'Murika

[Unsigned]

There is nothing I "WANT" to do that is prohibited by law. We need laws because too many people have snot bubbles for brains

Sure, I certainly agree we need laws.
Like "don't steal", "don't murder", etc..
And we've had those since the beginning.
Not the govt forcing social engineering initiatives on a healthy society, like we got in the mid 60s.
Those are the laws I meant.
Of course, it started much earlier, like with the Federal Income Tax, but they mutated and greatly expanded in the 60s.

All IMO of course. I am sure many people disagree with the above and they are most certainly entitled to do so.

 

[okidoke]

Wonder why the world map tells a different story

The regular world map as people know it is not a correct representation. If you look up “different types of maps of the world” you’ll see more realistic size comparisons of countries.

 

[TheRealCallie]

@CenotaphGirl

Here you go.
https://www.discovery.com/science/AuthaGraph-World-Accurate-Map

 

[TheRealCallie]

 

[user 135671]

Springsteen

 

[Azariah]

Murica.....



..... I marry ya?

 

[SquareBin]

I'd be a little more generous and say we've been on a downswing since sometime in the '70s (about 30 years after WW2).

(On a side note, I don't think it's a coincidence to say punk really started becoming a thing in the late '70s - it wasn't that the kids were dumb, or wanted to be "bad", it was that they knew something was wrong, and it was - that's when the attack on the middle class began, in full swing.)

Or I'd be even more generous and say that the '90s were good, and we've been on a downswing since 9/11.
DEFINITELY on a downswing since Hurricane Katrina in '05, which caused a gas price spike for a few years after until the Recession in '08, and things have been pretty lousy and getting lousier ever since.

That's why I'm not enamored with Big Tech - because tech has been increasing/improving all this time, but most people's quality of life continues to go to hell. So it doesn't seem like more tech will solve anything.

I looked at history books in school and I always thought to myself, "the past looks so bad, I'm glad I live in the modern world where things are better than they used to be". I thought the future meant things would continue to get better, like they always seemed to over the course of history. The fact that things seem to be getting worse instead, despite advances in tech, makes me so angry.

In my opinion, the creation of the middle class, and having it be relatively easy to get into, is what made us a modern, advanced country. That's what made the economy strong. Since the middle class has been under attack, we've been regressing to how it is in third world countries, where there is no middle class, or it's very small and difficult to get into. Look at Russia - an unfathomably wealthy elite, a small middle class, and lots of people stuck at the bottom, with lots of crime, alcoholism, drug addiction, and despair. There's a lot of heroin use in Russia, and it's not because the people are dumb, it's because they feel hopeless enough that being strung out on heroin is more attractive than reality. The same thing is happening here, though not yet to the same extent. I feel like that's what we're headed for if we don't start adopting more middle-class friendly policies. This is why I think Darwinian competition is bad. Most people won't thrive in an environment that's more Darwinian than less. Most people aren't cut out for it. And if most people are doing badly, you're not going to have a healthy economy, because to do that, people need to have money to spend. But they can't have money if they can't compete. And they can't compete if they don't have competitive advantages to start with, which I feel most people don't.

I'm a strong believer in, making the middle class accessible, even for people who weren't academic achievers. I'd rather have a healthy economy because more people have more money to spend on things, than worry and nitpick and play weird goody-goody holier-than-thou games about who does or doesn't "deserve".

But generally yeah, I agree that we're on a downswing, and have been for a while.

thanks for your review, it helps shine a light on america, and there's a good parallel here in europe, where it also feels as if the middle class is shrinking...

 

[user 139760]

...YO JOE!

 

[TheSkaFish]

thanks for your review, it helps shine a light on america, and there's a good parallel here in europe, where it also feels as if the middle class is shrinking...

Sure thing. And yeah I believe you. I wish people would rebel against this, I mean, it's not like having a strong middle class was something that happened in ancient times, and we're not even sure if it happened at all - it was within living memory. I even remember it from when I was a kid, things felt very different than this, and were a lot better. And there was a sense that things were going to keep getting better too - not this sense of doom and gloom and everything continuing to get worse. There was a sense that we really turned a page, and the "bad old days" were history.

The problem today is that so many people still identify with the billionaires, even if they aren't wealthy themselves, because they want to identify with the people or the side that's "stronger", and a lot of them have the authoritarian/dominant/a-hole personality. These kinds of people will just go along with what the billionaires want, even if it makes their own life worse, out of this backwards need to hate and punish. A lot of people will side with the billionaires, because these people are one-issue voters, or they'll just vote out of spite to punish the people that they don't like. And the billionaires have basically been churning out propaganda since the '70s, and have conditioned a lot of people to mindlessly repeat the propaganda instead of thinking critically, and to write off anything that goes against the billionaires' agenda as "communism", even if it really isn't.

Another problem is, there are still a lot of people that are comfortable enough with the way things are. They might not be actively for it, but they don't feel that impacted yet by how things have regressed. They're still doing fine themselves, so they don't see any of what's been going on as a problem.

I think we need to remember that things like middle-class lifestyles, reasonable working hours, weekends, holidays, sick leave/vacation, etc., all this stuff we take for granted as "normal life" didn't just always naturally exist, or magically appear on its own, or exist as a result of "productivity" or "innovation", or was given to us out of the goodness of the billionaires' hearts - people had to actually fight for these things, sometimes physically. If the upper class could have gotten away with it, they would have given us nothing - no 8-hour days, no weekends, no work-life balance at all. Most people would be little more than slaves, at best. "Normal life" shouldn't be taken as a given and should always be guarded, because if it's not, it won't be long before they try to take it all back. If there was anything wrong with "the good times", it was that they made people too complacent, lulled them into a false sense of security and made them think class conflict was over. It wasn't, by a long shot.

The problem is, big business became heavily involved in politics more than before, and as a result the government went from the people's lawyer, to big business' enabler/enforcer. I feel like just like government itself, capitalism needs checks and balances to function. In government, checks and balances keep one branch of government from having too much power. In society, the government was supposed to check big business' power, and keep it doing the right thing, working for the interests of civilization. Unions also help check big business' power, but they have been on the decline for decades now. We need business to produce goods and services and employ people, but we need government to protect people from the profit motive, because the profit motive doesn't put people first. And if all this isn't to benefit the people, then what is it all for? Today big business exists for itself, its shareholders and owners, and any benefit to society is an afterthought. The rest of us can go to hell for all it cares, and the government isn't going to make it care anymore like it used to. I don't believe any of that nonsense about how the billionaires are the "leaders" of society and care the most about it - they care about themselves, maybe their immediate families, and that's it. If they really cared so much about society, they would stop supporting regressive policies and impeding its progress.

But yeah, it's really disappointing to me to see how we've gone backwards like this. Things might get better in the future, as more young people realize that something is wrong with "the way things are". But the problem is, I still feel like that's a long time out, if it ever happens at all.

 

[Cherubino]

number one ... rest of the world #2