical possibility they could have started a chain reaction that would destroy the world they were saying when they were talking about building it fyi.
Anyway though this rat got in there when it was on and they are saying that through the timeline off, a week before harambe.
I am sorry to hear what happened to you. I hope you find out of your personal hell. Sometimes it's better for your health to distance a bit from social media and their doomer memes.
I'm sorry but it's been hell here on Earth since at least 2015. Your own legitimately terrible events were individual symptoms of the larger pestilence. Either that or a lot of us were already in hell before you got here.
I messed around with pills pretty bad back in 2012 and ended up with seratonin syndrome one night. Good things have happened since but nothing ever felt normal since then. Ive never talked to a doctor or psychologist about it (really anyone now that I think about it) but I swear my brain never recovered fully. Mix that in with some concussions a few years before from HS football and I feel like my brain is just broken. It might just been depression, but stuff seemed so much brighter before.
Sorry for my own rambling, but I wish you well and understand where you are coming from.
Its actually that between 1991 and 2001 that we merely had a full decade of relative stability in world events. Crazy shit stopped happening for a while and we have collectively imparted that things used to be "normal" on people born after 2001 but they've interpreted their own childhoods as the normal years.
I see this said about the 90s all the time but really this is not true. In the 90s there was (not an exhaustive list)
First Gulf War
Yugoslavia war
Rwandan Genocide
Oklahoma City Bombing
Columbine Massacre
Los Angeles Riots
The Fall Of USSR (while on one hand a good thing it also cause so much economic decline, hunger, and excess mortality in the millions to many former bloc countries)
Somalian War
US 1990 recession
1997 Asian Financial crisis
Dot com bubble
Hurricane Andrew
1999 İzmit earthquake
It's very common when asking any person what was the best period of time for the world for their response to be a period of time their formative years were.
The reality is history is full of horrid horrid things and nostalgia is a follie that'll trick your mind.
Yes, stuff still happened, but it was all mostly local scale in consequences or temporary blips. Conflicts, economic downturns, weather events can all be huge tragedies, but an entire super power cratered in on itself in '91 and splintered into smaller countries massively rewriting the political landscape. And in 2001, 9-11 happened and its arguably a starting point for a domino effect of terrible unhinged shit that followed that also had massive global political ramifications, arguably to this very day.
What? Any and all filters an intelligent species could encounter need to be factored in statistically, even if not all of those filters will 100% be encountered
Let's not forget the chaos and societal upset during the first term.
Edit: I guess it would actually 2015 as the last normal year. 2016 started with Harambe and ended with the far-right winning an election and a Nazi parade honoring trumps election.
Bruh we as Americans have such a short attention span/memory I stg.
His first term was "BUILD THE WALL", "CHECK THE BAFROOMS", "SHUT DOWN BASES IN EUROPE" and "NO MUSLIM IMMIGRANTS ALLOWED!!!!"
None of these ideas he's espousing are new, they're just more hateful and damaging. He just got slightly better at understanding politics/government, so now he's more dangerous/efficient.
Yeah, there was too much infighting and incompetence for him to do as much damage in the first term. His cabinet was dropping like flies the first term and we're almost 8 months in and nobody's been fired yet
I've always found it some form of narcissism or something that people always find some way to interpret something during their time as the most/best/worst whatever.
Kind of like how every election is always the most important election ever.
Or today is the most or least safe or all of these ridiculous things people suggest anecdotally. Your average person has little knowledge or context of history and just selfishly presumes, yes, NOW, this time, OUR time is the most crazy.
I'm well aware I'm thinking too much for a shitpost.
I watched a few documentaries on the 100 Years' War recently; I'm convinced we're still living out THAT trauma ... and that was just one crazy time out of many. It's one of the ways I cope with climate change and the degradation of the global environment: reminding myself that living in really fucked up times is more the norm than anything. I do believe that modern technology and the absolute privilege we live with has given many of us in the developed world the illusion that we're in control of the world. I have a suspicion that the awareness of how little we can do to stop the sheer randomness and brutality of life and human callousness is why religion has been so prevalent for most of history, it's people having some solidarity in, "Holy shit, this is fucked. God, save us, you're obviously our only hope."
Making the internet as easily accessible and dumbed down as possible didn't help. It let stupid people easily find each other and reinforce each other's beliefs while isolating themselves from reality.
2017-2021 was Trump, so I think it started earlier. Was it maybe more like US election season 2016 as the start of it? It's hard to pinpoint. But yes. The old US seems gone now-- Our government went from covertly corrupt to very openly so. We're becoming Russia, and its hard to imagine ever rolling it back to who we once were.
2000 is when Bush got elected and we openly courted the fringe, the uneducated, and religious right. Openly chose obstinacy and willful ignorance in an unqualified nepo-president who got the job because of daddy. 9/11 happened and the standard became selling shitty policy to Americans by labeling it something patriotic. The tax breaks came fast and hard, more unilateral decision making by the President. We can easily argue there were a lot of historic actions that led up to this from Gingrich to Nixon to Reagan, but Bush and the RNC are the one that really set things in motion to get us to trump. The Tea Partiers, Pailin, the official voice of the Right used openly to demonize the left and people like McConnell or Bohner actively sabotaging bipartisanship and undermining the presidency.
2005 was the best year: France had a hot and dry summer, so the grapes got a high concentration in sugars and tannins, which gave to most wines of that year an extreme deepness and complexity.
Oh, I miss 2005 so much.
It felt like maybe the 2nd Gulf War was starting to wind down a bit, and there was some hope that maybe both the US and Al-Qaeda/Islamic State were going to chill their boots a little.
The internet was at its peak in terms of usefulness versus not having been taken over and enshittified by a tiny collection of megacorporations.
The UK had just passed the Civil Partnership Act for same-sex couples, and a few other countries had something similar.
TV was getting pretty good as well.
Yeah, the 90s were still best, but 2005 was the best year since then.
1975 is the beginning of the end for the US Empire. The treasury spent on a dumb war in SE Asia, Reaganomics and his trickle down BS, Gulf War I & II (wasting more treasure). Krasnov, COVID and fucking Krasnov again.
1972 was the genesis, there was a business Round Table where the rich and Powerful companies agreed on a long game to overthrow democracy and undo the gains from the New Deal. They have since refined the game, and destroyed any organized opposition. Also obviously had worthless conservatives on their side take over the Democratic Party.
And that's my theory as to how Trump won a second term. A lot of people think that 2019 is the cutoff
Personally I think it was 2015 was the last normal year for the world and my life hasn't recovered from 2012. I'd actually say 2022-2024 were the most normal and stable years of my life. I got married, held a job, and built a community in a stable place.
2022-2024 were the most normal and stable years of my life.
Maybe stable for you, but the rest of the world wont leave your world alone. Defund and reallocate happened in those years. The genocide of Palestinians under a Dem president using your tax dollars started in 2023. And Ukraine was invaded in 2022.
