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“Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3 while 1/3 watches.”—Incorrectly attributed to Werner Herzog but just some random person on the internet it seems.
Still the quote makes sense even without the appeal to authority
Thanks, TheReturnOfPEB for correcting me
Only this time instead of a silly mustache model, we have a cheeto baked rolley-polley.
What a wonderfully horrifying quote
Waking up? I’m pretty sure we’ve been well aware sense the civil war. Most of us are just Squidward.
TIL updated my post to reflect that
Nah. America had Nazis in the 30s too. We’re immune to the most rabid varieties of fascism and authoritarianism because they don’t produce all the cool products Americans demand.
Americans might be plagued with racism and bigotry, but we’re way too lazy and invested in our own lives for a coup. Literally our bread and circuses are way too good.
Your bread is pretty shit though. One of the things I miss when I’m over for more than a week is actual, good bread.
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Good bread is expensive or made yourself.
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It seems pretty common for travelers to lament the lack of good bread like at home. Bread basically a living organism that is ultra local. Good bread like at home really only exists at home. Local water, temperature, humidity, and other environmental factors seem to play a big part.
Ask anyone from New York or New Jersey about getting a good pizza or bagel in another state. It doesn’t matter who makes it or if they’re using the exact same recipe, perfect bread can evidently not be replicated outside the region. There is even a bagel company in south Florida, catering to snowbirds turned transplants, that claims to use water from that region to make their bagels.
It’s not as delicate a matter as you make it out to be. I was just looking for a kind that isn’t mushy like toast or full of sugar like a bagle. If classic sourdough or whole grain with an actual crust exist in the US it’s not trivial to find for foreign visitors.
Yeah, good food isn’t trivial to find when you travel. I’m empathetic to that frustration. But judging all bread based on the cheapest abundant and easy to find bread a foreigner can find without any apparent effort seems like a mistake to me. I certainly wouldn’t judge all Italian food by what I found in my hotel in Venice. I wouldn’t judge NY bagels by what I found during my layover at La Guardia. And I wouldn’t judge an entire countries bread based on what I found in the grocery store.
Sorry, but two disagreements—good food is trivial to find when you travel in Italy lol and American bread is bad without question
Whole Foods has a great bakery. It was a loaf I bought there that inspired me to start making sourdough. Locally, we have “Cuban bread” that I’m pretty sure is really Tampa bread, if you get it at the right bakeries it’s great. Supermarket bread is mostly nonsense, is that not true elsewhere?
Good bread like at home really only exists at home.
Or at a quality bakery. But those aren’t nearly as profitable as fast food joints.
Old-style Korean bakery goods… yummy…
I’m in VA and I have a couple of spots that sell their food “from NY water shipped daily.” Idk it is bomb ass bagels and pizza though. I’m not sure what the water does but I enjoy eating it.
I worked for a brewery that brought in all their water from the same spring or something. Even though it was a chain with multiple us locations.
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That describes the 2/3rds that’s watching or being killed. Our complacency is what makes us vulnerable.
It’s selection bias. Folks who resist get stomped on. The folks that remain are increasingly docile.
Repeat this process over and over again - from the Palmer Raids to the Blacklists to the crushing of the Civil Rights / Antiwar movements to the Drug Wars and Terror Wars - until your culture is properly domesticated and you can do whatever you want to them.
I think the anti-war movement - more specifically specifically the anti-draft movement - caused a lot of unintended damage. By effectively ending the draft it removed many young people’s connection to world events.
The Iraq and Afghanistan wars would have been met with a lot more resistance. If all those years of stop-losses and quadruple deployments had instead been years of drafting young people, a lot more people would have stood up the the Bush administration. That would have gotten a generation politically active and would have prevented a lot of what’s happening today.
By effectively ending the draft it removed many young people’s connection to world events.
I don’t buy that theory, as the broader global economic forces were a bigger influence on GenX / Millennial youth than any particular US military hot zone. And I loathe to think how the Bush/Obama admins would have responded to Afghanistan/Iraq if they thought they had unlimited free conscripts to throw at the problem forever, rather than a depleted reserve of voluntary enlistees and national guard troops to draw from.
