Is the US a dystopia?

Climate catastrophe is going to be pretty universal IIRC.

which is v little to do with the point about 1492 is it

you can get with dystopia, or you can get with datopia

just throwing this out there but maybe dystopia fans are blind to dystopias

I dunno I think most fans of the crust punk band Dystopia probably would agree that the USA is a dystopia fwiw

let me see, is the US a dystopia.

the republican party is trying to actively KILL a lot of people. let me just see how that plays in the polls

The approval rating among those who voted for [Biden] has dropped from 80% to 69% in the April survey. There have been notable declines among Americans 18-34 and suburban residents, both of whom, in dramatic swings, now register net negative views on the president.

As bad as Biden’s number may be, the polling data for Democrats in Congress is far worse.

Republicans now sport a historic 10-point advantage when Americans are asked which party they prefer to control Congress, holding a 44%-34% margin over Democrats. That’s up from a 2-point Republican advantage in the October survey.

In the past 20 years, CNBC and NBC surveys have never registered a double-digit Republican advantage on congressional preference, with the largest lead ever being 4 pints for the GOP.

“If the election were tomorrow, it would be an absolute unmitigated disaster for the Democrats,″ said Jay Campbell, partner at Hart Research Associates and the Democratic pollster for the survey.

yes it's a full blown dystopia

nah but rich people have never had it better tho

A 4 pint lead is difficult to overcome tbh. sorry

Can the apocalypse be local?

Americans rly struggle with not being the world and i think its quite telling tbh

― fix up luke shawp (darraghmac), Friday, December 10, 2021 8:10 PM (one hour ago)

I was addressing "the apocalypse" that it could be argued helps to confirm the US as a dystopia, the subject of this important poll. So I guess I do think it can be local, idk, why not? Anyway Columbus never even entered future-US territory, it's more of a symbolic hinge year for everything being terrible from then on

I'd figure most people using the term think in the sense of dystopian science fiction and I kinda think 2021 has quite a few elements that seem like out of such.

There's no utopia that's not someone's dystopia, and vice versa.

The notion of local dystopias is an interesting one. Could be that there was an egalitarian paradise unfolding just a continent or two over from Mad Max.

If the US ticks all the boxes- and there's a case- then clearly plenty of very nice places to live in exist besides so id say thats a clear yes

Have we ever not been? Slave state — apartheid state — Vietnam/Watergate — Corporate state — Fury Road (2016-present)

the people in the mayfield candle factory that collapsed worked 12-hour shifts that paid $8 an hour. 110 ppl were inside. 40 ppl are still unaccounted for. they haven’t recovered a survivor since 3 am. pic.twitter.com/CsIIfLw3Pc

— Tracy Moore (@iusedtobepoor) December 11, 2021

it’s legal in kentucky to fire someone for refusing to work mandatory overtime

— Tracy Moore (@iusedtobepoor) December 11, 2021

The notion of local dystopias is an interesting one. Could be that there was an egalitarian paradise unfolding just a continent or two over from Mad Max.

Zardoz is another one. Although The Eternals are mainly a bunch of insufferable bores and their egalitarian paradise is pretty lame, but you wouldn't complain about it if you were being held captive by Charlotte Rampling.

Slave state — apartheid state — Vietnam/Watergate — Corporate state — Fury Road (2016-present)

We didn't start the fire, etc.

Let's see what all we have...you got this one.

US combined laissez-faire capitalism on it's drug industry and combined with heroin blow-back from the 'war on terror' created the opioid epidemic for fun and profit killing over a million Americans since 1999.

Getting back to the topic at hand, Le Guin wrote a book about a moon. Also was there some Cold War global political framework in her gender-bender book? I don't recall.

Climate catastrophe is going to be pretty universal IIRC.

― papal hotwife (milo z), Saturday, December 11, 2021 1:14 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

which is v little to do with the point about 1492 is it

― fix up luke shawp (darraghmac), Saturday, December 11, 2021 1:17 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

It is though (unless I'm misreading). The USA is the biggest historical contributor to the climate crisis. An argument could be made that if 1492 never happened, there would be no global crisis. Same for much of global environmental destruction -- Amazon forest all gone? Thank Ronald McDonald.

Local teachers in South Dakota “Dash for Cash” to help their classrooms by fighting over $5,000 in $1 bills while the crowd hoots and hollers. pic.twitter.com/azwGJKhaKU

— Eoin Higgins (@EoinHiggins_) December 12, 2021

they're going to remove that rug at some point

and then charge them for it!

An argument could be made that if 1492 never happened, there would be no global crisis.

