SUCH an underrated city. I spent a day there back in 2022 and it's so pretty, calm, peaceful, fucking fantastic chocolatiers...
Actually, as an American, I found all of Belgium highly underrated. Everyone always talks about Paris, Berlin, and Munich as the crazy big tourist destinations in that region.
I went to Brussels for my birthday in spring 2022, and its easily one of my favorite birthdays to date. Unf. Big Belgium Fangirl here. 10/10 I want everyone I know to visit.
Thing aren't ok now. We're actively funding people that kill civilians and children, all while the people back home living check to check are defaulting on payments, trying to afford ever increasing grocery prices and gas. But the stock market and billionaires are doing good so at least we have that.
We're the country of giving up your life and health for the rich.
The George W. Bush administration (and the burgeoning WWW 2.0) allowed me to look back and realize that since Reagan the US has been on the express train to fascism, autocracy and genocide. Scholars point out the Southern Strategy and the Moral Majority were active responses to the end of segregation and the legalization of interracial marriage. And then Behind The Bastards dated it back to industrialists living the good live during the Great Depression being sore about the New Deal, and their plot to repurpose Christianity and patriotism to create an American order of feudalism and fascism.
And here we are with the Heritage Society's Project 2025 looking to seal the deal.
Currently, I don't think so. The problem is the WILDLY different views on what the actual problems even are, let alone what we should do to try to solve them.
If we can actually charge trump criminally, I think we'll be okay. He is a self-serving squealer, on top of being and idiotic blabber that can't keep a secret. He will bury every one of his sycophants to get a single day off his prison sentence.
Also, nothing is scarier than a peaceful man resorting to violence. The non-MAGA majority are slow to violence, but if it happens, it would be swift and unstoppable.
What do you think will measurably change in the average person's day to day life if Trump gets charged or not? Are taxes going down? Wages going up? Will housing or healthcare become more affordable? The whole fucking thing just seems like a clown show designed to keep people distracted from actual problems to me.
Don't get me wrong, he's a traitor and should be treated as such along with all his cronies but I just don't believe anything will get better for me afterwards.
I mean, this is kind of like the meditation on death from the book of the five rings. Like, once you accept death as inevitable you can see that on a long enough time scale things will be fine.
We've beaten Trump before we can do it again. He's a fucking 3x loser and his supporters are still full of hope.
Meanwhile Democrats after winning the presidency and the midterms are shitting themselves instead of standing up to the fuckery and organizing to vote.
Y'all Americans on this post need to cheer up. You don't know what 'the end', the apocalypse, doom, or whatever sinister synonym for 'conclusion' even is, what a curropt government really is, and less still know what misery feels like (I don't either). Acting like it's the end of the fucking world and getting all nihilistic is the most shitty-American thought there is. Stop crying and help? Or just keep watching. It's not the end of things and nothing that can't be fixed.
History can tell us where things will go. But from here it looks like we're dealing with an attack on our democratic features by the transnational white power movement (or the Christian nationalist movement. There's lots of intersection.) in order to rework the US into a one-party autocracy, as per the Heritage Society's Project 2025.
And in the meantime, the climate crisis looms in the background like an army of frost zombies, one that won't be put down by simply killing the zombie king.
Corporate ownership of the government, the slide to fascism, the divide between the common people due to the worsening cycle of right wing extremism, the accelerating climate change, the ever increasing cost of housing, the ever increasing cost of everything--things are going downhill fast and it's wild to be at a point in my life where I'm finally losing my depression while everything in the world is decaying lol
He was great in Minority Report. I'll concede that that isn't a Colin Farrell movie, and that objectively it's not a great movie. But HE was good, in it.
"So Mr President what has your government done for young families and in particular childcare and parental leave on your 4 years that will rally up the democratic base come 2024?"
He's also the president: he can make proposals, he can sign executive orders, but he can't force funding for those things. He can't wave his hands and pass laws -- those are things congress does, and shockingly every single progressive or pro working class idea he or his party backs gets immediately shut down in congress by the GOP.
There has always been a decent sized portion of the population that thinks the end is nigh, society is collapsing, etc
It's because imagining a future is scary, people don't like thinking about things that are as hard to predict and uncomfortable as a good future where things are easier and society smarter because it carries with it the certainly that current beliefs will be over turned and current struggles forgotten - its very unsettling.
People love to think they're at the high point of civilization and things will collapse because otherwise things feel kinda pointless and scary - especially the thought of everything we know and care about becoming irrelevant and opinions we carry getting over turned