Former President Donald Trump is expected to surrender himself to the Fulton County jail at the end of next week – on Thursday or Friday, a senior law enforcement official with knowledge of the surrender told CNN.
Former President Donald Trump is expected to surrender himself to the Fulton County jail at the end of next week – on Thursday or Friday, a senior law enforcement official with knowledge of the surrender told CNN.
Can we all just stop for a second and appreciate what a crazy fucking time it is to be alive in this country?
Absolutely. And in so many way. I’m only in my 40s and I feel like I’m living in a vastly different world than the one I was born into.
The rate of change is unlike anything humans have ever had to cope with in our 2 million year history.
For almost all of human existence, there wasn’t even a CONCEPT of progress… no sense that humanity was going anywhere. Your life was virtually identical to that of your great great great grandfather, and would be the same experience had by your great great great grandchild.
I remember a world of rotary phones, small towns with personalities before chains homogenized the world. I remember how the United States had a whole different personality before 9-11. I remember when Republicans had actual plans for governing (OBAMA’S affordable care act was basically a clone of Bob Dole’s plan). I remember the world before the Internet, when malls were packed and buzzing, when shopping in stores felt magical and not like a ghost town.
I remember analog and even black and white TVs. I remember the first video games and PCs,b dial-up Internet, browsers before tabs were invented.
I remember when acid rain was there number one environmental concern, and how we actually accepted the science and made policy to fix it.
I remember the bugs.
I remember so many more bugs. The night alive with fireflies. Windshields plastered with splatters on the highway.
I remember paper maps! FM radio. Cassette adapters.
The world is so, so, so different. It changed so fast.
Republicans became a suicide cult.
The government stopped breaking up monopolies, and started bailing out too-big-to-fail banks.
The United States tortures people now. People never charged of a crimes were tortured at Guantanamo Bay.
I grew up in a home that my parents bought cheap. They had two cars. They took us on vacations every year. They saved up for retirement. My dad had a PhD. He did well.
I have a law degree. I will never own a home. I will never be able to afford even a single vacation. I will never be able to retire.
They rolled back Roe.
They staged an insurrection.
I’ve been working with GPT-4 night and day since it was released to the public. I’m 100 percent convinced that with a little supplementation, it is the first artificial GENERAL intelligence.
It can already create better writing and code than MOST of the human population.
Where will it be in 5 years? 10? 20?
It’s going to be smarter, funnier, more creative, more thoughtful than all of us. In our lifetime. WHY, then, are we even HERE at that point? Why do we even exist?
These were questions for science fiction. For the future.
It’s happening NOW. WE, of all humans in the span of history, are the ones who will see our species become obsolete.
So yeah. Let’s take moment to realize how cosmically, historically insane it is to live in this moment.
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It might surprise you to know that comment was written by chatgpt
Amen. And love your first point about how way back, the average person did not have a concept of progress in their day-to-day life.
I guess that didn’t really start to blow up until Newton laid the laws of physics down (along with calculus - what a guy) to allow for drastic scientific development. Once we had steam engines and the Industrial Revolution…change has become almost commonplace now.
I too remember paper maps…always in the glove box.
Having to remember phone numbers.
Encyclopedias
No cell phone and no internet.
I was thinking about your comment and came back. I’m nearly 39 so a similar age.
First of all. What if you put your phone down, got off the internet and had a look around at your life and what is happening directly in your world. I’ll bet it’s not as chaotic as it feels when we see crazy headlines everywhere. You get up, chat with your family if you are lucky enough to live with someone, perhaps you go to work and interact with your coworkers or clients, hopefully the day isn’t too stressful. Come home, think about what you will have for dinner and hope it doesn’t make you too fat. Go to bed. You might squeeze in some time for hobbies, or visiting friends on the weekends.
