'Revolutions' and 'History of Rome' host Mike Duncan discusses the decline of the American empire, comparing it to Rome and other revolutions.
  • JohnnyFlapHoleSeed@lemmy.world
    211·
    4 months ago

    Yup. Have been since the late 90’s

    Government failed to properly regulate social media, so now they are just platforms for the enemies of the US to brainwash the stupid and impressionable.

    Facebooks slogan should be “Have money? We’ll treason!”

      • ArsenicNLovelace
        101·
        4 months ago

        We have already acknowledged that there are limits to speech. Hate speech, libel, or misleading advertising for instance, are all regulated to some extent.

        It’s the lack of enforcement of these regulations on the other social media platforms are a big reason I moved to lemmy.

        If those centralized platforms had been better regulated and not succumbed to enshitification, or turned into a firehose of unmitigated hate speech, corporate propaganda, and stochastic terrorism, I’d probably still be using them.

      • Quadhammer@lemmy.world
        41·
        4 months ago

        I think the point of regulation is to have SOMETHING at your disposal when dealing with powerful companies. Think about it, who the fuck is going to stop these tech companies if they decide they want an army? These mega corps are like their own government at this point

        • JohnnyFlapHoleSeed@lemmy.world
          3·
          4 months ago

          Exactly. The reason we even have the FCC in the first place is for national and public safety. Otherwise foreign interests could begin controlling what Americans see, hear, and think by pursuing influence. Or bad actors could compell people to do things against their own safety and interests for personal gain.

          Fox News should have lost their broadcast license and been sued into the ground and the execs charged with conspiracy to commit treason, at the very least after the J6 insurrection

    • krunklom@lemmy.zip
      1·
      4 months ago

      I read the Wikipedia article on Richard Nixon last night and was shocked at how progressive (by the ludicrously low standards of what progressive means today) many of the things he did were.

      America is in decline man.

      Figure your shit out.

  • PhilipTheBucket@quokk.auEnglish
    16·
    4 months ago

    Short answer: Yes

    Long answer: It is impossible for a strong society to be built out of people who are clueless, easily fooled, don’t work very hard (unless they are forced into it for money reasons), and don’t give a shit. Americans as a whole still have a lot of good qualities, and they used to have a lot of good qualities that also overlapped with how to build a strong country (among them an absolutely powerful investment in shaping their own country and their own collective destiny to be the way that it should be to give themselves a fair and high-quality life), but that second thing, they don’t have any more. The current explosion of rotting cancer in our government is a symptom, not the cause, and I don’t think anything we can do to change “the system” is going to do a damn thing about what the real problem is or change our trajectory.

    I wish I knew the answer. We’ve been getting away with it for honestly quite a while longer than we deserved to, but I think the piper is back now, and he wants to be paid.

  • NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone
    9·
    4 months ago

    The funny thing is they think it’s only the end of the Republic phase (right wingers are obsessed with this), but it’s already the start of the Bad Emperors phase.

  • Rentlar
    5·
    4 months ago

    Yes, the US government is actively crumbling from the weight of sheer incompetence brought by Trump’s appointees. It and somehow a significant percentage of Americans lust for cruelty and vengeance against a self-manufactured threat.

    However I do share the writer’s compulsive optimism, that there is always a way out, if the collective willpower is there:

    Is the U.S. past the point of no return?

    I don’t know. I will tell you I am congenitally an optimist. I have a Pascal’s Wager thing going with hope and optimism, that it’s probably better to act as if hope can possibly exist than to just say there is none and we’re doomed. So my official answer is, we’re not doomed, and there are ways out of this, because there’s ways out of anything. We’re ingenious little creative monkeys, we can get out of scrapes. We’ve gotten out of scrapes before. Maybe we can get out of this scrape.

    I would hate for the takeaway to be that things are hopeless and that we’re just doomed. That just because things look like they’re very bad, and they will end badly, that means that they’re going to end badly. That’s not actually the case and there are always ways to fight and turn things back.