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this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
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Can we all just stop for a second and appreciate what a crazy fucking time it is to be alive in this country?
Absolutely. And in so many way. I'm only in my 40s and I feel like I'm living in a vastly different world than the one I was born into.
The rate of change is unlike anything humans have ever had to cope with in our 2 million year history.
For almost all of human existence, there wasn't even a CONCEPT of progress... no sense that humanity was going anywhere. Your life was virtually identical to that of your great great great grandfather, and would be the same experience had by your great great great grandchild.
I remember a world of rotary phones, small towns with personalities before chains homogenized the world. I remember how the United States had a whole different personality before 9-11. I remember when Republicans had actual plans for governing (OBAMA'S affordable care act was basically a clone of Bob Dole's plan). I remember the world before the Internet, when malls were packed and buzzing, when shopping in stores felt magical and not like a ghost town.
I remember analog and even black and white TVs. I remember the first video games and PCs,b dial-up Internet, browsers before tabs were invented.
I remember when acid rain was there number one environmental concern, and how we actually accepted the science and made policy to fix it.
I remember the bugs.
I remember so many more bugs. The night alive with fireflies. Windshields plastered with splatters on the highway.
I remember paper maps! FM radio. Cassette adapters.
The world is so, so, so different. It changed so fast.
Republicans became a suicide cult.
The government stopped breaking up monopolies, and started bailing out too-big-to-fail banks.
The United States tortures people now. People never charged of a crimes were tortured at Guantanamo Bay.
I grew up in a home that my parents bought cheap. They had two cars. They took us on vacations every year. They saved up for retirement. My dad had a PhD. He did well.
I have a law degree. I will never own a home. I will never be able to afford even a single vacation. I will never be able to retire.
They rolled back Roe.
They staged an insurrection.
I've been working with GPT-4 night and day since it was released to the public. I'm 100 percent convinced that with a little supplementation, it is the first artificial GENERAL intelligence.
It can already create better writing and code than MOST of the human population.
Where will it be in 5 years? 10? 20?
It's going to be smarter, funnier, more creative, more thoughtful than all of us. In our lifetime. WHY, then, are we even HERE at that point? Why do we even exist?
These were questions for science fiction. For the future.
It's happening NOW. WE, of all humans in the span of history, are the ones who will see our species become obsolete.
So yeah. Let's take moment to realize how cosmically, historically insane it is to live in this moment.
It might surprise you to know that comment was written by chatgpt
Amen. And love your first point about how way back, the average person did not have a concept of progress in their day-to-day life.
I guess that didn’t really start to blow up until Newton laid the laws of physics down (along with calculus - what a guy) to allow for drastic scientific development. Once we had steam engines and the Industrial Revolution…change has become almost commonplace now.
I too remember paper maps…always in the glove box.
Having to remember phone numbers.
Encyclopedias
No cell phone and no internet.
Poor Leibniz, totally forgotten by history. Can you imagine inventing friggin calculus and nobody notices or cares? lol
Bugs. Yeah. That still creeps me out.
It's probably just the one of the first signs of ecological collapse due to climate change so nothing to worry about :(
I was thinking about your comment and came back. I'm nearly 39 so a similar age.
First of all. What if you put your phone down, got off the internet and had a look around at your life and what is happening directly in your world. I'll bet it's not as chaotic as it feels when we see crazy headlines everywhere. You get up, chat with your family if you are lucky enough to live with someone, perhaps you go to work and interact with your coworkers or clients, hopefully the day isn't too stressful. Come home, think about what you will have for dinner and hope it doesn't make you too fat. Go to bed. You might squeeze in some time for hobbies, or visiting friends on the weekends.
Sure, housing is a massive problem right now, but financial bleakness isn't new - imagine how it felt to live through the great depression? I'm in Australia, but a couple of years ago we had my son's birthday at this nice lookout at the top of a hill. There was a plaque there that read that the road to the top of the hill was built by men during the depression in exchange for food to feed their families. The more kids you had the more hours you had to work. It was like 5 or more kids was a mandatory 12 hour day.
That would have felt bleak and like there was no way out.
Imagine getting caught up in world war 2? You would think the world had now really gone to shit. It was so traumatizing to the population here that every tiny town has a plaque of all the people who died from it. The names in the list are usually longer than the population of the town right now.
Then after the war, stuff like the threat of atomic war, nuclear winters and the entire earth dying because of a conflict escalation.
