These might be the good old days. Go outside, feel the grass, say wassup to your neighbors,… whatever you do that means community, because sh*t might get bad for a while.

  • TheBlue22@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    As a person from Europe, who’s is living next to Ukraine, who’s girlfriend is ukranian, who’s many friends are Ukrainian, who’s many friends died due to that terrorist state: If you were eligible to vote in the US and didn’t, fuck you.

    Any vote that didn’t go to Kamala, is a vote for fascism, a vote to accelerate and finish the genocide of palestine, a vote to cease support for Ukraine and a vote to help terrorists in ruzzia. If you support any of that, Fuck. You.

    But I know my ukranian brothers, they will not surrender. Even if you selfish American pricks don’t support them. They will fight until they can’t fight anymore, and then they will still fight.

    Unlike you, they are brave. They are heroes. They know whats fucking right.

    And frankly, for all terrible things coming to the US, if you didnt vote, you deserve them all.

    If you are from the LGBTQ+ community, not white or a woman, and you didn’t vote, you have just commited suicide.

    I will still support Ukraine, financially. Its not much but I don’t care. And if its not enough and the worst comes, I am ready to die to save my brothers, just like my people did in the past.

    I am willing to do my part, if you didn’t vote, you didnt. So one, last fuck you.

  • Tattorack@lemmy.world
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    I’m seeing a lot of “democracy is going to die” posts… But… I hate to break it to you:

    America is not a democracy. And if somehow it is a democracy, then it’s an incredibly bad one. It’s the least democratic democracy in the Western world.

    The two party system, the first past the post voting system, the indirect method of counting votes, lobbying, gerrymandering, the electoral collage. Systems to try and manipulate what a vote means. Systems that try to remove as much democracy from democracy as possible, while still being able to keep up some mock appearance.

    Your whole country is fucked and backwards from the very beginning, and that wouldn’t be so bad. But if America does something we all have to suffer for it!

  • DankDingleberry@lemmy.world
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    as an european, i am watching in absolute shock. i really dont understand how HALF the USA can still vote for this Chicken Nugget of a person.

    • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
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      Some people only have information from one side of the story. If Trump wins, he will likely try to mimic what both Putin and Orbán did with the media.

    • Womdat10@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      While you’re mostly right, it isn’t really half because we have this fun thing called the electoral college, that likes to make Republicans win.

      • M0oP0o@mander.xyz
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        Well and so far the popular vote is more red then blue. I think the USA will get the government the voters deserve.

        Here’s hoping the rest of the world can not get pulled down.

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          I’m someone smack in the middle of a liberal city in an always blue state, I don’t know what else there is for me to do. I’ve attempted helping educate and getting people to vote in other states who normally choose not to, I’ve voted in every election down to local boards and try to know who I’m voting for. Locally, we had a lot of successes so far this election in our state…but that won’t help much if, y’know, fascism.

          • EvilCartyen@feddit.dk
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            People turn fascist when they’re desperate and angry, same as always. So when people experience economic hardship they look for somone to blame, often immigrants. So we call them racists, and I guess that’s true, but it comes from something else; economic inequality.

            In Europe we do the same thing, in the French elections the rural population voted overwhelmingly for the fascists - here in brown.

            In the German elections, the poorer former East-German provinces also supported the fascist AfD, here shown in the darker colours.

            Even in Denmark, where I live, the more right-wing and extremist parties are popular in the southern, western, and northern parst of the country - the poorer rural areas, who’s seen their jobs disappear, their shops close, and their income stall even as the country as a whole gets richer.

            So the challenge of liberal democracy is clear; show the population outside the cities that they, too, can get their piece of the pie. If we cannot solve that, then we’ll see more countries turn fascist in the next decade.

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              Jesus, been scrolling for hours and finally someone has said it. It’s why someone like Bernie trended so well and actually had a chance if the DNC would’ve ran him in 2016. He wanted to raise EVERYONE up, regardless of any identity or ideology. He came with receipts and actual plans that he non-stopped harped on every second he had a mic in front of him. This election cycle I didn’t hear a single actual legislative plan fleshed out like they did with the healthcare for all in 2016 debates. You’re not gonna win a mud-slinging contest of “he said, she said” when people just don’t care.

              A lot of people (white and/or rich mostly) also know that they have benefited from racial discrimination and opportunities stolen from other people. They saw their parents buying homes, getting loans and jobs. They vaguely heard how difficult it was for POC or displaced individuals, they don’t want the system turning on them. In their bleak futurism that the right-wing paints, we will all be treated equally so everyone is a target. Instead of targeting voters concerns in an economical way, they went with a polisci approach like Harris’s horrible housing innovative.

