Absolute suburban energy.

Can the pendulum swing back to the middle again?

Uh, it is dickfuck. Living in a walled garden that's powered by the slave labor of a billion foreigners was never the norm. You were born as far out as a pendulum can swing without tipping the whole clock over.

without tipping the whole clock over.
remains to be seen

I mean I guess the 90's were chill in the sense of me being too young to notice the wider problems going on in geopolitics, so I was too busy wondering why some kids were given milk at break time and others weren't even though we were all told it was good for our health to worry about, say, Israel, but 2001 had fucking 9/11, how can anyone think that decade was chill?

The passage of time is a hell of a drug
I still meet people who think that after 9/11, everyone was holding hands and singing kumbaya by the campfire
I wonder if it feels nice to not remember anything properly?
- The Unity of the German people after the Reichstag fire was truly wholesome 🥰🥰🥰
  The Jews and the communists and the disabled and the neurodivergent and the queers? Well, the Nazi Party had good intentions, you can’t really blame them for valiantly safeguarding their homeland 🥰🥰🥰
All those WTO protests were just a vibe, not a cell phone in sight
90s = my cool childhood where I got lightly ostracized/bullied for broken english but otherwise passed as white barely middle class and did culvasack shit with other randos. I have no formal understanding or frame of reference in relation to anything bad before 911 except that one+ time(s) (alot) somebody was mean to me on the playground.
I actually still don't know anything bad that happened between 1990 and 911, but my contemporaries are apparently immune to learning about all the bad things that happened between 1776-1990 and 911-2023. Apparently learning is just too much.
- I actually still don’t know anything bad that happened between 1990 and 911
  The illegal dissolutions of the USSR and Yugoslavia are two big ones.
- Growing up in the 90s I'd hear random splotches of bad stuff happening here and there. People starving in Somalia, the Waco massacre, the Bosnian genocide, Oklahoma City bombing. I just vaguely remember news reports of people dying in these incidents, but not really understanding why.
  In 1997-98, when I was 13 I particularly remember hearing about this dude named Saddam Hussein wanting to make germ weapons to drop on us. My dad reassured me that it was all fake, that the media just wants to scare us. I took his word for it. Then 9/11 happened a few years later and he was suddenly convinced that Saddam was stockpiling WMDs to use against us. I was older and knew better, but no amount of reassuring from me was ever able to convince him otherwise.
  I feel like 9/11 just broke a lot of peoples' brains.

The liberal urge to turn back time instead of actually solving problems

It's all just fucking bandaid fixes with them anyway.
sick to bastard death of "used to be".
used to be this, used to be that, how about used to be thinking about the future and not missing the past
Turning back time is more of a fascist thing. So this liberal is in a process of scratching.
I empathize with this urge because as a mortal being I also want it to not be getting closer to my death, but also,
cmon libs like damn /:

Plus the whole partial societal collapse thing in half of the world
But have you considered it’s when I was 8 years old and daddy bought ice cream for me?
I will actively refuse to acknowledge reality in favor of my idealized delusion of what the 90s were 🥰🥰🥰

shit was fucked in the 90s and 2000s. deindustrialization of the US was in full swing, so every blue collar worker was getting RIF'd or threatened with it. of course, the white collar tech libs didn't care. they also didn't care that clinton murdered the last bit of the social safety net and full throttled the prison pipeline. because lol he smoked weed but didn't inhale. saxophone blowjob from the intern what a cool sex pest.

until the dotcom bubble burst in the late 90s. then white collar workers had questions about the economy. but once that turned around for white collar workers by the mid 2000s and everybody bozo with spare income was settled into 4 ARMS across 3 houses, the GFC hit, jobs lost, homes were foreclosed on, and everybody's retirement account vanished like a fart in the wind.

people nostalgic for the 90s and 2000s were probably in middle school and just miss being a kid. or they're ancient and the lead poisoning is taking its toll.

people nostalgic for the 90s and 2000s were probably in middle school and just miss being a kid.
I'll confess I have a good deal of nostalgia for the time, but yeah, it mostly comes down to this. I think it's something people experience across the political spectrum, but it's how they understand and engage with those feelings that separates leftists from chuds.
- Same here, nostalgic for the times when I’d stay up all night playing N64 and eating pizza in my friend’s basement. But I also recognize I was a child so I had no responsibilities and not really any way to engage with the wider problems in the world, so of course it was all just a bowl of cherries.
  I also later came to find out during that time my dad came into a bunch of money. I love my dad but I also know he doesn’t really have a lot of marketable skills. He lost his job just before coming into that money and I don’t think he’d be able to make much more than minimum wage but also support a family (the job he lost was a favor someone did him so he was making more than he would otherwise). Had that not happened I’m sure my childhood would be drastically different.
people nostalgic for the 90s and 2000s were probably in middle school and just miss being a kid.
fr I'm surprised they aren't just outright saying "I wish I had no responsibilities or awareness again" because I was a kid in the 90s and the only thing I remember about the 90s was toys and tv shows.
- Legos and cartoons were so much better than geopolitics and working to not starve to death outdoors.
I don’t miss the late 90s a single bit. Homophobic death threats don’t really constitute my idea of “wholesome childhood”.

