Hey, German here. What the f*** are Americans doing at the other side of the Atlantic? Some of you already know this monstrosity. I did’nt. This is a Ford F650 Truck and when I stepped out of my Youtube Bubble I realized, it was marketed as the “biggest, baddest Truck on the road” for the everyday American. Are you guys serious?! Is the end goal really to drive a Monster Truck to McDs to get a McFlurry? Americas bloodiest wars have been fought in the middle east to secure oil, bombing nations to rubble. And all, for this bullshit? The excess, waste and decadence is mind boggling to me and people on Reddit seriously justifying this by “you know dude I’m 6,4ft. I don’t fit in any other vehicle” makes me go up the wall.
We have indeed gone insane, but remember, not all of it is internal though. Let’s not forget the influence campaigns being waged against America from various foreign nations that are trying to divide the country to cause it to be so busy fighting itself, that it effectively removes itself from the world stage, letting those nations basically do whatever they want without American interference.
The Chinese are spying to steal your technology, the Russians are doing pro bono campaign work for the most divisive candidates and the Americans are perfectly able to go off the rails without outside help
I would say perfectly willing and/or eager to go off the rails.
We don’t even have to try mate.
The problem is the backdoors to SHIELD used by the oligarchs that want to give it secret orders are ultimately going to be used by HYDRA as well. In fact, one of the failures comes from the belief that the HYDRA element infiltrating SHIELD can be detected and cleaned out as if with an antivirus scan.
We’ve seen this the way NSA turned from a communications security department to a surveillance and intelligence department (that is, from anti-surveillance to surveillance), so instead of exposing and closing exploits and vulnerabilities, they catalogued them in secret for their own use – leaving them available for other interests, including rival foreign states.
I’d like to say we have the terror scare from the 9/11/01 attacks to thank for that, but federal law enforcement in the US like FBI and NSA have secret-police tendencies, and like to use their powers to harass or neutralize enemies of the current administration, so this has been going on for some time.
A recent Behind the Bastards two-parter about How Capitalism Ate Christianity takes it as far back as the Great Depression and resentment of the New Deal. Larry Lessig notes that Boss Tweed in the 1850s was already moving to turn the US into a plutocrat-run autocracy, hence the current government as an oligarchy with small democratic features.