The moment when Harambe died was when the timeline split.

Shits been weird since Leonard Nimoy died. So make that 2015.

Basically at long as taco is in the office it will be miserable.

The bad things is that in first term there was that there were still competent people around him. This time he fired everyone and replaced with lackeys. Unless he is stopped, US might not recover from it.

Just looking at the recent meeting in Bejing shows how quickly USA is losing its power. And it's been only 7 months.

It was kind of a meme that 2016 sucked. Then Trump got elected at the end and everything magically got better for everyone and we all lived happily ever after.

(Do I really need to include the /s here?)

For real, how short is the meme maker’s memory? We went truly off the rails during the first Trump admin.

I relate 100% with this. How funny. Like, that's perfect.

This is actually the right answer. Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, and we're all still in the middle of what is essentially a no-declared-sides WWIII now. 2015 was good, but things had shifted in the world a bit. Countering China was starting to become a huge deal suddenly for the US, and China moved into the South China Sea and did some currency revaluation that was all aimed at their 2029 and 2049 CCP anniversary goals.

Also, I was in fucking phenomenal shape.

Its whatever best year you remember. From my perspective, its been sharply downhill since 2000.

Those older than me often say it went to shit during the Reagan years. Its been slowly getting worse for a long time.

You may not have been paying close attention. Obama was astoundingly better than Trump, but invasive spying on citizens was allpwed to remain legal under his watch, and he extended what was allowed. Drone striking questionable targets started under him as well. There's more, but those two are the highlights usually brought up.

Syeve bannon was behind the media push that ended it. He's talked about it in interviews.

lmao wrong. It was the year before yts invaded. 1400 something.

I came here to say the exact same thing. 9/11 changed the US forever in a bad way.

We were downloading MP3s on dial up.

idk, I was a kid and harry potter wasn’t real, so that kind of sucked for me

And harambe

sept 11 was the first time the republicans had the chance to seize the opportunity to put america on track for its fascist fourth reichdom fantasy.

The terrorists ended up winning the long game in the end. They caused America to tear itself apart from within and made it a pariah on the world stage.

Almost makes the inside job conspiro seem not as crazy...

9/11 also marks the end of western hegemony as the West destabilized the world and ruined its reputation as a force for good in its pursuit for revenge, leading to the rise of BRICS and other anti-imperial coalitions.

9/11 also coincides with peak imperialism, the final stage of capitalism, which marks the point when increasing exploitation abroad has diminishing returns so capitalists must begin devouring the imperial core, leading to stagflation, enshittification, rent-seeking, and other parasitic activities. This in turn leads to an economically struggling population of former petit-bourgeois, which is a class condition that is especially susceptible to reactionary propaganda, leading to the rise of fascism.

Historians will almost certainly mark 9/11 as the beginning of the end of the American Empire.

I wouldn't say things were great up until 2019, but 2020 and beyond is when things really seemed to go to shit

God sent us plague as a warning to not elect him, and he ended up in the office.

In a way it's fair to say that every moment changes every moment that happens after. The entire global economy is still reeling from Reaganomics ffs.

I lived through all these. 2001 and 2008 were horrible, but sort of felt like a normal kind of horrible. Recessions and terrorism were things I'd seen before. It was only the scale that made those anomalous.

From my (American) perspective 2016 was when shit started getting very weird. We were relatively stable, relatively prosperous, foreign wars were tapering off... And half the country decided that a game show host was her best bet going forward.

Then it started snowballing... Bill Cosby's a rapist, there's a global pandemic, Kanye put out a pro-Hitler song, Pete Davidson is a sex symbol that no starlet in Hollywood can resist, The secretary of health had his brain eaten by worms, everything you own or use became a subscription service, The fear Factor guy became a political king maker, The first lady has a crypto scam that everyone's kind of okay with, we created AI but it's only good for spam and rule 34 tweets, we decided political corruption isn't a crime if you brag about it, America's war machine is being turned on its cities... Oh and the US is building full on concentration camps.

It's a very strange time even compared to occupy, The tea party, or Bush riding out 9/11 Reading a children's book in an elementary school.

None of those are correct. There is before Harambe and after Harambe. The day he was killed everything changed.

I vote for 2016. The unthinkable happened.

