Yeah, of we could just stop importing food from the USA, that would be greaaaaat
this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
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Jesus Christ, can we please close our airports for American flights?
Genius.
That’s just about got the whole zeitgeist sewn up.
Anyone have the quotes handy on how they want to destroy the country and rebuild as feudal kingdoms?
If bird flu is such a minor issue, I say we inject it into Donald Trump, JD Vance, RFK Jr., and Elon Musk. Demonstrate how safe it is. Do it. Come on. DO IT YOU WUSSES.
Interestingly, my understanding of the way in which flu vaccine was (in part) produced involved injecting blood infected with a the flu into developing chicken embryos (eggs), allowing them to develop the flu, and several probably very complicated steps later, you've got flu virus particles for a vaccine.
Any ways...
I guess that would succeed in killing off a bunch of the elderly and infirmed, which be a huge savings to Medicare and social Security, so it's a win-win right?
/S if it wasn't implied already
Hahahahahaha jesus tapdancing christ this timeline is fucking wild. He is going to create the conditions for the next pandemic. It’s gonna start here. I’m calling it now.
I would totally bet on this prediction happening. Easy winnings.
new pandemic is already started, look at current measles
I've contracted covid twice. Both were when visiting the US. And that was before this numpty was in charge. This will not go well.
I love how the U.S. spent like 90 years building up soft power around the world and we are giving it all up in like a 3 month span.
Every person in charge of an agency, is literally not qualified to run a grocery store let alone the agencies they run.
Its alll about loyalty now, and its going to send the U.S. back into the dark age.
Hitler came to power because the treaty of Versailles devastated and humiliated germany. what the fuck are historians going to point at in the US that lead to the rise in fascism? fucking gamergate? The self-inflicted 2008 crisis?
yeah, but also you-know-who.
Regan had a huge hand in the downfall of the US.
what the fuck are historians going to point at in the US that lead to the rise in fascism? fucking gamergate? The self-inflicted 2008 crisis?
Losing the Cold War. America wasn't beaten militarily, but brought down via foreign propaganda. (It also hit the UK, with Brexit, and other countries with similar harmful things going on domestically to them.)
Livejournal was one of the earliest "modern" social media sites (for those who didn't experience it, it was like a longer-form tumblr--longer text posts, fewer images), and it was sold to a company in Russia in the early 00s. I remember scratching my head as a 20-something about why the servers kept going down, then I learned that intellectuals in Russia had taken it up as THEIR social media and due to politics "on the Russian" side it was getting DDoS'd.
I was still too young to connect the dots then, or understand what all that really meant (hindsight is always much better, isn't it?) but basically they perfected control via social media first on their own people, probably trawled through all the content of the original LiveJournal users posting in English, then perfected using what they learned there on later social media sites.
And because Americans A) thought the Cold War was over, and B) have a bit of a head-scratcher conundrum when it comes to free speech because it's valued so highly and nobody likes censorshiop, nobody did anything or even realized anything was happening until the harm was already done.
Personally, again with hindsight, I think company-designed social media algorithms that just suggest content to you as "trending" or whatever should be illegal (and block buttons should be mandatory). Users should have to be forced to follow, one by one, the content they want to subscribe to.
Having "trending" algorithms that have no transparency in what they show or boost allows malignant actors to game the algorithm.
If you force people to follow others based on word of mouth or reblogs from their actual friends, and give people a way to solidly block someone that's easy to find and instant to use, it will cut a lot of the bullshit down. People will be somewhat less inclined to fall down wells of stupidity. It won't completely stop it, but people are lazy and if you don't dangle shit in front of their nose many will go off and do something else instead of putting in the effort to find something horrible.
Well stated, thisis the conclusion i have come to as well. We lost an information war we did not know we were fighting.
We only didn't know because this type of authoritarianism requires an ignorant, sedentary, and fearful populace and so we're not taught the crucial skills it would take to resist as we waste away and treat each other and ourselves like shit, because what we are taught is a zero-sum, individualistic, hierarchical way of life that teaches us the system is perfect and we're not doing it right if we don't get the results we want, and fools us into perpetuating harm in a self sustaining, cyclical manner. It's very sad but all the more reason to try something new. It seeps into everything, it's quite literally a death cult.
What historians will point to in my opinion are two key point in modern American history that unleashed the decent into madness.
- Raegan, his financial policies laid the groundwork for the modern ultra wealthy tech bros.
- 9/11, 9/11 turned patriotism into a national psychotic duty.
After 9/11 you could slap a US flag on basically anything, shout patriotism and make a shit load of money while being thanked for it.
Then it just rolled on.
Reagan was in place thanks to the Southern Strategy begun a decade or so earlier to ensure a voting percentage for the GOP and religious right no matter what. There are unfortunately many other "turning points" throughout US history where we could have gone a different route but chose this one, usually because "it's always been this way" mentality.
