it’s really, really dangerous when otherwise well-meaning people assume that things are already pretty much as bad as they can get - ThreadSky

faineg.bsky.social • 160 days ago

it’s really, really dangerous when otherwise well-meaning people assume that things are already pretty much as bad as they can get

Reposted from Faine Greenwood

everyone claiming that the US has ALREADY descended into ultraviolent pogroms, which you’d know if you were just *paying attention*, needs to get a goddamn grip

Comments

blank.org•160 days ago

LOLsob. There’s a lot of ruin in a country. I feel like everyone should be required to have at least one drunken conversation with an ex-Yugoslav before opining on this.

stephenjudkins.bsky.social•160 days ago

Just talked to a friend who I see infrequently about how she arrived in the US as a kindergartener speaking only Bosnian

berthadecool.bsky.social•140 days ago

Same for my wife only in high school; learned English watching US sitcoms and is now fluent, has a BA, blogs with over 25K followers, and is learning some Chinese and Korean watching their TV.

ncogneato.bsky.social•160 days ago

I knew some exchange students who jumped every time one of the local (in the USA) army base's helicopters flew in hearing range. They were very attuned to the noise in a way I hope to never understand.

kentropic.bsky.social•160 days ago

Lest we forget how brutal & horrific civil war can be, this essay is burned into my memory from its first publication, 27 years ago.

bonenberger.bsky.social•160 days ago

Driving into Ukraine across the border March 2, 2022, to get my wife’s parents out and train a local defense force, we drove for about 5 minutes past a line of busses, cars, and people on foot waiting to cross to Poland. It was 2am and it was snowing

blank.org•160 days ago

And as abstractly hilarious as it might be to find out how Mexico would deal with an influx of several million american refugees... the reality would be distinctly less funny.

cadencecivet.bsky.social•160 days ago

Can confirm having a Bosnian prof for one of my senior level classes was a big influence in me abandoning professional IR career aspirations

I couldn’t be more thankful for it.

cadencecivet.bsky.social•160 days ago

Having a guy who escaped genocide asking, in person, if I *wanted* to play god was a big “Oh hell fucking no” moment

fvehafric.bsky.social•160 days ago

As a union rep I dealt with working immigrants in the early 2000s who were were refugees from one side or another in the former Yugoslavia, and the stories they had to tell were horrifying. No one should actually want an armed revolution. It's insane, bottom of the barrel, utterly last resort stuff

blank.org•160 days ago

Amen. I think people have a very weird idea of how an American crack up would go: Yugoslavia is absolutely the modern model for it and it is as close to the worst case scenario as you can get.

jeremyhammett.bsky.social•160 days ago

I knew guys who did IFOR/KFOR missions in Yugoslavia and Kosovo in the 90s and their stories were worse than Afghanistan or Iraq. Unimaginably brutal conflict.

drsaddison.bsky.social•159 days ago

I dated a guy who was deployed there for a while. Boy was he messed up by it. Horrifying stuff.

kevinriggle.bsky.social•160 days ago

Not for nothing, IMO a big part of the reason that the American Revolution worked as well as it did was because the gov'ts of the colonies continued to function more or less as they had before and after, they were breakaway provinces separated by an ocean, it wasn't also a civil war in the bargain.

blank.org•160 days ago

Yup. And our own civil war had the _extremely_ unusual property of happening across one big, single contested border, again between two governments with direct continuity from the status quo ante. That’s not how it usually goes and absolutely would not be the case again.

kevinriggle.bsky.social•160 days ago

Even the American Civil War, roughly the same story minus the ocean. A modern civil war on a city-by-city basis is purest nightmare fuel.

blank.org•160 days ago

100% this exactly. And anyone who thinks that “oh, the conservatives have all the guns” means it’ll be over quickly has (a) entirely misunderstood the political demographics of the armed forces, and (b) failed to understand that belligerents can _always_ find someone to sell them guns.

toastchanges.com•160 days ago

Pretty sure it also is a cognitively dissonant statement to both decry the "rampant gun violence of the inner cities, immigrants, and other libtards" while simultaneously asserting 'the conservatives have all the guns.' Pick a lane.

kevinriggle.bsky.social•160 days ago

"The breakaway California National Guard has set up positions in San Francisco to shell the US Army forward operating base protecting the Port of Oakland and the US Air Force is bombing San Francisco"

kevinriggle.bsky.social•160 days ago

"US Navy assets moored along the Bay in San Francisco are stranded in the crossfire with a skeleton crew of Marines aboard and under active assault by the former National Guard forces"

rlux.nyc•160 days ago

Or a Holocaust survivor.

