The rich are getting richer faster than the rest of us.
Real wages are stagnant. Social safety nets are constantly being removed.
Labor protections have been being rolled back or enforcement lax since the ATC strike.
Atomization and alienation have taken root.
The mythos of the nuclear family being paramount is fully embedded in the culture, destroying the older concept of a broader family and community taking part in the rearing of the next generation and just general socialization.
We're heading to the failure of multiple systems, including food production and power, due to climate change and the increasing frequency of disastrous weather systems.
"Greed is good" has been a value promulgated by the elites for a few generations now.
Things are getting more expensive faster than wage growth, especially basics and things needed for economic upward mobility (housing, education, healthcare, etc).
Identity politics and wedge issues are dividing people who otherwise have similar interests.
Modern life is anxiety and depression inducing, creating a rise in interpersonal conflict.
Our government is no longer accountable to the people or representative of them in any real way unless you're in the top quintile of wealth/income (and that is generous).
All of these things, and many more, are ripping apart the social contract. People no longer feel invested in the wellbeing of the places in which they reside or the governmental and societal systems they are a part of. Instead, they merely endure them with resentment. This won't end well.
- California is getting very soft on crime recently, people now realize they can rob and steal what they want and there are zero consequences for it, this has lead to almost a complete collapse of order in most major california cities(see excessive smash and grabs($1B stolen in a few weeks in LA/SF bay area) and skyrocketing drug use(SF has more addicts than high school students) and homelessness, along with car jackings and robberies). I live in california and my family has been here for over a hundred years so I have seen its rapid deterioration in the past 3-4 years.
- Complete abandonment of any type of positive morality from the media or any leaders.
- Extreme division due to both right and left moving farther from the center.
- Sky high college costs have made things very difficult for people that are in college and those leaving the system are left with life crushing debt.
- Housing and rent are at all time highs due to excessive money printing and over generous govt. handouts the past 1-2 years.
- Jobs are available and are plentiful there are just not enough workers for the positions or qualified people for the higher earning ones, in addition alot of people were making more sitting around getting checks and enhanced unemployment than working at the lower wage positions.
- I traveled to multiple states over the last year(Hawaii, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Oregon) and this stuff is not happening everywhere, its mainly in CA and NYC and other high density urban areas.
You are claiming this isn't happening in those states, but especially New Mexico and Oregon, ... it is definitely happening in those states, so I question your experience with the other ones. Out of those, maybe Utah is not having those problems? Even as an island, Hawaii has had huge problems for decades, perhaps the worst (housing affordability, homelessness, rising crime rate).
California's incarceration rate is already double or triple that of Canada, Japan or Western Europe.
This says a lot about your position in what you imagine is the 'center'; the reality is that both sides are only moving further right. This has been happening for decades.
This is a false statement according to actual studies. Democrats have been moving further left at a higher rate than Republicans have been moving further right. [0] [1]
Before you say this study is outdated and therefore no longer relevant, you need to find a well regarded study that supports your original claim.
[0] http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/201...
[1] https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/pew-research-c...
I think some of the points in your comment may be valid, especially regarding extreme division, loss of societal trust, and growing inequality. Trust in police and in our institutions probably hit an all time low in 2020. But I think pointing purely to "progressive DAs" doesn't map to reality.
Actually, I think they're at all-time highs because you literally refuse to build anything except suburban hellscapes full of single-family houses made of ticky-tacky that all look just the same. I'm serious about this. California's recently-passed upzoning law is the only effective policy intervention for housing I've seen from your state in decades.
1. Some guy chased a woman in his car and she ran to a fire station. He crashed into the fire station and fought firefighters. Released 0 bail.
2. Violent criminal with a long past let out of jail to attend funeral and hasn’t returned.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. We have constant 0 bail for young carjackers who steal peoples cars for joy rides.
It’s madness. I don’t care what anyone says about “punishment doesn’t deter crime”. That’s against human nature and total horseshit.
