Oh we're past the point of no return. The question we're at now is how much damage can we mitigate from here forward.
The US has killed any of it's power it's had in the world beyond military and economic. The power it had through friendships and trade deals, they're fucking gone. Trade deals have been shown to be temporary and based on whims so why would anyone do it. And friendships? HAHAHAHAH.
So now it's economic... and oh look, we're about to start tearing that apart and probably look at a depression that will be compared to the OG Great Depression, while the trade deals are going across the world and China is definitely willing to step up to the plate to be the "adult in the room" in trade deals.
So last it's military power. And with getting rid of officers to only have loyal ones... that means strategy and tactics will be going out the window for "We have a big hammer."
That's the US's interaction with the world, which most of our lives we've been in the dominant position. So that'll get rough. Now on to the things internally that DOGE has gone through and cleared out, it'll take years to unfuck the stuff already done.
The worst case scenario, I would argue, is that this ends in the destruction of the world via nuclear war within less than an hour. This is what I am scared of the most.
I just want to know ahead of time frankly because I know where the nuke is likely to hit in our city and I'm out of the insta-vaporize zone so I want to get closer.
No. He's just been pushed to the side and is pissy about it. I'll appreciate his involvement in resisting that maybe he can pull off some of the supporters, but at the end of the day, he's still an asshole.
I'll preface with I'll agree that for the most part, it's men being whiny about "woke" and other nonsense. They're assholes. I really don't have anything to add to that front.
So I'll add a perspective of the small other crowd in situations friends of mine and I have found ourselves in, that having criticisms of women led stories gets us lumped in with the above group when the same criticism of a male led roles/stories are fine and dandy. And we're not exactly a group that hates women led stories despite our love of scifi action. Sarah Conner, Ripley, Jesse Faden if anyone has played the game Control.
Some of it I get as a female led cast movie/show will get hate before the first previews even launch so legitimate discussions can happen. However, I can go on absolute rants about how terrible movies can be: Tom Cruise remaking The Mummy was, attempting to do Hellboy without Ron Perlman and Guillermo Del Toro, whatever the Conan the Barbarian attempt Jason Mamoa had, and no one bats an eye. (Lets be honest, those were all terrible movies)
However I've been called a misogynist when I talk about in the list with those above ones how absolutely terrible the all women cast remake of Ghostbusters was. Again, I knew there was a lot of undue hate, but if I ever discuss it, I've had to outright asterisk it every time that none of my complaints were to the actresses themselves but the movie from worldbuilding to some of the concept of it being made itself (As in: It's Ghostbusters, an IP that's been around for decades, did we need to dedicate screentime to remaking it from scratch? A complaint I'll have at every reboot of a popular IP.)
And there's legitimacy to the why. As you point out, there's very few women led movies/stories which (I assume) means that with some representation there's the want to nicer to it, especially as there are people who are outright assholes about it. Vs Another White Guy Does Things is easy to deride a movie because... speaking as a white guy, I'm going to be there mocking that movie too. But that's why I put the "(I assume)" earlier, because it's not like I'm lacking in some form of representation, so it's easy to mock it.
I will wrap up this though with again, it's a small extra outside perspective for a different viewpoint. If people just complain "There are too many women in x", no, they've stopped having legitimate complaints and are just being jackasses.
Theoretically maybe the "savior" won't shoot, maybe.
Look, it's not a good deal, but hey, I'm trying this optimism thing out. Don't think it's working.
That said, anyone who makes a deal with Trump hasn't paid attention to any of the deals he made in his last administration that he'll drop them when they're inconvenient.
Watergate is as far as you can draw a direct line.
I'd say Nixon administration as a whole. They picked up the dixiecrats post Civil Rights movement. Look up Nixon's political Strategist Kevin Phillips and his discussion on the Southern Strategy where it was specifically targeting the racist whites to bring them into the Republican party.
But then that's the part where I can say goes all the way back to slavery, but hey, if you grew up in the South the Civil War was never quite over even to modern era. But I'd definitely say the Southern Strategy the Republicans put into place would be where I'd say the beginning of drawing a direct line to where we're at now.
Missouri here... if you're worried about your congressman hearing from you daily after the cuts, you're already on the game too late. If you're concerned you need to be doing it before
Y'know what, I'll bite. It's been long enough I can't definitively say whether it came up before or not.
But that's a point though, she did move her policy to that of the ones that the Bernie supporters and they still snubbed her and we got Trump.
So in that we made sure the Left didn't have a seat at the table because they didn't bother to show up right after showing they had the numbers and ability to do so, and we got a billionaire man-baby who sucks up to other billionaires and fascist regimes. Good trade.
I say this as a Bernie voter, but my national vote was still for Hillary. Citizens United and the Supreme Court were on the line, I told other leftists it was on the line, I was told I was overreacting... so call me fucking Cassandra.
Pretty much. I just always like to point these things out as there's a nice bit of revisionism amongst the left on "We want this, why didn't the dems give it to us" while people don't show up and vote for them, then cry they didn't show up because "Dems are as bad as republicans." Which frankly is as bad as the right on their revisionism.
The 16 election was an attempt to take down Citizens United as well as bring up the Trans Pacific Partnership. The TPP was specifically trying to get the other Asian countries to lock out China in trade to reduce its power. But the right wingers thought "No we want to be hard on China" pulled out of it, and basically left China to look at all the other Asian countries who didn't have a partnership with the US and bring them to heel.
Citizens United came about in 2010, during the Obama administration, and specifically that same year Republicans had gained majority in the House, creating a divided congress that meant no laws could get through, especially an anti-Citizens United bill. An executive order isn't going to fix this one.
The Left falls into the same fallacy as the Right, they want a strong leader who can "solve all the problems." Problem is the Right is really good at it because it's really their authoritarian style. The part that pisses me off is the Right is also really good at showing up at the polls when they matter even if they hate the candidate, as long as it moves the needle one step over to their side while the Left keeps having a lot of voters be all or nothing.
Okay, I had trouble getting off of sodas, and everyone suggested fizzy water instead, and they all tasted nasty, like maybe the water sat in the room with the fruit maybe.
But this is the only time I'll ever say good about Walmart, their walmart branded carbonated waters are 99 cents a liter and taste amazing. The Fuji Apple one is the one I usually get and it tastes like a fizzy apple soda but doesn't have sugar.
Since I avoid walmart like the plague, I've learned to just drink water now. Tap water is my go to. But these things are like my guilty pleasure, which is a far cry better than the sugar drinks imo.
Oh we're past the point of no return. The question we're at now is how much damage can we mitigate from here forward.
The US has killed any of it's power it's had in the world beyond military and economic. The power it had through friendships and trade deals, they're fucking gone. Trade deals have been shown to be temporary and based on whims so why would anyone do it. And friendships? HAHAHAHAH.
So now it's economic... and oh look, we're about to start tearing that apart and probably look at a depression that will be compared to the OG Great Depression, while the trade deals are going across the world and China is definitely willing to step up to the plate to be the "adult in the room" in trade deals.
So last it's military power. And with getting rid of officers to only have loyal ones... that means strategy and tactics will be going out the window for "We have a big hammer."
That's the US's interaction with the world, which most of our lives we've been in the dominant position. So that'll get rough. Now on to the things internally that DOGE has gone through and cleared out, it'll take years to unfuck the stuff already done.