• cmbabul@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Yall the history majors have been freaking the fuck out for over a decade

    Source: am history major and have been freaking the fuck out for over a decade as have several classmates and other historians

    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      4 months ago

      I am not a history major, but I got a 5 on AP US History… and have degrees in Econ and Poli Sci.

      Basically, the last 10 years for me has been everyone I know thinking I am literally insane.

      And then roughly 90% of what I was saying would happen, has now happened, within +/- 2 years of when I said it probably would.

      None of them have bothered to apologize for being wrong, emphatically, derisivesly wrong, about basicsally everything, so, fuck em, and fuck this country honestly.

      • petrichornetrainfall@piefed.social
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        4 months ago

        Not only do they never apologize for being wrong, they never apologize for accusing you of wearing tinfoil when what you said would happen, happens.

        Then they continue telling you you’re over-reacting about the current thing you’re telling them.

        Its like consistently predicting the lottery numbers, and then arguing with you when they keep losing even though you tell them the winning number the day before every time.

            • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
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              4 months ago

              IIRC there was a funny tale … in christian medieval times, it was illegal to tell the future. (like, fortune tellers and such)

              in the text i read, people predicting the future was seen as a “real” thing, i.e. they believed it really worked. they still didn’t like it though. i wonder why.

        • Strider@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Yes this! There’s literally no space for them between treating you insane and then freaking out.

          No one could’ve known!

      • Hatshepsut@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Two books you might want to check out are The Death of Expertise by Tom Nichols and “The Tyranny of Merit” by Michael Sandel. Here is a link to his TED profile and talks. Both talk about why this is happening and how we got here. While somewhat depressing, I found both books very validating(? can’t put a word to it) of all the frustration with family/friends these last years. Education has been gutted and imho real history is no longer taught. Add the internet and social media to the culture and suddenly everyone is an expert. In less than a year, he has destroyed the integrity, reputation and effectiveness of every federal agency made to keep us safe and let us sleep at night. The UN has been effectively neutralized by our vote on the security council. It’s maddening beyond words and I’m scared shitless of what’s to come.

        • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          4 months ago

          I will try and check those out, thanks for the reading list =D

          But uh… yeah.

          I had a terrifying ‘validation’ moment when I realized that +/- 1 year of when I graduated Uni…

          That was the peak of average US literacy and math abilities.

          I have always gotten a lot of shit for describing myself as usually the most intelligent person I know personally, in the real, in most social situations I am in…

          And well now the chances of me personally running into someone on my level who is younger than me are approaching zero.

          Most people I meet, even doctors, other kinds of professionals… they do not believe me when I tell them I have two degrees and used to work for MSFT, a Fortune 500 logistics company, that I independently taught myself how to code in multiple programming languages and SQL, unrelated to my degrees, that I have enough knowledge to build a video game from “scratch” (yay Godot!), because I have also been making video game mods for two decades…

          They just think I am literally crazy and making it up, because I don’t look or talk like a corpo type.

          Yep, I just love it here.

      • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
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        4 months ago

        I have had friends start to freak out this term. I told them that most of this same stuff happened last term, you just didn’t hear about it (or listen to what I was saying) for some reason. Granted, he’s become much, much worse since our conversations in February because of SCOTUS backing him, but he had concentration camps last time as well.

        • PugJesus@piefed.social
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          4 months ago

          I remember reading about them sterilizing migrant women in camps at the border last term and just staring at the wall for a good minute.

          Can’t wait (/s) to see what escalations await us.

            • PugJesus@piefed.social
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              4 months ago

              Yeah. The news broke in 2020 during the later part of the election cycle, but the incidents started around 2018.

              A fourth of the population swore up and down it didn’t happen (“But if it did, they shouldn’t have been here illegally in the first place!”), a fourth said “I don’t know who to trust so I’m going to ignore it 😔”, a fourth said “I don’t follow politics/I’m more worried about consumer prices”, and a fourth was pissed.

              Welcome to American politics. Leave your sense of decency at the door.

        • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          4 months ago

          I mean, Trump did Jan 6th, said he wanted to be a dictator, Project 2025 outlined everything that was going to be, and is currently being done.

          It was not any kind of difficult to figure this out lately, unless one just prides themself on being ignorant or has some kind of unexamined onion layers of normalcy bias at the same they are angry and worried about how not normal things are.

          Oh well, cognitive dissonance is a bitch I guess, time for the Great Filter to attempt to cull that out of the gene pool.