Sure, housing is a massive problem right now, but financial bleakness isn’t new - imagine how it felt to live through the great depression? I’m in Australia, but a couple of years ago we had my son’s birthday at this nice lookout at the top of a hill. There was a plaque there that read that the road to the top of the hill was built by men during the depression in exchange for food to feed their families. The more kids you had the more hours you had to work. It was like 5 or more kids was a mandatory 12 hour day.
That would have felt bleak and like there was no way out.
Imagine getting caught up in world war 2? You would think the world had now really gone to shit. It was so traumatizing to the population here that every tiny town has a plaque of all the people who died from it. The names in the list are usually longer than the population of the town right now.
Then after the war, stuff like the threat of atomic war, nuclear winters and the entire earth dying because of a conflict escalation.
You described my childhood experience perfectly, but we might have just been very lucky and grew up in an optimistic decade full of rationality and scientific progress.
Bugs. Yeah. That still creeps me out.
It’s probably just the one of the first signs of ecological collapse due to climate change so nothing to worry about :(
Le sigh. Yup.
cant bone a robot. i don’t think it’ll be replacing us anytime soon
Not with that attitude
As someone who was in first grade when the towers went down I have to ask, how did the country’s personality change from your view? What was it like before vs now?
The clearest way I can illustrate this is that after Pearl Harbor was attacked, FDR have his famous speech which carried foremost the message: “we have nothing to fear but fear itself”.
Contrast that to Bush’s message, which was, essentially: Be afraid! Give up your liberty for (the illusion of) security!
For years it was: If you see something suspicious, call the cops! Let the government inspect you if you want to ride the subway! (But only at some stops. Terrorists, please don’t walk a block down to the next station!). If you really want to help, spend money buying whatever! Take off your shoes to board a plane! Our government recommends you buy a bunch of hardware to protect your home against chemical weapons and dirty bombs!
Or: oh, hey, we invented a color-coded system to tell you how scared you should be all the time! (Pay no attention to the fact that we’ll go on high sheet every time my administration comes under scrutiny for anything!)
Or: hey, we can label ANYONE we want as “ENEMY COMBATANTS” and they will have NO RIGHTS and we will torture them.
What changed was that Bush’s administration used inflated fear of terrorism as a means of control. And if you voted against something in Congress… say, a war with Iraq (who had NOTHING TO DO with 9-11) you were branded as unpatriotic, and you got death threats.
Don’t forget Freedom Fries, because those French pussies wouldn’t join “George and Tony’s Rootin’ Tootin’ Shoot 'Em Up Middle East Tour.”
I think American citizens of Japanese descent would disagree with your good old days assessment of how Americans were treated by their own government during WW2. They certainly had their liberty and livelihoods taken from them. Furthermore people of color in general were still under the thumb of institutionalized racism that continues to this day. Do you believe they were better off back then too?
You’re talking about oppression of minorities, and no one is going to argue that that was unconscionable. But I’m referring to the character if America as a whole. No part of our population was untouched by the darkness of the Bush administration.
I think FreeLikeGNU has a point here… the happier America as described has generally only been a reality for a subset of the population. Can we really suggest that is/was the ‘character [of] America’ as a whole?
The whole “MAGA” thing feels related to this point. Its like a large group of American’s feel the oppression, fear and lack of optimism and, in their anger and frustration, have embraced a view that what made America great was the division and exploitation rather than the optimism.
I’d argue causality — that they were purposefully led to that view by exploitative fuckwad Republican leadership that cared about Party more than the country and who used the fear, and exploited the crisis, to gain and maintain power and now don’t want to give it up. But we don’t really need to understand why or who led that change to also step back and be sad that the change happened.
Pretty sure you said:
You don’t think sending an entire ethnic group who are also American citizens to internment camps in the dessert forcing them to abandon their homes, work, friends, businesses is what you just described?
That’s slightly different. (Very slightly). Those American citizens actually did have the right to fight their incarceration in court.
… It just so happens that the court absolutely shit the bed in a 6-3 ruling about their constitutionality
On the other hand, internment camps were effectively ended by the the supreme Court the next year.
