2016 US elections was a ridiculously sobering moment for realizing that we had not progressed nearly to the extent that I nievely thought.
This one rings home pretty hard. I’ve definitely viewed the people around me differently since then. And especially since covid as well.
Agreed, Covid ties or is a close runner up for me as well in terms of people showing their true colors.
I’m not even from the US and honestly it was a sobering moment for me as well. I realised how people like Hitler get into power. Before 2016 I knew it was possible like cognitively but Trump being elected made it feel real in a way it never had before.
Same for my country (Hungary). For the first time almost all off the opposition parties agreed to merge into eachother, then the chosen opposition president almost became the old corrupt guy’s wife (old people voted for them), then the Ukraine már happened where everyone knew Orbán made a ton of contracts with Putin, LITERALLY disses Zelensky but never mentions Putin’s name and Orbán won with a record 2/3 again.
Hungarian people literally can’t remember about 1956, it seems.
I have thought a lot about the “How do background characters tell if they’re in a story?” thing a lot since.
The day the alternate timeline stopped being a meme. The day “we’re in too damned interesting times to this not be the end of humanity” became a reality.
If the world burns, whatever. We have had it coming.
The 2008 bank bailouts. Watching our government spend nearly a trillion dollars to bail out some unelected bankers who made some bad decisions and were “too big to fail (true)”. Watching them spend that money on bonuses for their execs, while none of them went to jail. Watching the social response to that (occupy) and then watching a coordinated federal crackdown of those protests across the country. And then watching bailouts happen again and again since then. Meanwhile in Iceland, they overthrew their government over it. The global financial system has deeply rooted flaws, and bailouts are an inevitability in it. We will inevitably, every so often, make another huge wealth transfer like that because so longs as lending exists, particularly private lending, and all banks are interconnected so that if one fails they all fail, there will always be bank runs and bailouts. Even the most well-intentioned bank cannot hedge against all risks and market shocks. And the government will just turn on the money printer every time it happens while you watch your hard-earned money lose its value.
Snowden file leaks lead me down the path to privacy and to reading books like Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky. Lead me down the path to degoogling and linux and now decentralized services like Lemmy.
It seems like every week some article comes out with big tech abusing their rights. This week was Philips hue and last week or so it was a mom getting 2 years in jail because Facebook gave up information about her giving abortion pills to her daughter.
I am using all these foss services myself and making my friends and family use them and be aware of these events. It’s a slow car crash and if people are apathetic and say “I have nothing to hide” and eventually “I have nothing to say”, soon we’ll be stripped of more rights until it’s too late.
“The cells of death row are filled with guys who had nothing to hide.” - Kenneth Eade
GWB publicly condoning torture.
I grew up during the tail end of the cold war. Torture was something the Soviets did. We were better than that.
And sure, I knew the CIA did stuff like that under the table, but it was never OK.
It’s what got me interested in politics, and why I feel that we shouldn’t try to hide the bad things we’ve done when we teach history. Knowing what we’re capable of is necessary to keep ourselves from repeating the mistakes of the past.
we ‘shouldn’t’ try to hide the bad things we’ve done when we teach history
The keyword here is shouldn’t. Most people don’t do lots of things they should.
Not out of malice but simply laziness, it is a lot easier to just default to the norm and go on. Try comparing what should get done in politics(campaign promises) to what actually gets done in washington. In short what should happen and what actually happens are two different things in a lot of areas.
Not how I view the world, but how I view USA and “citizens of the free world”.
In 2016 my girlfriend and I visited New York - for me, first time visiting USA. I had a co-worker who lived in USA for most of her childhood, so I asked her if she had some advice for me to get along with people I met on my way.
“Never underestimate the stupidity of Americans”.
I thought that to be rude as I had “talked” with many Americans on Reddit and sure, there were idiots, but that didn’t define a person from USA for me.
We arrived in New York and took a cab to the hotel. The driver asked us “So, is Donald Trump making headlines in Europe?” (This was during the 2016 election).
I laughed and told him “Yeah, can you believe people will vote on such a moron”…
Oh no I didn’t… He was furious, as Donald Trump was the Saviour of USA and he was singlehandedly going to “clean up the swamp” or whatever his catchphrase was… and then he said one of the stupidest things I have ever heard.
