Is the US a dystopia?

that said i fully believe s.f. is a dystopia

the curious thing is that despite being more connected to each other than ever before - in terms of news, events, protests, crimes, strategies, insights, data, music, art, film etc - we appear to be more divided than ever

Immediate access to everyone else's thoughts taking away the comforting falsehood that mostly we all want the same things maybe?

"A lot of people seem to move through the streets as though they’re somehow both hostile and boring, and they are more boring now that people around us are less engaged and more enterprises are outlets of corporate chains such as Starbucks and Walgreens, so there’s nothing distinctive or local and no one lasting to get to know."

awww, they should join a book club! it gets rough when you hit your 60s. its lonely out there. i already feel it and i'm only 56. also: Hostile Boredom is the title of my late-80s Philly diary.

also, writers are notoriously boring on the street and they just stare at people hoping they will do something interesting.

also, san fran disconnectedness just makes me think of sad hippies:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U45CzgrLE9s

i'd like to know what young people in san fran think of life there. and not just the children of the ruling class. all kinds of young people. do they hate it? do they love it? i almost moved there in the early 90s. a friend wanted me to come there. but i chickened out. i had too many records and books. Tales of the City on PBS almost made me go! that show really got to me. even then i had another friend there who said that if i came i would have to have some $$$ because it was not cheap. so, i went back to philly. plenty of money for cheesesteaks.

i have a younger friend (32ish) who moved to the Bay Area a couple years ago and eagerly wants out. Expensive, tech-bro-y, etc. But some of it is also east coast/west coast culture clash - they are very direct and have had a hard time forming strong bonds with folks who style they perceived as elliptical, indirect, noncommittal etc.

I am glad I no longer live in the Bay even tho I miss parts of it terribly— mostly my friends and the access to the outdoors.

Solnit green is people

(That doesn't actually mean anything; I've just wanted to have an opportunity to post it.)

I don’t really see how Solnit is anything but a reactionary. “We used to do this, but now everything is ruined”— it’s just a liberal rather than rightwing reaction, but it’s still inadequate and paltry.

Her column immediately after the election was one of the most embarrassing things I have ever began reading, I couldn’t even finish it.

She produces absolutely cringe-inducing pieces fairly regularly. I'm not even sure the truly horrendous one I read is the same as the one you refer to here.

The headline of the one I am referencing: "Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do."

How anyone with any sense of US history could write such trash with a straight face is beyond my ken. She sucks.

That is absolutely bizarre because check out her published article on the day of the election.

https://lithub.com/rebecca-solnit-we-the-people-can-make-a-better-future-for-all/

Such a weird series of thoughts, but most especially the idea that we should celebrate (far) right wing people voting based on their ideals because the American dream or something.

libs gonna lib, always incoherent and failing upwards. beyond any sense that this person is considered a major public intellectual, she is a total moron afaic

Agree.

I don't know that US history is all that lively a determiner of how most people feel about the quality of their neighbors, but just observing how the US Congress has become a garbage heap and looking at the tight presidential polls during the election itself, there was plenty of current evidence of how utterly degraded and corrupted our political process is. You'd have to be pretty blind to miss it.

The headline of the one I am referencing: "Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do."

How anyone with any sense of US history could write such trash with a straight face is beyond my ken. She sucks.

I have no opinion on Rebecca Solnit (other than that I liked her famous essay about mansplaining from a million years ago), but I think this headline expresses a common sentiment felt by a lot of Americans who are well-informed but tend toward optimism, who believe that "the moral arc of the universe is long but bends toward justice."

You, of course, have always known that the majority of Americans are stupid, cruel people and the country's leaders are morally bankrupt criminals worthy of the highest contempt, so naturally you will find this sentiment hopelessly naive. But not all of us are as enlightened as you.

You attribute scorn to my position when that is only a small part of it.

I actually don’t believe that most Americans are cruel people, but I do believe that the anti-intellectualism and propaganda shoved down the throats of US students in history classrooms from Kindergarten onwards is a real problem we need to talk about. Long story short, I think that a lot of people in this country are stupid, but I also don’t really believe that is their fault a lot of the time, given the social and educational environment they are subjected to.

"Americans who are well-informed but tend toward optimism, who believe that "the moral arc of the universe is long but bends toward justice.""

Please be more informed.

There's no need for that snark.

yeah, we're better then this. it's not who we are. #Biden4ever

I'm immune to optimism/pessimism stuff. I now live in a newly red county where a majority of the Hispanic minorities voted for fascism. All I've ever known is work. So what I've always taken out of the MLK arc-of-the-universe stuff is "We bend it, it doesn't happen by itself." The second part is white lib nimby shit.

fuck this is true. being well-informed makes anyone a well-informed ilx shitposter. i ain’t talking about me, obv.

I think what I object to is the implication that people who are optimistic (and who may at times feel disillusioned because of their optimism) are necessarily stupid.

