Is the US a dystopia?

it’s legal in kentucky to fire someone for refusing to work mandatory overtime

— Tracy Moore (@iusedtobepoor) December 11, 2021

The notion of local dystopias is an interesting one. Could be that there was an egalitarian paradise unfolding just a continent or two over from Mad Max.

Zardoz is another one. Although The Eternals are mainly a bunch of insufferable bores and their egalitarian paradise is pretty lame, but you wouldn't complain about it if you were being held captive by Charlotte Rampling.

Slave state — apartheid state — Vietnam/Watergate — Corporate state — Fury Road (2016-present)

We didn't start the fire, etc.

Let's see what all we have...you got this one.

US combined laissez-faire capitalism on it's drug industry and combined with heroin blow-back from the 'war on terror' created the opioid epidemic for fun and profit killing over a million Americans since 1999.

Getting back to the topic at hand, Le Guin wrote a book about a moon. Also was there some Cold War global political framework in her gender-bender book? I don't recall.

Climate catastrophe is going to be pretty universal IIRC.

― papal hotwife (milo z), Saturday, December 11, 2021 1:14 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

which is v little to do with the point about 1492 is it

― fix up luke shawp (darraghmac), Saturday, December 11, 2021 1:17 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

It is though (unless I'm misreading). The USA is the biggest historical contributor to the climate crisis. An argument could be made that if 1492 never happened, there would be no global crisis. Same for much of global environmental destruction -- Amazon forest all gone? Thank Ronald McDonald.

Local teachers in South Dakota “Dash for Cash” to help their classrooms by fighting over $5,000 in $1 bills while the crowd hoots and hollers. pic.twitter.com/azwGJKhaKU

— Eoin Higgins (@EoinHiggins_) December 12, 2021

they're going to remove that rug at some point

and then charge them for it!

An argument could be made that if 1492 never happened, there would be no global crisis.

Are we talking a world where Europe never came into contact with the Americas?

I can’t live without potatoes

-LL McCooljay

It would have happened eventually.

I can’t live without potatoes

OTM

Lol, Neanderthal.

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— Sam Biddle (@samfbiddle) December 13, 2021

It would have happened eventually.

Right but I'm saying the timeline where America turns the Earth into a toilet wasn't necessarily predetermined.

Maybe ecocide is the dharma of the human race idk.

this is all god's fault. god put the oil in the ground, fully formed, 8000 years ago

it was all predetermined

idk these guys predicted it pretty early

https://i.ibb.co/f4P96K0/index.jpg

https://i.ibb.co/cFmrLPX/index.jpg

Yeah I never loved the band but those album titles stuck with me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CczFit6tGhs

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/kentucky-tornado-factory-workers-threatened-firing-left-tornado-employ-rcna8581

personally idgi. fresh produce in american supermarkets is quite bad and expensive, every major city in the world has decent markets, etc. i guess it's better if it's brightly lit and you can listen to an instrumental soft jazz version of after the gold rush? https://t.co/g3b5LOgBcD

— joolsd (@joolsd) December 14, 2021

which Publix plays that?!? I'm happy if I get early '80 Boz Scaggs.

I regret starting a thread that functions as an invitation to post the most depressing news you can find, but more narrowly the degree to which the US seems to be embracing core elements of the most prominent fictional dystopias is pretty striking! Sadly not cyberpunk this time:

https://pen.org/scope-speed-educational-gag-orders-worsening-across-country/

And it’s getting worse. In the month since the report’s release, state lawmakers introduced 12 new bills, bringing the total to a staggering 66 educational gag orders for the year in 26 states, 12 of which have passed into law.

Here’s what’s happening:

The recent group of bills includes seven in Missouri and one each in New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and South Carolina.
All 12 of these bills target K–12 schools, four include provisions that would impact colleges and universities, and four include a focus on state agencies, other state-funded institutions, and “places of learning.”
Six of these bills specifically ban “critical race theory,” making a total of 20 state-level bills introduced this year with such explicit prohibitions.
Six of these bills contain explicit prohibitions against teaching or using curricular materials from “The 1619 Project,” bringing the total of these to 17 for the year.

xxp I remember back in the 80s, we hosted some soviet kids. When we took them to the supermarket, they lost their shit.

I think the original tweet is referencing that, not that Safeway is better than a local French produce market.

we do have abundant food (not everywhere, of course) of mostly mediocre quality. it's ok.

the critical race theory mess is one of the factors in favor of dystopia

to me

xxp I remember back in the 80s, we hosted some soviet kids. When we took them to the supermarket, they lost their shit.

I think the original tweet is referencing that, not that Safeway is better than a local French produce market.

So was communism.

I guess that’s the kind of joke that lands better with boomers.

And that's the kind of joke that lands better with people from 2017.

the tweet is responding to libertarians tweeting photos of american grocery stores to prove a point

american supermarkets are among the purest products of american capitalism and therefore accurately reflect all our most popular theories about health and happiness, from gluttony to asceticism, all packaged in convenient sizes for easy consumption. it's a design that's been copied all over the world, with appropriate modifications to suit local tastes and incomes. almost any praise or criticism you want to make about supermarkets can be justified using real world examples.

from gluttony to asceticism, all packaged in convenient sizes for easy consumption

cf. Randall Jarrell's A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (1960) and the companion poem "Next Day"

Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All

You want to know dystopia? Sometimes I have to go to three different supermarkets to get everything I need.