Are we talking a world where Europe never came into contact with the Americas?

I can’t live without potatoes

-LL McCooljay

It would have happened eventually.

I can’t live without potatoes

OTM

Lol, Neanderthal.

NEW: Drone startup BRINC, which just pulled a $25 million VC round, says it was inspired by the 2017 Vegas shooting to build non-violent robots. I obtained a video showing their original mission was a border patrol drone system designed to tase migrants https://t.co/TclkWOO3eM

— Sam Biddle (@samfbiddle) December 13, 2021

It would have happened eventually.

Right but I'm saying the timeline where America turns the Earth into a toilet wasn't necessarily predetermined.

Maybe ecocide is the dharma of the human race idk.

this is all god's fault. god put the oil in the ground, fully formed, 8000 years ago

it was all predetermined

idk these guys predicted it pretty early

https://i.ibb.co/f4P96K0/index.jpg

https://i.ibb.co/cFmrLPX/index.jpg

Yeah I never loved the band but those album titles stuck with me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CczFit6tGhs

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/kentucky-tornado-factory-workers-threatened-firing-left-tornado-employ-rcna8581

personally idgi. fresh produce in american supermarkets is quite bad and expensive, every major city in the world has decent markets, etc. i guess it's better if it's brightly lit and you can listen to an instrumental soft jazz version of after the gold rush? https://t.co/g3b5LOgBcD

— joolsd (@joolsd) December 14, 2021

which Publix plays that?!? I'm happy if I get early '80 Boz Scaggs.

I regret starting a thread that functions as an invitation to post the most depressing news you can find, but more narrowly the degree to which the US seems to be embracing core elements of the most prominent fictional dystopias is pretty striking! Sadly not cyberpunk this time:

https://pen.org/scope-speed-educational-gag-orders-worsening-across-country/

And it’s getting worse. In the month since the report’s release, state lawmakers introduced 12 new bills, bringing the total to a staggering 66 educational gag orders for the year in 26 states, 12 of which have passed into law.

Here’s what’s happening:

The recent group of bills includes seven in Missouri and one each in New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and South Carolina.
All 12 of these bills target K–12 schools, four include provisions that would impact colleges and universities, and four include a focus on state agencies, other state-funded institutions, and “places of learning.”
Six of these bills specifically ban “critical race theory,” making a total of 20 state-level bills introduced this year with such explicit prohibitions.
Six of these bills contain explicit prohibitions against teaching or using curricular materials from “The 1619 Project,” bringing the total of these to 17 for the year.

xxp I remember back in the 80s, we hosted some soviet kids. When we took them to the supermarket, they lost their shit.

I think the original tweet is referencing that, not that Safeway is better than a local French produce market.

we do have abundant food (not everywhere, of course) of mostly mediocre quality. it's ok.

the critical race theory mess is one of the factors in favor of dystopia

to me

xxp I remember back in the 80s, we hosted some soviet kids. When we took them to the supermarket, they lost their shit.

I think the original tweet is referencing that, not that Safeway is better than a local French produce market.

So was communism.

I guess that’s the kind of joke that lands better with boomers.

And that's the kind of joke that lands better with people from 2017.

It is! And still up

Randy's one of our ghouls and he is one of the absolute worst. a complete monster.

but he's our ghoul.

Ran All-Ghoul

Ras Al'Green

Ras Al’Gore

Randy, you're a Fine ghoul

https://i.imgur.com/yV83zW2.jpeg

official Florida GOP web store

https://i.imgur.com/DwSQiaM.png

$25 for a fucking coffee mug

we'll be seeing these in thrift stores for years to come, right next to copies of the Da Vinci Code

Gotta look forward to a future of deserted malls

A couple opened a sneaker retail store which was successful but had to close because the entire mall basically closed down pic.twitter.com/fieWwGkBXn

— Financial Dystopia (@financedystop) July 3, 2025

Expect a large format coffee table book on the abandoned malls of America by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre in about ten years.

malls have been closing for a good while now

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_mall

"Some major healthcare systems such as Vanderbilt Health and the University of Rochester (UR) Health have converted several dying malls into new "health malls" or "mall to medicine"."

okay that is pretty dystopian

I go to that Vanderbilt health center all the time. it's kinda nice?

yeah come to think of it, I think the place where my wife gets quarterly migraine treatment is in a repurposed mall or something.

My son goes to community college at a campus that is a repurposed mall, the same mall in fact where his mother worked when he was born.

Are the bones of the mall left intact? If you need a MRI do you walk past a ENT, OB-GYN and pretzel place?

