Is the US a dystopia?

huh, okay

Charles Haywood, creator of the Society for American Civic Renewal, has said he might serve as ‘warlord’ at the head of an ‘armed patronage network’

The founder and sponsor of a far-right network of secretive, men-only, invitation-only fraternal lodges in the US is a former industrialist who has frequently speculated about his future as a warlord after the collapse of America.

good luck fella

Pic of this man pls

Idahohoho: Other filings identify three lodges in Idaho – in Boise, Coeur d’Alene and Moscow – and another in Dallas, Texas.

https://theworthyhouse.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/CRH-12-22-2-1024x1536.jpg

Not super warlordy imo

he made his fortunes in shampoo, which is also not very warlordy

Smash his glasses and he is defeated

https://nypost.com/2023/09/18/armed-security-guards-patrol-philly-cheesesteak-shop/

At least it’s sunny take that britishes

this too I guess

WARNING: GRAPHIC ⚠️ Police in Alabama used a stun gun on a high school band director at a football game just for letting his students finish playing a song. 85% of the students at Minor High School are Black. Cops attacked a teacher and traumatized these kids forever. pic.twitter.com/Wn2xSYZPKY

— Fifty Shades of Whey (@davenewworld_2) September 18, 2023

“You want people to feel safe and be safe.

Yeah man, nothing feels safer than a random dude dressed up like a Blackwater merc walking up and down the street while I get lunch.

Fwiw, i live somewhat close to that cheesesteak shop, and it’s in a “transitional” area that is equal parts working class families, light industrial, and social service agencies. Also important to note that the old original steaks shop closes in 2019 and this new iteration is the result of a guy from Delco coming in, buying the building, and creating a new version of the place while hiring all the old staff. I

Gotta send a message to the guys who robbed the 200$

seriously fucking angry at that stun gun band director story

“It’s a little overkill. Even if you have an armed guard, OK. But, walking around with a machine gun, it’s not family-friendly,” he added.

Come on, it's the perfect ambience.

no no see these are the good guys with guns, you can tell because they're holding guns and a bunch of innocent people are dead on the sidewalk

assault weapons to whet the appetite

Manson family friendly, maybe

Utopia now

he got acquitted lol https://t.co/wUoA7TSyEs

— Shaun (shaunvids on bsky) (@shaun_vids) September 30, 2023

ok guns are good now

^^^

I don’t know, is it

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/01/us/security-guard-public-safety-portland.html

"They were all doing their best. The police officers whose active patrol force had shrunk by 20 percent to crisis levels because of attrition, recruiting challenges and the impact of calls to defund the police." get fucked n y times

sounds like the NYT is actually the dystopia here

that article was shameful copaganda

If the world is going to burn anyway, let's pile some fuel on and make it burn brighter

"Americans Are Still Spending Like There’s No Tomorrow"
https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/americans-are-still-spending-like-theres-no-tomorrow-6a1d307
(use the sub-blocker of your choice)

The trip cost about $10,000, including three, $1,000 last-minute plane tickets, 10 nights at a $385-a-night 4-star resort and several elaborate meals.

Even though the family decided to cancel subscriptions and cut back on dining out to help offset the bill, they say they have no regrets—especially since they got to see Lahaina just a few months before it was decimated by deadly wildfires.

Fears about a changing climate are driving some people to try to see places before they’re gone. In a monthly Deloitte survey of 19,000 global consumers, climate change was the only topic among 19 different concerns that respondents reported feeling significantly more worried about over the past year.

