Do you feel the USA is better now than it was 22 years ago?

LainaGabranth · Jun 30, 2022

mrdude said:
So basically you just like to whine.... and there's no plan to sort anything out as whining is far easier. Yep I get it, you are one of those people that want others to work and you can live off the backs of their hard work, and yet you go on about slavery.....think about that for a minute.

Seethe.

krakenx · Jun 30, 2022

Nearly every service nessesary for a government to provide that make a functional and prosperous society have been cut drastically over the past 20 years. What few services remain are either barely functional, or have been privitized and provide only a fraction of the value we pay the private businesses providing it.

The impact is visible. People are less educated and less healthy. The environment is more polluted. Temperatures are higher, crop yields are down. Roads are undrivable, public transportation is unusable. Unregulated corporations cheat their employees and customers alike, and crooked courts and mandatory arbitration ensure there are no penalties for doing so.

Meanwhile the tax burden on the poor and middle class has never been higher. Folks in the upper middle class pay over 60% of their income between federal, state, property, and sales tax. We aren't getting what we pay for at all. Other countries have free healthcare. We don't even get sick time.

Instead of uniting against the obvious wrongs being done to us openly by government and its corporate owned leadership, instead the population fixates on divisive distractions like gender, race, and gun control. The idea of having a well run government acting for the public good isn't even part of the conversation.

LainaGabranth · Jun 30, 2022

krakenx said:
Nearly every service nessesary for a government to provide that make a functional and prosperous society have been cut drastically over the past 20 years. What few services remain have been privitized and provide only a fraction of the value we pay the private businesses providing it.

The impact is visible. People are less educated and less healthy. The environment is more polluted. Temperatures are higher, crop yields are down. Roads are undrivable, public transportation is unusable. Unregulated corporations cheat their employees and customers alike, and crooked courts and mandatory arbitration ensure there are no penalties for doing so.

Meanwhile the tax burden on the poor and middle class has never been higher. Folks in the upper middle class pay over 60% of their income between federal, state, property, and sales tax. We aren't getting what we pay for at all. Other countries have free healthcare. We don't even get sick time.

Instead of uniting against the obvious wrongs being done to us openly by government and its corporate owned leadership, instead the population fixates on divisive distractions like gender, race, and gun control. The idea of having a well run government acting for the public good isn't even part of the conversation.

Up until the end of this you've been pretty spot on, but the idea that people only care about gender and race inequalities and somehow don't care at all about economics and social programs is flat out wrong. We saw, without a doubt, the highest level of class consciousness this country has ever seen in 2020 and from there discussions about the gaps in wealth and power for marginalized groups have become impossible to ignore. Buildings got burned because it's been so long with them being ignored for fuck's sake.

The reason the idea of a "well run government" isn't part of the conversation is that no major outlet is going to advocate for positions that would ultimately result in the removal of both parties, partly due significant amounts of funding coming from said groups, and also because it'd be a complete shitshow. You won't, for example, ever see CNN, Fox News, OANN, and so on come out and advocate for worker ownership of the means of production, or worker co-ops, or anything of the sort, because they'd risk waking up their workforce to the flaws of what they directly work under.

Shit is *fucked.* Both parties in the US are on the right, with Republicans going further and further beyond the definition of "far right." Voter suppression is massive in various red states, and economic disparity remains a severe problem for people. So I think it's really disingenuous to paint this like a situation where people just don't "care," or aren't "talking about it," because they are. They just don't get the mainstream focus you want them to. It's called controlled outrage, the right uses it and always has. Look up how the term "Politically Correct" was coined, look at why the War on Drugs was created and who it was targeting. They always focused on marginalized groups trying to advocate for socialist policies because they're immediately able to be smeared by the powers that be for being the wrong skin color, gender identity, or sexuality, and so on.

smf · Jun 30, 2022

LainaGabranth said:
So I think it's really disingenuous to paint this like a situation where people just don't "care," or aren't "talking about it," because they are. They just don't get the mainstream focus you want them to. It's called controlled outrage, the right uses it and always has. Look up how the term "Politically Correct" was coined,

Yeah, as soon as you try to talk about it someone has a meltdown and accuses everyone of being "woke"

LainaGabranth · Jun 30, 2022

smf said:
Yeah, as soon as you try to talk about it someone has a meltdown and accuses everyone of being "woke"

Exactly. I don't blame you for the perception you have of politics, economic criticism, and class consciousness, but there's a lot more nefarious stuff at play than just people selfishly ignoring the inherent failures of capitalism in favor of gender/race/gun stuff.

sarkwalvein · Jun 30, 2022

smf said:
As predicted, you have it upside down.