People who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. The USA has been in a constant power struggle between monied interests and liberty since the founding days. The same party has been in control of China since before Mao was starving millions of people. A lot of european countries are literally still monarchies.
In a very real sense we do li:e in a fantasy world, where the pervasive oppositional disingenuous bullshit and disinformation have poisoned us, and we trust the shit we made up to process stuff as high level abstractions without necessarily tying them back to anything remotely near bare-metal material reality.
And tyen when people find exploits in tjose abstractions, there is no recourse, nothing to check them against.
Reality is happening, but we do not comprehend it.
Edit: if you want fiction about this, the book 'echopraxia' has this running through it, or the film 'eddington' which is entirely about this.
At this point, anything remotely near bare-metal material reality triggers such a cognitive dissonance in a lot of folks, on account of all of the bs they have in their heads, that all of that bare-metal material reality is discarded as too painful.
What we have now is capitalism, but it is other things as well. Some say late stage capitalism. It is a plutocracy. It is becoming even more of a kakistocracy, rule of the worst. It was borderline fascist and now becoming moreso.
We had capitalism in the 1950s through the 1970s, and we had a pretty prosperous society, for whatever faults the system had, anybody with a job could live a decent life, which is the overriding concern of everybody, not living in destitute poverty.
They have changed the way inflation is measured a number of times to understate it, and now we are compound fucked by 50 years.
Social Security checks would have been worth $1,200 more on average a month just in 2008 under the unchanged standard. We are getting robbed everyday by inflation and we believe the ivy league suits on TV that tell us our wages have never had more buying power.
The minimum wage applied to everybody outside of agricultural work. So the minorities that did not share in an exalted social status, still had enough money to live a dignified life.
I specifically addressed that so I would not have somebody discounting the lessons from the post-war era because not everything was perfect. It's not perfect now either by the way, so you can discount everything from today or any period in time with that logic.
We are being robbed and you are addressing some abstract concept, and not the means by which we have been robbed. Inflation is a real measured thing we could reset our wages and raises on. I think you are wrong headed on all of your points here.
Capital being valued over labor is not mutually exclusive with addressing us being robbed by dishonest numbers.
You act like a shitty unjust system of exploitation can ever be made just.
Like the abstractions youve been trained to hold dear are 'real' and not abstractions so many fucking degrees out. 'Money' and 'inflation' are fake. We made them the fuck up. Outside of systems designed to value them theyre entirely nonsense.
Yes we're being robbed, thats the nature of labor when ownership is valued above it! When accumulation and centralization is the fundamental incentive! The very system was designed to lie and exploit, yes, of course its doing that. Why do you tjink the fuckers lying to you and exploiting you love it so much?
You act like you can fix a bisection with a band-aid. Like you can fix something so thoroughly broken without fundamental systemic change.
Like, metaphor time: combustion engines are bad, but switching to electric cars powered by coal power plants isn't really better. You get that right? We need trains, ideally powered by overhead wire renewables, so we arent hauling 2-10 tons of vehicle around for every hundred pounds of human. And maybe more local production of heavy shit.
Like, you sre right. There is injustice. And im not, like, a fan of tjose things, but i think the system is much more fucked than you think it is.
You have no cause to accuse me of not seeing things like they are first of all.
Second of all you just refuted my own point while agreeing with me. You could have just added to my point, but you refused it and then expounded on the same subject.
The inflation rate is a real tangible thing people can understand, that shows how full of shit the system has been for our entire lives.
Its not about the money directly, it's about the alienation from things like labor and value, plus absolutely insane shit people need to believe to feel okay in it.
In 2010 they tried to create micro black holes, since this hat not worked the probability for extra dimensions is somewhat limited, at least that is what we believe.
But maybe something went wrong back in 2010.
This was going on under the surface all this time, growing and growing, people just did not see it as a valid concern thinking "crazy people" or "stupid people" will "come around eventually". They did not expect there'd be enough of them to pull the carriage backwards.
This isn't about America. The whole world was fucking nuts in 2020. We kicked it off by burning Australia to the ground and a few months later, we had so many world disasters, COVID in the forefront, that we forgot Australia.
This isnt a shitpost, this a fact. In 2020 everyone had little choice but to stay online, on social media, and got absolutely brain fucked by extreme opinions being forced on to them by whatever side the algorithms threw at them. Almost no one on line is in the middle, or if they are, they are very quiet. Everyone is extreme right or extreme left and they attach that to anything and everything. Music, movies, tv shows, comics, youtubers, etc etc etc.
I mean, for example, why cant any woman be allowed to voice her opinion on bathrooms without being called a nazi or woke? Why isnt this subject just a conversation? Why is at the forefront of seemingly everything? And why is being for or against linked to woke and nazi? Are why are we all seemingly OK with banning people from spaces just because they have a different opinion?
And have you noticed that any example used to shit on the left or right are utterly ridiculous extremes? Or the sex wars, they are huge right now. Self professed alpha males morons looking for virgins that will cook and clean vs onlyfans whores who wont stop being gang banged in public toilets for anything less than 6ft3, 6 figure incomes, and 6 pack abs. These people are all insane, but for some reason they keep getting pushed as the average or the majority of people dating. All women are misandrist, all men are misogynist, and theres extreme fuckwit doing fuck wit things on a youtube video to prove it...
Dont like Star Wars these days, chaps? No, you see, its not cos its shit. Its cos youre racist and sexist, dont you know? You need to cut that shit out, and watch the masterpieces coming out of disney+ right now!!!!
Scared to walk home alone at night? Well, thats because theres men on every corner waiting to rape you... Dont think all men should have a curfew? I mean, Sally met that one guy who turned out to be into playing warhammer on Saturday nights with his friends. Its basically the same rape...
Extremism in everything, and theres an easily clickable buzzword for anyone that you dont like, so that others rally to your cause.
The whole fracking world needs to drink a nice big tall glass of calm the fuck down.
A little bet.ter all the time (can't get noo worse)🎶
I've seen this argument so many time... It's not going downhill, we are just getting older, we understand the problems of the world better, we are more informed, we watch the news and we start to have that nostalgia feeling that it was better before. It was not ! The world is getting better for so many metrics, sure there are issues, there always has been, it's not perfect. Sure there are localized places where it's temporarily getting worse ( the US might currently be living through a rough time, but it will pass).
Overall, it's getting better all the time. We are currently living the best time in history so far. Millions of new stuff to discover, infinite access to the cumulated knowledge of mankind. More democratic country than ever, famine is getting down overall, health is getting better too. Poverty is decreasing too.
I'm not saying we shouldn't do anything to try and make it even better, we definitely should do everything we can, there is still a lot to do to make it the best world possible. But please stop with this constant whining about the past. It was not better, you simply didn't know any better in the past, and your memory of the past is tainted because your brains actively choose to erase bad stuff and only remember good stuff (this is a real human brain unconscious behaviour, look it up).
