Comment by flumpcakes
15 hours ago
This is such a depressing read. What is becoming of the USA? Let's hope sanity prevails and the next election cycle can bring in some competent non-grievance based leadership.
15 hours ago
This is such a depressing read. What is becoming of the USA? Let's hope sanity prevails and the next election cycle can bring in some competent non-grievance based leadership.
This isn't a one-election thing. It's going to be a generational effort to fix what these people are breaking more of every day. I hope I live to see it come to some kind of fruition - I recently turned 50.
Some people are calling it the "American century of humiliation"
No other country that went through a phase like this has ever recovered. Not even in a century.
I won't give in to doomerism.
Germany, Italy and Japan are all wealthy, stable democracies right now. Not without their problems and baggage, but pleasant places in a lot of ways.
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That’s just historically inaccurate. You had massive upheavals across numerous countries throughout time, this is small in comparison to the civil war’s impact on the USA for instance. You think this is worse than half the government rebelling and revolting and killing an amount of young men that today would be equivalent to 6 million deaths? It’s bad now but your comment lacks historical evidence.
On eastern social media a big discussion going around right now is referring to America as being on the “kill line”.
The world knows the US is close to folding in on itself.
China seems to have recovered pretty well.
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U.S. Civil War? Roman Crisis of the 3rd Century? Russian Revolution? England's War of the Roses? China's periodic dynastic changes?
They usually don't come back with the same political organization - that's sorta the point. But plenty of civilizations come back in a form that is culturally recognizable and even dominate afterwards.
I’d be interested to see some specific examples cited as it’s hard to take this comment at face value.
The Unenlightenment. Dereconstruction.
> No other country that went through a phase like this has ever recovered. Not even in a century.
Oh I can think of a couple in the '40s that bounced back after a while.
This is a laughably ridiculous assertion.
Rome was 'in decline' for 1000 years... these things are mostly feel good blather and not realistic statements on the position of nations
Is this a joke that’s going over my head? The country we all know the term “century of humiliation” from has recovered and is literally a superpower right now?
> generational effort to fix
You imply that there are folks that willing to fix or even recognize that things are broken in the first place
> It's going to be a generational effort to fix what these people are breaking more of every day.
That assumes you have people wanting to fix what is broken - and I have a hard time believing even now that they are in the majority.
MAGA and their supporters? They want to see the world burn, if only for different motives: the "left behind" people in flyover states just want revenge, the Evangelicals literally believe they can cause the Second Coming of Christ by it [1], the Russia fangroup wants to see Ukraine burn to the ground and the ultra-libertarians/dont tread on me folks want all government but maybe a bit of military to go away. That is what unifies so many people behind the Trump banner.
The problem is, on the left side you got a bunch of people completely fed up as well. Anarchists of course, then you got the "left behind" people who still want revenge on the system but aren't willing to enlist the help of the far-right for that goal, you got revolutionaries of all kind... and you got those who believe that the rot runs too deep to fix by now.
And let's face the uncomfortable truth: every one of them, bar the Evangelicals and the Russia apologists, actually has a decent point in wanting to see the world burn. Post-Thatcher capitalism has wrecked too many lives, the US Constitution hasn't seen a meaningful update in decades and no overhaul in centuries, the "checks and balances" that were supposed to prevent a Trump from reaching office or rising to the position of effective dictator have been all but destroyed, the "American Dream" has been vaporware ever since 2007...
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c20g1zvgj4do
I’ve been called bad things on HN for suggesting there’s even a whiff of corruption in this administration. That alone scares me. Deeply.
there's more money and "don't rock the boat" mentality on here as a consequence of that and they try to keep the moderation light. So its just not discussed enough to give people still tragically mired in that tribalism, the appropriate levels of shame.
Hope is not a plan, unfortunately, so if that's all we've got, I don't have much hope.
What do you mean? You think any company should do whatever the government tells them?
All of what's happening is a symptom, there is no reason it would change course with the next elections, all of this is the logical development of decades of cultural, political and morale rot in the US society. Trump isn't a bad moment we have to push through before we get back to the baseline, there has been no serious push back from anyone so far, it's here to stay
You mean, what's been happening to the USA? this isn't a new trend. Militarization of police, open attacks on democracy, unilateral foreign policy moves.
the country jumped the shark post 9/11 and has been on a slow rot since then.
Indeed. Bin Laden succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. He kickstarted our self-destruction.
I think the shoe lace bomber did more than bin laden - decades of ritual humiliation at airports was normalised.
No, this is cope, Trump is deeply different.
Trump is different because he is flailing to deflect from the fact he is deeply legally compromised. But he is reaching into a toolbox of things that have already been made available.
yeah there is close to little relation between the current administration and pre-Trump GOP. That entire party is now compromised. Beforehand you could always assume they'd be locked out by legal, business, or party pressure but that hasn't been seemingly much of a thing since Trump (as seen most recently in the illegal tariffs the administration continues to try to apply globally).
