We explore real-life reformation here in this informed, online community.
Historian Niall Ferguson likens the US situation circa 2024 to a “late, Soviet America.”
He notes that in 1990, observers were noticing a “ghastly and tragic... loss of morality” within the USSR. “Apathy and hypocrisy, cynicism, servility, and snitching,” were running wild. Nearly half the population thought that theirs was an “unjust society.” USSR leaders were old party hacks...
The Soviet economy was largely fake... almost all of it directly or indirectly controlled by the Communist Party. The government ran chronic deficits... supporting a bloated military that looked powerful, on paper, but couldn’t win a war.
“Sound familiar?” asks Ferguson:
"Look at the most recent Gallup surveys of American opinion and one finds a similar disillusionment. The share of the public that has confidence in the Supreme Court, the banks, public schools, the presidency, large technology companies, and organized labor is somewhere between 25 percent and 27 percent. For newspapers, the criminal justice system, television news, big business, and Congress, it’s below 20 percent. For Congress, it’s 8 percent. Average confidence in major institutions is roughly half what it was in 1979."
Bill Bonner
“There’s a real appetite to date leftists now,” said Abby Beauregard, “but it’s really hard to find explicitly leftist dating spaces.”
Most fornication apps have a “liberal” option, but no “leftist” option, so lefty singles are finding more explicit ways to signal their politics to like-minded love matches, on Hinge and beyond. Some have turned their dating profiles into mini-manifestos, writing out their entire belief system as answers to the apps’ prompts.
“There’s a nice feeling on the apps right now with people being proud to be communists or leftists, and they’re saying that,” said Carolyn, age 38.
The blustering Trump administration recently slapped a 50% tariff on all goods from Brazil (even though it has a trade surplus with that country). This was to punish its government and judiciary for pursuing charges against former president Jair Bolsonaro (a good guy) for plotting a coup after he had lost the elections (a false accusation).
But we should have known the tariffs would only help socialist President Lula (a bad guy) and make things worse for true Brazilian patriots.
Polls show revived support for the socialist administration in the face of American bullying. The tariffs also harm the interests of business elites who are often the biggest supporters of Bolsonaro. “What was meant as a show of strength by MAGA and its Brazilian franchise has turned into a political gift for Lula, who now gets to credibly present himself as a symbol of national resistance while leaving his opponents scrambling to choose between loyalty to Bolsonaro and the economic interests of their own base,” observed Brazil ...
“…parents my age have been signing up their kids and teens for therapy in astonishing numbers, even prophylactically. I talked to moms who hired therapists to help their kids adjust to preschool or to process the death of a beloved cat. One mom told me she put a therapist “on retainer” as soon as her two daughters reached middle school. “So they would have someone to talk to about all the things I never wanted to talk about with my mom.””
Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up