We're running out of water for agriculture. The zoomers may be middle aged, and the alphas, adults, when the climate crisis fully catches up with us. And if the human species is lucky, it'll happen first in the US or Russia or one of the old-guard powers, and the new order can use their renewable energy surplus to create new desalinization technology.
But current estimates (by those few climatologists willing to say other than it's going to get very bad. ) estimate the upper limit of the sustainability projections are a global population of about a billion people, if the international community chose to act today on all fronts. (Obviously that's not happening in the US, or in autocratic regimes, who imagine -- falsely -- they can create a self-sustaining colony on Mars -- we're a century or more from that).
That is a best case scenario unless we discover some miracle technology.
All other scenarios get worse than that, from a population in the hundreds of millions to human extinction. There is a ray of hope near the bottom, since Homo Erectus had at least one period of tens of thousands of years with a population under 10K before they would populate the world again, until they were out-competed by other hominids (e.g. us. Homo Sapiens). So we might have a tiny society that survives for an eon, but don't expect any culture (from wet burritos to Beethoven's Fifth to the 道德經) to survive. And a fuckton of science will have to be rediscovered.
So seriously bad shit for all of Human society is, at this point, for all intents and purposes, inevitable.
Yes, the climate crisis is a huge problem, probably the biggest mankind has ever faced. Everyone should do everything they can to try to minimize it (I sure am).
You'd say it started going downhill in 2019 or 2016 ?
/s
There is good news though: climate literacy is going up, more and more people realized everyday throughout the world. It hasn't really reached the political level in most countries but I see a trend of countries taking more and more action against climate change. Of course we are not there yet, but we could be in the future. This is not to say that "the climate" is not worsening, but there are improvements here and there. I truly believe humanity will make it, likely not with the same population count but still. Life on earth is almost guaranteed to survive, it has lived through worse than that. It has to get worse for people to really realized and act against it.
Climate change is one thing, but it's not "ALL", there are many metrics by which the world is getting better all the time.
All in all though, and I think it's the most important: doomer talk is not helping at all, it demoralises people, and it prevents them from acting, if people believe we are done for, why would they make any effort ? Why would they try to fix it ?
Seeing the strong word you have about the climate crisis, I can only imagine you are doing everything you can to minimize it, are you ?
Everything I can is scant little. But some people object to my removing my footprint entirely. While I separate out my recycling from my landfill, perhaps you can explain how I can better encourage multinational corporations to consider sustainability as something other than a marketing tool.
Yes, we have bacteriaphages which serve as treatment for XTR Tuberculosis, but things like this do scant little for people who are infected as autocratic interests work to dismantle the global disease control state. Yes, young people are better learning left-wing politics as our education systems in the US are being systematically dismantled around such efforts.
I am sure you can find small ways things are improving. After all, we are closer to manned Mars expeditions even if they're decades away. We are closer to fusion power even if it's still approximately the same thirty years away it was in the early 1990s. There will be a point we can stuff hydrogen into a power plant and get a net energy output by fusing it into hydrogen, but that is a long way away, longer than our time left if our international community doesn't take immediate action.
But yes, I'm bitter. In the 1980s when I was a student and young worker I was expected to give 110% (despite that is oxymoronic, it was the rhetoric of the time) and since then I learned that our leaders, our representatives, our officials don't even bother to act like adults while holding office and allegedly conducting their duties.
We are watching the decline and fall of civilization. USSR went, now the US, and the EU and China stages are already destabilizing, and that's not merely from climate change, but our refusal to distribute political power.
So I can't be entirely sure, my friend, but it appears from over here, from my (granted, cynical) eye that you are missing the forest for the trees.
The climate crisis is only the first of great filters humankind is imminently careening towards and has yet to show effort towards navigating. We are rapidly turning into the example for future intelligent species of what not to do... assuming they can discover that example from the geological layers, determine how we killed ourselves and then actively choose a reasonable response where we failed to do so.
But I don't say this as a doomeristic / beatnik approach. I'm saying this as a sober assessment. We're not going to get to enjoy the benefits of 2020's era progress for very long, assuming we can hold it as autocrats wreck all we've wrought for their own personal gain, and the world literally burns.
Yeah, I still feel like that year is when things really went off the rails in the US. I lost a lot of friends and family to the cult, and I'm starting to think they're never coming back. A chasm has formed in America and it's only getting wider.
I think 2016 was the last great year.
It got better in 2021 for a bit.
The moment when Harambe died was when the timeline split.
Nah, Bowie.
I still remember listening to Blackstar when I heard he passed. There was something so weird and ethereal about that moment I tend to agree thats when things went from bad to shit.
Listening to that album with the knowledge that he wrote it knowing it would be released posthumously broke me
we all know Harambe split the timeline. Nothing was the same after that.#neverforget
Shits been weird since Leonard Nimoy died. So make that 2015.
Basically at long as taco is in the office it will be miserable.
The bad things is that in first term there was that there were still competent people around him. This time he fired everyone and replaced with lackeys. Unless he is stopped, US might not recover from it.
Just looking at the recent meeting in Bejing shows how quickly USA is losing its power. And it's been only 7 months.
I think it's the other way around actually.
The first time nobody expected Trump to win, so they didn't have a plan what to do if he did.
The second time they had a plan called Project 2025 and they are going through it more or less point by point now.
It was kind of a meme that 2016 sucked. Then Trump got elected at the end and everything magically got better for everyone and we all lived happily ever after.
(Do I really need to include the /s here?)
For real, how short is the meme maker’s memory? We went truly off the rails during the first Trump admin.
I relate 100% with this. How funny. Like, that's perfect.
It was 2014. That was the final year of that Obama high where things really felt like they were turning a corner before we were slowly confronted with a world where Donald Trump might actually be president, and the only one standing in his way was somehow Hillary Clinton, a woman that Republicans had been preparing to beat for literally 20 years.
This is actually the right answer. Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, and we're all still in the middle of what is essentially a no-declared-sides WWIII now. 2015 was good, but things had shifted in the world a bit. Countering China was starting to become a huge deal suddenly for the US, and China moved into the South China Sea and did some currency revaluation that was all aimed at their 2029 and 2049 CCP anniversary goals.
Also, I was in fucking phenomenal shape.
I'd argue that 9/11 was when the major shift started in the US.
Its whatever best year you remember. From my perspective, its been sharply downhill since 2000.
Those older than me often say it went to shit during the Reagan years. Its been slowly getting worse for a long time.
It's whatever year that the oppression affecting the less privileged finally reached you.
Dimpled chads and the Brooks Brothers riots. The Jingoism that followed 9/11 masked the turn things would be taking.
