Ugh… so many of these, and I look around. I know I’m at minimum 4th generation US on both sides of my family.

Another thing that gets me is how many people will say voting doesn’t matter when they maybe only vote on presidential elections.

Voting is not a 4 year thing, it’s an absolute grind and locally can affect more of your day to day life, as well as keep building its way. higher up. I live in a state that so many people showed up and voted for bills that went against the state legislature, but they actually voted less for the people… now of course the state is overthrowing the things voted in.

So yes, SO VERY MUCH vote and be active in politics.

At that age, I was trying my hardest to figure out what I’m doing, to be together like the older adults.

I’m 39, I don’t have a clue what I’m doing and I’m more together than most of my coworkers, many who are older than me.

We’re all just trying to figure it out, so when you look up and think you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re with everyone. And if you know someone who says they have everything together and don’t have any issues, be wary as they likely have a lot of blind spots to their life.

I mean… I’m not going to argue the fall of the US isn’t stupider than the fall of Rome…

But I will argue the fall of the US started back when Reconstruction was stopped. Just took a while for the confederates to win.

Oh boy, Joe Rogan is just the newest flavor of awful. Bill O’Rielly started the whole current entertainment news by being a comedian who suddenly started being a right wing mouthpiece and any time he got called out on his shit it was “For entertainment purposes only” and he was on about the anti-left wing movements about coastal elites and unions taking workers wages.

But then the right wing even to then was building to massive corporations that donated to them, groups like the biggest anti-union propaganda machine in the world, WalMart. Notice that during the Reagan era they had “Trickle Down Economics” to fool people into thinking if the wealthy were just wealthier, then they too could be wealthier.

And the wars between groups have been speared on by the US since post civil war. Can’t have former slaves having jobs, that’d take from the whites. Can’t have people from overseas taking railroad jobs, that takes jobs from Americans. The big slaveowners of the American South were not the majority, so why did so many people fight for that confederacy? Because they were convinced by those wealthy that if slavery went away, there would go the economy… especially as so many people’s jobs were in existence to the slavery machine.

Joe Rogan wasn’t some new bogeyman who figured out how to overthrow the world. The rich has been finding ways to make poor people fight each other instead of them as a tale as old as time.

As a leftie who moved to a red state a decade ago, welcome to the suck. It only gets worse.

I left iphone because of a walled garden issue, was thinking about working with my parents off of iphone so I can actually assist with them because I’ve been off of it for decades.

Instead may be the other direction because at least iOS has a modicum of privacy by at least telling the US government to make their own back doors instead of just licking the boot like google does. I’m not a fan of apple by any stretch of the imagination, but at this point of the falling apart world fuck it, I gotta figure out what the least evil is, even if it’s only marginal.

See, I’ll drive for the most part, because to add on to my bitching about public transportation.

One time had to go to a place for work training. It was 12 hours away. I wanted to drive, company says no, they have me tickets.

It took me 14 hours to get back home from what was a 12 hour car drive. And flying always ends with me pissed off.

So it’s all just absolute shite.

Once Kansas City had apparently a fantastic streetcar. Then the car companies bought it up and tore out the rails. Now we’re getting a streetcar being built again but it’s just doing downtown on one street. I’m not near the streetcar.

So I drive to work. It’s 12 miles, about 30 minutes (or 20 miles, 30 minutes if I take interstate around the city… honestly this city is weird, EVERYTHING is 30 minutes away.) If I wanted to take the bus, the shortest time frame would be 1 hr 35 minutes… not including that I’d have to get halfway there to get to the first bus stop.

Cities… if I wanted to take the train, I can go to Chicago for relatively cheap using Amtrak… but gotta plan that 3 months in advance, and the 8 hour ride we HOPE doesn’t get extended because Amtrak doesn’t own the rails it’s on. Flipside, driving is 8 hours. Other cities, St. Louis, Wichita, basically I have two train lines, one in state, and one cross country. If I want to go to Denver… it’s not happening.

So to answer your question, I want you to try to imagine how bad you think our public transportation is. Then lower your expectations.

Oh I get it completely. There’s a bunch of subreddits I miss, my industry I work in which is very niche, leatherworking, heck even the motorcycle community in Lemmy is… lacking.

On the other part you brought in… OH BOY! Unhinged TED talk time.

So I live relatively close to the Royals and the Chiefs stadiums. John Sherman, gas magnate, the owner of the Royals decided he wanted to move the stadium to downtown, where things have been picking up. Specifically he wanted it in the Crossroads where there’s a lot of local community shops and everything, because he wanted it near Power and Light district where there’s bars and the like which… oh right, he owns a lot of. Troubles came up that the stadium proposals took foooooooorever to even come up, looked like it was drawn on a napkin instead of anything serious, and wanted a tax levy to be put on the city to continue one that still hasn’t been paid off for the last time the two stadiums were built. The whole time saying “Look how the stadiums bring business in!”… the area around the two stadiums have managed to keep a Denny’s and a Taco Bell alive, the big resort hotel couldn’t even survive. Yea… real great for business.

