So, making America great again?
It wasn’t great back then, either.
Yeah - but I fear all too soon we’ll be looking back at those years fondly…
My wife and I are both career aid workers, mostly for projects funded by USAID. Today, my wife was informed that her salary is greatly reduced, but she is being kept on to lay off the rest of the company. USAID owes her not for profit millions for work completed, but just isn’t paying it. Everyone we know is out of work and our industry just evaporated.
I’ve started the process to immigrate, but my wife is not sure she wants to leave her parents. My idiot father in law who thinks that America is the greatest nation on earth unwittingly helped my case to immigrate when he told his daughter “I don’t want to talk about this!” When she tried to discuss the current state of America and the collapse of our lives’ work.
I feel the same. Everyday is more of a struggle.
Hope is not even part of my vocabulary at this point.
Musta been a shock to realize what overpaid horrible people you were, huh?
Best of luck. Just so shitty that decent folk who are trying to do decent things - for reasons other than personal enrichment - are among the first (but certainly not the last) to suffer.
Especially since I risked my life for the country that hates me. I have over 30 colleagues of all nationalities who died on the job.
At this point I’m basically just here to ensure my 19-year-old is safe. I’m looking into how to get her money offshore, into a European or UK account, to ensure she can escape Canada if there’s an invasion and occupation and have something to start a new life. If I can keep her safe, that’s my core purpose. That’s something to strive for.
I’m in a better mood.
I have made my best effort to live as an activist and improve the world I live in. That includes attempting to be a part of ongoing social movements that also attempt to improve things.
I’m recently reconciled to the possibility that I am not successful in any of this and that that’s okay. Okay in the sense that I’ve lived life fully engaged and made my best effort, and there’s really no point in kicking myself for not being a great social-political movement leader.
And in the plural, that we are not successful and everything goes in the wrong political direction but that collectively we made a passionate effort. We did what we could.
I do think we’re headed for Mad Max / Hunger Games / etc territory and things are going to be quite bad.
But ultimately you have to be at peace with yourself as the resistance in a way that doesn’t depend on being a brilliant success at it, you know?
Make whatever stands you find appropriate. Be brave more often than intimidated by all this. Please know you aren’t alone in all this.
This really gave me something to think about.
Thank you.
[quote=“Dinsdale, post:97, topic:1013246, full:true”]
Unfortunately a lot of people are morons and/or jerks. Social media has enabled millions of them to connect and spread their moronic jerky message and drown out any thoughtful conversation that can actually solve problems with solutions that might require the slightest change in moronic jerky behavior. Trump is just a symptom of that IMHO.
My concern for the future is that instead of solving all of man’s problems, AI will simply make everything worse but further dividing people into little stupid jerk islands that use AI to generate all sorts of stupid content that is difficult to distinguish from legitimate facts.
But real problems won’t just go away. We’ll just be too stupid to solve them because we won’t be able to separate the truth of anything from the noise.
Some agreement with your post, but I avoid the thought that they’re all stupid, or even the majority of them. Or that some collective “we” will be too stupid.
Instead, too fragmented, too distracted, too narrowly focused on that one thing that we ignore the rest of the crap heading down the pipe, oh yeah, 100%
And while I do not excuse MAGA/Republicans for it, I absolutely understand that for a number of them (and probably a large number of them in the Leopards/Faces Pit thread) that it’s the “too narrowly focused” group that’s deadly. All they see, for whatever reason, is that ONE issue, and no matter what, they want that even if a more rational evaluation of the totality would be different. Historically for that group, it could be guns, abortion, or lower taxes. Recently, I’ve seen people add vaccinations to that list, including a lot of former Democratic voters who for reasons felt that preventing mandatory vaccinations that were going to do “things” to them or their kids was the only issue that mattered.
I am 95+% ready for random chance to try with a new species given my disgust with our own.
“We” (liberals, conservatives, and normals alike) collectively will effectively become stupid because we will be unable to discern truth from bullshit or come to a consensus on what is actually true. You can’t make reasonable decisions if you don’t have valid information to reason from.
Absent the ability for critical thinking, people make decision based on emotion. And it’s pretty easy to emotionally trigger people with strong political beliefs.
I’ve been saying that, nearly verbatim, a lot the last six months or so.