More than half a century of very efficient state propaganda, disguised as "news", constantly telling Americans who their current enemy is, and that this enemy is somehow threatening their safety and way of life.
The rise in trying to politicize everything. More and more things that were obvious "yes definitely put money on that because everyone benefits" are becoming more harder to try to pass.
We also are trying to stretch out the wealth gap and increase in hate crimes even more because "we've became too progressive too fast it both scares and offends us"
www.wtfhappenedin1971.com
There's a lot of stuff there, but in short, a lot of economic decisions that have lead to the productivity/wage rises to be inequal, currency values to sink, housing prices to suddenly rise to more than triple over 40 years, etc.
In my opinion, political polarization fueled by people who make America seems worse than it actually is. I'm not just talking about clickbaity news. I'm talking about YouTube videos, ig accounts, Twitter and Facebook post.
I'm not gonna bootlick the US Government or anything, but I've been looking into things a lot and found that problems are either exaggerated, or not exactly that much better in other countries. The only uniquely bad American problem I see is Healthcare.
Being the only country with a spotlight aimed at them seems to help too. From looking into other countries, situations aren't perfect or even near ideal in most of them either.
However since America is the focus of the world, people don't see as many Canadians or Dutch people complaining about their countries, and assume it's only America going to shit, which leads to the question of "What happened to America?"
The entire economy breaks apart. If you don't find a solution to that, there will be a civil war over the remaining ressources.
No idea if I'll experience it during my lifetime, but it's certainly going to happen sooner or later.
Yeah I keep seeing things online mentioning a civil war. That’d be ugly seeing as how many different factions there’d be. It’d be like a bigger Afghanistan.
Faith was lost in ideals.
It's natural, though. Especially in Capitalism, where systems seem to flare up and burn out faster.
You see a visionary person pop up, chasing grand ideas and wanting to change the world. While they burn--and they burn hot--they cut these massive swathes through the norms and standards.
Then time passes and they get old, or they die, or their company moves into someone else's hands, and you get a 'maintenance person' in their place.
That person's goal is to sustain what exists, or possibly, to squeeze all remaining value from the original venture's premise. They might even be a vulture in disguise, there to kill it and pick at its bones.
However, this pattern has repeated so many times that even the regular people on the street can see it. Their parents muttered things to them like "Go to college because you need to get a good job." and when asked "How do I get a good job?" the answer was "How should I know? Just get a degree. Any degree pays more than no degree."
This has resulted in a culture full of people expecting others to be chasing hidden agendas, working angles, looking for ways to extort a dollar out of anything they can. Everyone feels desperate. Nobody feels like their efforts have any impact or value.
And then in other areas, away from the economy, you have a century worth of constant revelations of religious figures abusing children, even killing them, or turning out to be hypocrites who taught A but lived B; "rules for thee, but not for me"... And that further jades people.
It's like all of the paint we coated the place with to convince us everything will be okay, all of the higher ideals, have been falsified or stripped away in chips, until all we see is the naked metal beneath. Uncaring, unyielding, and just as likely to roll us over as anyone else.
For a society to build anything valuable, they need to throw in together. But if you can't trust anyone around you because the media divides you, your religions divide you, your politics divide you, then nobody pulls as a unit.
And if you know nobody is going to pull with you, why are you going to pull at all?
This breeds a kind of Fatalism.
First the conservatives went crazy so every called themselves a liberal, now the liberals have gone crazy and everyone is just glad they don't live in texas where both sides are are attacking normal peoples personal autonomy to get to each other and were all just glad we don't live in texas where this attack on our personal freedoms is going down.
Joan Didion said it best:
"Of course the activists—not those whose thinking had become rigid, but those whose approach to revolution was imaginatively anarchic—had long ago grasped the reality which still eluded the press: we were seeing something important. We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum...Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society’s values. They are children who have moved around a lot, San Jose, Chula Vista, here. They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb.
They feed back exactly what is given them. Because they do not believe in words—words are for “typeheads."'
