Is the US a dystopia?

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

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

got it sordid

Is ILX a dystopia?

just look around

As of today, 50% of women in federal prisons are Indigenous.

This is genocide.

— martha paynter (@MarthPaynter) December 17, 2021

Is the fact that's about Canada the point you're making or a mistake?

I saw someone on TT try to claim that 1 in 4 American woman will experience either an attempted kidnapping or be kidnapped. Um. What?

I saw discussion of this point, which I also think is likely, that this person is conflating their risk of being kidnapped/trafficked with their VERY LIKELY risk of being s. assaulted at some point in their lives, which IS about 25% of women as reported although I assume that's a massive undercount. So yes, the resulting panic and fear is doing the work of obscuring that we're most likely to be assaulted by our intimate partners, family members, and people we know. Duh.

i found that focusing on those risks got in the way of my ability to protect myself from the actual risks i face.

Yeah, exactly.

Otm re SWers obv

yeah actually io your saying that really helps me kinda put into focus just how those irrational fears helped to keep me in an abusive relationship

when i came out suddenly i'm part of a community where the lifetime incidence of being an SA victim is over 50%. and i have this tremendous fear of being sexually assaulted, and i say, you know, _statistically_. _statistically_, you know, i'm at high risk, so i need to be aware and take precautions. that's what i tell myself. and the precautions i take are precautions against _outsiders_, _strangers_. people i don't know.

at the same time, the incidence rate being what it is, i'm now around a _lot_ of SA victims. and i see what SA does to a person, see the ways in which people who've had SA respond to what's happened to them. this might sound weird, but the best way of being able to tell if someone is an SA victim is if they _act_ like an SA victim. when i see how SA victims act, get to know it firsthand, it starts being pretty clear to me that hey, wait a second, that's exactly how i react. my fear of SA isn't _statistical_, isn't _rational_, it's _visceral_. to the extent that i figure, well, i've probably been sexually assaulted at some point. probably i just don't remember it because repressed memories. i did (maybe still do) actually have repressed memories. generally they were things i avoided and didn't want to think about, and this was something i wasn't trying to avoid, but i figure, you never know. (That's the thing, isn't it? It's so hard to feel like I actually _know_.) meantime i'm apologizing to my then-spouse for the way i instinctively recoil in terror whenever they touch me. of course it couldn't be anything to do with _them_. has to be something wrong with _me_.

i genuinely... i'm genuinely shocked at how much denial i was in. how much pressure i still feel, internally, to say it didn't happen. all of the lies i was taught about SA - lies the patriarchy taught me - that still run through my head, even though i know they're not true. the way i have to talk about it over and over again, to reinforce and affirm to myself that yes, if i look at the facts, that was what happened. they sexually assaulted me.

i also kinda understand why. leaving my ex was very difficult. my life is materially worse in a lot of ways for having done it. and - ok i know every abuse victim says this - but i genuinely do believe i _was lucky_. i see some people try to get away from their abusers, and their abusers try to take everything they have, in terms of material resources. all my ex did was try to convince me to kill myself. i mean that sucked, i don't want to minimize how awful that was, but a lot of people have it bad in ways that i didn't. don't have the same opportunity to take control of their own life that i do. because there isn't support for SA victims. people don't even _believe_ SA victims, most of the time. for some reason people believe women more, particularly white women, when they talk about some shadowy nebulous conspiracy to kidnap women off the street.

because when some guy brags about sexually assaulting women and people like him _more_ for doing that... it's easy to feel helpless, hopeless. it's easy to feel despair. it's really tempting to me to grab onto anything i can, anything at all, to help me feel like... i mean, feel not just like i have some control, but so people will fucking RECOGNIZE me as a victim. because most women who experience SA don't get recognized or accepted as victims when it's an intimate partner, a relative, a co-worker. only when it's an _alien_.

so yeah i do feel pressured as a woman, particularly as a white woman, to act in ways that serve and promote patriarchy. and it fucking sucks that so many women give in to that pressure. i'd almost call the situation... dystopian.

geeez sorry for sucking at posting recently, i was tired posting and completely missed the context of this revive. the disingenuous right-wing obsession with "trafficking" is indeed nauseating. obviously when it comes to vulnerable communities experiencing this kind of thing, i mean, that's a whole different discussion

YES.

To get back to scott's original point a bit, I think -- America was already a dystopia for the unprotected. The most at-risk people in America are undocumented, indigenous, Black, queer. Policies exclude them, laws don't protect them, the news doesn't cover them.

Let the rage fill you the next time your sister in law or that other parent at T-ball says they heard that their friend's cousin found a piece of tape on their bumper and called the police, or tells you that 300,000 children are abducted from playgrounds each year so "Mamas be safe out there."

Literally just googling that catchphrase for this post brought me to a video someone made with 7 paranoid things she does at the gas station to keep her kids "safe" while pumping gas, INCLUDING LOCKING HERSELF OUT OF THE CAR. Maybe it's different with smart fobs these days. The idea that your kids are safer if you completely lock your car up while getting gas and standing right next to it--the only thing that's going to do is cause 300 people to lock their kids in the car with the keys inside because their hands were full.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/20/energy/three-mile-island-microsoft-ai/index.html

Funny thing is that it's usually the data centers that generate TMI.

Wow at that TikTok

There was some definite weird modem backwoods old west to the two yokels that were following the carrion birds to find the dead body of that highway shooter outside of London KY this week. They were live streaming when they found the body while buzzards dined. They were pretty pleased with the 25k they got paid in reward for finding the nutcase gunman. Pretty damn dark if you ask me.