You know, DOGE, fascist president and corporations dictating what people can do, institutions being ruined, laws being ignored. Is there any way out of that or is it over? Is the USA done?

  • SabinStargem@lemmings.world
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    3 months ago

    I would say so. The only question is whether the good guys win a civil war. My money is on ‘yes’, since Yarvin’s Cabal is hellbent on exiling all of the competent people from their society, along with being jackasses who have alienated many peoples. It will be a bloody struggle, but I think that Dogey America will ultimately receive the Old Yeller treatment. I only hope that every member of Yarvin’s Cabal are executed - Elon, Thiel, ect.

    Let’s not make the mistakes of the 1st Civil War, 1st Business Plot, and 2nd World War, where many high ranking members were permitted to escape justice.

    • T00l_shed@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I think the US is over. There will be something else for sure, but i don’t know if the US is salvageable

      • BaroqueInMind@lemmy.one
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        3 months ago

        If these things Trump is removing with presidential orders was so important, why the fuck didn’t Congress make them laws while Democrats had a majority in the past twenty fucking years?

        This shit is infuriating to me that we only blame one side for these issues.

        • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          why the fuck didn’t Congress make them laws

          Why do you think that would make any difference? Are you not seeing the trump administration straight up ignoring laws that are in place blocking a lot of their current behavior?

          • BaroqueInMind@lemmy.one
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            3 months ago

            Fair point. But then if laws are meaningless if you happened to be wealthy or in a position of power, why is everyone in the Democratic Party essentially shrugging and doing literally nothing about this?

        • andrewta@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          I agree. Even if the democrats were doomed to fail because of how the Republicans operate. But the democrats didn’t even start the process.

          At least be in record that a bill was put up and the Republicans voted it down. To not do anything was stupid. Maybe ya get lucky and get something passed.

        • DontTreadOnBigfoot@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Because the Democratic party is, and always has been, a willing collaborator.

          They have their petty squabbles, but they’ve always been on the same side in regards to making sure the wealthy and powerful stay that way, at all costs.

      • treadful@lemmy.zip
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        3 months ago

        I think you need some perspective. The situation is bad and seems like foreshadowing of worse things to come. However, we’re a pretty far distance from states pulling away or civil war breaking out.

        • T00l_shed@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          There’s more to it than that. I’m talking about a dictatorship, where trump flaunts the law, more than he already has.

        • Da Cap’n@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          3 months ago

          Um, not so much. California is going to have a vote on state independence on the next ballot. I can see Texas following suit.

          • treadful@lemmy.zip
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            3 months ago

            And does anyone actually think those have a chance of passing right now?

            There’s always been talk of succession here and there, but we just aren’t at the point of the US actually breaking up.

            • hornywarthogfart@sh.itjust.works
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              3 months ago

              Yeah we aren’t anywhere close to the point of states breaking out of the union. Some people will call for it, maybe even a lot. But as soon as they realize what is required that shit will stop immediately. California would quite literally need to go to war with the union to gain that independence regardless of what they voted. So not only would they need to actually vote for it but then they’d have to be willing to go to war and kill and die for that separation and their independence.

              As strong as people feel, we aren’t even close to that point. Not to mention it would fail; none of the states currently have any hope of competing against the US military machine. Give us a couple hundred more years to really really deteriorate and siphon all value from the people and land and we may be there.

            • wisely@feddit.org
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              3 months ago

              Curious why you think that? Blue states no longer have any representation. Their representatives are blocked from even entering federal buildings through the public access. Their votes don’t matter. Nobody’s votes count for anything in blue states, and are unlikely to even be counted accurately in the future.

              The fed isn’t even recognizing court orders. Education and most services, protections are being disassembled across the government. Energy grids weakened as wind and hydropower is being cut off.

              People’s rights are being stripped away. Their tax money is being used against allies. Trade wars. Prices are going up. I can’t think of a reason for them to remain paying out more taxes than they receive into a hostile corrupt system they have no voice in, besides the military holding them hostage.

            • NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io
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              3 months ago

              I mean I don’t think most people are for state independence now, but the idea is gaining legitimacy. There’s just no reason to stick with a federal government that will take your taxes and then give you nothing.

  • Sanctus@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    If we can’t get enough people protesting and taking action, yes. The window is closing.

    • pixxelkick@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      The fuck is protesting going to do at this point, lets be real here. Why do you think a protest has any sway of the bulldozer that is happening in the US Legal system?