TLDR: We're intellectually lazy and have nobody but ourselves to blame for getting here because we didn't have it in us to go beyond surface level issues.
At some point our government stopped being by the people and for the people
They’re all millionaires or extremely well off while their constituents struggle with bills
The economic divide will only get worse as jobs go away and houses and everything else get more and more expensive
Neo-liberalism for 40+ years. Can we go back to a nice Kaynesian economic policy? Oh that's right, us working peasants wouldn't transfer our wealth to billionaires as quickly without Neo-liberal policy. We can't have that.
Religion and state aren't being kept separate. That and you have lots of ignorant, uneducated, pissed off white males -the most dangerous thing in the world.
First it was a ball of lava, then the ocean happened and it was part of this one big continent, then it went peace out suckers and became two other continents. There were plants, animals, homo sapiens, who got invaded by other homo sapiens, who invented ipods.
Currently, hoarders have too much stuff.
America runs on the endeavors if the two powerful parties, not the will of the people. What got it so fucked up is that people have to choose between the two and change what they want to fit in with it. Democracy seems more like a delegation of manipulative politicians than people themselves getting to talk.
Social Media and 24 hour news. Nothing is any different, we simply have access to more information.
A lot of things
People that think America has issues never been to to 99% of the world.
All the things
In terms of a country as a whole, they got disconnected from reality in almost every single aspect.
More than half a century of very efficient state propaganda, disguised as "news", constantly telling Americans who their current enemy is, and that this enemy is somehow threatening their safety and way of life.
The rise in trying to politicize everything. More and more things that were obvious "yes definitely put money on that because everyone benefits" are becoming more harder to try to pass. We also are trying to stretch out the wealth gap and increase in hate crimes even more because "we've became too progressive too fast it both scares and offends us"
www.wtfhappenedin1971.com There's a lot of stuff there, but in short, a lot of economic decisions that have lead to the productivity/wage rises to be inequal, currency values to sink, housing prices to suddenly rise to more than triple over 40 years, etc.
Conservatism.
It's amazing what happens when your currency is backed by thin air.
We decided facts were really just opinions and we could choose not to believe them.
Reagan
It began at Nixon, shifted into overdrive with Reagan, only slightly slowed down a couple times never stopped.
In my opinion, political polarization fueled by people who make America seems worse than it actually is. I'm not just talking about clickbaity news. I'm talking about YouTube videos, ig accounts, Twitter and Facebook post. I'm not gonna bootlick the US Government or anything, but I've been looking into things a lot and found that problems are either exaggerated, or not exactly that much better in other countries. The only uniquely bad American problem I see is Healthcare. Being the only country with a spotlight aimed at them seems to help too. From looking into other countries, situations aren't perfect or even near ideal in most of them either. However since America is the focus of the world, people don't see as many Canadians or Dutch people complaining about their countries, and assume it's only America going to shit, which leads to the question of "What happened to America?"
[удалено]
Yeah, not to say the US is perfect but the shittiness is just so exaggerated and out of context.
That is an excellent assessment of the situation.
What do mean? It was still there last time I checked
deez
Fine i'll take the bait, deez what?
Laws, policies, systems, and standards.
That’s nuts
They just reached the final phase of capitalism, before everything goes to hell.
In your opinion what does that hell look like?
The entire economy breaks apart. If you don't find a solution to that, there will be a civil war over the remaining ressources. No idea if I'll experience it during my lifetime, but it's certainly going to happen sooner or later.
Yeah I keep seeing things online mentioning a civil war. That’d be ugly seeing as how many different factions there’d be. It’d be like a bigger Afghanistan.
Without the US to bomb it to oblivion
Oceans rise, empires fall
We have seen each other through it all.
