Is the US a dystopia?

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

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

whew I had doubts

"I can't answer without sharing my personal definition of dystopia"

5 voters just laying it all down

oh yeah, absolutely.

I'm not up on the history, back in the day did "I was just following orders" save any Nazis from the gallows?

I just look so damn good in those boots

I'm not up on the history, back in the day did "I was just following orders" save any Nazis from the gallows?

― conspiracitorial theories (stevie)

nah. at the same time, though, the people Varoufuckice is interviewing aren't, by and large, the people who wound up on the gallows. As far as I can tell, most of the people who eagerly worked to put the Nazis' policies into action didn't really face meaningful consequences for doing so. honestly, my suspicion is that a lot of these folks would actually have a better life in a post-fascist state than they do now - not that this would make them any less eagerly fascist!

naturally, i suspect i'd have a better life in a post-fascist state. assuming i can live that long. the odds get worse by the day.

I'm not up on the history, back in the day did "I was just following orders" save any Nazis from the gallows?

yeah instead they got to staff up West Germany, American science programs (and Soviet, though less cushy as jobs go) and become western intelligence assets

rest assured that if we ever buck this, we will have the weakest possible demagafication, and democrats will call on us to forgive and forget, to heal, and to embrace bipartisanship

Maybe they'll cut the ICE budget by 5%!

There would have to be major constitutional changes to prevent this happening again, that’s even less likely.

rest assured that if we ever buck this, we will have the weakest possible demagafication, and democrats will call on us to forgive and forget, to heal, and to embrace bipartisanship

― budo jeru

look real talk, i'm not really on the same page as you here

gonna get into some "doomposting" here. not actually "doomposting", but this stuff is kinda challenging to accept.

i don't keep up with the administration, but apparently they're going to revoke my legally obtained passport with my legal name on it and replace it with one in my deadname

whether or not it's legal for them do to that doesn't actually matter. i know y'all really hoped that the courts would stop the president from doing blatantly unconstitutional things, but they aren't and they won't. the law right now is whatever the president says it is.

when the current president got into office and things got bad, i had a pretty good idea what it meant. i am familiar with the policies implemented by the austrian paperhanger, not just at the _end_ of his rule, but from the very beginning. one of the sources that i rely on most is a collected diary called "i will bear witness" by a guy named victor klemperer. of course the diary everyone knows from that period is anne frank's. there are a number of other really good diaries from that era, though. klemperer was an adult in 1933, a highly educated man working in academia. he survived the war, although if it hadn't been for the bombing of dresden he probably wouldn't have.

in the early years, a lot of people didn't take hitler seriously. jewish people did. a lot of people who could left. klemperer reports a joke making the rounds: a new immigrant arrives in mandatory palestine. the first official he meets asks him "are you here from conviction, or from germany?"

klemperer knew what the potential consequences were if he didn't leave. he chose to not leave. the people who did leave... at first, the nazis were happy to have jews leave germany. their _official_ plan was always to deport the jews - they never publicly admitted what they actually wound up doing. that "honeymoon" period was very brief. soon, it got harder and harder for jewish people to leave germany. there were all kinds of bureaucratic obstacles put in their way. often jews did need to give up everything they owned in order to leave. a lot of people, of course, couldn't get out.

i don't believe for a second that any replacement passport they give me will be valid for very long. i consider any "honeymoon period" i had to get out of america over. i seriously thought about leaving. some friends of mine did leave. i just wasn't able to get out in time. nobody's fault but mine, really. i could have worked harder, could have found a steady source of income, could have gotten the paperwork together and gone to uruguay. it was just... too much for me to do. overwhelming.

in practical terms, that window's closed. for me and for most of us.

the president is also working to strip birthright citizenship from people born in america. i don't doubt for a second that he'll succeed. and i don't believe for a second that he'll stop with citizens born to illegal immigrants. i fully expect to have my citizenship stripped from me, before too long. i don't find the prospect particularly upsetting in and of itself. it's merely formalizing a state of existence that's been in effect since january. i am one who the law binds, but does not protect. the courts won't protect my rights. the congress won't protect my rights. legally, the administration can do anything it wants to me. it can do anything it wants to _anyone_.

