Submitted 2 weeks ago by thal3s@sh.itjust.works to [deleted]
https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/36f7f719-28a2-4405-93a0-8e65be3c7763.jpeg
My theory is that Covid killed everyone and this is purgatory. (TikTok screencap)
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.
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.
I’d argue that 9/11 was when the major shift started in the US.
Its whatever best year you remember. From ny 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.
It’s whatever year that the oppression affecting the less privileged finally reached you.
Dimpled chads and the Brooks Brothers riots. The Jingoism that followed 9/11 masked the turn things would be taking.
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.
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 out could have gotten this bad when looking from the perspective of 2015.
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.
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
But he spoke well and smiled a lot, especially when fake-drinking that Flint water. What a hero.
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.
Syeve bannon was behind the media push that ended it. He’s talked about it in interviews.
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.
It was the year before europeans arrived.
YouTube was like 2006, not 1400s. Where are you getting your information?
You remember the year 1400?
hhhooo boy…let me tell you about how it felt to live in the world before September 11th 2001…
it was freaking amazing.
I came here to say the exact same thing. 9/11 changed the US forever in a bad way.
Those who are willing to give up liberty for a semblance of safety deserve neither and all that.
We were downloading MP3s on dial up.
Who knew bands had so many unreleased songs?
Man oh man. I went Napster crazy.
Napster ring a bell?
idk, I was a kid and harry potter wasn’t real, so that kind of sucked for me
ah yes, 2000, when JKR wasn’t known to be a fascist supporting shitheel.
Nah, it was 2016, right before orangini and brexit.
And harambe
Dicks out 😔🍆💦
September 11th, 2001 was a real inflection point for the US. We, collectively decided that civil rights aren’t as important as revenge.
sept 11 was the first time the republicans seize the opportunity to put america on track for its fascist fourth reichdom fantasy.
The overwhelming majority of Democrats also voted for the Patriot Act. Democrats and Republicans are two sides of the same coin.
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.
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.
Almost makes the inside job conspiro seem not as crazy…
It says 2019 to trick the viewer into commenting “no 2012” or 2016, since no real human thinks everything was great until 2019. It’s bait for interactions.
This is an ad for McDonald’s
I wouldn’t say things were great up until 2019, but 2020 and beyond is when things really seemed to go to shit
Ive lived through a few of these already.
2020 is when everything changed.
2016 is when everything chagned.
2012 is when everything changed.
2008 is when everything changed.
2001 is when everything changed.
I lived through all these. 2001 and 2008 were horrible, but sort of felt like a normal kind of horrible. Recessions and terrorism were things I’d seen before. It was only the scale that made those anomalous.
From my (American) perspective 2016 was when shit started getting very weird. We were relatively stable, relatively prosperous, foreign wars were tapering off… And half the country decided that a game show host was her best bet going forward.
Then it started snowballing… Bill Cosby’s a rapist, there’s a global pandemic, Kanye put out a pro-Hitler song, Pete Davidson is a sex symbol that no starlet in Hollywood can resist, The secretary of health had his brain eaten by worms, everything you own or use became a subscription service, The fear Factor guy became a political king maker, The first lady has a crypto scam that everyone’s kind of okay with, we created AI but it’s only good for spam and rule 34 tweets, we decided political corruption isn’t a crime if you brag about it, America’s war machine is being turned on its cities… Oh and the US is building full on concentration camps.
It’s a very strange time even compared to occupy, The tea party, or Bush riding out 9/11 Reading a children’s book in an elementary school.
Perhaps this is the result of ‘modern’ values corrupting our society.
We must return to the old status quo
None of those are correct. There is before Harambe and after Harambe. The day he was killed everything changed.
I vote for 2016. The unthinkable happened.
We shot that poor damn gorilla.
Almost like something happens every 4-8 years. hmm
It was all pretty normal at least in USA until Sept 10, 2001.
Boomer: 1968
Martin Scorcese: 33 AD
Are you fucking dumb? Do you not remember Drumpf’s first term in office?
God sent us plague as a warning to not elect him, and he ended up in the office.
To me it was 9/11 that started the insanity… Either way, if you look at movies from the 80s and movies from today, you clearly see the humanity lacking from todays movies.
Let’s be real- it was the US’s response to 9/11 that started the insanity. There was absolutely a way forward, but no- some shitheads gave the Americans a bloody nose and the US decided to try to stop the bleeding by stabbing itself in the heart for two decades.
