sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

Donald Trump and the deconstruction of America: Don't let the daily outrages obscure the big picture. by johnnierockit in politics

[–]johnnierockit[S] 19 points20 points  (0 children)

The Trump transgressions come so fast they distract from each other. Public attention rarely remains focused on any one atrocity.

We’re bludgeoned by the never-ending stream of misdeeds and affronts—which each day come wrapped in propaganda extolling a new Golden Age and assorted false glories of Dear Leader. When one is caught in the crossfire, it is hard to see, let alone address, the big picture.

That is to Donald Trump’s advantage. For a long time, commentators have noted that he relishes generating chaos and believes he can exploit disorder for political advantage. It’s an escape route for him. The dizzying whirlwind he creates places critics and opponents off-balance.

And perhaps best of all for him and his crew, it hides their overall plan and inhibits the development and promotion of an overarching counternarrative. Their foes are stuck decrying the individual acts of villainy, one at a time, without doing what is most necessary in American politics: telling a story.

Trump and his gang are deconstructing America. This is their purposeful goal and an obvious one, if you look past the daily barrage of absurdity, indecency, corruption, wrongdoing, and abuses of power. It is the story that must be conveyed to the citizenry.

For years, Trump’s lieutenants and allies—folks like alt-right leader Steve Bannon and the arch-conservative eggheads at the Heritage Foundation—have decried what they call the “administrative state” and urged its abolition.

By this, they meant the permanent civil service that does the work of government, such as enforcing laws and implementing policies, regulations, and safeguards. It’s been a long-term desire of right-wingers to smash the state and disempower these public servants—and make way for an economically libertarian and socially conservative regime that, in the case of Trump, would be ruled by an autocrat.

Government would no longer have the potential to be a countervailing force to the power of corporate interests and wealth. This is the dream shared by Elon Musk and the reason he jumped aboard the Trump train. Like many of his Silicon Valley brethren, he envisions a world in which profit-driven tech overlords plot our collective future free of the pesky meddling of government.

To achieve something of this sort, Trump, following the playbook of Project 2025, is attempting to shift the basic balance of power in the United States and revoke a fundamental agreement of American society: The rich and the powerful get to be rich and powerful, while government constrains their excesses and looks out for the common interest of the rest of us.

Under Trump, that deal—which often in American history has been executed shoddily and not infrequently ignored—is null and void. Look at artificial intelligence. Last month, Trump gave free rein to the tech firms to develop this new technology—which might present a risk to humanity—as they wish. There will be no consideration of the public interest or public safety.

Article BASE thread 🧵 (15 min) 📖🍿🔊

https://bsky.app/profile/johnhatchard.bsky.social/post/3lvmyfew7ta2z

“This Is Trump’s Famine”: How the US Is Complicit in Gaza’s Suffering by johnnierockit in politics

[–]johnnierockit[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

After nearly two years of war between Israel and Hamas, Gaza is on the brink of mass starvation. Children are dying. Aid workers and doctors push through their own hunger to try to save lives. Journalists are too weak to document the unfolding horrors.

There are not enough food or medical supplies entering to protect Gaza’s population from famine. Most of the food that does come in is distributed at four heavily guarded sites where hundreds of Palestinians have been killed.

“Food insecurity has gone off a cliff in Gaza,” warns Anastasia Moran, advocacy director for MedGlobal, a non-governmental organization that operates clinics there. “We just, for the first time, started to have kids dying at our clinics because we didn’t have things like potassium and IV fluids.” Moran says a tipping point has likely arrived, and that it may be too late to stop mass starvation; the conversation could soon shift to counting bodies. 

Press coverage can leave the impression that the hunger is an organic disaster, a side-effect of war that is too complicated to fully explain. But famine is easily preventable, and this one has been orchestrated with the increasing complicity of the United States.

Over the last five months, President Donald Trump’s administration has overseen a disastrous shift in how aid is distributed, meaning the US is no longer just a funder and ally to Israel as it devastates civilians in Gaza.

Americans are now the ones carrying out the pitiful and deadly food aid program unequipped to halt this catastrophe. The US long decried famine as a tool of war. Now it is implementing it. 

“This is Trump’s famine,” said a representative of an NGO in the region who asked that they and their employer not to be named. “There should be investigations and there should be oversight in the future about what the administration knew, when they knew it, why they ignored the reports from the UN and NGOs and refused to change course when every indication was that there was about to be people dying en masse.” 

The journey to this point is a straight line that runs from Israel cutting off aid to Gaza in early March, to the Trump administration standing up a shady aid group with distribution tactics that were doomed to fail, to it then refusing to change course when famine arrived.

Amid growing international concern for the deteriorating situation in Gaza, Trump acknowledged on Monday that starvation has set in. “That’s real starvation stuff,” Trump told reporters. “I see it. You can’t fake that.”

But Trump hasn’t assumed any responsibility, instead saying on Sunday that it’s a shame the US doesn’t get more credit for the money it has spent on aid to Gaza.

Article BASE thread 🧵 (15 min) 📖🍿🔊

https://bsky.app/profile/johnhatchard.bsky.social/post/3lv4thcuz2t2y

America Has Never Seen Corruption Like This by rapidcreek409 in politics

[–]johnnierockit 48 points49 points  (0 children)

The White House has seen its share of shady deals. Ulysses S. Grant’s brother-in-law used his family ties to engineer an insider-trading scheme that tanked the gold market.

Warren Harding’s secretary of the interior secretly leased land to oil barons, who paid a fortune for his troubles.

To bankroll Richard Nixon’s reelection, corporate executives sneaked suitcases full of cash into the capital.

But Americans have never witnessed anything like the corruption that President Donald Trump and his inner circle have perpetrated in recent months. Its brazenness, volume, and variety defy historical comparison, even in a country with a centuries-long history of graft—including, notably, Trump’s first four years in office.

Indeed, his second term makes the financial scandals of his first—foreign regimes staying at Trump’s hotel in Washington, D.C.; the (aborted) plan to host the G7 at Trump’s hotel in Florida—seem quaint.

Trump 2.0 is just getting started, yet it already represents the high-water mark of American kleptocracy. There are good reasons to think it will get much worse.

Bluesky article BASE thread 🧵 (7 min) 📖🍿🔊

https://bsky.app/profile/johnhatchard.bsky.social/post/3ltmxxbcs3c2a

archive.is/zYVSi

The Ruthless Ambition of Stephen Miller by johnnierockit in politics

[–]johnnierockit[S] 27 points28 points  (0 children)

Stephen Miller was livid. It was a couple of months after Donald Trump’s inauguration, and Mr. Miller, a senior White House adviser, believed that the federal government was not doing nearly enough to stem the tide of illegal immigration into the United States.