              Harris proposes to provide $25,000 down-payment assistance to first-time homebuyers who have paid rent on time for two years, with more generous support for qualifying first-generation homeowners. … The proposal stems from an idea the Biden-Harris administration presented earlier this year, which called on Congress to implement $25,000 in down-payment assistance exclusively for 400,000 first-generation buyers, or first-time buyers whose parents weren’t homeowners, and a $10,000 tax credit for first-time buyers.

              You’re parents had a shack? sorry. Get no economical support from parents but they effect your government support? sorry. Congress didn’t pass it? sorry. We’ve decided to change the definition of a “starter-home”. Sorry.

              The piece of the pie was a perfect way to put it, I’ve seen so many shit takes from everyone on here I’m flabbergasted. From people “getting popcorn to watch everyone get their just desserts” to “maybe we shouldn’t of ran a woman-POC this election cycle”.

          • M0oP0o@mander.xyz
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            Not sure what to tell you, I am in another nation but a similar situation. The state of things is now to the point media is untrusted, nationalism is both here and missing, while people are angry but happy to blame the “other guys”.

            • AsheHole@lemmy.world
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              My ultimate fear is we’re too late and this is a global trend, but hopefully we can break through it. (We as in humanity, my team kinda dropped the ball on this one it’s looking) We need to get people educated and working towards change instead of casting blame on the “other guys” like you said. Right now though it’s hard not to feel lost knowing my loved ones and my rights and safety is at stake. I hope things look up for you and your loved ones.

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                Both of our nations really need to have some electoral reform.

                Best we can do it seems is an “I voted” sticker.

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        It’s not even close to half. Republicans are a quarter to a third of the country.

        It’s voter suppression and Democrats being the biggest possible fuckups they could be at every fucking opportunity.

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        You could watch the reactionism ramp up as they slipped into the minority during Clinton; and white men struggling to deal with the loss of their relevance has basically been the story of American politics since.

  • Strider@lemmy.world
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    So as far as I understand it as of now it’s pretty much decided early with almost no chance of Harris making it.

    So there you are. You’re right. I was right. We all were.

    We hoped for sanity.

    But it seems a massive criminal openly stating he will run a dictatorship has been voluntarily elected.

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    NYT is calling it for Trump. America as we know it, may be over.

    The war in Ukraine is about to end, with Russia probably getting everything they want, NATO might disband, China likely takes Taiwan, 100 years of authoritarianism and tyranny may be upon us after Trump truly consolidates powers, and nukes the Federal government.

    I fucking wish I was being hyperbolic.

    • RangerJosie@lemmy.world
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      Nah, we’re gonna balkanize sooner or later. Economy is fucked beyond fucked. (Thank you Reagan) It won’t be able to keep going. Especially not with republicans at the tiller. The end of the US will be the same as every other empire. But with nukes.

        • RangerJosie@lemmy.world
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          Stagnant wages, weakened unions, at-will employment, low corporate taxes, etc. All Reaganomics. Supply side economics. Basically destroyed the economic powerhouse that won the Cold War. It’s still a goliath, but instead of an immovable industrial bullwark its all debt driven gambling now. Speculation and financialization.

          • humble peat digger@lemm.ee
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            And who moved shit to China so it’s now much worse? Bill Clinton.

            And now not even US/EU cars are competitive anymore. Boeing is in decline. Intel is dying.
            Go into any store - nothing made in US anymore.

            Accept responsibility - it’s a Democrat bill Clinton doing

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      America as we know it, may be over

      Stop. I can only get so hard

      The war in Ukraine is about to end

      Damn, if only we had listened to the people calling for a negotiated peace since the first moment instead of calling them Putin bots…

      NATO might disband

      As a western European, I fucking wish, but you’re too hopeful for that. NATO is exclusively a force for evil, and the only interventions that it’s carried out are the bombing of Yugoslavia and the bombing of Libya, the latter resulting in a decade of civil wars that destroyed the formerly most prosperous country in Africa. Extraofficially (not technically NATO), also the invasion of Iraq. How is literally any of that good.

      100 years of authoritarianism

      The US has never been anything different from that. It’s based on the genocide of natives, on slavery of imported Africans, and the decisions made at the government are consistently against the will and the interests of the majority.

      Down with the US empire

    • humble peat digger@lemm.ee
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      I like the part about Ukraine. Also don’t care about Taiwan.
      But kinda wish democracy maintains in us.

