Is the US a dystopia?

let me see, is the US a dystopia.

the republican party is trying to actively KILL a lot of people. let me just see how that plays in the polls

The approval rating among those who voted for [Biden] has dropped from 80% to 69% in the April survey. There have been notable declines among Americans 18-34 and suburban residents, both of whom, in dramatic swings, now register net negative views on the president.

As bad as Biden’s number may be, the polling data for Democrats in Congress is far worse.

Republicans now sport a historic 10-point advantage when Americans are asked which party they prefer to control Congress, holding a 44%-34% margin over Democrats. That’s up from a 2-point Republican advantage in the October survey.

In the past 20 years, CNBC and NBC surveys have never registered a double-digit Republican advantage on congressional preference, with the largest lead ever being 4 pints for the GOP.

“If the election were tomorrow, it would be an absolute unmitigated disaster for the Democrats,″ said Jay Campbell, partner at Hart Research Associates and the Democratic pollster for the survey.

yes it's a full blown dystopia

nah but rich people have never had it better tho

A 4 pint lead is difficult to overcome tbh. sorry

Can the apocalypse be local?

Americans rly struggle with not being the world and i think its quite telling tbh

― fix up luke shawp (darraghmac), Friday, December 10, 2021 8:10 PM (one hour ago)

I was addressing "the apocalypse" that it could be argued helps to confirm the US as a dystopia, the subject of this important poll. So I guess I do think it can be local, idk, why not? Anyway Columbus never even entered future-US territory, it's more of a symbolic hinge year for everything being terrible from then on

I'd figure most people using the term think in the sense of dystopian science fiction and I kinda think 2021 has quite a few elements that seem like out of such.

There's no utopia that's not someone's dystopia, and vice versa.

The notion of local dystopias is an interesting one. Could be that there was an egalitarian paradise unfolding just a continent or two over from Mad Max.

If the US ticks all the boxes- and there's a case- then clearly plenty of very nice places to live in exist besides so id say thats a clear yes

Have we ever not been? Slave state — apartheid state — Vietnam/Watergate — Corporate state — Fury Road (2016-present)

the people in the mayfield candle factory that collapsed worked 12-hour shifts that paid $8 an hour. 110 ppl were inside. 40 ppl are still unaccounted for. they haven’t recovered a survivor since 3 am. pic.twitter.com/CsIIfLw3Pc

— Tracy Moore (@iusedtobepoor) December 11, 2021

it’s legal in kentucky to fire someone for refusing to work mandatory overtime

— Tracy Moore (@iusedtobepoor) December 11, 2021

The notion of local dystopias is an interesting one. Could be that there was an egalitarian paradise unfolding just a continent or two over from Mad Max.

Zardoz is another one. Although The Eternals are mainly a bunch of insufferable bores and their egalitarian paradise is pretty lame, but you wouldn't complain about it if you were being held captive by Charlotte Rampling.

Slave state — apartheid state — Vietnam/Watergate — Corporate state — Fury Road (2016-present)

We didn't start the fire, etc.

Let's see what all we have...you got this one.

US combined laissez-faire capitalism on it's drug industry and combined with heroin blow-back from the 'war on terror' created the opioid epidemic for fun and profit killing over a million Americans since 1999.

Getting back to the topic at hand, Le Guin wrote a book about a moon. Also was there some Cold War global political framework in her gender-bender book? I don't recall.

Climate catastrophe is going to be pretty universal IIRC.

― papal hotwife (milo z), Saturday, December 11, 2021 1:14 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

which is v little to do with the point about 1492 is it

― fix up luke shawp (darraghmac), Saturday, December 11, 2021 1:17 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

It is though (unless I'm misreading). The USA is the biggest historical contributor to the climate crisis. An argument could be made that if 1492 never happened, there would be no global crisis. Same for much of global environmental destruction -- Amazon forest all gone? Thank Ronald McDonald.

Local teachers in South Dakota “Dash for Cash” to help their classrooms by fighting over $5,000 in $1 bills while the crowd hoots and hollers. pic.twitter.com/azwGJKhaKU

— Eoin Higgins (@EoinHiggins_) December 12, 2021

they're going to remove that rug at some point

and then charge them for it!

