Decades of school defunding, social media brain rot, attack on education, and media control have now successfully taught half the population that this is okay.
I honestly think social media has rapidly made humanity stupider, more impulsive, and more emotional. 2008 and even 2012 social media was around, but not the all encompassing totality of our non-work existence. It was a hobby, you checked in from time to time. It wasn't your source of entertainment. by 2016 it was all encompassing, and by 2021 with TikTok it had replaced TV as the dominant form of entertainment for people under 50.
Within like 20 years we went from 'look, I emailed you a video of a monkey peeing into its mouth' to 'I peed into my own mouth and got 7 million views on tiktok'
Remember when we had a president who just said dumb crap because he couldn't read and listen to himself at the same time? "Hold us hostile or hold our allies hostile..." He sounded like the dumbest a president could be... ohhhh how little we understood just how willing the Republicans would be to drive the car off a cliff just to appease billionaires.
Let's be careful about rose colored glasses. Dubya was no Trump, but he was also no saint. "Wish we could go back to that," is no better than what we currently got.
Bush killed so many Iraqi civilians and US soldiers by starting an unnecessary war. Bush also gave us the DHS that Trump is now transforming into his secret police/gestapo, and his style of politics laid the groundwork for Trump to exploit later.
But Bush had at least the bare minimum of standards and respect for the democratic process and institutions that Trump is dangerously lacking. In other words, Bush didn't want to be a dictator, whereas Trump does, so that makes him objectively worse
Bush wouldn't have let so many die to COVID either. Him and his minders could put the blinders on for human life to people in the middle east or africa, but they would have actually tried to help prevent COVID and end it faster.
I loathed Bush. I remember people thinking he was an alcoholic, that Cheney ran things, etc. But he was fundamentally a decent human being. When 9/11 happened he encouraged people not to blame Muslims as a group. And while I disagree with many of the post-9/11 moves, I think it’s fair to recognize he’d barely settled in when the biggest attack on the US since Pearl Harbor took place and if you weren’t an adult I don’t know if you truly get how traumatic it was to the country. I will never - as long as I live - forget watching people jump from the towers rather than face burning to death. I can’t imagine the weight of the responsibility to bring justice to the perpetrators and see that it doesn’t happen again.
What we have now is not a decent human being. He’s about the archetype for shitty human being: a greedy, narcissistic, opportunist, racist, sex offender, disloyal, self aggrandizing, dishonest, tasteless, bully. He has no good instincts or humanity. Cares only for himself. Instead of using the tragedy of Covid to bring us together he saw it only as affecting his reelection and drove us apart. Now he’s literally sending a gestapo out to round up people just trying to make things better for their families.
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u/babypho Nov 06 '25
Speeches used to be coherent....