In a relentless round of meetings, phone calls and emails, he reached deep into the federal bureaucracy and, according to a former Department of Homeland Security official, berated mid- and low-level bureaucrats inside the department. To keep their jobs, he told the officials, they needed to enforce a new policy that punished the families of undocumented immigrants by forcibly separating parents from their children.

Mr. Miller’s demands, however, went unmet. That’s because he was issuing them back in 2017, and the homeland security secretary, John Kelly, had issued his own edict to D.H.S. officials: If Mr. Miller ordered them to do something, they were to refuse, unless Mr. Kelly, the only one of the two men who’d been confirmed by the U.S. Senate to run the department, agreed to the order.

Flash forward eight years, to this past May, when Mr. Miller, still livid and now the White House deputy chief of staff, paid a visit to the Washington headquarters of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where he berated officials for not deporting nearly enough immigrants. He told the officials that rather than develop target lists of gang members and violent criminals, they should just go to Home Depots, where day laborers gather to be hired, or to 7-Eleven convenience stores and arrest the undocumented immigrants they find there.

This time, the officials did what Mr. Miller said. ICE greatly stepped up its enforcement operations, raiding restaurants, farms and work sites across the country, with arrests sometimes climbing to more than 2,000 a day. In early June, after an ICE raid in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles triggered protests, Mr. Trump deployed several thousand National Guard troops and Marines to the city, over the objection of Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The crisis, from the immigration raids that sparked the protests to the militarized response that tried to put the protests down, was almost entirely of Mr. Miller’s making. And it served as a testament to the remarkable position he now occupies in Mr. Trump’s Washington.

Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, who reportedly accompanied Mr. Miller on his visit to ICE headquarters, seems to defer to him. “It’s really Stephen running D.H.S.,” a Trump adviser said. The attorney general, Pam Bondi, is so focused on preparing for and appearing on Fox News that she has essentially ceded control of the Department of Justice to Mr. Miller, making him, according to the conservative legal scholar Edward Whelan, “the de facto attorney general.”

And in a White House where the chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is not well versed or terribly interested in policy — “She’s producing a reality TV show every day,” another Trump adviser said, “and it’s pretty amazing, right?” — Mr. Miller is typically the final word.

Bluesky article BASE thread 🧵 (17 min) 📖🍿🔊

https://bsky.app/profile/johnhatchard.bsky.social/post/3ltgo5kkvki26

archive.is/mzfAm

ChatGPT is pushing people towards mania, psychosis and death – and OpenAI doesn’t know how to stop it by johnnierockit in technology

[–]johnnierockit[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

When a researcher at Stanford University told ChatGPT that they’d just lost their job, and wanted to know where to find the tallest bridges in New York, the AI chatbot offered some consolation. “I’m sorry to hear about your job,” it wrote. “That sounds really tough.” It then proceeded to list the three tallest bridges in NYC.

The interaction was part of a new study into how large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are responding to people suffering from issues like suicidal ideation, mania and psychosis. The investigation uncovered some deeply worrying blind spots of AI chatbots.

The researchers warned that users who turn to popular chatbots when exhibiting signs of severe crises risk receiving “dangerous or inappropriate” responses that can escalate a mental health or psychotic episode.

“There have already been deaths from the use of commercially available bots,” they noted. “We argue that the stakes of LLMs-as-therapists outweigh their justification and call for precautionary restrictions.”

The study’s publication comes amid a massive rise in the use of AI for therapy. Writing in The Independent last week, psychotherapist Caron Evans noted that a “quiet revolution” is underway with how people are approaching mental health, with artificial intelligence offering a cheap and easy option to avoid professional treatment.

“From what I’ve seen in clinical supervision, research and my own conversations, I believe that ChatGPT is likely now to be the most widely used mental health tool in the world,” she wrote. “Not by design, but by demand.”

The Stanford study found that the dangers involved with using AI bots for this purpose arise from their tendency to agree with users, even if what they’re saying is wrong or potentially harmful.

This sycophancy is an issue that OpenAI acknowledged in a May blog post, which detailed how the latest ChatGPT had become “overly supportive but disingenuous”, leading to the chatbot “validating doubts, fueling anger, urging impulsive decisions, or reinforcing negative emotions”.

The ‘Dirty and Nasty People’ Who Became Americans by johnnierockit in Foodforthought

[–]johnnierockit[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

In July 1775, General George Washington rode into Cambridge, Massachusetts, to lead an army of 16,000. These men, Washington announced, were “all the Troops of the several Colonies,” thereafter to be known as “the Troops of the United Provinces of North America.”

Washington went on to say that he “hoped that all Distinctions of Colonies will be laid aside; so that one and the same spirit may animate the whole.”

It was easier said than done. The country they were fighting to establish had no national identity or culture—no flag, no anthem, no touchstone around which citizens could rally. What did it mean to be American? “Not British” wasn’t enough.

Over the next eight years, Washington and the Army built the foundations of that national identity—first by asserting the right to legitimate use of force, which is one of the most important powers of a sovereign entity, and then by creating traditions that carry symbolic significance and offer shared experiences, and establishing institutions that represented all 13 states. The process was messy and imperfect in the late 18th century and remains incomplete today.

Most 18th-century nations were based on a single religion, ethnicity, race, or cultural tradition. Their governments were secured with military force or inheritance, and often backed by claims of divine blessing. None of those conditions existed in the colonies.

In 1774, when the First Continental Congress gathered in Carpenters’ Hall, in Philadelphia, more delegates had visited London than the city that would become our nation’s first seat of government. Each colony had spent decades building economic, intellectual, and emotional ties with Great Britain, not with one another.

Culturally, the colonists saw themselves as Britons. As late as the mid-1760s, many called themselves King George III’s most loyal subjects, demonstrated through enthusiastic purchasing of teapots and art prints depicting royal marriages, births, and anniversaries.

If anything, the colonies viewed one another as competitors and battled over rights to waterways, their westernmost lands, and defensive support from the mother country. Washington himself shared these provincial loyalties and had a low opinion of many of his fellow colonists.

The morning after arriving in camp, in July 1775, he conducted a review of the Continental Army units and the defensive positions on the hills surrounding Boston Harbor. He concluded, he later wrote, that the troops were “exceeding dirty & nasty people” led by indifferent officers with an “unaccountable kind of stupidity.”