An argument could be made that if 1492 never happened, there would be no global crisis.

Are we talking a world where Europe never came into contact with the Americas?

I can’t live without potatoes

-LL McCooljay

It would have happened eventually.

I can’t live without potatoes

OTM

Lol, Neanderthal.

NEW: Drone startup BRINC, which just pulled a $25 million VC round, says it was inspired by the 2017 Vegas shooting to build non-violent robots. I obtained a video showing their original mission was a border patrol drone system designed to tase migrants https://t.co/TclkWOO3eM

— Sam Biddle (@samfbiddle) December 13, 2021

It would have happened eventually.

Right but I'm saying the timeline where America turns the Earth into a toilet wasn't necessarily predetermined.

Maybe ecocide is the dharma of the human race idk.

this is all god's fault. god put the oil in the ground, fully formed, 8000 years ago

it was all predetermined

idk these guys predicted it pretty early

https://i.ibb.co/f4P96K0/index.jpg

https://i.ibb.co/cFmrLPX/index.jpg

Yeah I never loved the band but those album titles stuck with me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CczFit6tGhs

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/kentucky-tornado-factory-workers-threatened-firing-left-tornado-employ-rcna8581

personally idgi. fresh produce in american supermarkets is quite bad and expensive, every major city in the world has decent markets, etc. i guess it's better if it's brightly lit and you can listen to an instrumental soft jazz version of after the gold rush? https://t.co/g3b5LOgBcD

— joolsd (@joolsd) December 14, 2021

which Publix plays that?!? I'm happy if I get early '80 Boz Scaggs.

I regret starting a thread that functions as an invitation to post the most depressing news you can find, but more narrowly the degree to which the US seems to be embracing core elements of the most prominent fictional dystopias is pretty striking! Sadly not cyberpunk this time:

https://pen.org/scope-speed-educational-gag-orders-worsening-across-country/

And it’s getting worse. In the month since the report’s release, state lawmakers introduced 12 new bills, bringing the total to a staggering 66 educational gag orders for the year in 26 states, 12 of which have passed into law.

Here’s what’s happening:

The recent group of bills includes seven in Missouri and one each in New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and South Carolina.
All 12 of these bills target K–12 schools, four include provisions that would impact colleges and universities, and four include a focus on state agencies, other state-funded institutions, and “places of learning.”
Six of these bills specifically ban “critical race theory,” making a total of 20 state-level bills introduced this year with such explicit prohibitions.
Six of these bills contain explicit prohibitions against teaching or using curricular materials from “The 1619 Project,” bringing the total of these to 17 for the year.

xxp I remember back in the 80s, we hosted some soviet kids. When we took them to the supermarket, they lost their shit.

I think the original tweet is referencing that, not that Safeway is better than a local French produce market.

we do have abundant food (not everywhere, of course) of mostly mediocre quality. it's ok.

the critical race theory mess is one of the factors in favor of dystopia

to me

xxp I remember back in the 80s, we hosted some soviet kids. When we took them to the supermarket, they lost their shit.

I think the original tweet is referencing that, not that Safeway is better than a local French produce market.

So was communism.

I guess that’s the kind of joke that lands better with boomers.

And that's the kind of joke that lands better with people from 2017.

the tweet is responding to libertarians tweeting photos of american grocery stores to prove a point

american supermarkets are among the purest products of american capitalism and therefore accurately reflect all our most popular theories about health and happiness, from gluttony to asceticism, all packaged in convenient sizes for easy consumption. it's a design that's been copied all over the world, with appropriate modifications to suit local tastes and incomes. almost any praise or criticism you want to make about supermarkets can be justified using real world examples.

from gluttony to asceticism, all packaged in convenient sizes for easy consumption

cf. Randall Jarrell's A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (1960) and the companion poem "Next Day"

Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All

You want to know dystopia? Sometimes I have to go to three different supermarkets to get everything I need.

I regret starting a thread that functions as an invitation to post the most depressing news you can find

You cannot design a thread that wouldnt fall prey to this within ten mins have you seen this site lately

From another article.

