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>some drastic form of change and restructuring will have to happen

That's how we got this administration in the first place. There is no rule that smashing the system has to leave you with a better one.

You're going to have to specify...

You talking like, U.S. declaration of Independence, or more/less recent than that...?

While my mind is fuzzier now, I like to think it was a "things change for the better" else - engineers/scientists completely stop giving a fuck about helping the U.S.

That's one example of something totally different. In order for this to be the same thing, someone would have to platform on removing the constitution or something

And also there's no rule that says it will get worse, either. When you have competent people making the rules, there's a good chance it gets better

Trump's election reflected a popular belief that rule by establishment experts was so intolerable, literally anything else would be better. It was the same passionate, desperate anger, the same "fuck it, let the world burn" strategy, just pointed in the opposite direction.

Opposite direction? Same direction as the poster above, just in different language.

The mandate was to respect scientists less, not more.

Implying that the system has been smashed.

Trump said he'd smash the system, and I'll admit I thought he would. That was one monumental lie.

I think your sentiment is understandable given the state of affairs. Have you spent time reading about past societies that have undergone collapse?

While it may seem daunting, changing the system before a point of no return would historically be the right move.

Historically, the most likely outcome of your strategy is a shift towards more oligarchs and feudalism.

Have a look at Russia, Iraq, China (post ww2), etc.

I don’t think there is any reason to be optimistic about “drastic change” being change for the better. It very well can go both ways, and historically tends to the worse.

Maybe a modern exception, split of the former https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czechoslovakia into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_Republic and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovakia which don't do so bad.

Also, at least recently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguay

A lot of people feel similarly.

And almost all those people are people whose lives will not be affected negatively by 4 more years of the terrible administration, so they get to enjoy moral outrage while others bear the burden of feeding their moral indignation.

On the other hand, people whose lives are actually getting destroyed don’t have the same luxury. On a personal note, I have colleagues whose entire lives have been upturned thanks to this administration, but fortunately they are extremely skilled so they were simply able to recall rate by building their lives elsewhere in a country where the administration is not trying to make their lives miserable. The same cannot be said for the many millions of others who are suffering negatively thanks to the admin (especially the many tens of thousands who will be dead due to COVID who wouldn’t have been in a bare minimum competent admin).

Good luck with that. There is a very large portion of the population that believe this administration has left the world better than they found it.

30 millions jobs lost and counting. 70,000 deaths in the US alone. No international cooperation. No organized plan to contain the pandemic, or even demonstrate confidence. to the markets. The endless stream of scandals before that can only be dismissed if you buy into the endless propaganda machine.

The world is not better by any measure.

> The world is not better by any measure

Strictly speaking, that's not true. The world is now aware of how painfully unprepared we are for cataclysmic events, like pandemics.

The world now also knows how dangerous China is due to the dangers of offshore supply chains, the disinformation they spread which endangered lives, and the dangerously strong influence they have over the WHO.

These are all good things and we're better off knowing them.

We've known all this before and could have done something about it if there was a collective political will more mature than that of self obsessed child.

There is no logical link between willfully making our own government incompetent and corrupt just so we can realize how unprepared we are. That sounds like a self fulfilling prophecy.

> We've known all this before

Maybe you've known it. The people at large did not and now they do. Anti-China policy was often viewed as racist. Don't underestimate the power of common knowledge to influence the political winds.

I don’t know why you are trying to convince me or why you think providing figures will change the fact that a large portion of the country feels one way. You can’t argue your way out of that fact.

I'm not, my reply wasn't meant for you. I think that deceptive propaganda like yours shouldn't go unchallenged or else it seems like it has more credibility than it deserves in the eyes passersby on forums like this.

As a person that does not support Trump I find it hard to believe that I am creating deceptive propaganda.

However, I will fix it for you, zero percent of the US supports Trump or believes he has made the country a better place. There is a zero percent chance he will win the next election. Is that the delutional propoganda you prefer?

perhaps in the United States, a large portion of the population of the planet certainly does not think so.

Great, and how are they going to vote in the upcoming elections? The parent was not discussing Trump's popularity wrt to the world because frankly, that doesn't matter, what matters is changing public opinion within the US.

