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If you pretend for a second this is a HoI4-like historical simulation, it’d be really interesting to see what the american dictatorship is going be like. Are we talking populist murder-happy forever-revolution? Shut-the-fuck-up-or-else secret police state? A digital surveillance state with never seen before levels of control? The suspense!
Alas, we live on this planet. Bummer.
More of what already works. Keep the masses busy with Disney, Fox, and fast food. Divide the population with wedge issues like abortion, LGBT, guns, etc. Give outsized presence to Trump‘s topics in corporate media. Consolidate media ownership further. Go hard on nationalist and imperialist rhetoric (MAGA). Wave the flag and cross. Blame immigrants. Blame foreigners. Stoke racial tensions. All the while make shitloads of money by manipulating the market and cutting regulation. Run elections but make sure democrats always lose. Depoliticize the population. Start a war. Spread so much crap information that people tune out. Privatize everything, empower billionaires.
Don’t worry, one responsible billionaire will step in and put things right.
Anyone else have fantasies where aliens hover over the whitehouse?
Pictured here sending down good ideas
thoughts and pasta
can i get linguine with my thoughts please and godbless
feeling the energies, and good vibes
Starting to become time for people to understand that there’s not going to be a democratic way to fix this. Sometimes you need that tree of Liberty refreshed. We should be talking about Revolution.
Honestly yeah, civil war 2025 baby!!! There’s already AltGov organizations popping out… We need to organize better, to learn from Hong Kong and its residents.
I do hold some hope that the Joint Cheifs have a “fuckin NO!” Line they wont cross. Like invading Canada.
The tech oligarchs have already decided that they need the resources and don’t want to pay for them. This is definitely happening one way or the other.
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Even then, theres an old saying about how people who know they arent doing the right thing having a line they wont cross, but true belivers being caipable of anything because they believe they are RIGHT.
I remember reading something once, that the reason so many people didn’t believe in the threat of Global Warming was because there have been so many other threats they heard about that didn’t come to be.
Except, they didn’t just, not happen.
Overpopulation? Mass starvation? Scientists dedicated their lives to increasing agricultural production.
Y2K? Computer scientists put more man hours than some factories did during WWII to eliminate the potential bugs.
Hole in the Ozone? We eliminated the chemicals causing that particular one.
But none of that work was in the public eye for 99.9% of people. So, their lives went on as if there was never any threat. Thus, people slowly got it into their heads, consciously or not, that all predictions of destructions wrecking our way of life were bullshit.
This is the (exclusively) political version of that. Most Americans have lived in a largely functioning democracy for so long they don’t really comprehend that it’s possible for America to not be as it is. Sure, plenty of people wring their hands about encroaching authoritarianism, but they don’t see America just turning into a state where voting and free speech don’t exist.
I don’t think this is strictly accurate. The 20th century was rife with problems we failed to address (in part or in total).
- Lead and Asbestos were rolled out despite their known hazards and were never properly cleaned up
- Our nuclear weapons stockpile is as big a threat as its ever been. We never really solved the problem of nuclear waste disposal, either, so we’ve just got these cesspools congealing in spots around the country.
- Aggressive industrial agriculture has drained a number of major aquifiers, while industrial fishing and ocean dumping has obliterating the native marine population
- Oil spills plague us to this day, utterly despoiling major riverways and polluting the Gulf of
MexicoAmerica at record rates. - De-industrialization has stripped much of the Midwestern interior of economic activity, plunging the region into poverty
- The Oxycontin/Heroin/Fentanyl epidemic only gets worse with every passing decade and the only response we seem capable of initiating is “more cops!”
What we’ve seen over the last 40 years hasn’t been a steady series of policy wins nearly so much as a consolidation of media into the hands of a small corporately controlled cartel. It isn’t that computer bugs and food shortfalls and environmental catastrophes and even outright genocides aren’t happening. Its just that we’ve decided to stop talking about each of them in turn, as the public loses control of its independent information streams.
Most Americans have lived in a largely functioning democracy for so long they don’t really comprehend that it’s possible for America to not be as it is.
Point to the decade in which America had a “largely functioning democracy”.
Was it during the 60s, when it was open season on civil rights leaders and populist presidents? Was it the 70s, when the Nixonian War on Crime/Drugs stripped millions of Americans from the voting rolls through felony disenfranchisement? Was it the Reagan Era, of brutal police violence and race riots and MOVE bombings and the FBI/CIA in open war with anyone to the left of Tip O’Neale? Was it Clinton’s 90s and the disaster capitalism that forced a wildly unpopular series of international trade deals with the intent of dismantling trade unions? Was it the Bush War On Terror, with its blacksites and misinformation campaigns and endless wars? How about Obama’s bank bailouts followed by the GOP spearheaded 2010 gerrymanders that packed and cracked state and federal legislatures nationwide?
Where’s this democracy I keep hearing all about? I’m 40 years old and I struggle to point to a moment in my life when this country ever felt like more than a White Dude’s Caliphate.
You seem to be missing the point.
My blackest blackpill moment in my adult life was the realization that we ALL hold a strange little belief somewhere in the back of our minds that someone, somewhere is serious enough that they will step in if our life or the whole world starts to go off the rails.
We hold this belief, this feeling about more than politics, we think this way about our whole lives. We always carry an unconscious sensation of sorts that there’s some safety net that will catch us if we screw up too badly. That if the world gets too chaotic the “army” or someone is going to deploy and restore order.
Then there’s the people who have projected this feeling into superstition and conspiracy and believe aliens are watching us, or that lizard people are actually in control, that there’s some shadowy cabal of people with all the real power who are pulling all the strings and everything is going according to their plan even if it doesn’t look like it. It’s funny how that sounds exactly like religion if you change the characters around.
