A brave drone operator’s struggle with guilt and despair as she/they drop the bomb onto an all girls school mislabeled as an airforce base.

Swelling music as she stares at a picture of her own daughter while the burning bodies of the children play on a monitor just slightly out of focus behind her.

Even better.

The only thing cooler than Americans embracing green energy is Americans embracing illegalism.

Greeted as Liberators

And decoupling only started to really happen last year.

We began decoupling when we took a militant policy against immigration. You can take that back to Clinton in the 90s or all the way back to Eisenhower in the 50s. But we’ve been adopting strains of isolationism straight back to the final days of WW2.

You could describe the Cold War as an enormous globalized decoupling event, which we tentatively recoiled from a few times before collapsing back into it.

Authoritarianism is spreading like wildfire

The entrenched neoliberal post-Cold War consensus is cracking up.

But anyone who told you that the Reagan Era global order wasn’t authoritarian sold you a box of rocks.

Upper middle class Americans are getting a taste of life outside the bubble. This is what “democracy” has felt like in The Philippines and Brazil and Ferguson, MO for some time.

They are using their essentially bottomless pit of money, influence, and resources to shape a world where they are permanently definitively on top.

When were they not? Do you think the folks fucking kids on Epstein’s Island twenty years ago weren’t doing the exact same thing?

When you snip away the social safety net, drop the illusions of “friendly neighborhood police officer”, and abandon any effort at mitigating the ecological consequences of capitalist expansion, this is what you get.

Is this one of the Tankies I’ve been hearing so much about?

Did not realize they were so cute.

assigns them a score if a citizen walks on the sidewalk correctly

Funny story about Jaywalking

The automobile lobby in the US took up the cause of labeling and scorning jaywalkers in the 1910s and early 1920s. In 1912, for instance, Popular Mechanics magazine reported that the term was current in Kansas City: “The city pedestrian who cares not for traffic regulations at street corners, but strays all over the street, crossing in the middle of the block, or attempting to save time by choosing a diagonal route across a street intersection instead of adhering to the regular crossing, is designated as a ‘jay walker,’ in Kansas City.”

In 1915, when New York City’s police commissioner Arthur Woods sought to apply the word “jaywalker” to anyone who crossed the street at mid-block, the New York Times protested, calling it “highly opprobrious” and “a truly shocking name.”

Originally in the US, the legal rule was that “all persons have an equal right in the highway, and that in exercising the right each shall take due care not to injure other users of the way”. In time, however, streets became the province of vehicular traffic, both practically and legally.

Anyway, enjoy your hyper-criminalized car culture hellscape while making spooky fingers about Evil Foreign Country.

Using a computer isn’t that hard. Sending an email isn’t that hard.

You were not born when the decoupling began. You will not live to see it end.

I suppose the plan was to decouple the world from the dollar all the time.

I mean, depends on who you ask. But there’s definitely been a deliberately effort from within the Silicon Valley wing of the economy to force people into using Cryptocurrency as a legally-compulsory dollar alternative.

laughing from my desk job at a Fortune 500 O&G company

My normie mom sent my techie dad an email in 1982 announcing that she was pregnant.

Normies have always been on the internet.

The pattern I see, over and over again, is that “Things really started going downhill right after I graduated high school / college and stopped having enough free time to fuck around, but not enough interest in global news / national politics to be inundated with The Existential Horror.”

And if you grab names out of a bag, you’ll find people from every generation insisting the Olds Ruined Everything For Me and The Youngs Can’t Do Anything Right. Somehow, they’re always living in the sweet spot of history.

i mean the 90s were funner but frustrating hardware and connectivity meant only us patient nerds would be online.

The 90s had ample supply of weird gross freaks who were just smart enough to get dial-up working because they needed it to trade child porn and post racist screeds on sports talk forums.

The internet was once a fun place

glances at the 1990s Internet

Jesus fuck, that’s a lot of links to Stormfront getting passed around. Also, a whole lot of pedophilia. I’m sure that’ll clear itself up, though.

Maybe if I flip forward to the '00s…

Jesus fuck that’s a lot of Islamophobia and Homophobia. Also, it appears we are in somewhere between two and five wars, and everyone is homeless all of a sudden. Still tons of pedophilia, too… Hmmm.

Maybe '10s?..

Wow, that’s a lot of misogynism and outright racism! Also, I hope all this anti-vax click-bait I see popping up everywhere isn’t a portent of something bad happening in the future. Oh! Bad news, everybody. We’ve still got pedophilia.

Damn, here we are in the '20s.

It appears they haven’t fixed the racism or the sexism or the warmongering or the pseudo-science or the child pornography. But I’ll admit, I’m seeing significantly fewer “cute cat videos” now.

your trashy two party system that americans never tried to change

They’ve tried to change it repeatedly. Everyone from Ralph Nader to Ross Perot to George Wallace to Eugene Debbs have lead caucuses to try to change it.

Instead of crying about the past

Those who ignore the past…

But then you’ve got folks who really do believe the problem with the Democratic Party is that they try to win women’s votes at all. All to often, I see the complaint aimed at the two-party system that it’s one party too many.

It is being held up as an excuse within the liberal party to keep women down. The message the party leadership wants to send is that they ran a flawless campaign and the voters failed them.

Always and forever, folks like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries want you to believe they need to embrace fascism in order to win elections. Had Harris or Clinton won, we’d have been told they were only victorious because they campaigned to the right of their progressive base. Now that they’ve lost, they get to argue the need to purge feminists from the party if they want another chance at the majority.

Harris and Clinton lost because not enough Americans voted for them

The only correct part of this answer

But it didn’t help.

The biggest thing holding Harris back was not being on the Epstein plane when she had the chance.

All the Silicon Valley freaks turned on the Dem Party to support Trump. If Biden had stayed in, he’d have lost just as hard. If Tim Walz had been at the top of the ticket, he’d have lost, too.

The thing is, they may not even be conscious of it.

Again, you’re flat out ignoring all the women who won in 2024 (and beyond) by these same voters.

Even in a race where it was Trump/Harris and R-Man/D-Woman, both Trump and the liberal woman would win.

You can’t explain that with subconscious bias.

Gaza: What starts here, changes the world

I read it as Emmo