You may not have been paying close attention. Obama was astoundingly better than Trump, but invasive spying on citizens was allpwed to remain legal under his watch, and he extended what was allowed. Drone striking questionable targets started under him as well. There's more, but those two are the highlights usually brought up.
The worst the obama administration got was a typical couple of weeks of the Trump administration. It is so much worse now it's unthinkable it could have gotten this bad when looking from the perspective of 2015.
Your mistake is viewing trump not as the obvious fash continuation of the state/capitalism but as some kind of unique magical monster.
That's how we got here.
Trump is a unique magical monster. There isn't anyone else that can act the way he does. He has a personality disorder that cannot be copied by any average intelligent person. There isn't anyone else with near that type of wealth and social immaturity. No other adult has ever acted like he does that didn't have a mental disorder.
Others try to copy him but are easy to see through as they cannot bring themselves to act like he would. Ramaswamy tried but is just too mature and of normal intelligence. You need a child(with a disorder) in an adult body with 100% total and complete confidence in itself. A complete narcissist.
There has never been anyone like him before as anyone with his type of childlike behavior would have been dismissed.
I'd like to introduce you to Andrew Jackson....
An orphan with limited education became a successful military leader who spoke intelligently. About the opposite of Trump. Both are clearly evil yet one is childlike while the other is not.
Andrew Jackson was a literal psychopath, and came up with the ideology of just ignoring court rulings.
if you want to bring up warcrimes, the world has never been normal, especially not the US, they've been up to some heinious shit since before we were born
Yeah since they invaded and genocided the americas. Always has been.
I think in 2010 or so someone said that if you were US Marine and were involved in every single action that the USMC took part in, you would take part in around 2 events every year.
Trump did more drone strikes in his first term than Obama did in both his terms. And that is only of the strikes we know. At one point trump declared that strikes dont need to be reported and they didn't count the number of strikes afterward.
Biden actually fully ended drone strikes... and he did it quietly without much fanfare.
Right, Obama didn't snap his fingers and fix every problem in the world or country, but it really felt like we were finally getting to a point where we had a new liberal voting coalition which would start to push US politics left, so that we could finally unwind a lot of those underlying legacy issues.
Fixing the core issues which created this "obligate imperialism" in the first place were never going to be fixed in the span of one decade, but Obama arguably set us up to grind out more progress in the next administration.
That's why this whole thing is so frustrating. We were on the path to a supreme court majority and burying a lot of old school conservative ideas in the coming decades, and now we are farther away than ever, because so many people can't see the long game.
I think part of the issue is that after winning on the platform of "change", Democrats veered hard into "establishment status quo". They won so hard that most people don't even recall the few bad parts of the Obama presidency at all (the point of my last comment, that it wasn't all sunshine and roses), and then threw that lead in the trash.
They had a chance with Sanders, but threw away an absurd amount of public goodwill by very openly pushing him out of the running in favor of Clinton. That effectively left Trump as the only candidate carrying the "change" flag, and a lot of people were too dumb to see he was full of shit.
When Democrats had a chance again, they went with another "establishment safe" choice and only won with Biden due to an immense outcry against Trump. Then they lost again because they wouldn't platform someone people were willing to get out to vote for.
If we get out of this shitshow, I'll be very interested in what history says about the last few presidential races.
But he spoke well and smiled a lot, especially when fake-drinking that Flint water. What a hero.
I remember this. This was a turning point. That and the bailouts.
Bailouts said, "I'm for the rich." Flint said, "fuck the poor."
Bailouts started with GWB.
Handouts to the rich (aka "bailouts") are a major foundation of the casino economy. No beginning and no end under capitalism.
Not possible. Handsome man. Beautiful family.
Syeve bannon was behind the media push that ended it. He's talked about it in interviews.
Steve Bannon gave birth to GamerGate through WoW guilds.
Insert small to large dominos meme where the small domino is some disheveled guy playing WoW at 3 AM talking about how women suck and the large one is Donald Trump recreating concentration camps, J6, or whatever dystopian bullshit else that has happened in the last few years.
lmao wrong. It was the year before yts invaded. 1400 something.
You remember the year 1400?
YouTube was like 2006, not 1400s. Where are you getting your information?
hhhooo boy...let me tell you about how it felt to live in the world before September 11th 2001...
it was freaking amazing.
I came here to say the exact same thing. 9/11 changed the US forever in a bad way.
We were downloading MP3s on dial up.
Who knew bands had so many unreleased songs?
Man oh man. I went Napster crazy.
Check out this new song called Metallica.exe !
Dam u!! Y my computer not start up n e more?
Napster ring a bell?
idk, I was a kid and harry potter wasn’t real, so that kind of sucked for me
ah yes, 2000, when JKR wasn't known to be a fascist supporting shitheel.
to be fair, she probably also wasn’t at that time. money ruins people
Nah, it was 2016, right before orangini and brexit.
And harambe
He was so pure of soul the Lord had to take him away before the world got fouled.
Dicks out 😔🍆💦
September 11th, 2001 was a real inflection point for the US. We, collectively decided that civil rights aren't as important as revenge.
sept 11 was the first time the republicans had the chance to seize the opportunity to put america on track for its fascist fourth reichdom fantasy.
The overwhelming majority of Democrats also voted for the Patriot Act. Democrats and Republicans are two sides of the same coin.
The terrorists ended up winning the long game in the end. They caused America to tear itself apart from within and made it a pariah on the world stage.
9/11 also marks the end of western hegemony as the West destabilized the world and ruined its reputation as a force for good in its pursuit for revenge, leading to the rise of BRICS and other anti-imperial coalitions.
9/11 also coincides with peak imperialism, the final stage of capitalism, which marks the point when increasing exploitation abroad has diminishing returns so capitalists must begin devouring the imperial core, leading to stagflation, enshittification, rent-seeking, and other parasitic activities. This in turn leads to an economically struggling population of former petit-bourgeois, which is a class condition that is especially susceptible to reactionary propaganda, leading to the rise of fascism.
Historians will almost certainly mark 9/11 as the beginning of the end of the American Empire.
Almost makes the inside job conspiro seem not as crazy...
It says 2019 to trick the viewer into commenting "no 2012" or 2016, since no real human thinks everything was great until 2019. It's bait for interactions.
This is an ad for McDonald's
I wouldn't say things were great up until 2019, but 2020 and beyond is when things really seemed to go to shit
God sent us plague as a warning to not elect him, and he ended up in the office.
In 2015?
God ordered the plague through Internet Explorer.
2015, not 1995.
Ive lived through a few of these already.
2020 is when everything changed.
2016 is when everything chagned.
2012 is when everything changed.
2008 is when everything changed.
2001 is when everything changed.
In a way it's fair to say that every moment changes every moment that happens after. The entire global economy is still reeling from Reaganomics ffs.
I lived through all these. 2001 and 2008 were horrible, but sort of felt like a normal kind of horrible. Recessions and terrorism were things I'd seen before. It was only the scale that made those anomalous.