I haven't read Solnit's book Hope in the Dark, but this summary suggests that her attitude is a deliberate choice and not borne of ignorance:

"In it, she makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argued that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable, and that pessimism and despair rest on an unwarranted confidence about what is going to happen next."

https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/791-hope-in-the-dark

Don't think optimism is the issue, more naivety and soft jargon in the intersection of self-help and faintly left leaning politics.

I suggest reading the article above.

Also while there are obviously interesting discussions about energy and positivity as a driver for political change, "radical hope" in the way explained there has become a kind of cliché that academics or people on the border of academia and journalism repeat or explain in a vapid sort of way.

People can be motivated by all sorts of emotions.

It is also weird that this discussion began with two almost entirely contradictory articles.

I'll confess that "radical hope" as term and concept has never made sense to me; it sounds vaguely liberationist theology.

One must imagine Sisyphus happy, is all I know.

We will have to just agree to disagree here. Her disgraceful comments about radical anarchist tactics in 2011 and the general tenor of her observations and ideological positions is loathsome liberal pablum, imho, and friends and I regularly discuss whether she is a psy-op.

I will concede that I don't know her work well enough, and this thread is the first criticism of it I have encountered.

I mean is there any word that won't be placed after "radical" in the popular political thought arena? I've honestly seen it creeping into food discourse. If you type it into a book store website you'll find about a hundred results.

radical hemorrhoids

https://www.domusweb.it/en/news/2012/05/15/radical-sitting.html

https://www.domusweb.it/en/news/2012/05/15/radical-shitting.html

I will concede that I don't know her work well enough, and this thread is the first criticism of it I have encountered.

This was inarticulate: What I meant is that I have always had generally positive feelings about Solnit based on the little of her work that I have read, and what I've gleaned about her reputation; I hadn't realized she was someone who was critically maligned. I have learned something from this thread and will make sure to be distrustful of her work in the future.

I feel I've only seen criticisms in the last couple of years really. Fairly wide range of them also, by which I mean not a united voice perhaps.

I'm immune to optimism/pessimism stuff. I now live in a newly red county where a majority of the Hispanic minorities voted for fascism. All I've ever known is work. So what I've always taken out of the MLK arc-of-the-universe stuff is "We bend it, it doesn't happen by itself." The second part is white lib nimby shit.

― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

i wouldn't say i'm immune to optimism/pessimism. i like to think i'm jaded, but it's a shell, really, and i'm just as easily shocked as anyone. shocked by myself, more than anything.

it was just yesterday that it hit me what "deportation" is, in the fascist mind, a euphemism for. how the hell can i make sense of that? how can i make sense of democracy knowing that a not-insignificant percentage of people would willingly vote for their own extermination? i know that one can be blind to one's own personal self-interest, but there is something shocking about that, even though i've personally been there myself, even though i've wished, at one time or another, for omnicide.

a great deal of my light reading is about atrocities. i call it light reading because it's mostly popular history - _when paris went dark_, _bloodlands_, etc. but i do read it critically. i was reading the chapter about the city of paris' role in the holocaust, some of the things rosbottom says. i read him as being implicitly critical of how _positive_ and _upbeat_ a lot of the jewish writing of that time is, some suggestion that they were deluding themselves. and then, at the same time, there are offhand mentions of the tremendous spike in suicides. nobody ever looks at the people who killed themselves as being a symptom. neither the ones who killed themselves in 1940 or the ones who killed themselves in 1980, the ones who "survived". i have a hard time thinking of something like that as being the sort of thing one "survives". one lives through it and one is changed by it, and if one is lucky, one doesn't live long enough to see one's children do the exact same shit to other people that was done to them.

maybe it's "pessimistic" for me to believe, as i do, that the only thing that stands in between a lot of people and, well, being genocided, is donald trump's own total incompetence. i'd really like to believe that "humanity" wouldn't let that happen. people here? people here would oppose it, just as many in paris opposed it, just as many fought hard for the humanity and dignity of the people they knew. do any of us have the power to prevent the people in power doing something like what was done at the Vel' d'Hiv'? not really, no. it wasn't the germans out there on the streets conducting that roundup. it was the french police.

as much as i would like to... exculpate the 50% of voters who did this, as much i know that whatever happens, they will _out of necessity_ one day be forgiven... they don't deserve it. what they've done is clear to many of us. everyone of these people, along with the washington post refusing to endorse a candidate, disney refusing to broadcast an already-completed episode of a kids show on the grounds that it stands up for trans rights...

if you asked me a year ago, i would've said that america is unquestionably a dystopia. today, well, i don't know what the word "dystopia" is supposed to mean. we live at the whims of genocidaires, now more than ever.

and i'm isolated. i'm isolated and precarious and afraid. everyone i know is isolated and precarious and afraid. and i fucking hate it. i don't know how much time i have left. i want at least to be able to fucking enjoy the time i have. and i'm not, not really.

"I think what I object to is the implication that people who are optimistic (and who may at times feel disillusioned because of their optimism) are necessarily stupid."

Is your optimism "warranted" after the worst people win elections, after seeing the near extinction of a people, after climate catastrophes. All made by us.