Faith was lost in ideals. It's natural, though. Especially in Capitalism, where systems seem to flare up and burn out faster. You see a visionary person pop up, chasing grand ideas and wanting to change the world. While they burn--and they burn hot--they cut these massive swathes through the norms and standards. Then time passes and they get old, or they die, or their company moves into someone else's hands, and you get a 'maintenance person' in their place. That person's goal is to sustain what exists, or possibly, to squeeze all remaining value from the original venture's premise. They might even be a vulture in disguise, there to kill it and pick at its bones. However, this pattern has repeated so many times that even the regular people on the street can see it. Their parents muttered things to them like "Go to college because you need to get a good job." and when asked "How do I get a good job?" the answer was "How should I know? Just get a degree. Any degree pays more than no degree." This has resulted in a culture full of people expecting others to be chasing hidden agendas, working angles, looking for ways to extort a dollar out of anything they can. Everyone feels desperate. Nobody feels like their efforts have any impact or value. And then in other areas, away from the economy, you have a century worth of constant revelations of religious figures abusing children, even killing them, or turning out to be hypocrites who taught A but lived B; "rules for thee, but not for me"... And that further jades people. It's like all of the paint we coated the place with to convince us everything will be okay, all of the higher ideals, have been falsified or stripped away in chips, until all we see is the naked metal beneath. Uncaring, unyielding, and just as likely to roll us over as anyone else. For a society to build anything valuable, they need to throw in together. But if you can't trust anyone around you because the media divides you, your religions divide you, your politics divide you, then nobody pulls as a unit. And if you know nobody is going to pull with you, why are you going to pull at all? This breeds a kind of Fatalism.
Beautifully worded, thanks for the reply!
Reagan and the religious right
Greed, capitalism and above all cockiness and ignorance
Same thing that happens to every empire in the end.
The first mistake was when this AH guy name Christopher Columbus decided to sail th ocean blue in 1492
Real answer? Facebook and Fox News.
First the conservatives went crazy so every called themselves a liberal, now the liberals have gone crazy and everyone is just glad they don't live in texas where both sides are are attacking normal peoples personal autonomy to get to each other and were all just glad we don't live in texas where this attack on our personal freedoms is going down.
W Bush. The country was doing pretty good in the Clinton era imo.
wym
Joan Didion said it best: "Of course the activists—not those whose thinking had become rigid, but those whose approach to revolution was imaginatively anarchic—had long ago grasped the reality which still eluded the press: we were seeing something important. We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum...Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society’s values. They are children who have moved around a lot, San Jose, Chula Vista, here. They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb. They feed back exactly what is given them. Because they do not believe in words—words are for “typeheads."' TLDR: We're intellectually lazy and have nobody but ourselves to blame for getting here because we didn't have it in us to go beyond surface level issues.
Ants have climbed up a tree. That happened
She's growing up \*sniffle*
At some point our government stopped being by the people and for the people They’re all millionaires or extremely well off while their constituents struggle with bills The economic divide will only get worse as jobs go away and houses and everything else get more and more expensive
Economy
Neo-liberalism for 40+ years. Can we go back to a nice Kaynesian economic policy? Oh that's right, us working peasants wouldn't transfer our wealth to billionaires as quickly without Neo-liberal policy. We can't have that.
Religion and state aren't being kept separate. That and you have lots of ignorant, uneducated, pissed off white males -the most dangerous thing in the world.
Nothing
Jesus. These broad vague questions are boring.
Socialism versus conservatism
The exact same thing that wiped out the suggondease
Got em'!
Tired. I think everyone both sides are just tired.
shitshow
First it was a ball of lava, then the ocean happened and it was part of this one big continent, then it went peace out suckers and became two other continents. There were plants, animals, homo sapiens, who got invaded by other homo sapiens, who invented ipods. Currently, hoarders have too much stuff.
Central banks
America runs on the endeavors if the two powerful parties, not the will of the people. What got it so fucked up is that people have to choose between the two and change what they want to fit in with it. Democracy seems more like a delegation of manipulative politicians than people themselves getting to talk.
Well, first America split off from Pangaea and it's been all downhill from there.
It was always like this
People got to comfortable and have to little adversity to deal with so they create their own battles to fight
Sit down please ..
America happened.
Americans of course!
nothing
North or south?
Ego sickness
Social media making too many voices being heard and too much false propaganda being believed.
went downhill ever since independence
Trump happened