      Protesting is just not gonna accomplish much, a little bit more than that is needed I think.

        • NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io
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          3 months ago

          Just to make it clear, though: The kind of protesting that works is not standing in the road and blocking traffic on a weekend. We’re talking indefinitely long protests where you occupy public places in a massive show of force meant to force the present regime to back down, and all the violent clashes and multi-day standoffs that come with that. This is (part of) why the civil rights movement worked but the Iraq war protests didn’t. For a recent example of this in action look up the Ukrainian Revolution or the Tunisian Revolution, or for an American example the civil rights movement. If the person you’re responding to had in mind more typical quiet single-day protests then they’re 100% correct, otherwise you’re right but it’s very much uncertain whether Americans have the guts for this kind of stunt.

          • knightly the Sneptaur@pawb.social
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            3 months ago

            Americans are the most domesticated and propagandized culture on the planet. I gave up on the ideal of mass consciousness after Occupy, because the billionaires who own this country have spent generations dumbing it down to the point that almost nobody cares. We’re not seeing mass protests of the kind you describe untill things get very bad for a lot of people.

            • kitnaht@lemmy.world
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              3 months ago

              Occupy was infiltrated by our government by people meant to destroy it from the inside. They incited people and then arrested them for it. This isn’t something that simply died off, they’ve mastered being able to co-opt an idea, push it the way they want, propagandize FUD around it, and then make it disappear.

              • VerifiedSource@sh.itjust.works
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                3 months ago

                Occupy destroyed itself by being too unfocused and ambitious. It also failed to institutionalize and burned itself out quickly.

                Sure the state also did its part to sabotage it. However some of the structures like consensus and stack speakers were easily exploited by all kinds of detractors and grand standers and also wore people out by their duration.

                Don’t get me wrong, it was great that it happened and there are merits to its approach.

                CHAZ had a similar problem with their demands. What Occupy and CHAZ have in common is a continuous occupation of an area with people living there and building a small society. Security concerns, internal contradictions, and external pressure then lead to them falling apart after a month. With both we got a super intense short time of action with grand rhetoric but no staying power. Participants seem to be more interested in experiencing revolutionary cosplaying an anarchist utopia than achieving effective change or building a sustainable movement.

                Occupy and CHAZ also have in common, that they were not repeated the next month or the next year with any success. Previous participants were frustrated or burnt out by the experience and outcomes.

                The Dakota Access Pipeline protests also seem to have attracted protest tourists, who came more for the vibes than the cause.

                White people are colonizing the camps…" protestor Alicia Smith added on Facebook. "They are coming in, taking food, clothing and occupying space without any desire to participate in camp maintenance and without respect of tribal protocols. “These people are treating it like it is Burning Man or The Rainbow Gathering and I even witnessed several wandering in and out of camps comparing it to those festivals.”

                In this case as well, the protest lasted for one longer time only, remained mostly local, and even ethnically specific.

                I don’t know that much about American protest culture and organizations. But my impression is a lack of long term organizations and repeated protests for years for the same goal. There are punctual chaotic outbreaks, sometimes widespread anger like with BLM.

                What other sustained long term groups exist besides Code Pink? The name BLM was coopted and exploited financially by a foundation afaik.

                I also know that climate activist movements like Fridays for Future and eXtinction Rebellion were only able to mobilize a fraction of what was going on in Europe at the time.

                In contrast to Dakota Access the German group Ende Gelände occupied a different coal mine with a couple thousand people every year for a week or so from 2015 to 2024.

                Do I have a wrong impression or is there a lack of political organization around protests and causes in the USA?

      • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        That just means your target changes. You’re not protesting to change an unchangeable administration. Instead you’re building consensus and creating a movement that can activate if certain lines are crossed.

  • TheFeatureCreature@lemmy.ca
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    3 months ago

    In the short term: Yes. Unless the US military decides to remove a sitting president but that is extremely unlikely.

    In the long term: Yes, but also no. Fascism is extremely inefficient and expensive and the US is destroying its own economy and pushing away all of its allies and former trade partners. Things will get very rough but it will not last forever. There will be a lot of rebuilding that needs to be done.

    Unfortunately this has been a long time coming. The United States has never really been united and it was only a matter of time before another possible civil war loomed on the horizon.

    • jaxxed@lemmy.ml
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      3 months ago

      It is also with saying that America will be a different thing on the other end of this. No crumbling empire comes back the same.