I want to see Venice before it sinks, if that counts.

im the same with west ham

lol. See Dagenham and die.

jesus christ that NYT article

look, i don't get out much, but i do _live_ in portland

so the thing about the cops here is that they're damn near as bad as chicago cops, and have been for some time. remember that shit that went down in 2020? yeah nothing has fucking changed since then. the only person who has authority over the cops is our piece of shit mayor, ted wheeler, who everybody hates but who is still in office because first past the post elections are a shitty, anti-democratic way of running elections... i think we actually changed the way we do elections, i forget what we're doing now, but i think it's not first past the post.

anyway, this fucking landlord piece of shit is too chickenshit to call out the cops and the police union, so that's the current situation. everybody hates the cops but the one guy with the authority to do anything about it refuses to do so, and yes that's not exactly a great situation for public safety. the cops also have trouble hiring because they're racist pieces of shit who everybody except ted wheeler hates.

so! we have a situation where portland isn't being effectively funded _or_ governed. the homeless situation is... the city passed an ordinance recently banning daytime camping, and they're going to start enforcing it soon. which sucks for the people who are homeless but it turns out just letting people camp on the streets isn't an adequate substitute for an effective social safety net. it just, honestly, it wasn't working out.

the funny thing is that housing prices are _still fucking going up_. people are camping on every street, the graffiti has gotten to the point where some people are actually spraying cross-hatching over signs on the highway so motorists can't read them (again, i'm pro-graffiti, but i think that's maybe going a little far)... after real estate developers gentrified the historically black neighborhood there's now a diaspora all over portland and so we have, for the first time ever in our history, white flight, and real estate prices are _still going up_. people are still losing their jobs and being forced out into the street.

and i do see this acutely because, you know, i'm trans and this is an immediate and pressing concern for a good chunk of my friends. even the ones who are employed... jobs here don't pay enough to be able to afford housing. add to that the situation... i'm not really connected with much of the larger trans community these days, but earlier this year every week at least one trans person was showing up from usually-texas because it wasn't safe to live there anymore. i mean it doesn't matter what else happens here, portland is safe for trans people in a way most of the country just isn't.

but yeah, let's run a whole story talking about our Hero Security Guards

whenever people outside of here write about portland... it's like reading people in general-readership publications writing about science. they get it so fucking wrong. people talk about it like it's some horrible example of the left eating itself, which... i mean, we _do_, but it's less about our political beliefs and more about us being systemically underresourced and traumatized. but nobody ever talks about _that_ part of it.

some people are actually spraying cross-hatching over signs on the highway so motorists can't read them

lol i was driving up and down the 405 yesterday and today and was like "damn if i didn't know this city like the back of my hand *and* also have gps in my car i'd be so fucked rn", you simply couldn't read a single exit sign

Kate, thank you for the context.

Xpost

"America’s epidemic of chronic illness is killing us too soon"
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/america-s-epidemic-of-chronic-illness-is-killing-us-too-soon/ar-AA1hCsaz

After decades of progress, life expectancy — long regarded as a singular benchmark of a nation’s success — peaked in 2014 at 78.9 years, then drifted downward even before the coronavirus pandemic. Among wealthy nations, the United States in recent decades went from the middle of the pack to being an outlier. And it continues to fall further and further behind.

A year-long Washington Post examination reveals that this erosion in life spans is deeper and broader than widely recognized, afflicting a far-reaching swath of the United States.

While opioids and gun violence have rightly seized the public’s attention, stealing hundreds of thousands of lives, chronic diseases are the greatest threat, killing far more people between 35 and 64 every year, The Post’s analysis of mortality data found.

Heart disease and cancer remained, even at the height of the pandemic, the leading causes of death for people 35 to 64. And many other conditions — private tragedies that unfold in tens of millions of U.S. households — have become more common, including diabetes and liver disease. These chronic ailments are the primary reason American life expectancy has been poor compared with other nations.

Sickness and death are scarring entire communities in much of the country. The geographical footprint of early death is vast: In a quarter of the nation’s counties, mostly in the South and Midwest, working-age people are dying at a higher rate than 40 years ago, The Post found. The trail of death is so prevalent that a person could go from Virginia to Louisiana, and then up to Kansas, by traveling entirely within counties where death rates are higher than they were when Jimmy Carter was president.

