[The USA has always had] a perennial problem with violent crime. […] And the reason it cannot be stopped is that the people, both the population at large and those who are supposed to be in charge, do not want it to stop whatever they may claim.
If they sincerely wanted to put an end to it, they could do so in a moment of reasonable consensus. […]
100% exactly. This is all an expression of the people’s will, at least of those people who are even active at all. I’ve written a comment recently that a large part of the US see themselves as warriors who would rather die on the battlefield than rot away in Hel, the place of eternal boredom where nothing ever happens.
The same is happening in the US today. People lose a sense of vision for the future, and without that vision, people are left to rot in their own non-meaningful life. We need to find a new vision for the future, and fast.
Emperor Manicula is likely to be the first in a long line of autocrats. The dream is over but the country won’t collapse, it will just become a dangerous belligerent and an impediment to world peace, with naked assertions to power. It does not look good for us avoiding a world war.
That’s how all wealthy civilizations end.
The central problem is that hierarchical systems reward and thus select for psychopathy.
People with principles, morals, ethics, empathy and/or integrity will have choices they will not make - courses of action they will not follow, no matter the potential rewards. Psychopaths and sociopaths are not similarly constrained - they’re willing to do absolutely whatever it takes to succeed. So they will always have an advantage in hierarchical systems.
Additionally, once they gain power, they will generally arrange things such that it’s easier for them to hold power, which not coincidentally makes it easier for other psychopaths and sociopaths to gain and hold power.
Of course, with psychopaths and sociopaths in power, the civilization begins to decline. At that point, there are two broad choices - to reform the system or to warp the system to protect the privilege of the psychopaths. Naturally, the psychopaths choose the latter.
So they find themselves in a situation in which the civilization is in decline due to their actions and they’re determined to keep doing what they were already doing. So they need a diversion so that they avoid the blame for the damage they’re doing. And that’s actually fairly easy since there are a great many people who can sense thst the civilization is in decline, but who are too stupid and angry to sort out who really deserves the blame. And all the psychopaths have to do then is isolate some unpopular fringe group(s) and tell the stupid and angry peiple that it’s all their fault, then the psychopaths can stay their destructive course while the stupid and angry people fight with whichever group(s) they’ve been pointed at.
And that’s exactly where the US is today.
I agree with all the points you’ve made, but I vehemently disagree with your rhetoric in calling people stupid.
A large portion of the people you are denigrating have been raised in areas with poorly funded and under-valued education. Some are willfully ignorant, yes, but most of those people have never been given the opportunity to learn or to appreciate the value of education.
Calling people stupid is an insult that will alienate and propagate the “us vs them” mentality we need to overcome. They are humans that have had many disservices done to them by the government and thus distrust it. We have to figure out how to work with those who have been failed, those who haven’t fallen into hate but are ignorant or apathetic. Teaching literacy would go a long way.
Except that they are in fact stupid.
Yes - that’s largely due to an educational system and a culture that (not coincidentally) fails them, and yes - it’s an insulting term. But it’s true, and bluntly, I don’t give a shit if stupid people are offended by being called stupid, and particularly when those specific stupid people are responsible for electing and supporting a government that’s on a direct parh to bringing needless suffering and death to millions.
They are going to destroy everything that was ever good about the US and kill millions of people along the way. It’s far too late to worry about them maybe getting their feelings hurt if we say something mean about them.
If you’d like to ensure you’re up against an additional ~112,000,000 adversaries, by all means. That’s how many apathetic or disenfranchised voters sat out the election. I don’t like those odds, and I refuse to deny anyone the chance to redeem themselves. Describing them as stupid when you are aware of and admit to the fact the intentional actions of a hostile government has created the environment that made them ‘stupid’ will only create more enemies.
Unless you’re willing to kill a hundred of million in pursuit of your own goals we will need to help those who have been disadvantaged and show them a path out of apathy. That’s not just teaching literacy and critical thinking, mind you. It’s providing opportunity to pursue and achieve goals they had buried away in themselves when they realized how badly the deck was stacked against them.
