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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
Fascism is imperialism turned inward, etc.
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.
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.
Unlike Hong Kong, we don't have the CIA backing us and the US is not afraid of how other countries perceive its treatment of its citizens.
Nearly any non-color revolution and failed revolution in the last 2 decades is better to learn from.
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.
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.
If there's a "they" who made me feel this way, then I owe them a lot of gratitude and gestures of thankfulness for helping me wake up and gain control over my own brain.
See, I'm not talking about economically, but I do agree that there has been an effort, if not overt then implicit, to make people feel that money will always be out of their reach. I get that and it's not what I'm talking about, I mean on a higher level, this is a child-like belief we all carry in our lives, we just tend to project it outward into the world of sociology and politics because we tend to stay the same in life. We're all children, we're the same people we were when we were kids, we just have more layers of complexity piled up around that inner child.
Wicked people exploit this. Again, whether or not they consciously understand the principle doesn't even matter, this is something we're wired to do as social creatures, either seek protection from outside sources or exploit those looking for it.
When you start embracing the reality that at least on an interpersonal and existential level, you ARE alone and always will be, I think that gives you great strength to push back against toxic rumination and unwise social influence. It clears your mind and at least after you finish mourning something you didn't know you were hoping for, you start finding what your real powers are, you start thinking about actually taking control over your life.
If we could impart this feeling to everyone, everywhere, we would see an overnight turn in our species. But that's impossible. Too many people are too different and no two people would understand the message the same way. We are all the main characters of the story standing around waiting for the show to start, not knowing it's already running and we can write the story at any time.
Shit I try not to think about for $1200, Alex!
(But I can't disagree with a word.)
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.
yeah those fuckin NO guys were likely the ones trump fired though
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 harbor a similar hope!
Ukraine flattening the Kremlin woukd go a long way towards rectifying much of this. The Oligarchy has become heavily invested Ukraine losing.
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!
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
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.
the issue with our current system is that it requires those with the power to cede some of the tools that help them in power in order to fix it
When they don't cede it we take it. There's hundreds of millions of us and only a handful of them.
Aren't there supposed to be a whole bunch of 18-25 year olds who don't have children or long term careers yet?
That's why old people send them to war, they're the expendable adults! (/s)
TBH though, it is a little weird I have no idea what that crowd is up to.
Is this boomer for real chat?!
Anyway, this 30 lbs of Ramen is about to disappear!
no swallow == fake
cHeCkS aNd BaLaNcEs
If we got rid of the unconstitutional "executive order" system, this couldn't happen.
Executive Orders aren't unconstitutional on their own.
The president can do meaningless gestures in an Executive Order, like declare a happy birthday to a foreign head of state or something, and that's not unconstitutional.
The president can also exercise the inherent constitutional powers of the office through executive order, too: grant a military medal to somebody, tell executive branch employees that they have Christmas Eve off, provide for a system of classifying state secrets, etc. Those might have real effects, but so long as it's the exercise of power that the presidency actually has, there's nothing unconstitutional about that.
Then the president can also exercise the powers given by Congress: tell the EPA to start a rulemaking process, declare a public health emergency and invoke some of the powers under the procedures previously defined by Congress, etc. If the powers involved were granted by Congress, and the power itself was not unconstitutional, then there's no problem there.
The big issue is that a lot of people misunderstand when an executive order is performative and has no legal effect, or when an executive order merely directs an agency to do something with legal effect. That agency's actions need to be evaluated for legality, but the executive order itself does nothing, except communicates the president's preferences to that agency in a public way. The president could just as easily call up that agency head by phone and say the same thing, and wouldn't even need to publish that order.
It's not the procedure that's unconstitutional. It's the actual contents and substance of the orders that are probably illegal.
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.
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!
... until there isn't
Read up on the history of Latin America to see where we're headed. There are a couple different possibilities.
Argentina drugging then throwing political dissidents out of an airplane over the Atlantic ocean comes to mind
The USA/CIA will infiltrate your gov/various militia groups to over throw socialist governments democratically elected? What?
'Relatively' doing a lot of heavy lifting here.