I get exhausted on Lemmy in particular trying to explain to the nihilistic, cynical teens here that such an outcome would in fact, be a bad thing.

In the Hearts Of Iron IV store you can trade them to have your custom fursona painted on the side of your SU-122.

Technically the company owns it, I ain’t gonna burn out my good ones on work.

Almost every currency, crypto included is valued against the USD, I just don’t see everyone moving to dogecoins if suddenly it costs $340,000 to buy a hamburger. There is very real incentive to throw every possible resource behind keeping the middle-class complacent and comfortable for as long as possible.

Self-care in the 2020’s:

Rotating your chair away from your work monitor to your recreational monitor after a horrific day of being abused over zoom to watch the news on your other monitor until you’re a wreck, then playing some video games you actually hate.

I mean, if the US dollar does collapse it certainly won’t be a forever thing, but the people with the most money in the world have a LOT of resources to keep things the way they are. I’ll be surprised if the keepers of the cash let the cash become devalued.

The vast, vast majority of this country who are only marginally invested in politics combined the needs of capital to secure that stability will override whatever political ambitions any leadership has in the long-term. All of the current crisis is still just a flash in the pan, it will pass, the pendulum will swing the other way and the cycle will continue. I’ve been watching it a long ass time, I have seen nothing yet that makes me believe the country will experience wide-scale change.

It’s going to get more authoritarian broadly, it’s going to have more unrest and reduced rights, particularly as the climate changes and the immigration situation gets a lot more inflamed as refugees start piling up to get in, but right now, unless a LOT of people make a lot of huge changes to their media consumption habits, we’re going to see a rougher, nastier status-quo for decades to come.

The USA is a HUGE boat that turns slowly, it’s not one country, it’s 50. And because of that, small changes have huge consequences but only decades down the line. Few people who haven’t actually traveled the nation really get the scale involved and what has to change before we see lasting change.

Can’t do that without revolution.

Which is still about a century away.

The US is unlike every other developing or even developed nation that has gone through revolution for two huge reasons:

1. It’s not one big country, it’s 50 smaller countries, each with its own power and systems and elections. If you’re going to collapse a system you have to do it 50 goddamn times perfectly.

2. Nobody here is even remotely close to an actual “revolution” on either side of the political spectrum. Despite the huge marches and protests and violence the world sees out of the USA right now, the vast majority of the hundreds of millions of people here are mostly tuned out. The economic machine is grinding away harder than ever, and powered by a vast segment of the population who get all their news from 30-minutes of facebook memes on a Sunday night while getting ready for bed.

Yah it will get you Tankiepoints™ out the wazoo to say you pray for the collapse of the USA but with every other country’s economy tied to the US dollar, that outcome will be less than ideal when you want to go to your local market and buy food or medicine in almost every other country on Earth.

I get downvotes when I remind people of this fact like I’m making an argument for something. Talk to your local leaders about why they have invested so much in the US, not me.

Which is also a cute segue to remind people that all the loot and cash that Trump’s people are scooting out the back door of our treasury? That’s YOUR money also Mr and Mrs Europe, Canada, Mexico, etc.

If everyone did it, we would change the world overnight.

Tame.

I genuinely can’t look at zootopia the same way.

It was a mistake allowing nearly a decade to pass between the first and the sequel, the internet had too much time to saturate in “content.” If I go out to watch the sequel with family I’m going to be looking around uncomfortable like someone gonna drag me out of the theater.

I like your style. Thank you for the support.

Nah, you’re too reactionary, I’ll pass.

My original comment was only to clarify that a friday protest isn’t remotely a “general strike” so I wish that outlets, forumgoers and media would stop using the term because it’s reducing the power behind the word. Actual general strikes have been performed in our modern world and have crushed governments. This isn’t doing that, and I fear too many naive people are going to think that a couple friday marches on PTO are going to make anyone in seats of power cry.

I never said it’s bad to march and protest, it IS having an impact, but by itself it won’t move anything because the people in power don’t actually care about the will of the people, if all you’re doing is saying you’re unhappy, well great. They WANT you unhappy.

I don’t know how to get hundreds of millions of Americans to understand this, neither do you. None of us do, but we can keep trying and we can keep making sure that our language isn’t getting watered down because we want to believe in things that aren’t real. This is all going to get worse before it gets better, and people will point to it and say “See? General strikes don’t work!” when we haven’t even done one yet.