But truly, finally, realistically internalizing that there is nobody coming, that you are utterly alone, even if you have people close to you, that NOBODY is going to help you in the worst case, that NOBODY is going to lock the country down and restore order, that NOBODY will give you fair hearing and let you plead your special case if your life falls down too far, that God isn’t there, there are no angels or demons, there is no cabal. Everyone is dumb. Everyone is insecure and looking at each other for acceptance and cues what to do. We’re all children… this is a painful thing to accept and understand but it’s massively liberating. It’s like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute and there’s no ground. It’s weightless falling through the cosmos.
But it’s your fall. Yours alone.
Shit I try not to think about for $1200, Alex!
(But I can’t disagree with a word.)
The biggest and most truthful conspiracy is not that there’s some shadowy cabal puppet masters pulling all the string, but nobody has any fucking clue what’s going on and the world lives in a constant state of anarchy and our notions of “government” or “the state” is just a coping mechanism to help us believe that “somone is in control.” We feel like we need to believe in it like we used to believe in the church, until the Enlightenment of course (and we all know what that entailed.)
You feel this way because you’ve been intentionally individualized.
There is strength in community, but community threatens the capitalist class so they’ve done everything they possibly could to drive wedges between us.
You’re absolutely right that nobody is coming to save us. That means it’s up to us to save each other. It’s not too late.
I’m just praying for “natural causes” to make things better.
I never thought I’d be a cheerleader for arteriosclerosis, but here we are!
If we got rid of the unconstitutional “executive order” system, this couldn’t happen.
Yeah that’s the problem: authority as such
Specifically unchecked authority. Executive orders are just as bad as legislation from the bench, or judgement by legislation. Whenever one branch of government overreaches into another’s territory, there should be hell to pay. But our system was established with the idea that the three branches would be fundamentally adversarial. The moment there’s any hint of cronyism, we’re screwed. Washington warned us against parties, others warned against the two-party system. Eisenhower warned us that the MIC would control both parties. Goldwater warned us that the MIC & the cult religions would take over.
We failed to heed the warnings. Here we stand.
cHeCkS aNd BaLaNcEs
the issue with our current system is that is requires those with the power to cede some of the tools that help them in power in order to fix it
Read up on the history of Latin America to see where we’re headed. There are a couple different possibilities.
The USA/CIA will infiltrate your gov/various militia groups to over throw socialist governments democratically elected? What?
Well, there’s always the next President
Bold of you to assume we get more free elections.
I’m so sick of people spouting this, it’s defeatist and is essentially saying “i lost, oh well, time to give up.”
It’s more “it’s time to try something else.”
I don’t know who else needs to hear this, but electoralism is over in the United States. These people have stopped playing by any rules.
This is in our hands now. Nobody’s coming to the rescue.
Christ some of you people are so smug. The people confidently saying “we won’t have any more elections” never follow it up with any inspiration or call to actions. It reeks very much of “Genocide Joe” “Both sides are the same so why even bother” "All politicians are crooks apathy that’s fucked America over.
Voting was never going to solve it, voting is the absolute bare minimum you can do. “These people” wrote the rules 70 years ago, we lost the class war and it’s only becoming apparent now. I don’t know who needs to hear this but posting online isn’t going to do anything, it’s just going to leave a record for Elon to scrape when he assigns your social score.
I agree with you that it’s in our hands now, nobody is coming to help us. If you’re not a white christian male, now is the time, before it’s too late. Get a couple guns (a long one and a short one) and learn how to use them. Learn some basic first aid, you really just need to know how to stabilize someone. Start networking with like-minded people in your communities. The police will not protect us, they’ve proven they’ll happily club senior citizens to the ground and shoot any protesters in the face with rubber bullets while escorting a rightwing murderer to safety. Their little coup was successful and if they don’t want to give up power they won’t.
Get to know people in your community. Take an interest in growing food, learn how to fix things. Get a gun (or two) and learn how to use them.
https://mutualaiddisasterrelief.org/
https://afsc.org/news/how-create-mutual-aid-network
I’m sorry you feel that way. I welcome your mockery if we have something resembling a normal 2026 midterm and 2028 general.
I’m a little surprised so many folks don’t seem to realize we have crossed a threshold that may indeed spell the end of the US as we have known it up to now, and seem to think this was just another election. But, I guess for folks who haven’t witnessed that many of our elections in their lifetime it might seem that way.
If more people did realize that, I’d have a lot more faith that we’re going to be able to stop it.
I agree “folks don’t seem to realize we’ve crossed a threshold” and seem willing to just curl up and die.
Fuck that noise.
Well, we’re clearly talking about two different thresholds, but my happiness doesn’t require us to agree, and yours shouldn’t either.
Good day to you!
I suppose that’s true, you have a great day too!
Thanks!
I worry about my American neighbors 😬
Yeah one thing I’ve observed is Americans constantly complaining that Democrats aren’t doing anything. There’s a belief that the opposition party can somehow stop a party that controls all branches of government.
They can’t. They no longer have power. Anything they do is completely performative. You’re complaining about a performance in a meaningless play while the people in power are dismantling your country and destroying people’s lives.
This is what Americans voted for. Didn’t think their vote mattered but it really did.
When Democrats have power they can’t do anything, when Republicans are in power everything they want done gets passed by Democrats.
The Republicans had no problem stopping the show when they were the minority party in all branches.
A country that’s known for pillaging/genociding the native, using slavery and ravaging other countries for profit is now pillaging the one’s they convinced are living in the “greatest country in the world”.
shocked_pikachu_face.jpg. -People in the US