I wonder what could be the cause?/s

https://www.c-span.org/video/?153917-1/president-carter-address-crisis-confidence

it's almost as if politics were more than just a game of sneering at gaffes made by the other side

Almost

ok, a little health data nerding out here

In 2015, Princeton University economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton garnered national headlines with a study on rising death rates among White Americans in midlife, which they linked to the marginalization of people without a college degree and to “deaths of despair.”

always. always always always. it hasn't changed since 2015. look at the wapo's data. it's county by county. bonnie holloway? white. the people in the pictures accompanying the article? mostly white. the doctors aren't. most of the patients are.

and it perpetuates this grossly distorted picture of what's happening. there's this "rural purge" narrative that's emerged where everything is focused on white americans without a college degree and, you know, i feel bad for them even if their behavior is profoundly self-destructive. they're not the first or the only people to be let down by the profit-driven american medical system.

like, really, i'm not judging, i didn't understand the extent or impact of misogyny until it started happening to me... to the extent that white rural americans without a college degree can _understand_ what's happening and, you know, work with people who aren't like them to take steps to address it... which is hard. i know it's hard. particularly when you're isolated and are only used to operating in one community.

the thing is, if you look at the data, the thing that's not mentioned at all in this article, is the tremendous gap in healthcare along racial lines. which has always been there and for most of my life wasn't acknowledge, people didn't want to acknowledge race as a factor in outcomes. but it is. you want to see the starkest example of that, just look at infant mortality.

_poverty is not a white phenomenon_. i wish media narratives would fucking quit acting like it is.

the other thing you need though is a complete societal shift in how we view illness. big example: obesity. obesity is _still_ thought of as an individual moral failure even though that just isn't the fucking case. my girlfriend gets shamed a lot more for being obese than she does for being trans.

the way the healthcare system treats her... always, always always, they want her to go in for more diabetes testing, and diabetes testing is good, is important, but they _already did labs_, they found her blood sugar _normal_, her a1c _normal_, but when clinicians look at her, it doesn't matter what the data says, she's _obese_ and they can't believe their data.

incidentally diabetes is a good way to look at racial differences in medicine. my mom has had diabetes since 1981. she developed gestational diabetes while pregnant with her third child, which developed into full-blown diabetes after. she's been obese her whole live, and she's been a smoker since she was about 15. her health is overall very good, even though she's resistant to getting medical treatment.

living alone, she had an infection but wanted to tough it out, wouldn't leave. none of her relatives lived in the same town as her. my brother couldn't get her to go to the ER. finally her sister got her to do it. she didn't want to call an ambulance because ambulances are too expensive. which they are. the ambulance business is a fucking racket and everybody knows it and nobody does anything about it. i think uber and lyft probably won't even _take_ you to a hospital... how many people say they're "just visiting" rather than call an ambulance, which costs orders of magnitude more?

ambulances are a racket. private health insurance is a racket. most of us know this stuff. and it affects, it influences the care we get. my mom's career was mostly as a government employee, she retired as a government employee, so she has access to care. her diabetes is well-controlled, well-managed. all of stuff you have to worry about with diabetes? losing limbs, losing eyesight? not at risk. now, she's done the work to do that, she takes it seriously. her brother, who has done pretty well for himself, also has diabetes, and he doesn't do as much work to take care of it, and he's had more problems with it. so i don't want to underestimate the role taking care of oneself plays. that said, she also has resources available to her that most people simply don't, and that reality is _reflected in the data_. but when people _look_ at the data, it always seems to be through the lens of health disparities affecting white middle-aged rural americans without a college education, and that gives one a pretty distorted view of things.

---

focusing on... even _preventative_ medicine is the wrong approach. the focus needs to be on _trauma_ and the sources of trauma. i talk about it a lot with other people who are going through the MH system. the way the mental health system reduces things to an individual level, atomizes things, while not dealing with systemic factors in mental health.

that's not a deliberate bias. that's, like, a necessary evil. circle of control. circle of control. the therapists and the patients alike know what's happening. most of us know, at least in portland most of us know, that the problem is capitalism. overthrowing capitalism isn't the job of the mental health system. it is, however, the solution. the problem is exemplified by the washington post's owner (who i hasten to add i don't believe had any overt influence whatsoever on the focus or tone of the article), and the solution is for us to _acknowledge our differences_. i want what comes next to be what's better than we have now, and i think an important part of doing that is working to understand and care for each other now, when none of us have the resources to do so. as fucking hard as it is, in some ways it's easier, when none of us have _access_ to sufficient resources to even care for ourselves.

the united states absolutely is a dystopia. for me? for me the united states has _always_ been a dystopia. and that's the case for a lot of people. acknowledging that isn't an act of despair for me, it's realizing how much those of us living in dystopian conditions are _doing_, how much we're all working against.