Another trouble is… as I say, I am one of those who actively detests sports… I wish I could find the post, there’s an old Reddit post describing what not liking sports was like and used archeology in how it invades everything around you so it’s easy to go from “I couldn’t care less” to “Okay, I hate this thing now. It is insufferable.” I say all that to say, just paying any attention to the news I knew at the time the Royals was the second worst team in the MLB, they were that bad. So they knew they couldn’t get this move off the ground so they went to the Chiefs who was the most recent superbowl winner which of course was happy to get money their way, and the ad campaign went out. And despite the Royals/Sherman being the push on getting this going, it was all Chiefs all the time. I literally even got a flier in my mail “The liberals are trying to take away our teams!” paid for by the team push, so yay politics even drug in. The whole time threatening “Well if you don’t vote it in, we’ll move. Maybe to Kansas (right over the border) or hey, even Tennessee.” Thing is, the state remembers St. Louis on the other side had the rams, built them a stadium and whoopsiedoodle they packed up and moved to California leaving a city with a stadium and fuck all to do with it.

So we’ve got all sorts of issue in state and local level, but holy fuck all the political pressure since the voters turned down the tax is “How can we keep these teams in Missouri!” And it’s funny, I said I’d be more okay paying for it if we got ANYTHING out of it… I don’t mind paying taxes to keep our zoo going and it’s nice I get a hefty discount when I go, but the Royals and Chiefs are giving a nice hearty “go fuck yourself” for us paying taxes so the billionaires have their teams.

On to the “Why are you a fan?” question you brought up. I don’t question it… but I’ve never understood it. I grew up in Arkansas that never had a pro team so college sports was big… I got to hear the “calling the hogs” my entire life and never comprehended the why. Probably because dad was not a sports guy and had the opinion “Why do I want to watch people play a game?” even though he played in high school and I’ve been pretty much the same. I get the community stuff, and that’s fantastic. I’ve just found a community outside of sports so it doesn’t resound to me. The reason I’ve become so against sports beyond it’s completely impossible to ignore it it’s so inundated in culture, is the sheer amount of money that goes into it in all levels. High school, if you’re one of the “football” schools, your school only has 3-4 sports, all the big stadium ticket getting team sports, the smaller less prestigious schools get more sports like wrestling and the like… guess which situation I ended up in? And watching schools dump money into the sports above all other things like theater, labs, etc. “But it brings in money for the school.” Cool cool… so why are we getting asked for a tax levy so the school can build yet another stadium? Repeat this for the college level so the “Hogs can have a proper place to play!” and now the city with pro teams level. And I hear the ticket prices and think I wouldn’t pay those prices to see my favorite band… and again, those ticket prices and yet we have to pay for their shit?

I’m not a sports guy, I’m pretty anti-sports actually (I can go on absolutely unhinged TED talks about how the local teams are trying to drain the city for taxes… I want to continue, so feel free to ask but not doing it here.) But I agree with you on the niche hobbies and local flavor.

I still have to use Reddit because there hasn’t been a good community for local on Lemmy (yes, I know everyone going “it’s user generated” but I’m like 1 of 5 instead of the hundreds still on reddit) and small hobbies in a lot of the crafting world is non-existent on Lemmy.

I don’t have an answer on this one, just sucks. It’s the trouble of being one of the first ones in the door.

God I hope so. Don’t hope for the US to learn.

We didn’t on guns after Sandy Hook so get some popcorn for the horror show to come for us.

If you’ve read Orwell, then you know we have.

I’ve stopped asking about States Rights to do what, they just sidestep it. I just ask them about the confederate constitution.

Article I, Sec. 9(4), Article IV, Sec 2(1)(3), Sec 3(3) (I’ll give a hint, it’s where the CSA federal government outlawed states enacting laws to outlaw slavery. States Rights my ass)

If I get the sputtering boat of “butbutbut” after that it’s what are the secession declarations of Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia.

At that point either they really didn’t fucking know… I grew up in the South and I was an adult before I knew a lot of these, it certainly isn’t in the education system I’ll tell you that… but if it isn’t the really didn’t know category, then they’re as much a lost cause as their myth.

Someone else pointed it out, Freedom Convoy was effectively the next “States Rights” Don’t argue with them in good faith, they don’t argue in good faith themselves.

They’re the ones that cry “2A” about guns but worship the ground of Ronny Reagan who enacted gun legislation to go against the Black Panthers. This is the group that also talks about 2A and would storm the capital attacking police but calls Black Lives Matter riots and cheer when police show up. Hell, they cry about 2A when they worship Trump who said “Take their guns first, due process after.”

They talk about “Freedom of Religion” but it’s always their religion. War on Christmas, how dare they take down the ten commandments, while cheering for the guy who wanted a Muslim ban, attacked Sikhs post 9/11 because they couldn’t even get the religion they were mad at right, and want to force their religion into schools and courthouses.

They talk about freedom of speech when they scream about being able to lie, but cheer that Musk will throw people off that will actually fact check. The party of “Fuck your feelings” cries how they’re being attacked and needs protected when it’s turned around on them.

They cry about discrimination with Affirmative Action, but it’s simply the new Southern Strategy post Obama. Had a black president, racism is over, wave the flags. Oh, still helping minorities, RACISM! But they still stand with people who wave the swastika and the confederate flag and manage to say with a straight face they are not racist at all.

They made use of the social contract of tolerance, that we’re all supposed to get along as a society. They have done so by spitting in peoples faces, enacting violence, screaming epitaphs and being the worst people ever, then run back to society every time it’s turned on them.

Do not give them the good faith they ask for. Do not treat them as reasonable human beings, they are not. When they can act with basic fucking decorum that is required to be a person, then they can be treated like members of society again.

When you hear a loud noise just think to yourself “Please be haunted and not something expensive…” it’s what I do.

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.

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.

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.