various assassinations, the brink of nuclear apocalypse, an unpopular political war away from home that caused a social movement, and political espionage.
It’s like we’re cursed.
I just hope they don’t bring the world down in their own demise
OP, read up on the fall of Rome and how it all went down. It’s pretty likely we will see the fall of America in our lifetime.
Helpful to know that the country was markedly different before and after each of these events. Think of things before and after WWII, for instance. We will experience similar over the next 20 - 40 years.
It got better right? Right?! RIGHT?!
It’s like we built on top of a haunted Native American burial ground or something
EXACTLY
Yeah, but not every empire survives these things. Or survives and remains recognizable.
The U.S. has also never experienced a felon rapist traitor in the Oval Office with an entire party abdicating their responsibilities and conceding their power to that felon rapist traitor and protecting him from repercussions at every opportunity.
Reality check. We have a literal traitor in the Oval Office backed by a treasonous party.
Shit’s not looking good.
Nixon seems like he comes close
What bothers me is the weaponization of the justice department. I think it needs to be politically unbiased so that justice can be served in a fair and equal way. I don’t like when a party goes after political opponents. Yes people need to help accountable but they also deserve a fair trial.
Nixon was bad but super tame compared to Tangerine Palpatine.
Shit is not looking good
various assassinations, the brink of nuclear apocalypse, an unpopular political war away from home that caused a social movement, and political espionage.
It’s been a crazy week.
Captain, it’s Wednesday!
Hungover, what I miss?
And it’s only Tuesday!
“Extinction is the rule, survival is the exception” - Carl Sagan
There’s an unbroken chain of descent between you and the first single-celled organism.
Not for entities like me
While it’s true that the US survived all of those challenges of the past and had a pretty good run after WWII… was that just the coin toss coming up heads 10x in a row?
You can only drop something so many times before it actually breaks, and we never really fixed the cracks caused by the civil war.
Reconstruction ended early after Johnson took office and as a result we didn’t end segregation in the south until a century after the war ended.
There are people alive now who still remember segregation and some of them liked it that way. And now they’re empowered, both metaphorically and literally, thanks to the gerontocracy we’ve created.
We’re going to tear ourselves apart trying to undo 60 years of progress over the next 4 years.
I feel like if we pull through this as an intact nation it’s not going to be recognizable as the nation we grew up in until long after we’re all gone. It’s going to take generations to clean up this mess.It also has given me a lot of hope. There is a ton of backlash from people from all walks of life.
I think we all need more empathy and understanding
Agree 100%.
Although I don’t just blame the old people, a lot of them were hippies.
We’re still the same divided country we were in the civil war, racists and oligarchs vs people of better character.
Trump has, even at this early point, permanently changed the political realities of this country. He will be remembered for elevating the presidency to the point where the rule of law no longer applies.
Likely less than 1% of boomers were hippies. They call it “counter culture” for a reason.
What most people would consider “hippies” consisted of a pretty small group of people mostly living in California.
A larger and much less genuine movement came later when John Lennon decided to appropriate hippy fashion. But that’s all it was (fashion).
People who truly held core values like “peace, free love and compassion” were absolutely not the majority but they were loud and colorful and now we remember that period of time as being overrun with hippies.
I’m so proud that Congress has taken it apon themselves to do absolutely nothing.
Abuse of power isn’t political and can come from either side. We need to limit the executive branch
a lot of them were hippies.
A lot of them were hippies that became selfish assholes. People change. Especially when there are propaganda networks working to change them.
We’re still the same divided country we were in the civil war
Except now every stupid, racist asshole has the ability to spread their message to millions of people.
Don’t say you agree 100% and then say although.
feel free to delude yourself, don’t try to dilude other people.
I don’t think this is only true for your nation. I mean, I’m from Belgium, not only did this nation massacre a lot of people in the Congo, it also provided the uranium for the Manhattan Project and the ensuing Little Boy dropped on Hiroshima.
It’s not (per se) nations that get the worst out of us, it’s the power structures controlling such nations.
Europeans are always like “we’re bad too”. When your country has probably done what like 1, maybe 2 large scale war crimes. Let us have this one /s
Agreed, most every nation has survived horrible things and quite a few have done horrible things. It’s not just the US.
No, I’m sure. But we seem like we’re on some accelerated timeline or something. Gotta be awful quickly.
To the point of the one above you, Belgium is technically younger than the United States.
But honestly, the only reason we really know how messed up a lot of these things are, is because of people digging into these things and finding out that power corrupts. We need transparency, integrity and honesty if we are to get to a point where we don’t read the news with existential dread.
I think most of governing at this point is cleaning up messes from before and creating new messes along the way because we are incapable of solving problems sustainably.
Take immigration, which has become a widespread issue all throughout the west. Rather than figuring out how to stop people from wanting to run away to our countries, we prefer to exile these people, separate them from our society and, if at all possible, just make them not come into our countries at all. I’m not saying there’s a simple solution, I’m just saying we are so focused on combating symptoms, we completely ignore the actual cause of issues.
Transparency is always the answer. Any changes which increase secrecy or decrease accountability are the opposite of progress.
Rather than figuring out how to stop people from wanting to run away to our countries, we prefer to exile these people, separate them from our society and, if at all possible, just make them not come into our countries at all.
Carrot and stick. Some people only understand hoarding their carrots and beating anyone within reach with their sticks.