You are far more bigoted than me, you don't even seem to mind displaying it in public.

Loons are those who attack others who just want everyone to be nice to each other, people like you.

But he is right.

Loons are those who attack anybody with a divergent point of view without even trying to consider it or think what it may mean from the point of view of the other.
Loons are those who strive for witch hunting and polarization instead of conversation and consensus.
These loons are fascists under guise.
Loons pretend to fight for social justice, but that pretention is just hollow posing seeking nothing more than self satisfaction in their mob mentality.
They really like to pretend they have a high moral stand while what they do is sow discord.
They are not fighting for social justice, but they give a bad name to people that truly seek social justice, and this is unfair.
They are the reason SJW is a meme. Because of them no real discussion exists anymore, no social progress.
They destroyed the movements for social justice. This is the sad state of things.

LainaGabranth · Jun 30, 2022

sarkwalvein said:
Loons are those who attack anybody with a divergent point of view without even trying to consider it or think what it may mean from the point of view of the other.

sarkwalvein said:
They are not fighting for social justice, but they give a bad name to people that truly seek social justice, and this is unfair.
They are the reason SJW is a meme. Because of them no real discussion exists anymore, no social progress.

sarkwalvein · Jun 30, 2022

LainaGabranth said:

I mean people are not looking for a conversation, they just go for witch hunting.
How do you progress like this?

PS: I don't understand why did you put those two quoted sentences against each other, they are talking about the same thing (they don't contradict each other). I may be missing your point. I guess I don't get the meaning of the thinking emoji in this context.

LainaGabranth · Jul 1, 2022

sarkwalvein said:
I mean people are not looking for a conversation, they just go for witch hunting.
How do you progress like this?

PS: I don't understand why did you put those two quoted sentences against each other, they are talking about the same thing (they don't contradict each other). I may be missing your point. I guess I don't get the meaning of the thinking emoji in this context.

Do you feel even the slightest bit of shame in posting something like "People are just witch hunting and trying to disregard each other's ideas" and then posting something hilarious like that SJWs are even real??

Like look in a mirror, doofus.

xMarvin732 · Jul 1, 2022

The US is basically its own world, harmful trends coming over to the EU and other places.
Also the mental health of the citizens have been declining with all of the shootings happening more recently.

sarkwalvein · Jul 1, 2022

LainaGabranth said:
Do you feel even the slightest bit of shame in posting something like "People are just witch hunting and trying to disregard each other's ideas" and then posting something hilarious like that SJWs are even real??

Like look in a mirror, doofus.

Shame for what?
I really believe you misunderstood what I wrote, and this wouldn't surprise me, I am not particularly good with words.

But it may also be that your reply already shows what I am talking about: witch hunting before trying to understand what the other person means, looking for discord and social divide instead of conversation. Anyway, I don't want that, and I want to avoid misunderstandings, so I will explain what I wrote with different words believing that I wrote it so poorly the first time that it was misunderstood.

SJW is a meme, it is a real meme. A meme is not a person, a meme is an "element of a culture or system of behavior passed from one individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic means".

Memes, like propaganda, can affect the opinion and behavior of the masses.

The SJW meme has made it very difficult to talk about topics regarding bettering of society.
Someone that really wants to talk about an ongoing social problem is not taken seriously and casted away due to the influence of this.

I see many people nowadays pretend to fight to improve society, but they really act with mob mentality and witch hunting. They don't try to discuss a topic or persuade other people, they cast people away instead. This sows discord and produces a social divide. They put themselves in a moral high ground that is not real, and from that place they attack others. They even shun away other people trying to speak about the social problems they live and see, because their problems are not mainstream.

