Is the US a dystopia?

haha

mike thompson was a nazi
he liked to play ss
he had a picture of adolf old boy
right there in his ceo vest

and yeah he’d deny your mama
and he’d torture your pop
and yeah he’d march you up to that wall
and deny your claim after crushing your balls

he was a nazi
but he’s not anymore
he was a nazi
luigi evened that score

Though it would be tempting to add to the MDC meme, Luigi going mod ska dancing, buying funny sunglasses, etc … if someone has already done this, post it please

<3 xp

Xp <3 tabes & sleeve

for context:

https://i.imgur.com/X7O33p0.jpeg

Lol table

i realized his name was Brian Thompson. oh well lol

I think Thiel's being poisoned by his barber... the guy clearly hates him...

bands photoshopping Luigi into their concert pics Where's Waldo style would be the move

Can I just say that having a bunch of asshole murderers share or approximate my name is only slightly more upsetting than sharing a name with a prolific dragon pornfic author

I was going to say the bright side is it keeps your own content way down the search engine results but I could see where that's also not ideal for many reasons

Yeah, I’m not looking at the dude who killed a BLM protester and going “at least no one is seeing my Lana Del Rey hot takes”

oof

Diddy's top attorney, Marc Agnifilo, is married to high-powered attorney Karen Friedman Agnifilo, who is representing Luigi Mangione, the man accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. pic.twitter.com/n5xv1rMQOr

— XXL Magazine (@XXL) December 16, 2024

Diddy & Mangione both have access to $$$.

I imagine these high-profile cases are good advertising or resume boosters

Walmart employees are now wearing body cameras in some stores

Can I just say that having a bunch of asshole murderers share or approximate my name is only slightly more upsetting than sharing a name with a prolific dragon pornfic author

― DJP

shit i'd love to share a name with a prolific dragon pornfic author

some of my best friends are dragon pornfic authors

well, one, but i mean, isn't that enough?

i used to have the same name as a Legendary Auteur

it was cool except that people kept thinking i _was_ the legendary auteur for some reason

or that i was somehow impersonating the legendary auteur

it was a lot of pressure. i didn't need that kind of pressure.

anyway now i don't have the same name as anybody famous, because women aren't allowed to be famous

i kinda wish women were allowed to be famous, because the non-famous woman whose name i have seems pretty cool

(mdc at portland, oregon concert meme)

goddammit i miss all the cool shit that happens in this town

why do i even live here anyway

ok my brain is now telling me it's because i'm "too lazy to move"

i used to be cool you know

no, not really

i used to have the delusion that i was cool

Just putting this here

Vice President J.D. Vance

(mdc at portland, oregon concert meme)

goddammit i miss all the cool shit that happens in this town

why do i even live here anyway

ok my brain is now telling me it's because i'm "too lazy to move"

i used to be cool you know

no, not really

i used to have the delusion that i was cool

https://theonion.com/you-know-i-used-to-be-kind-of-cool-once-1819583601/

I can relate tbh … though as my ilx-documented research in the field of hipster studies shows … cool is relative.

― sarahell

see, i've always seen you as cool!

but yeah cool is a conundrum... i'm not really interested in being cool anymore, though i hasten to add not in some sigma-male "i'm too cool to be cool" kind of way. when i think of "cool" i think of this one girl i used to be friends with. she decided she was too cool for me and for portland and moved to brooklyn. being rejected by her, particularly the way that she did it, hurt, but looking back she kinda had... pretty low self-esteem and a lot of her behavior was her being pretty nakedly desperate for external approval. some people use a word for behavior like that and i wouldn't use that word, because it gets taken to mean that someone is a Bad Person, and i don't think she's a Bad Person.

when i think of cool i also think of lou reed exploding penn and teller with eye lasers and penn saying "you're too cool for us, lou". lou reed was definitely cool. would i want to be lou reed? no. would i want to hang out with lou reed? also no. i don't care how "cool" somebody is, if someone's being an asshole they're no fun to be around.

on the other hand, when i think of "cool" i also think of my neighbors who have a giant spider with laser eyes and fangs in front of their house. they change it around seasonally. this december the spider has a red nose and antlers and is holding a human-sized bundle of spider silk with a santa hat sticking out in its maw. they left a perfectly-working catapult out with the trash this morning. good construction, in perfect nick. it's mine now. i'd like to know them. i don't know if anybody else thinks they're "cool" but i do.

or i think of this lady i used to know back in the '90s who lived in medford. probably people don't think of anyone from medford as being "cool", it's one of those "can any good thing come out of nazareth?" places. i think this lady was cool. her dad was one of those sweet nerds who knew all the carny tricks. he showed me how to breathe fire. he could eat fire, too, and hammer nails up his nose, but that was harder. i guess hammering nails up one's nose isn't much harder than doing a COVID swab. i guess we all theoretically know how to do that now. sometimes i wonder if that lady's come out yet. she was one of those awkward nerd girls i liked (in an ambiguous way) who was kinda implicitly queer, even though we never talked about it.