      • cmbabul@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        I feel for you, none of us are getting apologies of any kind, nor are we likely to get any accolades for being right. Shit sucks

  • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
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    4 months ago

    That’s me, with a degree in history, and a lifetime of watching it play out. My anxiety level has never been this high. This is not normal life, and we are absolutely careening towards disaster, and NOBODY at the top has the slightest idea how to drive this car. I don’t think some of them are even smart enough to know what a car is, or how it works.

    I know where this all leads to. I know how many people have said “It will never happen in my beautiful country.” Every German said that in 1939. In 5 years, entire cities were bombed to rubble, and millions of their fellow citizens were dead.

    In 1984, Sarajevo hosted the Olympics, and showed their beautiful modern city and nation to the world. In 1992, less that 10 years later, they were under siege in the Bosnian War:

    Lasting from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996 (1,425 days), it was three times longer than the Battle of Stalingrad and more than a year longer than the siege of Leningrad, making it the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare.[11]

    The Huns used to come to a beautiful city, and kill literally every single person. One day, the people are enjoying their lives, and the next day, every single one of them is dead.

    The horrors of war happen to normal cities all the time, throughout history. Too many people on both sides don’t understand how easily it can happen to them. Nobody is immune.

    • luciferofastora@feddit.org
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      4 months ago

      I would also call to mind the slow decay of the Western Roman Empire, where many of the elites just thought the death throes to be another crisis that would pass, because they never expected that the empire could even end.

      Just because something has stood for a long time, that doesn’t mean it can’t come crumbling down. Whether slowly or quickly, whether quietly or violently, the world will change, and there is no telling whether the structures we took for granted will endure, or whether whatever change may come will be for the better. We can only guess, and my guesses aren’t particularly optimistic.

  • SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    World Wide Financial Crisis ✅

    World Wide Pandemic ✅

    Fascist Take Over of a Super Power ✅

    History doesn’t repeat itself but it sure rhymes.

  • LillyPip@lemmy.ca
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    4 months ago

    Yeah, no. That was 2015. Then from 2016-2019 it was:

    Then from 2020 to 2023 it was:

    Then in 2024 it was:

    And now in 2025, it’s:

  • Jankatarch@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    How could anyone see this coming when until 2016 we were just minding our own business invading small countries in the east.

  • Stupidmanager@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Like living in a live documentary with shitty actors who are happy to portray their historical characters by committing acts of violence against other humans.

        • KingOfSleep@lemmy.ca
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          4 months ago

          It’s never too late unless we give in to cynicism and apathy. It is heart breaking that so many people already have given up the fight.

          • HumanOnEarth@lemmy.ca
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            4 months ago

            I’m sorry but it really is too late. The US government has access to all the money, information, and weapons they need to be 100x worse than Hitler. There is no chance this is stopped by overcoming apathy.

            The literal only hope is a coup, and I’m pretty sure that if it was going to happen, it would have already happened by now. Hopefully I’m wrong.

  • SabinStargem@lemmy.today
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    4 months ago

    I am guessing that Mexico and Canada might be the winners from this in a couple of decades. If they enter a conflict together against the USA during a civil war, they can potentially annex a fair bit of territory. Plus, many world powers would likely support that fight - it is an opportunity to give a black eye and remove the US from the world stage.

    • Rekorse@sh.itjust.works
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      4 months ago

      The government would start an external war before it would let a civil war happen. Just like Germany, its likely the world will need to come together to stop the US.

    • merc@sh.itjust.works
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      4 months ago

      Nobody in North America is going to be a winner from this. It’s going to be chaos. A lot of productive capacity that could otherwise have been used to make useful things or provide useful services is instead going to have to be spent on preventing the chaos in the US from spilling over the border.

      I also don’t think Canada or Mexico would want to annex territory. Annexing requires a strong military to hold the territory, and neither Canada nor Mexico has a strong military. What’s more likely IMO is that there’s some kind of a civil war and the US is split into multiple smaller sovereign states. After the dust settles, some will be on great relations with Canada and Mexico. Others will be isolated states that are closely tied to Russia or Saudi Arabia or something.

      • tempest@lemmy.ca
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        4 months ago

        The US is famous for its advanced weapons but those depend on massive supply chains all over the country.

        They can’t even supply Ukraine with artillery shells.

        All the factories the US had to spin up in their last conventional war are gone and are the people who knew how to run them and work them.

        A civil conflict would be pretty short unless an external power started supplying one side with arms.

