#^ not doing this btw for a number of reasons. 1) money. 2) outdated knowledge and not able to find 2010 edition anywhere

[timefadesaway]

i kind of miss being a kid and having compendiums on lots of different subjects and learning about all sorts of things it makes me sad i don’t have those anymore. i would love to get a set of books about things like science and world history and art. the internet is wonderful sometimes for knowledge but i miss having things in print like that i feel like i learn better from print than screens

hollies but with linda mccartney instead of allan clarke what should i do

get the encyclopeadia britannica 15th edition 1976 leather bound full set inc index 1307 off ebay. you will need the energy in the coming days

[evilelitest2]

Why has political shit gotten so damn extreme like I know Obama wasn't even great but the economy did improve somewhat with him in why the hell did everyone just go absolutely insane this year politically like what is the source of this madness like literally why

That is a very good question, in fact I am doing a whole series right now called 100 Days of Trump where I try explain WTF happened via media, but yes, America has kinda gone insane and at the risk of massive simplification I am boiling it down to 7 core reasons, think 7 sins  

1) Ronald Fucking Reagan, aka Trump 1.0.  Basically Reagan’s entire presidency was either  “Horrible policies that won’t come back to bite us until decades later” or “refusing to reform the system”.  Like, in terms of how the US works administratively, we haven’t reformed since the 80s, we are the most powerful nation in the world with an administrative system from the bloody 70s. LIke I can’t reiterate this enough, America hasn’t had a proper reform for almost 40 years, which btw was also tore of France and Russia right before the revolutions.  Like the Us goverment as an institution hasn’t been patched for ages, it is outdated, underfunded, administratively backwards and mismanaged and that all boils down to Reagan’s policy of massively cutting taxes.  Without money, goverment cannot function and so all of the things goverment is suppose to do aren’t working right.  People without welfare or a social safety net are far more likely to become radical.  When a country has A giant wealth gap, very little welfare, no healthcare, a shitty education system, a shrinking middle classes, and stagnant wages, the country is unstable, that is just how it goes.  All of those things Republicans like to cut aren’t just good because it is nice to not have children die, it also make the country more stable.  If somebody has a decent job, fine education, good standard of living, and a safety net, then they are far less likely to be attracted to radical politics.  But thanks to Reagan we have been spending 36 years cutting the very things that keep the country stable.  Also under Reagan we saw massive money in politics and the start of corporate media.

Also Reagan plus CLinton (who was the democratic Reagan good job) started NAFTA and the Free Trade movement which is great for corporations but terribel for the American worker.  Free trade only works if you combine it with good welfare and public education and the US had neither, cause we wouldn’t want to tax the rich.  Also infrastructure has stagnated, really all over America shit is falling apart because our leaders haven’t been doing their bloody jobs for 4 decades.  

2) The war on Terror.  Like I know it doesn’t feel this way, but we have been at war for 16 years now, a long bloody costly war which….hasn’t really come to anything.  We killed Bin Laden and it didn’t seem to do anything, we invaded Iraq over a false pretense, we have spent Trillions of dollars and nothing ever seems to get better only worse and there doesn’t seem to be a way out.  When people get frustrated and feel like they have been lied too by those in power, they turn to extreme solutions, particularly if said solution is simple, because they want to believe these things can be ended simply rather than address a complicated reality (cause again we cut education for 40 years)

For that matter, also the War on Drugs when it comes to dumb expensive harmful wars that don’t ever effect anything other than increasingly militarizing the police department.  

3) The Crash.  You are right, the economy did improve after Obama and the country is so much stronger than it was after 2008, but most of that economic growth came in the urban areas not the rural and while better it is still really shit for about 50% of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck.   The fact that the Crash was caused by Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush’ own incompetent policies and NOBODY was punished for it is still galling, that Wall Street and the banks fucked over the economy for their own personal gain and basically got off scot free for it is really infuriating, and the things that got us into this mess….haven’t really been changed.  Cause money in politics 

4) Money in politics, our political class is an absolute joke.  The fact is that the rich and the corporate wield absurd amounts of influence in American politics and there doesn’t really seem to be anything the people of the US can do about it, its just a nightmare.  There are thousands of easy obvious solutions to problems in the US which could be solved and….they aren’t, because some rich asshole makes more problem by that problem existing or doesn’t want to pay taxes 

5) An outdated political structure, the actual political system of the US is a mess, it doesn’t work as intended and is designed so that the useless shits who are currently in power stay in power while doing as little as possible.  Look at things like the Two Party System, the Primary System, the Electoral College, the structure of the Senate, First Past the Post Voting, Gerrymandering, the Filibuster, the makeup of the Supreme Court, or the military industrial complex and tell me that any of that shit makes sense, its a nightmare, it needs reform and nobody is going to do it because anybody who actually wins using these broken terrible rules they are incentives  to not fix them, because after all…they won that way.  People feel quite rightly that they have very little say over what their goverment does and the last 16 years in particular have just been that on open display to everyone . LIke everybody knows that the War on Terror and the War on Drugs don’t work, but nobody stops it because the political system disincentives politicians from actually solving problems.  

6) Racism……racism, like…..racism.  The US is a deeply racist country, the Civil Rights movement wasn’t very long ago and there is a segment of this population who really wish that  the Civil Rights movement never happened.  To them, the fact that a black man was in office for 8 years, a black man named Barrack Hussein Obama, scared and enraged them, almost as much as the knowledge that thanks to Latino immigration the US is becoming less and less white.  To people who have thoroughly internalized the racial caste system, the knowledge that they might not have the automatic power and privilege that comes with being white in the US scares them, and Obama’s existence is living proof to how much the country is changing.  Combine that with a growing self confident and  assertive new civil rights movement in Black Lives matter and a lot of racists fear that the power that comes with being white in this country might be stripped from them . There was an interesting study where white people believed the number of Blacks and Latinos were at 20% and 25% respectively, when in reality it is 14% and 17%, there is a racist backlash to the thought of a changing nation.  This happens all the time btw, much of  most violent  racism always comes not when a group is so small it is almost unnoticeable, or when the group is large enough to defend itself, but when that group is large enough to establish themselves but not large enough to defend themselves.  

7) Finally it must be said, a polarized nation makes a lot of money for a lot of people, and by a lot of people I of course mean Rupert Murdoch.  A lot of core Trump supporters would actually like the Democratic party based on certain principles, wellfare most notably, but they can’t see it that way, they are constantly being riled up by the Right Wing media machine, and this is true to a lesser extent on the left and center.  Outrage and fear makes money, and ever since the US News Media have been corporately owned (thanks Reagan…thanks a lot) there is a whole industry based on peddling to humanity lowest urges and encouraging their worse behavior.  Cause here is the thing, Fox News makes money when it depicts Obama as a secret terrorist Socialist Communist hoping to kill all the whites.  If the US went to war with Iran, Fox New’s investors would cheer because that makes more money it is simply more profitably to have a divided nation than a united one.  I mean think about how the Gun industry’s main selling point i “Fuck those liberals” you buy a gun as much to piss off the imagined liberal boogie men as you do for other reasons, and this is true to a lesser degree to the left.  

TLDR: America has been adopting a “Kick the can down the road” approach and in 2016 the road has been blocked by a giant mountain of cans and we crashed the car.