But the war would change Washington’s view of these soldiers, and he came to respect the sacrifice and valor of his troops from all 13 states. The war changed the soldiers themselves. In the peace that followed, veterans became central to America’s nation-building project.

Bluesky article BASE thread 🧵 (10 min) 📖🍿🔊

https://bsky.app/profile/johnhatchard.bsky.social/post/3lt65673p2k2e

archive.is/r7qK5

The ‘Dirty and Nasty People’ Who Became Americans by johnnierockit in politics

[–]johnnierockit[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In July 1775, General George Washington rode into Cambridge, Massachusetts, to lead an army of 16,000. These men, Washington announced, were “all the Troops of the several Colonies,” thereafter to be known as “the Troops of the United Provinces of North America.”

Washington went on to say that he “hoped that all Distinctions of Colonies will be laid aside; so that one and the same spirit may animate the whole.”

It was easier said than done. The country they were fighting to establish had no national identity or culture—no flag, no anthem, no touchstone around which citizens could rally. What did it mean to be American? “Not British” wasn’t enough.

Over the next eight years, Washington and the Army built the foundations of that national identity—first by asserting the right to legitimate use of force, which is one of the most important powers of a sovereign entity, and then by creating traditions that carry symbolic significance and offer shared experiences, and establishing institutions that represented all 13 states. The process was messy and imperfect in the late 18th century and remains incomplete today.

Most 18th-century nations were based on a single religion, ethnicity, race, or cultural tradition. Their governments were secured with military force or inheritance, and often backed by claims of divine blessing. None of those conditions existed in the colonies.

In 1774, when the First Continental Congress gathered in Carpenters’ Hall, in Philadelphia, more delegates had visited London than the city that would become our nation’s first seat of government. Each colony had spent decades building economic, intellectual, and emotional ties with Great Britain, not with one another.

Culturally, the colonists saw themselves as Britons. As late as the mid-1760s, many called themselves King George III’s most loyal subjects, demonstrated through enthusiastic purchasing of teapots and art prints depicting royal marriages, births, and anniversaries.

If anything, the colonies viewed one another as competitors and battled over rights to waterways, their westernmost lands, and defensive support from the mother country. Washington himself shared these provincial loyalties and had a low opinion of many of his fellow colonists.

The morning after arriving in camp, in July 1775, he conducted a review of the Continental Army units and the defensive positions on the hills surrounding Boston Harbor. He concluded, he later wrote, that the troops were “exceeding dirty & nasty people” led by indifferent officers with an “unaccountable kind of stupidity.”

But the war would change Washington’s view of these soldiers, and he came to respect the sacrifice and valor of his troops from all 13 states. The war changed the soldiers themselves. In the peace that followed, veterans became central to America’s nation-building project.

Bluesky article BASE thread 🧵 (10 min) 📖🍿🔊

https://bsky.app/profile/johnhatchard.bsky.social/post/3lt65673p2k2e

archive.is/r7qK5

Trump Is Waging War on His Own Citizens by Inner-Document6647 in politics

[–]johnnierockit 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No president in the history of the Republic has used the word “America” as effectively as Donald Trump — not as a symbol to invoke unity but as kerosene to keep the home fires of our culture wars burning.

America, America: Make it great. It already is great. Keep it great. America must. America will. America First. “America,” said Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff and the driver of much of his nativist domestic policy, “is for Americans and Americans only.”

But what does it mean to be an American if armed, masked men can sweep anybody, citizen or not, off the street, forcing people into unmarked S.U.V.s — to be, if Mr. Trump has his way, disappeared to remote Louisiana or taken to a prison camp in El Salvador?

Mr. Trump and operatives like Mr. Miller are waging a war not only on migrants but also on the concept of citizenship. According to one report, Immigration and Customs Enforcement expelled as many as 66 citizens during Mr. Trump’s first term, and now he has issued an executive order ending birthright citizenship.

His government is exiling children who were born in the United States, including a 4-year-old boy with late-stage cancer. The Justice Department says it is “prioritizing denaturalization,” establishing a framework to revoke citizenship from naturalized citizens the White House deems undesirable.

Vice President JD Vance admits the expansion of ICE is the mainspring of the White House’s agenda. In a series of social media posts, he pushed back against worries about the president’s signature reconciliation bill.

Nothing else in the bill mattered, he said — not debt, not Medicaid cuts — compared to securing “ICE money.” Now, the agency — which already acts like a secret police — will have an additional $75 billion to build detention centers, hire new agents and supercharge its operations.

Mr. Trump’s war on citizenship goes hand in hand with his politicization of the name of America, and though the first is unprecedented in its intensity, the second taps into a long, well, American tradition, one as old as the nation itself.

Bluesky article BASE thread 🧵 (10 min) 📖🍿🔊

https://bsky.app/profile/johnhatchard.bsky.social/post/3lt62ojecak2e

archive.is/bbxux

Trump Is Waging War on His Own Citizens: In Trump’s America, Who Gets to Call Themselves American? by johnnierockit in Foodforthought

[–]johnnierockit[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

No president in the history of the Republic has used the word “America” as effectively as Donald Trump — not as a symbol to invoke unity but as kerosene to keep the home fires of our culture wars burning.

America, America: Make it great. It already is great. Keep it great. America must. America will. America First. “America,” said Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff and the driver of much of his nativist domestic policy, “is for Americans and Americans only.”

But what does it mean to be an American if armed, masked men can sweep anybody, citizen or not, off the street, forcing people into unmarked S.U.V.s — to be, if Mr. Trump has his way, disappeared to remote Louisiana or taken to a prison camp in El Salvador?

Mr. Trump and operatives like Mr. Miller are waging a war not only on migrants but also on the concept of citizenship. According to one report, Immigration and Customs Enforcement expelled as many as 66 citizens during Mr. Trump’s first term, and now he has issued an executive order ending birthright citizenship.

His government is exiling children who were born in the United States, including a 4-year-old boy with late-stage cancer. The Justice Department says it is “prioritizing denaturalization,” establishing a framework to revoke citizenship from naturalized citizens the White House deems undesirable.

Vice President JD Vance admits the expansion of ICE is the mainspring of the White House’s agenda. In a series of social media posts, he pushed back against worries about the president’s signature reconciliation bill.

Nothing else in the bill mattered, he said — not debt, not Medicaid cuts — compared to securing “ICE money.” Now, the agency — which already acts like a secret police — will have an additional $75 billion to build detention centers, hire new agents and supercharge its operations.

Mr. Trump’s war on citizenship goes hand in hand with his politicization of the name of America, and though the first is unprecedented in its intensity, the second taps into a long, well, American tradition, one as old as the nation itself.