I state that the behavior of these people are part of the reason the meme of SJW exists. And the exitance of this meme, as I said above, works like negative propaganda for people that look for conversation, as they are all put into this same bag.

sarkwalvein said:
They are the reason SJW is a meme. Because of them no real discussion exists anymore, no social progress.

I hope you can now see clearly that in no moment I stated that an SJW are real people that exist (I thought it was clear when I wrote meme in there).

LainaGabranth · Jul 1, 2022

How can you write such a massive wall of text and not get a single word of what I just said?

sarkwalvein said:
They really like to pretend they have a high moral stand while what they do is sow discord.
They are not fighting for social justice, but they give a bad name to people that truly seek social justice, and this is unfair.

Barring how pretentiously written this is, it's also demonstrably false, but that's besides the point. This is stating that these people exist.

Like I know you're really, really fixated on trying to sound intelligent or poetic in your delivery but the gist of your post is just that there's these groups of people who are performatively progressive and go around calling everything fascist and shit. That's not a thing. Never has been.

I was around when the SJW meme started, it explicitly was done because of people on 4chan crying over random tumblr posts that were critical of things like heteronormativity or systems of power that favored whiteness over everything else. Of course when you say something performatively poetic you're gonna get called a dumbass. That doesn't mean I'm "witchhunting you," you victim complex weirdo, it just means you said something stupid. Quit being so melodramatic about internet drama you don't even know the origins of.

SG854 · Jul 1, 2022

sarkwalvein said:
Shame for what?
I really believe you misunderstood what I wrote, and this wouldn't surprise me, I am not particularly good with words.

But it may also be that your reply already shows what I am talking about: witch hunting before trying to understand what the other person means, looking for discord and social divide instead of conversation. Anyway, I don't want that, and I want to avoid misunderstandings, so I will explain what I wrote with different words believing that I wrote it so poorly the first time that it was misunderstood.

SJW is a meme, it is a real meme. A meme is not a person, a meme is an "element of a culture or system of behavior passed from one individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic means".

Memes, like propaganda, can affect the opinion and behavior of the masses.

The SJW meme has made it very difficult to talk about topics regarding bettering of society.
Someone that really wants to talk about an ongoing social problem is not taken seriously and casted away due to the influence of this.

I see many people nowadays pretend to fight to improve society, but they really act with mob mentality and witch hunting. They don't try to discuss a topic or persuade other people, they cast people away instead. This sows discord and produces a social divide. They put themselves in a moral high ground that is not real, and from that place they attack others. They even shun away other people trying to speak about the social problems they live and see, because their problems are not mainstream.

I state that the behavior of these people are part of the reason the meme of SJW exists. And the exitance of this meme, as I said above, works like negative propaganda for people that look for conversation, as they are all put into this same bag.

I hope you can now see clearly that in no moment I stated that an SJW are real people that exist (I thought it was clear when I wrote meme in there).

To be fair everything becomes a meme

sarkwalvein · Jul 1, 2022

LainaGabranth said:
How can you write such a massive wall of text and not get a single word of what I just said?

Barring how pretentiously written this is, it's also demonstrably false, but that's besides the point.
Like I know you're really, really fixated on trying to sound intelligent or poetic in your delivery but the gist of your post is just that there's these groups of people who are performatively progressive and go around calling everything fascist and shit. That's not a thing. Never has been.

I was around when the SJW meme started, it explicitly was done because of people on 4chan crying over random tumblr posts that were critical of things like heteronormativity or systems of power that favored whiteness over everything else. Of course when you say something performatively poetic you're gonna get called a dumbass. That doesn't mean I'm "witchhunting you," you victim complex weirdo, it just means you said something stupid. Quit being so melodramatic about internet drama you don't even know the origins of.

Sorry that I sound pretentious. I really don't have a clue how to write right. If anything here sounds poetic, it was not the intention.

I see there are groups of people that claim to be progressive and go around casting out people with an opinion that conflicts with theirs, instead of trying to reason with them. And I believe this has a negative effect on groups of people that are progressive and try to have a conversation and reason with others, instead of casting them away.

I really think casting people away does no good to society. To socially condemn somebody without a fair trial, "cancel culture", is something I would call witch hunting.

