The United States right now is having a lot of parallels to the Soviet Union in the late Brezhnev era:
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An increasing amount of people losing faith in the government.
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Common people continuing to have economic issues.
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Foreign military conflicts occurring, especially in the Middle East, that are, at best, stalemates.
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The head of government is having, or has had, a mental decline.
even Brezhnev and the soviet bureaucracy at it's most corrupt and self-serving still found a way to give everyone free healthcare...
and housing...
and education...
and food...
goddamn it lenin return to us :cyber-lenin:
Graveyard of empires takes its... fuck, how many times as Afghanistan toppled an empire again? I lost count
Funny you mention Brezhnev. I was reading the wiki article for the term "Gerontocracy" and couldn't help but notice the anti-communist propaganda (framing it as if all communist states inevitably get run by out-of-touch, senile old fucks) immediately followed by the United States section.
so our next leader will sell us out for a mediocre meal and plunge us into horrifying conditions?
Kamala state visit to the U.K., 2025 - The Empire Strikes back
So you mean as soon as a new leader orders tanks to shoot the congress buildings with parliamentarians inside the United States (like Union of Soviets!) breaks apart in a multitude of "nations"?
sadly dissolution of the union is unlikely because none of the states have any culture or identity of their own unlike in the soviet union.
Eh, it’s definitely different because of settler colonialism and the cities and populations developing in a much shorter time then in Europe, but I do think there would be enough differences that some areas would want to, it just wouldn’t be all individual 50 states, or even necessarily perfectly in current state lines.
The biggest ones that comes to mind are Texas and the former confederate states, who already constantly threaten to, or at least the republicans there in.
That brings up some concerns about how the large and mostly democratic POC populations in those states would react.And now writing this, I think you might be right, America is very divided and I don’t know if whatever regional differences exist is enough to create sovereign states in the same way as ethnic nationalism could in the former USSR.
Plenty of good comparisons to the late Soviet era. People in general - from the presidium all the way to the regular people - were largely just "going through the motions" of it all. The entire leadership was a gerontocracy and completely out of touch with what younger people wanted and were unresponsive. In the face of numerous economic challenges, instead of being pragmatic and trying out new ideas, the leadership just stuck with all the "old ways of doing things".
Red Plenty is a great book about this, but you have to go into it with the right mindset. It's easy to read it and become a real doomer because the USSR genuinely tried to get socialism right but they just couldn't put it all together. It depressed me at first but I later realized all the mistakes the USSR made don't have to be repeated. Instead, Red Plenty basically reads like the present-day USA. We (US Americans) can see the problems in our system and are both unwilling and unable to fix them. And think it's gonna lead to some sort of collapse.
can see the problems in our system and are both unwilling and unable to fix them
Real HyperNormalisation hours
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lmao looking forward to Joe Biden being the first president to die in office in the 21st century
Can't wait to see all the conspiracy theorists pull a 180º and start saying that he was a great president murdered by the commie antifa.
it was because the commies were too mean on the internet, it gave him a stroke! now think twice before you post
"We're a gerontocracy!" "No, we're a plutocracy!" "Kleptocracy!" "Oligarchy!" "Fascist police state!"
What if we took all the worst ideas and put them together? what could go wrong?
NFTs are great! You get to launder money using art but more slowly and publicly and use more energy than a household does in a month!
This is the "people who enjoy art are deluding themselves" guy from that P=NP thread.
Lmao I'm so proud I started that weird fucking thread. It wasn't even about P=NP but I guess it is now.
You're right lol the discussion got so out of hand that I forgot it was just about theoretical math in general. Well done though, probably my favourite and the least painful struggle session.
the standards have been lowered to the point that it doesn’t matter anymore
well, they're not wrong about that. not that the standards for the mental health for capitalist war criminals matters.
it's been 2 months and he's already this gone lol, he's not making it for 4 years
"Memories, misty colored oatmeal, Frank Sinatra at the Copacabana, lifeguard for the black kids, sit my lap little girl..."
"Um... Mr. President - my question was 'What are you doing to do about North Korea's nuclear weapons test?'"
"Kim-jung-a-jung Asian man brought to heel - you know the deal!"
It's a cheap trick for my impressions. My other go-to is to have him say "America" over and over. I just can't resist the urge. It's how I hear him in my head. Anyway - I haven't watched he press conference yet. I will later and hopefully it'll give me new ideas.
America America America to the tune of Developers Developers Developers?
I have him say stuff like...
"America is— because America is America - the greatest country in here's the deal - the history of America...."
A music reference could work really well. Maybe I'll use America from West Side Story
2024 primary, Kamala Harris loses again and the Dems have to scramble to find another elderly man on death's door for her to be the VP of
This is how Bernie can still win!
(God I hate that meme, but it works well here.)
Finally, the libs have their Reagan 30 years after the moment for Reagan was over. Now they can all die knowing they've undone the Mondale loss.
Biden in the middle of answering questions: "am I going too long jack? I'm sorry I'll just stop there."
"what you didn't even finish your first point"
https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/md7wnh/biden_excels_at_his_first_news_conference_the/
Biden excels at his first news conference. The media embarrass themselves.
The thread is starting to take off so there's some quality lib brain brewing.
At least Red MAGA wears a hat to let you know how terrible they are.
r/politics reflexively calling mild criticism of the President fake news :thonk:
If you ever sort r/politics by new, half the posts will be articles about democrats doing something bad or with mild criticism of democrats, with a whole heap of downvotes and a bunch of reflexive comments basically saying "this is not from our official list of acceptable MSM news outlets, ignored, fake news" so their brain doesn't even have to begin to engage with it
The delusion of the people in that thread has honestly made me feel uneasy, just literally being like "he realised that it was a waste of time so he decided to leave early". Yeah, sure thing :whywhywhywhywhy:
He had to go DRIVE A CAR and speak COMPLETE SENTENCES and LOVE AMREIC A god bless him and his dogs :flag-agender-pride: but the american flag instead
"Tonight Biden restored dignity to violently shitting your pants while screaming the N word at a press conference" - /r/politics in like 6 months probably.
He literally told you what day it is and who the president is. What more do you want? You want him to draw a clock with all the numbers at the bottom like time is a void he feels his last remnants of consciousness slipping into?
Y'all, any president is going to say they're running again during the first three months of their term. If Biden said he wasn't running he'd immediately become a lame duck.
This means nothing. Biden doesn't know if he's running in 2024 and neither does anyone else.
Chen made a post about it being a bad idea because he's be 82 and someone on rose twitter was like "oh yeah, how old was Mao when he died in office, chen!?"
"I was going to go 82 and then he died lol"
but they deleted it, I guess realizing it didn't make the point they thought.Don't you know? Those unscrupulous obedient orientals lack the skull shape that enables free thought.