Universal health care and universal basic income are small steps in the right direction, but with the looming spectre of climate change (that we are actively, intentionally, and gleefully accelerating) then we need change at a systemic level. That system has under-educated and under-provided for those ~112,000,000 people. If you teach them how and why and who snatched their opportunities away it’s going to be much easier to affect the change you want to see. If you’re willing to lump that many people together and call them ‘the problem’ I’d argue that you are the problem.
Don’t hate.
those specific stupid people are responsible for electing and supporting a government that’s on a direct parh to bringing needless suffering and death to millions.
I understand the sentiment, but I believe your anger is misdirected. They did not have a choice in being uneducated and subject to propaganda, and have been manipulated into voting for the psychopaths, by the psychopaths. They did vote for this, but I don’t know if they’re actually responsible for this. Pitying them is ok, assaulting them isn’t.
Aside from this, well said.
Splitting hairs on blame and feelings will not keep the stupid MAGAts from shooting you in the street, citizen. Don’t apologize for Nazis, whether they’ve been indoctrinated or they’re goose-stepping by choice. ✊🏻
those who haven’t fallen into hate
You appear to need help with reading comprehension as well, or at least a math lesson. Please, take a seat.
Officially, Trump received ~77,000,000 votes and Harris received ~75,000,000 for a total of ~152,000,000 out of ~174,000,000 registered voters. If you must insist the 77,000,000 who voted for Trump are all Nazis, that still leaves ~22,000,000 apathetic registered non-voters.
Those numbers do not take into account the ~90,000,000 disenfranchised or apathetic otherwise eligible voting-age population. That’s ~112,000,000 eligible voters who did not explicitly lick the boot. If you’d like to count all 112,000,000 eligible non-voters as Nazis that means the USA contains ~189,000,000 Nazis, or about 2.5 times those who either support the neoliberal status quo or acknowledged the effectiveness of harm reduction over purity tests.
A more reasonable take on the eligible non-voter number is to assume apathy or ignorance over bigotry. Bigotry is indeed a hard beast to fell. Apathy or ignorance, however, can be overcome by promoting literacy and by extension critical thinking as valuable and necessary skills.
These people are not stupid. They have been failed by an educational funding paradigm designed to educate the wealthy while the impoverished are left behind. Do you really believe they are all Nazis?
Also; referring to anyone as ‘citizen’ is an explicit alienation of a group of humans. Alienation and dehumanization are major tools of fascism. Do better.
I’d argue this isn’t limited to just the US.
that’s exactly the opening thesis
And I’d agree.
So what’s the alternative? Non-hierarchial societies don’t really exist, and if they do, in smaller tribes, they get infiltrated or destroyed by larger societies.
GET RID OF BILLIONAIRES
Create a society where you ban extreme wealth.
You allow people to gain wealth, as much as they want but you create an upper ceiling … like say 100 million. Beyond that, any further wealth you create is just sent to the government as taxes and spent on public services and infrastructure and on other less fortunate people.
Wealth is also not inherited and when you die, a small part of your wealth is passed to your descendants but the majority is given over to the government to again be used for taxes, infrastructure and public services.
Humans will always be greedy bastards and there will always be people who will game the system in their favour for whatever psychotic or manic reason they have (similar to people with hoarding mentalities or people who collect cats or bottle caps) … in this suggested society, people would still be allowed all the freedoms to fulfill their fantasies or manias within a controlled environment and not to the point where they are degrading all of humanity in the process.
UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME
And as you create an upper ceiling of wealth, you also create a lower floor of poverty … you use all that extra money and institute Universal Basic Income and allow every able bodied human an equal opportunity to become as much of a greedy bastard as they want and start to gain their own wealth. Or they use their good start in life, generate a bit of wealth, get an education and find the cure for cancer. Imagine if we had thousands or even millions of scientists who no longer have to worry about making rent and instead spend their time trying to find cures for things or finding new solutions to the energy crisis or environmental problems like global warming.
Instead … we have a world where we funnel all the wealth of the world to a small group of people who sit on it, defend it at all costs and send humanity to its doom while billions of people either starve, near starve or spend all their time and energy just barely getting by.
