So called “nationalist”, support local farmers.

Nothing more British than shutting down a local business to reap profit from outsourcing. Just ask Thatcher.

You described literal progress only to say it’s the illusion of progress.

I’m describing the systematic roll-back of free travel, free trade, and freedom of individuals to co-mingle absent legal barriers.

We need paperwork to cross borders. We need documentation to legally accept offers for work. We need licenses from the state to formalize marriage. We can be arrested, detained indefinitely, and subject to physical and psychological abuse without so much as an official reason by state officials. We can be conscripted into war, extorted for our wages, and deprived of our homes and personal effects at the whims of state officials.

And to top it all off, we have an entire industrial education establishment that compels us to repeated the dogged lies that this is progress. We have state-sponsored celebrations intended to lionize our enslavers. We have parades of security service workers through the center of our townships, paid for with wealth looted from our own pockets, to drive home how occupied we all are.

How the fuck is that progress?

There is no legitimate argument that we haven’t moved leftward over the last thousand or so years.

The colonial era of the 1400s to 1900s resulted in an industrial scale enclosing, enslaving, and extermination of entire ethnic cohorts. This was not a leftist move by any definition. It was 500 years of settler colonialism which resulted in some of the most abysmal living conditions in recorded history.

We have not yet recovered from this massive global reconfiguration of human society. While we enjoy more advanced tools and industrial scale infrastructure, we remain both socially and physically less independent of our authoritarian oligarchs than we were prior to the European Imperialist Era.

So progress that only seems like progress but progress is progress boss.

We have a modern economic system that produces more homes than people, while guaranteeing a certain population will remain homeless their entire lives. We have a system that produces enormous surpluses of food, but guarantees a segment of the population will remain malnurished. We have a system that produces vast excesses of professional expertise, but guarantees only a fraction of the population can access professional services.

All of our shortages are manufactured. Trump’s latest tariff wave is the most blindingly obvious example of how these shortages are imposed - not even via some convoluted market mechanism, but through the whims of an authoritarian madman.

This is not progress in a social sense. It is a huge regression from our historical roots. We are prisoners of the state and of the economy, subject to arrest, torture, and execution at the whim of the local leadership. And the only reason you and I are not personally under a boot right now is because we haven’t been targeted yet.

Before that was slavery.

Before Jim Crow was Reconstruction, which was the real Progressive Era for African Americans. The Freedman’s Bureau, elections overseen by the Union Army where black citizens were guaranteed a vote, mass migration out of southern plantations and into the industrialized north, and real (abet fleeting) economic progress for the millions of newly liberated peoples.

War on Drug and War on Terror happened at the-end-of/after the New Deal Progressive Era

The Federal War on Drugs began with the Smoking Opium Exclusion Act of 1909, squarely in the thick of the Roosevelt/Wilsonian Prohibitionist period. You could argue that prohibition wars were going on decades earlier, at the state level. Similarly, the War on Terror was an outgrowth of the War on Crime, which has its roots back to the post-Reconstruction South and the prison exclusion of the 13th Amendment.

Progressiveism and Regressiveism is always in a tug-of-war

The liberal/conservative tug-of-war over popular support for government is a tug-of-war. But the underlying policies have a strong through-line going back over a century. Policing, surveillance, and the administrative state bloat with each new administration, following different rhetorical lines but always moving towards the same effective end.

Monarchies have fallen, eventually Oligarchies will fall.

Monarchies rose and fell for thousands of years prior. They did not end, they only changed their form. Regional and sectoral dictatorships are alive and well in the modern era, from explicit Kingdoms in the Middle East to vertically integrated monopolies governed by tyrannical CEOs in the West.

The only exceptions are where popular movements have successfully revolutionized the government, democratized capital, and hedged out foreign financial parasites.

The United States is not one such place.

Tell me, do you think a Black person is safer living 100 years ago in the USA, than today’s USA?