lizamazel.bsky.social•160 days ago

someone who lived through the Cultural Revolution. Rwanda. Cambodia. Just--

ranamar.bsky.social•159 days ago

Heck, read The Three Body Problem, which has an author's note at the end swearing up and down that this is absolutely not a book that exists to criticize the Cultural Revolution. (By now, I'm convinced that he was telling the truth. And yet...)

jgaehring.bsky.social•160 days ago

Who is saying "ultraviolet pogroms"?

clearspark.bsky.social•160 days ago

I have started to refer to people who pretend it's impossible to get worse as "fascism trivializers".

thelearneddog.bsky.social•160 days ago

Surely The Revolution is at hand.

hurricanexyz.bsky.social•160 days ago

Yeah lol

"Things are currently quite bad!" I am with you

"Things are as bad as they could get!" you seem to be experiencing a failure of imagination

(This also applies to the situation in the Middle East...)

modestholdings.com•160 days ago

As a low level policymaker in (presently) red Iowa, my mantra is that things absolutely can get worse. Inertia alone commands it.

My job is to resist that inertia while being honest about the task.

hurricanexyz.bsky.social•160 days ago

The amount of room for it to get worse is STAGGERING

Like

Human society used to be a LOT worse than it is now? It could in theory go back to being like that

modestholdings.com•160 days ago

In Iowa the motto is, "Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain."

"We will" is our charge. Every goddamn day we must put our shoulders into the work.

kmagnacca.bsky.social•160 days ago

Not just a failure of imagination, a failure to understand what many other countries not only have experienced but currently are experiencing.

gravelinfluencer.bsky.social•160 days ago

I don't understand the point. If the goal is to motivate action, there is enough legitimately bad stuff going on that can be described accurately without resorting to hyperbole.

bjorning.bsky.social•160 days ago

The point is to discourage action, so that things get worse. Accelerationists are not good people.

jeninmotion.bsky.social•160 days ago

I think a lot of very online leftists are in full doomer mode not because of reality on the ground but due to all the anxiety and depression from 2016 or 2020, so they're reacting like very anxious people do.

adamvann.bsky.social•160 days ago

Fans of the Washington Wizards have known this for 12 years

joseph-crowley.bsky.social•160 days ago

It's usually a sign the person needs to get out of that social media space. There are a few people who are at "as bad as it can get" and they deserve to be heard, but it also devalues their story to pretend it's everyones story.

richpuchalsky.bsky.social•160 days ago

It's also dangerous when "it could always be worse!" is the go-to reply about anything that is currently bad.

richpuchalsky.bsky.social•160 days ago

Wow, look at this thread. It's almost as if "it could be worse!" is a more genteel way of saying "enjoy the camps!" to some leftist

jurisdudence.bsky.social•160 days ago

It’s childish and infuriating.

bertrandsballot.bsky.social•160 days ago

The nothing matters caucus is alive and well and they have all found each other online.

lizamazel.bsky.social•160 days ago

also dumb as a rock and frankly insulting for people who know damn well how bad things can get.

this country, sometimes...

semiapies.bsky.social•160 days ago

I am intensely skeptical that they're "otherwise well-meaning people". At best, they mean nothing, because they're just posturing with no intention of doing anything. At worst, they mean ill, as they're trying to undermine and demotivate genuinely well-meaning people.

mumbly-joe.bsky.social•160 days ago

Fwiw my take is that it can absolutely get more violent, but honestly I think it is a point well taken that tolerating Trump in society for as long as we have has made shit plenty violent already. We're basically in a dull background roar of neo-Nazi "lone wolf" style violence leading into that.

bjorning.bsky.social•160 days ago

Yes, but that's very different from actual pogroms. Nobody's seriously saying everything's fine!

faineg.bsky.social•160 days ago

Exactly

mumbly-joe.bsky.social•160 days ago

it's *different*, but at the same time, the white nationalists doing all of it do see it as part of a preparatory continuum intended to progress towards that, and increasingly have the overt support of a major political party in continuing to pursue it.

mumbly-joe.bsky.social•160 days ago

so I'm still willing to call it different as a matter of degree, but pretty far down a path that we should have taken more decisive action to get out of several years ago.

bjorning.bsky.social•160 days ago

Absolutely true, but the point is that they haven't gotten there, so giving up on the course of action most likely to stop them and saying "I guess they already won, why try?" is Bad, Actually.

faineg.bsky.social•160 days ago

Exactly

thryse.com•160 days ago

That’s the whole point of fascism. “The subhumans aren’t suffering enough, they’re laughing at us, we can and must make their lives much worse.”

smadin.net•160 days ago

Every so often I see people saying things like "America already is, and has always been, fascist," and I always wonder, if that's true, how come the current Republican party is trying so goddamn hard to _make_ it fascist?

tft.io•160 days ago

Things can pretty much always get worse! It's sort of the whole "being alive" deal!

