i do not think the average american voter realizes the privileges that they had as as citizens of a deeply integrated world hegemon are slowly vanishing one by one

To quote one of Guiterman’s more serious poems about America, “Only is grief unavailing for glory departed — Only in want do we count what the glory is worth.”

I have a white coworker that I'm somewhat friends with and he told me that he's planning on taking a trip to Japan in about a month or so. It will be interesting to hear about how he is treated over there by the locals when he gets back, especially with all of this going on.

The Japanese are far too polite for him to notice Anyone angry with him will say something he'll mistake for a compliment lol

Pretty much. I tried telling him about the phenomenon that happens when some anime viewers visit Japan and become depressed because it's barely like how it's depicted in those cartoons and he didn't know anything about it. So it's safe to say that you might be right about that.

Wait until he tries to get into the shops with "Japanese Only" signs...

I do. I'm 73 and many/most things at least for were better in the 1990s.

Honestly all the average person does now is show each other funny tik-toks on their phone and eat fastfood slop. They'll never notice.

Yeah, we have been sleepwalking into this for many years now. And the normalization of it all by the media and the pundits has been instrumental. Don't wake up, stay in your dream world, everything is OK, there's nothing to worry about, certainly not fascism!

UBL really did one-shot America. It just took 24 years to take effect.

Oh no, it was the rightwing Christian wackos. They have been at work undermining our democracy for decades before 9/11.

But do that get that opening without a 9/11? A lot of this has been simmering away for a long time, but I don't know if it all boils over if the towers are still there.

I don't think 9/11 was a big factor except to aggravate existing xenophobia and paranoia among the "deplorables". I think the culture war stuff and Obama's Presidency were more important, leading to major advances for the right wing. More people felt free to unleash their inner Nazi.

A lot of that stuff started entering the main stream as anti Muslim rhetoric as 9/11 made Islamophobia a pretty mainstream position. A kid in my class has bricks thrown through their window. But it's also trying to argue which link in a chain is the most important.

If we're all alive by then, Christmas is going to be fuckin bleak.

"i didn't know what to say...." youtu.be/Ym6AkJyH_kY?...

the natcons great aspirations is for the US to be hungary so...here we go

*North Korea* 🤷

Well they're going to get the us to be Hungry so that's only one vowel away.

Aim high...

I thought they wanted to be Russia or did they change their minds after Ukraine been defying Russia for the last 2+ years

Rank and file - Russian propaganda Conservative elites, especially the "intellectual" or Federalist Society types - Hungarian example

They want to be Hungary but if they keep it up, a lot will be hungry

oh yay hungarian fascism worked out so well for my people cool cool

You should be so lucky. Hungary has by far the most authoritarian system in the EU, but the regime is crumbling and it doesn't roll over innocents in its death throes. Hungarian cities are not under siege. The government can be meaningfully replaced in democratic elections.

For instance, the Hungarian government banned the gay pride parade in June, still a quarter of a million people showed up (a huge number in a small country!), and the police *protected* these peaceful protesters against the busload's worth of Proud Boys type provocateurs who showed up to disrupt it.

Hungary’s in the Schengen Zone. Shit, we’re gonna wish we had that level of international access and privilege

Wow, they're banning guns now? I live in Hungary and no, the situation is not even close to what's in the US. We don't have the military deployed on the streets, or anything like ICE, or even a fraction of the police brutality at our demonstrations. We have corruption but next to no violence.

At this point, many of the average American voters seem to be content eating paste.

We have generations of people who fed off the labor of the people who made this country work and they paid them back in scorn.

then again is there anything more american than having the entire system thoroughly rigged to favor you at every step and then loudly announcing that you made everything yourself from nothing and its time to smash the entire system which has been nothing but a hindrance to your greatness

I should have stockpiled more mirin.

I don’t want to shitlib post but this is pretty much Putins revenge

It’s a real existential nightmare for those of us who do know it though