This is such a funny thing to say lmao, if it’s bait then it needs to be in a museum. Bravo Vince

“You’re ridiculous for participating in the society you were raised in, how dare you. You need to run out into the woods like Ted Kaczynski, never pay taxes again, and survive like the kid from Hatchet. Oh? You have people that you care about? Just forget about them, duh. Oh? I’m a hypocrite because I’m typing this on a device that was obtained through said ‘ridiculous lifestyle’? Nah, false equivalence. Just trust me, I’m basically Siddhartha Gautama. All I need is Lemmy.”

That’s the thing though. The US is already a highly fascistic state and has been for more or less over a century. If we go over the standard criteria, there’s relatively centralized autocracy with the President, militarism which has pervaded American culture and politics for essentially its entire existence (especially apparent in globalized media such as Hollywood productions), suppression of opposition through shunning of any political ideologies left of the centre (clear in tactics seen throughout the red scare), belief in a natural social order with the working, middle, and upper classes, along with “undesirables” like the homeless and other marginalized communities, alignment of the economy with the state through the military-industrial complex, and explicit conditioning of individual identity to be aligned with the national one through the pledge of allegiance and US-centrism.

The only thing that’s up in the air is the President’s status as a dictator, but I would argue that’s simply a result of the US government’s focus heretofore on soft power, i.e. focusing on diplomacy and relatively peaceful occupation as opposed to force or violence. The ability of the President to have such drastic effects on the economy and current policy is already tipping the scales against the non-dictatorship argument in any case.

I’m not necessarily trying to make a call to action, that would be narrow-minded. I’m simply pointing out that real change on a societal level doesn’t truly happen until people realize things are getting desperate, and at that point the already long-standing problems were made a whole lot worse by believing they could be managed with less overt means.

This should be in a Mad Libs at this point

“If you ____ I have ____ to sell you”

The problem is that US politicians are not acting with voter’s futures in mind, and the “progressive” ones & their constituents seem to believe that the only way things will get better is if they continue to bend the knee and cater to a constantly devolving status quo. Progress doesn’t happen when you reduce your goals, and change doesn’t happen without force. If reality doesn’t account for you, you need to make it so. I suppose it’s just a matter of it needing to get so bad that you realize the future was never promised to anyone to begin with.

Completely missed my point. There’s nothing beneficial about a retributive standpoint based on distrusting an entire identity group because of statistical averages. Cathartic I’m sure (on a purely non-thinking and surface level), but then you’re no better than the people you’re criticizing in that regard. It’s entirely emotional, quite like the people in charge of the US right now.

I’ll always be baffled by the blatant hypocrisy on display in sentiments such as these. As if an eye for an eye has ever led to anything more than two blind people.