Slavery has existed since antiquity. That’s my fucking point. You can do this “the actual original evil was X!” shit forever, because humans have been monsters to each other since the time of Sumer. Slavery, rape, genocide, it’s all there because some rich asshole wanted more.
I’m not disputing the horrible acts of America or the colonists and explorers that predate it. I’m saying that your line of reasoning isn’t useful here and just distracts from the topic of discussion.
You’re not wrong. But that line of reasoning is literally without end. You’re essentially talking about the problems that are caused by formal, enforced hierarchies.
Democracy is fucking trash. Genuinely awful way to run things because it requires that the people be both educated and motivated about their civic duty and fails catastrophically if that stops being true.
But it’s still way better than anything else we’ve tried, or at least better than anything we’ve tried that can scale to needing to manage millions or billions of people.
America isn’t failing, it has already failed.
People so fucking unwilling to face reality, for any number of reasons. No one likes to admit that their actions or lack thereof might make them in some way culpable.
The cancer’s been in us since Reagan. The Bushes, Clinton, fucking Obama didn’t do shit about it because they were profiting from it. Just like they still don’t actually care, because they’re part of the owner class. They ain’t the ones at risk from any of the insanity in the world. Their wealth, status, and privilege protect them.
Trump wasn’t the cause of this. He’s just the point at which the cancer had metastasized to the point it couldn’t be ignored. Maybe we’d have survived if Biden hadn’t been such a drizzling, spineless shit of an administration. Radical surgery and treatment might have been able to bring us back from the brink. Weakened, damaged, diminished, but able to recover if we hold to a new way of living.
Trump 2 was us deciding as a nation to be the smoker with COPD and two heart attacks lighting up another smoke.
Biden refusing to make examples of the ringleaders of the Jan 6 coup attempt - the congresscritters, media personalities, and yes fucking Trump himself - sent a message that was heard loud and clear. Treason’s okay. If the leaders of the coup had been charged and tried for treason, with all that entails, then maybe it would have caused the cult to wither. Because it’s not just the dumb, poor cultists you need to go after, you gotta get the leaders too. Cults can’t survive without their leaders.
But maybe if Obama hadn’t been such a spineless fucking coward, we wouldn’t have been here. Whip your stupid party into shape, run roughshod over any wet pants senator or representative that tries to get in the way of delivering on those promises of aid programs for the people, tell Glitch to pound sand and just bypass Congress entirely and appoint Garland to the SCOTUS if Congress refuses to do its fucking job. Because the failures of neoliberalism set the stage for a fascist populist to take over. People wouldn’t buy into that messaging if they were happy.
But there’s no coming back from the kinds of damage Trump has done, both domestically and abroad. The damage that piece of shit Musk did with DOGE will be paying dividends for years, let alone what his little Hitler Youths were doing by stealing social security data and selling it off to Palantir.
America’s dead. People need to stop being stupid and accept it.
It encourages people who find these bugs to use them rather than report them.
I mean if it’s just a fender bender, who cares? Bumpers are meant to bend. Do you think it was hit hard enough to cause actual structural damage?
I was trying to point out the fallacious reasoning you’re operating under but you apparently come into discussion threads to talk about things that aren’t the subject of the thread so you do you, champ.