“90% of Muslims are terrorists and if you don’t kill them, they will kill you”…
I know not all Americans are this dumb, but I learned my lesson… Never underestimate the stupidity of Americans.
It can be applied elsewhere too. Whenever politics come up, it’s wise to initally talk about it in a neutral state.
Well, yes, but where I’m from the topic “Donald Trump” is not a political one, it’s more of a “will you look at that shit show”.
A lot has changed since 2016 and I will most definitely approach every subject in a neutral state, as I feel like more and more people are getting more stupid by the hour.
Ahh I see, then I’m part of the dummy ones it seems.
Indeed a lot has changed since 2016, but maybe people were always this stupid, although your comment indicates that you’re pretty experienced in life already, so maybe you’re right. I’m only 22.
Talk about current issues and potential solutions rather than ideologies or politicians.
Hmm an even better approach.
My old boss was once asked by a NY taxi driver “So what language do you all speak over there in England?”
He said French.
I might not have been a raging, bleeding-heart, anti-capitalist liberal had Trump not gotten elected in November 2016. Until then I might have considered myself apolitical with no strong political ambitions. Seeing the post-election riots/protests opened up the world to me, his election wasn’t a stupid joke but an injustice on all the people Trump essentially campaigned on fucking over.
Another crazy moment was the second time I got high on weed. I was super panicked at first, but when I went to bed, all of a sudden abstract art made sense to me as I had visions and felt a connection to their work even if I didn’t know their name. That high had residual effects the next day and I had felt changed somehow.
Sorry but “anti capitalist liberal”? But liberalism is capitalism
it’s amazing how many people think “liberal” = “leftist”
We can blame America for that
yea I had the same reaction. In the US I think it bears a different meaning, they equate liberal with the left. Even though it hardly makes sense, it’s the usage
- 9/11
- Bush v Gore
- GWB re-election (despite war, recession, etc.)
- Trump election
- COVID
All chipped away at notions of stability, fairness, and sanity.
Still have hope, but tend not to believe the hype so much.
COVID. Really never understood before how little of a shit the U.S. government has for its people. But they straight up let us fucking die while telling teenagers they needed to get back to work for minimum wage so they could get their shit Mcdildos and mochafuckaccinos and add gold spinning rims to their yachts. I can’t wait until these old fucks start dying off, I don’t care what political leanings they claim to have, we need a fuckin overhaul.
Even more so I was shocked at how little care a lot of people have for others in general.
Ohh, the lockdowns showed me how all of you motherfuckers really are. It was VERY enlightening.
It really is interesting isn’t it?
A lot of people are shitheels
A lot of people are ornery
A lot of people don’t think for themselves
A lot of people are susceptible to conspiracy
A lot of people are followers by nature
I could go on and on.
The whole “the world will end in 2012” hysteria back then. It was my first glimpse into conspiracy theories, which I’ve spent a lot of time learning about ever since. It made me realize that nothing is ever too idiotic to not have an alarming number of people fall for it. It’s why I wasn’t surprised by the rise of the Q-movement or the resistance against the absolute bare minimum of COVID measures because of microchips in vaccines etc. All of that were just yet additional “of course people believe that shit”-moments for me.
Like Tommy Lee Jones said in Men in Black “A person is smart - people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals.”
I haven’t been surprised by how stupid people can be in a long time.
Actually, how did the 2012 thing became such a viral trend? Literally even news sites aired it SEVERAL times here, and I already thought that’s it was a dumb conteo story. (I was 11 then)
As someone who was in his late teens then, I don’t think many people really seriously believed that the world was going to end in 2012. It was more of a running joke. I remember that a few days before the 21st of December, someone posted on a forum for students of the university I was then attending that exam results were going to be posted on the 21st; someone else responded “oh, so for some who took this course the world will actually end on that day”.
It was the end of a ~5,000 year cycle in a mayan calendar or something.
For me it was when I was watching Soul with some friends and eventually came to some emotional realizations. I realized that I only had a superficial understanding of how to communicate. I could discuss ideas in the abstract, but I had trouble with expressing myself emotionally and personally because I was always conditioned to repress how I feel. I guess like 22 in the movie I only saw myself as a casual observer. It took a couple rewatches for me to process the difficult emotions I was feeling into something I could explain but when I did it really helped my overall mental outlook on life.
