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And that’s basically it!
I love how the U.S. spent like 90 years building up soft power around the world and we are giving it all up in like a 3 month span.
Every person in charge of an agency, is literally not qualified to run a grocery store let alone the agencies they run.
Its alll about loyalty now, and its going to send the U.S. back into the dark age.
Hitler came to power because the treaty of Versailles devastated and humiliated germany. what the fuck are historians going to point at in the US that lead to the rise in fascism? fucking gamergate? The self-inflicted 2008 crisis?
What historians will point to in my opinion are two key point in modern American history that unleashed the decent into madness.
- Raegan, his financial policies laid the groundwork for the modern ultra wealthy tech bros.
- 9/11, 9/11 turned patriotism into a national psychotic duty.
After 9/11 you could slap a US flag on basically anything, shout patriotism and make a shit load of money while being thanked for it.
Then it just rolled on.
Don't forget the importance of the Citizens United ruling, which gave the green light to funnel unlimited amounts of corporate money into campaigns, reaching a crescendo in this past election when the world's richest man bought himself a President.
CU and the lack of federal public funding for elections (by which I mean the state funds the campaigns of those who want federal offices) basically resulted in the US political class ending up fully in the pocket of the corporations.
That's what absolutely destroyed our ability to elect anyone other than what the corporate doners want, and thus you end up with nothing but corporate-friendly politicians, and thus a whole bunch of people who have no problem with facism and well, here we are.
Reagan was in place thanks to the Southern Strategy begun a decade or so earlier to ensure a voting percentage for the GOP and religious right no matter what. There are unfortunately many other "turning points" throughout US history where we could have gone a different route but chose this one, usually because "it's always been this way" mentality.
A multitude of issues have contributed to this, the creation of fox News, allowing our entire manufacturing sector to leave the country, and then ignoring the poorest and most vulnerable people's issues, misinformation, social media, state actor disinformation campaigns, and probably a bunch of stuff I haven't mentioned. Pick your favorite.
The pandemic, the inherent flaws of an antiquated two party system, malicious individuals controlling all major social media platforms, an overworked and undersupported population, low education standards. Idk I'm German and have never been over but from what I can tell it's very complex. And while many of my fellow Europeans like to give Americans shit online right now the truth is most of us are one or two unfortunate elections away from a similar scenario. Whatever it is that's driving people apart isn't exclusively an American problem.
Whatever it is that's driving people apart isn't exclusively an American problem.
This is the scary part. The entire world seems to be shifting right again. I think a lot of it how easy misinformation and disinformation is to spread with the ubiquitous social media now, but like you said, it's complex, and there likely isn't any single factor contributing to this.
what the fuck are historians going to point at in the US that lead to the rise in fascism? fucking gamergate? The self-inflicted 2008 crisis?
Losing the Cold War. America wasn't beaten militarily, but brought down via foreign propaganda. (It also hit the UK, with Brexit, and other countries with similar harmful things going on domestically to them.)
Livejournal was one of the earliest "modern" social media sites (for those who didn't experience it, it was like a longer-form tumblr--longer text posts, fewer images), and it was sold to a company in Russia in the early 00s. I remember scratching my head as a 20-something about why the servers kept going down, then I learned that intellectuals in Russia had taken it up as THEIR social media and due to politics "on the Russian" side it was getting DDoS'd.
I was still too young to connect the dots then, or understand what all that really meant (hindsight is always much better, isn't it?) but basically they perfected control via social media first on their own people, probably trawled through all the content of the original LiveJournal users posting in English, then perfected using what they learned there on later social media sites.
And because Americans A) thought the Cold War was over, and B) have a bit of a head-scratcher conundrum when it comes to free speech because it's valued so highly and nobody likes censorshiop, nobody did anything or even realized anything was happening until the harm was already done.
Personally, again with hindsight, I think company-designed social media algorithms that just suggest content to you as "trending" or whatever should be illegal (and block buttons should be mandatory). Users should have to be forced to follow, one by one, the content they want to subscribe to.
Having "trending" algorithms that have no transparency in what they show or boost allows malignant actors to game the algorithm.
If you force people to follow others based on word of mouth or reblogs from their actual friends, and give people a way to solidly block someone that's easy to find and instant to use, it will cut a lot of the bullshit down. People will be somewhat less inclined to fall down wells of stupidity. It won't completely stop it, but people are lazy and if you don't dangle shit in front of their nose many will go off and do something else instead of putting in the effort to find something horrible.
Well stated, thisis the conclusion i have come to as well. We lost an information war we did not know we were fighting.
Regan had a huge hand in the downfall of the US.
I can at least tell you why people vote Trump. All right here:
How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind
Posted that many, many times, but it's important enough to post forever. As true now as it was in 2016.
I've been on both sides of what the author is talking about, seen and experienced everything he touches on. Give it a read, it's important.
We were already a 3rd world country in comparison to most of our allies. Now we are speedrunning becoming a 7th world country
If bird flu is such a minor issue, I say we inject it into Donald Trump, JD Vance, RFK Jr., and Elon Musk. Demonstrate how safe it is. Do it. Come on. DO IT YOU WUSSES.
That's not RFK Jr. talking. He died long ago. His body is being controlled by the worms.
This was the worms' plan all along: finally revenge on the chickens.
Let's not use the word "controversial" when "nobody with any qualifications would ever fucking agree with this" is more accurate. Controversial suggests a lack of consensus.
So “do nothing” is his answer to bird flu and measles?
Everyone who survives will be immune.
That's the whole logic. It was awful enough with Covid's 1% mortality. Measles only kills about 0.1%. Bird flu kills 90-100% of infected birds and 50% of infected humans. And there's plenty of lasting/permanent deficits short of literal death. They're psychopaths.
Oh cool, so this world ensure it spreads to humans. Would could go wrong?
That was the whole play with COVID. Not much changes in 5 years it seems.
Hahahahahaha jesus tapdancing christ this timeline is fucking wild. He is going to create the conditions for the next pandemic. It’s gonna start here. I’m calling it now.
What a fucking disgrace he is to the Kennedy legacy. I hope he gets swallowed by a whale or gets eaten by a bear or a worm eating his brain.
For the unaware, this bird flu variant has about a 50/50 survival rate. It won't be like Covid.
Inhumane is ironic considering that the mere existence of poultry farms is inhumane. But yeah, it would be stupid, cruel and it will raise the chance of mutations that spread to other species including us.
BND: There's a high probability that the last pandemic was caused by negligence in China.
US: Last Pandemic? Wait, hold my pisswater.
Who would have known. The russian mafia puppet government that's doing it's best impression of the New world order stereotype.. is suggesting a population cull
I am reminded of the quote "some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I'm willing to make".
I remember when people laughed at the concept of the immune system being like a muscle, that needs frequent excercise, and with same excercise it could be built back.
Good times.
Nowadays I wonder when will people shoot each other with increasingly higher caliber bullets to build up immunity to bullets.
'Murica, I swear you guys really need a slapping.
Please invade us. We need help
He can go first. Go ahead Bobby, show us how easy it is.
I guess that would succeed in killing off a bunch of the elderly and infirmed, which be a huge savings to Medicare and social Security, so it's a win-win right?
/S if it wasn't implied already
Yeah, of we could just stop importing food from the USA, that would be greaaaaat
The Secretary of HEALTH recommends letting a pandemic spread. Think about that for a second.