PhilipTheBucket

One of my first experience of the US was Detroit, Gary (the where Michael Jackson is from) and Flint.

Out of all the possible places for a visitor from abroad to come to in America, you landed in Gary, Indiana?

That is fucking fascinating. Are you open to tell me a little more about your time in Gary?

Interesting. You haven't read "more" in the singular with that meaning (definitely not in formal language, if you did see it it would be because of someone trying to be fancy but making a mistake). "Mores" is from Latin, the singular is "mos" which isn't used in English. "Mores" is a very very unusual word for a non native speaker to use, that's just what made me curious.

For future reference I don't think I would describe almost any common person in America as "centre-right" politically right now. Almost everyone is either MAGA, or at-least-center-left (on the American version of the spectrum at least), or apolitical-or-pretending-to-be. And almost no one anywhere on the right knows what the gilded age was. IDK, maybe it's an issue of translating their politics into your terminology and then back into English.

Also it was a little bit strange that you seemed to almost totally ignore my "my country is dying I hate this" comment and somehow take the opposite meaning from it. Your reply was kind of boilerplate, just something you could say to any American who made a reply to your comment, with a few fitting quotes from my message taken out of context up at the top. Then there are sort of weirdly formal structures to it (the bulleted list breaking down components of your argument like an essay, and "consider novel approaches" and "cultural mores" and things like that). I would say it sounds like LLM text, except that there are also in it minor grammar mistakes (which is fine honestly, I'm a native speaker and I make plenty of those.)

I was just curious, just prodding a little bit, that is all, hope you do not take offense. Maybe you did some academic work in English, and so that's just become the way you write when you're writing English and so it's unlike a lot of Lemmy comments as a result.

My country is trying to die, there are monsters in the streets and it's hard for me to see how we can win the fight that is coming for us. From my side you're not going to bother me too much with any negativity you type in a Lemmy comment.

There's that whole thing about everything in the US taking this horrifying downwards turn right around 1970, by all these different metrics, and there's not really an obvious reason for it. I actually have one speculative theory on that: I think that in the 1968 Democratic convention, the Chicago cops beat the fuck out of a lot of the most passionate and engaged leftist activists the country had out in the street, and the lesson they took away from that (sorta reasonably, even though the Chicago cops certainly were not Democrats) was "fuck the whole political system then, I don't care, I'm out and fuck you." McGovern suffered his absolutely heartbreaking shutout in 1972, and the Democrats just stopped winning elections completely for the next 20 years, and eventually they learned their lesson and became Republicans. We went from JFK and LBJ to Clinton, and the new era of 1990s / 2000s horrors was born with no left representation anywhere in Washington.

So yeah, I agree with you. There's not really any reason to think that anyone in Washington would react to the electoral disengagement of the left by moving any direction other than right, and I think there is a good argument for a strong precedent of them moving far right and the whole country getting fucked over a barrel up to and including the present day because of it.

the hands of a citizenry that can’t be bothered to make sure it all stays on the rails

I don’t understand how we can survive.

Every day now I think about leaving. I want to be here but I can’t see how it will survive.

The US is unique because it was able to constantly absorb in all this new blood from outside to wash off the stagnation, keep things solid and strong, but now that’s cut off. [emphasis added]

Arguably, it is this sort of superficial, exceptionalist rhetoric is at the root cause of the situation

If you keep parroting, “freedom this, freedom that”, your not going to be able to make a true evaluation of the price and nature of freedoms when push comes to shove.

My brother I think you need to reread what I actually wrote.

I mean it's 100% fair criticism, honestly. The part where it falls down for me is where the solution always seems to be "Don't vote for Democrats!" (and then leaves the room, walking proudly)

Almost everyone in Washington is a piece of shit, although the Republicans are much worse. If you want to have another FDR, you have to have another several decades of labor movement before that, fighting for change from the bottom up. And then the political class is the last to come around, and they can lock in and extend some of the changes you fought for. "Democrats are POS" is mostly true. "Let's get less engaged to politics / It doesn't matter who wins the election" is a fucking horrifying reaction and plan to cope with that and make it better.

I've heard many people on Lemmy say that they're not planning to engage with the electoral system until the Democrats get better on their own. All I can say to that strategy is, better start looking around for where to move to that'll give you the best shot at having a pretty comfortable ICE facility to call home going forward. And if you identify as any kind of anarchist / Marxist / anything like that, if you are at all engaged with any kind of counterculture or activism and you're still in the US, you should probably be making plans to leave, because for you it will probably be much much worse.

Yeah. I don't disagree. It's so fucking upsetting.

You cannot run a country when the people who run all the country machine day to day don't give a shit about education, aren't invested in maintaining what sustains them, don't really look out for each other, and don't work that hard. You just can't do it. I don't care what politics you put on top of it, what system you want to make that's going to reform Washington in whatever way. It just doesn't work, it's like building a house out of mud. The horrors we're starting to experience the early stages of right now are just the inevitable product of leaving the most powerful organized government on the planet in the hands of a citizenry that can't be bothered to make sure it all stays on the rails.

The US is a big place, and a hell of a lot more diverse than my depressing little summary up there, and it has literally millions of people who are fighting hard to keep the ship off the rocks right now. I don't feel like the early days of the Gestapo had gangs of civilians keeping tabs on where they were going and showing up and yelling at them sometimes until they left. I feel proud as hell of the people who are trying to stop it all, and that's very much a part of the American character, somehow, even after all these years of rot. Tolkien talked about it in the English people, soft like butter sometimes but then tough as old tree-roots when they're tested. America has heart in a way that a lot of countries don't seem to have. But it just feels like the ground is melting under us. I don't understand how we can survive.

I'm not talking about "this" being Trump, although yes absolutely that too. I'm just talking about... everything. Every empire dies, and more or less always in the same way. Success and good living, then softness, then rot, and it crumbles. The US is unique because it was able to constantly absorb in all this new blood from outside to wash off the stagnation, keep things solid and strong, but now that's cut off. I'm just really scared for my country. I fucking love this place, it's my home. Every day now I think about leaving. I want to be here but I can't see how it will survive.

Maybe it will heal stronger after the break. It's a unique type of country, it doesn't have to follow that same decline and fall. Maybe this is what we need to break us out of half a century of lazy stagnation entitlement. I don't know. All I know is, I'm looking around and I can't see what's going to bust us out and up. I don't feel like I know my country, I don't know any other home but I don't feel like it is my people anymore.

Three upvotes, final offer

Stephen Miller is clearly Himmler. They even have a certain physical weirdness in common. The Goebbels part of the operation has seen some substantial improvement; I think they have learned that it works better if you don't have one visible person who's in charge of the propaganda, but just a shadowy network that's smuggling various things that are "what everyone believes" into the discourse. I don't think there is really an equivalent of Goebbels in the modern setup.

I think it's bad that my first thought was to check the year, to find out what stage of the progression we're at, and how much time we still have...

Turns out we're at the beginning of the camps opening. Sounds pretty accurate. Basically no time left.

Totally, totally. So when did he vote to send weapons to Israel?

• Which one was your favorite time he voted to send weapons to Israel? I keep asking
• You're talking nonsense since Bernie Sanders has been extremely vigorous about opposing Israel (pretty obviously more so than Eurovision is) in a bunch of specific and material ways, here are some examples

Does that way of explaining it make sense?