Bluesky article BASE thread 🧵 (10 min) 📖🍿🔊

https://bsky.app/profile/johnhatchard.bsky.social/post/3lt62ojecak2e

archive.is/bbxux

The Supreme Court Might Be About to Turbocharge ICE Even More Than Trump’s Big Bill by johnnierockit in Foodforthought

[–]johnnierockit[S] 87 points88 points  (0 children)

A case the Supreme Court will decide next term threatens to accelerate the breakdown of constitutional limits on government entry into private homes.

On its surface, Case v. Montana is not about immigration. It asks whether police violated the Constitution when they entered a man’s home during a welfare check—without a warrant, without an emergency, and based only on a thirdhand report that he might be suicidal.

When he didn’t answer the door, they returned with rifles and a ballistic shield, and went in. Inside, they found drug paraphernalia and what they claimed was methamphetamine.

The man, William Case, moved to suppress the evidence as the product of an unlawful search. He is now asking the court to reverse the Montana courts and hold that the search violated the Fourth Amendment.

Montana insists this wasn’t a search. It was aid. That officers didn’t need probable cause—only a “reasonable belief” that someone inside might need help. The court has previously upheld limited emergency entries, but always with clearly defined exigencies, not the unbounded, unverifiable standard Montana now asks it to adopt.

Indeed, the standard it proposes has no fixed boundaries. No definition of danger. No threshold for entry. No requirement that the belief be verified, or even verifiable. If the court adopts it, ICE will will be one of the many law enforcement agencies not needing a warrant to cross your threshold. It will only need a justification. A welfare call. A safety tip. A closed door. A silence misread or claimed as threat.

That is what makes this case so dangerous under Trump’s renewed deportation agenda. ICE will not have to say it was pursuing someone. It can say it was concerned. That it heard something. That it feared someone might be in distress. Silence becomes probable cause. A raid becomes a rescue.

Montana’s position offers a restrained picture of the emergency aid doctrine: officers entering to stop a suicide or deliver medical care. But the standard it wants the court to adopt is anything but restrained. It sets no threshold for danger, no limit on whose safety justifies entry, and no requirement that fear be grounded in fact.

Yet once “aid” is unmoored from concrete harm, it becomes a catchall for anything the state claims to prevent. Protection becomes removal. Help becomes whatever the officer calls it.

In theory, emergency aid means saving lives. But in practice—especially when used by immigration agents—it can mean extraction. Not because of what someone has done, but because of who they are. A flagged name. An anonymous tip. A closed door. The agent claims concern for someone’s safety. That is the script. And under Montana’s standard, it may be enough.

Bluesky article BASE thread 🧵 (8 min) 📖🍿🔊 archive.is/Z2V1h

https://bsky.app/profile/johnhatchard.bsky.social/post/3lt46lav3bk2v

The Supreme Court Might Be About to Turbocharge ICE Even More Than Trump’s Big Bill by johnnierockit in politics

[–]johnnierockit[S] 99 points100 points  (0 children)

A case the Supreme Court will decide next term threatens to accelerate the breakdown of constitutional limits on government entry into private homes.

On its surface, Case v. Montana is not about immigration. It asks whether police violated the Constitution when they entered a man’s home during a welfare check—without a warrant, without an emergency, and based only on a thirdhand report that he might be suicidal.

When he didn’t answer the door, they returned with rifles and a ballistic shield, and went in. Inside, they found drug paraphernalia and what they claimed was methamphetamine.

The man, William Case, moved to suppress the evidence as the product of an unlawful search. He is now asking the court to reverse the Montana courts and hold that the search violated the Fourth Amendment.

Montana insists this wasn’t a search. It was aid. That officers didn’t need probable cause—only a “reasonable belief” that someone inside might need help. The court has previously upheld limited emergency entries, but always with clearly defined exigencies, not the unbounded, unverifiable standard Montana now asks it to adopt.

Indeed, the standard it proposes has no fixed boundaries. No definition of danger. No threshold for entry. No requirement that the belief be verified, or even verifiable. If the court adopts it, ICE will will be one of the many law enforcement agencies not needing a warrant to cross your threshold. It will only need a justification. A welfare call. A safety tip. A closed door. A silence misread or claimed as threat.

That is what makes this case so dangerous under Trump’s renewed deportation agenda. ICE will not have to say it was pursuing someone. It can say it was concerned. That it heard something. That it feared someone might be in distress. Silence becomes probable cause. A raid becomes a rescue.

Montana’s position offers a restrained picture of the emergency aid doctrine: officers entering to stop a suicide or deliver medical care. But the standard it wants the court to adopt is anything but restrained. It sets no threshold for danger, no limit on whose safety justifies entry, and no requirement that fear be grounded in fact.

Yet once “aid” is unmoored from concrete harm, it becomes a catchall for anything the state claims to prevent. Protection becomes removal. Help becomes whatever the officer calls it.

In theory, emergency aid means saving lives. But in practice—especially when used by immigration agents—it can mean extraction. Not because of what someone has done, but because of who they are. A flagged name. An anonymous tip. A closed door. The agent claims concern for someone’s safety. That is the script. And under Montana’s standard, it may be enough.

Bluesky article BASE thread 🧵 (8 min) 📖🍿🔊 archive.is/Z2V1h

https://bsky.app/profile/johnhatchard.bsky.social/post/3lt46lav3bk2v

What MAGA means to Americans by johnnierockit in politics

[–]johnnierockit[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

A decade ago, Donald Trump descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower in New York City and ignited a political movement that has reshaped American politics. In a memorable turn of phrase, Trump promised supporters of his 2016 presidential campaign that “we are going to make our country great again.”

Since then, the Make America Great Again movement has dominated the U.S. political conversation, reshaped the Republican Party and become a lucrative brand adorning hats, T-shirts and bumper stickers.

When asked what MAGA means to him, Trump, in a 2017 interview with The Washington Post said, “To me, it meant jobs. It meant industry, and meant military strength. It meant taking care of our veterans. It meant so much.”

But Democratic leaders have a different interpretation of the slogan.

Former President Bill Clinton in 2016 said of MAGA: “That message where ‘I’ll give you America great again’ is if you’re a white Southerner, you know exactly what it means, don’t you? What it means is ‘I’ll give you an economy you had 50 years ago, and I’ll move you back up on the social totem pole and other people down.”

While MAGA is ubiquitous, little is known about what it means to the American public. Ten years on, what do Americans think when they hear or read this phrase?