Is the problem really that too few people are in prison?
We have many criminals.
Criminals deserve punishment, including jail should the crime be severe enough.
Criminals prey on law abiding citizens.
If you won't enforce the law, citizens will take the law into the their own hands.
Then you will be forced to cry for criminals even more than you are doing now.
If you don't treat the cause, then you'll just continue getting more symptoms.
Maybe we should figure out what it is about the USA that keeps generating so much more antisocial behavior than everywhere else and fix that.
It seems extremely difficult to break this cycle without actually removing kids from their parents/friend groups.
Whichever way you cut it, it's bad for society for it to be such a large percentage.
I can see you're enraged.
There's the real problem about everything - making judgments and decisions about the world based on emotions, not facts. You should care what other people say, especially the people who study things scientifically. I'm sure it sounds great and judicious to your enraged lizard brain to lock someone up and throw away the key, but there's a lot more to consider than what makes you feel good.
I think we're past "nuclear family" at this point. Getting married is actively discouraged by our legal system.
It's not a "mythos", it's a fact that children raised in nuclear families have much better outcomes than those who are not [0]. Practically every sociological study confirms this.
Black children are the least likely to be raised in nuclear families in the US, and aligned with the study, are the most likely to suffer from health and mental/emotional/sociological issues.
It's recently become some weird leftist/neo-marxist talking point to subvert the "Western proscribed nuclear family". BLM had to remove this talking point from their website after it was widely criticized [1].
[0] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_10/sr10_246.pdf
[1] https://news.yahoo.com/black-lives-matter-removes-language-1...
Come on dude, use context clues.
Which are specifically covered in the CDC report that I listed above.
"Children living in blended (i.e., stepparent), cohabiting, unmarried biological or adoptive, extended, and other families were generally disadvantaged relative to children in nuclear families, and were, for the most part, comparable to children living in single-parent families regarding most health status and access to care measures."
> Which is why I explicitly mentioned extended ("broader") families and communities.
Those "broader" families and communities have unfortunately been failing Black Americans for generations.
>Come on dude, use context clues.
Come on dude, use reading comprehension. At least you admitted here for all to see that you'd rather be a virtue signaler over being a data driven adult.
As I said, I agree that having a mom and dad is good. It produces better outcomes than having one or neither. Go grind your axe elsewhere.
Isn’t that just a restatement if the rather mundane concept of compound interest?
If savings account A has $100 and account B has $1mil, does it go without saying that account B will grow far faster?
I never understood why compound interest should be seen as a negative. What is the counter proposal?
Is the root of this issue really "in" the population? Or is the population merely responding to a set of external circumstances?
I'm uneasy when someone says something like "weed out of a population." Many dark journeys have started with this idea.
> However, a 2 year period of cultural erosion can lead to this regression getting cemented as a modern cultural identity of non-elite US.
From my perspective, this erosion started showing itself during Occupy Wall Street. Our entire economy was set on fire and very few, if any, people were actually held responsible for that. They were bailed out, and everyone was expected to move on.
If I had a sense that something needed to be "weeded out" of my society, I know that's where I would start.
Or you could argue that their internal culture probably due to religion was not strong enough to fight against external influences.
Sweden is one of the least religious countries in Europe, and one of the safest.
"Approximately 13 percent of the population in Sweden experience problems in their own residential area with crime, violence or vandalism. It is one of the highest proportions in Europe."
https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/artiklar/2019/fler-upplev...
Modern America has no common history. America has no common ethnicity, no common roots and now no common religion. The least religious nations are often ethnically homogeneous (Sweden, Korea) or have an incredibly strong national cultural identity of what it means to belong (France, Singapore).The US had neither, and then took down the one thing that held together 80% of the US as of 2000. ie. Christianity (mostly protestant-derived)
And I'm a Hindu-by-birth Atheist immigrant. So, I don't have any vested interest in the restoration of Europe-derived Christianity within the US.