GREAT TIMES FOR WHO?!?!

GREAT TIMES FOR WHO MOTHERFUCKER

"being adult is stressful" thanks brain man for your great insight

Income inequality and deregulation are running rampant, now I must live like the poors

poor people can all afford internet now, now the whole internet treats everyone as disposable exploitable bozos and doesn't give me special treatment anymore

Multiple countries call the 90s the "lost decade" because of various things, usually economic collapse

- "omg my country is collapsing"
  yeah excuse me but I'm listening to Alanis Morissette and drinking Zima

Everybody

Uhhhh... When I was 25 years younger things were more chill?? Seemed like I had more time to relax??

That guy is missing being a child and not feeling alienated by everything around them while being egocentric and seemingly not being able to imagine any other perspective than his own

No he's also missing a genuinely better standard of living that he no longer has access to even if he has absolutely no clue why that is or how to state what's different

It's out of nowhere if you don't pay attention. Checkmate tankie

the 90s and 2000s were such great times. Everybody was just chilling and enjoying the greatest era of innovation and entertainment

Thats just called going to school middle class in the calm before american capitalism, obungler and co. bungled up 2008. Now its just mourning a lost future by haunting the past.

TIL that Oscar-bait Hollywood equivalents of corporate music and garbage romcoms = greatest era of entertainment

just pure, unadulterated

Death to America

Fukuyama's been having a rough time recently. I think his application for a work visa in Hong Kong was denied, so he started writing more China bad articles lol

the pendulum

i fucking hate this term so much
100% a "vibes based politics understander"

Wow if only someone or many many someones over 150 years of history have written about this tendency of society. It would be really great if someone did because then maybe I could learn more about why this is happening and why we can't ever go back.

Oh well books aren't real anyway I guess we'll just never know why this is happening!

yeah they don't make 'em like shock and awe (2003) anymore

2008 that was when everything went wrong for this guy how does he not know that, fucker you were there

I'm becoming an accelerationist just to annoy this lib

I support the idea of the pendulum swinging to the left. I suspect this user is imagining a pendulum that stops in the middle, but that is not how pendulums work. The whole mechanical reason for using pendulums is that they will swing right past the middle.

Yes, but then we also need a communist revolution to abolish the pendulum before it swings hard right into Nazism

Anytime people say something like this, just read it as "when I grew up I didn't pay attention to the news and other people so it all seemed awesome"

US policy fucked with a bunch of people until something happened in 2001 (I forget) that set us on a course of further human suffering until 22 years later when it reached the op.

"everything was so great in the 90s" says the guy who never paid attention to a 90s hip hop song in his life

the romanovs probably thought things were pretty cool and chill too

Forget the pogroms and the tyranny and the murder and exploitation, the most important thing in the world is that the royal family gets to go to fancy costume parties

Anticommunism in The Twilight Zone (1959-1964)

In this essay, I will

in the 00's reboot of The Twilight Zone, an episode about the Red Scare was rewritten with the only change being replacing "communist" with "terrorist" and it was still relevant.

Rome decisively wins the 3rd Punic war in 146BC. Everything seems fine and dandy in the greatest hegemon in the world and 13 years later the poorest citizens are being murdered en Mase during elections for asking for the right to land for 10 years of military fucking service.

When a poorly organized state gains power it will still be poorly organized

I've never seen someone reveal exactly what they are in 6 sentences. They could've done nazi chants and we couldn't glean as much.

Only a matter of time before they join the Freikorps in a hopeless effort to bring back imperial zenith when they could live their comfortable cracker lives built off the blood of billions.

Disillusioned petite bourgeoisie constitute one of the most vocal supporters of fascism.

these people will literally never make the jump from "i miss my SEGA" to any kind of materialist or class analysis

I absolutely hate this term, what you thought that little fucking bubble of comfort was going to shield you from the mistakes committed by society?

The pendulum doesn't give a shit where it swings, the era of comfort during the golden era of neoliberalism was Interim period, and it was only reserved for those belonging to certain few and select areas, I.E. White middle class

The 90s had a huge crime wave, drug epidemic, homicides, the unravelling of worker's consciousness, mass unemployment. The 1992 LA riots, the destruction of cities like Miami, Detroit, New York, Pittsburgh and the countless cities in the Midwest, all because some greedy fuckwit bankers got the whole world as a pie to indulge in.

I wasn't born in the 90s, and honestly? I can never live for a moment being born then, I would've been suffocated by the complete ignorance of the working class, things are bad now since that's the natural decaying state of capitalism. The thrill and rush of ignorance can only be enjoyed by a select few now, don't like it? Then fucking change it, stop crying about the past, look to future where you can be happy.