      • VantaBrandon@lemmy.world
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        You won’t care about Taiwan until your iPhone costs $3000, then you might realize it was worth defending

        • Miaou@jlai.lu
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          Most American comment, talk about the end of democracy for millions of people and death of thousands, worry about the price of their iphone

          • yrmp@lemmy.world
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            They’ve been trying to move chip fabricators to the US for decades. The education system is shit here and we don’t have the talent. Also it’s really difficult to get the fabricators right and built for a reasonable cost. So yeah. Your non-iphone is gonna be pricey.

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                The CHIPS act? You mean one of the things the Biden admin bragged about?

                Good thing the incoming administration isn’t petty enough to nuke anything associated with the previous administration…

                • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                  You mean one of the things the Biden admin bragged about?

                  yeah.

                  Good thing the incoming administration isn’t petty enough to nuke anything associated with the previous administration…

                  that would be unfortunate.

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                Remember when the US government gave the telecoms billions to build gigabit internet infrastructure nationwide and they fuckin just didn’t do it?

                Pepperidge Farm remembers. Show me a working fab as a result of that act after Trump and Co manage to not fuck it up and then your comment might have some merit. Note: the coming brain drain will not be kind to the USA.

                • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                  Remember when the US government gave the telecoms billions to build gigabit internet infrastructure nationwide and they fuckin just didn’t do it?

                  me too, i also remember in 1930, when the great depression happened. I don’t see the relevance here though.

                  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act#Impact

                  shit in r&d is not like throwing money at big corpo and hoping they do what you want. If you don’t turn out results in r&d, it’s a dead field.

                  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act#Project_announcements

                  plenty of project announcements, idk if you think the government can’t like, build buildings or something, even though they can make the interstate highway system. But in defense of the CHIPS, building fabs is really fucking hard, costs billions of dollars, and takes many, many years.

  • TriflingToad@sh.itjust.works
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    I didn’t understand what this post meant yesterday. “I’m still afraid of what would happen?”
    Now it makes total sense. Fuck.

  • Maple Engineer@lemmy.world
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    If Trump loses there are the next two months of wondering how many people will die around the inauguration, then the next two years of wondering what the project 2027 people are going to do, then…

    The only way to stop this is to fix the US system. Fix the courts. Fix the elections. Fix gerrymandering. Fix the right wing control of the media. Fix the lies from the “news”.

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    Technically there are 2 months until Jan 6 in which anything can happen. I’m just not hopeful that anything will and don’t think it’s in my best interest to take a stand and make change happen.

    This is how they win. We let them.

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    And the thing is: Trump is not a clever man. In fact, he’s blantantly, obviously, ferociously stupid. He didn’t just appear out of nowhere. The rest of us have been watching this dog eat grass for the last 50 years.

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      I can’t beleive the number of New Yorkers (NYC residents and expats) that trust Trump. He has wreaked havoc across the city and metro area with terrible buildings, stiffed contractors, and constant financial mockery. His post-TV show perception has done an insane job of making even the most affected people forget what a sack of shit he his. They really think 1. He runs businesses well due to his continued financial growth and that 2. Running the country like his businesses will somehow benefit them, the national equivalent of those laid off from his private endeavors.

      So anyway, that’s how I know they just racist assholes.

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    People outside the US have always been terrified of what the US president might do. Imagine if China had military bases all over the world.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      The Kenyan Ambassador to the UN once addressed criticism of his country’s relationship with China thusly:

      “Every time the English visit Kenya, they bring a lecture. Every time the Chinese visit Kenyan, they build a hospital”

      • RangerJosie@lemmy.world
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        Which is exactly why China is going to win. They play the long game where we only care about the next quarterly report. We drop bombs, they build schools and hospitals and install water wells. We trap countries into IMF loan scams, they give interest free loans.

        We make mass graves. China makes friends.

        • bobalot@lemmy.world
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          While this is true, I suggest reading “All trade war are class wars” by Michael Pettis and Michael C. Klein.

          Basically, both China and America have been persuing trade policies (which result in persistent trade imbalances) which are unsustainable.

          China through subsiding it’s export sector through preferential interest rates (transfer income from savers to borrowers like industrial enterprises), managed currencies (transfers income from importers to exporters), weak labor laws (workers to companies), etc. which results in smaller household sector which cannot consume what it produces.

          These policies primarily benefit industrial exporters at the expense of everyone else.

          Note: This is not unique to China. Germany, Japan, Taiwan, America (up to the great depression), etc. have persued such policies.

          American subsidies consumption via policies which encourage a higher dollar (being attractive for foreign capital), higher debt, etc. which results in an household sector than consumes more than it produces.

