The same group of Americans all worried about the anti-Christ found the one guy who matches the profile and decided to make him President. Twice.
Accelerationists and bigots make up a large chunk of that bloc, and “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” make up the rest.
(The oligarchs that bought him don’t count in the same group as the plebeians.)
Religious accelerationists are beyond my understanding. Provoke God into action? And how exactly do you plan to avoid God’s judgement? I mean religious extremists often give impression like they think their God is stupid and you just need to find a loophole in the rules.
God is omnipotent. He doesn’t need our help to sound the trumpets and bring about Revelation.
It’s like they started at Genesis, got bored in Leviticus, and skipped to the end of Revelation without bothering to read about that pesky Jesus fella in the middle.
Bold of you to assume they even opened a bible to start with
It’s a mental illness, it doesn’t make sense, and its no use trying to make sense of it.
I mean, there’s literally an “actual” case in the Bible. I’m not even religious, so sorry if I can’t provide much detail, but in the story of Sodoma and Gomorrah there’s this bloke who asks God to save one soul. After God says okay, he’s like, if you could save one, couldn’t you save another? Then he proceeds to get God to save everyone in the same vein.
Yeah, God in his infinite wisdom and his mysterious ways (of being convinced by a 10 cent trick).
God’s just trying to avoid a buffer overflow. So only one person per request.
I hate to burst your bubble there, but actually it’s the exact opposite. Abraham hears what God is going to do to Sodom and Gomorrah (and that’s only because God chooses to tell him), and thinks to himself, “Oh shit, my cousin is there. I don’t want him to die.”
So Abraham starts out small. He says, “if I can find 50 good people, you won’t murderhobo everyone?” “Fine,” God replies. Now Abraham has something he can work with. He tries 45, God says cool. Abraham gets God to agree on 40, 30, 20, 10, each time God agrees. At 10, God up and leaves, and Abraham just chills there.
But of course, they can’t find even 10 in those cities. Oh well
Yeah, that’s the story. Thanks for the correction.
They were made in God’s image and they are morons therefore God is a moron. - Moron Thinking
Moron Logical Fallacy - A moron who has the unfounded belief that they are smarter than anyone else and anyone who claims otherwise is a moron.
There are a lot of us who’ve been paying close attention, though, and are doing all we can.
I was 17 when 9/11 happened and I’ve been watching and learning. Now is the time to move
You may be able to survive the shakeup. Maybe a loved one doesn’t end up in Lubbock or Alcatraz or CECOT. Maybe your neighborhood looks like it always did.
Maybe your state plays nice with the feds. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe shit gets hairy. The people pulling Trump’s strings want Christian Nationalism and they’ll get it, at least here in the South. We fought em before and we’ll fight em again. We may lose, though.
The time for action is here.
Meanwhile mid-40s walking through world ending pollution:
This place is so much better without all the cigarette smoke!
I also appreciate the restoration of our ozone layer. I remember there was a time (when above a certain latitude at least) my skin would fucking burn in less than 5 minutes under direct sun, it’s a lot better now but it seems weird we all just kind of collectively forgot about that time when we all nearly ended the world to such a degree that we could feel it outside, then we all reversed course and fixed it mostly.
I wonder if we would be more motivated to fix our current issues if they caused skin burns.
This is a great point on how regulation can work and how we, as a society, need to do better celebrating our accomplishments.
The weird thing is that it worked too well. Like Y2K, it was fixed so it became a nothing burger. Now everyone thinks it was an overreaction and don’t want to keep fixing things.
I remember people talking about not curing covid as fast because then people wouldn’t take the next pandemic as seriously.
The holes in the ozone layer were over the poles. You never experienced it.
Both can be true.
I’m tired of living through “interesting times”.
“Shouldn’t have wished to live in more interesting times” -Tav, Baldur’s Gate 3
That’s the point though - it wasn’t a good thing
Except it’s not interesting anymore. It’s been a cycle of the same bullshit over and over again.
Young me in 2012 “I want to live through interesting times” 🤔 rather than being bored. Little did I know.
As a millennial born in the Balkans: economic collapse, hyperinflation, dictatorship, economic collapse, war, revolution, y2k, global economic crisis, end of the mayan calendar, semi-dictatorship, (self-imposed) exile, brexit, covid, war v3, climate crisis getting real, revolution again? (idk I don’t live in my home country anymore), whatever the hell is happening now
Interesting times indeed
economic collapse, hyperinflation, dictatorship, economic collapse, war, revolution, y2k, global economic crisis, end of the mayan calendar, semi-dictatorship, (self-imposed) exile, brexit, covid, war v3, climate crisis getting real, revolution again?
