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2016 US elections was a ridiculously sobering moment for realizing that we had not progressed nearly to the extent that I nievely thought.
This one rings home pretty hard. I’ve definitely viewed the people around me differently since then. And especially since covid as well.
Agreed, Covid ties or is a close runner up for me as well in terms of people showing their true colors.
2016 and the following four years were eyeing opening on just how far away from even okay a majority of the US is.
Yeah but it was the election that was the “event”. At the time i thought it must have been an aberration, it was during the following years I realised it was a symptom of the real problem.
Up until that point, I was a naive centrist that thought sane liberalism would win out. That election single-handedly destroyed that view and slammed me hard to the left.
You’re probably in the real center now, my understanding is American center is to the right, and their left is actually closer to center
I should probably clarify that it slammed me firmly in the Bernie camp, but I’ve drifted even further to the left (broadly libertarian/anarcho-socialism) since then
I’m slightly left of centre, but I am now voting quite far left to try counter the right swing we are most likely going to have with this next election.
The US Democrats are center right in many aspects yeah.
I’m not even from the US and honestly it was a sobering moment for me as well. I realised how people like Hitler get into power. Before 2016 I knew it was possible like cognitively but Trump being elected made it feel real in a way it never had before.
Same for my country (Hungary). For the first time almost all off the opposition parties agreed to merge into eachother, then the chosen opposition president almost became the old corrupt guy’s wife (old people voted for them), then the Ukraine már happened where everyone knew Orbán made a ton of contracts with Putin, LITERALLY disses Zelensky but never mentions Putin’s name and Orbán won with a record 2/3 again.
Hungarian people literally can’t remember about 1956, it seems.
I have thought a lot about the “How do background characters tell if they’re in a story?” thing a lot since.
The day the alternate timeline stopped being a meme. The day “we’re in too damned interesting times to this not be the end of humanity” became a reality.
If the world burns, whatever. We have had it coming.
COVID-19. People simply refused to do the absolute minimum to stop the spread of the virus. At least in my community, everyone was still socializing with friends and family (without a mask, of course), going out to eat, taking part in recreational activities with other people. Something as simple as “stay away from other people until we get this under control” was too hard for the American public. It certain changed my view of the people around me.
Same, it really bumped up my pessimism regarding people
Haha I remember a talking head saying at the start that this could bring humanity closer together and I sat laughing in my couch for a minute
For me it definitely highlighted how many people in American society think they are the main character and fuck everyone else.
Welcome to *The ME Show! *
Starring: Me!
Co-starring: (fuck) you!
Actions > Talk. They were telling you their true views. People rarely say the quiet part(their views) out loud so it is valuable to be able to translate their actions into their true views.
When you know how others truly feel, it allows you to decide who is worth listening to. Not to say you shouldn’t listen to people with different views, but instead decide whether they are telling you their beliefs or telling you what they think you want to hear(BSing you) and use that rate how trustworthy they are on the topic.
GWB publicly condoning torture.
I grew up during the tail end of the cold war. Torture was something the Soviets did. We were better than that.
And sure, I knew the CIA did stuff like that under the table, but it was never OK.
It’s what got me interested in politics, and why I feel that we shouldn’t try to hide the bad things we’ve done when we teach history. Knowing what we’re capable of is necessary to keep ourselves from repeating the mistakes of the past.
we ‘shouldn’t’ try to hide the bad things we’ve done when we teach history
The keyword here is shouldn’t. Most people don’t do lots of things they should.
Not out of malice but simply laziness, it is a lot easier to just default to the norm and go on. Try comparing what should get done in politics(campaign promises) to what actually gets done in washington. In short what should happen and what actually happens are two different things in a lot of areas.
I mean this is a pretty big one for most people, but march 2020 COVID lockdowns. My family and I were bunkered down like the family in the movie Signs, just trying to figure out what was going on and keeping each other safe.
It was a bizarre time. I remember going to the supermarket - it felt like an apocalypse with boxes of stock being torn open by shoppers instead of unpacked by staff. Stuff all over the floors. People pushing / pulling multiple trolleys.
It made me realise how close we are to chaos.
Covid made me realise just how much we live in different versions of reality and how harmful that is during a crisis that requires everyone to be on the same page. At the beginning of the lockdowns I joked about how some people would rather die than comply with basic public health practices…and then it actually fucking happened in real life. Not only that but they took down other people with them. Not such a funny joke anymore.
I was an essential worker who had zero time off and the empty streets at all hours were nuts. I am back at a normal job now where people did lock down, and everyone had a mass experience that I did not.
The 2008 bank bailouts. Watching our government spend nearly a trillion dollars to bail out some unelected bankers who made some bad decisions and were “too big to fail (true)”. Watching them spend that money on bonuses for their execs, while none of them went to jail. Watching the social response to that (occupy) and then watching a coordinated federal crackdown of those protests across the country. And then watching bailouts happen again and again since then. Meanwhile in Iceland, they overthrew their government over it. The global financial system has deeply rooted flaws, and bailouts are an inevitability in it. We will inevitably, every so often, make another huge wealth transfer like that because so longs as lending exists, particularly private lending, and all banks are interconnected so that if one fails they all fail, there will always be bank runs and bailouts. Even the most well-intentioned bank cannot hedge against all risks and market shocks. And the government will just turn on the money printer every time it happens while you watch your hard-earned money lose its value.
COVID. Really never understood before how little of a shit the U.S. government has for its people. But they straight up let us fucking die while telling teenagers they needed to get back to work for minimum wage so they could get their shit Mcdildos and mochafuckaccinos and add gold spinning rims to their yachts. I can’t wait until these old fucks start dying off, I don’t care what political leanings they claim to have, we need a fuckin overhaul.
