Hey, we’ve got social media and all that now. The memes and all the valuable info from whoever will surely take care of it.

I’m afraid there is no business model that can finance quality journalism. We are currently seeing the consequences of this.

Man, I only watched that for thirty seconds and had to stop right away because the orange one is such a moron:

Many, many, many years ago - hundreds of millions of years ago - people were doing business and they traded in rocks and stones and other things…

Nope, I’m out…

Edit: If only I’d read the previous comment … I missed it.

Ah, yes, that’s right.

canyon.mid is also a real classic, even if it’s not quite as funky.

He hides the pain for all of us.

Another perspective of presumably the same event by Josh Kirby…

/c/showerthoughts also has a “no politics” rule, which means that many topics are off-limits - and since this rule is worded very vaguely, the admins decide at their own discretion which topics are allowed.

I couldn’t agree more, especially since, for anyone not from the US, even the most moderate White House posts are so utterly absurd that these days it’s really hard to tell the difference between satire and real-life clown show.

I can assure you that everyone is trying their best to adjust somehow, but it’s really hard given this level of absurdity.

Noice!

Because they are all the same kind of people, and age doesn’t really matter in itself - most of the people at the top are just white and old men because the system was set up by those very people.

And that is precisely the problem: this system of endless greed propels ruthless psychopaths to the top. It is sold as a performance-based society, even though performance has absolutely nothing to do with it - if that were the case, the problem wouldn’t exist in the first place.

Yes, it would have been much more credible if the White House had announced that the president was on vacation on a tropical island. Anyone would believe that right away…

It’s kind of interesting that most people here seem to assume that attending college is synonymous with education or knowledge. It would be nice if that were the case.

However, there are also quite a few people who went to college but didn’t learn a thing there - especially in countries like the U.S. or England, where a college degree costs an absurd amount of money, this happens all the time. It’s especially common there to find children of wealthy people who are as dumb as a box of rocks, yet still manage to buy their way into high society with a college degree - they’re guaranteed to get it, regardless of whether they learn even the slightest thing at university.

The current U.S. president is a good example…

I recently attended the wedding of a friend who married into nobility. Most of the bride’s friends, who had all attended Eton or Cheltenham, worked in some capacity as estate or property managers.

Edit: The whole event had a pretty satirical feel to it - there was even the mentally unstable, rich daughter who, later in the evening, threw herself at you while drunk and went on and on about how awful her mother was, how boring her friends were, and all that. Oh, and there were quite a few rich old perverts as well who were constantly making lewd advances toward the much younger women in attendance. All in all, it was quite a strange wedding.

Shuts down speculation? That just fuels the speculations.

They must know that everyone can see it’s a lie when they say he never stops working - not even MAGA morons can possibly believe that.

Sometimes I even sing…

I think similar mechanisms are at work there as well, though to a lesser extent: I think there’s hardly any country in the world where nationalism is as pronounced as it is in the U.S.

On the one hand, this has to do with cultural dominance, which is reflected, for example, in the global popularity of the U.S. entertainment industry and so on. On the other hand, however, it also has to do with the fact that the US has been placing nationalism at the center of its culture for decades, ranging from the pledge of allegiance in schools to the targeted promotion of sporting events, where not only are flags waved, but the desired, ruthless competitive mentality - which is essential to unbridled capitalism - is directly manifested in mass events with a participatory character. There are countless examples of how the image of the superior, righteous nation has been massively propagated over decades.

This illusion is now beginning to crumble, however, because unlike its predecessors, the current U.S. regime does not care about maintaining a respectable facade, which actually does not strike me as particularly clever: Apparently, these people are solely concerned with maximizing their own enrichment, even if it means risking the collapse of the entire system.

The reason for this seems simple to me: Even their first, rather pathetic coup attempt went unpunished - they therefore assume they can do whatever they please without being held accountable. And they seem to be right in this assessment: Millions of people do take to the streets on particular days, as they did just yesterday, but this has no serious consequences for the regime, especially since they largely control the media, so that despite the scope of the protests, there is hardly any reporting on these mass demonstrations.

And this is likely the crux of the matter: because public discourse takes place in the media, yet the media is controlled by the very same people on whose behalf the corrupt regime acts, many citizens still seem unaware of the extent of the misery in which the country finds itself.

Coupled with the fact that the U.S. has always heavily cultivated national pride, many citizens likely assume that things will sort themselves out as usual: Despite obvious corruption, they continue to trust the legal system, hope for the midterms, and believe that everything will get better again with the Democrats, and so on. In any case, a majority of U.S. citizens seem to assess the situation as such that it is not yet necessary to put their own comfortable way of life at risk, although this appears to be changing somewhat. If I understand correctly, there are now apparently efforts to organize a general strike, which seems to me to be the only peaceful means of forcing the regime to step down and, maybe, even pushing through long-overdue fundamental reforms.

Whether this will work, however, seems rather unlikely to me. I see it - also from the outside - exactly the same way you do: It also seems to me that the majority of U.S. citizens underestimate the gravity of the situation, or at least that they do not want to admit that their system has been so thoroughly infiltrated that it is beyond salvation - at least if the living conditions of citizens are ever to improve significantly.

As I said, I see the reason for this in a combination of self-deception and the fact that the media are controlled to an extreme degree by oligarchs.

I think it’s fair to say that, on the whole, many U.S. citizens haven’t woken up from the “American Dream,” even though it’s been an absolute nightmare for quite some time now.

I suppose many people don’t even want to wake up, because then they’d have to take charge of shaping their own day.

Yes, it’s really quite strange - especially in its extremest form among MAGA supporters: This “movement” clearly has much more in common with a cult than with a rational, political organization. I don’t necessarily think that the vast majority of people who feel they belong realize what they’re being used for. It’s interesting from a mass psychology perspective, but unfortunately disastrous for the US as well as for the entire world.

In a way, but then again, not really, because to feel shame, one must first acknowledge that one is responsible for something reprehensible. It seems to me rather that it is precisely the acceptance of responsibility for the collective actions of the US - which are, after all, manifested in the actions of elected representatives - that is being prevented by ignoring reality. It seems to be more of a defense mechanism to protect one’s own, believed-to-be-secure identity from collapse by fleeing from reality.

In this sense, it strikes me more as something like willful blindness, deliberate ignorance, or cognitive dissonance reduction - as psychologists would say. So some kind of self-deception designed to allow one to continue clinging to one’s established self-image, even when one is aware that it does not correspond to reality.

Shame, on the other hand, would be the next step - one would only feel that once they have realized that they have lived a lie for half their life.