I'm a software engineer and have given considerable thought to leaving the US because I am struggling to come to terms with how my taxes are spent and politics in general here. It's universally bad. I'm considering Finland, Sweden, Norway, or Switzerland. They all rank high in happiness, high in democratic representation, and low in corruption. All are difficult to immigrate to but I basically feel a moral obligation to explore the option

Switzerland is difficult to immigrate to, wouldn't say the same about Finland, Sweden and Norway though, quite the contrary if you are a software engineer.

The only issue I do have with leaving is the war thing. The past few years, I've really been telling myself we're probably at the point that China really does have the U.S. militarily beat if it comes down to it... but despite how many of us HN'ers are aware of some frivolous military budget spending (like literally doing something, tearing it down, and doing it again to spend the budget) - some of those hundreds of billions of dollars are definitely going into tech capable of destroying human life in ways really can't imagine. Plus, if it would somehow come down to large amount of humans actually fighting... the arrogance many Americans have is quite helpful for that.

Moving to a smaller country, I don't know how I would feel in World War just because of population numbers and physical location. Given the arguments we can see between humans in U.S. states, and knowing how trivial it truly is to something like the ideologies of the CCP... I fully expect serious global conflict within my lifetime. That's the one thing I do atleast think I feel safer with being in the slightly rural MidWest than a smaller country....

Maybe this is getting away from the point of things. But fuck. I've experienced a lot of physical pain in life from my body falling apart, but in my mind, the horrors that could be experienced in war makes it seem like nothing. I'd just not like to die in a horrible way because of dumb fucking shit. However, that's probably stupid of me seeing as how that's how most of human history has been.

In what way does China have the U.S. beat from a military standpoint? I am no expert, but as far as I know, the U.S. military is still far stronger.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-army-navy-specialre...

https://www.usip.org/publications/2018/11/providing-common-d...

Don't you have the missile silos in rural Midwest. A truly global conflict with existential fear in major powers, will get hot. But currently the US could absolutely devastate China atomically, but China would only be able to take swings at major US cities.

Everyone will be losers but as things currently stand, China would loose the most.

Do we really know that? Maybe they have developed some form of working SDI.

Furthermore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Great_Wall_of_Chin...

Oh yeah, someone will technically "win" a full exchange, I'm sure. The brass may see high survival rates. But the infrastructure will be bombed away. It will take decades to rebuild. One can't even compare to anything before and extrapolate. There have been local disasters and rebuilding, but we have never seen a complete national system bombed away and what will come after.

(A variant of a worst case I haven't even considered before is a full nuclear Armageddon, and then Command and Control survives to take nuclear potshots for years afterwards. For instance if one party has still substantial conventional forces but the other manages to from time to time scrounge up another nuke and launch it.)

I could see them have more ICBMs than apparent, but successful SDI I don't think is possible, not against nuclear strike submarines in any case.

While i feel similar, be careful what you whish for, because it could also swing the other way, giving imbeciles even more power. Like for example in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Handmaid%27s_Tale_(TV_seri...

I didn't like it that much, but didn't need too much suspension of disbelief to see it as a realistic possibility.

Think of all the televangelists, megachurches, religious fundamentalists and so on. What happens in dire times? People flock to such things. There is no 'rationality" in it, just instinct. Thereby worsening the chance of the outcome you wish for.

I felt the smarter way would be to ridicule these horror clowns as much as possible, so their incompetence would obvious to almost everyone. But somehow that seems to not even matter.

I'm clueless as to why. It does not compute!

That's the plot of "Atlas Shrugged".

Except that it is precisely the opposite in certain important details. John Galt did not want a functioning society funded by money tax^H^H^H stolen from him. He did not want the society to offer medical care or education to "engineering student with quite severe chronic illness that also got fucked over by abusive parents/a broken home" He went to strike and pushed for existing society's destruction precisely because he did not want those.

(On the grandparent, I have to agree that occasionally I feel like the development of society at large is kept hostage by morons. Not only politics, but practically everything seems to be built for the lowest common denominator. It may really be that one day in the future some kind of Galt's Gulch is needed. Only Rand is going to be turning in her grave. If not for any other reason, then because in this gulch the members are pissing on her grave.)