varoufuckice talks about someone who asks ICE candidates if they've read "Eichmann in Jerusalem". i have. i think it's a really interesting piece. it was very controversial when it was published, possibly still today. arendt pointed out that eichmann's involvement in the holocaust wasn't actually illegal. i think people today should keep that in mind. the people who are going after immigrants, who are going after minorities, are legally in the right. those of us who oppose them - we're legally in the wrong, at least as far as united states law goes.

the other thing i noted from klemperer's early diaries is the ways in which people treated him differently once hitler got into power. he had lots of friends who stopped talking to him. they were uncomfortable around him. being around him was kind of a downer, honestly. he had colleagues, people he liked, who would make excuses for hitler, say that what he was doing wasn't that bad, that he was blowing things way out of proportion. to his face, his academic colleagues would do this. they weren't nazis. some of them later became nazis, but a lot of them didn't.

honestly, the impression i get is that most people didn't really take hitler seriously until "kristallnacht". even then, there were plenty of people who defended him. hitler had a pretext for it - again, this doesn't really get into the history books. he claimed it was a response to some young jewish kid murdering a minor nazi official. most people didn't accept this. by then, it was honestly too late. hitler had consolidated power. he had proved that he had the ability and the support to rule germany. whether or not people in other countries liked it, they accepted it. what were they going to do, declare war on germany because they were mean to jews? there were a lot of people in those other countries that didn't like jews either - not just people like charles lindbergh who openly supported hitler. just people who didn't think german jews were worth going to war and dying over. even while the war was going on, a lot of people just didn't accept the holocaust was happening. there's a famous anecdote about jan karski, an eyewitness to the holocaust, visiting america in 1942 and telling felix frankfurter what was happening. frankfurter said "i am unable to believe you". when someone else in the room pointed out that karski's testimony was extremely credible, that he wasn't lying, frankfurter clarified "i did not say he was lying. i said i am unable to believe him. there is a difference."

hitler, of course, was responsible for the holocaust. the nazis were responsible for the holocaust. felix frankfurter was not. fdr was not. the Good Germans were not.

hitler was also, though, ignorant. it's a practical limitation, ignorance. it's why he ultimately lost the war, why the nazis could _not_ have won world war ii. hitler didn't listen to his generals. hitler's actions were based on his blind ignorance, his blind hatred, rather than anything resembling reality. he was always destined to lose.

the only reason he got as far as he did, though, was because people who _weren't_ ignorant and _weren't_ incompetent supported him. german industry supported hitler. german religious institutions, by and large, supported hitler - they weren't about to get on board with so-called "positive christianity", but neither were they part of the "confessing church". german moderates, liberals, social democrats - they supported hitler. they didn't like hitler - they found him vulgar - but they saw communism as a bigger threat to germany than fascism.

i do want to make clear that history does NOT repeat itself. i don't think that things are going to go down the same way in america that they went down in germany. too many things are different. having said that, i do also think that we can learn a great deal from studying that situation - studying how people reacted to hitler, and what the results of their action or inaction was.

my takeaway is that i am in a pretty dangerous position, immigrants are in a pretty dangerous position. lots of us are in a pretty dangerous position. my takeaway is that i don't, at this point, have any reason to believe that our current situation will end up _without_ a great many people dying unnecessarily. all of the institutions around me can't or won't support the people being put into danger by this administration. it's not that i'm hopeless, though. if i have faith in anything, it's ordinary people. in spite of everything i still believe that people are really good at heart.

if i have faith in anything, it's ordinary people. in spite of everything i still believe that people are really good at heart.