Perez agreed to the settlement rather than take the case to trial out of concern that a jury award could be overturned on appeal on grounds of qualified immunity for police. Generally, qualified immunity protects law enforcement officers unless they violate clearly established law arising from a case with nearly identical facts, according to the Legal Defense Fund.

So essentially they can get away with anything as long as it's bizarre enough?

yes - the "clearly established" thing comes early in a string of bad Supreme Court decisions on this. ime the episode of the 5:4 podcast on Qualified Immunity was an informative and sobering listen.

The scale of the US military-industrial complex's grip on higher education is just staggering—if you want to understand why schools went so ballistic over calls to divest from war, start here https://t.co/PDb64wGUPP pic.twitter.com/BwLP7zPV2y

— Jack Mirkinson (@jackmirkinson) May 29, 2024

The M-I complex has had a death grip on US universities and colleges for most of the past 70 years. It started seriously gearing up in the 1950s and was unshakably entrenched by 1970.

reminds me of the Cyber Patriot program in grade schools, which is available thru LAUSD for example, and while it's not explicitly military-industrial complex it's sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security, Air Force Reserve, American Military University, and founded in part by CIAS (not to be confused with the CIA but still....)

7th graders should just be in chess clubs.

it's not a *direct* pipeline to the MIC, and school districts don't invest in it afaict, but it's amazing how that stuff just trickles all the way down in education.

The Cyberpatriot (mobile) site is even datedly creepy like something produced for a Starship Troopers deleted scene.

The M-I complex has had a death grip on US universities and colleges for most of the past 70 years. It started seriously gearing up in the 1950s and was unshakably entrenched by 1970.

I think I ranted about this on the Oppenheimer movie thread, but American academia wasn't exactly pushed into this - it should be M-I-A, the invisible partner. By the beginning of '43, every physicist in America knew that the Manhattan Project was a science Skull & Bones - whoever got the tap on the shoulder was going to be part of setting the direction of american physics - which leads to the UC running Los Alamos and Livermore, electrical engineering school partnerships with corporate towns like IBM in Kingston, and the o.g. Silicon Valley. All the M & I hired from the A like they were pro football teams. When I entered UC Irvine in 1983, the number of corporate partnerships the university had was front and center as advertising.

FWIW, in 1981 General Dynamics took my entire high school to Disneyland for free. All of the rides were free. Way more effective propaganda than Cyber Patriot

i recently went to a book fair where the author of this book happened to be and i meant to check it out -- has anyone read it?
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61108472-palo-alto

I read his first book, but the length of Palo Alto put me off.

yes it is HUGE! i would only read as ebook

I kinda lost a bit of interest in that book after reading this review: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/grieving-redness-in-the-west-reading-malcolm-harris-after-mike-davis/

I guess this could go into one of the general COVID threads but running an anti-vax psyop in the middle of a global pandemic as part of Cold War II: The Coldening seems pretty dystopian.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covid-propaganda/

fuuuuuck.

Americans when they need to grocery shopping in the suburbs pic.twitter.com/XlCvI3eIB8

— sean (@_sn_n) June 15, 2024

Can't believe this isn't an SNL skit.

This seems like the inevitable accoutrement for those at the top of the disaster capitalism pyramid (not even joking)

Better looking than the Cybertruck

have we considered not having an Orange County?

not a high bar, but milo otm

on the other hand, what could possibly go wrong with a lot of terrified people driving around in vehicles that can blind any vehicles behind or in front of them?

Looks to me like some small time chop shop is modifying Cadillac Escalades to cater to some role-playing lunatics (or drug lords) with money to burn, hoping to make a few bucks from an ultra-niche market. They'd probably quote you a price in crypto if you ask them to. Not exactly representative of anything more dystopian than capitalism in general.

There was a time when profound face-melting psychosis might have been a barrier to owning a tricked-out Psychomobile but luckily for unhinged maniacs capitalism keeps hurtling towards it's inevitable conclusion

https://www.rezvanimotors.com/rezvani-vengeance#vengeance-home-page

based in Montana

Ha, of course.

"Vengeance is Mine, sayeth the LORD? SORRY GOD! Vengeance is yours for $1499 a month for a 48 month lease!"