Blastman said:
klezmer electro-thug beats said:
I don't pretend to comprehend each and every voter's muddle of intentions, but historically shit like this happens when a country is in what you might call terminal decline. I don't really want to know what the terminal decline of a stronger superpower than history has ever seen with 750 military bases around the world looks like but I suspect I will find out
Idk how I didn't even see you said this, but what does "shit like this mean"? i'm just not sure exactly what you mean
I guess I was talking about the election result, but more broadly:
Incoherent political movements toward punishing scapegoats over any kind of vision of the future. Nothing will get better for anyone, but your purple haired grandson you hate, or the immigrants in your neighborhood, or just women generally, will have it worse than you. The ideology behind Trump has completely abandoned the idea that political power can be wielded to improve any voter or regular person's life (no one can remember the last time that happened. Maybe the COVID checks, but that's it). And honestly the alternative from the Dems is not far from this - they don't promise to imprison and persecute enemies as much (though they damn well tried re:immigration this time around), but their offering is that things will get worse less rapidly under their watch. Not that things will get better. No more money in your pocket, not improvement in services from the collective wealth of the richest nation ever to exist in all of history, no baseline of dignity to everyone's existence that no one need fear falling below, no peace, no progress toward a world where there won't be 2 billion climate refugees in a handful of years, no feeling that you have a form of group power of self-determination within your community, whether that's your home, neighborhood, workplace or whatever. Certainly not your nation, or your world.
Politics play out strictly as an aesthetic, a consumer choice you use to signal the kind of person you are. Absolutely no promise to wield the levers of power toward a specific end. Everything is mystified, automatic, behind a curtain - you can't possibly understand what we do here in the halls of power. The function of government and the ends it works toward categorically cannot be as simple as giving the people what they want. And no one can explain why the choice was between two parties that do not reflect in any way what their voters want when polled on "issues" or specific political ends. No one can explain why even the people who "win" are miserable and will continue to be so, with their only satisfaction from having won being that they get to witness others' suffering. Older generations especially: thinking, voting and acting politically as if the world will be sucked into a black hole when they die. Nothing matters beyond them, not even their own children. Zero vision of a world after their existence ends, zero concern for it. The fact that the crypto and AI bubbles that are now powerful lobbies in government are literally mortgaging the suffering of children born today via climate disaster, mass displacement and the terrifying actions you can imagine governments like this will manifest in response to those things: war, exploitation, imprisonment or abuse of refugees, genocide? And it's all for a bunch of temporary wealth for a handful of sociopaths. Even dangling stories of temporary wealth for a few is enough to send many millions of people onto the bandwagon, chasing that ludicrous simulacrum of "wealth" - which in its true form is personal dignity, peace, stability, community, self-determination (in the form of freedom to move, time to oneself to develop one's own person, freedom to decide how to live), a lot of things that generally money alone doesn't give you; a lot of things that depend on the people around you having roughly the same material "wealth" as you, not you having the most.This level of deep, deep dysfunction of a society - what is supposed to be a collaborative project to protect and share amongst one another - has come about for a few historical reasons. The profit margin for capital is getting thinner everywhere. Or everywhere real. Tech bubble products don't collect your garbage or make your tap water not give you cholera. Maybe the US was able to stave off this dissolution for so long because of the national wealth it was able to gain through being first a genocidal takeover of an entire resource-rich continent, and then after that, a military superpower, dictating the terms of global trade, industry and investment. But it's starting to feel in a collective subconscious way that it's not hanging onto that status forever. So they look for internal enemies, they give up on anything getting better because the real way you could improve things for yourself is to improve things for the parts of the world you've traditionally exploited and stomped on. You can't build a wall big enough to keep out the sun, the seas, the clouds. Or refugees from the parts of the world you've made hell.
When you had it big, and you lose it, it does very weird things to people's self-regard as a nation. Look at the UK crying its eyes out every time it doesn't win a world cup, a sport a billion+ people play, of which 60 million are British. Why SHOULD they be world class? Why are they paying the United States to basically lease nuclear weapons so they can feel really big and strong, like a real global player? Because a hundred years ago they had colonies in every time zone, and they built a couple of pretty stone colonnaded city centres with the ill-gotten money from that network of global exploitation. They can go it alone! Vote Brexit! It's like society-scale dementia. And it's coming for the States, where it will play out differently. And the States has enough nuclear weapons to kill every human on the planet a hundred times over.Sorry this isn't super coherent. I'm not VI Lenin I'm just some guy.
ersonal opinion, Democrats went too far to the extreme on a number of their policies and alienated swaths of the populace
