My theory is that Covid killed everyone and this is purgatory. (TikTok screencap)

  • Toneswirly@lemmy.world
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    2 hours ago

    The vaccine was really just a sedative; they kidnapped you and plugged in you to the matricksssssssss

  • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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    5 hours ago

    “With this character’s death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created.”

    It was Harambe. We didn’t reload.

  • outhouseperilous@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    6 hours ago

    In a very real sense we do li:e in a fantasy world, where the pervasive oppositional disingenuous bullshit and disinformation have poisoned us, and we trust the shit we made up to process stuff as high level abstractions without necessarily tying them back to anything remotely near bare-metal material reality.

    And tyen when people find exploits in tjose abstractions, there is no recourse, nothing to check them against.

    Reality is happening, but we do not comprehend it.

    • staph@sopuli.xyz
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      6 hours ago

      At this point, anything remotely near bare-metal material reality triggers such a cognitive dissonance in a lot of folks, on account of all of the bs they have in their heads, that all of that bare-metal material reality is discarded as too painful.

  • ubergeek@lemmy.today
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    1 day ago

    September 11th, 2001 was a real inflection point for the US. We, collectively decided that civil rights aren’t as important as revenge.

    • ArxCyberwolf@lemmy.ca
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      2 hours ago

      The terrorists ended up winning the long game in the end. They caused America to tear itself apart from within and made it a pariah on the world stage.

    • FlyingCircus@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      9/11 also marks the end of western hegemony as the West destabilized the world and ruined its reputation as a force for good in its pursuit for revenge, leading to the rise of BRICS and other anti-imperial coalitions.

      9/11 also coincides with peak imperialism, the final stage of capitalism, which marks the point when increasing exploitation abroad has diminishing returns so capitalists must begin devouring the imperial core, leading to stagflation, enshittification, rent-seeking, and other parasitic activities. This in turn leads to an economically struggling population of former petit-bourgeois, which is a class condition that is especially susceptible to reactionary propaganda, leading to the rise of fascism.

      Historians will almost certainly mark 9/11 as the beginning of the end of the American Empire.

    • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
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      24 hours ago

      sept 11 was the first time the republicans had the chance to seize the opportunity to put america on track for its fascist fourth reichdom fantasy.

      • FlyingCircus@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        The overwhelming majority of Democrats also voted for the Patriot Act. Democrats and Republicans are two sides of the same coin.

  • GladiusB@lemmy.world
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    21 hours ago

    The world has always been crazy. Just more adults are becoming aware of it and able to see it all the time, every day.

    • ArxCyberwolf@lemmy.ca
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      2 hours ago

      Making the internet as easily accessible and dumbed down as possible didn’t help. It let stupid people easily find each other and reinforce each other’s beliefs while isolating themselves from reality.

  • socsa@piefed.social
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    1 day ago

    It was 2014. That was the final year of that Obama high where things really felt like they were turning a corner before we were slowly confronted with a world where Donald Trump might actually be president, and the only one standing in his way was somehow Hillary Clinton, a woman that Republicans had been preparing to beat for literally 20 years.

    • hansolo@lemmy.today
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      1 day ago

      This is actually the right answer. Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, and we’re all still in the middle of what is essentially a no-declared-sides WWIII now. 2015 was good, but things had shifted in the world a bit. Countering China was starting to become a huge deal suddenly for the US, and China moved into the South China Sea and did some currency revaluation that was all aimed at their 2029 and 2049 CCP anniversary goals.

      Also, I was in fucking phenomenal shape.

    • PlaidBaron@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Its whatever best year you remember. From my perspective, its been sharply downhill since 2000.

      Those older than me often say it went to shit during the Reagan years. Its been slowly getting worse for a long time.

    • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 day ago

      You may not have been paying close attention. Obama was astoundingly better than Trump, but invasive spying on citizens was allpwed to remain legal under his watch, and he extended what was allowed. Drone striking questionable targets started under him as well. There’s more, but those two are the highlights usually brought up.

      • socsa@piefed.social
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        1 day ago

        Right, Obama didn’t snap his fingers and fix every problem in the world or country, but it really felt like we were finally getting to a point where we had a new liberal voting coalition which would start to push US politics left, so that we could finally unwind a lot of those underlying legacy issues.