Instead of a static number, you just make it a multiple of the minimum wage. Say, the upper limit is 500 x Minimum Wage x Full Time working hours, or right now about $15.6 million. If you have enough for a person to live 5 lifetimes, then you have enough for you and your family. If you feel that’s not enough, maybe the minimum wage needs improving.
This is the answer. It’s really that simple: outlaw billionaires.
Yeah, because billionaires get that way by obeying laws already… 😶
Occasionally reminding the people at the top that if they don’t behave then they won’t live very long.
Why “occasionally”?
I have a thought experiment on this that I am developing. It’s still to complicated to properly convey but it’s basically an immutable set of axioms upon which we can individually build our personal social contract.
From the axioms we declare addendums, every addendum id public and is opt in at that personal level. Everyone’s adopted addendums are public so we can choose who to associate with based on shared addendums.
Create these as mathematical proofs that are essentially contracts that have predetermined but immediately executable penalties when the person fails to adhere to their addendums. The penalty is paid out directly to the damaged parties.
For example I say X is true backed by Y value, if it can be determined X is false anyone that I promised X to is owed Y. If I overextend and cannot pay, others will know I am untrustworthy and unable back up future claims.
If you took X and passed it off as true, I would also be responsible for resolving that value.
People will quickly learn not to make up bullshit and keep their word. Society will quickly learn what Y values are appropriate for given assertions.
You are getting warmer :)
Wouldn’t this penalize people who change their mind?
- or do they get more Y-points from subscribing to larger groups, and if so, wouldn’t it just turn into a majority dictatorship?
Changing your mind is fine. But you can never pretend you didn’t change your mind. Someone who yo-yos around some
Y points are your personal value for data you’ve generated. No one earns from gossiping other people Y points, the person whose generated the data point is the one who always gets paid. If no one cares about the X then the Y has no real value. I may put Xs I don’t want anyone to know at insanely high Y values.
I’m not sure what mechanism would causes a dictatorship, I’m interested in how you think it could be exploited.
I haven’t given all the details. The idea is very complex compared to what we do today but at the same time. But the complexity is in the translation not the based mathematical concepts.
For example, you get no value from reselling my X, I get the Ys. What you can do is use many Xs to generate a new X1 you value at Y1. All those Xs are part of the new X1 and that’s where lies get really expensive because I’ll become financially responsible for healing those X1s you shared, if my real value causes X1 to change. These are a series of very basic math formulas that are itself not very complex. The complex is all the inputs and outputs. The system is only possible by using computers because these are massive but trivial given what these LLMs are doing.
I started these thoughts about two decades ago as part of a world building idea of a future where this is already in place. The technological development that has occurred since then makes me think the system could actually be built today via some combination of etherum like contracts and variants of LLMs.
The whole thing feeds right back into itself but it is just us and it is just an every expanding representation of society and our cumulative knowledge.
Every truth is traceable back to recorded physical data and every falsehood literally does not fit because the physical data does not exist.
The only reason it doesn’t exist because it has no capitalist value. If someone is sitting in the middle collecting fractions of Ys for ever interaction, that is not this system. If someone is able to say, I own X because I discovered the mechanism first and no one else can sell X even if they collect all the data points need to make X, that is not the system.
Y must always be less than the cost of generating a new X because someone else will come and undercut you. The real value is in the human experience.
Good education is the main bulwark against this type of decline. Any political party that starts banning books, denigrating teachers, or cutting education funding should set off major alarms. Making people stupider is step one in the long game of authoritarian takeover.
So what’s the alternative?
Constantly improving the big compromise. No one size fits all. Constant work. Not only in the government, but also in people’s heads.
Keeping the checks and balances in place. Finding loopholes and fixing them - if need be with more checks and balances.
Yes, a stable and relatively just state will always require administration. Be sure it doesn’t all fall into one person’s hand.
But the USA lost all this decades ago. Frankly, it’s a miracle that it took so long for a president to take full advantage.
As a good first step, the means of production must be controlled by the people, not by individuals, so that the fruits of our labor benefit everyone. As a second step, those of us aware of the problem must band together to create a strong vanguard (if you will) that can defend the people from infiltration while we all figure out how to make a non-hierarchical system.