To me, the closest thing to a common american identity is a combination of the following 3:
* Protestant values of hard work, merit and family
* Colorblind-live-and-let-live immigrant melting pot
* Capitalistic enterprising nature of shooting for the moon and that anyone can be a billionaire/President.
Now, these might not be perfect, but it was the closest thing to national values that 80% could get buy in on.
However, populist politics of the last 10 years and the change in wealth distribution post 2000 has seen wholesale rejection of almost all of these values from both the populist left and the populist right. As the nation continues fracturing, the resentment towards your fellow countrymen grows to the point that you feel no civic duty towards your fellow countrymen, and maybe even take joy in looting them.
Religion unites as long as it is homogeneous. High level of religious beliefs would not help much, if they didn't unify people through a collective identity. So in this case, high levels of religious participation would not have helped, because there would still never be any agreement on a common religious identity given the degree of religious heterogeneity.
On an aside, I always find it funny when people say that countries that tolerate heterogenous identities such as the US or India are discriminatory or racist. Yeah, as if you with your 95+% cultural/religious/ethnic homogeneity have any right to speak about diversity. You can already see Europe coming apart at its seams with a small influx of culturally diverse middle-eastern refugees. The friction you see, is a result of an open system that allows each of these incompatible cultural identities to get a voice in the national discourse.
Hindus in India divide and fight amongst themselves based on caste even though they all follow the same religion.
In other words: freedom, equality, justice, democracy, and self-determination.
America's relationship with religion has always been complex. The first amendment simultaneously guarantees the free practice of religion and enshrines its separation from the state; as a government, the U.S. cannot make any law that preferences a particular religion. Many of the founders were Deists, which is a religion that simultaneously accepts the existence of God but also relies upon empiricism, rationality, and individual thought to divine His will. America is also explicitly not Protestant, and the dominant religion varies a lot from place to place. I grew up in New England, which has a Puritan early history but now is populated by largely Catholic Irish & Italian immigrants. My mom's childhood friends in NYC all seemed to be Jewish. In Utah, it's mostly Mormon.
I'd argue that the main reason America is falling apart is that we've forgotten those core values of liberty, equality, justice, democracy, and self-determination. These have always existed in some tension, but right now we're not doing a particularly good job of any of them. Instead the focus is on capitalism, virtue-signalling, protection from outsiders, preferencing your in-group, forcing your particular morality on others, and many other very human but very un-American activities.
There is only circumstantial evidence but the story sounds plausible. If things continue like this, I'd wager that trump will return in 24
The lockdowns are in fact nothing to do with the virus, and instead are part of a scheme to hide the true nature of contemporary capitalism? Please ...
Look, I get it, the "bailouts" distributed huge sums of money and lots of it went to people who, viewed through the lens of some sort of moral common sense, should not have received it. That's unfortunately the price you pay for a big country with a big economy. Trying to ensure that none of it was misdirected would have ensured nobody got any at all.
It's possible to believe that government (like all human institutions) can be deeply flawed and corrupt while simultaneously still doing things that in aggregate are beneficial to the whole of society.
Did some of it go to places it should not have done? See my previous responses.
> And that ... Theory about the lockdowns supposedly not being because of the virus but to hide a larger financial crisis/weath reallocation is spreading quite quickly at least at far as I can tell.
to even mention this "theory" as if it had any credibility whatsoever crosses a line where I'm not willing to cede good faith, sensible thinking etc., and can only react with dismissal and condescension.
"And that ... Theory about the earth not really being round but actually flat but the illuminati prefer that we think it is round because reasons ..." is in the same ballpark.
If you're interested in debunking the parent comment, perhaps reading it carefully and responding to the points would work better. This could potentially open people's eyes and even make them agree with you. Instead you have opted to go for divisive insults, which likely reinforces the belief of anyone who is inclined to disagree with you.