heymrteo.bsky.social•160 days ago

Absolutely. “We’re already living under fascism” - uhhh, NO

vitalivour.bsky.social•160 days ago

Unless you are Black, disabled, indigenous, or queer then absolutely you can make the case fascism is here and has been here for quite some time. Fascism isnt exclusively Nazi death camps, y'know

heymrteo.bsky.social•160 days ago

Thanks for giving me permission to call out what’s fascism or not, then. I agree with your last point.

vitalivour.bsky.social•160 days ago

Kinda hard to take "no fascism here" seriously when you've faced it down first hand lmao

amancuso.bsky.social•160 days ago

Every time someone says something like that in my presence, I tell them the story of one of the many refugee kids I've taught. Fleeing the village in the Burmese mountains, chased by bullets. Going to school under a tree in a Rwandan refugee camp. Etc.

osana.bsky.social•160 days ago

Extremely dangerous. It's often the quickest way to experience just how much worse things can actually ge

mattcramer.bsky.social•160 days ago

2016: “What the hell do you have to lose?”

2020: Refrigerated trucks are storing piles of dead bodies that are overflowing the morgues

jaymiemoore.bsky.social•160 days ago

"Don't tell me there's no place to go but up 'cause there's always more down."

theleaderisgood.bsky.social•160 days ago

I’m less mad that people lack imagination and more mad that none of them have read a book.

jeninmotion.bsky.social•160 days ago

Like, bomb threats from MAGA chuds are bad, but it's not actually a pogrom or purge. There is in fact a difference.

zzyzx.bsky.social•160 days ago

For no other reason, it makes it hard to get increased attention when things get worse. It just becomes ignorable rhetoric.

silkscreenfiend.bsky.social•160 days ago

At best it's an excuse for apathy. At worst, an excuse for genuine malevolence.

noahjnelson.com•160 days ago

If nothing else, they underestimate how bad things CAN get.

nclud.bsky.social•160 days ago

And for the worst ones, that just sounds like an adventure

lizamazel.bsky.social•160 days ago

I had to block some fuckwit yesterday who was stanning for Jill Stein because it pushed the Dems to the right after losing 2016 (I think), *combined with* oh yeah Project 2024 will happen this cycle or the next one, with no commentary for that at all.

Do you-do you--

nothing. *plonk*

lime.bsky.social•160 days ago

Our quasi-motto down here is “it gets worse before it gets worse”

ellisor.net•160 days ago

smoreagain.bsky.social•160 days ago

This isn't even the worst that the United States has been

actfortransit.bsky.social•160 days ago

Things can always get worse.

eoellrich516.bsky.social•160 days ago

A wise man once said “the alternative to bad is not necessarily good. It can always get worse.”

sumac914.bsky.social•160 days ago

Yes..and naive as hell. My mother was born in Berlin during WW2. Up until the war, her family had been fairly successful and lived a very comfortable, somewhat well off life. They didn’t speak up when the should have and later suffered right along with everyone else, the men in the family forced..

sumac914.bsky.social•160 days ago

to join the Nazi military and fight in the war, their neighbors taken away, eventually their homes and communities destroyed, everything they had was gone and they were forced to flee invading Russian forces who weren’t too happy with Germans…they should have paid more attention, cared more…

sumac914.bsky.social•160 days ago

Spoken up for what they knew was right. They didn’t, unfortunately. They took the cowards way out and lived to regret it. Everyone’s lives were destroyed..didn’t matter who you were, your religion, your money. This is not trivial/people should recognize the dangerous times we find ourselves in.

darbyscastle.bsky.social•160 days ago

You're 100% right..

brooklynmarie.bsky.social•160 days ago

Shit can always get worse!

kirkmurphy.bsky.social•160 days ago

""Worst is a bad word," I said to him, "and I hope you do not live to see it.""

ctdawe.bsky.social•160 days ago

It stuns me a bit how much wise it can get that people just seem unaware of.

ctdawe.bsky.social•160 days ago

*how much worse

phoenixcalida.bsky.social•160 days ago

This part

lizamazel.bsky.social•160 days ago

ALWAYS.

bluesmank3.bsky.social•160 days ago

A million dead from covid is bad. Deporting 10% of the workforce is worse.

aristofontes.bsky.social•160 days ago

Never Challenge Worse

xanadian.bsky.social•160 days ago

And if it isn't at "worse" yet there's usually SOMETHING we can do to slow the trend and keep it from "worst!" Claiming we've already lost is, well, giving up.

daphnecascadia.bsky.social•160 days ago

Indeed it is. What I have learned in the course of my life is that no matter how bad things are, they can always get worse. We must not take anything we value for granted.

izzos.us•160 days ago

Remember in college during GW Bush and someone in class went off about how we were "living in fascist dictatorship already!" And this other older student just went "I grew in Iran and you have no idea what you're talking about"

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