From my (American) perspective 2016 was when shit started getting very weird. We were relatively stable, relatively prosperous, foreign wars were tapering off... And half the country decided that a game show host was her best bet going forward.
Then it started snowballing... Bill Cosby's a rapist, there's a global pandemic, Kanye put out a pro-Hitler song, Pete Davidson is a sex symbol that no starlet in Hollywood can resist, The secretary of health had his brain eaten by worms, everything you own or use became a subscription service, The fear Factor guy became a political king maker, The first lady has a crypto scam that everyone's kind of okay with, we created AI but it's only good for spam and rule 34 tweets, we decided political corruption isn't a crime if you brag about it, America's war machine is being turned on its cities... Oh and the US is building full on concentration camps.
It's a very strange time even compared to occupy, The tea party, or Bush riding out 9/11 Reading a children's book in an elementary school.
Perhaps this is the result of 'modern' values corrupting our society.
We must return to the old status quo
None of those are correct. There is before Harambe and after Harambe. The day he was killed everything changed.
I vote for 2016. The unthinkable happened.
We shot that poor damn gorilla.
Almost like something happens every 4-8 years. hmm
It was all pretty normal at least in USA until Sept 10, 2001.
Boomer: 1968
Martin Scorcese: 33 AD
To me it was 9/11 that started the insanity.... Either way, if you look at movies from the 80s and movies from today, you clearly see the humanity lacking from todays movies.
Let’s be real- it was the US’s response to 9/11 that started the insanity. There was absolutely a way forward, but no- some shitheads gave the Americans a bloody nose and the US decided to try to stop the bleeding by stabbing itself in the heart for two decades while threatening anyone who pointed out that this was a bad idea.
Legit but let's be even more real. It's the US's imperial insanity that caused 911. That insanity has always been fundamental to USA from its founding.
Yeah its been a wild ride since 2001. I'm not even American but it felt like the whole world kinda shifted gears after that.
Trump was president in 2019 and I remember him cutting massive amounts of food aid (means on wheels) for elderly people during Christmas time. It was some serious Scrooge shit, except he didn't get three ghosts to make him mend his ways.
He got the three ghosts, he just slept through them.
Just a reminder that traitor lunatic Trump was president in 2019. So no. Lol
Exactly. You have to go back to at least 2015 to find anything resembling normal life.
....And things still weren't as crazy as they are now. To me that's points towards the guys theory LOL
It went to shit when you dumb mother fuckers elected him for the first time in 2017. Stupid fucking idiots.
The old people who run the world feel the weight of their impending deaths, but in their narcissism they have mistaken it for the oncoming end of the world.
In their mind the world will end with their deaths, so they are only doing what nature bids them to do. If they had it their way they would detonate every nuclear weapon in existence within a few seconds of their final demise to take everyone with them.
Tell that to the zoomers.
The real insanity stems from everybody having a random lingering covid symptom that's just annoying enough to drive you insane, but not bad enough to kill you. 5 years later, I still get phantom burning smells that I can't even compare to anything I've ever smelled before. It's torture.
😷 ⬆️
It’s absolutely social media to blame imo. 10 years ago they were only just starting with the aggressive algorithms we know today. This combined with the rise of TikTok and its own algorithm has lead to a resurgence of the right. I believe this was a direct response to how progressive we seemed to be getting in the 2010s. The wealthy right were getting scared. I occasionally accidentally see YouTube “recommendations” and it’s usually unhinged right wing shit with millions of views.
As someone who regularly watches my youtube recs, I never see this. Maybe it's because youtube knows my preferences from watching their recommendations....
On the other hand youtube is definitely trash that promotes fascism. So I'm not doubting you either.
Oh yeah I’m never logged into an account; so I when I see it, I see what it’s pushing as trending and popular. These days I use Freetube and only see what’s “recommended” by accident when I occasionally use YouTube on my iPad.
When I used to use an account I also didn’t see any fascist shit either, so at least that’s a way to avoid it!
Fall of 2012. Obama wins again. Weed is legal in some states. Gay marriage. Nuclear powered tank lands on Mars. iPhone 5.
Well I know it wasn't gay marriage... Must've been caused by the iPhone 5.
Harambe died in 2016
"I just got a great idea for a new novel! It's about the end of humanity, but with a twist, because the humans don't even know they are done for yet. They think it's just a bit more aggressive flu, but in fact it's highly contagious and each time you get it, it damages your brain a slight bit more. Everyone keeps getting infected and so they slowly get dumber and more aggressive until civilization collapses in wars and economic chaos."
"That's stupid, something like that could never happen."
The flu is one thing, all of the toxins we are exposed to from companies trying to save a buck is everywhere as well. This is like some 1984 shit we are heading right now. More dangerous chemicals than ever being allowed into our water, our air, and our food. The flu and the covids are just icing on the cake. And I think I have noticed people getting Dumber from the 90s. Not starting in 2020 starting before that.
agreed, except that the "getting dumber" really only started around 2010 or so..
The world has always been crazy. Just more adults are becoming aware of it and able to see it all the time, every day.
Rome went out drunk on wine and conquest.
We’re going out buzzed on overpriced food delivery and crypto regret.
Cheers!
The internet has made us aware of how fucked up our kind is.
"With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created."
It was Harambe. We didn't reload.
We were saying this elsewhere, and someone posted a link claiming the real cause was like a week before Harrambe, a rat I think it was crawled into the Hadrian collider I think while on, in switzerland I think they are accelerating particles to study Physics bullshit, higgs boson something.
There was a theoretical possibility they could have started a chain reaction that would destroy the world they were saying when they were talking about building it fyi.
Anyway though this rat got in there when it was on and they are saying that through the timeline off, a week before harambe.
Harambe wasn't marked as Essential, but he was truly essential for all of us.
My ex wife cheated on me on December 28th, 2019.
I took a whole bunch of pills two weeks later that apparently are not lethal in any amount.
However, since then, I am all but convinced we live in hell, because never once in the past 5 and a half years has anything gotten better.
I'm sorry y'all. This might be the bad place.
I am sorry to hear what happened to you. I hope you find out of your personal hell. Sometimes it's better for your health to distance a bit from social media and their doomer memes.
I'm sorry but it's been hell here on Earth since at least 2015. Your own legitimately terrible events were individual symptoms of the larger pestilence. Either that or a lot of us were already in hell before you got here.
No, no you are right, dicks out man. Dicks out.
I messed around with pills pretty bad back in 2012 and ended up with seratonin syndrome one night. Good things have happened since but nothing ever felt normal since then. Ive never talked to a doctor or psychologist about it (really anyone now that I think about it) but I swear my brain never recovered fully. Mix that in with some concussions a few years before from HS football and I feel like my brain is just broken. It might just been depression, but stuff seemed so much brighter before.