I wouldn't say that I *am* optimistic. I struggle with feelings of despair. I do hold out some hope (which is different from optimism) that some things can be overcome, that all is not lost, etc., because I am not one to give up so easily, and because I need to hold onto that belief to live in this world. Not everyone does, I realize. But this relates to differences in temperament rather than intellect.

Hope is essential, even when all hope is lost.

The problem is more about where to place this hope, and that is where I think there's prob some pretty huge differences between ilxors.

The only hope, I think, we find is in ourselves, then we direct that hope towards activists and politicians who most align with it a small victory at a time.

That is absolutely bizarre because check out her published article on the day of the election.

https://lithub.com/rebecca-solnit-we-the-people-can-make-a-better-future-for-all🕸/

Such a weird series of thoughts, but most especially the idea that we should celebrate (far) right wing people voting based on their ideals because the American dream or something.

Things are changing. Last week, President Biden went to the Gila Reservation in Arizona to apologize for the Indian boarding schools and other genocidal acts toward Native Americans. He said in a tweet:

saw on bsky articulated v well this AM or yesterday that Trumpers are a cult and you can't argue with a cult

Alfred otm

i'm hopeful (or dumb) enough to be unconvinced that a Harris win would not have been the best outcome

-not

one thing i know i am, is tired

I've honestly seen it creeping into food discourse.

I know this probably isn't what you meant but unfortunately it is somewhat radical, apparently, to believe that all people should have food to eat, live indoors, etc.

Interesting re Solnit. I also had a positive impression of her work, mostly A Paradise Built in Hell which I've heard the most about and have been meaning to read at some point.

yeah I'd thought about trying to get her to write something about the topic of that book for the nonprofit magazine I work for.

saw on bsky articulated v well this AM or yesterday that Trumpers are a cult and you can't argue with a cult

― a (waterface)

it's really important for me to... i have strong beliefs on what's effective and what's not when responding to trump voters and it's not really a theoretical consideration for me. it's not within my power to affect trump voters' behavior. what's in my power is to try and influence people who _know_ trump voters. i'm really aware of how limited that power is, though. i'm really aware that ultimately, people make their own decisions, and ultimately, i _trust_ people to make decisions for themselves, even if i don't agree with those decisions.

there's this lady i know and i just want to scream at her "STOP TALKING TO YOUR SHITTY, ABUSIVE PARENTS". i truly believe that she would be so much better off as a person if she would just stop talking to them. and the people around her say the same, her wife says the same, her friends say the same. one day she might. i really do believe that. she was thinking about it recently, and me, and everyone else around her said "Yes, this is a good idea," and, you know, she still wants them to _understand_. she believes that if she says the right things, in the right way, that they'll _understand_ and stop doing the things that they're doing. it's a hard thing to accept, that one's parents can value what people say on the tv, on facebook, more than they value their own daughter. that's just how it is, though, with a lot of people. one's parents, one's spouse, whoever... however they _feel_ about that person, they treat that person like shit.

that sucks, but i've seen lots of people cape for their abusers. _i_ caped for _my_ abuser. i know firsthand just how fucking hard it is to leave. not just before, but _after_. the cost of leaving someone you don't just love, but _depend_ on. when le guin talks about omelas... maybe she's talking about a political construct, or maybe she's talking about our siblings, our parents, our spouses. to me there's no difference. if someone is hurting me or people i care about, and i can't convince them to stop by any other means, i have to walk away.

i don't think the decisions we have to face are any different, any easier, than the choices trump voters have made and continue to make. i do look at trump voting, at conservatism, through the lens of abuse, and abuse, to me, is a cycle. making a better world, climbing out of this hell we're in, to me, the first step is breaking the cycle. is being willing to step away from people who aren't acting in our best interest, no matter what they say. for trump voters, that means stepping away from trump, from all his works, from his empty promises. for others, that means... stepping away from, or otherwise working to protect ourselves from, the actions of the people in our lives who voted for trump. this isn't something we all have equal opportunities to do. i'm privileged to be able to have done it to the extent that i have, and in no way do i ever wish to put a burden or expectation on other people to behave a certain way for _my_ benefit. desire, yes. obligation, no.

-

the second, harder part, the part i struggle with, is _not_ leaving. is remaining in community with other people, is learning to trust other people. to be able to discern when i am the one who needs to change, who needs to listen. to do the work to walk away from my own ignorance, bigotry, prejudice. to own my own shit. to take personal responsibility for my life without shame, and to seek out people who _won't_ shame me or hold me accountable for _their_ lives, _their_ actions. because there are _lots_ of people like that in this world. there are lots of people here like that.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a62875397/homelessness-in-america/

Yeah, I was just coming here to post that Esquire story. Holy shit.

Just the constant hassling by cops.

The constant “can you give us your number?” When they have nothing to give in return.

i am from that town. i know (and worked) with patrick in the early 2000s. it is all true. ask me anything.

i had to stop reading when he was writing about his teeth :(

i don't have any questions, i can see how this could happen to a person