I’m going to die a very scary, traumatic death and so are a lot of the people who are closest to my heart—we’re all homeless, and we’re all drug addicts, and I have the special bonus of being (sort of) trans as well. I’m already seeing the ratcheting up of hatred for homeless drug users—I’ll be shot in the head and kicked into a pit, and my only hope is that I’ll be one of the very first so I won’t have to live with the pain of worrying about anyone I care about.
So yeah, while I agree that America’s collapse would be a W for humankind overall, it’s hard to fucking see that silver lining when things are that bleak.
I just want the rest of what’s likely to be a very short life to be chill. I just want things to be normal.
I feel you. This shit is horrifying and no amount of detached irony changes that. It might be good for humanity in a big picture way but it's horrific for people living right now.
I totally feel to see his anything good is supposed to come of a US collapse, even in a very big picture. You mean like CO2 emission would go down or sth.?
Like the end of a globe-spanning empire that sponsors and perpetrates horrible fascist violence and genocide. Like the end of sanctions/blockades on places like Cuba and the DPRK. Honestly just those make it seem pretty good in the very big picture.
I don't think wishing for it makes anything good happen though. I feel pretty bad about the immediate localized consequences myself
Hell, it'd be better even for the imperial core and US vassals (who don't deserve the benefit). The likes of Europe and the UK could eliminate US interference in their elections, rebuild some of their specialised manufacturing base, not get dragged into every murderous boondoggle of a war and spend their military budgets on actual defense instead of vanity hardware to line the pockets of US military contractors.
Maybe I phrased it awkwardly. I mean the Europe doesn't deserve the benefits of American decline. I wasn't expressing sympathy.
lol, my bad. We’re in agreement on that point (and complete disagreement that Europe has anything good coming for it anyway)
No worries comrade. On second read it wasn't too clear so I edited.
Amerika is the greatest threat to humanity. The end of its global hegemony would be the best thing for the worldlol imagine supporting america, knowing every fucking awful thing it's done
knowing every fucking awful thing it's done
i'd wager it's unlikely that they do
America has crushed more socialist movements worldwide than any other government in history
It's failure was inevitable, it's already in mid-failure. We (the masses "we" not like a handful of people on hexbear lol) can decide if that failure hurts us or not.
A long time ago, in the 30s, my people remember the Great Depression a little different than the settlers. For us, the indigenous were always poor - and now so were the whites. If anything social reality got better for a lot of people and there was more solidarity - amid the terror of unemployment and poverty, I don't want to pay a rosey picture. Just that market failure and capitalism finally grinding against itself doesn't mean that the proletariate only has terror to look forward to.
Failure of America does not have to mean the homeless die on the street - we can redistribute goods and set up squats. We can set up vertical hydroponics farms in empty office towers. We can set up free clinics and use biomodofied yeast and e coli to make our drugs and meds without enantiomers - more pure than chemical processes. I don't want to make you feel like you're feelings and fears are wrong - only tell you that the coming struggle can be won to our benefit, and it's not all downside for the people alive today but maybe good for the future. No, it can be good for us too!
We can set up free clinics and use biomodofied yeast and e coli to make our drugs and meds without enantiomers - more pure than chemical processes
idk what that means either, but it sounds cool so i am upvoting it
If you make a drug with chemistry, it'll make a 50/50 mix of left-mirrored and right-mirrored molecules. Like your hands, they're mirror images but cannot be flipped to be the other one. Sometimes the mirror of the desired molecule is harmless and sometimes it'll cause massive birth defects or be deadly poison.
If you program a yeast cell to make that drug molecule it'll only make the desired molecule and not its mirror.
A lot of pharmaceuticals have two (or more forms) that identical in chemical formula and mostly identical in structure, except one chiral centre is flipped. Sometimes that version doesn't do anything, sometimes it kills you. Classic example is one version of thalidomide is just a nice sedative, one version will be a total disaster to babies in utero.
Chemical processes can rarely distinguish between the forms, you can do some engineering to change up the racemic mixture to favour one form over another but you can't really get 100% of one form - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enantiopure_drug
But... cells do that all the time. Tons of proteins have tons of ways they could be folded. Same for an substance they excrete from a protein. They can distinguish between enantiomers very very well - that's what they've evolved to do! We can take advantage of that by inserting a vector teaching the bacteria or yeast to make one specific form of a substance. And they will, they just do the instructions they're given. They will excrete the target drug or med in a pure racemic mixture. We can take advantage of that, we just need to insert those vectors into yeast or whatever soonish and just grow em for "free" (absent the initial cost lol and the cost to wash the drug from the rest of the crap we don't want). That's what I mean.
pure racemic mixture
A racemic mixture is a 50/50 mix of enantiomers
It’s a little known band called revolutionary optimism. You wouldn’t have heard of them
its entirely possible and people are already working on expanding access to certain medications with that. transformed e. coli and yeast are already used industrially to produce medications like insulin (a plasmid carrying the human insulin gene is forced into e. coli). theoretically you could do this with anything, just insert the human gene for it into some bacteria or yeast and they become little factories for it.