Regarding the meme of SJW, I was completely wrong regarding how it started. And yes, that would make me feel shame due to not checking if my preconception was correct before posting it.

SG854 · Jul 1, 2022

LainaGabranth said:
How can you write such a massive wall of text and not get a single word of what I just said?

Barring how pretentiously written this is, it's also demonstrably false, but that's besides the point. This is stating that these people exist.

Like I know you're really, really fixated on trying to sound intelligent or poetic in your delivery but the gist of your post is just that there's these groups of people who are performatively progressive and go around calling everything fascist and shit. That's not a thing. Never has been.

I was around when the SJW meme started, it explicitly was done because of people on 4chan crying over random tumblr posts that were critical of things like heteronormativity or systems of power that favored whiteness over everything else. Of course when you say something performatively poetic you're gonna get called a dumbass. That doesn't mean I'm "witchhunting you," you victim complex weirdo, it just means you said something stupid. Quit being so melodramatic about internet drama you don't even know the origins of.

Also I'm just gonna be really blunt, you aren't nearly as smart or interesting as you're trying too hard to be.

I'll give it to sarkwalvein. He doesn't seem to come off as pretentious or anything. Especially on past comments he wrote on this site. He's just trying to have conversation on what he thinks is happening.

You are reading him wrong. And projecting wrong things about his tone. I would suggest on understanding what he's trying to convey rather then make him into a caricature of what you think he's trying to come off as.

LainaGabranth · Jul 1, 2022

sarkwalvein said:
Sorry that I sound pretentious. I really don't have a clue how to write right. If anything here sounds poetic, it was not the intention.

I see there are groups of people that claim to be progressive and go around casting out people with an opinion that conflicts with theirs, instead of trying to reason with them. And I believe this has a negative effect on groups of people that are progressive and try to have a conversation and reason with others, instead of casting them away.

I really think casting people away does no good to society. To socially condemn somebody without a fair trial, "cancel culture", is something I would call witch hunting.

Regarding the meme of SJW, I was completely wrong regarding how it started. And yes, that would make me feel shame due not to checking if my preconception was correct before posting it.

Please stop using memes and twitter as your frame of reference. Cancel culture isn't even a thing, at best it's people on twitter being obnoxious and at best it's accountability culture. The real damages to things like "cancel culture" isn't people saying "hey! this person sucks! Un-person them!" It's capitalism. Companies with power over people are the ones who fire people, and because your ability to live and survive revolves around the meme of currency, you're basically fucked. That doesn't mean there's some nebulous ghost of "cancel culture" going around, it's just that capitalism has too much power. Always has been.

People on the right are going to use, and I cannot stress this enough, literally any goddamn reason they can find to devalue someone's opinions or otherwise write them off. It's happened with the anti-war movements against the Vietnam war, it happened with people who liked rock, or Yu-Gi-Oh, it's happened with people who are trans, and so on and so forth. The point is, the right's ability to discredit and argue someone is something they've always used without justification, and performative liberals aren't creating a justification for that. Like I said just now, the right will find any reason to discredit someone. You could make too much money, or too little money, or have too extreme of opinions, or so on and so forth.

sarkwalvein said:
I really think casting people away does no good to society. To socially condemn somebody without a fair trial, "cancel culture", is something I would call witch hunting.

Like, don't you think it's a little presumptuous to say that there are people who shouldn't be cast away? There's a lot of far right figureheads doing everything they can to create an objectively shittier country all around, and I reaaaaaally don't think that trying to convert people like, say, Tucker Carlson to a position that isn't either grifting white nationalism to boomers, or unironically believing in white nationalism. I say nip the problem in the bud and just deplatform him.

You are, essentially, virtue signalling against something that not only doesn't exist, but that you don't even understand the origins of the terms for. And ordinarily, people saying stupid shit isn't something that matters, but I'm specifically confused as to why you talk about how it's bad that these stereotypes of progressives exist, while...you explicitly argue for their legitimacy??

sarkwalvein · Jul 1, 2022

LainaGabranth said:
The real damages to things like "cancel culture" isn't people saying "hey! this person sucks! Un-person them!" It's capitalism. Companies with power over people are the ones who fire people, and because your ability to live and survive revolves around the meme of currency, you're basically fucked. That doesn't mean there's some nebulous ghost of "cancel culture" going around, it's just that capitalism has too much power. Always has been.