There, we’ve just come up with Marxism-Leninism.
Oof, yeah, that went great for everyone before.
For the vast majority of people, it was a large improvement, yes.
If humanity survives long enough (that’s a big if), I believe that the establishment of non-hierarchical systems is inevitable.
Humanity, as it matures philosophically, sociologically and psychologically, will outgrow the desire for hierarchy exactly as individuals outgrow the desire to be parented.
For the time being though, there is no alternative. Virtually every civilization that’s ever existed on Earth has already died in more or less this same fashion, and the ones that haven’t yet will.
As a bit of an aside though, my opinion is that the first step has to be a dedicated public health effort to diagnose antisocial personality disorder and ensure, by whatever means necessary, that society is protected from those who suffer from it.
Hopefully that’s something our descendants can do when they build whatever they’re going to build out of the rubble we’ll leave behind.
Oh, will it now… That’s generous.
We’ve only tried hierarchy with humans at the top.
Cats should be in charge.
Dogs should be in charge.
(oh fuck here we go again)
I thought we were trying to move away from psychopathic leaders?
Maybe they haven’t been psychotic enough.
They’re already in charge.
Democratic socialism
Very well said.
the America of the Founding no longer exists
That’s precisely their plan. The only reason they fetishize the founders so much is because they want to tear it all up and become the new founders, who they will then bind generations to listen to.
They are admitting that that is the end goal of Project 2025.
The leader of a conservative think tank orchestrating plans for a massive overhaul of the federal government in the event of a Republican presidential win said that the country is in the midst of a “second American Revolution” that will be bloodless “if the left allows it to be.”
I’d argue they want to go back to the roots of America. Only wealthy white men allowed to vote, with indentured servitude and slavery for everyone else. I think it’s important we don’t deify a bunch of rich slavers.
I mean that’s effectively what we have RIGHT NOW. Only billionaires wield any political power, and most of us work for one of those billionaires in some capacity, cause they control the money supply
Yeah, it can (and will) get much much worse. Ask the literal slaves about whether they would think that their situation was equal to yours.
Agreed, but they want even more unfortunately
The roots of America are a long trend away from these things.
Not really though. It is the illusion of trending away from them, but in actuality just rebranding them.
Taking my content back, fuck Lemmy 👎
He knows, but he’s saying that on purpose, to make sure everyone who doesn’t agree is lumped into the "other"s and ostracized. It’s the same reason Trump is still blaming the “radical left” for Kirk’s shooting, even though the shooter is by no means leftist.
Whenever you hear “the left”, think “Emmanuel Goldstein”, except less Jewish (because somehow the Israelis are on the same side as these people)
Fair point.
The America of the Founding fathers was an economy built entirely on slavery, the founding fathers were almost to a man white, slave-owning landed gentry. Their America was far from perfect, but they attempted to leave us the mechanisms to make it better; which inch by inch, we’ve done for the last 250 years. Until now. Now, all bets are off, and the constitution has no meaning, the bill of rights will soon be overturned by Executive Order and upheld by the SCOTUS. This fascist takeover has been the plan SINCE THE NEW DEAL. Hate to agree with MAGA on anything but the time for talk and peaceful solutions has passed. Death to fascists is the only solution, the only way forward.
“It’s called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.”
- George Carlin
… I think Americans are waking up with a terrible hangover
That’s all? From here, it seems like it’s more of a “terrible hangover” from rotgut liquor & overly-cut drugs, with a spent condom hanging from their collective ass and Cheeto-crusted santorum painted everywhere -and then some. 🤷🏼♂️
I think we are closer to OD’ing.
fentanyl and now carfentanyl are ravaging rural america. the repuplicans are trying to say its flowing across the border into our country. the truth is it is domestically manufactured. it originates in the core of appalachia and is then sold everywhere else. militarizing LA, DC, Chicago, Charlotte, or Memphis won’t fix it, nor will 1k daily deportations. the only fix for these problems is to meet the needs of the people. rural americans are desperately poor. if we want to address crime, we should address their material needs.
but none of this is about preventing crime. it’s all about supporting crime.
