My theory is that Covid killed everyone and this is purgatory. (TikTok screencap)

Sometimes I really think 2019 was the last normal year of our lives and we are now in some alternate reality where nothing makes sense and everyone is insane.

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[+] 85 points 1 year ago (9 children)
  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    We were downloading MP3s on dial up.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Who knew bands had so many unreleased songs?

    Man oh man. I went Napster crazy.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    idk, I was a kid and harry potter wasn’t real, so that kind of sucked for me

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  • [–] 73 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Nah, it was 2016, right before orangini and brexit.

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    [–] 102 points 1 year ago (11 children)

    I think 2016 was the last great year.

    It got better in 2021 for a bit.

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  • [–] 62 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    The moment when Harambe died was when the timeline split.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)
  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I still remember listening to Blackstar when I heard he passed. There was something so weird and ethereal about that moment I tend to agree thats when things went from bad to shit.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Basically at long as taco is in the office it will be miserable.

    The bad things is that in first term there was that there were still competent people around him. This time he fired everyone and replaced with lackeys. Unless he is stopped, US might not recover from it.

    Just looking at the recent meeting in Bejing shows how quickly USA is losing its power. And it's been only 7 months.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    I think it's the other way around actually.

    The first time nobody expected Trump to win, so they didn't have a plan what to do if he did.

    The second time they had a plan called Project 2025 and they are going through it more or less point by point now.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago

    It was kind of a meme that 2016 sucked. Then Trump got elected at the end and everything magically got better for everyone and we all lived happily ever after.

    (Do I really need to include the /s here?)

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  • [–] 41 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    September 11th, 2001 was a real inflection point for the US. We, collectively decided that civil rights aren't as important as revenge.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    9/11 also marks the end of western hegemony as the West destabilized the world and ruined its reputation as a force for good in its pursuit for revenge, leading to the rise of BRICS and other anti-imperial coalitions.

    9/11 also coincides with peak imperialism, the final stage of capitalism, which marks the point when increasing exploitation abroad has diminishing returns so capitalists must begin devouring the imperial core, leading to stagflation, enshittification, rent-seeking, and other parasitic activities. This in turn leads to an economically struggling population of former petit-bourgeois, which is a class condition that is especially susceptible to reactionary propaganda, leading to the rise of fascism.

    Historians will almost certainly mark 9/11 as the beginning of the end of the American Empire.

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  • [–] 38 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    It says 2019 to trick the viewer into commenting "no 2012" or 2016, since no real human thinks everything was great until 2019. It's bait for interactions.

    This is an ad for McDonald's

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  • [–] 29 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Trump was president in 2019 and I remember him cutting massive amounts of food aid (means on wheels) for elderly people during Christmas time. It was some serious Scrooge shit, except he didn't get three ghosts to make him mend his ways.

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  • [–] 89 points 1 year ago (29 children)

    It was 2014. That was the final year of that Obama high where things really felt like they were turning a corner before we were slowly confronted with a world where Donald Trump might actually be president, and the only one standing in his way was somehow Hillary Clinton, a woman that Republicans had been preparing to beat for literally 20 years.

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  • [–] 35 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    This is actually the right answer. Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, and we're all still in the middle of what is essentially a no-declared-sides WWIII now. 2015 was good, but things had shifted in the world a bit. Countering China was starting to become a huge deal suddenly for the US, and China moved into the South China Sea and did some currency revaluation that was all aimed at their 2029 and 2049 CCP anniversary goals.

    Also, I was in fucking phenomenal shape.

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  • [–] 30 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

    Its whatever best year you remember. From my perspective, its been sharply downhill since 2000.

    Those older than me often say it went to shit during the Reagan years. Its been slowly getting worse for a long time.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Syeve bannon was behind the media push that ended it. He's talked about it in interviews.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago

    Steve Bannon gave birth to GamerGate through WoW guilds.

    Insert small to large dominos meme where the small domino is some disheveled guy playing WoW at 3 AM talking about how women suck and the large one is Donald Trump recreating concentration camps, J6, or whatever dystopian bullshit else that has happened in the last few years.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago (18 children)

    You may not have been paying close attention. Obama was astoundingly better than Trump, but invasive spying on citizens was allpwed to remain legal under his watch, and he extended what was allowed. Drone striking questionable targets started under him as well. There's more, but those two are the highlights usually brought up.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Drone striking questionable targets

    if you want to bring up warcrimes, the world has never been normal, especially not the US, they've been up to some heinious shit since before we were born

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Right, Obama didn't snap his fingers and fix every problem in the world or country, but it really felt like we were finally getting to a point where we had a new liberal voting coalition which would start to push US politics left, so that we could finally unwind a lot of those underlying legacy issues.

    Fixing the core issues which created this "obligate imperialism" in the first place were never going to be fixed in the span of one decade, but Obama arguably set us up to grind out more progress in the next administration.

    That's why this whole thing is so frustrating. We were on the path to a supreme court majority and burying a lot of old school conservative ideas in the coming decades, and now we are farther away than ever, because so many people can't see the long game.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago*

    I think part of the issue is that after winning on the platform of "change", Democrats veered hard into "establishment status quo". They won so hard that most people don't even recall the few bad parts of the Obama presidency at all (the point of my last comment, that it wasn't all sunshine and roses), and then threw that lead in the trash.

    They had a chance with Sanders, but threw away an absurd amount of public goodwill by very openly pushing him out of the running in favor of Clinton. That effectively left Trump as the only candidate carrying the "change" flag, and a lot of people were too dumb to see he was full of shit.

    When Democrats had a chance again, they went with another "establishment safe" choice and only won with Biden due to an immense outcry against Trump. Then they lost again because they wouldn't platform someone people were willing to get out to vote for.

