Counterpoint: it's a balkanized failed state that's lost ground to all of its neighbors. It's worse inside but it's lost the ability to be nearly as bad as the real USA.
Which is what makes this so funny: in Cyberpunk's setting the US ate absolute shit and collapsed while the USSR became a tepid liberal social democracy instead of being couped by Yeltsin, so the shard only makes sense as a prank like when dipshits try to write notes about "forced labor" in chinese and pretend they found them in a shoebox that actually came from Bangladesh or the like. It was probably snuck in by some chud writer, because there seems to have been little to no oversight to consistency with all the little random text blurbs scattered throughout the game, but it does make no sense in context: the NUSA's a failed state and the USSR is liberal.
Wait, fuck, what kind of "books" would come from a dying ancap state and get someone life in prison in a functional state? It suddenly makes sense if one assumes they were importing XBDs or the like.
Yeah. Like, Johnny had some good points all throughout the game. V even was a victim of corpo supreme power (sure he stole the tech and put it in his noggin, but still). Yet V defends the status quo mocking Johnny's anticapitalist thought in many convos. Wish V was less lib. Of all people, he has a good reason to hate the status quo.
Johnny doesn't have points, he has tepid, baby's first anticapitalism talking points. He rants about how capitalism bad, corporations bad, but it doesn't go deeper than that.
that's just not true, sure his major act of adventurism was largely motivated by his girlfriend issues, but he constantly rants about how he saw corporations take peoples land and kidnap child soldiers and how his main goal is to defeat the corporations more than anything else like survival or wealth or fame or whatever. like sure maybe he needs to read theory but calling him "a selfish dick who hurts and wants to hurt the world" is the lamest possible take i could expect to see on a leftist website lol. i wish more 'selfish dicks' like him would nuke more corporate offices.
technically they are threatening the whole world with a wmd that would kill anyone using cybernetics, so actually worse than threatening people with nukes and bombs because its essentially an instant professor x aneurysm