Just like every other country
You’re not wrong about all the things that have happened, but there are lots of countries around the world over that same timeline who have had a much worse go of things. The US has been the most powerful country in the world, so what happens here has an outsized impact, however this seems like just another facet of “American exceptionalism,” that the bad things that the US has done or had happen are somehow more special than all the bad things that have happened everywhere else.
The US has been the most powerful country in the world
For roughly 75 years.
France was strongly dominant under Napoleon for 15 years and didn’t suffer too badly for 15 more years after that.
The period of the British Empire’s global dominance, often referred to as the Pax Britannica, ran roughly 300 years.
The Roman Empire was dominant in the West for roughly 500 years, much longer in the eastern reaches.
The primary difference of the period of US dominance is that it has been almost entirely sustained by MAD - mutually assured destruction vs every other entity on the globe.
I think a big factor was world war I. Europe got decimated so the US had a major upper hand.
Then World war II happened and the US was still mostly untouched. We are seeing the fall out of a war that happened in the 30s/40s
Among the empires you just cited, let’s consider the wars, atrocities, assassinations, crises, and plagues they perpetuated and endured
let’s consider the wars, atrocities, assassinations, crises, and plagues they perpetuated and endured
Absolutely. And, while there’s always atrocities and tragedies around the world, back in “those days” the height of civilization was still brutal and cruel. We, globally, seem to have improved the “bright spots” somewhat as time goes by - even if we still leave the bulk of global human population in poverty and oppression.
My point about the 75 years? There have been shorter flashes in the pan, and much longer ones, we’re nothing particularly special - what is special about this era is the power that fossil fuels have endowed modern society with. We’ve done some good things with those, and a lot of bad too.
So if you notice that we bombed Iran this week, you must find it the most important bombing? I truly don’t get how some people’s hobby is to shit on the US
Why wouldnt you?
Because the time the world has existed includes times other than this week. And other countries.
Exactly So why wouldnt you? The US is not and has never been a good guy.
*except for when it was in WWI/II among others
Literally a way to get rid of hungry mouths post-Depression, and wars the US didnt even want to be part of until they were attacked. Russia defeated Germany but the US took credit for it.
So… your point is that we are the only country of concern “because we have never been the good guy”?
Strawman. Fail.
I think you misunderstood that guy
Without WWII the US would hardly be a relevant world power like it is today. The US minted its dominance in WWII by producing so much and pushing the world to adopt its standards in the aftermath. Of most everything, from goods to language. If it weren’t for that, diplomacy would probably still be conducted in French, and screws wouldn’t have 60° angle threads
WWII was bad for the world, but literally the best thing to ever happen to the US probably
World War I started it and world war II sealed it
WW1 really was a different story. The US adopted the standards of its allies when possible, or otherwise just couldn’t use stuff from their allies. We produced things for our own use, but not for everyone on our side of the conflict. Plus WW1 was kind of a massive resource pit for everyone involved bc of trench warfare.
The fact that we couldnt share resources among allies in WWI is part of where the push for adopting a standard came from. And the reason it ultimately became the US’s standard is because the US production was removed from the conflict. Meanwhile European factories were getting bombed. Before the adoption of our standards, our allies were actually paying to establish factories in the US that would build to European standards.
WWI also had more specialized parts which was a mess, and the Europeans hadnt kicked that by WWII the way that the US did. We had already recognized the importance of standardization outside of military purposes by that point, so we were ahead of the game there.
Its more like WWII started it, and our persistence post WWII to push for our standards as the new ISO standards sealed it. ISO didnt exist until after WWII. It basically was created to be “the league of nations / UN for things”
Are you saying that the country has survived through things, so you don’t worry any more? Not sure if I understand your logic.
I am saying that the present situation is not out of character for the USA.
We are the Florida of the world.
Yeah it is dawg. This is really completely new territory in almost every way.
The US as a whole can’t really achieve Florida levels of… Floridaness. You need fewer good paying jobs, higher costs of living, lots more old retired people running things, more drugs - all kinds, sunburn and sweat instead of frostbite and snow to shovel.
I don’t see how America is special relative to “the world”. Many countries have gone through much more than that.
We’re doing the disaster speedrun.
Japan might be the expert: Totally decimated in WWII, including two nuclear bombings. Earthquakes, tsunamis, typhoons, volcanic eruptions. Fukushima diaster. Tokyo Sarin gas attack. Economic crash, ageing population, mass suicides.
Every country is unique. I don’t see the need to compare nor do I think op had any desire to compare
I didn’t start the comparison. It was the OP who said “We are the Florida of the world.”
True. Maybe a little less of a comparison than yours though.
It’s like people who say that you shouldn’t get vaccinated, you should just get the disease so you don’t get the disease.
It is more like saying that if you survived a stroke, you will live forever.
“amEriCA wENT thGROuGH 2 WoRld waRs” no fight on usa soil ever …
There should be an another to tell it
Don’t forget that both times we waited until the second half of the war to even step in. We waited until all the other nations were exausted before lifting a finger.
☝️Actually, the war of 1812 was in the US. The White House was burned down and Washington DC was occupied.
And the civil war, our deadliest, was fought on US soil.
Even in WW2, the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Battle of the Aleutian Islands ought to be mentioned.
Relevant graphic. USA deaths weren’t even in the top ten, percent-wise or raw numbers.
I don’t think that the semantic discrepancy is really the point.
Apparently Hawaii and the Philippines don’t exist
It’s also already gone through everything happening right now.