Sorry for my own rambling, but I wish you well and understand where you are coming from.
All that happened to me is I was in a drunk like state for 36 hours.
I got a big promotion? I found a new group of friends? That's about it though.
Eh The Matrix had it right. 1999
Miami, the chads hanging.
Shaka, when the votes fell.
It was obviously a very slow change starting in 2012. The mayans knew what was up!
Its actually that between 1991 and 2001 that we merely had a full decade of relative stability in world events. Crazy shit stopped happening for a while and we have collectively imparted that things used to be "normal" on people born after 2001 but they've interpreted their own childhoods as the normal years.
I see this said about the 90s all the time but really this is not true. In the 90s there was (not an exhaustive list)
It's very common when asking any person what was the best period of time for the world for their response to be a period of time their formative years were.
The reality is history is full of horrid horrid things and nostalgia is a follie that'll trick your mind.
Yeah, it's less "stability in world events" and more so the west riding high off winning the cold war.
Yep, preach.
What about the African Great War?
Edit: ...and Sierra Leone and Liberia.
Yes, stuff still happened, but it was all mostly local scale in consequences or temporary blips. Conflicts, economic downturns, weather events can all be huge tragedies, but an entire super power cratered in on itself in '91 and splintered into smaller countries massively rewriting the political landscape. And in 2001, 9-11 happened and its arguably a starting point for a domino effect of terrible unhinged shit that followed that also had massive global political ramifications, arguably to this very day.
Same but with 2012.
Maybe the Mayan apocalypse people were right.
It’s not an alternate timeline.
It’s the most profitable one.
We're really generating value for those shareholders aren't we?
Absolutely.
And as you can see, fiction scales better than truth.
And the profitable timeline is the only possible one. This is the great filter.
This would imply that capitalism is inevitable in species with potentially spacefaring intelligence. I refuse to accept that for my own sanity’s sake.
Perhaps it's a contextual Great Filter only for instances of intelligent life in which capitalistic modes of production win out.
Then it doesn’t serve its purpose of solving the Fermi paradox.
What? Any and all filters an intelligent species could encounter need to be factored in statistically, even if not all of those filters will 100% be encountered
The timelines been screwed since harambe was murdered.
*2016 was the last normal year.
Let's not forget the chaos and societal upset during the first term.
Edit: I guess it would actually 2015 as the last normal year. 2016 started with Harambe and ended with the far-right winning an election and a Nazi parade honoring trumps election.
Bruh we as Americans have such a short attention span/memory I stg.
His first term was "BUILD THE WALL", "CHECK THE BAFROOMS", "SHUT DOWN BASES IN EUROPE" and "NO MUSLIM IMMIGRANTS ALLOWED!!!!"
None of these ideas he's espousing are new, they're just more hateful and damaging. He just got slightly better at understanding politics/government, so now he's more dangerous/efficient.
Yeah, there was too much infighting and incompetence for him to do as much damage in the first term. His cabinet was dropping like flies the first term and we're almost 8 months in and nobody's been fired yet
I've always found it some form of narcissism or something that people always find some way to interpret something during their time as the most/best/worst whatever.
Kind of like how every election is always the most important election ever.
Or today is the most or least safe or all of these ridiculous things people suggest anecdotally. Your average person has little knowledge or context of history and just selfishly presumes, yes, NOW, this time, OUR time is the most crazy.
I'm well aware I'm thinking too much for a shitpost.
I watched a few documentaries on the 100 Years' War recently; I'm convinced we're still living out THAT trauma ... and that was just one crazy time out of many. It's one of the ways I cope with climate change and the degradation of the global environment: reminding myself that living in really fucked up times is more the norm than anything. I do believe that modern technology and the absolute privilege we live with has given many of us in the developed world the illusion that we're in control of the world. I have a suspicion that the awareness of how little we can do to stop the sheer randomness and brutality of life and human callousness is why religion has been so prevalent for most of history, it's people having some solidarity in, "Holy shit, this is fucked. God, save us, you're obviously our only hope."
Nah 2012 when people got smartphones is when the world ended
Smartphones --> dumb people --> Donald Trump
Making the internet as easily accessible and dumbed down as possible didn't help. It let stupid people easily find each other and reinforce each other's beliefs while isolating themselves from reality.
2017-2021 was Trump, so I think it started earlier. Was it maybe more like US election season 2016 as the start of it? It's hard to pinpoint. But yes. The old US seems gone now-- Our government went from covertly corrupt to very openly so. We're becoming Russia, and its hard to imagine ever rolling it back to who we once were.
Harambe was 2016!
Not my joke, but it fits, lol.
2000
Just been a whipsaw shitshow since.
2000 is when Bush got elected and we openly courted the fringe, the uneducated, and religious right. Openly chose obstinacy and willful ignorance in an unqualified nepo-president who got the job because of daddy. 9/11 happened and the standard became selling shitty policy to Americans by labeling it something patriotic. The tax breaks came fast and hard, more unilateral decision making by the President. We can easily argue there were a lot of historic actions that led up to this from Gingrich to Nixon to Reagan, but Bush and the RNC are the one that really set things in motion to get us to trump. The Tea Partiers, Pailin, the official voice of the Right used openly to demonize the left and people like McConnell or Bohner actively sabotaging bipartisanship and undermining the presidency.
Yeah, 2000 for sure.
I think the last normal year was either 2012 or 2013.
2005 was the best year: France had a hot and dry summer, so the grapes got a high concentration in sugars and tannins, which gave to most wines of that year an extreme deepness and complexity. Oh, I miss 2005 so much.
Yeah 2005 was good.
It felt like maybe the 2nd Gulf War was starting to wind down a bit, and there was some hope that maybe both the US and Al-Qaeda/Islamic State were going to chill their boots a little.
The internet was at its peak in terms of usefulness versus not having been taken over and enshittified by a tiny collection of megacorporations.
The UK had just passed the Civil Partnership Act for same-sex couples, and a few other countries had something similar.
TV was getting pretty good as well.
Yeah, the 90s were still best, but 2005 was the best year since then.
2014*
2016*
1975 is the beginning of the end for the US Empire. The treasury spent on a dumb war in SE Asia, Reaganomics and his trickle down BS, Gulf War I & II (wasting more treasure). Krasnov, COVID and fucking Krasnov again.
1972 was the genesis, there was a business Round Table where the rich and Powerful companies agreed on a long game to overthrow democracy and undo the gains from the New Deal. They have since refined the game, and destroyed any organized opposition. Also obviously had worthless conservatives on their side take over the Democratic Party.
And that's my theory as to how Trump won a second term. A lot of people think that 2019 is the cutoff
Personally I think it was 2015 was the last normal year for the world and my life hasn't recovered from 2012. I'd actually say 2022-2024 were the most normal and stable years of my life. I got married, held a job, and built a community in a stable place.