    If we get out of this shitshow, I'll be very interested in what history says about the last few presidential races.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago

    Trump did more drone strikes in his first term than Obama did in both his terms. And that is only of the strikes we know. At one point trump declared that strikes dont need to be reported and they didn't count the number of strikes afterward.

    Biden actually fully ended drone strikes... and he did it quietly without much fanfare.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

    The worst the obama administration got was a typical couple of weeks of the Trump administration. It is so much worse now it's unthinkable it could have gotten this bad when looking from the perspective of 2015.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago* (5 children)

    Your mistake is viewing trump not as the obvious fash continuation of the state/capitalism but as some kind of unique magical monster.

    That's how we got here.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Trump is a unique magical monster. There isn't anyone else that can act the way he does. He has a personality disorder that cannot be copied by any average intelligent person. There isn't anyone else with near that type of wealth and social immaturity. No other adult has ever acted like he does that didn't have a mental disorder.

    Others try to copy him but are easy to see through as they cannot bring themselves to act like he would. Ramaswamy tried but is just too mature and of normal intelligence. You need a child(with a disorder) in an adult body with 100% total and complete confidence in itself. A complete narcissist.

    There has never been anyone like him before as anyone with his type of childlike behavior would have been dismissed.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    There has never been anyone like him before as anyone with his type of childlike behavior would have been dismissed.

    I'd like to introduce you to Andrew Jackson....

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    An orphan with limited education became a successful military leader who spoke intelligently. About the opposite of Trump. Both are clearly evil yet one is childlike while the other is not.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Andrew Jackson was a literal psychopath, and came up with the ideology of just ignoring court rulings.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Yet his personality is nothing at all like Trump. Jackson would not be able to lower himself to say the idiotic types of immature things Trump would say. Jackson truly believed in his horrid views. Trump takes whatever view he sees gets him the most attention/power/money regardless of the view and will change it as needed.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    But he spoke well and smiled a lot, especially when fake-drinking that Flint water. What a hero.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I remember this. This was a turning point. That and the bailouts.

    Bailouts said, "I'm for the rich." Flint said, "fuck the poor."

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  • [–] 23 points 1 year ago
    [–] 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    It’s absolutely social media to blame imo. 10 years ago they were only just starting with the aggressive algorithms we know today. This combined with the rise of TikTok and its own algorithm has lead to a resurgence of the right. I believe this was a direct response to how progressive we seemed to be getting in the 2010s. The wealthy right were getting scared. I occasionally accidentally see YouTube “recommendations” and it’s usually unhinged right wing shit with millions of views.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I occasionally accidentally see YouTube “recommendations” and it’s usually unhinged right wing shit with millions of views.

    As someone who regularly watches my youtube recs, I never see this. Maybe it's because youtube knows my preferences from watching their recommendations....

    On the other hand youtube is definitely trash that promotes fascism. So I'm not doubting you either.

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  • Oh yeah I’m never logged into an account; so I when I see it, I see what it’s pushing as trending and popular. These days I use Freetube and only see what’s “recommended” by accident when I occasionally use YouTube on my iPad.

    When I used to use an account I also didn’t see any fascist shit either, so at least that’s a way to avoid it!

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  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    The real insanity stems from everybody having a random lingering covid symptom that's just annoying enough to drive you insane, but not bad enough to kill you. 5 years later, I still get phantom burning smells that I can't even compare to anything I've ever smelled before. It's torture.

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  • [+] 35 points 1 year ago (4 children)
  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    God sent us plague as a warning to not elect him, and he ended up in the office.

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  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Fall of 2012. Obama wins again. Weed is legal in some states. Gay marriage. Nuclear powered tank lands on Mars. iPhone 5.

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  • [–] 33 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    Ive lived through a few of these already.

    2020 is when everything changed.

    2016 is when everything chagned.

    2012 is when everything changed.

    2008 is when everything changed.

    2001 is when everything changed.

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  • [–] 22 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    In a way it's fair to say that every moment changes every moment that happens after. The entire global economy is still reeling from Reaganomics ffs.

    I lived through all these. 2001 and 2008 were horrible, but sort of felt like a normal kind of horrible. Recessions and terrorism were things I'd seen before. It was only the scale that made those anomalous.

    From my (American) perspective 2016 was when shit started getting very weird. We were relatively stable, relatively prosperous, foreign wars were tapering off... And half the country decided that a game show host was her best bet going forward.

    Then it started snowballing... Bill Cosby's a rapist, there's a global pandemic, Kanye put out a pro-Hitler song, Pete Davidson is a sex symbol that no starlet in Hollywood can resist, The secretary of health had his brain eaten by worms, everything you own or use became a subscription service, The fear Factor guy became a political king maker, The first lady has a crypto scam that everyone's kind of okay with, we created AI but it's only good for spam and rule 34 tweets, we decided political corruption isn't a crime if you brag about it, America's war machine is being turned on its cities... Oh and the US is building full on concentration camps.

    It's a very strange time even compared to occupy, The tea party, or Bush riding out 9/11 Reading a children's book in an elementary school.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    "I just got a great idea for a new novel! It's about the end of humanity, but with a twist, because the humans don't even know they are done for yet. They think it's just a bit more aggressive flu, but in fact it's highly contagious and each time you get it, it damages your brain a slight bit more. Everyone keeps getting infected and so they slowly get dumber and more aggressive until civilization collapses in wars and economic chaos."

    "That's stupid, something like that could never happen."

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    [–] 16 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    "With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created."

    It was Harambe. We didn't reload.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    The world has always been crazy. Just more adults are becoming aware of it and able to see it all the time, every day.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago

    Eh The Matrix had it right. 1999

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (1 child)
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