Oh my god https://t.co/IlhzXIf5vm pic.twitter.com/or3ZNRqqaJ

— Read Abolish Rent (@JPHilllllll) December 18, 2024

Probably because they held their company Christmas party in the morning (like my employer)

he prob just figured the ceo needed a stabbin

i guess hammering nails up one's nose isn't much harder than doing a COVID swab.

Narrator: It is.

Omg that’s…there’s a decent chance I know someone who knows someone in Fruitport. I used to live there.

it was a manufacturing company, how else are you supposed to sell your boss on new methods for assembling technology

The largest pharmacy chain in America is accused of "unlawfully dispensing massive quantities of opioids and other controlled substances to fuel its own profits at the expense of public health and safety," according to a civil lawsuit filed by the Justice Department, which was unsealed Wednesday.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/cvs-knowingly-dispensed-massive-amount-invalid-opioid-prescriptions/story?id=116927855

^^^^ CVS soon to donate to Trump's inauguration

i go to CVS
and I see BS

its old news kinda. all three of the big chains made massive profits during the opioid crisis and when you read what walgreens did back then...its truly horrible. the whole not caring about people thing. hell, all those doctors overprescribing for all those years...i don't remember the AMA putting out an apology to people about what doctors did here. a chain like walgreens should have been put out of business. they should have had every license revoked. all these chains overbuilt thinking the opioid ride would go on forever and now they are all bankrupt and closing everything AFTER they put every independent drug store in the country out of business. its maddening.

anyway, now, the dystopian thing to me is just the not caring part. not on the part of the companies. the people who live here. the vast majority of people in this country do not care that almost everyone relies on these horrible chains for medicine. nobody is going to stop going to CVS after reading that story. nobody is going to stop using amazon after watching a scare documentary about amazon. that's that suicidal aspect of a dying superpower. people just kinda give up. they know things are horrible...eh...at least weed is legal...

i was reading/watching some thing about the 10 million or more men who have just stopped doing anything. they don't work. they don't go anywhere. it was bleak. also i totally saw myself in that cohort if things had worked out differently for me.

I'm imagining a CVS-sponsored inauguration with lots of songs like "Midnight Blue" and "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?"

Lol

My home town used to have a family-owned pharmacy that was in the 2nd or 3rd generation and they shut a couple of years ago. I don't know for sure but it probably didn't help that a Walgreen's opened in the shopping plaza near the highway.

I was really sad when our local indie pharmacy shut down, it was by far the most pleasant good-vibes pharmacy I’ve been to. And it had that charm of fixtures etc that hadn’t been replaced since the 80s

When I call in prescription refills my pharmacy's voice mail menu starts "Thanks for calling [drugstore], your local independently owned pharmacy."

the problem is that when something similar happened to Walgreen's, it resulted in them making it near impossible for patients to pick up controlled substances at their stores after that for patients that actually needed them for their pain. This was around 2013-2014 I think but many people shared they got told filling the prescription was "feeding an addiction" and to seek other pharmacies to fill their Rx at, or people who had to wait excessive amounts of time. Walgreen's was putting all of the pressure on their pharmacists to go through a really long, secret checklist before dispensing them, and it was actually hurting people who depended on the drugs.

so I'm guessing CVS will be the same (tbh, it might already be that way today, idk)

i was reading/watching some thing about the 10 million or more men who have just stopped doing anything. they don't work. they don't go anywhere. it was bleak. also i totally saw myself in that cohort if things had worked out differently for me.

― scott seward

my mom's youngest brother - early gen x - lost his job in 2008. he was a research scientist. he tried going back to law school. tried getting a job as an EMT. didn't work out. he kinda scraped by, lived in his basement studio listening to prog rock, sometimes playing prog rock. his wife kept working, kept working through the breast cancer. idk. maybe he did more for the family, more for their son, than he seemed to. seemed like she did a lot and he didn't do as much. anyway, he had a stroke and lost the ability to form memories, which made it even harder for my aunt, caretaking him full-time, until he died a couple years back.

my mom's second youngest brother was a real estate lawyer... when the '08 crash happened, he couldn't get work. he'd just bought a big new house for his big family. they were underwater, it got repo'd. got into doing sales. i don't know that he's really good at it. he gives off kind of a willy loman vibe. he had a stroke too, though it wasn't as damaging. last i heard of him he seemed to be doing ok, went in for the deaconate, which seemed to be giving his life meaning. trad cath, opus dei type. black sheep of the family in that regard. he became dead to me after he made a big deal about being a "never trumper" and then voted for trump anyway, because borchen. i have no idea what him or his family think of me and don't much care.