I regret starting a thread that functions as an invitation to post the most depressing news you can find

You cannot design a thread that wouldnt fall prey to this within ten mins have you seen this site lately

no.

lol

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

whew I had doubts

"I can't answer without sharing my personal definition of dystopia"

5 voters just laying it all down

https://t.co/fFOE6vEXOc pic.twitter.com/PPoldWoOdT

— District Sentinel (@TheDCSentinel) December 15, 2021

we should maybe do a "worst living american" poll

impossible. polls are limited to only 50 choices

maybe a poll to make the poll

a poll of polls? better update the list of lists

don't visit ILB if you don't enjoy a poll of polls

https://eugenesrobinson.substack.com/p/in-defense-ofgreg-ginn

Later during a session for the Black Flag inspired Black Face, a band Dukowski and I had formed to play all of his Black Flag tunes, as well as his unreleased Black Flag songs, he had told me that Ginn was “evil.”

“Totally fucking evil, man…” and we sat in the fading light of a Los Altos Hills evening where we had just been rehearsing.

I heard it all. But, and this is the thing with me…Ginn had always been nice to me. Though the list of people who I had met who had always been nice to me — Charles Manson, Anton LaVey, John Wayne Gacy, Bill Clinton — doesn’t seem to say much, I did value this.

More than that when perusing all of what he had contributed to my life it seemed almost easy to forgive. Records by Bad Brains, Minutemen, Husker Du, Meat Puppets, Sonic Youth, nevermind Oxbow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EabebOlDkUw

most damning thing i can say about bill clinton is that i was watching the chevy chase documentary and he opened a birthday card from bill clinton, and chevy chase said nice things about bill clinton

CHEVY
CHASE

the man who's so evil that hardly anybody loves him

i mean i can say more damning things about bill clinton, a lot of us can, but that's the most damning thing i can think of right this second

Obviously Clinton had to get on Chevy's good side to avoid a devastating parody where Clinton falls down a bunch of times.

is Greg Ginn a dystopia?

is Greg Ginn a dystopia?

― The Immortal Bird of Avon (Boring, Maryland), Tuesday, May 26, 2026 9:50 AM

known close associate of donald rumsfeld

(that's a pun, i'm making a pun, to my knowledge that's not literally true)

Rumsfeld also had an album called “My War.”

I love Eugene but his riff in that essay about not knowing if Ginn smoked weed must at best be some deadpan comedic thing

Rumsfeld also had an album called “My War.”

LOL

Enjoyed this from Rebecca Solnit -

https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/circuses-vs-roses-notes-on-pleasure-and-scold-culture/

https://bsky.app/profile/joshuajfriedman.com/post/3mmxjlv5qp22s

i lack the energy to make this non-bsky available, sorry

jokes on them robots of the future will only be programmed to do the “Billie Jean” dance

Enjoyed this from Rebecca Solnit -

https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/circuses-vs-roses-notes-on-pleasure-and-scold-culture/

― If your ass is a Bible, 213 will regulate (Neanderthal), Wednesday, May 27, 2026 10:59 PM (two days ago)

lol start of that post immediately reminded me of the old Onion article about Saddam Hussein referencing "Hot in Herre" in one of his videos. irrationally annoying pet peeve: posts that aren't time/date stamped. maybe it's trivial but in a dystopia a month feels like a year.

but yeah that meme in question is clearly dumb, if one is tired of people always talking about taylor swift (and i am, at this point), and one feels the need to say that (which i do right now, apparently), then one should just say it (which i just have, in parentheses). it doesn't make me morally superior or The Resistance, just tired.

the reason i don't engage with the media (including the main politics thread, interestingly enough) isn't because i'm tired of hearing about taylor swift. it's because i'm tired of hearing about awful shit. last week i spent the first 10 minutes of my therapy session figuring out how to make the content of a new Edge tab a blank page because my therapy link only works on Edge, and whenever I open Edge I get smacked in the face with some horseshit. i don't want to hear about what jeff bezos thinks of zohram mandami, and it's _not_ because i think it's "trivial". it's because jeff bezos, unlike taylor swift, is an evil fucking oligarch. it's important for me to acknowledge that the US is a dystopia, and it's also important for me to do that on _my_ terms. having that shit smack me in the face right before therapy means that i spend the first ten minutes of therapy thinking about those assholes instead of what i _want_ to be focusing on

that's really what it comes down to - choice. when i was younger, i had a burning, passionate hatred for phil collins, because he was omnipresent. i was always hearing about him, hearing about his music, and i didn't really want to. these days idk, he's fine, i guess. he was a good drummer. i don't have to listen to anything by or about phil collins unless i want to, and i guess sometimes i want to!

i had to do radical surgery on the Edge new page feature, too, it was exhausting. felt like I knew coding by the time I got a page with just the weather on it.