Well I didn’t say they were equally stupid, I just said all of those cultural trends were stupid.
People can do what they want, but if you’re going to have a conversation about the collapse of a country, well people who get excited about a gas station and drive an hour away to fill up on gas - yep it’s just a gas station - are part of the reason for that decline.
> tarted? Were you raised in some kind of cave that prevented access to recorded human history?
I don’t think Americans have hated each other or been this divided in quite some time. I don’t even think Americans hated each this much during the Civil War. You’re missing the context of the conversation here. Of course people have always had conflict, but the nature and intensity of that conflict can vary.
People literally started a war and fought it for 4 years, killing more americans than basically anything else we could categorize as a single event, entirely to preserve their right to hold other americans as slaves, and you think people are hating more now?
It seems a tad unlikely.
Equating some hypothetical people enjoying a buccees with the collapse of a country is, and there's really no other way to say this, profoundly ignorant.
Why countries collapse, hell, what collapse even means, could fill several dozen books, but "rule of law" is a real big part of what makes a functioning country.
It's the difference between something like an actual state and a feudal fiefdom.
> People literally started a war and fought it for 4 years, killing more americans than basically anything else we could categorize as a single event, entirely to preserve their right to hold other americans as slaves, and you think people are hating more now? It seems a tad unlikely.
I think you’re overreacting to how many people felt during the Civil War, at least from what I’ve read or internalized over my lifetime. There really was, quite literally brother versus brother and while there was incredible disagreement and violence I think folks then still recognized one another as Americans at the base level. Today MAGA and Leftists hate each other so much they’ve lost even that. Another way to think about it is, how many veterans do you know who hate Iraq or Iraqis, or hate Afghanistan or Afghani people (Taliban aside)? Not many, right? Vietnam - we actually won the peace there. Japan? Germany? Folks get over wartime violence surprisingly quickly. But I think the way far-right fascists MAGAland and far-left communist lefty land feel about each other is genuine hatred and it's a bit different. Obviously one may disagree.
> Equating some hypothetical people enjoying a buccees with the collapse of a country is, and there's really no other way to say this, profoundly ignorant.
Well they’re not hypothetical. There was one that just opened in Ohio. Hour long lines to get gas. If someone is going to suggest that the US is collapsing or throw around this late-stage capitalism nonsense, well, it’s only fair to point out examples of that collapse.
The Rule of Law is for the most part doing just fine in the US. It’ll never be perfect, we aren’t an ethnostate nor do we share a common ideology to make things easy. The only area where we really are failing these days seems to be traffic enforcement.
> while there was incredible disagreement and violence I think folks then still recognized one another as Americans at the base level. Today MAGA and Leftists hate each other so much they’ve lost even that.
Mother of absurdity. You should read what they wrote and said back then. And how much violence they enacted.
And no, slaves were not recognized as americans or even humans. The abolitionists were hated more in the south.
Well I didn’t say they were equally stupid, I just said all of those cultural trends were stupid.
People can do what they want, but if you’re going to have a conversation about the collapse of a country, well people who get excited about a gas station and drive an hour away to fill up on gas - yep it’s just a gas station - are part of the reason for that decline.
> tarted? Were you raised in some kind of cave that prevented access to recorded human history?
I don’t think Americans have hated each other or been this divided in quite some time. I don’t even think Americans hated each this much during the Civil War. You’re missing the context of the conversation here. Of course people have always had conflict, but the nature and intensity of that conflict can vary.