9/11 helped but by that point Christian nationalists had already spent the 20 years since Regan tying patriotism to faith.
Don't forget the importance of the Citizens United ruling, which gave the green light to funnel unlimited amounts of corporate money into campaigns, reaching a crescendo in this past election when the world's richest man bought himself a President.
CU and the lack of federal public funding for elections (by which I mean the state funds the campaigns of those who want federal offices) basically resulted in the US political class ending up fully in the pocket of the corporations.
That's what absolutely destroyed our ability to elect anyone other than what the corporate doners want, and thus you end up with nothing but corporate-friendly politicians, and thus a whole bunch of people who have no problem with facism and well, here we are.
A multitude of issues have contributed to this, the creation of fox News, allowing our entire manufacturing sector to leave the country, and then ignoring the poorest and most vulnerable people's issues, misinformation, social media, state actor disinformation campaigns, and probably a bunch of stuff I haven't mentioned. Pick your favorite.
The pandemic, the inherent flaws of an antiquated two party system, malicious individuals controlling all major social media platforms, an overworked and undersupported population, low education standards. Idk I'm German and have never been over but from what I can tell it's very complex. And while many of my fellow Europeans like to give Americans shit online right now the truth is most of us are one or two unfortunate elections away from a similar scenario. Whatever it is that's driving people apart isn't exclusively an American problem.
Just to chime in on Covid - I think that was a symptom caused by a lot of underlying problems, and not a cause. Granted it had its effects, but under a rational leadership from the US I don't think we would have seen what we did ever get that far. The topic here (bird flu), measles, etc. are an example of how they are more of a fever indicator from a deep infection we've had for decades and just pretended things were fine. Hell, the failure of Reconstruction after the Civil War is the ultimate example of that bandage over a festering wound.
Whatever it is that's driving people apart isn't exclusively an American problem.
This is the scary part. The entire world seems to be shifting right again. I think a lot of it how easy misinformation and disinformation is to spread with the ubiquitous social media now, but like you said, it's complex, and there likely isn't any single factor contributing to this.
I can at least tell you why people vote Trump. All right here:
How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind
Posted that many, many times, but it's important enough to post forever. As true now as it was in 2016.
I've been on both sides of what the author is talking about, seen and experienced everything he touches on. Give it a read, it's important.
Yeah and it’s a good piece, but there’s a huge hole or two in the reasoning. Namely that rural areas are aiding and abetting the forces that beat them down despite clear and rational evidence - in abundance - to that fact.
They’ve given up on reason. They’re hoodwinked, bamboozled, conned, and every other synonym despite clear facts and science.
And cities bad is not new, but it’s also where their hero lives. So ?
Also the thing about cheering for assholes is kinda thin.
I think it’d be better to make these arguments through the media trump voters consume. That’s the underlying mechanic of his argument anyway.
That tracks, it's Jason Pargin. He's the king of oversimplifying an argument and then hammering it into the ground, but it's always at least entertaining.
"They hate every part of capitalism without hating capitalism" comes to mind a lot
Yeah, that all checks out.
But their way of living is dying because that's what happens with industrialization. It's not exactly something people can fight. It's been happening for a loooooong time.
Like there aren't many, if any, ways to prevent it from happening either.
What I don't get is the bit at the end where it explains that Trump can be the guy they root for even though he is literally a smarmy big city elite who only goes to church for photo ops, doesn't pay his workers, etc. And the article is like, don't you root for Tony Stark and left-leaning talk show hosts, because they target the people you don't like?
And I'm like, no, honestly, those guys are insufferable. I need someone to explain why anyone likes them.
Also I grew up in a right-leaning area and I didn't understand their values any better when I was a kid, honestly. At least as a little kid I was religious, but when I got to high school and started asking tough questions at church it became obvious that our supposed religious leaders didn't have satisfactory answers to questions like "It would be immoral if I had the power to stop evil and didn't use it, why isn't it immoral for God to allow evil to exist?" So then I stopped being religious, too, which pushed me further out of their subculture.
(I guess some of my actual values aren't popular almost anywhere; I'm a pacifist anarchist which is fairly uncommon. So there has to be more to why people end up the way they do than where they live.)
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Spiraling wealth inequality that even the Democrats refused to acknowledge or fix, let alone the Republicans.
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We were already a 3rd world country in comparison to most of our allies. Now we are speedrunning becoming a 7th world country
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That's not RFK Jr. talking. He died long ago. His body is being controlled by the worms.
I think the worms are the most intelligent part about the guy.
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So “do nothing” is his answer to bird flu and measles?
Everyone who survives will be immune.
That's the whole logic. It was awful enough with Covid's 1% mortality. Measles only kills about 0.1%. Bird flu kills 90-100% of infected birds and 50% of infected humans. And there's plenty of lasting/permanent deficits short of literal death. They're psychopaths.
Oh cool, so this world ensure it spreads to humans. Would could go wrong?
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What is wrong with the man ?
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