Being treated for cancer in hospital (in remission now, thank you) during COVID lockdowns gave me lots of time to reflect on my life. Realised that probably I was the asshole all these years; and also came to the realisation that I’m autistic and socially awkward. Reading David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs helped me to understand all the corporate games and garbage that I’d been part of for most of my career.
When I think about my life, it’s divided into pre-cancer diagnosis, selfish workaholic and part of corporate life; and post-cancer remission, unemployed, living off my savings, kinder to the people and the world, but unable to find a job that resonates with the new me.
I’ll throw one out for COVID, but not just the lockdowns or the immediate work changes. It was more about how the deaths kept happening. And happening. And happening. Yet people still failed to take it seriously, even to the point of rebelling against seemingly common-sense safeguards like vaccines, masking, and staying the fuck home.
In the US, we lived through about 4 years of shenanigans and bullshit and lies from an incompetent federal government leading up to the pandemic. But surely that wouldn’t fly for long. You can lie about the number of people at a rally (because who the fuck cares), you can apparently lie about where a hurricane is projected to go (because it’s jUsT a PrOjEcTiOn or something), but surely you can’t bullshit your way out of a pandemic. Hospitals at capacity. Bodies piling up. Loved ones lost. Visible, real, tangible impacts of poor leadership and poor decisionmaking.
But, turns out you can. Even in the most dire of circumstances, you can still convince people that reality isn’t real. Or even if it is, it doesn’t really matter and it’s not their problem. And there are enough people out there who will buy into that message that it will ruin things for everyone else.
Edit: To the original point of the question… I guess I had a little more faith in humanity before all that happened. More faith that real-world consequences would win out against rhetorical bullshit and tribalism.
reality isn’t real
It is worth keeping in mind Hanlon’s Razor with this. “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by neglect.” They are running on emotions and accepting being wrong hurts so they simply don’t accept their emotions.
I knew it as “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”. I think it fits better here, too, when in the face of actual death, people still ignore common sense. Screw neglect, that’s pure, unadulterated, 100% organic, fresh as the driven snow stupidity.
I prefer this fuller version
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by neglect, ignorance or incompetence.
Stupidity implies it is something that cannot be changed. Usually their behavior could be changed but it is just a hard task to change their behavior that requires the person in question to be willing to change.
Trump
winninggetting carried by the EVs made me a bitter, jaded, hopeless husk. I lost faith in the republic, in america, in people, in common sense…I don’t know if I ever truly recovered.
Come to think of it, i’ve lived through at least two instances where the direct opposition of the public’s will have lead to death, suffering, and the collapse of represenative democracy: Bush v Gore, and the Trump Presidency. Odd how that’s a common trend.
What’s EVs?
I think he meant Electoral College. Unless 2016 saw the release of the ‘Tesla-Force 1’
Electoral votes
Losing everything. My family wasn’t rich but it was well off, and in my young stupidity I thought we deserved to live better than others did because we worked hard (had a family business).
Turns out hard work means almost jack shit. I mean, I’m good now because I have very marketable skills and I do work hard at a job not many want to do, but it takes me around the world and I can tell you, fucking everything in life depends on luck, starting from where you are born.This is the biggest difference between myself and my brother.
My dad is fairly well off having run a company for decades at this point and I knew I didn’t want to lean on that. So I went on my own career path.
My brother decided to join the family company. Over the past 20 years he was gifted 50 percent of the company as a bonus. He didn’t understand that he’s only in that situation because the owner was his dad. He’s never understood how big of a safety net the two of us had growing up. He genuinely thinks that his hard work is the sole reason for his position in life and that anybody that’s willing to work as hard as he did (and he did, I won’t deny it) would be on a similar situation as himself.
The luck factor is also called opportunity. People succeed financially because they had some opportunity arise that enabled the success to be a possibility. Be it a random chance that they were given a job interview, that their dad owns a company they can start at, or they happened to grow up in an area with good education options they could lean on to develop skills, or just a serious safety-net.
I had option 2 and 4, but used option 3 to eventually get option 1. I’m mostly unsatisfied with the world because I wish everybody had option 3 and 4 to start with regardless of family.