    • rayyy@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      You are being way too optimistic. A lot of people will needlessly die, not only from violence but also disease, starvation, suicide and natural disasters.

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I would say it’s been coming since BEFORE the civil war.

      People always take my words out of context when I say that life in general would have been better for everyone long term if the south won.

      People take that to mean that I’m pro-slavery. I’m not. If the south won, slavery would have died out naturally by the early 1900s (assuming confederate america lasted that long)

      But if the south had won, and been able to leave the union? I feel like they’d have made the worst possible choices for their country on a repeated basis. I feel like their country would have crumbled and disolved into multiple smaller countries. The united states would have continued expanding out west. Texas is probably the only former state that wouldn’t have crumbled.

      The rest of the confederate states? They’d be struggling to survive, last in the world in education, terrible healthcare, basically a bunch of 3rd world countries. But the rest of the USA? SO MUCH HEALTHIER FOR IT!!! All these cancers trying to tear down OUR country today, wouldn’t be part of our country. They can go fuck up the country of Alabama. Go nuts.

      The pure amount of butterfly effect policies that would be different is mind blowing.

      To me, the south winning isn’t about slavery. It’s about taking this large lump sum of the worst people in the country, and cutting them free like you cut away a tumor to get rid of cancer.

      • db2@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        You’ve convinced me. I hadn’t thought if it quite that way.

        (The previous comment was unedited at the time this was written, just in case)

      • TeamAssimilation@infosec.pub
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        3 months ago

        What if this is karma for invading and taking half of Mexico? There weren’t slavers or shittier-that-usual people in the region before that.

        • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          You should read about the Spanish missions and their treatment of the native people on the west coast. But also the Mexicans weren’t innocent of things either. They were constantly having political violence and even voluntarily returned monarchies. (yes plural)

          • TeamAssimilation@infosec.pub
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            3 months ago

            As. Mexican, I agree with you. The conquistadores weren’t people of the highest caliber, and while the catholic monks were better, their mission was evangelizing at any cost, even if it meant killing people who didn’t want to. Even prehispanic people could be brutal.

            The main difference between colonial Mexico and USA was that slavery wasn’t a thing here, because the evangelized became full-fledged catholics, having a saved soul and all. Something unthinkable for the slavers, who justified their acts because blacks “didn’t have souls”.

            Mexican creoles, the hacendados, found a loophole: Catholics could still be exploited by crushing, multigenerational debt. That’s why we had a century of turmoil after the revolution(s), right after the century of turmoil after our independence from Spain.

            Guess my point is: by the time USA invaded and forcefully took half our country, we didn’t have slavers (the hacendado’s loophole was gone), and definitely didn’t trade humans as things. Your south brought back evils that were gone at the time.

            • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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              3 months ago

              Yeah that’s true. The American South was exceptionally evil. I don’t think we’ve ever properly processed that as a country.

        • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          I mean, if the united states is getting karma for invading and annexing other peoples land, SURELY you’d think there would have been some repercussions from Native Americans, right? Hell, even Canada arguably has some leeway to give us karma if that’s the case.

          And Hawaii.

          And technically Puerto Rico, and the Somoa Islands, and Guam.

          Even though Vietnam isn’t, nor has it ever been a US territory, they still know what it’s like to be invaded by us. We were never trying to take land for ourselves, but we WERE trying to take land for our cold war ally. We just failed is all. And yet…for everybody reading this from a country that ISN’T America, here’s the weird thing. In our schools, they teach vietnam in history as if WE WON. Which I assume the rest of the world easily see’s how absurd that is. Here in America? There are PLENTY of people who think we’ve never lost a war. There are people who defend the 2001-2020 invasion of multiple middle eastern countries as a war we won. Some of them think it was multiple wars in a short amount of time we won. Others think it was one continuous war that we won. But those people exist. I’ve met many of them.

          Now, with all that said, NOBODY calls them freedom fries. Nobody. Never even heard of a single person who calls them that. It was a 2 week thing on tv, and then everybody just shrugged and called it stupid. Which is exactly what I’m hoping this whole gulf of america/mexico thing is. Just political theater, and then it’s over because it’s stupid.

      • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        3 months ago

        If the south won, slavery would have died out naturally by the early 1900s (assuming confederate america lasted that long)

        Do you have access to some alternate timeline or something? Where can I get this secret information that you have?

        • Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          3 months ago

          The civil war itself destroyed the south’s market for cotton. The number of slaves that fled was ever increasing and the war made it even easier.

          If the north and south were separated they would have continued to come north but would then be asylum seekers.

          The north of the south would have been the main producers of economic growth as mineral exports from that region exploded after the civil war. Based on this alone it’s not certain the confederacy would have actually collapsed.

          It would take someone with deep historical knowledge of that era to make any realistic predictions of what would have happened.

          For instance, the likelihood of the confederate states not further splittering isnt known. And then there are issues such as if the west coast or other regions would do attempt the same break from the union.

          There are all sorts of trade imbalances that would be in play. But it’s hardly an idle thought experiment. There are simply too many pieces.

      • NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        This is complete hogwash speculation. You have no idea what would have happened to the North if the split had been permanent.

        • ShepherdPie@midwest.social
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          3 months ago

          I mean it’s very obviously speculation because nobody has a crystal ball to see the outcome of decisions that never happened. It’s just an interesting thought experiment and something to ponder.

          • anomnom@sh.itjust.works
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            3 months ago

            You haven’t factored in the the north’s economy was based on manufacturing things using materials from the south. Industrialists got rich from it and that’s a major factor in why New York cops were returning slaves before the war.

            The Industrial Revolution was powered by coal from the south.

            Before the public works and refrigerated train cars that made California a farming state, a lot of food was grown down there.

      • scarabic@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        How exactly would slavery have died out “naturally” in a union made up entirely of slave states who’d just fought and won a war to defend it? I get your point about letting the south stand in its own so it could fall, but you are too casually sweeping aside the issue of slavery. “Yeah yeah - that would pass naturally - now let me tell you my MAIN point….”

        • tan00k@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Northerners weren’t simply more high minded than southerners concerning slavery - industrialization lessened their dependence on slaves to the point where they could abandon slavery without the economy crumbling.

          Presumably this would happen in the south as they industrialized as well.

              • scarabic@lemmy.world
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                3 months ago

                Yep the South was invested in agriculture, to this day a labor-intensive sector, largely due to advantages in climate and geography which were basically fixed. So how again would slavery have spontaneously ended in the South again? It’s a question - please answer it.

        • Aqarius@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Frankly, it’skind of the opposite: the slavery part of the argument is obvious, simply because IIRC the model of chattel slavery the US south operated on was only viable through the constant flow of new people to feed into the meatgrinder. The “better off” part is kinda dubious.

          • scarabic@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            I’m afraid you do not recall correctly. One of the features of American slavery is that it was population self-sustaining. You can see #4 on this UNESCO page. I like the way they put it: American slavery created a people where there was none before.

      • Seleni@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        To be fair though, Texas seceded once already and within a year or two was begging to be taken back. They probably would have crumbled too.

      • RippleEffect@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        You say this but it’s hardly just the south that voted for trump. As you mentioned, the butterfly effect could have changed things dramatically. Things still could have turned out worse for everyone.

        Though things are pretty crap now so I can definitely relate to your thought process.

      • Semjaza@lemmynsfw.com
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        3 months ago

        On the one hand… First World War would’ve ended very differently.

        On the other… Maybe eugenics would already be discredited by the 20s with how it went in Dixie.

        • NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io
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          3 months ago

          I mean WWII was salty Europeans fighting salty Europeans over European salt. Nothing for America to get involved in.

          • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            Did you forget about the part where the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor? You couldn’t have kept the US out of World War 2 with a trillion dollar payoff. The country wanted blood.

          • Semjaza@lemmynsfw.com
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            3 months ago

            The US arms shipments to Britain, and later after the gun runner ship Lustiana, hoping to use its civilian passengers as a shield in breach of the rules of war, led to American popular support for joining with the Allies, which they eventually did to push Germany to defeat despite the newly Sovietised Russia withdrawing.

            And it might be that Dixieland and Yankeeland would support the Allies and Axis, and WWI would have had an American theatre, too opening in 1915 or so. And any major war fought in North America in the 20th century would totally alter the form US neo imperial power and hegemony took, if any at all, in the latter part of the 20th century.

            As a minimum, a different US would alter how Versaille and Balfour treaties were made and what who agreed to.

          • Semjaza@lemmynsfw.com
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            3 months ago

            I didn’t even mention the Second World War, because the first would’ve been different enough to make it having happened in a familiar form into unlikely.

    • TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip
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      3 months ago

      All these years, preppers may have been right. Having a well supplied fortress of your own can turn out to be very handy.

      • freebee@sh.itjust.works
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        3 months ago

        It’s still a shitty situation. Really what’s a shitty situation with an extra 20 kg of coffee in your basement, but still a shitty situation? The prepper fortress is a very unrealistic thing to try to strive for anyhow for anyone living in a city, majority of people. It’s the widespread doomsday mentality and the downward spiral of the conspiracy nutheads that got the USA where it is today anyhow… Good luck hanging on in your basement for 10 years. That’s easily how long it can take if it goes full fascist. Even then, hard to compare, the implosion of a nuclear armed superpower has only happened once before in history (Soviet Union), and that shit ain’t over yet either, Ukraine is a direct continuation of the process. So they’re like 35-ish years in, where USA seems to be heading now. Abandoning NATO is the equivalent of the implosion of the Warsaw Pact.

    • scarabic@lemmy.world
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      Personally I think this resurgence is a highly specific cultural moment that is coming as religion dies off and the white population of America teeters toward minority status.

      Since the US birth rate began to decline (natural phenomenon that happens to all developed nations) its strong immigration has held it up. But that has had an accumulating demographic effect. White people lost their official hegemony a long time ago but now they are facing the prospect of losing their simple majority and it scares the living shit out of them. It’s not just because privilege sees equality as oppression. It’s also because they know that they have treated others incredibly badly, and deserve to be castigated should they lose power.

      That’s why this Trump admin is so ugly. It’s the death spasm of a dying culture. That’s why this Trump admin is hollow at the center: it’s backed by a group that has no future and can only harken back to the past. This is why this Trump admin is openly undemocratic: they no longer have the numbers to play the game.

      This too shall pass, but at great cost. The USA is the greatest political prize there has ever been and it won’t be let go of lightly.

    • kitnaht@lemmy.world
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      To be fair, decades to destroy. This has been slowly culminating since before I was even born. Maybe before my parents were born.

  • bizarroland@fedia.io
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    3 months ago

    Nah, but it’s going to be a long way back to 2015.

    We’ve been set back to the 40s. Maybe by the next 40s

    • MelonYellow@lemmy.ca
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      3 months ago

      My partner and I are already brainstorming what countries we would go to if in the future shit really hits the fan. I mean just as a hypothetical. Mexico’s up there. We could easily pick up and go, trouble is it’d be harder to get the rest of our family on board.

        • MelonYellow@lemmy.ca
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          3 months ago

          Ditto. Wouldn’t be this big culture shock. You could just drive there, don’t gotta mess with flying. If you can get to Mexico, you can fly out anywhere else if you’d like. And like a lot of people, we already know basic Spanish from school. Wouldn’t be hard to pick up the rest. xD

  • TheCriticalMember@aussie.zone
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    3 months ago

    I believe the US is a failed state. trump just decided that himself and his AG are the only people who can decide which laws apply to the executive, and ordered the termination of all remaining Biden era US Attorneys. I know we’ve been saying this a lot lately, but it feels like a mask off moment.

  • Maeve@kbin.earth
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    3 months ago

    It depends on the will and strength of mind of the populace. The politicians are laughing all the way to their Swiss bank accounts.

  • wirebeads@lemmy.ca
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    3 months ago

    2nd amendment Americans. Shoot your fascist orange government rapist leader right between his beady little eyes.

    Trumps time has come.

    • Seleni@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Shoot the dictator and prevent the war? But the dictator is merely the tip of the whole festering boil of social pus from which dictators emerge; shoot one, and there’ll be another one along in a minute. Shoot him too? Why not shoot everyone and invade Poland? In fifty years’, thirty years’, ten years’ time the world will be very nearly back on its old course. History always has a great weight of inertia.

      -Terry Pratchett (Lords and Ladies)

      Been thinking about this quote a lot lately. The fact that Trump is so popular shows that he’s just the symptom of a deeper, possibly terminal disease.

      • AnimalsDream@slrpnk.net
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        3 months ago

        This is the thing making me lean more toward leaving than trying to change things. Even if Trump were magically impeached today, and our election system were left as near-intact as it is, somebody just like him could be just as likely to be elected in the next cycle. And odds are he’s going to pull off rigging the system to make sure that happens by then.