Maybe stable for you, but the rest of the world wont leave your world alone. Defund and reallocate happened in those years. The genocide of Palestinians under a Dem president using your tax dollars started in 2023. And Ukraine was invaded in 2022.
I left the US after Bush Jr was elected and it was the best decision of my life. That's when fascism started it's slow ramp up in the USA
It's everywhere, like apostrophes in possessive pronouns.
apostrophe's
🤨 Not today. It's Friday. Must ... remain ... calm...
Mus't
You've ruined my weekend.
If you think fascism started with Bush, then you missed about 400+ years of history.
It's always been there somewhere in the shadows, but that was the first time I saw it happening out in the open.
Been a few blurbs published about how covid affects brains
In 2019 the guy from the Apprentice was POTUS.
I second 2015 as the last year things sucked on a normal and bearable Level.
Ah youngins
It's been downhill for quite some time
All these people saying INSANE things like “2015” break my goddamn heart. Like… there’s no way for them to know just how much better it could be.
It’s infuriating that the people making it worse absolutely DO know better.
Actually that was 1997
People who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. The USA has been in a constant power struggle between monied interests and liberty since the founding days. The same party has been in control of China since before Mao was starving millions of people. A lot of european countries are literally still monarchies.
This is the normal.
The vaccine was really just a sedative; they kidnapped you and plugged in you to the matricksssssssss
We will make any excuse for these issues to not be deeply rooted in our civilization, huh
June 26th 2015 was the peak for the U.S. It's been downhill from there.
2018 for chile
In a very real sense we do li:e in a fantasy world, where the pervasive oppositional disingenuous bullshit and disinformation have poisoned us, and we trust the shit we made up to process stuff as high level abstractions without necessarily tying them back to anything remotely near bare-metal material reality.
And tyen when people find exploits in tjose abstractions, there is no recourse, nothing to check them against.
Reality is happening, but we do not comprehend it.
Edit: if you want fiction about this, the book 'echopraxia' has this running through it, or the film 'eddington' which is entirely about this.
At this point, anything remotely near bare-metal material reality triggers such a cognitive dissonance in a lot of folks, on account of all of the bs they have in their heads, that all of that bare-metal material reality is discarded as too painful.
I know it's cliche, but i think capitalism deserves a lot of the blame.
What we have now is capitalism, but it is other things as well. Some say late stage capitalism. It is a plutocracy. It is becoming even more of a kakistocracy, rule of the worst. It was borderline fascist and now becoming moreso.
We had capitalism in the 1950s through the 1970s, and we had a pretty prosperous society, for whatever faults the system had, anybody with a job could live a decent life, which is the overriding concern of everybody, not living in destitute poverty.
They have changed the way inflation is measured a number of times to understate it, and now we are compound fucked by 50 years.
Social Security checks would have been worth $1,200 more on average a month just in 2008 under the unchanged standard. We are getting robbed everyday by inflation and we believe the ivy league suits on TV that tell us our wages have never had more buying power.
Weird, because in china they call what we had in the 50s communism (it's what they're doing now). They're not more or less correct than you are.
Tgough i should note thatvwhat youre saying is true for white men.
The concept of ownership being valued over labor snd basing our economy on a nonsense points system we equate with virtue is a bigger problem
The minimum wage applied to everybody outside of agricultural work. So the minorities that did not share in an exalted social status, still had enough money to live a dignified life.
I specifically addressed that so I would not have somebody discounting the lessons from the post-war era because not everything was perfect. It's not perfect now either by the way, so you can discount everything from today or any period in time with that logic.
We are being robbed and you are addressing some abstract concept, and not the means by which we have been robbed. Inflation is a real measured thing we could reset our wages and raises on. I think you are wrong headed on all of your points here.
Capital being valued over labor is not mutually exclusive with addressing us being robbed by dishonest numbers.
You act like a shitty unjust system of exploitation can ever be made just.
Like the abstractions youve been trained to hold dear are 'real' and not abstractions so many fucking degrees out. 'Money' and 'inflation' are fake. We made them the fuck up. Outside of systems designed to value them theyre entirely nonsense.
Yes we're being robbed, thats the nature of labor when ownership is valued above it! When accumulation and centralization is the fundamental incentive! The very system was designed to lie and exploit, yes, of course its doing that. Why do you tjink the fuckers lying to you and exploiting you love it so much?
You act like you can fix a bisection with a band-aid. Like you can fix something so thoroughly broken without fundamental systemic change.
Like, metaphor time: combustion engines are bad, but switching to electric cars powered by coal power plants isn't really better. You get that right? We need trains, ideally powered by overhead wire renewables, so we arent hauling 2-10 tons of vehicle around for every hundred pounds of human. And maybe more local production of heavy shit.
Like, you sre right. There is injustice. And im not, like, a fan of tjose things, but i think the system is much more fucked than you think it is.
You have no cause to accuse me of not seeing things like they are first of all.
Second of all you just refuted my own point while agreeing with me. You could have just added to my point, but you refused it and then expounded on the same subject.
The inflation rate is a real tangible thing people can understand, that shows how full of shit the system has been for our entire lives.
Sure, but I'd wager it goes beyond the singular manifestation of power as money. Plenty of other manifestations, and all lead to similar places.
Its not about the money directly, it's about the alienation from things like labor and value, plus absolutely insane shit people need to believe to feel okay in it.
In 2010 they tried to create micro black holes, since this hat not worked the probability for extra dimensions is somewhat limited, at least that is what we believe. But maybe something went wrong back in 2010.
2016 as a gen z i reamber the xanax epidemic of the time and it was bad
Was that when the mumble rapper OD'd on hot cheetos?
that was after this was more of the "look at me i do xanax cos im so sad crowd"
There's too many people and the simulation can't keep up a coherent narrative
It's called mass psychosis.
I feel the same about 2007, and 2000.
Ah the good old Futurological Congress by Lem. Read it, the movie is a mess.
There is a movie?
Barely.
This was going on under the surface all this time, growing and growing, people just did not see it as a valid concern thinking "crazy people" or "stupid people" will "come around eventually". They did not expect there'd be enough of them to pull the carriage backwards.
I think it was always fucked. They just hid it better, and many people pretended not to see.
American defaultism.
This isn't about America. The whole world was fucking nuts in 2020. We kicked it off by burning Australia to the ground and a few months later, we had so many world disasters, COVID in the forefront, that we forgot Australia.
These kind of lib delusions are how we got here.
This isnt a shitpost, this a fact. In 2020 everyone had little choice but to stay online, on social media, and got absolutely brain fucked by extreme opinions being forced on to them by whatever side the algorithms threw at them. Almost no one on line is in the middle, or if they are, they are very quiet. Everyone is extreme right or extreme left and they attach that to anything and everything. Music, movies, tv shows, comics, youtubers, etc etc etc.