If all those years of stop-losses and quadruple deployments had instead been years of drafting young people, a lot more people would have stood up the the Bush administration.
I don’t think Bush could have been meaningfully less popular with youth voters by 2004. His approval rating was already under 40% in the 18-24 demographic. Young people were regularly in the streets in protest all through 03-04. I was in college at the time, and there were parades of protesters running through the quad at the start of every term. But it was the Boomer voters who dictated the direction of the country, and their hatred of brown skinned foreigners was matched only slightly by their disgust towards Millennials.
The groundswell of opposition to Bush kept piling up until it fully materialized in the 2009 Dem super majority, but then… Obama didn’t get us out of Iraq. Hell, the reason he beat Hillary was because he came out as staunchly against Iraq while she waffled. The antiwar movement was widespread in 2008 and continued to truck on through 2012. But it wasn’t voluntary enlistment that strangled the war. It was a big wave of ostensibly antiwar Democrats taking office and then not ending it.
Bush would have been voted out in 2004 of the young people had actually voted.
Shame they’d all been disenfranchised by voter registration purges that year.
We’re immune to the most rabid varieties of fascism
Doubt.jpeg
I think most of us are less apathetic like Squidward and more just exhausted. We care about a lot of the things happening, but there’s so much going on we physically can’t keep track of, let alone care about, it all, so we don’t. We just don’t have the mental or emotional energy for it.
We’re all trying to be SpongeBob, but we’re all subject to being a Squidward some days.
It’s not just Americans. As a Canadian we’re deeply affected by American situations (plus our own politics). Sometimes the only way to put up with the complex world we live in is a little Squidwardism
I feel for you. On behalf of my country, I would like to apologize for all the bullshit we put you all through. You deserve better neighbors. :(
Well, let’s not pretend any of us even ‘need’ American influence to become shitty. The entirety of Europe has apparently decided that it’s been long enough since WW2 for us to give Fascism another try. Sure, the US influences the world, but we’re more than capable of fucking things up ourselves.
While maybe not as bad as the US yet, that image can be recycled for Europe in a short while.
…covfefe.
True
There are few ‘viable solutions’ that readily present themselves to the concerned voter, so little gets resolved and issues continue to grow and morph. If you look at things through a state by state lens it becomes more cloudy because state laws will affect more immediate issues and can very likely differ. It’s hard to command fifty entities in one direction, all worried about various concerns in various directions. Having faith in this Rube Goldberg machine def makes for a bad time, so apathy and hope suffice. System working as intended, do not investigate.
Honestly, that’s why despite as much respect as I have for the Constitution and the founding fathers, I sincerely believe that a parliamentary, rather than federal system, would be far more efficient & effective. Sure, problems could effect faster, but so could solutions.
Very tangentially relevant xkcd
Lol, I love how there’s an xkcd at this point for seemingly everything.
Oh hey I think I’m in this picture.
Are you the styrofoam cup
And then the red second someone from Europe cracks wise about it, all of them descend upon the poor healthcare haver like a pack of rabid wolves.
For how capable we are of recognizing and hating our own problems, we are equally incapable of hearing about them from anyone else without punching said anyone else in the face for talking shit.
Salutes flag, sheds patriotic tear, admires eagle screeching while spreading its wings before the majestic sunset
I still feel like half of the time the people from Europe are using it as an opportunity to pat themselves on the back for something they were born into. (I can make this criticism because I’m from there)
And ignoring the fact that they just elected a political party that wants to eliminate the very thing they’re bragging about, because an immigrant might be able to afford a doctor.
Trust me, i’m not patting myself anywhere. I live in Italy.
The
AmericanpeopleEuropeans and Americans are natural enemies. Just like Americans and Russians. And Americans and Americans. Damn Americans! You ruined America!
Under the “right” circumstances, any of us could be any of those characters.
I’m Squidward. At some point we have to realize that it’s not our fellow Americans fault they are misinformed and undereducated, it’s the fault of the ruling class and how we are being educated. The ruling class is never going to teach you the means to overthrow them. Unfortunately, it is up to us as individuals to teach each other critical thinking, media literacy and our shared history. It was never us versus MAGA, us versus the boomers, us versus the tankies. It was always us versus the rich. 🤑
Until the tankies seize power and start killing the anarchists for being anti-state xd
Not all tankies would do this, but it’s happened before and it’s good to be cautious around those who want supreme authority, even if they claim it’s just “temporary”. If we see the Chinese state wither away and give rise to a truly communist society, I’ll be genuinely surprised.