  • lennybird@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    So anyway, now may be a good time to:

    1. Reach out to our foreign friends and ask to help lobby their governments to provide refugee programs before we are cut off from the outside world.

    2. Look into decentralized mesh internet infrastructure.

    • NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io
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      4 months ago

      Given the general trend of far-right everything, fat chance of 1 happening before it’s too late. Better hope Mexico is taking people.

      • plyth@feddit.org
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        4 months ago

        Better hope Mexico is taking people.

        After everything that happened?

        Besides, maybe they didn’t build the wall to keep Mexicans out but to keep US Americans in.

    • MisterFrog@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      This is obviously not an expectation on you personally, alone. But have you guys heard of fucking organising a coherent resistance?

      Please. You have nukes, and imperium over much of the world.

      Could you like, actually reform and not just roll over? We don’t want you. (Well, other countries in general. Not that I’d want to prevent people fleeing, personally).

      A mass flight from the US is not a viable solution for the world. It’ll be Gilead, and we’ll all be fucked.

      Sincerely, from the provinces.

      (P.S. it’s not super rosy here either, but at least it’s just sparkling capitalism over here, and not full on fascism)

      It might be a good time to: fight like hell. Get involved in your local political groups organising to stop the rise of fascism. If you don’t, then it’s on you (collectively).

  • marcos@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    The US has been clearly moving downhill since 2001. But the acceleration they got this year has been incredible.

    And for everybody not there, remember they have the largest nuclear arsenal on Earth.

    • Doomsider@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Largest conventional military as big as the rest of the world combined plus the nukes. The US is beyond scary.

    • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
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      4 months ago

      2001?

      Dude, it started long before that. One could argue that it was Newt Gingrich, and the Contract With America in 1994. Or the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, which allowed unregulated propaganda. Or 1986, when Rush Limbaugh’s show proliferated around America, quickly becomes the Conservatives most successful recruiter and indoctrinator. Or in 1974, when the Republicans took advantage of the post-Watergate chaos, and passed a new tax code that baked in Trickle Down Economics.

      Personally, I maintain that it all started in 1968, when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. He would have ended the Vietnam War earlier, saving thousands of lives, and taken America in a completely different direction. Instead, Nixon was elected, and took us down the path of evil that has led to us being occupied by treasonous, corrupt, pedophile MAGA Nazis.

    • mrmanager@lemmy.today
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      4 months ago

      Just enjoy the ride until it ends. People are worrying but there is not much anyone can do.

      The true test of being here is managing to stay a good person in the middle of a world telling you to become a bad one.

    • Socialism_Everyday@reddthat.comBanned
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      4 months ago

      This isn’t the US going downhill, it’s the US incarnate. The country is founded on the genocide of Native Americans, Hitler openly expressed admiration and inspiration from the Manifest Destiny. In the early 1900s, the US was already applying so-called big stick ideology and staging coups in Central America. Hell, when was Jim Crow repealed? This isn’t the US going downhill, it’s the US doing what it’s always done, but slightly towards the inside too.

  • kibiz0r@midwest.social
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    4 months ago

    right now

    I mean…

    • J6
    • QAnon
    • Unite the Right
    • Back The Blue (et al)
    • Chutkan swatting
    • Pelosi attack
    • Whitmer plot
    • Malheur
    • Gamergate
    • Birtherism
    • Tea Party
    • Patriot Act
    • Snowden
    • Abu Ghraib
    • George Lincoln Rockwell
    • John Birch Society
    • Goldwater
    • Reagan (and hell, the ways Carter teed him up)
    • Nixon
    • That whole white nationalist enclave project in the remote Northwest

    I think in many ways the people who paid attention are the least surprised.

  • TheObviousSolution@lemmy.ca
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    4 months ago

    If only it were that. This is an evolution of what happened then, and even though the descent is less drastic it has far more downward momentum because of what’s involved. Given the most likely global victors this time around, the narrative shift that Europe is going to experience this time around is not going to look good.

    People think this is going to be World War III when the reality might be closer to the silence following the height of extinct civilizations, except involving the whole world and with a pending environmental catastrophe to displace humanity to boot.

    • tempest@lemmy.ca
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      4 months ago

      Nah this is all unique. This has definitely never happened anywhere else and they’re are absolutely no parallels that can be drawn.

      The US is such an exceptional democracy, land of the free and all that.

      • HugeNerd@lemmy.ca
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        4 months ago

        That’s right, Citizen, good correct-think. We can always bomb our way to peace and invade our way to diplomacy.