(I don't want to get into a pedantic fight over Any Rand / objectivism / Atlas Shrugged, I simply want to share an alternative viewpoint)

It seems to me that Ayn Rand / Atlas Shrugged get used to justify a lot of brutalist ideas, even among her direct inheritors. Having watched some of her interviews and read several of her books, I'm not convinced that the elimination of government was her intent. Further, while she tried to paint a realistic picture, ultimately Atlas Shrugged is a work of fiction that falls apart when placed within real-world constructs, especially 50+ years on after its publication.

At the heart of it, what Rand appeared to most argue in Atlas Shrugged was against regulation and governance that superseded the inalienable rights of citizens plus centralized power in an authoritarian state and took away the economic agency of the individual. That doesn't preclude a functioning republic where people can own businesses, own the rights to their creations, and still pay taxes for the benefits of services best provided by government.

Now here's the irony: Rather than coming for our system via communism, which was Rand's concern, instead it was nominal capitalists who came to destroy the system via regulatory capture. I don't see what the right-wing, nominal capitalists in the US have done to be any different than the moochers in Rand's book.

To me both communism and right-wing (brutalist aynrandian) capitalism are the same in some sense. Both are somewhat nice ideologues in naive theory. But if you bring them to real world, communism brings you Soviet Union and right-wing capitalism brings you regulatory capture moochers or warlords, depending a bit on your flavor of capitalism.

The major difference is that only some insignificant weirdos in the fringes have not agreed that communism is stupid in practice. Brutalist aynrandian ideology is much more prevalent problem and needs to be somehow gotten into same ridiculed state as communism as an actual feasible ideology.

Hopefully not getting too lost in the pedantry, and I'm absolutely not a Rand supporter (though I had my 16-year old Atlas Shrugged phase where I actually read the whole damn book).

a) You're spot on she didn't want to destroy the govt. She was explicitly a minarchist, and she swapped major arugments and ridicule with the Ancaps of the time (like Murray Rothbard)

b) The communism hate gets floated most, but my read of Atlas Shrugged was that she placed the collectivists at the same evil level as the church, crony capitalists, and postmodernists, to the point of having characters who 1-dimensionally represented each of them (she's literally got a lobbyist character called "Wesley Mouch").

That's why it's always hilarious to me when I see neocon congressfolk saying that Atlas Shrugged is their favorite book: she hated the church as much as the government (and would've likely hated those politicians as well).

Poked around some articles after writing some of this, found this one to be pretty neutral and illustrates my point a little better: https://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/the-paul-ryan-ayn-rand...

This really resonated with me. I am very sad to say that I agree with you. I'm a PhD student elsewhere now, but did my undergrad at UPenn in the States and was absolutely disgusted by the framing of science/learning/academia in the country in general (as well as the country's general level of media discourse). Of course, school itself was wonderful, and I'm blessed to have had such humbling peers there; that stood as such stark dichotomy with the country as a whole. The social moment very much felt like I imagine being a Soviet biologist watching Lysenko come to power would. I worked so hard for social good in the US, but it all felt futile. I chose a respectable opportunity at a program in my home country (Canada) over higher-ranked options in the US because of it. I know a number of friends who similarly chose foreign programs over previously more desirable American ones.

Trump 2020 only since it seems not enough people think we haven't learned sht and hell, think we are somehow a better country because of him. Let it burn and maybe AOC can start with a clean slate in 2024.

> Let it burn

That may well be ok for you to say but thousands of people have already died as a direct consequence of Trump's presidency. Hundreds of thousands more have been penalised for their race, beliefs, sexuality, etc. Generations to come will suffer because of the regulations they're undoing and the courts they've packed with Federalist wingnuts. Have some compassion, c'mon.

Thousands in the Middle East died from Obama's presidency. At a certain point you start to think that the "lesser of two evils" strategy just shifts the playing field to be ever-increasing in its evil across the board.