The framework for collecting the data to feed to the AI, exposed by Snowden, was designed and implemented in the wake of 9/11 by Bush when Trump was still busy banging teenagers with Epstein and not even thinking about politics.
Then Obama re-authorized and expanded it. Trump and Biden haven’t even moved the needle, really.
Now they’ve put up tens of thousands of permanently installed facial recognition cameras (not Flock ALPR, those point the other direction to get number plates) all over SoCal and southern Nevada (that I’ve directly observed; presumably it is happening in many other cities as well), and TSA and CBP are collecting as many ID-verified sets of facial geometry as they possibly can, whenever they can. ICE is of course using it nonstop, as well as feeding additional geometry into it. They’re flying drones 30 feet above sidewalks in downtown LA to mass collect faces.
The DoD can’t wait to deploy SOTA AI against Americans en masse.
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"Recently turned American citizens" have every bit as much right to free speech, as guaranteed by the 1st amendment, as any other American citizen does. That's the whole point of the constitution. To pretend otherwise betrays the core values of our democracy.
Yeah well my family's been here for hundreds of years and fuck him. They're more American than that piece of shit will ever be.
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That's congresswoman "recently turned American citizen" to you sir. BTW she became a citizen 26 years ago. My favorite part of Ilhan Omar being an outspoken congresswoman who keeps getting reelected is how it drives islamophobes crazy.
Selective memory as usual, outright dishonest at that. Let’s remember MTG heckling Biden. The when and who started heckling the sotu is well known.
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Complaining about the head of the government publicly so important that its included in the first amendment instead of one of those other ones.
My brother in Christ we shoot our Presidents for sport in this country. There's nothing more American than heckling the government and God bless any immigrant who doesn't put up with its bullshit.
The irony inherent in this post is stunning in its purity. Weapons grade. I should be wearing goggles just to view this post. It's off the charts.
> Let's hope sanity prevails and the next election cycle can bring in some competent non-grievance based leadership.
Would be nice, but I have a bad feeling that the impact of widescale mostly unregulated AI adoption on our social fabric is going to make the social media era that gave rise to Trump, et al seem like the good ol' days in comparison.
I hope I am wrong.
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That seems to be a denial of reality. Democrats are already winning races all over the country, in places that (traditionally) have been Republican strongholds.
But don't let me stop you from believing in a worldview that contradicts reality ... lost of Republicans (and some Democrats) do it too.
Democrats are mostly winning because the republicans have totally lost it, not because they are bringing forward a political vision that makes sense. I guess that’s where we are.
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Local county races and dog catcher races do not matter. What matters is who occupies 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. That is the only race that counts.
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Dems have lost to Trump twice and it looks like they want to run the same campaign strategies in future elections. They are relying too heavily on "trump bad" to win and I worry about what that will ultimately result in down the line.
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In a nutshell, this is the problem with mainstream dems (and I include Newsom in this) looks an appearance matters a lot more than actual policy leadership.
The policies that actually affect people's lives, there's a lot of overlap for both mainstream dems and republicans.
I live in Idaho, and school teacher here are also extremely underpaid (My kid's teachers all have second jobs). Yet our state has magically found $40M to give away to private school while it's also asking the public schools to find 2% of their budgets to cut.
In I think both cases, the solution is simple, give the teachers a raise and probably raise taxes to pay for it. However, both parties are fairly anemic to the "raise taxes" portion of the message and so they instead look for other dumb flashy one time things they can do instead.
Federal democrats have relied way too heavily on Republicans being a villain and vague "hope and change" promises to carry them through an election cycle. They need to actually "change" things and not just maintain the status quo when they get power.
The Democrats are currently overwhelming favourites to win the House with a decent chance of also winning the Senate in the 2026 midterms and strong favourites to win the 2028 presidency.
I'm not sure why you think they are doomed.
Fox news is going to talk about trans people a lot is the thing. Journalists will turn up to press conferences about anything and ask about trans people. Any response at all will be all that appears on TV.
Last election cycle the "niche issues" people complain about were overwhelmingly talked about more by people saying they opposed them.
Controlling the narrative is very easy when you have a cowardly or bought media, and plan to traffic in rage and clickbait.
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It's interesting that in the UK the traditional two-party system is broken, because everyone realises that both of the traditional parties have been bought by rich folk and business interests, only serve their own interests, and can't be trusted any more. The main contenders now are Reform and The Greens, a situation that no-one predicted five years ago.
The same is true in Australia, though there's no charismatic left-wing leader emerging, and the Farage-equivalent is a laughing stock who struggles to be coherent at times. But because of billionaire money, she's still up there on the polls.
The US system makes it much harder for new parties to form, so it's probably going to be factions in the existing parties. And, of course, MAGA is the new faction in the Republican party; effectively a new party itself. So the ground is fertile for a new left-wing faction in the Democrat party to rise.
Yeah. They really are trying hard to lose.
The current situation in the US is the depressing thing- articles like this give me hope. Real Americans aren't having these BS authoritarian violations of our constitutional rights.