this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
586 points (94.3% liked)

No Stupid Questions

37418 readers
1020 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

You know, DOGE, fascist president and corporations dictating what people can do, institutions being ruined, laws being ignored. Is there any way out of that or is it over? Is the USA done?

(page 2) 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Honestly we were screwed long before now, but yes. Its going to be a slow decline into fascism until we collectively wise up. I do think there's a real possibility of that happening, but its going to take a lot of work.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

My hopes are far lower than yours. Nazi Germany had just enough popular support to function without democracy and used heavy propanda to increase its support for a whole decade before it lost the war against all of its neighbors and itself. It took long years of foreign occupation to repair German society, and China isn't looking like a good choice of occupier in the event a fully Nazified US loses. Many German people today remember their grandparents being ardent Nazis until their deaths. I'm worried the same will be the case for me.

We need a big EU militarization, yesterday. Probably navally focused, treating the US like Imperial Japan and the rest of the Americas like its Manchuria. Russia is a more imminent threat but at least it's a paper tiger in all things except nuclear. Still, armies are needed to defend against it as well.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

I'm just hoping we can sort things out before it gets as bad as Nazi Germany was. Maybe I'm being overly optimistic, but having a defeatist attitude certainly won't help our chances.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

My brother sent this to me the other day and I gave it a watch. It feels pretty unbiased (although I'm uneducated), and seems to have a more macro, zoomed-out view of America and just nations on the whole. I thought it was pretty interesting and it helped to put some things in perspective.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

So long as there is people living in a place, having kids, and trying to improve their lives, the places will remain. The government may change, social structure's get overhauled, but the same fact that people are having kids and building a life means those places are unlikely to go away. The old republic is dead. We have supreme court justices taking bribes then passing judgments saying they can. We have the position of President where anyone in it can legally say "I was doing it for my country the laws don't apply." And get away with it. The United States of America as a Democratic Republic, is over. But there still exists a United States of America that has transitioned to a Democratic Empire/kingdom. So to the question; "Is the USA screwed?" The simple answer is No. It will continue on so lobg as the population does. Is the Democratic Republic of the United States screwed? Bitch be dead, screw the corpse if you like.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Although there's a lot of knee-jerk reaction in some circles, Trump issuing EOs that are illegal and unenforceable only go as far as all the other vitriol that slides it's way out of his mouth creases. Plenty of things he does are blocked by judges, including his demand that only him and his AG are allowed to interpret the law. It just doesn't work like that. Although the possibility of things being escalated and allowed through a compromised supreme Court still exists, it hasn't happened yet. I'm not giving into the mania while checks and balances still actually do exist.

Corporations dictating what people can do has been happening basically my whole life.

DOGE is another story. It's very bad, yeah, but I'm not sure how it affects me personally in my day-to-day.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's erroneous to claim the judge orders blocking the executive orders have done anything.

As judge of Lemmy, I order you to stop posting. /s

^ There, that statement alone had just as much effect as the judicial orders. Fact is, DOGE still has extensive access to most of the systems that they breached, and judges have largely been ignored, or have given rulings complicit with Trump's actions.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

All government services will start going to shit. You will not notice immediate effects of this, but roads will be worse, food and drugs will become unsafe as the already inadequate monitoring becomes no monitoring, etc. It just won't all happen overnight and everything will slowly get more dangerous and shinier as all government oversight is destroyed.

Even more indirectly, data products that companies use for deciding investments will become increasingly unreliable. This will increase uncertainty and risk in any corporate investment and lead to decreased corporate spending and an eventual economic contraction.

More immediately, a large number of the people fired this week and last week work in rural areas and the sudden loss of so many jobs in those areas will lead to significant local recessions as the federal money being added to the economy through paychecks disappears overnight.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Not yet, not necessarily. The further this goes, the closer they come to the point of no return.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

A point of no return won't be hit for a while. The buildings still exist and people with domain knowledge are still around.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 59 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (26 children)

Well, it depends on how you define the USA. You mean the Republic of the United States of America? Yeah, no, that's dead. It is currently dead. It died when the SCOTUS made the president functionally beyond criminal prosecution, and everyone has just kind of been playing weekend at Bernie's since then (though the Trump administration is dropping the pretense pretty quickly). Don't get me wrong, it's been dying for a long time, but that was the exact moment it was declared dead. No matter what happens, the republic as we knew it is dead and is not coming back. Nobody believes in the constitution anymore; among our leadership there are only either those who are in a hurry to destroy it, or those who are unwilling to defend it. I think a lot of the American populace haven't sincerely believed in the constitution as an effective charter for governance for a while, too. Imo, we're less than a year from the legislature being dissolved in some fashion of another, unless they just hang on like some ceremonial vestigial organ.

What we get to decide now is what comes next. That's what nobody's sure about. Are we going to have a middle-east style theocratic government? Italian fascism? Maybe the military defends the constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic and we re-form the republic? German fascism? Neofeudalism? Peaceful balkanization? Hot balkanization? COULD IT BE?! BY GOD, it's the ghost of Lenin with a steel chair! Or maybe we'll get something entirely new? It's frankly impossible to guess while we're living in it. I think cold balkanization is both the most likely and most optimistic scenario. IN THE MEANWHILE, yeah, you're still going to see all the window trimmings of the USA; the maps will still say USA, we'll at least nominally still have the things that make America America (like the constitution still sitting in its fancy protective case, as though the GOP didn't just wipe Trump's ass with it), it'll all look weirdly normal while they make the republic's corpse do a funny little jig.

load more comments (26 replies)
[–] [email protected] 69 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (9 children)

Yes.