Thanks 🙏🏻 for making my point for me.
Gotta hand it to the politicians and the media. After that Occupy Wallstreet business, they got to work real quick turning Americans against each other. Successful.
Oh right, it’s not like we fought a civil war over a hundred years before that, and to this day there are still people here flying the losing sides flag. We’ve been turning on each other a long time. It’s an American tradition at this point.
Turns out that people, in general, are intellectually bankrupt and very easy to manipulate.
Being miserable and treating other people like dirt is every N̶e̶w̶ ̶Y̶o̶r̶k̶e̶r̶ American’s God-given right.
Ah yes, united.
Untied
Saying “American people” the way the Beastie Boys would say “Another dimension”
Europa: staring fascisticly from a distance.
Europa: staring from a distance of anywhere between 365 and 601 million miles away…
Broke: my phone autocorrecting to the German spelling.
Bespoke: Your clever joke.
Thank you, I appreciate it :)
Just balkanize already
It’s rural vs urban, just like in a lot of other countries. Pretty tough to separate that way since they both depend on each other.
More urban versus suburban. The suburbs are an enormous money sink that require tons of subsidy and infrastructure expansion to persist. A bunch of our municipal, state, and national policy revolves around keeping life in the suburbs artificially cheap and expanding the housing stock.
Rural communities don’t have anywhere near the kind of political influence as the suburbs, as they lack a wealthy professional workforce or a large enfranchised voter base to command elected offices. While you definitely see rural politics show up in suburban races, they tend to revolve around cultural icons (driving a big truck versus riding the bus, having a big yard versus living in a town home, proximity to colleges and communities of color, taste in clothing or music) rather than actual rural political issues (water rights, agricultural labor issues, affordable education and health care).
Rural communities get steamrolled as regularly as urban communities. We’re seeing that now in Texas, where the governor is turning a blind eye to another big drought and unleashing his police force on migrant farm workers as he gets ready to axe all the public schools out in the tiny towns and force people into low-budget charters. Urban centers are louder in their opposition, but the rural neighborhoods are getting fucked just as hard.
Yes I agree, and that’s a reality that we don’t point out often enough. Even so, schisms really tend to happen more along cultural boundaries than actual policy.
Rural areas would benefit so much from progressive policies, but so many of them would rather make life hell for the “bad people” than actually improve their own life. I don’t understand how people can be so hateful, and frankly I’m glad I don’t.
so many of them would rather make life hell for the “bad people”
A lot of the voter polls in rural neighborhoods are migrant workers without voting rights in the district. A lot more are too young to vote and not interested in sticking around long enough to set down roots in a poor community. And a healthy slice more than that are Company Town employees, who get a great deal of their political knowledge from their bosses.
I don’t understand how people can be so hateful
Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. The first step is terrifying people, often with very legitimate concerns. Then comes misinformation and misdirection, scapegoating and bigotry. And finally, you just pound on those priors knowing full well people aren’t going to fact-check you on every rumor and innuendo when you’re telling them something they’ve been primed to believe.
Communities with very real and persistent drug abuse problems get sold on the “Evil Mexican Cartels ruined your town” mythology by sprinkling it with half-truths and selective reporting. Communities that got de-industrialized in the 80s and 90s are told to hate East Asians for “stealing” their jobs with cheap foreign labor and unfair business practices (that the employers still managed to profit off of). Communities of Jews are told to hate Arabs and communities of Arabs are told to hate Africans and communities of Africans are told to hate Jews, because the Scary Outsider controls the financial system that’s driving everyone in town into bankruptcy.
And always, forever, there is the Specter of Communism. The Authoritarians in the big evil government (not the military! not the cops! the evil foreign blue-haired trans tankie bureaucrats) coming to take away whatever prosperity you have left.
Simmer people in that soup for long enough and they’ll all come out spitting hate, because its the only thing they’ve ever known for years and years and years.