I mean, for example, why cant any woman be allowed to voice her opinion on bathrooms without being called a nazi or woke? Why isnt this subject just a conversation? Why is at the forefront of seemingly everything? And why is being for or against linked to woke and nazi? Are why are we all seemingly OK with banning people from spaces just because they have a different opinion?
And have you noticed that any example used to shit on the left or right are utterly ridiculous extremes? Or the sex wars, they are huge right now. Self professed alpha males morons looking for virgins that will cook and clean vs onlyfans whores who wont stop being gang banged in public toilets for anything less than 6ft3, 6 figure incomes, and 6 pack abs. These people are all insane, but for some reason they keep getting pushed as the average or the majority of people dating. All women are misandrist, all men are misogynist, and theres extreme fuckwit doing fuck wit things on a youtube video to prove it...
Dont like Star Wars these days, chaps? No, you see, its not cos its shit. Its cos youre racist and sexist, dont you know? You need to cut that shit out, and watch the masterpieces coming out of disney+ right now!!!!
Scared to walk home alone at night? Well, thats because theres men on every corner waiting to rape you... Dont think all men should have a curfew? I mean, Sally met that one guy who turned out to be into playing warhammer on Saturday nights with his friends. Its basically the same rape...
Extremism in everything, and theres an easily clickable buzzword for anyone that you dont like, so that others rally to your cause.
The whole fracking world needs to drink a nice big tall glass of calm the fuck down.
🎶It's get.ting bet.ter all the ti-i-ime
I have to admit. it's getting bet.ter
A little bet.ter all the time (can't get noo worse)🎶
I've seen this argument so many time... It's not going downhill, we are just getting older, we understand the problems of the world better, we are more informed, we watch the news and we start to have that nostalgia feeling that it was better before. It was not ! The world is getting better for so many metrics, sure there are issues, there always has been, it's not perfect. Sure there are localized places where it's temporarily getting worse ( the US might currently be living through a rough time, but it will pass).
Overall, it's getting better all the time. We are currently living the best time in history so far. Millions of new stuff to discover, infinite access to the cumulated knowledge of mankind. More democratic country than ever, famine is getting down overall, health is getting better too. Poverty is decreasing too.
I'm not saying we shouldn't do anything to try and make it even better, we definitely should do everything we can, there is still a lot to do to make it the best world possible. But please stop with this constant whining about the past. It was not better, you simply didn't know any better in the past, and your memory of the past is tainted because your brains actively choose to erase bad stuff and only remember good stuff (this is a real human brain unconscious behaviour, look it up).
We're running out of water for agriculture. The zoomers may be middle aged, and the alphas, adults, when the climate crisis fully catches up with us. And if the human species is lucky, it'll happen first in the US or Russia or one of the old-guard powers, and the new order can use their renewable energy surplus to create new desalinization technology.
But current estimates (by those few climatologists willing to say other than it's going to get very bad. ) estimate the upper limit of the sustainability projections are a global population of about a billion people, if the international community chose to act today on all fronts. (Obviously that's not happening in the US, or in autocratic regimes, who imagine -- falsely -- they can create a self-sustaining colony on Mars -- we're a century or more from that).
That is a best case scenario unless we discover some miracle technology.
All other scenarios get worse than that, from a population in the hundreds of millions to human extinction. There is a ray of hope near the bottom, since Homo Erectus had at least one period of tens of thousands of years with a population under 10K before they would populate the world again, until they were out-competed by other hominids (e.g. us. Homo Sapiens). So we might have a tiny society that survives for an eon, but don't expect any culture (from wet burritos to Beethoven's Fifth to the 道德經) to survive. And a fuckton of science will have to be rediscovered.
So seriously bad shit for all of Human society is, at this point, for all intents and purposes, inevitable.
Yes, the climate crisis is a huge problem, probably the biggest mankind has ever faced. Everyone should do everything they can to try to minimize it (I sure am).
You'd say it started going downhill in 2019 or 2016 ? /s
There is good news though: climate literacy is going up, more and more people realized everyday throughout the world. It hasn't really reached the political level in most countries but I see a trend of countries taking more and more action against climate change. Of course we are not there yet, but we could be in the future. This is not to say that "the climate" is not worsening, but there are improvements here and there. I truly believe humanity will make it, likely not with the same population count but still. Life on earth is almost guaranteed to survive, it has lived through worse than that. It has to get worse for people to really realized and act against it.
Climate change is one thing, but it's not "ALL", there are many metrics by which the world is getting better all the time.
All in all though, and I think it's the most important: doomer talk is not helping at all, it demoralises people, and it prevents them from acting, if people believe we are done for, why would they make any effort ? Why would they try to fix it ?
Seeing the strong word you have about the climate crisis, I can only imagine you are doing everything you can to minimize it, are you ?
Everything I can is scant little. But some people object to my removing my footprint entirely. While I separate out my recycling from my landfill, perhaps you can explain how I can better encourage multinational corporations to consider sustainability as something other than a marketing tool.
Yes, we have bacteriaphages which serve as treatment for XTR Tuberculosis, but things like this do scant little for people who are infected as autocratic interests work to dismantle the global disease control state. Yes, young people are better learning left-wing politics as our education systems in the US are being systematically dismantled around such efforts.
I am sure you can find small ways things are improving. After all, we are closer to manned Mars expeditions even if they're decades away. We are closer to fusion power even if it's still approximately the same thirty years away it was in the early 1990s. There will be a point we can stuff hydrogen into a power plant and get a net energy output by fusing it into hydrogen, but that is a long way away, longer than our time left if our international community doesn't take immediate action.
But yes, I'm bitter. In the 1980s when I was a student and young worker I was expected to give 110% (despite that is oxymoronic, it was the rhetoric of the time) and since then I learned that our leaders, our representatives, our officials don't even bother to act like adults while holding office and allegedly conducting their duties.
We are watching the decline and fall of civilization. USSR went, now the US, and the EU and China stages are already destabilizing, and that's not merely from climate change, but our refusal to distribute political power.
So I can't be entirely sure, my friend, but it appears from over here, from my (granted, cynical) eye that you are missing the forest for the trees.
The climate crisis is only the first of great filters humankind is imminently careening towards and has yet to show effort towards navigating. We are rapidly turning into the example for future intelligent species of what not to do... assuming they can discover that example from the geological layers, determine how we killed ourselves and then actively choose a reasonable response where we failed to do so.
But I don't say this as a doomeristic / beatnik approach. I'm saying this as a sober assessment. We're not going to get to enjoy the benefits of 2020's era progress for very long, assuming we can hold it as autocrats wreck all we've wrought for their own personal gain, and the world literally burns.
2016 also had Brexit and Trump winning at the ballot box
Yeah, I still feel like that year is when things really went off the rails in the US. I lost a lot of friends and family to the cult, and I'm starting to think they're never coming back. A chasm has formed in America and it's only getting wider.