Is the US a dystopia?

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

we should maybe do a "worst living american" poll

impossible. polls are limited to only 50 choices

maybe a poll to make the poll

a poll of polls? better update the list of lists

don't visit ILB if you don't enjoy a poll of polls

glad we got this settled

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

An account trading under the username "Magamyman" made more than $553,000 placing bets on the prediction market Polymarket that Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would be out of power just before an Israeli strike killed him on Saturday.

Did we ever get this sorted lads?

The Lancet recently published a study which found that sanctions from the US have caused 38 million deaths since 1970. The average death toll ranges from 400,000 to over 1 million per year. https://t.co/jWhaPOVbCZ pic.twitter.com/T6yOcQbvYl

— حيدر | Haydar (@chronicalihere) March 9, 2026

Doomsday Believers No Longer Fringe: Study Suggests They’re A Third Of America

-About one in three Americans in the study’s sample believed the world would end within their own lifetime, a figure that aligns with broader national polling, and those beliefs turned out to be stronger predictors of risk behavior than political affiliation or income.

- Apocalyptic belief is not one thing: researchers identified five distinct dimensions, including who or what people believe will cause the end, how soon they expect it, and whether they view it as something to dread or welcome.

- The specific flavor of someone’s end-of-world belief matters enormously. People who blame human action for eventual catastrophe perceive current threats as more urgent, while those who believe God controls the end times are significantly less likely to support extreme action to address them.

- A puzzle the researchers could not fully explain: people who believe the apocalypse will ultimately be a good thing still tended to support drastic measures to prevent existential threats.

Thank you

The denial that this is sooooooooo many people is a form of passive gaslighting that makes me feel craaaaaaazy since I was 12

Its gaslighting from the 1/3 that is like that, wanting the end times

And also from another 1/3 that’s just like “well it’s religion so I can’t criticize!!!l”

Meanwhile in the middle 1/3 we’re just squishing around, horrible

see idk how to interpret this study

cuz i'm an ex-doomer, or someone _trying_ to be an ex-doomer, it's still something i struggle a lot with

i'm pretty miserable a lot of the time, i deal with a lot of learned helplessness

i used to want to "burn it all down" and i've moved on because, well

america isn't "the world", capitalism isn't "the world"

and the things that are burning down don't really need my help

i don't think the world is going to end. i don't think there's going to be a nuclear conflagration destroying everything. mostly this is pascal's wager. i don't see a point in living _as if_ the world is about to end, because god knows it's not up to me. when i was young, there was this person who led something called the "church of euthanasia", went around saying "save the planet, kill yourself", and last i checked they were some variety of transfemme, had come out as some variety of transfemme, and god we work so hard to stay alive, we fight so hard to stay alive, and here's someone who i consider one of My People - i want to believe there is such a thing as My People - saying that saving the planet means self-selecting out, and i believe they're _wrong_ and they influenced me a lot, when i was younger, even though i never believed them, i never thought that what they were saying was _right_. i'm not going to tell them what to believe. i don't see a point in telling them what to believe. and i've had so many friends who have self-selected out, in whatever form.

the problem is that the stuff that i've grown up thinking as "normal", thinking as "the world", these things clearly have no future. i'm no longer arrogant enough to believe the world won't survive me. i no longer believe what i have been taught all my life, which is that what i say, do, feel, think, doesn't matter, that i can't, won't, am _not_ changing the world.

am i making the world a better place? i'd like to think so. does it feel like enough? no. do i deal every day with people who believe it will never be enough, that we're all doomed? yeah, i do. and it takes a toll. to stay alive while my friends are dying and people in power either don't notice or praise it. i don't want to be 'the last person to die for a mistake', but if a mistake kills me, like it's killing so many of us, does it matter whether i die _for_ it or _against_ it?

i don't know what drives muslim apocalypticism, but i do know that america has been trying to eradicate muslims for a very long time, that america is currently strongly supporting a genocide against a majority-muslim country. sure, we should fight. and it _feels_ like we aren't, it _feels_ like evil is winning, and that these people, given their way, will, well. kill everything and everyone.

the world's not going to end in my lifetime and it's statistically likely that a billion or more people in the global south will die this century and that those deaths are, to some extent, going to be on america's head. how am i supposed to _feel_ about that? how am i supposed to _feel_ as someone who has been taught all her life that she is a "citizen" in what is, in practice, pretty obviously an "evil empire"? it's not on my head personally, and "collective guilt" is useless, but i believe that as a white american i _do_ belong to a group that bears collective _responsibility_ for these monstrous actions. no guilt in that. no shame in that. just, i mean, when the world survives what the american empire is doing to it, i hope they choose macarthur's approach over morgenthau's. i wouldn't blame people for choosing morgenthau's, even though it wouldn't, i don't think, be as effective as macarthur's, even though it would repay blood with blood. people have the right to judge us, as americans, because america has arrogated to itself the right to judge others and act on that judgement. i don't know how to justify myself as one of the "good ones", because right now to be a "good american" is not that different from what it meant, not long ago, to be a "good german". and there _are_ lots of good people who believe in america in a _good_ way, and are acting to try and make america a better place. i think that's different from being a "good american". and whether or not they succeed, whether or not they _can_ succeed, i believe that what they're doing is good. i wish i could believe what they believe. i would be happier. things would be easier for me. the world would be a better place, i think, if i could believe what they do.

i don't really have any hope for myself, for a lot of us. the time when we had a voice, a say in america, has passed, and i don't see how that time can possibly come again. the people in power seem to see _tolerating_ so many of us - muslims being one prominent example - as something that will lead to _their own_ extinction. i think that belief is wrong, but they have the power to act on that belief, and do, and in doing so destroy their own future, as a _direct result_ of their seeking to destroy the lives of those of those of us who _aren't_ in power. well, who's left? can i truly say that "mutually assured destruction" is not just another form of chekov's gun? i have no malice, no hatred, no desire to destroy left in me. i grew up in school being taught the words of chief joseph, "i will fight no more forever". was he wrong? about america? i want to believe that we are more than that. i do believe we are more than that, i guess. it's just really hard sometimes.

i'm gonna try and go back to sleep. i'm so tired. i'm so fucking tired. i know people are worried about me, both personally as an american. it's not good here. not good at all. i'm doing what i can.

i don't know what drives muslim apocalypticism, but i do know that america has been trying to eradicate muslims for a very long time, that america is currently strongly supporting a genocide against a majority-muslim country. sure, we should fight. and it _feels_ like we aren't, it _feels_ like evil is winning, and that these people, given their way, will, well. kill everything and everyone.

to be clear - which is something i struggle with - i _oppose_ the genocide being perpetrated against the palestinian people. the people perpetrating and supporting that genocide are the people i characterize as "evil", as the ones who, given their way, will kill everything and everyone. i believe that "we" - people who oppose genocide - should _oppose_ them, in a non-violent way, because violence wouldn't be effective, because violence only breeds violence.

end-of-days people often seem like they have an egotism-based belief. as if my life, or my lifetime, is somehow happening during the most consequential time in human history. kind of the flip side of people who think they're going to magically create a settlement on mars despite the fact any effort to do so would require decades of work completing interim steps that no one wants to do. just skip to the end

It’s definitely a form of narcissism to think the world’s gonna end with you and yours: apocalyptic narcissism.

i think apocalyptic belief is a mythical thing that arises out of the human psyche. i think it's true that the curve of human population growth is gonna go down soon. maybe stronger apocalyptic belief right now reflects that, i don't know. i kinda think what's narcissistic is believing that somehow the world is going to end if there are no more humans around.

great book on the subject fwiw

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