        Fixing the core issues which created this “obligate imperialism” in the first place were never going to be fixed in the span of one decade, but Obama arguably set us up to grind out more progress in the next administration.

        That’s why this whole thing is so frustrating. We were on the path to a supreme court majority and burying a lot of old school conservative ideas in the coming decades, and now we are farther away than ever, because so many people can’t see the long game.

        • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          22 hours ago

          I think part of the issue is that after winning on the platform of “change”, Democrats veered hard into “establishment status quo”. They won so hard that most people don’t even recall the few bad parts of the Obama presidency at all (the point of my last comment, that it wasn’t all sunshine and roses), and then threw that lead in the trash.

          They had a chance with Sanders, but threw away an absurd amount of public goodwill by very openly pushing him out of the running in favor of Clinton. That effectively left Trump as the only candidate carrying the “change” flag, and a lot of people were too dumb to see he was full of shit.

          When Democrats had a chance again, they went with another “establishment safe” choice and only won with Biden due to an immense outcry against Trump. Then they lost again because they wouldn’t platform someone people were willing to get out to vote for.

          If we get out of this shitshow, I’ll be very interested in what history says about the last few presidential races.

      • ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online
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        1 day ago

        Trump did more drone strikes in his first term than Obama did in both his terms. And that is only of the strikes we know. At one point trump declared that strikes dont need to be reported and they didn’t count the number of strikes afterward.

        Biden actually fully ended drone strikes… and he did it quietly without much fanfare.

      • nexguy@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        The worst the obama administration got was a typical couple of weeks of the Trump administration. It is so much worse now it’s unthinkable it could have gotten this bad when looking from the perspective of 2015.

        • technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 day ago

          Your mistake is viewing trump not as the obvious fash continuation of the state/capitalism but as some kind of unique magical monster.

          That’s how we got here.

          • nexguy@lemmy.world
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            1 day ago

            Trump is a unique magical monster. There isn’t anyone else that can act the way he does. He has a personality disorder that cannot be copied by any average intelligent person. There isn’t anyone else with near that type of wealth and social immaturity. No other adult has ever acted like he does that didn’t have a mental disorder.

            Others try to copy him but are easy to see through as they cannot bring themselves to act like he would. Ramaswamy tried but is just too mature and of normal intelligence. You need a child(with a disorder) in an adult body with 100% total and complete confidence in itself. A complete narcissist.

            There has never been anyone like him before as anyone with his type of childlike behavior would have been dismissed.

            • ubergeek@lemmy.today
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              1 day ago

              There has never been anyone like him before as anyone with his type of childlike behavior would have been dismissed.

              I’d like to introduce you to Andrew Jackson…

              • nexguy@lemmy.world
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                24 hours ago

                An orphan with limited education became a successful military leader who spoke intelligently. About the opposite of Trump. Both are clearly evil yet one is childlike while the other is not.

                • ubergeek@lemmy.today
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                  24 hours ago

                  Andrew Jackson was a literal psychopath, and came up with the ideology of just ignoring court rulings.

      • Skullgrid@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Drone striking questionable targets

        if you want to bring up warcrimes, the world has never been normal, especially not the US, they’ve been up to some heinious shit since before we were born

        • technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 day ago

          they’ve been up to some heinious shit since before we were born

          Yeah since they invaded and genocided the americas. Always has been.

        • ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online
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          1 day ago

          I think in 2010 or so someone said that if you were US Marine and were involved in every single action that the USMC took part in, you would take part in around 2 events every year.

      • HugeNerd@lemmy.ca
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        1 day ago

        But he spoke well and smiled a lot, especially when fake-drinking that Flint water. What a hero.

      • blarth@thelemmy.club
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        1 day ago

        Steve Bannon gave birth to GamerGate through WoW guilds.

        Insert small to large dominos meme where the small domino is some disheveled guy playing WoW at 3 AM talking about how women suck and the large one is Donald Trump recreating concentration camps, J6, or whatever dystopian bullshit else that has happened in the last few years.