Thanks to modern technological innovations, sure. Clean air/water, safer public transit, vaccines, etc go a long way towards improving quality of life for everyone, including the bottom of the social hierarchy. But has a black person in 2025 enjoyed the same degree of prosperity as a white peer over the intervening years? Absolutely not, and for the same reasons. They’re more predisposed to experience tainted air/water, they are comparatively less safe traveling, they have diminished access to modern medicine like vaccines and prenatal care, etc, etc.

And this is a deliberate function of public policy. The sky-high arrest rate of African Americans (particularly while traveling) is the result of a Nixon Era campaign to over-police black and brown neighborhoods that every subsequent executive and governor seems to have endorsed. The higher rates of cancer, the higher rates of obesity and malnutrition, the higher rates of disease transmission and mortality from preventable illness or injury all stem from eugenics policies pioneered in the OG Progressive Era. Even some of the pseudoscientific theories around mental, physical, and social aptitudes have endured.

it’s no where was common as before

The arrest rates of black men peaked in the 90s, during the height of the Reagan War on Crime. They’ve fallen off somewhat in comparison to arrests and harassment of hispanics and east asians, but are nowhere close to comparable to white peers. This is downwind of the reactionary media hijacking progressive language and ideology and weaponizing it against a population that its leadership believes is subhuman.

What we have in the modern era is rationalization of reactionary policy in progressive terms. The propaganda we experience is caped in progressive language. But the goals are the exact opposite.

But it also ended in the 20s.

Okay, so you’re talking about the 1890s-1920s “Progressive” Era of Prohibition and Sufferage.

Not the 1930s-70s New Deal / Great Society period of progressivism that was great for middle class white people and maybe a little less great for African Americans, East Asians, and American Natives who had to claw their way into a post-industrial standard of living against all the best efforts of the settlers.

Again, I might suggest you look back at the history of the T.Roosevelt to Wilson administration and reconsider whether this is the benchmark for progress you’ve been sold on.

We move pretty consistently leftward politically globally but only as a reaction to incredible periodic swings to the right.

This is simply not true. We advance technologically and we often mistake the mass media that comes out of these advances as social progress. But what we have historically endured over the last two centuries has been liberal rhetoric whitewashing much more reactionary and authoritarian policy than what our ancestors endured.

The long march has not been towards progress, but towards progressive pastiche.

This is such classic Fox bullshit. I’m reminded of FOX News changing the Party ID of Republicans they don’t like to “Democrat”.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mistake-fox-news-identifi_n_85656

Reagan was a neoconservative, heavily invested in deindustrializing the Midwest to break the domestic labor movement and capturing labor overseas for the benefit of investment capital. He succeeded too well, as his NAFTA and global trade policies birth to large foreign industrial powers that could meet the US as peers instead of supplicants.

Forty years later, Trump looked at the economic landscape and concluded he could undo the Reagan Era by throwing up high trade barriers, because he believed the finance capitalism at home (combined with our large international military) commanded leverage over physical capital abroad. Now we’re gambling on a war over Greenland and a promise that Europe needs Wall Street more than it needs Chinese manufacturing capacity.

But both Reagan and Trump were fixated on global US hegemony. They just went about it wrong, because they were dumb-dumbs surrounded by people more greedy than they were strategic. It’s a double-own goal, from opposite ends of the net.

We got a Progressive Era out of it

• Jim Crow

• Japanese Internment

• Religious revivalism

• The Wars on Crime / Drugs / Terror / Immigration, leading to the highest incarceration rate in the world

• Two major Red Scares and a collapse in union membership

• Intercontinent Ballistic Missiles with nuclear warheads

Some progress.

Obama, Reagan, Bush and Clinton weren’t fascists.

Obama and Clinton were neoliberal to their bones, which meant lots of Realpolitik and backroom handshake deals with fascists in order to drive down the bargaining power of labor and transfer enormous volumes of wealth to business aristocrats. Whatever you might say of their methods, the consequences of their militarism abroad and their austerity economics at home was a steady rise in global fascist tendancy.