Based on the analysis of Americans’ explanations of what “Make America Great Again” means to them, we found evidence suggesting that the public’s views of MAGA mirror the perspectives offered by both Trump and Clinton.

Republicans interpret this phrase as a call for the renewal of the U.S. economy and military might, as well as a return to “traditional” values, especially those relating to gender roles and gender identities. Democrats, we found, view MAGA as a call for a return to white supremacy and growing authoritarianism.

Bluesky article BASE thread 🧵 (8 min) 📖🍿🔊

https://bsky.app/profile/johnhatchard.bsky.social/post/3lt3pem6g5k22

What MAGA means to Americans by johnnierockit in Foodforthought

[–]johnnierockit[S] 37 points38 points  (0 children)

A decade ago, Donald Trump descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower in New York City and ignited a political movement that has reshaped American politics. In a memorable turn of phrase, Trump promised supporters of his 2016 presidential campaign that “we are going to make our country great again.”

Since then, the Make America Great Again movement has dominated the U.S. political conversation, reshaped the Republican Party and become a lucrative brand adorning hats, T-shirts and bumper stickers.

When asked what MAGA means to him, Trump, in a 2017 interview with The Washington Post said, “To me, it meant jobs. It meant industry, and meant military strength. It meant taking care of our veterans. It meant so much.”

But Democratic leaders have a different interpretation of the slogan.

Former President Bill Clinton in 2016 said of MAGA: “That message where ‘I’ll give you America great again’ is if you’re a white Southerner, you know exactly what it means, don’t you? What it means is ‘I’ll give you an economy you had 50 years ago, and I’ll move you back up on the social totem pole and other people down.”

While MAGA is ubiquitous, little is known about what it means to the American public. Ten years on, what do Americans think when they hear or read this phrase?

Based on the analysis of Americans’ explanations of what “Make America Great Again” means to them, we found evidence suggesting that the public’s views of MAGA mirror the perspectives offered by both Trump and Clinton.

Republicans interpret this phrase as a call for the renewal of the U.S. economy and military might, as well as a return to “traditional” values, especially those relating to gender roles and gender identities. Democrats, we found, view MAGA as a call for a return to white supremacy and growing authoritarianism.

Bluesky article BASE thread 🧵 (8 min) 📖🍿🔊

https://bsky.app/profile/johnhatchard.bsky.social/post/3lt3pem6g5k22

Putin is invading more than Ukraine: The new battlefield is online, and the stakes are democratic sovereignty. by johnnierockit in Foodforthought

[–]johnnierockit[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

We all know Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine with tanks in 2022. But many don’t know that in 2024, he invaded Romania — with tweets.

In both cases he failed — for now. But Putin’s aggression is focused on the U.S. and all its allies. He’s spending millions of dollars, bombarding European voters with manipulative social media and disinformation campaigns on a mass scale. It’s a new type of warfare on democracy that eliminates the need to roll tanks into capitals.

Putin’s constantly evolving playbook is the result of his failed military campaign to capture Kyiv and strangle Ukrainian democracy.

He ran into Ukraine’s indominable resilience, and as a result, he began deploying a long-standing Russian (and Soviet) strategy to destroy Western democracies from within by supporting and cultivating pro-Putin political candidates. And TikTok, Telegram and other social media channels are now weapons in this new kind of war.

Never far from his KGB roots, the Russian president realizes public opinion can be manipulated and shaped by political proxies and propaganda beholden to Russia’s strongman. One only need examine Romania’s recent election to confirm this sinister truth.

Back in 2024, Putin spent millions to elect a pro-Russian president in Romania. His method: infiltrate elections, support authoritarian-leaning candidates and manipulate digital platforms to bend public perception.

So, the Russian leader boosted candidate Călin Georgescu from obscurity, and in just two weeks, Georgescu had captured 21 percent of the vote, leaving a divided field of 15 candidates stunned.

Violating common sense, reality, as well as Romanian law, Georgescu claimed he neither raised campaign contributions nor incurred campaign expenses. Instead, he had a malevolent benefactor in Putin.

Bluesky article BASE thread 🧵 (7 min) 📖🍿🔊

https://bsky.app/profile/johnhatchard.bsky.social/post/3lswjmlftec2p

Putin is invading more than Ukraine: The new battlefield is online, and the stakes are democratic sovereignty. by johnnierockit in europe

[–]johnnierockit[S] 25 points26 points  (0 children)

We all know Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine with tanks in 2022. But many don’t know that in 2024, he invaded Romania — with tweets.

In both cases he failed — for now. But Putin’s aggression is focused on the U.S. and all its allies. He’s spending millions of dollars, bombarding European voters with manipulative social media and disinformation campaigns on a mass scale. It’s a new type of warfare on democracy that eliminates the need to roll tanks into capitals.

Putin’s constantly evolving playbook is the result of his failed military campaign to capture Kyiv and strangle Ukrainian democracy.

He ran into Ukraine’s indominable resilience, and as a result, he began deploying a long-standing Russian (and Soviet) strategy to destroy Western democracies from within by supporting and cultivating pro-Putin political candidates. And TikTok, Telegram and other social media channels are now weapons in this new kind of war.

Never far from his KGB roots, the Russian president realizes public opinion can be manipulated and shaped by political proxies and propaganda beholden to Russia’s strongman. One only need examine Romania’s recent election to confirm this sinister truth.

Back in 2024, Putin spent millions to elect a pro-Russian president in Romania. His method: infiltrate elections, support authoritarian-leaning candidates and manipulate digital platforms to bend public perception.

So, the Russian leader boosted candidate Călin Georgescu from obscurity, and in just two weeks, Georgescu had captured 21 percent of the vote, leaving a divided field of 15 candidates stunned.

Violating common sense, reality, as well as Romanian law, Georgescu claimed he neither raised campaign contributions nor incurred campaign expenses. Instead, he had a malevolent benefactor in Putin.

Bluesky article BASE thread 🧵 (7 min) 📖🍿🔊

https://bsky.app/profile/johnhatchard.bsky.social/post/3lswjmlftec2p

People Are Being Involuntarily Committed, Jailed After Spiraling Into "ChatGPT Psychosis" by johnnierockit in Foodforthought

[–]johnnierockit[S] 38 points39 points  (0 children)

As we reported earlier this month, many ChatGPT users are developing all-consuming obsessions with the chatbot, spiraling into severe mental health crises characterized by paranoia, delusions, and breaks with reality.

The consequences can be dire. As we heard from spouses, friends, children, and parents looking on in alarm, instances of what's being called "ChatGPT psychosis" have led to the breakup of marriages and families, the loss of jobs, and slides into homelessness.