Contrast that with “enemy combatants” who had NO ACCESS TO THE CIVILIAN COURT SYSTEM.
I don’t see how “slightly different” could support the argument that things were effectively better at the time citizens were put into camps. The legal system supported a racist policy by “6-3 ruling about their constitutionality”. Furthermore:
No. It was over two years before the order was suspended and the last of the camps shut down. The order was not officially terminated until 1976!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_9066
@flossdaily @Dark_Arc
All true.
The fear mongering the GOP party engages in now is unparealleled in its scope and voracity. All one has to do is mention limits on gun ownership to see the responses that start with “BUT I NEED PROTECTION!”
Not everyone is out to get you.
I could definitely see that, thanks. It’s been a great frustration of my life to see “American the brave” regularly be “America the scared”, and as I’ve gotten older I’ve increasingly found it (and many post 9-11 policies) ridiculous. I hope we can fix this in the coming decades, I wasn’t old enough to speak up or understand what was going on then… I am now.
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Preach!
I’m nearing 40 myself, I’m so depressed at what the future holds for my children.
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I’ll recognize it, but I’d rather not appreciate it. I’d appreciate it if half the country had never been infatuated with an historically proven con-man with delusions of grandeur. Legitimately one of the must frustrating realities for someone who believes in democracy to grapple with is that half the population MUST be less than average intelligence (and even some of greater intelligence will choose willful ignorance).
Appreciate has two different meanings.
to value or admire highly
understand (a situation) fully; recognize the full implications of.
It’s can be awkward because they are really divergent meanings with almost apposed connotations.
You’re correct. I was being intentionally obtuse to agree about the sentiment, but also further the lament. Kind of a “being funny to myself (and maybe no one else)” moment, but publicly expressed.
For real. Can anyone say that they guessed this would actually be a headline 7 years ago?
I could’ve guessed a coup would happen as a result of his presidency and that he should be in prison yea. He’s a lifelong crook and criminal and we had suspicions of outside involvement in the 2016 election cycle from the instant the_donald blew up
He said ahead of the 2016 election that he wouldn’t accept the results if he lost.
Yeah, that was the moment I knew shit was gonna get weird.
@gravitas_deficiency
And yet he still gets to walk around and promise to pay for people’s meals, then skip as if nothing is happening. It’s annoying
He didn’t even accept that he won*.
*“Won” in America means “gamed the system the best” not “got the most votes.”
Watching from this side of the pond is entertaining in a sad kind of way.
Trump is a figurehead of something above and below him that is a serious danger to democracy.
The same ideology that pushed Trump is the same ideology that created Brexit and is trying to break the NHS.
We’re all in a very dangerous boat right now.
This timeline can’t get any weirder
WHY WOULD YOU PUT THIS THOUGHT INTO THE UNIVERSE AS A CHALLENGE
If we’re going though planet scale catastrohpic events, at least sprinkle some comedy in there haha
I like you. You’re pretty alright.
Don’t say that!
Just wait.
There’s a looming existential crisis headed humanity’s way that most are sleeping on at the moment because they are so caught up in the present and not looking enough at the implications of the future.
As we catch up to that future, the relationship between odd behaviors inherent to the universe we find ourselves in and the universes we are progressively building is going to get harder to ignore.
I think a lot of people are going to have a really hard time coming around to what that’s going to mean.
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TILAW: AN·o·mie
noun: anomie; noun: anomy
In societies or individuals, a condition of instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values or from a lack of purpose or ideals.
“the theory that high-rise architecture leads to anomie in the residents”
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It hasn’t been since 2016? Or 2001?
I feel like it all kinda went sideways starting around 2014ish (2016 certainly kicked it up a gear). Maybe I died then and it’s all some sort of 6th sense bullshit
It started when the Supreme Court handed the presidency to W despite him losing the election. Once that mask was fully off, so were all the rules.
I’m halfway across the world and it’s been a crazy ride watching a country disgrace itself while also tearing itself to pieces.