Having fairly recently escaped from a bout of homelessness that lasted about a year…
Oh, fucking hell yes, fent, carfent, blues, whatever the fuck its called in your neck of the woods…
Holy fuck this shit is horrifying, turns people into basically actual zombies.
Destroys their minds, destroys their bodies.
I did my best with an ultimately inadequate but above average amount of first aid and trauma care training to more or less trade medical care for food and cigarettes for a while… this shit is a goddamned nightmare.
Immense paranoia and delusions and violent snaps can happen on a dime, for no apparent reason, basically just causes schizophrenia as best I can tell.
And when I say zombies, I mean … beyond the infamous ‘lean’ and shambling…
The shit also destroys your immune system, and when your homeless, you tend to get injured a lot.
I saw, and tried to help, many people, fent addicts, with just… necrotic zones, wounds that were beyond horribly infected, had been infected and untreated for so long… just… you’d have to do an amputation, the actual underlying flesh just … yeah, necrotic, grayish goop, not blood, is what came out.
I had gloves and masks and wouldn’t do anything close to that unless we could use some area in a shelter that I could sterilize, and then bandage them up, usually got one other person to act as a kind of ‘guard’ and prevent anyone from waltzing in or what not… but fuck man… shit’s horrifying, these people all need ERs and probably ORs and actual professionals…
We’ve had a bit of help, this is from 2020:
Study: Russian Trolls Supremely Effective At Exploiting American Fear, Anger Online
Of course, the main purpose of posts by Russian trolls is to incite arguments among different groups or ideologies: conservatives versus liberals, pro-life versus pro choice, pro-immigrant groups versus border wall enthusiasts, etc. Researchers say as outrageous as much of this content appears to be, Americans can’t help but to click.
After analyzing over 2,500 of these Russian posts, researchers discovered they generated clickthrough rates as much as nine times higher than the norm in digital advertising campaigns. In a rather poor reflection of human nature, it seems that controversy, lies, and fear mongering do very much equal clicks.
Another eulogy for something that never existed expect in the fever dreams of propagandists and politicians.
The American dream ended with Reagan.
It’s been a tramplefest ever since. And TV and the internet has been a better opiate for the masses than the printed press could have ever imagined.
Time is a flat circle.
There never was an American dream. There is - or rather, was - an American fantasy entertained by immigrants, that turns into a rather bland, if not unpleasant reality check when they arrive in the US and don’t strike it rich, which is the overwhelming majority of them.
Even the Pilgrims sailed to the New World with that fantasy in their minds, and then were confronted with the pretty awful realities of their miserable voyage and even more miserable life in the Plymouth colony. This is nothing new.
also. can we stop mythologizing the Massachusetts colony as being our national origin. the first english speaking colonists in the Virginia colony trying to make a quick buck through violence and deceit. yeah, the Massachusetts played a role in our modern christofascist imagery, but this whole thing has from the outset been about money and we can’t do anything about that until we confront that
No one conflates this.
Massachusetts is the origin of our physically rejecting the colonial regime. The Revolution starts in the Boston harbor.
The colony starts in Jamestown VA.
Everyone knows this. No one is saying otherwise. This is off topic for this thread.
The American dream has been dead a long while ago, stolen by a few very wealthy people. The breakdown is just the result of decades of distraction from the real authors of this theft.
Turns out, the American Dream is just a ginormous shopping mall in New Jersey
This article links here https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/09/12/killing-charlie-kirk-poisonous-left-wing-politics/
Which is written by a fucking chud trying to justify how “the left” has abandoned discourse in favor of violence and groupthink. Is the telegraph owned by some asshole billionaire too?
The telegraph is a conservative newspaper, yes.
Hint: Its nickname here in Britain is the ‘Torygraph’
concentrated wealth does that
Rome 2.0
It’s almost like we finished our expansion as an
empire…colony… state.There’s a difference: Rome took a thousand years to fall. America has gone back from going to the moon to medicine by leeches in half a century.