Failure of America does not have to mean the homeless die on the street
Also not to hijack your comment but failure of America does not mean failure of the world. Other states may still exist and we don't have to reinvent humanity is the US falls.
can set up vertical hydroponics farms in empty office towers. We can set up free clinics and use biomodofied yeast and e coli to make our drugs and meds without enantiomers - more pure than chemical processes.
I like your funny words
what makes me uncomfortable is when fellow leftists think that even the most anodyne pacifistic daydreams of america's fall are 'fucking terrifying' or 'nihilistic' and use marginalized communities as ideological human shields to run defense for american empire like it isn't currently killing homeless and trans people everywhere it goes and wouldn't do much more of that if its hegemony were less precarious.
If it helps I don’t think it’s going to collapse as much as others seem to think it will. The US is sturdy and will continue to be a global power even after it ceases to be a superpower, much like Russia or Germany.
I can see individual states collapsing because of climate change but not the entire country itself. If anything it will continue to exist in a fragmented state.
The US is blessed with some of the most plentiful resources and favourable geography in the world. Hundreds of millions of people living in that land under a single government would never not be a power.
Good news, it’s not going to collapse. It’s going to continue the slow decline it’s been experiencing for the past 20 years. Any violence as decisive as lining people up and shooting them will have enough gradual escalation leading up to it, over years, that you will be able to get the fuck out of dodge before it comes to that.
The rate of decline will not stay constant. If it remains on this current trajectory and the rate of change doesn't change then yeah, it will just continue a slow slide for decades. But these things always reach a certain tipping point when the institutions and norms that kept the machine churning fail and then the dominoes fall rapidly.
Sib doesn’t know about the transformation of quantitative changes into qualitative leaps.
Being a human shield of the amerikkkan empire sucks.
It's easier to imagine an horrifying, painful death than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.
I'd love to see this timeline for US collapse. Because what I'm seeing is the gutting of the EPA and likely the expansion of colonial capitalism for natural resources under a Trump administration.
None of that is good for humans or anyone else that lives on this planet.
And of course, targeting of trans people and other minorities domestically. Which personally affects me. But I don't see a silver lining for the rest of the planet either.
I can't stand the Democrats as much as the next leftist. But the US collapse rhetoric feels more like nihilism than hope to me.
If it's any consolation I suspect a "collapse" will not be all that simple. The policies carried out from place to place will be incredibly different, what happens in the south east isn't going to be the same policy carried out in Vermont for example. If balkanisation of the US occurred it would rapidly redraw into new power groups and each of those new regions would have different policy. Whichever one decides it wants to get rid of the homeless would also likely not shoot them but instead use hostile policy to make them migrate out of the region first.
With that said I think a collapse or balkanisation is the least likely outcome.
Yeah I sometimes get a little queasy when people here cheer about the possibility of my state balkanizing. I do agree it would be funny and would help reduce worldwide imperialism, but also I live here and don't like the idea of suddenly being stranded in a kleptocraric fascist Christian theocracy that goes broken within a year. I worry about some homeless folks I know too
Like I know I probably wouldn't experience 1% of what Palestinians or the Yemeni are going through, but like, I want my apartment and I want my money to be recognized as money and not Jesus fun bucks. Disclaimer though, I know I'm a crakkker and a settler and so I definitely have first-wolder disease and privilege that would probably get destroyed in open balkanization.
Death to America of course.
Its just Big Game Posting™ gotta signal to everyone how hardcore you are on the internet.
It won't be leftists celebrating empire collapse that will be going after people. When these institutions fail, the power sources most likely to be able to carry on, are also incidentally, exactly where a lot of conservative social and economic power is concentrated - these will use fascistic methods, because they are the methods of that class, they will justify leaving the weak to die, or actively killing them so as to justify the proscription and hoarding of resources and what will assureidly include a robust violation of of other social norms - everything that's been politely hidden behind privacy laws and norms will be actively destroyed, the scapegoats will be the people on the periphery that are least able to comport to whatever game of musical chairs that powered elite will want to play, which is gonna include the unhoused and the gender strange (it scares me quite a lot as a transfemme ngl)
and leftists being glad that maybe the beast will be too busy re-growing limbs and heads to do another genocide abroad - are not going to be the enemy, but their status as useful friends will come down to how they are also reacting to that moment, because anybody going ~WoOp wOoP D2A~ and otherwise sitting on their ass and trying to figure out how to comport to the new normal, are useless.
It's a healthy coping method. America collapsing will be a net positive for the world, even if it makes our lives shittier. Also collapse doesn't necessarily mean you will die. And if you do, at least the people in Gaza won't have American bombs raining on them.
The detachment prepares me to commit war crimes against fascists. Kill them in the worst way first