Even more so I was shocked at how little care a lot of people have for others in general.
Oh don’t worry, their kids will take their place.
I might not have been a raging, bleeding-heart, anti-capitalist liberal had Trump not gotten elected in November 2016. Until then I might have considered myself apolitical with no strong political ambitions. Seeing the post-election riots/protests opened up the world to me, his election wasn’t a stupid joke but an injustice on all the people Trump essentially campaigned on fucking over.
Another crazy moment was the second time I got high on weed. I was super panicked at first, but when I went to bed, all of a sudden abstract art made sense to me as I had visions and felt a connection to their work even if I didn’t know their name. That high had residual effects the next day and I had felt changed somehow.
Sorry but “anti capitalist liberal”? But liberalism is capitalism
it’s amazing how many people think “liberal” = “leftist”
We can blame America for that
yea I had the same reaction. In the US I think it bears a different meaning, they equate liberal with the left. Even though it hardly makes sense, it’s the usage
Yes, as others have pointed out I’m discussing from the North American political perspective (Ontario, Canada).
Got it 👍
Ohh, the lockdowns showed me how all of you motherfuckers really are. It was VERY enlightening.
The number of service workers who got physically assaulted or even killed for telling people to wear masks was pretty telling.
It really is interesting isn’t it?
A lot of people are shitheels
A lot of people are ornery
A lot of people don’t think for themselves
A lot of people are susceptible to conspiracy
A lot of people are followers by nature
I could go on and on.
The lockdown showed me how all of company owners really are. It wasn’t very enlightening, but everything was confirmed.
Except me
- 9/11
- Bush v Gore
- GWB re-election (despite war, recession, etc.)
- Trump election
- COVID
All chipped away at notions of stability, fairness, and sanity.
Still have hope, but tend not to believe the hype so much.
Being treated for cancer in hospital (in remission now, thank you) during COVID lockdowns gave me lots of time to reflect on my life. Realised that probably I was the asshole all these years; and also came to the realisation that I’m autistic and socially awkward. Reading David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs helped me to understand all the corporate games and garbage that I’d been part of for most of my career.
When I think about my life, it’s divided into pre-cancer diagnosis, selfish workaholic and part of corporate life; and post-cancer remission, unemployed, living off my savings, kinder to the people and the world, but unable to find a job that resonates with the new me.
Snowden file leaks lead me down the path to privacy and to reading books like Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky. Lead me down the path to degoogling and linux and now decentralized services like Lemmy.
It seems like every week some article comes out with big tech abusing their rights. This week was Philips hue and last week or so it was a mom getting 2 years in jail because Facebook gave up information about her giving abortion pills to her daughter.
I am using all these foss services myself and making my friends and family use them and be aware of these events. It’s a slow car crash and if people are apathetic and say “I have nothing to hide” and eventually “I have nothing to say”, soon we’ll be stripped of more rights until it’s too late.
“The cells of death row are filled with guys who had nothing to hide.” - Kenneth Eade
Snowden trully opened the world’s eyes bruv…
This sealed the deal for me and went FOSS
Microsoft using “off-shore” dns, like a druglord or something got me pretty annoyed, swallowed the linux pill whole! Bash scripting and all
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
In retrospect, was probably the Battle of Seattle in 1999. Not that I wasn’t aware of the issues before, but that really ripped off the mask to show me that the U.S. is fundamentally rotten at its core: The police are not the good guys, they don’t serve and protect, they are there to visit violence on the enemies of capital. And if innocent people in their homes or going to work get caught up and harmed, fuck 'em, they’re not wealthy enough to matter. The media will flat-out lie to maintain the good-cops-vs.-evil-protesters narrative. Our leaders will eagerly sell out American citizens to the interests of global capital, with only lip service to democratic traditions. And Americans are too disengaged to really question any of it.
For me, it provided the keys to understanding the events since, from Bush v. Gore to today. At least now the rot has become so obvious that the younger generations are forced to notice.
Never heard of the Battle of Seattle. What was it about?
It was the result of anti-World Trade Organization protests organized at the group’s gathering in Seattle in 1999. Basically, the police see protesters axiomatically as bad, so they showed up in riot gear and started a riot. The media reported it as violent protestors, despite some of the people who just lived nearby and were trying to get to and from work getting caught up, kettled, teargassed, and beaten alongside protesters. I wasn’t there, but the Internet had become a thing, and IndyMedia.org had lots of first-person coverage. It was the same pattern we’ve seen ever since cell phones with cameras have become ubiquitous: The video shows that the cops get violent and then lie about it.
For me it was when I was watching Soul with some friends and eventually came to some emotional realizations. I realized that I only had a superficial understanding of how to communicate. I could discuss ideas in the abstract, but I had trouble with expressing myself emotionally and personally because I was always conditioned to repress how I feel. I guess like 22 in the movie I only saw myself as a casual observer. It took a couple rewatches for me to process the difficult emotions I was feeling into something I could explain but when I did it really helped my overall mental outlook on life.
Trump
winninggetting carried by the EVs made me a bitter, jaded, hopeless husk. I lost faith in the republic, in america, in people, in common sense…I don’t know if I ever truly recovered.
Come to think of it, i’ve lived through at least two instances where the direct opposition of the public’s will have lead to death, suffering, and the collapse of represenative democracy: Bush v Gore, and the Trump Presidency. Odd how that’s a common trend.
What’s EVs?
I think he meant Electoral College. Unless 2016 saw the release of the ‘Tesla-Force 1’
Electoral votes
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