Fire Hose of Distraction.
King Wide-ass.
This is the sequel to the Trump pee tape.
Even the White house got spray tan. Should change the name to Orange house
the best part about being on bluesky is that politicians are not on bluesky
The fall of the American empire happening live for all to see. A pedophile president, a government chopped into pieces and fed into a wood chipper, a bunch of self obsessed egotistic billionaires lobbying for child labor laws to be repealed, and a totally deranged political system that has gotten so high on the fumes of its own rotting corpse that it can’t even tell it’s dying.
The MAGA fascist movement built itself on characterization of its opponents as pedophiles. Its one thing for this to be obviously untrue, its another thing entirely for it to suddenly preoccupy itself very heavily on protecting pedophiles. The entire political elite of the movement are greedy narcisstic egomaniacal sociopaths. Their primary motives have always been personal gain. Attaching themselves to an obvious pedophile is very different than attaching themselves to one who has been documented in the public arena as one. The republican party fascist elite won’t risk their own necks for that. I don’t know how they will respond. He however is running out of options that aren’t “create a police state, arrest all political opposition, and take state control of all media”. Its do or die for his dictatorship.
They’ve done a fine job so far being attached to Epstein’s well known best bud, so I doubt any more proof will change things
I feel fundamentally that “best buds with a pedophile” and “documented in front of the whole nation as sexually abusing children with Jeffrey Epstein” are just 2 fundamentally different things. Its never been a secret. But neither was Harvey, nor Bill Cosby. When it gained worldwide public attention is when associates dropped them. As soon as it became a risk to their public careers and their money.
That’ll never happen to Trump. No rich people want to make an enemy of America’s dictator.
Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho approves this message!
Piss House
So fucking lazy they can’t even make it look half way realistic. Brain dead vampire administration.
This makes negative sense
It does feel like I am stupider for having seen it.
Every time I see shit like this … all I keep imagining is 340 million idiots in charge of nuclear weapons and the world’s largest military
Your leadership isn’t the problem … the entire country is
dude I literally just live here why the hell are you blaming me
Been saying this for years. This country has been sick long before any of us were even born. The US has sorely needed a cultural revolution but the powers that be have done everything they can, from how they design our cities and infrastructure to our individualist culture they push in our media to the very fundamental structure of our government and economics which they control, to frustrate and obstruct the formation of close communities which can resist their authority while simultaneously extracting every iota of wealth from us.
The biggest road block is too few are willing to take risks to protect others but that is exactly what is needed: a mass of people joined together for the sole purpose of risking themselves for the sake of those who are being rendered powerless. It requires us to fundamentally change the way we think about the world around us.
The most common rebuttal is always “but I have a family and responsibilities! I can’t put myself at risk!” Yea, well, so do the people who need our help. We all have those things, that’s why we all need to protect each other, so that we can all protect those we care about together. People need to abandon this myopic individualism and start thinking from a communal perspective.
It’s like, everyone knows the poem “First they came for…” But no one seems to have understood the message.
There isnt really any significance between the people of one country and another, as far as things like intelligence and stupidity are concerned (especially one that is both not that old and whose population stems from a combination of different groups like the US, because by what mechanism could such a difference arise?). What we have in the US are the consequences of designing a political system badly. Id agree that the problem goes beyond merely the leadership, but I would be willing to bet that any group made to follow the specific system we have set up would eventually end up with roughly similar problems, just fit to the culture of the area in question.
I think America made critical missteps between 1930-1980 in terms of updating our government. Congress especially started to break down, with corruption heavily seeping in and things becoming more and more gridlocked until we get to today, where effectively nothing at all productive really happens in Congress.
Can anyone imagine any constitutional amendment happening these days, no matter how benign? I don’t think you could get them to agree water is wet.
Congress was the first branch to fall and rather than work to fix that, we’ve allowed the corruption to spread. Now the judicial branch is lost and the executive branch has taken supreme control.
America was founded on what is effectively an alpha version of democracy. Most other countries built upon that success and addressed obvious issues to varying degrees of success. Meanwhile America, instead of respecting the idea of a ‘living document’ instead venerated their constitution as a holy document and then calcified their government into total dead lock until it’s now about to collapse.
The supposition that the USA’s government was founded as an alpha version of democracy that failed to update seems ripe with American Exceptionalism. The claims suggest reform could have fixed a system built to serve a specific class. The system is working as intended with continued expansion of power into fewer hands.
The USA is not different in character from previous and existing systems of extraction. There is, and will continue to be, a class that benefits from said system. There are continued fomentings among the marginalized. Given the hegemony of the USA, Lemmy is a space where fomentings are happening. May such fomentings prefigure an end to extraction and heirarchy.
