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"You're being alarmist/hyperbolic/paranoid. That could never happen here." - Everyone, to people like me, since the post-9/11 PATRIOT Act days. Now that the re
by stego-tech 2y ago
"You're being alarmist/hyperbolic/paranoid. That could never happen here." - Everyone, to people like me, since the post-9/11 PATRIOT Act days.
Now that the reality is staring them in the face, suddenly folks want to know "what can we do?" Well, I'll tell you exactly what you can do:
Nothing.
I want to make this abundantly clear: you cannot undo this damage. You cannot roll back this clock. You cannot go backwards to a time before our elected leaders annihilated the global trust in American Empire, Business, and Institutions in favor of authoritarian ideals. We have had over thirty years of clear warnings about the outcomes of our policies, and nobody gave a fuck.
The Old World is Dead (https://green.spacedino.net/the-old-world-is-dead/ https://green.spacedino.net/the-old-world-is-dead/), and you cannot get it back. What we can do now, is move as quickly as possible to distance ourselves from the failed American state, its authoritarian regimes, and the sycophant companies and entities that enabled it. That means ditching American media, American goods, American services, and American capital. It's going to mean ostracizing an entire country and its people, and accepting the suffering that will bring until a new country (or countries) arise from its ashes, willing to cooperate on the global stage once more.
The only bright side is that countries who open their doors to persecuted minorities from America (LGBTQ+, non-white, neurodivergent, the disabled) are likely to reap immense brain gains as a result. America has failed, but the new world order has yet to be established - so if you want your country to have a seat at the table, now is the time to hoard (ex-)American talent and integrate them into your own society.
- alabastervlog 2y agoThe other day on here, I likened this to taking a bunch of steps toward a cliff, then jumping off, and then asking "what can I do to stop this?!" We're in the "free-fall" portion now. All we can do is wait and see how far we fall before striking the ground. The time to stop it was during any of the steps we took toward the cliff's edge.
- kelseyfrog 2y agoI was specifically told that I was being dramatic and that it was all rhetoric and that it could never happen here. What gives?
- gryfft 2y agoWhat gives is that many of those saying those things to you were arguing in bad faith to waste your time and attention. Now their team has won and they get to kill all the bad guys in peace.
- dfxm12 2y agoit was all rhetoric and that it could never happen here I hear this a lot. It's fascinating when you consider how many people claimed to have voted for Trump because he is a liar.
- matwood 2y ago> It's fascinating when you consider how many people claimed to have voted for Trump because he is a liar. It's wild. I have no idea if he meant to do this, but by being a known liar it let supporters pick and chose what to agree with.
- stego-tech 2y agoBecause - speaking from a lot of experience, both personally and professionally - human beings hate bad news. They reject the wet blankets, the naysayers, the doomers, the party poopers...you get the idea. I mean, the fact we have so many metaphors for the act of being the person giving a group bad news, should tell you how poorly humans look on it. Humans want to believe the sun will rise tomorrow, the birds will sing, the lines will go up, and everything will be fine (or better) than it was yesterday. This attitude is especially prominent in tech. There's a very real desire to immediately replace whatever was old with whatever is new, regardless of utility or viability. We're participants in (or supporters of) a system of startup-expansion-acquisition-repeat that only focuses on building something new that has a perceived valuation, not something that's actually beneficial. There's no attitude to look back or be objective, because tomorrow will just be better anyway. So when your business leaders, capital investors, regulators, engineers, and developers are all "high on their own supply" of new > old and complex > simple, that attitude seeps out into other aspects of society as a whole. Nobody likes naysayers who are right. It's just our curse, I guess.
- mvdtnz 2y ago[flagged]
- nsingh2 2y agoIt seems to me statements like these are what OP was referring when saying "You're being alarmist/hyperbolic/paranoid"
- stego-tech 2y agoI'm beyond done with people trying to say my lived experiences and the lived experiences of others are somehow invalid, hyperbolic, or over-exaggerated. And I'm done being nice to people trying to gaslight the lived experiences of others. Go away.
- mvdtnz 2y ago[flagged]
- eesmith 2y agoI think this means you learned about 'lived experience' on Twitter in 2018. The term has been increasingly used since around 1960 - https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=lived+experience&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=lived+experien... Here's one example from 2001, https://archive.org/details/qualitativeinqui0000pars/page/98/mode/2up?q=%22experience%22 https://archive.org/details/qualitativeinqui0000pars/page/98... : > How can an investigator attend with fidelity to the description of an experience- as-lived, without reducing it to experience-as-observed? Here's another example, not specifically of "lived experience" but of breaking things down into different types of experience; three in this case: https://archive.org/details/cpsnow0179shus/page/56/mode/2up?q=experience https://archive.org/details/cpsnow0179shus/page/56/mode/2up?... > Snow has divided the sequence into two main parts: three novels of Lewis Eliot’s direct experience, Time of Hope, Homecomings, and Last Things ; the rest, eight in all, are novels of his observed experience with “flickers of inner experience.”
- tim333 2y agoOr wait for things to change at the next election and maybe a bit at the midterms.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoYou still think we're making it to 2027 at this point without a huge clash happening? It's still the first 100 days.
- anonfordays 2y agoYes, stop being so histrionic. Democrats will win midterms, Congress will be in a dead lock, and hopefully the DNC will learn from its failures and put a real candidate in. I remember this same "sky is falling" rhetoric when Bush got reelected. Time moves on and the world will heal.
- frm88 2y agoInteresting read in the link. Thank you. I wish the site wouldn't throw an error when one tries to subscribe.
- stego-tech 2y agoThanks for letting me know! I took down e-mail signups since it looks like it'll require Mailgun after all, which I'd rather not get into the weeds over when I'm really just putting thoughts down at the moment. If you have an RSS Aggregator, the main URL has an RSS feed (green.spacedino.net/rss). Less e-mail clog, easier updates, though Ghost's RSS feed isn't exactly terminal-friendly if that's your jam (mainly due to mixed media). I might get around to fixing e-mail in the future. Appreciate the heads-up though, thank you!