Is the US a 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.

the tweet is responding to libertarians tweeting photos of american grocery stores to prove a point

american supermarkets are among the purest products of american capitalism and therefore accurately reflect all our most popular theories about health and happiness, from gluttony to asceticism, all packaged in convenient sizes for easy consumption. it's a design that's been copied all over the world, with appropriate modifications to suit local tastes and incomes. almost any praise or criticism you want to make about supermarkets can be justified using real world examples.

from gluttony to asceticism, all packaged in convenient sizes for easy consumption

cf. Randall Jarrell's A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (1960) and the companion poem "Next Day"

Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All

You want to know dystopia? Sometimes I have to go to three different supermarkets to get everything I need.

I regret starting a thread that functions as an invitation to post the most depressing news you can find

You cannot design a thread that wouldnt fall prey to this within ten mins have you seen this site lately

no.

lol

A school district board in upstate New York is investigating school officials amid accusations that the district may have confined elementary school students inside wooden “timeout” boxes.

Images of the boxes, which resemble tiny padded cells, first spread on social media last week, after a former member of the Salmon River school district school board accused officials of building them to seclude children with disabilities. The images unleashed an immediate uproar in the small district, which teaches about 1,300 children and lies on the border between New York state and Canada.

― Andy the Grasshopper, Monday, December 22, 2025 2:04 PM (one week ago)

my (public school) first grade teacher used to make girls stand in garbage cans with duct tape over their mouths for talking in class. i mean i guess theoretically she _could_ have done something like that to the boys but she never did. i'm not saying that to excuse or ameliorate in any way what this district is doing. that's just what this reminded me of. no, i don't particularly want to live in the past.

When I was a kid they had this thing called the "Owl Squad" that was mostly janitors and maybe a gym teacher who would come and drag kids that were acting up or throwing a fit out of the class room

I'm sorry but Trump announcing he's running Venezuela until a transition takes places almost beats the images of MAGA falling over each other on the Capitol 5Y ago, and it's three days earlier in the year. I am amazed at how the guy keeps outdoing himself.

One of the elementaries that I went to put kids (including me) into wooden boxes with benches inside when we acted up, as well. I was also spanked a handful of times, and tied to my chair by an older teacher in kindergarten. No, none of this helped me at all.

My sixth grade teacher would put you up against the wall, grab a handful of skin on your neck and lift up until you were standing on your toes, at which point you were expected to answer his line of questioning as to why you were "acting up." Which we all thought was par for the course. In hindsight, that man should have been jailed.

My grade school at least called yr parents in to witness the paddling. That escalated a bit when my younger sister went through the same grade school, they made the local news when a teacher started putting kids in the hot box (storage closet next to school furnace). Then there was the teacher that threw full cans of Campbell’s soup at the poor kid who was acting up b/c all the kids knew he was getting sexually abused at home. We all saw his Polaroids he brought to school and tried to tell deaf ears.

Brandon Friedman

that's fucked up!

Whoa

Xpost

Awful teachers and schools

And that Bluesky post, jfc

The Kill Line: What America looks like on Chinese social media

In the latter half of 2025, a phrase began circulating widely on Chinese social media: “The Kill Line” (杀线). It is not a slogan invented by policymakers or academics, nor a meme meant purely for ridicule. It is a sharp, unsettling, and revealing metaphor used by ordinary Chinese commentators to describe how American society appears from the outside. The Kill Line names an invisible threshold in the United States: a point at which a single shock, medical, financial, or legal, can push an otherwise productive middle-class citizen into irreversible collapse.

From within the U.S., this reality is often discussed in fragmented terms: healthcare reform, student debt, housing affordability, gig work, or income inequality. From outside, however, these fragments cohere into a single systems-level diagnosis. The American Social Contract, Chinese observers argue, has an unusually high ceiling and an exceptionally lethal floor. You can rise spectacularly, but you can also fall so fast, and so far, that there is no meaningful way back. You can work hard and do everything “right” just to have one disruption kick you to the gutter.

What shocks many Chinese audiences is not that inequality exists; China is no stranger to inequality, but that the American system appears to tolerate extreme fragility among people who are otherwise working, educated, and contributing to society. A layoff that coincides with illness. A rent increase layered atop childcare and student loans. A credit score collapse triggered by a few missed payments. A modest car repair. In these narratives, the Kill Line is crossed not through moral failure or laziness, but through ordinary life events that happen to everyone. Once crossed, institutional responses shift from support to punishment: fees, penalties, loss of access, legal exposure. The system stops absorbing shocks and begins amplifying them.