Almost like something happens every 4-8 years. hmm

Boomer: 1968

Martin Scorcese: 33 AD

Let’s be real- it was the US’s response to 9/11 that started the insanity. There was absolutely a way forward, but no- some shitheads gave the Americans a bloody nose and the US decided to try to stop the bleeding by stabbing itself in the heart for two decades while threatening anyone who pointed out that this was a bad idea.

Yeah its been a wild ride since 2001. I'm not even American but it felt like the whole world kinda shifted gears after that.

He got the three ghosts, he just slept through them.

Exactly. You have to go back to at least 2015 to find anything resembling normal life.

....And things still weren't as crazy as they are now. To me that's points towards the guys theory LOL

It went to shit when you dumb mother fuckers elected him for the first time in 2017. Stupid fucking idiots.

In their mind the world will end with their deaths, so they are only doing what nature bids them to do. If they had it their way they would detonate every nuclear weapon in existence within a few seconds of their final demise to take everyone with them.

Tell that to the zoomers.

😷 ⬆️

I occasionally accidentally see YouTube “recommendations” and it’s usually unhinged right wing shit with millions of views.

As someone who regularly watches my youtube recs, I never see this. Maybe it's because youtube knows my preferences from watching their recommendations....

On the other hand youtube is definitely trash that promotes fascism. So I'm not doubting you either.

Well I know it wasn't gay marriage... Must've been caused by the iPhone 5.

The flu is one thing, all of the toxins we are exposed to from companies trying to save a buck is everywhere as well. This is like some 1984 shit we are heading right now. More dangerous chemicals than ever being allowed into our water, our air, and our food. The flu and the covids are just icing on the cake. And I think I have noticed people getting Dumber from the 90s. Not starting in 2020 starting before that.

We were saying this elsewhere, and someone posted a link claiming the real cause was like a week before Harrambe, a rat I think it was crawled into the Hadrian collider I think while on, in switzerland I think they are accelerating particles to study Physics bullshit, higgs boson something.

There was a theoretical possibility they could have started a chain reaction that would destroy the world they were saying when they were talking about building it fyi.

Anyway though this rat got in there when it was on and they are saying that through the timeline off, a week before harambe.

Harambe wasn't marked as Essential, but he was truly essential for all of us.

Rome went out drunk on wine and conquest.

We’re going out buzzed on overpriced food delivery and crypto regret.

Cheers!

The internet has made us aware of how fucked up our kind is.

Shaka, when the votes fell.

I am sorry to hear what happened to you. I hope you find out of your personal hell. Sometimes it's better for your health to distance a bit from social media and their doomer memes.

I'm sorry but it's been hell here on Earth since at least 2015. Your own legitimately terrible events were individual symptoms of the larger pestilence. Either that or a lot of us were already in hell before you got here.

I messed around with pills pretty bad back in 2012 and ended up with seratonin syndrome one night. Good things have happened since but nothing ever felt normal since then. Ive never talked to a doctor or psychologist about it (really anyone now that I think about it) but I swear my brain never recovered fully. Mix that in with some concussions a few years before from HS football and I feel like my brain is just broken. It might just been depression, but stuff seemed so much brighter before.

Sorry for my own rambling, but I wish you well and understand where you are coming from.

I see this said about the 90s all the time but really this is not true. In the 90s there was (not an exhaustive list)

• First Gulf War
• Yugoslavia war
• Rwandan Genocide
• Oklahoma City Bombing
• Columbine Massacre
• Los Angeles Riots
• The Fall Of USSR (while on one hand a good thing it also cause so much economic decline, hunger, and excess mortality in the millions to many former bloc countries)
• Somalian War
• US 1990 recession
• 1997 Asian Financial crisis
• Dot com bubble
• Hurricane Andrew
• 1999 İzmit earthquake

It's very common when asking any person what was the best period of time for the world for their response to be a period of time their formative years were.

The reality is history is full of horrid horrid things and nostalgia is a follie that'll trick your mind.

We're really generating value for those shareholders aren't we?

And the profitable timeline is the only possible one. This is the great filter.

Bruh we as Americans have such a short attention span/memory I stg.