Legit but let’s be even more real. It’s the US’s insanity that caused 911.
Yeah its been a wild ride since 2001. I’m not even American but it felt like the whole world kinda shifted gears after that.
Just a reminder that traitor lunatic Trump was president in 2019. So no. Lol
Exactly. You have to go back to at least 2015 to find anything resembling normal life.
It went to shit when you dumb mother fuckers elected him for the first time in 2017. Stupid fucking idiots.
…And things still weren’t as crazy as they are now. To me that’s points towards the guys theory LOL
The old people who run the world feel the weight of their impending deaths, but in their narcissism they have mistaken it for the oncoming end of the world.
Trump was president in 2019 and I remember him cutting massive amounts of food aid (means on wheels) for elderly people during Christmas time. It was some serious Scrooge shit, except he didn’t get three ghosts to make him mend his ways.
I feel like that about 2016. I’m telling you, it all started with Harambe. It all went downhill from there XD
The real insanity stems from everybody having a random lingering covid symptom that's just annoying enough to drive you insane, but not bad enough to kill you. 5 years later, I still get phantom burning smells that I can't even compare to anything I've ever smelled before. It's torture.
Covid definitely fucked up peoples brains.
“I just got a great idea for a new novel! It’s about the end of humanity, but with a twist, because the humans don’t even know they are done for yet. They think it’s just a bit more aggressive flu, but in fact it’s highly contagious and each time you get it, it damages your brain a slight bit more. Everyone keeps getting infected and so they slowly get dumber and more aggressive until civilization collapses in wars and economic chaos.”
“That’s stupid, something like that could never happen.”
It’s absolutely social media to blame imo. 10 years ago they were only just starting with the aggressive algorithms we know today. This combined with the rise of TikTok and its own algorithm has lead to a resurgence of the right. I believe this was a direct response to how progressive we seemed to be getting in the 2010s. The wealthy right were getting scared. I occasionally accidentally see YouTube “recommendations” and it’s usually unhinged right wing shit with millions of views.
“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.
Harambe died in 2016
The world has always been crazy. Just more adults are becoming aware of it and able to see it all the time, every day.
Fall of 2012. Obama wins again. Weed is legal in some states. Gay marriage. Nuclear powered tank lands on Mars. iPhone 5.
Eh The Matrix had it right. 1999
My ex wife cheated on me on December 28th, 2019.
I took a whole bunch of pills two weeks later that apparently are not lethal in any amount.
However, since then, I am all but convinced we live in hell, because never once in the past 5 and a half years has anything gotten better.
I’m sorry y’all. This might be the bad place.
Miami, the chads hanging.
It’s not an alternate timeline.
It’s the most profitable one.
Its actually that between 1991 and 2001 that we merely had a full decade of relative stability in world events. Crazy shit stopped happening for a while and we have collectively imparted that things used to be “normal” on people born after 2001 but they’ve interpreted their own childhoods as the normal years.
*2016 was the last normal year.
Let’s not forget the chaos and societal upset during the first term.
Same but with 2012.
Maybe the Mayan apocalypse people were right.
The timelines been screwed since harambe was murdered.
SatansMaggotyCumFart@piefed.world 2 weeks ago
I think 2016 was the last great year.
It got better in 2021 for a bit.
CitizenKong@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The moment when Harambe died was when the timeline split.
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Nah, Bowie.
MissJinx@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
we all know Harambe split the timeline. Nothing was the same after that.#neverforget
Staples_McGee@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Shits been weird since Leonard Nimoy died. So make that 2015.
takeda@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Basically at long as taco is in the office it will be miserable.
The bad things is that in first term there was that there were still competent people around him. This time he fired everyone and replaced with lackeys. Unless he is stopped, US might not recover from it.
Just looking at the recent meeting in Bejing shows how quickly USA is losing its power. And it’s been only 7 months.
CitizenKong@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I think it’s the other way around actually.
The first time nobody expected Trump to win, so they didn’t have a plan what to do if he did.
The second time they had a plan called Project 2025 and they are going through it more or less point by point now.
spongebue@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It was kind of a meme that 2016 sucked. Then Trump got elected at the end and everything magically got better for everyone and we all lived happily ever after.
(Do I really need to include the /s here?)
AdamBomb@lemmy.sdf.org 2 weeks ago
For real, how short is the meme maker’s memory? We went truly off the rails during the first Trump admin.
Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
I relate 100% with this. How funny. Like, that’s perfect.