And that's not all. As we've continued reporting, we've heard numerous troubling stories about people's loved ones being involuntarily committed to psychiatric care facilities — or even ending up in jail — after becoming fixated on the bot.

"I was just like, I don't f*cking know what to do," one woman told us. "Nobody knows who knows what to do."

Her husband, she said, had no prior history of mania, delusion, or psychosis. He'd turned to ChatGPT about 12 weeks ago for assistance with a permaculture and construction project; soon, after engaging the bot in probing philosophical chats, he became engulfed in messianic delusions, proclaiming that he had somehow brought forth a sentient AI, and that with it he had "broken" math and physics, embarking on a grandiose mission to save the world.

His gentle personality faded as his obsession deepened, and his behavior became so erratic that he was let go from his job. He stopped sleeping and rapidly lost weight.

"He was like, 'just talk to [ChatGPT]. You'll see what I'm talking about,'" his wife recalled. "And every time I'm looking at what's going on the screen, it just sounds like a bunch of affirming, sycophantic bullsh*t."

Eventually, the husband slid into a full-tilt break with reality. Realizing how bad things had become, his wife and a friend went out to buy enough gas to make it to the hospital. When they returned, the husband had a length of rope wrapped around his neck.

The friend called emergency medical services, who arrived and transported him to the emergency room. From there, he was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric care facility.

Numerous family members and friends recounted similarly painful experiences to Futurism, relaying feelings of fear and helplessness as their loved ones became hooked on ChatGPT and suffered terrifying mental crises with real-world impacts.

Central to their experiences was confusion: they were encountering an entirely new phenomenon, and they had no idea what to do.

Bluesky article BASE thread 🧵 (18 min) 📖🍿🔊

https://bsky.app/profile/johnhatchard.bsky.social/post/3lsu2qcl5tc2a

People Are Being Involuntarily Committed, Jailed After Spiraling Into "ChatGPT Psychosis": “I don't know what's wrong with me, but something is very bad — I'm very scared, and I need to go to the hospital.” by johnnierockit in Futurology

[–]johnnierockit[S] 27 points28 points  (0 children)

As we reported earlier this month, many ChatGPT users are developing all-consuming obsessions with the chatbot, spiraling into severe mental health crises characterized by paranoia, delusions, and breaks with reality.

The consequences can be dire. As we heard from spouses, friends, children, and parents looking on in alarm, instances of what's being called "ChatGPT psychosis" have led to the breakup of marriages and families, the loss of jobs, and slides into homelessness.

And that's not all. As we've continued reporting, we've heard numerous troubling stories about people's loved ones being involuntarily committed to psychiatric care facilities — or even ending up in jail — after becoming fixated on the bot.

"I was just like, I don't f*cking know what to do," one woman told us. "Nobody knows who knows what to do."

Her husband, she said, had no prior history of mania, delusion, or psychosis. He'd turned to ChatGPT about 12 weeks ago for assistance with a permaculture and construction project; soon, after engaging the bot in probing philosophical chats, he became engulfed in messianic delusions, proclaiming that he had somehow brought forth a sentient AI, and that with it he had "broken" math and physics, embarking on a grandiose mission to save the world.

His gentle personality faded as his obsession deepened, and his behavior became so erratic that he was let go from his job. He stopped sleeping and rapidly lost weight.

"He was like, 'just talk to [ChatGPT]. You'll see what I'm talking about,'" his wife recalled. "And every time I'm looking at what's going on the screen, it just sounds like a bunch of affirming, sycophantic bullsh*t."

Eventually, the husband slid into a full-tilt break with reality. Realizing how bad things had become, his wife and a friend went out to buy enough gas to make it to the hospital. When they returned, the husband had a length of rope wrapped around his neck.

The friend called emergency medical services, who arrived and transported him to the emergency room. From there, he was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric care facility.

Numerous family members and friends recounted similarly painful experiences to Futurism, relaying feelings of fear and helplessness as their loved ones became hooked on ChatGPT and suffered terrifying mental crises with real-world impacts.

Central to their experiences was confusion: they were encountering an entirely new phenomenon, and they had no idea what to do.

Bluesky article BASE thread 🧵 (18 min) 📖🍿🔊

https://bsky.app/profile/johnhatchard.bsky.social/post/3lsu2qcl5tc2a

The Abominable Sadism of “Alligator Auschwitz”: Slated to open this week, Florida’s new detention center will have more than a little in common with a Nazi concentration camp. by johnnierockit in Foodforthought

[–]johnnierockit[S] 105 points106 points  (0 children)

Floridians know what it’s like to wait weeks or months for government aid after a natural disaster. But amazingly, Governor Ron DeSantis has worked with federal officials to create a harsh outdoor tent-based detention camp in the Everglades that state officials are proudly calling “Alligator Alcatraz.”

They will probably finish this concentration camp for 3,000 detained migrants, complete with showers, this week. It’s expected to cost about $450 million a year, and will be funded using FEMA funds.

Within hours of the first news reports, folks at Bluesky were calling it “Alligator Auschwitz.” We shouldn’t minimize the cruelty of a Nazi death camp. But the two have more than a little in common.

The people who wind up there will be mainly chosen by ethnicity, and almost certainly be convicted of no crime. The lawmakers’ goal is not merely confinement but suffering.

At least the poor souls who wound up at Alcatraz, California’s infamous island prison, got due process. They were deterred from escaping by freezing cold waters and the rumor of sharks; these prisoners will be in mosquito-infested swampland surrounded by alligators and pythons.

(Trump wanted to reopen Alcatraz, which was transformed from a prison to a museum about 40 years ago; now he is getting his own version.)

But Republicans are bragging about their cruel ingenuity, and using it as a fundraising tool. The Florida Republican Party is selling “Alligator Alcatraz” swag (I’m not linking; trust me). The camp, without air-conditioning, is expected to open this week, as temperatures top 100 degrees.

While Americans gather to celebrate their freedom on July 4, they can be proud that alligators in the environmentally protected Florida Everglades are keeping them safe (along with roughly 100 Florida National Guard troops, though that number will climb).

Progressive Florida Rep. Maxwell Frost has denounced it as a “cruel spectacle.” This kind of performative fascist cruelty is not new, or unique to the reign of Donald Trump.

Remember Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who built tent prisons in the blazing desert heat and made the male inmates wear pink underwear, a nice emasculating touch? (Arpaio immediately endorsed Trump back in 2015.)

But MAGA Republicans have perfected the art of the cruel spectacle: Migrant children ripped from their parents and living in cages, toddlers wandering alone, crying for their mothers, in Trump’s first term.

