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  • The 2008 bank bailouts. Watching our government spend nearly a trillion dollars to bail out some unelected bankers who made some bad decisions and were "too big to fail (true)". Watching them spend that money on bonuses for their execs, while none of them went to jail. Watching the social response to that (occupy) and then watching a coordinated federal crackdown of those protests across the country. And then watching bailouts happen again and again since then. Meanwhile in Iceland, they overthrew their government over it. The global financial system has deeply rooted flaws, and bailouts are an inevitability in it. We will inevitably, every so often, make another huge wealth transfer like that because so longs as lending exists, particularly private lending, and all banks are interconnected so that if one fails they all fail, there will always be bank runs and bailouts. Even the most well-intentioned bank cannot hedge against all risks and market shocks. And the government will just turn on the money printer every time it happens while you watch your hard-earned money lose its value.

  • For me it was an array of events.

    The war in Afghanistan (I was a kid but this was one of the tipping points that sent me down a hard leftist path).

    GWB… just collectively. Freezing when told the towers were hit; lying about WMDs so he could start an illegal war.

    Watching Obama get elected and then turning out to be a fucking fraud that built the drone program and carried on the US legacy of being the worldwide terrorist organization.

    A big one though was watching the police continue to terrorize the Black community over and over. Years ago on Facebook I had a couple of old high school friends that argued with me that you should do whatever a cop tells you. My response was to tell them how utterly fucking idiotic that was and that cops will violate your rights if it means they don’t have to do any paperwork. They’ll illegally search your vehicle (like they did mine one time), harass you (like they did to my friends and I when we were skateboarding), and if you’re Black, they’ll shoot you in the back if you run.

    Needless to say, I am not friends with either of them anymore. I think that’s when I really started to solidify who I was and have rejected absolutely everything that America is and does on the world stage. I’ve become known as the white guy that hates cops. I’ve worked with Black revolutionary groups, activist groups, written articles and tons of thoughts on police violence in America, and have marched against the police on multiple occasions. Hell, the police have surveilled me for who knows how long a few years ago, and I know people that have been under surveillance by the FBI. As an aside, you’d be amazed at the lengths this country will go to to keep eyes on peace activists.

    Everything America does as a collective has brought me to the conclusion that we are in a failed state, capitalism-in-decay freefall that I’m afraid we will never recover from. We no longer innovate; we continue to loot other countries; we are all a captive audience hitched to whatever whims the capitalists and other ghouls want.

    I’ve been laid off, had companies fuck me over for money and control, harassed by cops (all the way back to when I was 15 in the 90s), tracked by my own government for having a voice… there is nothing anyone can say that will convince me that the United States isn’t the enemy of the world and it’s citizens are nothing more than a disposable capitalist resource.

    I hate to be a downer but my view of this country is a product of what it has done to both its own people and people around the world. I feel like a prisoner in the US.

  • I started to understand what "institutional racism" means when george zimmerman was acquitted

    • As a non American, i always thought that Zimmerman’s was also a perfect demonstration of why the whole gun culture thing is inherently fucked/dangerous. When it’s ok for a guy to be walking around with a rifle for the purposes of community safety or whatever, of course people are going to be killed, that’s what guns are for.

      Apart from the racism angle (which I don’t intend to diminish), it seems to me a natural consequence of gun rights that at some point a murderer will be acquired because the killing was just part of their second amendment rights.

      • what bothers me the most about the case is that conservatives often say one of the reasons they should have guns is "what if I'm out at night and someone starts following me, I have the right to have some way to defend myself" which, sure, I get it. but if you look at the details and evidence, trayvon was unarmed, and more or less keeping to himself, until george, who was armed, started following him. maybe it's true that trayvon attacked first (there's no hard evidence indicating this, only testimony from george), but would it be so unreasonable after being followed by some random stranger with a gun at night? why is it not seen as a case of trayvon defending his life using whatever means available in the moment? after all, defending yourself from potentially harmful strangers is so important to them that they believe it warrants having access to lethal weapons (which again, I don't really disagree with, I just think you need people need to be held responsible with how they use that, but I guess chuds are willing to make exceptions...)

  • 2016 Brexit referendum -> Turkish coup-> trump presidential win

    It reinforced all my feelings about what was important in this world and simultaneously made very clear we are actually living in an age of sliding back, not of Progress. I was already very interested in politics by that point but with just about the knowledge to grab the weight but no proper explanation this summer half of 2016 felt like falling into chaos and uncertainty 3 times. In retrospect the outer two likely had much more influence on my life thereafter, but the middle one was the more jarring to watch unfold at the time.

  • Tripping too hard on mushrooms. I realized that the mind is powerful, and under the right conditions, can show you and make you believe that reality is absolutely anything. And I mean anything. You could be anywhere, anyone, become an inanimate object, have your world become pure geometry and sensation, completely lose sense of the scale and passage of time. There are almost no limits.

    • Yep, it’s they key lesson of psychedelics: reality is an illusion, never underestimate the power of the mind and how much it lives literally in its own world. Be mindful of biases and prejudices corrupting the very notion of truth, be sympathetic to those with mental health issues and trauma and be mindful of just how ubiquitous a problem mental health is and how important working on yourself is.

  • Finding out in primary school that other kids weren't poor and had all the shit they wanted while we sometimes had issues getting food.

  • That week recently when there were floods in every country except where there were fires in every country. That was wild.

  • I can't pin it down to just one, but holy shit school shootings and the way we've responded to them completely broke whatever part of me thought that our society was still capable of doing things. They keep upping the ante with how horrifying they are too - the high water mark currently is Uvalde, and I think that the next one that shocks the nation will involve the cops (or a "good guy with a gun") gunning down multiple kids or parents while trying to "help" and our collective response will still be to do nothing.

  • I stopped watching the 24/7 need channels. It cut out so much fear and paranoia that those channels thrive on.

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