The lid was always on.

Hahaha...

No just the ones who jumped out had means. The pot has a lid.

They jumped into the pot.

This isn't the first empire. Masses can be brainwashed. You can even have multiple layers of brainwashing, like how Republicans are extremely brainwashed, and Democrats are secondarily brainwashed to think they're the moral opposition, while both of them unquestioningly support the undercurrent of global imperialism.

Literally the only escape is the entire population being fully educated on the nature of politics, economics, societies, history. A people cannot realize a free and just society without completely understanding what that requires. Until then you're all just a fish flopping around on the floor of a boat.

I'm trying! I'm working towards proving I'm Polish-by-descent, then I'll be able to hold an EU passport. It's slow going.

And in the mean time, I'm in a trans-friendly state, can pass as cis and hetero, and I'm white. I have a go bag and a US passport that matches my birth gender. My next steps are improving my food stores to protect against tariff impacts.

The only things that tie me to this country are my friends (who are also looking into exit plans and whom I talk to online more than in person) and my dog (I imagine moving to a new country with a dog is even harder than finding an apartment with a dog). Oh, and I really love my job and my coworkers, but my job might go away with all of the societal upset.

Tell that to my cat who keep trying to go outside when its freezing and its winter. Wtf

ok. ok. ok. this is a bit of a stretch. I mean its really not all that slow.

Its such a shit situation. If you want out, you generally need to get a job in another country. A job in a different country generally pays significantly less than the cost of living in most of the USA, so you need to already have a significant amount of money already saved to even consider it an option.

Most of us are just fucking trapped.

Lobsters

Called my mom last night, told her to renew her passport asap.

Most people are like “the waters warm, this is nice, what are you going on about???” And I’m like “hi yes this water is scalding hot and about to boil we need to get out!”

Well, duh. A slowly boiling pot of water is just a fucking hot tub for 90% of the time you're in it.

Billionaires are keeping us in the pot, using levers of power that we don't access from the pot.

Don't forget the millions of us chained to the bottom because we have no choice

Thinking about slow-moving effects, I have a theory that exposure to fiction is one reason people feel inadequate and depressed. For most of human history our idea of what it meant to be normal came from real people around us. We didn't know any fictional characters except for a handful of stories told around the fire. After radio was invented we got to know a lot more fictional characters, a lot faster and more intimately than we get to know most real people. Then television made it more vivid because we could see them. We think of many of these unreal people as our friends. Some of them have more impact on us than real people do. It's a lot easier to feel boring and inadequate than it was when we didn't feel like we knew people whose lives are so much more dramatic and interesting than ours. I think this is a large part of why it feels like failure to have an unremarkable job or date average people. It's a very slow-moving social change nobody would have seen coming.

It's still not warm enough for population over a tipping point, you are just more aware of the boiling apparatus. I believe humanity will jump once it gets warm enough, much like a frog does, even in a slowly boiling pot of water. I trust humanity, after all we've survived so far, our ancestors overcoming much much worse. Can you imagine living in feudalism? Or sword fighting in medieval times? Or when we had to hunt?

“The guy trying to help me out of a pot is a different type of left than me, so i don’t want his help, and that other guy below me is also a different type of left so fuck him. Anyone who is slightly right or left of me is a fascist and I’m gonna enjoy watching them boil”

-the American left in 2024

As an American who just emigrated, I guess I jumped. I can still vote from overseas, but I'm pessimistic about the future.

Yea.....

Post UK Brexit was when I thought the same thing.

Inside the pot: slowly boiling water

Outside the pot: raging inferno that is heating the pot

When given the option to slowly boil, or jump into a raging inferno, I think most people would think twice about jumping out of the pot.

This would imply that they're not surrounded by other pots filled with water which is (varying degrees of) boiling. We don't really have a Socialist Utopia meeting spot, let's say.

Beyond that, eloping requires a not insignificant amount of money (as a Romanian, I can say that homes/apartments aren't cheap here, either, and we're not exactly L.A.)

And at the other end of the line, immigration's not exactly thought of with fondness, even in Europe. Don't forget, we're stewing in our own pot even if the heat's still relatively tolerable.