Or the dumbass submitting "FASCIST POLICE STATE!" videos who will happily support fascist candidates if they think it's more helpful to their smug sense of unsustainable moral purity.

Asher cares about breaches of human rights exactly as much as Crackersmack cares about Ashley Biden's 1999 pot possession charge.

For them it's just grist for Trump trolling and "cool kids don't vote!"

Nominal! Hazelnut! Even a stopped clock is right twice a day!

That is also very true. I’ve been reading about the abductions in Oregon and they’re hideous.

No, because the stopped clock ultimately is a piece of shit who supports the administration doing this and wants Trump to win a 2nd term to own the normies.

Love that
1) you made this about Biden unprompted
2) Biden literally wrote the USA PATRIOT act that was the single most important building block in the unchecked escalation of executive powers of surveillance and violence that made this situation possible

I'm sure that if we just don't say anything mean about Biden (which I guess includes bringing up his career's biggest policy accomplishments) he will fix all the problems that he spent his life enthusiastically causing.

Gosh, who could possibly have guessed that Ashersmack would again blame Biden for a direct action of the Trump administration?

remember DAPL? good times

I've been thinking of putting some sort of flooring up in my attic to harbour a family of Libs when Trumpnacht comes.

The US is a trash-fire because "Fox News" is allowed to spew misinformation and Republican propaganda under the guise of "opinion" that many people cannot differentiate from "reality".

They tailor their messaging to specifically appeal to resentment, perceived victim-hood and people who are susceptible to conspiracy theories. This distracts the rubes while their pockets are being picked.

This transfer of wealth has been going on since Reagan. Companies discovered they could scare their workers into accepting lower wages by threatening their jobs because of "the economy" or "Japan" or "Mexico" or "China" and pocket the excess to buy luxury yachts, multiple vacation villas or anything else they think validates their existence on the planet.

The economy belongs to a bunch of narcissistic parasites who are only interested in running up the score and don't give a rat's ass who starves because of it, as long as their portfolio value keeps growing.

it's cuzza edyookayshuh... edyoocaissuh... ehjiukea,,, edge-you-case-shun

Ye guys have mentioned two potential proximate causes.. But I'm wondering whats the *ultimate* cause.
Why did the education system get so bad? Why did ye trash anti-trust?

As I said above, the one thing I can think of is size. It just seems that huge countries/empires are doomed.

The ultimate cause? Avarice, I suppose.

There's a lot of money and power available. And you're right, that's because USA is yooge and its natural resources are abundant. Monopolies are a natural outcome of capitalism, and the people who run them get to control a lot of those resources, and thereby make a squillion dollars per minute.

It's annoying when someone convinces the government to disallow your pet monopoly, so you start paying government officers to help you circumvent or change the rules. And the dumber the electorate is, the less often you have to deal with such pesky attempts to reduce your income. So you also make your buddies help you ensure that there's less education available.

Eventually the government is toothless against your power. You like it, and your buddies in government like the kickbacks. Everyone (that you care about) is happy.

The huge size means there's more resources available for building such evil machines. But I don't know that it especially dooms you to such a fate, beyond the fact that all nations are temporary bodies. The system of government and especially of economics seem more significant to me than size. If you replace "wealth" for "size," I'm closer to agreeing with you.

It goes beyond size, though. It's also the relatively low population density overall. You can go to different parts of this yuge country, and experience things, see sights, and meet people which are in very few ways similar to those in other parts. Most other countries are compact and significantly more heterogeneous. The US is about as big as Europe in size, and it has more states than Europe has countries.

The EC has a very difficult time holding itself together, despite having a much weaker constitution, and more leeway for member countries to maintain autonomy. The US is struggling to unify a large, diverse, and very spread-out populace.

That's all on top of everything everyone else has been saying about Fox "news," the general ill-educated status of the people, and all those other dividing factors.

Because we were originally colonized by religious fanatics who thought Calvinism was too permissive, and then became a country in a war of succession started by wealthy, ruling class businessmen who wanted to stop paying taxes and get out from under British rule before Britain outlawed slavery.

Not that British colonial rule was good or anything, just that most of the issues that the revolution was fought over weren't particularly relevant to the lives of the majority of citizens.

Libertarianism is destroying this country. We are unable to fight a battle that requires everyone to join it. We have about 20% of this country refusing to wear masks and fucking it up for the rest of us.

Our inequality is above Louis XVI levels and our ruling ideology is some version of "The Secret."

Yeah cuz now AJ finally gets to drive the van.

Republicans don’t think anything they do is bad.

Even villains are the heroes of their own stories.