We didn’t start the fire.
Its getting uncomfortably accurate
Something something meme seized by the state for redistribution
The world ended like sixty times already this decade.
The screaming twenties just have no brakes.
I was working in Tech when the Tech Crash in 99 happened, working in the only large Investment bank that went bankrupt in the 2008 Crash and living in Britain when Brexit won the Leave Referendum.
Seen it all happen from a “safe” distance. Damn you’re unlucky in a way.
That’s unlucky as heck. I always think about how I decided last minute to go to get an associates instead of going to the typical four year. I ended up graduating and getting a job right before the financial crash. A pretty significant amount of my friends were still in college and couldn’t get jobs for years if ever (at least related to their degree)
Well, after my first crash and being out of a job for 6 months because of it, I’ve always been very prepared for that kind of situation so when Lehman Brothers went down I was just fine because I had plenty of savings (and was even asked back after a month because the division I was working with was bought by a Japanese Brokerage and remained operating) and similary when Leave won, not only had I “just in case” financially protected my savings from the hit on the British Pound if Leave won, but I could and did chose to leave Britain before the actual Leave date because I expected that country to increasingly suffer from the effects of leaving the EU.
So in a way, after the first one it wasn’t too bad.
You know the saying “what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger”? This is literally what it means. You suffer hardships you can learn from, and you adapt. Lots of people seem to think it’s about physical suffering, but in reality it’s more about overcoming adversity in general.
Yeah, that’s also the conclusion I came to.
Yep, I was one of those people who couldn’t get a job. Super cool to go back to your grocery store job you had as a seasonal gig during college to work full time after you got a degree and no one was hiring. Then I actually tried to move up the corporate ladder there just to be blackballed by all the non degree having half brain dead people working in management there that were intimidated by me passing them up at the next level.They would promote way less qualified people over me with the excuse that they were worried I would leave if I got in a career job. The 1st 3 years after college was fucking dark. To get an office job, I had to work at this shady ass limo company for a while, then they went belly up, and I had to work in a warehouse. Finally like 5 years later, I got an actual job in my field. I always said that I wished I just worked full time after highschool. Could have bought a house in the correction, and even if I worked some shitty wage slave gig out of highschool, I’d be 100x more well off than I am today. Houses in my town were at least somewhat affordable then, (6-700k) now they are 1.8 mil +.
41 years old and I’ve lived through 4 once in a lifetime economic events, one impending societal collapse (Y2K), a global pandemic, and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. I vote Giant Meteor 2025, just get it over with already.
I thought it was the dotcom crash and great recession, in addition to the ones you mentioned war on “terror” and pandemic.
2000 dot com crash, 2008 housing bubble, 2020 COVID recession, 2025 tariff downturn and looming crash. (That’s not including the recessions from the 80’s and 90’s)
I count Afghanistan and Iraq separately, they were two very different wars and fought for different reasons. Afghanistan was because of 9/11, Iraq was oil and regime change.
There’s a few genocides in there too. Also I sleep in an abandoned house for like 6mo after the housing bubble burst. Whole neighborhoods where a light never turned on. All speculation market.
Honestly I could have written a novel worth of things, but I wanted to keep it short.
GenX here… first time?
I mean… per the meme, very much not our first time.
We got lulled into thinking everything was going to be fine. Then we got whacked with all the tech outsourcing, dot-bomb, 9/11…etc. but at least we had cheaper college first and that gave us a foot in the door without as much of the crushing college debt that millennials got.
If I had a dollar every time some looney came up to me saying it’s the apocalypse in X day… I dunno like 12 dollars?
Which isn’t a lot because inflation is getting out of hand.
But it’s weird that it happened twice.
Still better than what most of the people before us lived through. It’s just that our parents were especially lucky with the time period they lived in.
And squandered the shit out of it.
The idea that people before us lived worse lives is one often used to obscure the clinical nature of standards we attribute to quality of life such as lifespan, infant mortality, food security, and housing. This is because it allows corporations to trivialize the impact of doubling the workload by normalizing the 40 hour work week and housework and child care, what used to be two people’s worth of work, into one.
Are we living ‘better’ lives? On paper, sure. Are we living happier lives? That’s hard to say.