His first term was "BUILD THE WALL", "CHECK THE BAFROOMS", "SHUT DOWN BASES IN EUROPE" and "NO MUSLIM IMMIGRANTS ALLOWED!!!!"

None of these ideas he's espousing are new, they're just more hateful and damaging. He just got slightly better at understanding politics/government, so now he's more dangerous/efficient.

I watched a few documentaries on the 100 Years' War recently; I'm convinced we're still living out THAT trauma ... and that was just one crazy time out of many. It's one of the ways I cope with climate change and the degradation of the global environment: reminding myself that living in really fucked up times is more the norm than anything. I do believe that modern technology and the absolute privilege we live with has given many of us in the developed world the illusion that we're in control of the world. I have a suspicion that the awareness of how little we can do to stop the sheer randomness and brutality of life and human callousness is why religion has been so prevalent for most of history, it's people having some solidarity in, "Holy shit, this is fucked. God, save us, you're obviously our only hope."

Harambe was 2016!

Not my joke, but it fits, lol.

Smartphones --> dumb people --> Donald Trump

Making the internet as easily accessible and dumbed down as possible didn't help. It let stupid people easily find each other and reinforce each other's beliefs while isolating themselves from reality.

Yeah 2005 was good.

It felt like maybe the 2nd Gulf War was starting to wind down a bit, and there was some hope that maybe both the US and Al-Qaeda/Islamic State were going to chill their boots a little.

The internet was at its peak in terms of usefulness versus not having been taken over and enshittified by a tiny collection of megacorporations.

The UK had just passed the Civil Partnership Act for same-sex couples, and a few other countries had something similar.

TV was getting pretty good as well.

Yeah, the 90s were still best, but 2005 was the best year since then.

It's everywhere, like apostrophes in possessive pronouns.

If you think fascism started with Bush, then you missed about 400+ years of history.

1972 was the genesis, there was a business Round Table where the rich and Powerful companies agreed on a long game to overthrow democracy and undo the gains from the New Deal. They have since refined the game, and destroyed any organized opposition. Also obviously had worthless conservatives on their side take over the Democratic Party.

2022-2024 were the most normal and stable years of my life.

Maybe stable for you, but the rest of the world wont leave your world alone. Defund and reallocate happened in those years. The genocide of Palestinians under a Dem president using your tax dollars started in 2023. And Ukraine was invaded in 2022.

All these people saying INSANE things like “2015” break my goddamn heart. Like… there’s no way for them to know just how much better it could be.

It’s infuriating that the people making it worse absolutely DO know better.

Was that when the mumble rapper OD'd on hot cheetos?

At this point, anything remotely near bare-metal material reality triggers such a cognitive dissonance in a lot of folks, on account of all of the bs they have in their heads, that all of that bare-metal material reality is discarded as too painful.

There is a movie?

This isn't about America. The whole world was fucking nuts in 2020. We kicked it off by burning Australia to the ground and a few months later, we had so many world disasters, COVID in the forefront, that we forgot Australia.

We're running out of water for agriculture. The zoomers may be middle aged, and the alphas, adults, when the climate crisis fully catches up with us. And if the human species is lucky, it'll happen first in the US or Russia or one of the old-guard powers, and the new order can use their renewable energy surplus to create new desalinization technology.

But current estimates (by those few climatologists willing to say other than it's going to get very bad. ) estimate the upper limit of the sustainability projections are a global population of about a billion people, if the international community chose to act today on all fronts. (Obviously that's not happening in the US, or in autocratic regimes, who imagine -- falsely -- they can create a self-sustaining colony on Mars -- we're a century or more from that).

That is a best case scenario unless we discover some miracle technology.

All other scenarios get worse than that, from a population in the hundreds of millions to human extinction. There is a ray of hope near the bottom, since Homo Erectus had at least one period of tens of thousands of years with a population under 10K before they would populate the world again, until they were out-competed by other hominids (e.g. us. Homo Sapiens). So we might have a tiny society that survives for an eon, but don't expect any culture (from wet burritos to Beethoven's Fifth to the 道德經) to survive. And a fuckton of science will have to be rediscovered.

So seriously bad shit for all of Human society is, at this point, for all intents and purposes, inevitable.

2016 also had Brexit and Trump winning at the ballot box