You described my childhood experience perfectly, but we might have just been very lucky and grew up in an optimistic decade full of rationality and scientific progress.
cant bone a robot. i don't think it'll be replacing us anytime soon
Not with that attitude
I'm confident Japan is working feverishly day and night to resolve this issue.
As someone who was in first grade when the towers went down I have to ask, how did the country's personality change from your view? What was it like before vs now?
You ever watch movies from the 90's to 2001? Notice how they are so damn light, jovial, inconsequential, happy, and just plain old fun? I'm talking American Pie, peak 90's humor, plus like Adam Sandler movies that were actually funny like Happy Gilmore and Billy Madison, Dumb and Dumber, Road Trip, Dude Where's My Car, things like that. They really capture the spirit of the 90's. There was this sense of optimism and joy that the cold war was over, technology is taking off, maybe we're about to enter this utopian future that Star Trek is always talking about.
Then boom, 9/11. Those first few days and weeks were something else. Unity like I'd never experienced before, it was incredible, absolutely dominated every conversation like nothing I've experienced since until Covid.
Then we started to fundamentally change in horrible ways. The Patriot act. Warrantless wiretapping. Torture. Illegal aggressive wars. The Bush Doctrine of preemptive first strikes. "You're either with us or you're against us." Free speech zones. Military WORSHIP where if you said a single fucking word against the military you are basically a treasonous bastard who should be shot. It was so fucking terrifying.
America is basically a textbook example of someone who went through a major trauma, had everyone's support almost universally, and then instead of getting therapy and working through it and resolving the issues that caused the trauma, it started spiraling out of control. Pushed away friends and allies, started fights it couldn't win, got more and more aggressive and closed minded. Radicalized.
It's a shame you didn't get to know America before 9/11. I was 19 on 9/11 and I barely got to know the country. It was far from perfect and everyone knew it, but the place we are at now is DIRECTLY related to 9/11 and I fucking hate it.
The clearest way I can illustrate this is that after Pearl Harbor was attacked, FDR have his famous speech which carried foremost the message: "we have nothing to fear but fear itself".
Contrast that to Bush's message, which was, essentially: Be afraid! Give up your liberty for (the illusion of) security!
For years it was: If you see something suspicious, call the cops! Let the government inspect you if you want to ride the subway! (But only at some stops. Terrorists, please don't walk a block down to the next station!). If you really want to help, spend money buying whatever! Take off your shoes to board a plane! Our government recommends you buy a bunch of hardware to protect your home against chemical weapons and dirty bombs!
Or: oh, hey, we invented a color-coded system to tell you how scared you should be all the time! (Pay no attention to the fact that we'll go on high sheet every time my administration comes under scrutiny for anything!)
Or: hey, we can label ANYONE we want as "ENEMY COMBATANTS" and they will have NO RIGHTS and we will torture them.
What changed was that Bush's administration used inflated fear of terrorism as a means of control. And if you voted against something in Congress... say, a war with Iraq (who had NOTHING TO DO with 9-11) you were branded as unpatriotic, and you got death threats.
Don't forget Freedom Fries, because those French pussies wouldn't join "George and Tony's Rootin' Tootin' Shoot 'Em Up Middle East Tour."
My god man I completely forgot about those stupid fucking terror alerts. "Today's terror alert level is Orange, just like it was yesterday and just it'll be tomorrow. Slightly elevated. Be afraid, but don't be too afraid to go to work, and make sure to vote for Bush again to protect you."
Remember leading up to the Iraq invasion, people were walking around unironically saying "I'd rather fight them over there than over here" as if Iraq could actually project power to the other side of the planet.
Fuck I hate this so much.
I think American citizens of Japanese descent would disagree with your good old days assessment of how Americans were treated by their own government during WW2. They certainly had their liberty and livelihoods taken from them. Furthermore people of color in general were still under the thumb of institutionalized racism that continues to this day. Do you believe they were better off back then too?
@flossdaily @Dark_Arc
All true.
The fear mongering the GOP party engages in now is unparealleled in its scope and voracity. All one has to do is mention limits on gun ownership to see the responses that start with "BUT I NEED PROTECTION!"
Not everyone is out to get you.