I agree with that, but still the career of the person who gets fired/cancelled goes south.

LainaGabranth said:
People on the right are going to use, and I cannot stress this enough, literally any goddamn reason they can find to devalue someone's opinions or otherwise write them off. It's happened with the anti-war movements against the Vietnam war, it happened with people who liked rock, or Yu-Gi-Oh, it's happened with people who are trans, and so on and so forth. The point is, the right's ability to discredit and argue someone is something they've always used without justification, and performative liberals aren't creating a justification for that. Like I said just now, the right will find any reason to discredit someone. You could make too much money, or too little money, or have too extreme of opinions, or so on and so forth.

Yes, they do this. But not only people on the right. And it is wrong in all instances. I believe censorship is worse though, but there should be consequences to defamation.

LainaGabranth said:
Like, don't you think it's a little presumptuous to say that there are people who shouldn't be cast away? There's a lot of far right figureheads doing everything they can to create an objectively shittier country all around, and I reaaaaaally don't think that trying to convert people like, say, Tucker Carlson to a position that isn't either grifting white nationalism to boomers, or unironically believing in white nationalism. I say nip the problem in the bud and just deplatform him.

Sure there are people that should be cast away. I don't think there are so many though. If what I wrote gives the idea that "nobody" should be cast away, that's not what I wanted to say. I believe there should be a fair trial first, to be sure there is no misunderstanding.

Regarding Tucker Carlson, this gives me a conflicted feeling, but I don't think he should be deplatformed. I believe raising the idea that censorship like this is ok would do more bad than whatever Tucker himself says.

LainaGabranth said:
You are, essentially, virtue signalling against something that not only doesn't exist, but that you don't even understand the origins of the terms for. And ordinarily, people saying stupid shit isn't something that matters, but I'm specifically confused as to why you talk about how it's bad that these stereotypes of progressives exist, while...you explicitly argue for their legitimacy??

The term already existed and I thought it was related to a behavior I saw, or that I thought I saw. I misunderstood the origins of the term, but that doesn't mean I didn't see the behavior I thought gave it origin. Still I believe I see this behavior, I don't know why you say it does not exist.

But I may be confused, as you said before I live too much online and I get influenced by memes and other stuff, I don't think I am alone in this though. It would be sad (for me) if I am just delusional regarding this.

LainaGabranth · Jul 1, 2022

I don't think it's that you're delusional, I think it's that you're putting too much stock in memes, so to speak. Performative people have always existed and always will. That does not however mean that it's any unique movement or whatever. SJWs as the term was coined don't exist, it's just a smear term used to discredit any social progressivist policies as insincere, when it's usually anything but. You should look into the people pointing the fingers at "SJW" people, though. There's a reason why we know today that "state's rights" is just a buzzword used insincerely to really mean "oppressing minorities" in practice. Read into Goldwater and what his "opposition" for example was to the Civil Rights Act. It was, verbatim, the rhetoric used by the right today.

Which brings me to my next point. Why would you be conflicted about removing someone like Tucker Carlson from their platform? He can still exist, he's just not able to radicalize your grandparents anymore. What's the harm?

H1B1Esquire · Jul 1, 2022

Dakitten said:
the political tur

Mai dude, yk exactly what the 90's was about.

but, to squeeze the pulp, as far as politics (super general), it's worse because of super PACs...and the fact we have more tech to expose fkrs....and globalization (it can be a good thing, but we are fucking up really bad).

Vague opinions and vague stuff.

LainaGabranth · Jul 1, 2022

H1B1Esquire said:
Mai dude, yk exactly what the 90's was about.

but, to squeeze the pulp, as far as politics (super general), it's worse because of super PACs...and the fact we have more tech to expose fkrs....and globalization (it can be a good thing, but we are fucking up really bad).

Vague opinions and vague stuff.

This is correct, PACs are fucking cancer.

Do you feel the USA is better now than it was 22 years ago?

Are things getting better or worse for the "Greatest Country in the World"?

Better

Worse

It's a mixed bag and very complicated and while I think some things have declined we do also have...

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