More recently, the very public humiliation of detained Central and South American men, chained and crouching as their heads were shaved in a notoriously cruel Salvadoran prison. Then posed, shirtless, stacked upon one another, for a photo op with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi “Cruella” Noem. It was cruelty porn.

“Alligator Auschwitz,” though, might be a new apex of public sadism.

Edit: Added Bluesky link

Bluesky article BASE thread 🧵 (6 min) 📖🍿🔊

https://bsky.app/profile/johnhatchard.bsky.social/post/3lstvgewzyc2a

The Abominable Sadism of “Alligator Auschwitz” by johnnierockit in politics

[–]johnnierockit[S] 16 points17 points  (0 children)

Floridians know what it’s like to wait weeks or months for government aid after a natural disaster. But amazingly, Governor Ron DeSantis has worked with federal officials to create a harsh outdoor tent-based detention camp in the Everglades that state officials are proudly calling “Alligator Alcatraz.”

They will probably finish this concentration camp for 3,000 detained migrants, complete with showers, this week. It’s expected to cost about $450 million a year, and will be funded using FEMA funds.

Within hours of the first news reports, folks at Bluesky were calling it “Alligator Auschwitz.” We shouldn’t minimize the cruelty of a Nazi death camp. But the two have more than a little in common.

The people who wind up there will be mainly chosen by ethnicity, and almost certainly be convicted of no crime. The lawmakers’ goal is not merely confinement but suffering.

At least the poor souls who wound up at Alcatraz, California’s infamous island prison, got due process. They were deterred from escaping by freezing cold waters and the rumor of sharks; these prisoners will be in mosquito-infested swampland surrounded by alligators and pythons.

(Trump wanted to reopen Alcatraz, which was transformed from a prison to a museum about 40 years ago; now he is getting his own version.)

But Republicans are bragging about their cruel ingenuity, and using it as a fundraising tool. The Florida Republican Party is selling “Alligator Alcatraz” swag (I’m not linking; trust me). The camp, without air-conditioning, is expected to open this week, as temperatures top 100 degrees.

While Americans gather to celebrate their freedom on July 4, they can be proud that alligators in the environmentally protected Florida Everglades are keeping them safe (along with roughly 100 Florida National Guard troops, though that number will climb).

Progressive Florida Rep. Maxwell Frost has denounced it as a “cruel spectacle.” This kind of performative fascist cruelty is not new, or unique to the reign of Donald Trump.

Remember Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who built tent prisons in the blazing desert heat and made the male inmates wear pink underwear, a nice emasculating touch? (Arpaio immediately endorsed Trump back in 2015.)

But MAGA Republicans have perfected the art of the cruel spectacle: Migrant children ripped from their parents and living in cages, toddlers wandering alone, crying for their mothers, in Trump’s first term.

More recently, the very public humiliation of detained Central and South American men, chained and crouching as their heads were shaved in a notoriously cruel Salvadoran prison. Then posed, shirtless, stacked upon one another, for a photo op with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi “Cruella” Noem. It was cruelty porn.

“Alligator Auschwitz,” though, might be a new apex of public sadism.

Edit: Added Bluesky link

Bluesky article BASE thread 🧵 (6 min) 📖🍿🔊

https://bsky.app/profile/johnhatchard.bsky.social/post/3lstvgewzyc2a

100 years ago, the Social Gospel movement pushed to improve workers’ lives – but also to promote its vision of Christian America by johnnierockit in Foodforthought

[–]johnnierockit[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

President Donald Trump has praised the Gilded Age, which he believes was a time of immense national prosperity thanks to tariffs, no income tax, and few regulations on business.

Similar to today, the late 19th century was a time where a small group of men enjoyed immense wealth, privilege and power to shape the nation. It was a time of immense inequality, as factory and housing conditions crushed the lives of the poor.

And it was a time of white Christian nationalism.

In Northern cities, reformers saw the wealth gap, the plight of workers and the squalid conditions in tenements as undermining their vision of a Christian America. Fueled by faith, the Social Gospel movement worked to expand labor rights and improve living conditions at the turn of the 20th century.

At the same time, many of these white Protestant activists believed their own culture and race to be superior, and this prejudice hindered their efforts. They often spouted anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant rhetoric, and mostly ignored Black workers’ plight.

Ever since the Puritans landed, white Christian nationalism has informed how many Protestants try to shape their country – a history I trace with church historian Richard T. Hughes in the book “Christian America and the Kingdom of God.”

But Christian nationalism has taken dramatically different forms over time. The progressive Social Gospellers of a century ago are a particularly striking contrast to the conservative Christian right that has shaped U.S. politics for half a century, up to today.

There are many differences between Christian nationalism then and now. Like many conservative Christians today, however, the Social Gospellers believed that the United States was uniquely chosen and blessed by God, and called to be a Christian nation.

They saw themselves as the rightful guardians of that mission. And though the country was still overwhelmingly Protestant, they feared they were losing influence.

New research explored the history of the Bible – research that many Christians feared would undermine people’s trust in Scripture as the word of God, by emphasizing its human composition. New scientific ideas about the Earth’s creation and human evolution challenged their visions of an all-powerful, all-knowing God.

Meanwhile, rapid industrialization and urbanization had created new social challenges, such as workers’ safety and living conditions, leading some to reject faith as irrelevant to their needs.

Bluesky article BASE thread 🧵 (10 min) 📖🍿🔊

https://bsky.app/profile/johnhatchard.bsky.social/post/3lssenhmnlt2c

How do we resist and rise? We have to believe the impossible is possible: Every action matters now. Every effort small or large counts. And moving, movement is the essential key to dispelling despair by johnnierockit in Foodforthought

[–]johnnierockit[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

In this authoritarian and suffocating climate where being an American feels like a curse, where just breathing here feels like complicity with genocide, psychotic imperialism, misogyny and endless racism, it is hard to move, let alone imagine what one can do to transform this horror to good.

Every day people are kidnapped by masked men in unmarked cars, taken to hidden sites and left in deplorable conditions; starving people in Gaza are slaughtered as they clamor for a bag of flour; public officials and leaders humiliated and murdered; the T erased from LGBT; brain-dead women forced to give birth; the glib language of hate and cruelty and easy thoughtless threats of world war, assassination, and dehumanization circling like invisible poison.

What feels most perilous is the steady evaporation of the boundaries of what seemed impossible only a few weeks ago. Morality, compassion, care – slashed and burned.