― Kate (rushomancy), Friday, July 11, 2025 1:46 PM

i wanna be clear and unambiguous here - i am _not saying this sarcastically_. if all of the people who are saying and doing all this awful stuff are genuinely terrible human beings, then i don't see any justification for saying that i'm not also a terrible human being. i've said homophobic stuff, transphobic stuff, racist stuff, and anybody has the right to judge me as evil for any of that, because whatever i say and do, i'm _accountable_ for. i'm just not going to judge _myself_ as evil.

i also know that most of the people who are doing this stuff _won't_ be held accountable for what they're doing. not really for any moral reason, but because it's not practical. it's the whole _munich_ thing. there'll maybe be some form of justice meted out against the worst people, the eichmanns and what have you and the rest, well...

well, what does justice _look_ like? i can say that most nazis didn't face any consequences for what they did, and legally? legally, that's true. a lot of the true believers, the people who bought into the propaganda broadcasts until the end, they killed themselves rather than live in a post-nazi world. is that justice? um, no, what hermann goering did is pretty much the exact opposite of justice. to the end, innocent people suffered for his evil. at the same time, this is why it's not a question of "if". because the only thing fascists are capable of doing is destroying, and among the people they destroy are their own children.

when i look at justice, i see, for instance, dan white being acquited of murder for killing milk and moscone, and is that justice? no. and in 1985 he killed himself, and is that justice? also no. and am i glad that dan white killed himself? yes.

for a long time i wanted to kill myself, and now i don't. if that's the closest i get to justice, that's enough.

no, i didn't think it was sarcastic. i mean, i'm pretty much 100% with you through that whole post. i do think things are likely to get far worse, in ways that people are afraid to admit. i think the other thing that's very upsetting is that for a large number of people, pro-trump and not, who do not belong to the communities targeted by trump, and who don't have sufficient ties to them, a lot of this will be able to play out far off in the periphery, perhaps even out of sight. and, i also think, as bad as things might get, that it's possible that in a period of years (say, somewhere between 3 and 30 years), there will be some kind of swing back into a more "normal" state of affairs. and i assure you that, if that happens, the democrats will be there to minimize and scold the people who feel compelled to tell the truth, and point fingers, about what happened. and like you say, part of that will be a practical consideration. idk. sometimes i get so frustrated when i hear this "we're on the right side of history" lib talk. not because i disagree really, although truthfully i don't give a shit, but i just mean that there's this implied redemption, like jd vance's smug face is going to get shoved in the dirt, and EVERYONE will call him a loser, and there will be justice, finally, in the end. and my point is that i'm going to keep fighting in spite of the overwhelming evidence that there never will be, and maybe that is what hope is, i'm not sure

i get so frustrated when i hear this "we're on the right side of history" lib talk

people who say this aren't talking about history at all, but morality, and all they could possibly mean is "I agree with my own values". the idea that it is possible to project 'history' forward as if it were some kind of legible trend line that can be counted on to supply a desired outcome is pure nonsense, but believing in nonsense because it is comforting or validating is a very human trait that pretty much everyone indulges in to some degree.

This fall, an expanding number of top schools — including Columbia, M.I.T., Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt and the University of Chicago — will begin accepting “dialogues” portfolios from Schoolhouse.world, a platform co-founded by Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, to help students with math skills and SAT prep. High-schoolers will log into a Zoom call with other students and a peer tutor, debate topics like immigration or Israel-Palestine, and rate one another on traits like empathy, curiosity or kindness. The Schoolhouse.world site offers a scorecard: The more sessions you attend, and the more that your fellow participants recognize your virtues, the better you do.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/opinion/college-admissions-essays.html

of course

doesn't China have some kind of 'moral currency' index or something like that?

I'm not sure I can muster up outrage over a system that asks students about a time they dealt with disagreement, or a system that allows conversation and debate to be included as part of an application process rather than solely relying on an essay? Maybe I'm missing something

yeah, pretty low on my dystopiameter

I mean, I guess the 'rate your peers' thing is kinda icky but it's also completely voluntary and doesn't seem like it will be weighed heavily in the admissions process

logging into the web 3.0 portal to demonstrate that you're a compliant little automaton who will definitely never occupy the quad to protest genocide is pretty gross IMO

On the other hand it is very good preparation for the modern workplace

and ILX

I agree w him that universities have to revalorise difference, disagreement and debate internally but the admissions innovations he cites seem designed to encourage that so I don't really get his beef