Of course, you could claim that flat earth theory is so disproven that there's no need to even bother, whereas "the lockdowns are to stop public unrest" theory might have something to it, so if I want to criticize it, I should explain all the evidence that says it's false.
We're just going to have to agree to disagree. From my POV, this idea is so utterly and obviously false prima facie that I'm under no more obligation to explain my dismissal of it than I would be in the flat earth case.
Also, where did I opt for "divisive insults"?
And I am not saying you are "obligated" to do anything. What I am saying is that by reacting the way you did, you are contributing to the hardening of beliefs and the polarization of this issue. If you want to live in a world where "utterly and obviously false" ideas continue to gain traction, then by all means keep insulting anyone who you disagree with.
Lockdowns also took place in nations around the earth with entirely different economic and governmental systems to the US, so unless you're a believer in some sort of hidden global order that managed to get the Chinese, the Norwegians, the Germans and the US to all do more or less the same thing, then the existence of lockdowns seems to A LOT more to do with a virus than some cover up of contemporary capitalism.
There's a limit to how much politeness we need to extend to edge-dwelling ideas. Most people (not all, I know) on HN would include flat earth theory as stuff that doesn't require politeness (though perhaps a little sympathy ... I dunno). The question is where do you draw that line, and my POV, we already draw it far too close to people who have bad-faith reasons for proposing, publicizing and discussing a bunch of ideas.
"Lockdowns also took place in nations around the earth with entirely different economic and governmental systems to the US, so unless you're a believer in some sort of hidden global order that managed to get the Chinese, the Norwegians, the Germans and the US to all do more or less the same thing, then the existence of lockdowns seems to A LOT more to do with a virus than some cover up of contemporary capitalism."
That makes a ton of sense and is a great argument! I wish you had replied to the original comment with this instead. I know you aren't arguing in bad faith, and I apologize for being a stickler on this.
> And that ... Theory about the lockdowns supposedly not being because of the virus but to hide a larger financial crisis/weath reallocation is spreading quite quickly at least at far as I can tell.
Maybe you think you can mention "that ... theory" without endorsing it in any way. I say that even mentioning this completely bogus garbage in a way that doesn't say that it's completely bogus garbage is effectively endorsing it. That's just the way communication systems work, unfortunately.
I'm not implying that you believe "that ... theory". I am saying that it's essentially insane, has no credibility, and is spreading only because people mention it in this sort of "offhand" way ("oh, I didn't mean anything").
So many of these Alex Jones wannabe 'anti-maskers invade a store protesters', schoolboard meeting ravers get publicized because they get people fired up and drive clicks and ad revenue.
It's normalizing that the way to handle disagreement is to act out.
I'm sorry to say that this onslaught of terrible behavior isn't because people are tired of lockdowns, it's because it's great for driving ad traffic & getting $ from voters.
There’s no stuffing the genie back in the bottle now. We’re going to be paying the price for the corporate excess of the 90s, 2000s and 2010s for the next few decades in the form of climate change, disinformation, authoritarianism and the ensuing civil unrest. Thanks to the combination of the last three we will continue to be unable to muster a coherent response to any problem going forward.
Maybe we can have some good times again eventually, but the next decade or two are going to be rough.
A loss of civic sense and cultural criminality are incredibly hard to weed out of a population, once it has taken root. I worry that the a mix of pessimism and a loss of civic sense is sending non-elite America into a death spiral.
Opponents of return-to-normalcy claim that these are temporary and anomalous circumstances as a result of covid. However, a 2 year period of cultural erosion can lead to this regression getting cemented as a modern cultural identity of non-elite US.
Cost-benefit analyses have been ignored in favor of tunnel-visioning on viral outcomes and short term political gain. At the end of this, we might just find ourselves asking "We made it out of this, but at what cost?".
p.s: I am not advocating for any particular policy, just pointing to the absence of any holistic response. That being said, the complete failure of the American response in terms of 'viral outcomes' despite tunnel visioning on it, doesn't inspire confidence in it.