We live in a YAF dystopia that is way less cool than most of the storybook ones.

And while every kid's story is their chance to veer away from the usual fate of becoming a corporate cog (laborer or soldier) in a billionaire vanity project, most will just end up stuck like Winston without his nook, or will get imprisoned or will just go homeless.

Can we stop using this as a meme template. Fuck that guy

it's just the worst timeline

I normally suggest using the Calvin version of this meme to avoid promoting him in any way, but he is part of the discussion topic here.

Stupidest timeline so far.

Dressing up genocide and the suppression of free speech as "combating anti semitism" would have been laughably transparent.

This shitbag is a contributor to the timeline. Horrible that the fuckwit became a meme.

Trump still has 4 more years. 🤮

That’s a generous assumption.

[off topic?]

"Stand On Zanzibar" won the 1969 Hugo award for best science fiction novel of the year.

It's set in the early 2000's and got so many of the details right it's uncanny. Some of the ideas that people in 1969 laughed at were mass homelessness; well paid folks needing room mates to make the rent; random school shootings, etc etc.

https://bookshop.org/p/books/stand-on-zanzibar-john-brunner/7252770?ean=9781250781222&next=t

I don't know...this mightve been a believable outcome by like 2002 or 2003 or so...W in power, USA PATRIOT act in effect, ICE replacing INS. A few years later and Sarah Palin has a legit shot at veep and kicks off the tea party movement.

Democrats had also just recently (as in, 2000) lost the presidency due to a SCOTUS decision and environmentalists who thought Gore wasn't good enough (Nader's vote count in FL was higher than Bush's official final margin).

Our present is the dystopian future the protagonist in a movie sees before they go back and fix it

I’m learning to subsistence farm, so I’m not arguing.

Like many liberal people in my country with Pooh-teen, no one believed it's even possible to degrade that quickly, and many still believe it's not really happening and can be undone in a couple of swift changes.

I think EU can take some lessons from two countries already declined in recent times.

you forgot he's sucking Putin's dick now

It's not the stupidest timeline because in that one everyone's happy because everyone's stupid. The problem is that you're smart and too many people with power aren't. After so many decades of living alongside news media empires, who make money if we're all terrified, I take everything with a pinch of salt now.

I automatically ignore any headline, for example, that asks a question in the subject line and doesn't answer it unless you read the article. Also, any article that uses hyperbolic phrases like "This is the end of..." or " slams/eviscerates/destroys with tweet/article/report".

Also, any headline with ridiculous numbers in it like "Eighty million people will be homeless by winter" or "The average human is filled with 5 kilos of micro plastics!". I even ignore headlines that promise good news, if they use the same tricks, like "New, cheap, easily mass produced chemical discovered that can fix climate change!".

It's kind of a new brain muscle for me but now my first impulse when I read any headline is to assume it's not true and then see if anything else comes along to suggest otherwise. Take all that BS, for example, about the 2000 foot deep chambers apparently discovered under the pyramids that just appeared in everyone's newsfeed. Didn't take long for that to get debunked.

Basically, I just assume all this is fiction until it's corroborated by several dependable sources. The reality of the state of the world is almost certainly not what is being put in front of us. It might be worse or it might be better but it's almost certainly not what they say it is.

I don't need to change your mind, i agree