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Absolutely. I don't mean to make the issue a partisan one, but to point out that it is distinctly non-partisan (at least between the Democrats and Reuplicans).

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> the variance of the incompetence of US presidents isn't very high

Bush: thousands dead through incompetence in the USA (Katrina, 9/11) Obama: Trump: thousands dead through incompetence and malice in the USA (ICE, COVID-19)

I've taken out the "overseas wars" because that's shared across all of them.

I've had the same thought and it sickens me that we've come to this point.

As someone who has made the transition from teenager to young adult during the Trump era, I feel like I've lost a game I never even had the chance to play. We have clearly gone so far off course but very few seem interested in steering us back to reality (between the impeachment "trial", the primaries, and our handling of COVID-19).

After four years of the disaster that is the Trump administration, any establishment Democrats like Biden elected to office will be praised no matter what they do, simply by virtue of not being Trump. But that's not real progress. They'll continue to neglect wealth inequality / infrastructure / privacy / technology issues.

And Trump isn't the problem, he's just a convenient distraction from the fact that big money controls both parties. It's just that establishment Democrats more or less want to maintain the status quo, while conservatives are using Trump to brazenly roll back regulations.

Four years from now, we'll have even more damning evidence about the true long-term economic/social/environmental damage done during his term (as if it weren't clear enough). If he's not in office long enough, this will all be blamed on the next president, adding more fuel to the fire for a likely 2024 run.

Or worse: Someone more cunning but just as evil comes along, charming voters while more adeptly covering up their true intentions.

Our only hope this that enough voters get really pissed off enough to vote in every local, state, and federal election consistently enough for the next couple decades so that we can start to heal.

Biden's not going to inspire that. Bernie, maybe, had the chance to. Trump will do it. And if we can't survive another four years of Trump, we don't deserve to.

I agree, but at least it seems like we're incrementally moving in the right direction, even if at a glacial pace. The fact that a 27-year old AOC was elected shows that people are fed up with establishment politicians and change is possible (prior to being elected she was a bartender with no money or connections, who ran on a grassroots campaign of being fed up with politicians taking corporate money and serving corporate interests over their citizens, and beat a Democrat who'd been in power for ~15 years).

Once the older generation dies out and the younger generation takes over, we'll start to see some real progress. Imagine where we could be if more of our politicians resembled people like Andrew Yang - young normal uncorrupted people who grew up in the internet generation. The problem is that most of our politicians are too old (average Senator is 61 years old) and are completely removed from the real issues facing Americans.

The problem is that when the older generation dies out, the younger generation is no longer young, and their attitudes have changed. Not quite to the same exact conservative/anti-progressive place that their parents and grandparents occupied, but definitely more conservative than they were when they were younger.

We'll see progress, to be sure (and that's good!), but it won't be as dramatic as you think. It'll likely be similar to the last several generations of progress.

That's true to an extent, but I think this time is different because the millenials have had to endure so much obvious hardships as a direct result of the baby boomers' incompetence (eg. student debt), and because millennials grew up with the internet and all the information that gives one access to. Politicians like Bernie and AOC are more in line with how millennial stand (my Boomer dad doesn't understand what they're so angry about), and if those policies were implemented, that'd be a massively different society than today.

> Bernie, maybe, had the chance to.

Bernie didn't even inspire people to vote for him in the primary; how was he going to inspire people if he got nominated?

Bernie had the main-stream media + the entire DNC apparatus against him. That's a ton of power and influence.

I'm not saying he would've 'won'; it's quite possible he positioned himself as too much 'non-establishment', or perhaps too little. but saying he didn't inspire people to vote for him in the primary is not evident, IMO.

> saying he didn't inspire people to vote for him in the primary is not evident, IMO.

The fact he didn't win is evidence of that, surely?

It's evidence, but it's not evident. Those are not the same thing.

Hence the "maybe". He clearly missed his chance.

I feel like there are many more folks that would vote for Trump in spite of Biden "winning" the Democratic nod. 1000% agree that the next president is going to be left holding the bag of sht and get blamed for everything so might as well let it be Trump.

Trump seems immune to blaming. To his fans, everything bad is because of unpatriotic traitors.