This framing resonates because it clashes with the mythology of American resilience that has long dominated global imagination. For decades, the U.S. projected an image of dynamism, opportunity, and self-reinvention. Anyone who works hard can achieve the American Dream. Total social mobility. The Kill Line metaphor suggests something else: a society optimized for efficiency and growth, but stripped of redundancy, forgiveness, and slack. In engineering terms, it is a system without safety factors. In human terms, it is a system that treats normal life events as personal failures rather than structural inevitabilities.

Chinese commentators frequently contrast this with what they call a “hard floor” at home. This is not nostalgia or propaganda; Chinese users are often brutally honest about corruption and inequality in their own country. Instead, it is an acknowledgment that family networks, state healthcare, and basic housing options still provide a buffer against total freefall. Life may be constrained, but annihilation feels very unlikely. In China, you can lose your job, but you will not be evicted from your home, lose healthcare, or go hungry. The comparison is not about which system is “better,” but about where risk is carried: collectively or individually.

Americans can learn from this external perspective is not a list of policy prescriptions, but a reframing of the problem itself. The Kill Line exposes how deeply American culture has internalized the idea that survival must be earned continuously, without interruption. It reveals how quickly empathy collapses once someone falls out of productivity. It shows how social trust erodes when people know that one misstep can erase decades of effort.

Perhaps most importantly, it highlights how invisible this precarity has become to those living inside it. When instability is normalized, it no longer registers as a design flaw; it feels like the weather. But to outside observers, the design is obvious. A society that cannot absorb ordinary human misfortune is not merely unequal; it is brittle and weak. And brittle systems do not fail gradually. They fail suddenly.

The Kill Line is not a prophecy of American collapse. It is a mirror. It reflects how the U.S. now appears to many watching from abroad: wealthy, innovative, and powerful, yet strangely indifferent to the survivability of everyday life. If Americans are willing to take this external critique seriously, it could open space for a deeper conversation about what it means to design a society that allows people to navigate ordinary life events without crossing a lethal kill line.

that roundup itself has the offputting whiff of AI but i never knew about this phrase? meme? pov? before so thank you

Resonates for me

survival must be earned continuously, without interruption

Two years ago I was unemployed and rapidly dying at Georgetown Hospital. I did a phone interview for a job while in intensive care and recovering from covid. Because mortgage, because kids, because college.

I mean, my ending was a happy one in that I got a liver, got that job, and the kid's in college. And my family did a whole It's a Wonderful Life "George Bailey? In trouble?" thang.

But I do wish that yawning terror - the bills won't stop arriving - hadn't been a factor.

YMP i have nothing but sympathy and respect for that track. damn, you earn it all. peace, and be well.

Thanks Hunt3r, it's only in retrospect that one has room for the "to what extent does this reflect dystopia" Or what does this situation say about society?" In the moment it's all just the shiz one is going through.

And I try not to make every topic all about my transplant journey or begin too many sentences with "as a survivor of..."

Interesting that it takes an external perspective to put a name to this bind - that China has a phrase for it and we kinda... don't.

chinese social media users otm.

yeah. a not infrequent and amazing part of my recovery experience consists of me sharing something of my own frustrations or wins, and being impressed or astonished by the experiences shared back to me. these are people with whom i am a bit familiar, and their strength and endurance and courage does humble me. i can only thank them for sharing, and state my admiration— so often, i do. many people are so very amazing, and i probably have no idea.

feel that. my PT, whom i mainly see for sports-specific issues, had a similar issue as i did last summer (blocked intestinal tract), but he was in the ICU for two days and they were sure he was going to die. we commiserate in a totally different way now— one of the things that happens is solidarity and mutual admiration for the resilience of such people.

anyway i admire you both!! and yes, Chinese social media users otm

likewise, ty

https://www.science.org/content/article/scientists-decry-trump-s-rush-loosen-radiation-exposure-standards?utm_campaign=NewsfromScience&utm_medium=ownedSocial&utm_source=twitter

The United States is dropping the principle of keeping nuclear workers’ radiation exposure “as low as reasonably possible.”

look i’ve sniffed uranium off of toilet seats

Downwinders in southern Utah have steadily voted GOP for decades so why the hell not?

Love how there is virtually no space in mass media (which has almost always been the case as long as I have been alive) to talk about evils of property, and who owns what and who ultimately pays the price for that

This guy gets it. pic.twitter.com/unPFLkPduG

— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) February 23, 2026