Meanwhile, if Reagan and Bush weren’t strictly qualified as fascists, they ran as close up to the line as they could get. Religious demagogues who leveraged a business media vomiting up disinformation and race panic to cultivate a white nationalist base of support and overthrow basic democratic institutions at home and abroad. The Brooks Brothers Riot was a coup in every way that mattered. Iran-Contra involved attempts at the illegal overthrow of multiple governments. Extremely fascist.

look, I know the Weimar Republic had its problems

The German state was doing a holocaust well before The Weimar Republic. They were just doing it to brown people in Africa, rather than white people in Eastern Europe.

Shark Island concentration camp

This is more than just “Pobody’s Nerfect”. It’s marginalized because it happened to people that modern western pop-historians don’t like to talk about on The History Channel or during NPR Story Hour. But it is absolutely fascism.

The invasion of Iraq was Fascism. The invasion of Grenada and the overthrow of governments in Chile and Honduras and Brazil and Argentina was Fascism. The constant feeding of racial resentment and inflaming of conspiracy theory among Florida Cuban ex-pats is fascism. The racial hysteria at the US/Mexico border is fascism.

Trump didn’t invent any of this.

Go outside, there are no bugs.

My neighborhood is alive with cicadas every night and there’s no shortage of mosquitoes biting.

I’m inside the Houston loop, too. Not out in the boonies. Spiderwebs in my garage. Toads in my drainage ditch. I assume they’re eating something.

I drove from Victoria BC to Fairbanks AK three years ago without washing my windshield.

That’s pretty normal in the winter. Try it again after a big rainstorm.

decades ago, houses were affordable, college was cheap, Americans weren’t crushed under mountains of dischargeable student debt, wealth disparity and effective wages were far better, and we had a far more functional political system.

For Middle Income White People in Certain States

But we also had the hanging threat of nuclear war, leaded gasoline in the air and painted all over the walls, Satanic Panic, an AIDS epidemic killing millions of people, several large market crashes that deindustrializee the Midwest, and $7/gal, and a Global War on Terror.

None of this was indicative of better economics or a functional political system.

I can’t think of much that hasn’t gone downhill since 2016.

mRNA technology premiering on the eve of a killer pandemic leaps to mind.

Women don’t want to be approached in public.

I think the problem is that men don’t want to be approached in public. Or in private, for that matter. Half the joke of this is how antisocial, short-tempered, and easily discouraged men are.

I’m not interested in having kids because the world is ending

I’m hard pressed to point to any ten-year period in which some number of Doomers did not insist The World Is Ending.

Like, take your pick of any ten-year span during the Cold War. That butted right up against the OG World Wars, with a Great Depression breather. Before that you had plagues, famines, and economic crashes that shat all over '08 and COVID.

Westoids live in the wealthiest, easiest, most affluent era of human history. Then someone points out “hey, eating burger every day isn’t sustainable” and they conclude the world is over.

Wars do be like that.

Unfortunately, the people pushing AI are the same ones selling recreational flamethrowers

It’s great for getting off the ground in a language you’re unfamiliar with. But a recipe for technical debt when used long term. You’re inviting spaghetti code with some real hair pulling bugs.

subscription based self driving taxis

Can’t wait until the Lime Scooter can travel 80 mph

Would there be enough land for the crops once everyone went crop eater

Yes. Even despite absurd levels of agricultural waste (40% of our crops go in the trash, in large part due to poor refrigeration infrastructure, dismal labor conditions, and market price fluctuations killing a harvest season) we end up with enormous vegetable surplus.

Fish, shellfish, and other sea life are still a highly efficient source of protein and other nutrients. Crawfish, for instance, are basically an invasive species byproduct of sugar and rice harvests in the Gulf Coast. There’s little reason not to eat them, given you’re getting them whether you want them or not. Same with mussels and clams, as anyone who has had to clean the underside of a boat can tell you.

But the degree to which pollution and industrial fishing wreck coastal and deep sea habitats absolutely does make it unsustainable long term. We could live to see a future without tuna or swordfish or halibut purely due to our aggressive ecology-wrecking fishing practices. So it’s less a question of “Could we live without fish?” and more a question of “Will we live to see the extinction of fish?”