The amount of harm already done to your country by Trump and Musk is immeasurable, and will take a generation or more to recover from.

The amount of harm done to your standing in the world is equally bad. The world was skeptical after Trump's first term fucked over the rest of the world, but we were hopeful that maybe the US had learned their lesson?

Nope. They elected a fascist. They RE-elected a known fascist, felon, rapist, idiot-child, psychopath. Worse, they bolstered Musk to get into a seat of unauthorized and unimaginable power.

When Trump announced his idiotic tarrifs, Canada collectively said "that's it - we're divorcing." When he pulled back on the idea for 30 days, Canada said "don't care, still divorcing."

Trump is following the exact model of Hitler, and it's only a matter of time until he actually invades either Greenland or Canada if he's not stopped. The USA has to collapse into ruin and rebuild from scratch before anyone is going to trust them again.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

Yep. We will need Nuremberg trials to actually move on from this.

load more comments (8 replies)
[–] [email protected] 71 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (17 children)

In the short term, yes.

If trump remains in office after this term, absolutely yes.

If we get a different admin - not just another republicrat trump clone - they’re going to have to spend an inordinate amount of time fixing all of trump’s fuckups. One of which should be restricting any wannabe monarch’s ability to rule by decree in the US. So yeah, we’re fucked, and we’re gonna have to spend a lot of effort getting unfucked, digging ourselves out of an oligarchy hole, instead of moving forward from a continually advancing starting point.

E: allies are already turning away from us, politically and economically. They’ll form new alliances and relationships that the US doesn’t get to be a part of, or at least won’t get a leading position in. Same with things like soft power from international aid. China will step in, maybe the EU or even Russia. We lose the goodwill, stability, and any economic “ins” we could have achieved with that soft power. We’re fucked in lots of ways.

[–] [email protected] 56 points 2 days ago (1 children)

During my lifetime, the view people have of the US has completely changed.
It used to be "When I grow up, I want to move there." and "Oh, you went to the US on vacation? AWESOME".
Now it's "Why the fuck would you go there, are you stupid?"

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (16 replies)
[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (11 children)

None of this is good, and it's going to cause a lot of big problems across just about everything but, theoretically at least, none of it is unsalvageable.

Remember that elections are run by the states, not the federal government.

So unless you live in one of the most hardcore Trump-sucking red states, you likely will be able to vote in 2026 and 2028, your vote will probably be fairly counted, and you will be able to determine not just the makeup of Congress 2 years from now, but also the types of people that we send to represent our interests and fight back against Trump.

Of course, Trump is wasting no time grabbing power, but it still remains to be seen whether or not Congress and the Supreme Court will surrender their power enough for him to get away with it. As much as the massive cucked-out bitches in Congress and SCOTUS pretend they love Trump, they actually hate his guts and are just as hungry for their own power as he is for his.

Finally there is the possibility of a genuine constitutional crisis in which Trump rejects the concept of shared power by coequal branches of government, in which case the entire constitution is rendered null and void and the USA completely ceases to exist as a federal entity and the union breaks down.

This would probably lead to a civil war, in which case the side that wins is the one that has the best logistics and strategy. I'm confident that the blue states, especially in an alliance with Canada and Mexico, would have no problem beating the land-locked redneck morons in flyover country. All that would be required is to bring the fight to the Southern coastal areas. They'd be totally surrounded and blocked in from trade on every side.

load more comments (11 replies)
[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

its been screwed since OBAMA was president, conservatives including poc cant get over the fact they had a half-AA as a president. ever since putin and the gop have been riding on racism and sexism as thier key election goals, and only recently anti-lgbtq+

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

It's to the point i believe myself the second coming. Rapture always perplexed me.

[–] [email protected] 234 points 3 days ago (39 children)

In the short term: Yes. Unless the US military decides to remove a sitting president but that is extremely unlikely.

In the long term: Yes, but also no. Fascism is extremely inefficient and expensive and the US is destroying its own economy and pushing away all of its allies and former trade partners. Things will get very rough but it will not last forever. There will be a lot of rebuilding that needs to be done.

Unfortunately this has been a long time coming. The United States has never really been united and it was only a matter of time before another possible civil war loomed on the horizon.

load more comments (39 replies)
[–] [email protected] 47 points 2 days ago (55 children)

Intensionally, the USA is going to lose its status as a hyperpower. Europe is going to decouple from American defense policy to the point where I can see American military bases close in Europe. An anti-Chinese military alliance will function with or without the USA anchored by India and Japan, but I see that force yielding some territory to China in the near term. There will probably be an increase in the number of wars in general as regions go into conflict without an American threat to maintain borders. Nothing the USA does is likely going to fix this.

Domestically, the administration is the greatest threat to the republic since the Civil War. If Trump is able to be pushed out in the future, there is going to need to be a major re-evaluation of how the American federal government works. This is going to require constitutional changes and the removal of major powers that the President has collected as the federal government grew.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

The US Constitution had plenty of ways to control someone like Trump. Not the least of which is the absolutely clear barring from public office for life of anyone participating in an insurrection. It's just that the people in charge of enforcing these statutes lacked the courage to enforce those statutes. Legal statutes and so forth are useless if they aren't enforced.

load more comments (54 replies)
load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›