          Note: This is not unique to America. The Anglo-Saxon economies all have this issue (noting that at times of high commodity prices Canada and Australia sometimes run trade surpluses).

          These policies primarily benefit importers and financial sector at the expense of everyone else, particularly the industrial sector.

          Although in America’s case, being the reserve currency provides great geopolitical advantages.

          These policies are unsustainable. One cannot import more than you export forever.

          America cannot to grow such vast sums of private and public debt. Eventually, there is a limit.

          Every other country that has persued such policies in the past have had difficult corrections. These can be quick and brutal (the great depression for the USA, where the economy shrunk 1/3 but the household sector only shrunk ~17% and thus the economy was rebalanced) or a slow adjustment like Japan (where household consumption grows marginally faster than overall GDP growth for 1-2 decades).

          This issue was seen and written about during the great depression (“beggar thy neighbour” policies). After WW2, John Keynes suggested a mechanism to rebalance trade so there were not persistent trade imbalances (the USA opposed this mechanism because it was running surpluses).

          Why does this matter in this instance? China is having great difficulty raising consumption and moving away from it’s export driven model. So it is looking for new partners to export to (given the West and even other devleoping economies like Brazil and India are unwilling to accept more of China’s subsided exports), like Kenya.

          It is running into the trouble Western counties had in the 1980s with developing countries being unable to service their loans for infrastructure, etc.

          China may not be popular soon because it (like the West during the 1980s) is unwilling to write off loans which cannot be paid.

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    Like. Did people forget how insane everyday was when he was President? Like you never knew what was gonna happen he was always wanting the attention.

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      I’m just going to keep riding this horse until it fucking dies but the very first thing he did was take everything Obama did during his presidency and throw it out the window, including the pandemic playbook.

      That playbook would have given us step by step instructions and reactions to deal with any type of suddenly erupting national pandemic like Ebola or coronavirus.

      And because of this, which was by all measures a racially motivated attack on Obama, more than 1 million Americans died in a badly managed pandemic.

      Trump’s racism killed a million Americans.

      It undoubtedly exacerbated the problem for the entire world and his total kill count is likely much more than that.

      How can you let somebody who genocided millions of people through racism sit in the oval office?

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        It’s a cult. They have people denying COVID ever existed. Heartily rejecting vaccines.

        There’s just too much to list but it only ever makes sense if you take whatever he’s doing as right and readjust everyone around him to work does it ever make sense.

        The fact that this election is even close is absolutely insane to me.

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        Se simply by popular vote because people are supporting that shit, knowingly or unknowingly

    • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
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      It’s crazy that the vote is apparently close. Really goes to show how many “average” americans have utterly lost any connection to actual reality and have guzzled enough of the kool-aid to believe the weird whacky world of wonders the religious fascists constantly conjure up.

      I wonder though, is this ultimately a failure not of the education and internal offices, decades ago? We let schools let people down, leading to them becoming undereducated terrible parents who let their kids down and made them vulnerable to be exploited by republicans and churches and crypto grifters. :(

      • scarabic@lemmy.world
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        Turns out it wasn’t close at all :(

        As recently as yesterday morning I had people in my social feeds posting pictures of themselves voting and “excited to witness our first female president!” assuming a Harris victory. What a shocker.

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          That’s not all, probably not even the main one. It’s a major cost of living crisis and impoverishment of average people while companies and the richest get richer. Neither the Ds nor the Rs want to do anything against it, they get their money from there.

          The people kinda understand this. But they’re not intelligent enough to distinguish “actually changing the system” with “just saying they’re gonna change the system”, like Trump does. Trump is always talking about uprooting the deep state and bringing an “average person”(white middle/lower class) perspective to politics, and people just gobble it up and believe it because he’s kinda good at talking with conviction.

          Of course the misogyny and racism is part of it and an extra, but it’s not the main reason at all. For some people it is, of course.

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          That’s a really black and white way to look at it. These are complex issues. Any attempt to find a simple explanation to them is by definition going to be oversimplifying it massively.

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      One thing I’ve had to absorb from all this is that the Trump I see is not the Trump they see. Yes their media outlets are lying to them, but my media outlets are also working overtime to turn every comment he makes into a sure sign of goose-stepping fascism right around the corner. His every off color remark, and he has a lot of them, are so amplified by the press I consume that he seems an obvious villain.

      I usually don’t “both sides” anything, but I do believe that while right wing media distort Trump, so does left wing media, and both contribute to this sense of “what can people possibly be thinking, to vote for him?” It’s because they haven’t been drinking from the same Trump hate firehose as me.