Turns out it’s hard to orchestrate hundreds of millions of people spread out over 9 millions square kilometers isn’t exactly easy to do, who are blissfully unware of anything happening around them and are comfortable sitting at home consuming media and games and don’t want to risk their jobs because they don’t have the security of community, because everyone has embraced being rugged loners as personality traits and not an obstacle to better lives.

FTFY

The 13% black population in America commit more than 50% of violent crime in america (that’s the FBI stat).

Oh shit, didn’t realize I was talking to a nazi. You know what, never mind.

Go learn about US history and maybe ask the important questions like “WHY” one segment of the population is both over-policed and under-represented. As I said, it’s an ongoing struggle, but racial essentialism is a NO GO. It’s evil.

You’re evil for repeating it. Get smarter you dingus, grow up. I wont see your reply.

I have no idea where you pulled those figures, but even if they’re from a legit source, that’s not an indicator of anything meaningful. There were similar rates and ratios about segregation in the US before the Civil Rights movement. It was a “known fact” that our cultures would never mesh, and people broadly supported keeping races separated by force if necessary.

But you know what we did as a country anyway? The people advocating for human rights won, we used the military to not enforce segregation but integration, and it made a lot of people VERY mad, which we’re still feeling the effects of today. But the outcome is that we don’t blink when we pass an interracial couple in most of the US. We have a long ways to go, but the disaster everyone was worried about was exposed to be a lie and it turns out black people are fine to mix with white people. We even use the same pools and water fountains and nobody was harmed.

The problem with all of these issues is that too many people bend to the discomfort of the minority too readily. No pushback. Everyone is so scared of change that they cling to outmoded ways of thought and rationalizations for keeping “the wrong people” out of their space, but the MOMENT you change our national leadership and policy, people adapt.

People adapt to your rule, that’s why we need to enforce systems to elect the best possible rulers, because good or bad they set the tone.

Those figures you cited could be radically swung in different directions if you ask them the question differently, or say “What about your neighbor Garcia who works at the gas station, he has four kids but no papers, do you want to deport him too?” And most people who have this kind of connection to someone will go “Well…”

Our species isn’t hard-set in its values, we can change everything overnight if we worked harder together to reduce the fear and insecurity and use better emotional narratives to remind people that we’re all humans and we have plenty of physical and emotional resources to integrate people into our population. We’ve done it before, we just need better follow-through and harsher punishments against those trying to dehumanize others.

I started watching network nightly news again after throwing it away for years and years, because I want to see what the average American who isn’t stuck online sees every night while cooking dinner for 3 screaming kids and having to juggle two jobs. NBC, ABC, even CBS.

It’s so bad. It’s dishearteningly bleak when you realize how much of the population catches blurbs and snippets of actual issues sandwiched between stories about weather and a local boy-scout who grew the biggest pumpkin, and of course the required nightly “true crime” story about a spouse who murdered their partner and had an affair.

I have nobody to scream at, nobody to shake. They didn’t even MENTION the strikes (protests) so far on any network, they have not shown the scale of the marches and the chaos on the streets of American cities. To say nothing of the neutral, blameless tone they use.

They only just barely started taking the people’s protests against ICE like an actual news story after Alex Pretti was murdered, because at a certain point, even the hand of the state can no longer dismiss or avoid actual reality.

This is because there are three forces of political capital in the country broadly. The strongest is the liberal masses, the majority. Farmed cattle used for the labor and attention spans and purchasing power. Middle-class America holds ALL the power because they have the most money and keep the system moving… as a result, they are manipulated and sedated the hardest.

The second force is nationalism. About 20% - 30% or so of the population are illiterate, rural or wannabe-rural grown toddlers screaming and waving guns and hating everything that moves, while worshipping the flag and kissing the king’s ass. Armed groups of nationalists have been the driving force of political capital for thousands of years, it’s no different now.

The last group is progressivism. Arguably the weakest, almost not worth mentioning it has so little power now, but is still technically on the list because we’re still here, still trying.

But it’s all shifting, as leftists start taking up arms and marching in larger and larger numbers, the networks and marketing companies have no choice but to notice it. This is because the liberal middle class is now noticing it, and when THEY shift, everything shifts.

To this end, I support continued protests and marches, even if they’re utterly pathetic by historical standards for moving systems.