A lot of these gun nuts actually believe the only thing holding China back from invading us is the fact that we're heavily armed. Don't get me wrong, in the event of a foreign invasion I can see how a heavily armed population could deter or thwart the enemy. But Americans don't understand how insanely fucking overpowered the US military is. The ability to project power to the other side of the planet on MULTIPLE FRONTS is uniquely American, and it is the US military's principle objective since WWII. The only way to do that is with countless trillions of dollars which only the US has been willing and able to do for decades.
The idea of Russia, China, or literally anyone, packing hundreds of thousands or millions of troops into boats, sailing across the Atlantic or the Pacific, landing ground troops in our cities, taking out the air force, navy, coast guard, army, and national guard, to the point where friggin Bubba and his Meal Team 6 commandos need to grab their guns and start shooting commies in the streets...it would be funny if it weren't their core political ideology...
Dude.....I'm 42 and that hits me in the feels. You couldn't have said it better
Preach!
I’ll recognize it, but I’d rather not appreciate it. I’d appreciate it if half the country had never been infatuated with an historically proven con-man with delusions of grandeur. Legitimately one of the must frustrating realities for someone who believes in democracy to grapple with is that half the population MUST be less than average intelligence (and even some of greater intelligence will choose willful ignorance).
Oh no, it's not that they're stupid. It's that they're evil. What Trump stands for and what that stupid-ass cult values is entirely something they're fully cognizant of and want. Right down to the genocide.
They just learned to hide it very well. Even mastering sophistry to do it.
I second this. Its horrible and sad that so many people are evil, or more to the point, can be led to an evil position which they’ll embrace and defend with all their intellect.
One of the scariest things about this shift is a realization that this is how countries do horrible things. A mob of excited people can make group decisions, and will follow horrible leaders because, well, because people can driven by emotions and group-think and localized social norms.
If the current Republican Party maintains its cohesion and membership I think what has been a generational lapse into authoritarian insanity could be a permanent shift in the American psyche. Thats even more terrifying than seeing so many people vote for Trump.
Appreciate has two different meanings.
to value or admire highly
understand (a situation) fully; recognize the full implications of.
It’s can be awkward because they are really divergent meanings with almost apposed connotations.
You’re correct. I was being intentionally obtuse to agree about the sentiment, but also further the lament. Kind of a “being funny to myself (and maybe no one else)” moment, but publicly expressed.
For real. Can anyone say that they guessed this would actually be a headline 7 years ago?
I could’ve guessed a coup would happen as a result of his presidency and that he should be in prison yea. He’s a lifelong crook and criminal and we had suspicions of outside involvement in the 2016 election cycle from the instant the_donald blew up
He said ahead of the 2016 election that he wouldn't accept the results if he lost.
Yeah, that was the moment I knew shit was gonna get weird.
@gravitas_deficiency
And yet he still gets to walk around and promise to pay for people's meals, then skip as if nothing is happening. It's annoying
Watching from this side of the pond is entertaining in a sad kind of way.
Trump is a figurehead of something above and below him that is a serious danger to democracy.
The same ideology that pushed Trump is the same ideology that created Brexit and is trying to break the NHS.
We're all in a very dangerous boat right now.
This timeline can't get any weirder
WHY WOULD YOU PUT THIS THOUGHT INTO THE UNIVERSE AS A CHALLENGE
If we're going though planet scale catastrohpic events, at least sprinkle some comedy in there haha
I like you. You're pretty alright.
Don't say that!
I'm having trouble locating a clip, but Patton Oswalt had a bit about a decade ago about the anomie the country felt when Nixon resigned and then got on TV and flew away in a helicopter.
I feel like Trump finally getting booked will be a similar feeling.
TILAW: AN·o·mie
noun: anomie; noun: anomy
In societies or individuals, a condition of instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values or from a lack of purpose or ideals.
"the theory that high-rise architecture leads to anomie in the residents"
Crazy if you like ultimate inequality and hate for all people especially homeless that can't afford $3,000 in rent each month.
Its even crazier when you realize many of those that struggle are the ones that vote for people that promise to make their lives even more shitty.
Not sure if appreciate is the right word but yeah what a crazy decade.
I'm halfway across the world and it's been a crazy ride watching a country disgrace itself while also tearing itself to pieces.
It hasn't been since 2016? Or 2001?
I feel like it all kinda went sideways starting around 2014ish (2016 certainly kicked it up a gear). Maybe I died then and it's all some sort of 6th sense bullshit
It started when the Supreme Court handed the presidency to W despite him losing the election. Once that mask was fully off, so were all the rules.