Pretty much. Secular education tends to begin with Columbus sailing across the Atlantic and seldom ventures north or south of our boarders – let alone touch on the rest of the planet until World War 2, after which a lot of curriculums just end. Elective courses are better… which is why nearly every year at least one of the states try to ban them.

Most of our protestant schooling likes to make special note of the fact that people fled here to escape religious persecution, that this or that sect wouldn’t be possible without American Freedoms™. Hell, Mormon scripture straight up says the US is a promised holy land.

You are looking for a Great Man of history to pin this on. You’d rather believe someone nefarious is in charge and pulling the strings from an ocean away, than to see this for what it is; an empire with no real conscious oversight. A pile of self-interested businessmen, politicians, and militarists doing whatever they can to line their pockets, profits above all else.

The US has, per capita, the largest prison population and, outright, the biggest military on the planet. If there’s a road to ‘unfreedom’, we traveled down it a long time ago.

You’d rather believe Trump is result of foreign interference, that our own institutions would never result in this without being sullied from outside. It’s fan fic, it’s Cold War nonsense.

Trump is the consequence of our political systems, of our spiteful culture, of our economics that promises success and leaves people sick, broken, and in debt. So what if the Russians had a few hundred Facebook posts? That “seed” would not have taken if the soil weren’t already fertile. Frankly, I don’t think it made a difference. We were barrelling toward Trump with or without the oh so spooky slavs typing on a keyboard.

On the one hand, you can read it as a parody of late 20th century life - like, haha imagine a caveman clocking into work

but on the other hand, Flinstones and its far future counterpart Jestsons kinda suggest an inability to imagine anything different. Automobile-ized suburban development frequently gets presented an the human ‘default’. As though we just default to this, rather than it being one of many ways cities and society could be organized.

You’re getting surveillance regardless of walkablity. Amazon is happy enough to hand Ring camera footage over to authorities no questions asked.

You worship the stock market and private property like a golden calf.

All hardware becomes legacy hardware in time. Even if we assume they’re eventually able to deliver on all those great big shiny promises, I’d rather not have to schedule an outpatient surgery just to keep up on emails. Pocket touchscreens being practically mandatory is bad enough…

And your metaphor was a fun oversimplification.

*Kinda hard to have an equal discussion when being a woman entails being sexually harassed and occasionally assaulted by a bunch of men, mostly ones you barely know or don’t know at all, on a regular basis before you even hit puberty.*

genuine question, how do you expect it to get any better if you aren’t being civil?

The decision matrix here isn’t [civil engagement ||or|| uncivil engagement], but rather:

[civil engagement and incur non-zero risk of uncivil retaliation ||or|| do not engage]

Non-participation is the safer option, broadly speaking. If your speaking with a stranger, it’s better to let a minor slight slide, than to engage civilly. As you get to know someone better, as you become more familiar with conditions, this chart becomes a secondary consideration or even unnecessary. But with strangers, you never know if you’re dealing with an outlier.

Desertification has increased

Local flora has decreased

Rabbit populations have octupled

Deer populations have doubled

And there certainly wasn’t a neighborhood where your highway on-ramp currently is.

That’s the interesting thing about empire, it’s self similar. A whole class of people may grow up geographically in or near the core, but their experience of life has more in common with someone in the semi- or outer periphery in terms of access to necessities or stability of life.

electrocuting an elephant to death, and for no better reason than tabloid advertising, kind of stands out in the historical record

that’s not to say Edison was PURE EVIL, just that I always remember the elephant alongside the more humanizing factoids. [Once, he asked a math student to find the volume of a lightbulb. The student started doing all kinds of caliper measurements and geometry calculations. Edison just filled the bulb with sand and tipped it out into a measuring cup]

I still think humanity should have just terraformed Mars or Venus on behalf of the trisolarans. That way, everyone has a stable orbit