We really fucked up when we didn’t hang all the slave owners and give their land to the slaves like was promised. And just let the Southern states basically recreate slavery. The whole leadership and political apparatus of the South should have been destroyed for good after the Civil War ended not the milquetoast bargain that we ended up with.
The Union should have occupied those states and reformed the education system, the moral code and made damn sure anyone glorifying the Confederacy was hung. That and making sure the laws were just and fairly enforced.
We still are dealing with the consequences of it to this day.
No system can survive the concerted efforts of bad faith actors to break it when they make up half of the population
The broken system is the reason there are so many bad faith actors in the first place. People are shaped by the systems around them. A well designed system wouldnt drive so many people to that point in the first place or incentivize actions on the part of the powerful that do so.
I don’t think it’s fair to blame the authors for not inventing socialism in 1776, but sure.
Liberalism was an improvement over monarchy for a specific class of merchant. The system has continued success for said class.
Using 1776 seems like a “life begins at conception” argument. The currently constituted system began closer to 1787. Declaration of Independence was issued in 1776. The Articles of Confederation were ratified in 1781. The Constitution was ratified in 1787.
No one is placing blame on the authors. It’s just a statement of fact. They created a system that had intrinsic flaws they were not aware of, due to the mechanisms that exposed some of the flaws not yet existing. Remember, the fundamental basis of this system we exist under was devised long before industrialization changed our economic and political landscapes. No one is faulted for their ignorance, you cannot account for things you do not know, but that doesn’t change the fact those systemic flaws still exist and have had far reaching consequences which have shaped society as we now know it.
If anyone is to “blame”, if you so need to assign it, it would be those who came after who saw the flaws manifest and, instead of correcting them, saw that they were exploitable for personal gain; so, endeavored to obfuscate those flaws as it served to entrench their own power of authority by exploiting them.
Had they been true to the “land of the free” motto, they would have.
I think you could certainly argue they’d have been abolitionists if they weren’t mostly rich hypocrites but they quite literally took the next step on the ideological evolution that led to socialism.
The rise of liberalism was radical in a world of absolute monarchies. The rise of capitalism was radical in a world of merchantilism and protectionism.
Demanding that people who lived in that world just invent socialist thought is about as reasonable as me demanding that you personally make the final breakthrough on fusion reactors.
Even if you were capable of being a part of it, at this point in time you are working on the technology that will enable those future discoveries.
Later thinkers will build on your work. Marx both criticised and built on the thoughts of Smith and Locke.
That’s just how fucking time works.
There is not a continuum of political progress. Looking back at historical records, it is easy to create a narrative that political progress, like time, is linear and progressing toward some goal.
Systems without heirarchy continue to be an option. Prefiguring such a system without a monopoly on violence is the tricky bit.
No it’s not like 70-80 million thanks
Always has been, pally. Unfortunately merit doesn’t mean anything compared to loyalty and tribalism here, and we were never truly represented at any point federally.
Thanks for the info
That post will pair well with an unenforceable EO stating we are going back to gold standard.
piss-soaked fantasies of the deranged.
this looks and reads like a troll post
You know, I didn’t expect the Ready Player One book to be so on the money on how inept and irrelevant politics would become in comparison to companies and Internet communities, but here we are.
Hope ordering a pizza in VR is possible soon.
Id bet it already is possible, at the very least there are apps that let you use one’s PC desktop in VR so one could order off a pizza place’s website using it.
That is more clever than I was thinking: hop on VR chat and ask my friend to do it for me.
WTF are you talking about? The government is more relevant than ever with how Trump is crashing the economy and sending people to camps. The politics hasn’t felt this relevant in my entire life, yet you think it’s somehow less so?
In the novel, there’s a sense of apathy towards any of the Federal government’s affairs, and society places all of their interest inside the day to day affairs online and through the actions of companies.
It’s even mentioned in one of the opening chapters that, “A reality TV star became the president, and all the government is doing nowadays is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic”. It’s obviously a satirical quote, but the point I was trying to bring is that the average citizen is just burned out, not even caring anymore.
To many in the US, more people are focused on what’s in their public feeds and what new products are coming out far more than political actions. That’s not a good thing.
You’re right, now is one of the most critical times of our political system. It’s not sustainable, the actions being taken are abhorrent, and we should continue to advocate for change.
It’s just comparing our world to fiction might be one of the only coping mechanisms left to avoid being depressed from it all.
Honestly, you can do better than Ready Player One. The characters sucked and win by being the most annoying type of media fans. The movie managed to improve on the dogshit characters a bit, but the obsession with pop culture references is even more disgusting in it.
I suppose. Ready Player One was just the first thing that came to mind for me. What story do you think would fit better as an analogue?
Cyberpunk if we’re taking about a feudalist future of weak governments and powerful companies. That’s not a universe you can overcome by simply being a trivia machine.