my mom's third and fourth youngest brothers are retired too. i think of them as more "late boomers". one was a doctor, one was a lawyer. the doctor, he's a pretty amazing guy. does a lot of good for the community in a lot of ways. problem is, the head of surgery... well, i won't get into details, but the head of surgery was doing some stuff that my uncle felt, with good reason, was... sacrificing the health of his patients for profit. and advocated on behalf of better patient care. anyway, my uncle's retired now. i guess that guy is still running the surgery department over there.

i got maybe one trans friend who works. a lot of us lost our jobs this year. i'm losing my job. i was perfectly good at this job seven years ago, but, well... i mean, i've talked about this job. i'm not sad to be leaving it, but where the fuck am i gonna work? i've stopped telling people i'm trans when i apply to places, which gets me interviews, but damn, it's rough to get a job doing anything. no, no, it's rough to get a job doing _nothing_, because nobody _does_ anything these days, really. i'd like to do something, but none of us have the power, none of us have the authority. my one friend who has a job... it'd be good work if the institutional support existed for her to do it well. one of my other friends, she got sacked unexpectedly recently. she was working at a non-profit supporting queer healthcare. they couldn't get the funding. she was telling me... she was a teacher for 20 years. the last straw for her was when the first brought kids back in school after COVID, the first fucking thing they did was standardized testing. first fucking thing.

my mom's youngest sister is an educator, tries to get books in for the curriculum. in ohio. there's only so much she can do, you know, in ohio. she's too young to retire, can't really afford to. she says mostly they're coming after the immigrants. i got a pretty distorted view of what the world looks like, probably, me being white, me being born here. i just know that a lot of people who were loud about supporting trans people in '19 aren't as loud these days. media that supports trans people gets quietly shelved, trans-affirming scenes get cut. it's too controversial. god, these days it seems a miracle that a show like _the owl house_ got made at all. i don't think a show like it would get on the air today.

i don't know where all this goes. i got unemployment for a while. i'm not gonna get kicked out of my home anytime soon, which makes me privileged. a lot of my friends are homeless. there's probably a future for us somewhere out there, but i can't really see it from here. i'm doing what i can to get by, to take care of myself. trying to get out there and socialize with other people. one's world gets smaller when things get hard the way they are. that's not good. i know the statistics. community is a matter of life and death - for everyone, no matter who.

i don't talk about it much because it's depressing. people don't want to listen. i don't want to talk about it. i got less to say. very little to say at all, really, these days.

My health insurance company has their own hospitals and pharmacies. It’s the one that ranked the “best” in that infographic where United was the worst. I have had this company since birth.

I think I have only had to get a prescription from Walgreens etc when I had dental surgery. It’s still absurd that dental is a separate thing…. because dental pain jfc the only times I have had opiods were for dental pain.

My uncle was a doctor who may have been one of the overproscribers … it wasn’t a getting bribes from pharmaceutical companies in his case, he just was really sympathetic to patients in pain, and wanted to help. Idk … he never talked about it and he has severe dementia now so we’ll never know lol

the family-owned former pharmacy that’s about a mile away from me is now just an ice cream shop, in the vein of old-timey soda fountain shops. they’ll never have a pharmacy license again after moving 700,000 (!) hydrocodone pills, most out the back door

it’s absolutely insane how many opioids were moving through the system for years

when you read about walgreens setting up their own distribution because they couldn't sell oxy fast enough back then...oof. talk about a menace to society.

i spent two hours on the phone with insurance trying to understand how they processed some claims for my son and got basically nowhere... in the end they were basically like 'oh yeah we messed something up we have to redo the whole thing'. they were very nice but also impossible to hear 1/2 the time because the customer service person appeared to have the entir emouthpiece of her phone in her throat.

when that Trump picture was supposedly the “hardest image of the year” we couldn’t even conceive of this pic.twitter.com/iktmtKk3C6

— Skyler Higley (@skyler_higley) December 19, 2024

fucking Adams, what is this Batman shit

funny haha news hit about cops in South Carolina chasing and tasing the Grinch made me feel very dystopia-queasy. Gosh that's hilarious chasing a guy and electrocuting him!

must-read article about our tech/app dystopia, posted by frogbs in the "backwards steps" thread

https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/

local indie pharmacy

Indie pharmacies had the edgy new meds. Not like that mass-market focus-tested crap put out by CVS, maaaan.

The major pharms are just all about the money, maaaan.