this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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Can confirm, the United States has lost it's mind. And yes, you have it down. The US goes abroad to secure resources for capitalist industry and has been promoting upsell and excess for some time now. Verhoeven's satirical advertising blurbs in Robocop (1987) were right on the mark.
Making us stupid and wanting to spend our money on $200 K-Pop bobble heads is exactly the world our corporations strive for, and the means to regulate them by a public-serving government was gutted in the 1980s by the Reagan administration. George W. Bush and Donald Trump (and the minimal pushback during the Clinton and Obama eras) are the natural result.
And in the next two decades you might get to see how the US does civil war and fascism. Every election lost by a Republican is challenged for legitimacy in an effort to neuter elections and create an autocratic one-party regime. Hopefully, this kind of shenanigan should sound dangerously familiar.
You got it right in one. We are out of our fucking minds, no small part to some willful efforts to turn the people of the US into mindless obedient consumers, but an epidemic of intergenerational mental illness has also contributed to Florida-Man-like conduct and truckers re-configuring their cars to belch soot as rolling coal.
We have indeed gone insane, but remember, not all of it is internal though. Let's not forget the influence campaigns being waged against America from various foreign nations that are trying to divide the country to cause it to be so busy fighting itself, that it effectively removes itself from the world stage, letting those nations basically do whatever they want without American interference.
The Chinese are spying to steal your technology, the Russians are doing pro bono campaign work for the most divisive candidates and the Americans are perfectly able to go off the rails without outside help
I would say perfectly willing and/or eager to go off the rails.
We don't even have to try mate.
The problem is the backdoors to SHIELD used by the oligarchs that want to give it secret orders are ultimately going to be used by HYDRA as well. In fact, one of the failures comes from the belief that the HYDRA element infiltrating SHIELD can be detected and cleaned out as if with an antivirus scan.
We've seen this the way NSA turned from a communications security department to a surveillance and intelligence department (that is, from anti-surveillance to surveillance), so instead of exposing and closing exploits and vulnerabilities, they catalogued them in secret for their own use -- leaving them available for other interests, including rival foreign states.
I'd like to say we have the terror scare from the 9/11/01 attacks to thank for that, but federal law enforcement in the US like FBI and NSA have secret-police tendencies, and like to use their powers to harass or neutralize enemies of the current administration, so this has been going on for some time.
A recent Behind the Bastards two-parter about How Capitalism Ate Christianity takes it as far back as the Great Depression and resentment of the New Deal. Larry Lessig notes that Boss Tweed in the 1850s was already moving to turn the US into a plutocrat-run autocracy, hence the current government as an oligarchy with small democratic features.
Ah, no worries, Europe is right behind you! The UK has completely fallen off the cliff and is a full blown kleptocracy, Hungary already has an openly fascist Government, and in Germany the Nazi party is currently clocking in at 20%+ in opinion polls, which would make them the 2nd strongest party in the next election. Yay! 🥳