_poverty is not a white phenomenon_. i wish media narratives would fucking quit acting like it is.

In a raw numbers sense, though, it is. There are a hell of a lot more poor white people than poor people of other groups, because this is still a majority white country, even if those margins are narrowing. So it's reasonable, from a certain angle, to focus on white poverty, particularly if it's been rendered less visible because of several decades' worth of media narratives about black poverty (in the cities, where all the journalists live).

So it's reasonable, from a certain angle, to focus on white poverty, particularly if it's been rendered less visible because of several decades' worth of media narratives about black poverty (in the cities, where all the journalists live).

― read-only (unperson), Wednesday, October 4, 2023 8:00 AM (one hour ago)

that's a good point and i got to really thinking about the article and the way it was constructed and the different ways in which it unconsciously replicated the racial systems of, in particular, louisville, kentucky (in that the sections dealing with race were sort of set apart from the rest of the story, and in the rest of the story race wasn't considered at all even though pretty much everybody involved was white... or when they're talking about a doctor who was born in pakistan! basically for non-white people, race was acknowledged, when it came to the experiences of white people, the story actually went out of its way to avoid pointing out that they were white)... anyway those are rough thoughts and they could use more elaboration because i decided to organize my dresser. it looks good! i have way more tops than i thought i did, which is good because portland is infamous for its top shortage. (the one true sign of a dystopia - everyone is a bottom. i think sartre came up with that one. sartre of course was famously a bottom himself.)

You want to find places where "sickness and death are scarring entire communities"? How about you take a hard look at indian reservations, WaPo, then come back and cry hot tears for us about diminishing life expectancy among whites.

Some of the darkest counties on that WaPo map were native lands.

You want to find places where "sickness and death are scarring entire communities"? How about you take a hard look at indian reservations, WaPo, then come back and cry hot tears for us about diminishing life expectancy among whites.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless)

exactly. when covid was hitting and all of the advice was coming out to "wash your hands for 20 seconds", a lot of the native population in alaska was looking at this advice and was like, ok, well, what do you do if you don't have running water? because that's the fucking reality of it for a lot of people.

Some of the darkest counties on that WaPo map were native lands.

― Elvis Telecom, Wednesday, October 4, 2023 5:06 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is absolutely true and it is tragic and shameful.

but the fact that life expectancy is dropping overall -- among the majority of the population -- has to be reckoned with as well. often, people from different demographic groups are affected by similar factors.

often, people from different demographic groups are affected by similar factors.

We all eat the same garbage*, we all breathe the same air.

*Yeah, yeah, you buy organic fruit at Whole Foods and eat fish instead of red meat and drink oat milk and blah blah blah. It all gets harvested from the same chemical-soaked earth, all the fish come out of the same polluted water...

Right but the main things actually killing people early are smoking, drinking, and consuming too much sugar/the wrong kind of fat.

With carcinogens it’s true aside from smoking we’re all pretty much at risk. But there’s significantly more risk from say your new car smell or the offgassing from the plywood in your walls than from that organic lettuce.

uh

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

some people are more at risk than others and it breaks down along class/race lines, what a surprise

I mean this is just from North Carolina, a plethora of articles and examples

https://ncnewsline.com/author/lisa-sorg/

i done my own research check it out i know why ppl dying.

also this doesn’t mean what you think it means.

or maybe it exactly does.

the issue is that any crisis becomes a crisis when white, perhaps formerly middle class people or middle class people are feeling its effects. the crisis that these bullshit papers breathlessly rend garments over in rural and exurban white communities has been occurring in non-white communities rural and suburban and urban communities for fucking ever. anyone with a fucking ounce of analysis knows that this is the case, and that it’s not that these problems don’t need to be addressed in white communities, but that they need to be addressed in all communities , but that rarely happens because of white supremacy.