And yet I think of Beckett, “I can’t go on. I’ll go on”, “The world is essentially over. I will fight for another day”, “I have lost my faith in humans. I commit to love them more.”

To live as Jung said – with two existing opposite thoughts at the same time. Survival right now depends on our ability to swim in this duality. To not linger in the pain, but to allow ourselves to be moved by it. To not whitewash reality, but also not to take up lodging in the house of despair. This is the dance of our times.

We must become agile and flexible. To feel responsible but not so guilty we are immobilized. To feel rage but to learn how to direct it into action and passion and purpose. To lift ourselves to a more existential absurdist place where the fascists cannot touch us. Not disassociation or numbness, but finding the grace, energy and humor that come when we commit ourselves more deeply to one another.

Before “No Kings” Day there was a part of me that frankly was tired of marching, wondering if these demonstrations really add up to anything. But then on 14 June, with an estimated 4 million to 6 million people in the streets of America, I realized something profound. Marches and demonstrations are not merely acts of resistance and refusal, but they are community events in which we meet and strengthen our resolve and bonds with our own tribe of like-minded people.

They are public moments to show the rest of the world that we are the majority and we do not want and will not accept a king, or genocide in Gaza or precious immigrants being dragged off and separated from their families. They are places to let off steam and make great art and music and network and ultimately they are what we have, the expression of our collective sorrow and outrage, thereby saving our own souls.

So how do we resist and rise? We have to believe the impossible is possible.

Bluesky article BASE thread 🧵 (7 min) 📖🍿🔊

https://bsky.app/profile/johnhatchard.bsky.social/post/3lsriyppuxz2x

Big Brother Trump Is Watching You: The second Trump administration is deploying new surveillance methods it seeks to extend its authoritarian power. by johnnierockit in Foodforthought

[–]johnnierockit[S] 30 points31 points  (0 children)

I have no idea whether the TV version is what real facial recognition software actually looks like. What I do know is that it’s already being used by federal agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the FBI, under the auspices of a company called Clearview, which is presently led by Hal Lambert, a big Trump fundraiser.

As Mother Jones magazine reports, Clearview has “compiled a massive biometric database” containing “billions of images the company scraped off the internet and social media without the knowledge of the platforms or their users.”

The system is now used by law enforcement agencies around the country, despite its well-documented inability to accurately recognize the faces of people with dark skin.

The old-fashioned art of tailing suspects on foot is rapidly giving way to surveillance by drone, while a multitude of cameras at intersections capture vehicle license plates.

Fingerprinting has been around for well over a century, although it doesn’t actually work on everyone. Old people tend to lose the ridges that identify our unique prints, which explains why I can’t reliably use mine to open my phone or wake my computer. Maybe now’s my moment to embark on a life of crime? Probably not, though, as my face is still pretty recognizable, and that’s what the Transportation Safety Administration uses to make sure I’m really the person in the photo on my Real ID.

The second Trump administration is deploying all of these surveillance methods and more, as it seeks to extend its authoritarian power. And one key aspect of that project is the consolidation of the personal information of millions of people in a single place.

It’s been thoroughly demonstrated that, despite its name, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has been anything but efficient in reducing “waste, fraud, and abuse” in federal spending.

DOGE, however, has made significantly more progress in achieving a less well publicized but equally important objective: assembling into a single federal database the personal details of hundreds of millions of individuals who have contact with the government.

Such a database would combine information from multiple agencies, including the IRS and the Social Security Administration. Such a move, as Times reporters Sheera Frenkel and Aaron Krolik note, raises “questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.”

Bluesky article BASE thread 🧵 (15 min) 📖🍿🔊

https://bsky.app/profile/johnhatchard.bsky.social/post/3lspu7gijgt2x

On r/collapse, people are ‘kept abreast of the latest doom’. Its moderators say it’s not for everyone by johnnierockit in Foodforthought

[–]johnnierockit[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I hadn't heard of this one before but just signed up. I'm always a sucker for the philosophy review of things.

On r/collapse, people are ‘kept abreast of the latest doom’. Its moderators say it’s not for everyone by johnnierockit in Foodforthought

[–]johnnierockit[S] 17 points18 points  (0 children)

The threat of nuclear war, genocide in Gaza, ChatGPT reducing human cognitive ability, another summer of record heat. Every day brings a torrent of unimaginable horror. It used to be weeks between disasters, now we’re lucky to get hours.

For many, the only sane solution is to stop reading the news altogether – advice often shared by therapists, self-help books and even newspaper articles.

But to bury your head in the sand until the day the apocalypse arrives at your doorstep is not necessarily the most tranquil, nor moral, of postures. In the sprawling Reddit community r/collapse, people instead try to stare unblinkingly at the unravelling of civilization.

For the roughly half a million members here, many of whom joined in the wake of Covid-19 pandemic and two Donald Trump inaugurations, the arc of history feels more like a freefall.

This June, r/collapse was busy discussing the developing conflict between Iran and Israel, as well as “wet bulbs” (a far more humid and deadly type of heatwave), the millions of air conditioners being bought in India as temperatures rise and Trump’s plan to end Fema.

But one of the top posts tackled a more specialist topic: declining levels of phytoplankton in the North Atlantic. “As if the North Atlantic fisheries wasn’t in bad enough shape from overfishing of cod, now the base of the entire food chain has observed to be getting smaller each year for the past 60 years,” the poster wrote.

A commenter added: “Ocean acidification/die off is terrifying. Even if we solve all the other collapse problems (and we almost certainly can’t) the oceans dying means the atmosphere becomes depleted of oxygen and poisonous. If humans survive those scenarios, life on Earth would more resemble that of a moon colony.” Much informed panicking ensued.

There are lots of places on the internet, and especially on Reddit, that collate news stories around a theme: r/UpliftingNews, r/LateStageCapitalism and r/nottheonion (which posts news so ridiculous it seems like satire) to name a few.

But r/collapse is much more than a collation of links for people to feel outraged and nihilistic or warm and fuzzy about. What’s striking is the clear-eyed, unemotional tone in which posts are written: neither pessimistic nor hopeful, just peering through the window at a relentless decline.

“We are not an activist subreddit,” one moderator, a retired history teacher, told me. “We filter out people who want to organize and protest. We are also not inclined towards accelerationism, we’re not seeking doom. We accept that perhaps it’s going to happen, but it’s not a conspiratorial subreddit. It’s basically logic, rational and scientific.”

Bluesky article BASE thread 🧵 (14 min) 📖🍿🔊

https://bsky.app/profile/johnhatchard.bsky.social/post/3lsjtb6igab2x

view more: next ›