I dunno I prefer not being murdered for practicing (or even converting from) the wrong religion, dying of plague or famine, or being enslaved for economic convenience. But maybe that’s just me.
Yes but I’d much rather prefer wandering through a bountiful forest to a stream crammed with fish, build a lean-to from what’s around me, and sleep cozy and warm under pine boughs on a moss mattress.
Agriculture broke us.
And be always afraid of being killed by a tiger or other predators. Constantly worrying about not finding enough food. Having insects crawl all over and inside you while sleeping or a snake choking you to death.
Yeah I call bullshit. What’s stopping you from living your dream if it’s that great?
Private property laws and the collapse of the biosphere
Most of the people worked 24/7 on their farm and had to give most of their crops to their feudal lord from which they were completely dependend for land and protection against bandits. And later people worked 7 days a week 10-12 hours in factories.
And alone the medical development clearly is a great improvement in happiness. Just imagine that newborns surviving until infancy was the exception rather than the norm. And women died regularly during childbirth. Tooth problems were causing tremendous chronic pain and often lead to death. Only cancer was a lesser problem because people simply didn’t live long enough for it to be very prevalent.
I am not saying things could be better now. But we don’t have to romanticize the past. For me it is rather motivating to see how far we have come already and that we also can overcome the challenges of our time.
We don’t have to romanticize the present either.
People still work 10-12 hours a week except they still have to buy their own groceries, cook food, clean the house, take care of their kids, and every other logistic that goes into housework. The idea that people always worked more and had less leisurely time in the past is one often used to downplay the impact of unpaid female domestic labor in the past to justify to expecting it of every person in the present.
Moreover, preindustrial workers only worked 1440 hours annually compared to the modern standard of 2080 hours. And that does not even include unpaid domestic labor.
Yes, it’s great to have all the social advances and modern comforts that we do. But humans are not machines where by indefinitely increase our quality of life we can expect an indefinite increase in hours worked. Just because we have smartphones, AC, cars, and whatever modern luxury you want to include, it doesn’t mean that suddenly we can work 12 hours a day every day and mentally stay sane.
The rise of the middle class was definitely a historical anomaly. Most of history has been the top 1% oppressing most everyone else.
Being born in the early 80’s… we’ve seen a lot.
- “Oh no everything will crash at the end of 1999 !”
- “Wait nothing happened… but that because it will definitely happen in fact at the end of 2000 ! Because there’s no year 0, we start at year 1, you see”
It was difficult to deal with the disappointment after all the hype 😢
Millions of man-hours were put in to keep Y2K from happening. In their coverage of New Year’s Eve 1999, ABC cut to the Y2K control room where people were amazed nothing was happening.
The only recognition all of those folks got for all of their work to keep the lights on and the planes in the air was the movie Office Space, and people who were disappointed they didn’t fail.
For all the verbal fellatio Office Space receives I was expecting it to be a god-like ultimate peak of human culture type deal but in reality it was a mid movie humor and plot wise. Its not bad but its very catery to a specific audience I wasn’t part of. I can see it being one of the first and few relatable films for white collar cubicle boglins at the turn of the century which feels like pretty much the sole reason of why I have to see it occasionally referenced 25 years later.
You’re right that it’s one of the few relatable films about that, but what gives it the staying power is that it is still relevant for the sort of work they’re doing. All of the things they talk about are the same 25 years later, except now they don’t know I’m not wearing pants since it’s on Zoom. Silicon Valley is in the same vein, and created by the same guy. I expect him to make “Home Office Space” shortly.
It must have felt very weird to be working to prevent Y2K while everyone else was hoping for a good show, and in the end see people be disappointed instead of impressed because nothing happened 😅
Watching things crash is always more interesting than watching things work perfectly as usual…
Correct. When I was living in Reno there was a doomsday DATE people decided on. It was a huge thing. A bunch of people just bought in. People euthanizing their pets, just madness. Day came. Nothing happened. It’s amazing what people fall for. It’s very sad.
I remember people following Harold Camping’s doomsday predictions. They sold their houses, bought RVs, preached that The End is Nigh, etc. The day came and went like any other. He revised the date a couple of times, but of course world didn’t end. I just can’t believe people are that gullible.
Desperate people are the easiest to sucker. That’s why so many scams target people looking for jobs.
At least four end of days. Y2K, Maiyan 2012, Rasputin’s 2013, and that Christian Fundie quadruple moon eclipse one.
