Is the US a dystopia?

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.

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— 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

https://t.co/fFOE6vEXOc pic.twitter.com/PPoldWoOdT

— District Sentinel (@TheDCSentinel) December 15, 2021

Yup, sure - was thinking of Reeve too but his accident etc.

There is a bizarre obsession with how actors who have formerly played Superman are doing now. No one cares about former Batman actors.

― xyzzzz__, Thursday, August 7, 2025 1:54 AM (one hour ago)

do people care how brandon routh is doing now? i don't know who brandon routh is. i had to look up his name.

here's how brandon routh is doing now:

In 2021, Routh appeared in The Nine Kittens of Christmas, a sequel to The Nine Lives of Christmas. In 2023, Routh appeared in an episode of Quantum Leap portraying a naval commander: Alexander Augustine. That same year, Routh reprised his role as Todd Ingram in the Netflix animated series Scott Pilgrim Takes Off.

i mean who are former batman actors? adam west? people care about him. um, michael keaton? george clooney? val kilmer? christian bale? ben affleck? robert pattinson? these men are not "former batman actors". they have had _careers_. if brandon routh hadn't played superman, what would we call him? "Former Nine Kittens of Christmas actor Brandon Routh"?

the time is now, they will not get weaker

― hello we are the tik tok data recruitment center (Hunt3r)

idk. it's, like, literally impossible to run a country like this in the long term. america's infrastructure is in ruins, america's economy is in ruins, and the sociopaths in power are pretending it isn't. i just can't imagine a _future_ for america. some 59 year old washed up tv actor is going to be in the secret police? cool, cool. maybe they can get kirk cameron to sign up next. kirk cameron sending kids to concentration camps. trump might be wanting to create his own schutzstaffel. from what i can tell, what he's actually getting is a sturmabteilung.

Adam West passed in 2017. :(

This is all horrible but I still kind of can't get over that Brown and Columbia will now be sending their students' test scores to the Federal government for scrutiny. Would you like to know how I scored on AP Bio too?? FUCK OFF AND GET OUT OF MY LIFE

Unrelatedly, my son just finished reading 1984

He said it sucked - proud of him lol

Does he have to read Brave New World yet?

Adam West passed in 2017. :(

― a ZX spectrum is haunting Europe (Daniel_Rf)

ah shit. still, he was 88 years old. he lived a long life. he was born in walla walla, i guess! also val kilmer passed in 2025, apparently. and look ok he wasn't a superstar actor, though he certainly seems to have been under the impression that he was.

the funny thing is that it's even, like, voice actors. i knew when kevin conroy passed. kevin conroy is a fucking icon, a legend. tim daly, on the other hand... i looked him up and duckduckgo gave me this picture

https://delawarevalleyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Tim-Daly-e1754004483752.png

and look, i mean, tim daly has probably had more of a career than anybody else who played superman. "He is best known for his role as Joe Hackett on the NBC sitcom Wings and his recurring role as drug-addicted screenwriter J.T. Dolan on The Sopranos.", Wikipedia says, but he was also the male lead in the first five seasons of a Grey's Anatomy spinoff and the male lead of a CBS network show that ran for six seasons and 120 episodes between 2014 and 2019. i've never heard of it, but mostly because i'm too young to be watching CBS. i'm only 50. my mom probably watched "madam secretary". that's not a knock on my mom. she's not a bad person for watching CBS or anything. she's just 76 years old, is all.

anyway kevin conroy is very definitely a former batman actor and God i love that man.

---

sorry, i got distracted, this is the dystopia thread. look. yes, america is a dystopia. it's a shambling corpse of a nation ruled by a shambling corpse of a man over the feeble protests of a shambling corpse of an opposition party. i'm not saying this is justice or even making a moral judgement. at the same time, america has for a very long time practiced necropolitics. i think it's fair to consider ICE a necropolitical project.

historically, as a white person, i've been exempt from necropolitics. i would argue that white trans people currently also fall into the category of people subject to necropolitics. i'm not particularly outraged by it. i don't think white trans people are uniquely deserving of consideration! i just wish that more white trans people would recognize that we're _not_ unique, that we exist within the context of a larger struggle.

in other words, this dystopia continues to exist for a reason... it's not something that's beyond anybody's control. there are things we can do about it. for me, the most important thing is recognizing the ways in which our current situation is rooted in racism and working to be antiracist. i don't really have power to change america's political system, but i do have power to oppose racism. i guess that's why i tend to talk about it so much when the topic of politics comes up.

you might want to include "batman" in your kevin conroy search, because that is most definitely not the kevin conroy who voiced batman.

That's Tim Daly, as per the post.

And yesterday the fucking Arizona Supreme Court used an AI reporter to announce that a man’s death sentence was being upheld

It's deliberate disrespect, like when the Trump admin requested a 1-day sentence for the man who killed Breonna Taylor

I don't think that's a picture of Tim Daly the actor, maybe some rando with the same name

https://planetcomicon.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/PCKC25_DALY_anncmnt-800x800.png

That's Tim Daly, as per the post.

― a ZX spectrum is haunting Europe (Daniel_Rf)

thank you. i know my writing's not always clear, and i think i wasn't clear here. that's a picture of _a man named tim daly_. it's not a picture of the voice actor who's also tyne daly's younger brother. (is tyne daly more famous than tim daly? i guess it depends on how into theater you are. i'm not into theater and i do know tyne daly, but then i grew up in the greater new york area and i saw a _lot_ of ads for her performance in "gypsy".) the point i was trying to make, and wasn't clear on, is that searching for "tim daly" turns up WRONG DUDE pictures pretty quickly.

mind you, tim daly only played superman early on. when the justice league series started, george newbern took over the role. wikipedia says george newbern is primarily known for his role in scandal, which might be true - i haven't seen scandal. it looks like he has a comparatively minor role on that show though. anyway if he's not primarily known as superman, he's the only superman actor i can think of who isn't...

i know we're supposed to be talking about dystopia right now, look i just needed to take a break, it's too depressing.

i looked him up and duckduckgo gave me this picture

classic duckduckgo lol

ah, tim daly! the heart and soul of Wings!

Also the son of James Daly, memorably the harried businessman who exited at Willoughby, per the classic Twilight Zone episode.

Have Tim and Tyne Daly been seen in the same room together?

https://3brothersliquor.com/cdn/shop/products/PhotoRoom_20230316_005340.jpg