Dead malls should turn themselves into film locations for post apocalyptic shows

https://hantasi.bandcamp.com/album/vacant-places

I've thought forever that dead malls would make great skate parks, but I haven't heard of that happening yet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x61qotePiYQ

LLoyd Center in Portland is a near-dead mall that seems to be perpetually in some state of re-development (something's happening as they are currently demolishing one part of it). It is still open, though mostly empty with the department stores and bigger name-brand stores having gone. Many of the remaining operating storefronts now house smaller businesses / organizations that wouldn't normally occupy a mall of its size. The ice rink still operates. I was there recently to visit an optician (who coincidently are about to vacate) and the whole place definitely has that Dawn of the Dead vibe.

Ford Motor Company leased out the empty Lord & Taylor anchor location in the mall in my hometown, using it as office space (informally it was known as Ford & Taylor.)

i do love lloyd center. i hope portland is some kind of model for the post-apocalypse. there are people who have jobs and money and most of the people i know just don't. i used to have a job and i couldn't keep it because shit was so fucked up. i'm trying to get a new one, but you know, you gotta put in 100 applications to get so much as an interview. the dream is to get government jobs. most of the people i know who still have jobs, they're government jobs, local, county, state. god knows how much longer those will be around when the federal government stops funding anything, but there's no point in worrying about the future.

refugees are constantly streaming in. a lot of them are less fucked up than most of the people i know are. i feel bad about it but hey i'll take any help i can get. it's hard to not live in crisis when surrounded by crisis. that old rudyard kipling poem, "if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you", well, i guess that makes me a Real Man, rudyard.

every four years portland elects another cis white male "leftist" who makes a bunch of promises when he gets into office says "hey i know let's give more money to the cops". we all know the cops are trouble and avoid them as much as we can. i know we hate the cops because the streets are covered with stickers and graffiti talking about how much we hate the cops. because i have friends who work for the government i know that the local, county, and state governments mostly fight over themselves about whose responsibility it is to do things. my friends who work, they're genuinely working, but nothing gets done, not just because of the squabbling but because what can they actually do, really? but it's not like the governmental agencies don't help people, because if it wasn't for them, _none_ of my queer friends would have jobs with benefits.

we make art and we fight about stupid shit and there is a lot of interpersonal drama and all of the chain stores are gone. i try to avoid buying shit from amazon but sometimes i do anyway. people smoke weed to self-medicate because they don't have access to the above-board healthcare system, well, it's better than drinking. there are definitely people who drink - i see them out on the streets screaming and yelling and passersby, particularly when the passersby are queer, which is most of the time because this is portland.

a lot of times people ask for what they need and can't get it because it just isn't there, and we still do what we can for each other. let me know if you're not able to get your meds this week. hey, i haven't seen you in a while, let's go out to coffee, i'll pay. i can't make other people ok, i'm not ok myself, but we get by.

a lot of churches are also taking over former malls, i wrote about the phenomenon in one of my books

Los Angeles to halt ‘disaster tourism’ buses through Palisades fire zone

Pacific Palisades neighborhoods were closed to the public for months after a January firestorm devastated the community, but since its recent reopening, there have been sightings of a new, disturbing visitor in the neighborhood: disaster tourists. Busloads of them.

“My office and others have received numerous reports about commercial tour operators conducting disaster tours in the Pacific Palisades,” Los Angeles City Councilmember Traci Park said at a council meeting this week. “They’re looking to profit off of destruction and other people’s losses. It’s really gross and it needs to be stopped.”

In a bid to stop the trend from becoming routine whenever disaster strikes the area, the City Council unanimously approved restricting “disaster tourism” buses from the Palisades fire zone and any disaster zone.

On Jan. 7, the Palisades fire tore through Pacific Palisades and surrounding areas, destroying more than 6,000 structures, many of them homes, and leaving 12 people dead. Although officials vowed to have a speedy recovery, the rebuilding process for the worst disaster in the city’s history has been challenging — and slow.

Park said the tour buses were not only unsettling but also potentially distracting and hazardous for crews continuing to work in the area.

“It’s also ... dangerous because we’re still actively clearing fire debris,” she said.

As a result of the vote on Park’s motion, the city’s Department of Transportation will restrict tour buses from any area declared part of a natural disaster emergency, and the ban will last through the duration of the emergency response.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/ufc-fight-white-house-2026-president-trump-1236306531/

Trump Says the UFC Will Host a Championship Fight at the White House

“If you take what U2 did and multiply it by a million, that’s where we are,” he said.

—

Boooooooooooooooooooo

^ sorry, that quote is from some dumb guy, but not that dumb guy