        I think that on a long term scale, to get at the root, something needs to be done about the media machine behind him. Culture eats policy for breakfast.

      • UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml
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        3 months ago

        The fact that Trump is so popular shows that he’s just the symptom of a deeper, possibly terminal disease.

        Capitalism

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      3 months ago

      Not that I’m opposed to the idea on principle, but realistically that kind of long wolf adventurism would only make things worse.

    • Arghblarg@lemmy.ca
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      3 months ago

      “He who saves his country does not violate any law.” -Donald Trump (reading a post-it note handed to him by Felon Musk, quoting Napoleon, or something)

    • dontkickducks@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Trump is just the convenient caricature of a puppet pushed forward to be the face and disorganise everything. When he dies he’ll be replaced by someone else capable of filling that role. It wouldn’t surprise me if the follow-up person is already known in their circles.

      Trump is old and messed up. The propaganda rocketing him up can just as easily shoot him down. He is here to do damage and to disrupt and corrupt the system. He’s here to weed out the failsafes against fascism/monarchy so a new political model can take over.

      When he’s done enough, someone else will step forward to rebuild and ‘repair the damage’ but only in such a way that the fascist/oligarchy gains more power and the majority of people lose more power.

  • missingno@fedia.io
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    3 months ago

    What do you mean by “screwed”? I think the question needs to be more clearly defined before I can give an answer.

    A lot of damage is going to be done. Things are going to get much worse before they get better. Some people are going to get killed.

    But I don’t think this is the literal apocalypse. Life will continue. It’s going to be hard to rebuild and will take a long time, but we will rebuild as much as we can.

  • Yerbouti@sh.itjust.works
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    3 months ago

    The funny things is americans were like “We need guns to protect ourselves from tyrants.” But of course, the ones with the guns are precisely the ones siding with tyranny.

    • crusa187@lemmy.ml
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      3 months ago

      Those pricks had one fucking job and they absolutely blew it. Boot lickers all of them, it makes me sick.

      • untorquer@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Power market’s going to get real funky in over the next 6 months as utilities run out of runway on their renewable programs.

          • Yerbouti@sh.itjust.works
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            3 months ago

            I mean, you’ll get to see the difference between a bad and discriminatory democracy and a pure dictatorship soon enough. If you think an economical crash will bring back progressivism, I wish you good luck but I think it’s really naive. At this point with the gafam siding with pedo-president, they just wait for automation and AI to get a little further before getting rid of half of the country. And since it’s the US, the other half of the country will take care of it for them. An economical crash would be the perfect setup for this. I’m not even american but for the first time of my life I’m considering getting a gun.

            • MolochAlter@lemmy.world
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              3 months ago

              you’ll get to see the difference between a bad and discriminatory democracy and a pure dictatorship soon enough.

              The former elected to enfranchise the aforementioned blacks, the latter is deporting people on a hunch, for instance.

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          3 months ago

          That’s an interesting point, because in terms of wealth inequality and unbridled exploitative capitalism stuff was pretty fucking dreadful back then too. But I don’t think there was as much interest in the super rich taking control of the government, because the government didn’t do that much and had never really been a problem for the wealthy (apart from that time they tried to abolish slavery…)

          I’m normally a “folks need to work together, big problems need big solutions” European lefty, but seeing the horror of what a powerful central government can do when it’s in the hands of crazy dipshits… It certainly highlights the benefits of small governments and localised power. Maybe this will lead to growth of some forces of progress that aren’t the federal government? The question is whether after the inevitable crash and burn, the next government will be willing to introduce the actual constraints, checks and balances to not let this happen again?

    • UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml
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      3 months ago

      ‘Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary’

      -Karl Marx

        • Psychadelligoat@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          3 months ago

          The chuds have more guns, thanks to many years of lefties demanding guns be removed from society and giving theirs up while the chuds just bought more (thanks for that one, Dad and friends)

          They’re also usually a liiiitle more ready to use them, and the law is a looooot more ready to defend them than they are us

          • VerifiedSource@sh.itjust.works
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            3 months ago

            Right wingers have organized militias for decades. These might be made up of stupid fat fucks, but they have trained how to organize, communicate, and do logistics.

            The number and quality of weapons is one factor. Wars are won by logistics, communication, and coordination. If you have an existing social political network, you can arm it pretty quickly. A group that knows how to set up a music festival in the middle of nowhere, can learn how to run a military camp.