Is the US a dystopia?

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.

NEW: Drone startup BRINC, which just pulled a $25 million VC round, says it was inspired by the 2017 Vegas shooting to build non-violent robots. I obtained a video showing their original mission was a border patrol drone system designed to tase migrants https://t.co/TclkWOO3eM

— 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

glad we got this settled

got it sordid

Is ILX a dystopia?

just look around

As of today, 50% of women in federal prisons are Indigenous.

This is genocide.

— martha paynter (@MarthPaynter) December 17, 2021

going to a rally in a bit, will bump thread later if capitalism overthrown

"To Hatzifotinos, such tragedies were avoidable. “ ‘Don’t have money’ is not an excuse right now,” he told me. “I don’t know why people are choosing to get evicted. It never used to be a choice. Now I believe that it is.”"

https://harpers.org/archive/2024/04/the-eviction-experts/

"Can American Policing Be Fixed?"

"Lunch with the QAnon Shaman"

https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/HA0424-0C1DS_001.png

NC legislature votes to ban the wearing of (medical) masks in public, with a carve-out for members of secret societies, aka the fucking klan

texas governor pardons a convicted premeditated murderer (who also sexted 16yos) but it's okay because the murder victim was a black protestor

Good luck with chemo in NC.

https://www.newsweek.com/jasmine-crockett-marjorie-taylor-greene-diss-track-1901743

The US world has always been a dystopia, with snatches of something slightly less horrible occasionally emerging from the morass for the sake of contrast

The US world has always been a dystopia, with snatches of something slightly less horrible occasionally emerging from the morass for the sake of contrast

― Great-Tasting Burger Perceptions (Old Lunch)

fuck this manichean blackpill shit

we can have better

we _deserve_ better

no personal offense to you OL

fuck it i'm just gonna post the thing i wrote here instead of the autism thread, #onethread

-

I mean the thing is it's not accidental, you know? The "top shortage" here isn't accidental.

With or without an autism diagnosis, people gotta find ways to get by. I went off to college when I was 18 and I didn't have the skills, social or practical, to take care of myself, so I moved back in with my mom. I moved out again to get a job, and again, I didn't have the practical skills or the emotional support network to function, so I moved back in with my mom. I spent a couple years addicted to drugs, cold turkeyed them, was fortunate enough to survive. Met someone who had low enough self-esteem to become my caretaker despite my, like, not having the skills to treat other people with basic kindness and respect, married her, and the trade-off with caretaker relationships is that it... Like you have a job that sucks and you steal office supplies, right? Being a caretaker is a shitty, demanding job. I don't blame my caretakers for doing the things they did. Judging them as beside the point.

I spent a long time trying to learn skills that I the people in my life didn't have the skills or support to teach me, and so I'm out here living on my own, taking care of myself. It's really hard, and I'm not really good at it. And it's not just me. I have dozens of memes humorously expressing the sentiment of "God, taking care of myself is so fucking hard." And some of them are puppygirl memes. I do know a fair number of people who are autistic puppygirls. The shit the right-wingers say on TV, that there are people out there who identify as dogs, who wants to sleep in a cage and drink water out of a dogbowl, that's true. That's not me, I'm not like that, but I understand where that comes from. I've looked at a guy out in public with his dog and looked at how he treated her and sighed and said "God, I wish that was me."

But it's not, and you know, I'm proud of myself and I'm happy about what I've been able to accomplish. I'm better off where I am now, to be able to live on my own, live independently. I buy my own groceries. I do my own laundry. I pay my own bills. I sweep my floor occasionally. I check the mail. I'm able to take the bus to and from medical appointments. I'm able to manage, by myself, the large number of medications I'm taking to be able to function independently.

I mean all this is a lot. Maybe for some people it's like "Oh well of course that's just normal people stuff" and for me it's not. It's work, it's really hard work. And I've learned to celebrate that for myself, what a good job I'm doing, how hard I'm working, because nobody's going to go out there and say "Good job, Kate! You checked your mail today _and_ you took a shower even though you really didn't want to!"

The hardest bit right now for me is holding down a job. Because, I know this is a very autistic thing to say, the job I am working for is meaningless and stupid, it has no value, provides no value to the world at large, and knowing this, it is very hard for me to do this job. I'm work from home, I'm isolated, I live on my own, and this is I guess supposed to be a "privilege". With autism, though, there's this thing called "parallel play", which means that when I'm around other people, it's easier for me to do things. Having friends is important for me for a number of reasons, and one of the main ones is that I can invite them over to my place. There's this assumption that when you invite someone over it's for, I don't know, immoral purposes, unnatural acts, and that's not how it is for me. I have someone over and once they're over it's a lot easier for me to do functional tasks to take care of myself.

Or even, like... just having a good time by myself, it's not something I can do. I mean like. I got a TV and a video game system and thousands upon thousands of movies I could watch. I want to watch these movies, they seem really cool, but it's just not something I can do by myself. So I have friends and I say "Hey why don't you come over, we can watch anime". Or not anime. I've been meaning to watch Jacques Tati's _Playtime_ for over a decade, and I had a friend over a couple weeks ago and I said "Hey, why don't we watch this?" And it is, in fact, a great fucking movie. Also I guess maybe a little relevant to autism, isn't it? These systems, these machines made of people, these small absurdities. And they're funny, but these little meaningless routines, walking slowly down a wall to press a button and pressing slowly back... sometimes it's how I make meaning of things. It's how I make sense out of a chaotic and overwhelming environment.

I mean I do get overstimulated by my environment and people act like that's, like, a functional deficit, and Christ, I don't understand how someone can _not_ be. There's _so much shit_ going on around me _all the time_. For me it's sound, I focus on sounds, and there are airplanes and drag racers and ambulances and shit that I don't even know what it is. Yes I have a hard time looking people in the eyes and it's not because I don't _feel emotion_ it's because there's so _much_ there. So much of everything.

And holding down a job I'm supposed to do ten thousand stupid things at once, and I'm supposed to do them by myself with a boss who makes frequent immediate and factually incorrect demands of me, and I'm supposed to do it while I'm sitting alone in my apartment by myself. Except for the lesbians and puppygirls and fetish artists and I don't even know who, the ones who I alt-tab over to. Because if I'm going to be by myself of course I'm going to want to be by myself with _them_. I don't even know how to talk to a lot of the people at my workplace. I'm sure they're fine people but they have no idea what my life is like. They want to understand, but they have no clue about how to go about it.

Which of course what people say about my "functional deficit". I don't think we're, like, equal. Me and allistic people. I don't think that the way I go about things is _equally valid_. I'm glad I've learned the social skills I've learned. I think it's necessary to... I mean when I was younger someone would say the stupidest thing I'd ever heard and I'd just say, without thinking, "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard." I mean now I know it's not helpful or valuable or _kind_ for me to say that. I know how to not say that, and I know that it's not _lying_ just because it's true and I don't say it.

It's a lot of work, though, to be kind, because a lot of people in power say and do things that are very stupid and cruel and I say nothing because there's nothing I can do about it. I radically accept it, is what I've learned.

But it's hard and yeah I'd drink out of a dog bowl and sleep in a dog cage and wear a collar if it meant I didn't have to do that. Even though none of those things are really things I want to do. I just want someone to care for me. Sometimes. And so does, like.... everybody else here. And that's how you get a top shortage.

ahh cool, cool cool cool

https://www.texastribune.org/2024/05/15/harris-county-election-challenge-180th-district-court/

xpost That was just the inky sludge festering inside of me briefly escaping into the world, my apologies. Just getting harder to keep it tamped down these days.