U.S. Politics

Remember guys; The Epstein Files completely exonerate Trump and all of his allies from any wrong-doing and actually prove that the Democrats are the bad guys and we'll all be amazed once they're released, except that the Epstein Files don't exist and why do people keep talking about them, but also if they do exist they are completely fake and made up by the Democrats to hurt Trump.
 
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I don't believe that. Not for one second.

It will be repaired. It may not be in exactly 4 years time, but we will survive and continue to thrive, but this phase is going to die out sooner rather than later, and from the ashes of that will rise a better functioning government for its people.

I have to believe that.
 
I don't know, though. I think the statement 'I have to believe that' kind of says it all. It's not a logical argument. It's emotional. Because the alternative is terrifying and unfathomable to us. But like, I imagine that's the same reaction you would have gotten from 90% of any population of people living through the final collapse of their own empires. Surely the Roman Empire will exist for eternity, right? It's too big and too powerful not to.

But they never do. They always collapse. They always fail eventually.

What I see now when I look at the US is people trying to be a singular collective, if a loose one, that can't agree on anything. People deny basic facts, basic science, even fucking basic mathematics. You can watch a video of like the dumbest piece of shit on earth - someone like Jordan Peterson (who I would argue is intentionally dumb, not uneducated)- debate an actual serious intelligent person where Peterson clearly flounders, equivocates, cries, and backpeddles the entire time and half of the audience will be like 'that Jordan Peterson guy is amazing.'

Call a genocide a genocide and half the country can be convinced in about 8 seconds that you're actually doing an anti-semitism. It doesn't have to make sense. You just have to shout it really loudly.

How do you repair that? How do you create anything approaching a cohesive confederation of people when you can't agree on the most basic, foundational elements of society? If half the country believe that living, and the things attendant to being alive, are basic rights, and half the country thinks anyone executing brown people should be allowed; how do you square that circle?

I don't see a way out that doesn't end in truly monumental violence and/or the complete dissolution of the Union. We allowed it to get to a point where a huge portion of the population aren't just actively doing and saying harmful, horrible things. They've become IMMUNE to reason, and without that reason they will continue to inflict pure psychosis on everyone around them. They control what happens to you, and they want you to fucking die and/or be enslaved. How do you fix that?

I really don't think you can. I think it's going to get a lot worse.
 
This would all be a lot easier if we could let go of the idea that the U.S., in its current form, somehow MUST continue to exist.
Like, it’s OK to find better ways to do things and to throw out the old ways. We don’t *need* things to endure. Positive change, even if it is positive change that fundamentally changes or even removes the US “as we know it” is not a bad thing.

What’s happening now definitely IS a bad thing, but a lot of that is allowed to happen because of how hung up we are on the past. It’s in the name “make America great again”. I submit that “great” and “again” should be avoided. We need NEW ideas and new ways of being.
The old ways failed, they brought us here.
 
Sadly, I have to agree. I'm pretty sure America is fucked. And unfortunately there isn't a way to get off the ship. The hole world is gonna suffer for it unfortunately too. My therapist doesn't even watch the news anymore just so she can do her job. It sucks that my only hope for the future is that my parents will probably die before we get to the mad max portion of our future. And honestly I may be very close behind them. They're about the only reason I'm still here now. The fact that death is what I look forward to is just... sorry I'm done.

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You're right, it doesn't. But when has this kind of change ever happened without violence? We had our own civil war over this shit centuries ago and we are still back where we started. I just don't see a way forward without alot of dead people, one way or the other. And that hurts my heart.

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We didn’t *finish* that Civil War, though.
This is the result of that.

And yeah, unfortunately, more bad things will happen before any potential “getting better” can happen.
 
For those of you who think the US is in irreversible societal collapse - what makes you think other countries are immune from the same fate? Is there something uniquely American happening here, or are the same factors that are driving us toward this fate present around the world?
 
For those of you who think the US is in irreversible societal collapse - what makes you think other countries are immune from the same fate? Is there something uniquely American happening here, or are the same factors that are driving us toward this fate present around the world?
I think that's a complicated question.
There are absolutely unique factors at play in the US. I don't think it can actually be overstated how much damage the GOP has done to the United States over the last 60 years. They set out to literally create their own voters to ensure they'd have almost unlimited access to power forever, and it worked. GOP voters are pathologically immune to facts and reason. For them, it's just tribalism. Whatever the GOP says is correct, and whatever anyone not GOP says must be wrong. The US -obsession- with guns and religion, which is 100% also a GOP initiative. While religious feeling isn't unique to the US, the US is among a very small number of countries for which it is -paramount-.

Other countries are absolutely sliding into fascism and authoritarianism, as well as just generally being heavily divided. But some of that we can even lay at the feet of the United States, as US politics have literally infected other countries (Canada is a great example - the issues I raised above don't really exist here, and yet we're careening toward the exact same talking points, goals, style of news, public indoctrination, etc -- Canada is just copying the US, and we're not alone). It cannot be denied that as the US goes, so goeth the world. At least the 'Western' world.

Some countries are already some combination of theocracy and dictatorship, and whether that is also the fault of the US is definitely something we could debate endlessly but it's hard to -deny- that the US has had any impact on foreign nations over the last 100 years.

That being said, we're definitely seeing these problems everywhere to some extent whenever people aren't already being brutally suppressed. So to actually answer the question that you didn't ask: I actually DON'T think other countries are immune to the same fate. As I said earlier, I think societal collapse is kind of the ultimate fate of every country if we don't make drastic changes that we won't make for a whole host of reasons. I think the human race itself has already proven itself a disastrous failure and now is just the long decline until we destroy ourselves. And we'll deserve it.
 
And then we find out that a) the Texas community that suffered so horribly in the recent floods was offered money by the Biden administration to improve their infrastructure, and their populace was so adamant about not taking any of that goddamn Commie money that the county tried to refuse it but took it just to keep it from going anywhere else, and then their county officials gave themselves a raise with it, AND that the county asked Texas for the money instead, repeatedly, and were refused every time; and b) that Noem did not renew contracts that expired shortly after the flooding, resulting in only a fraction of calls to FEMA for assistance actually being answered by anybody.
 
I just pulled on the thread of that whole situation with the money for infrastructure and honestly, if we lived in a just society, there would be officials up on homicide charges for everyone who died in those floods. Yeah, some blame lands on the voters, too, but we know Texas is gerrymandered to within an inch of its life, so the blame rolls uphill.
 
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