America cares more about prisons than their future

Why not? Obvously banking on aliens or cyberware is foolish, but the idea of corporations usurping the state openly or strongmen dictators rising isn't too outlandish.

B-but Stalin milled 1000 gorillion!

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How do you deport a natural citizen?

That's just relocation, not deportation.

It primarily comes down to letting yourself be influenced by two irrational biases, either confirmation bias (events matching your predictions ala futurologists, analysts, seers, and so on) or attribution bias (events matching or mimicking past events based on one's perception of the circumstances leading to the event ala historians, analysts, and religious dogmatists).

not to mention this

that chart on homicide rate should include population as well, because it seems very misleading without that.

Yes, natural born citizens do not have either definition apply to them.

In Rome's case the decrepit political structure proved unable to deal with the successive crises of the fourth and fifth century. The inability to establish a peaceful means of transition for the imperial title was also an impediment.

There were many, many factors leading to the downfall of Rome, in particular the rise of Christianity and it's establishment as the state religion. It not only diverted talent and finds away from the state, but gradually transformed the social organization of the empire. Pagan Rome's religion served the important purpose of engaging the aristocracy with the commons and giving them opportunities to ameliorate their problems with their largesse. Wealthy citizens would build all manner of civic projects necessary both for the maintenance of the city and the empire. With the decline of paganism, that kind of civic engagement, or at least the sort of identification that came with it, faded as well, especially as the wealthy began to evacuate to their country estates.

Anyway, Rome didn't 'fall' in the sense of some kind of cataclysmic event. When it does eventually end, the empire had already pretty much ceased to exist in all but name. Some things carried on, only under new management. Roman tax collectors and magistrates continued to administer regions with significant romance populations like southern France, only now they sent the money to a Frankish or Visigothic lord instead of the governor. There wasn't quite as much as their used to be as plagues depopulated the countryside and cities while population pressures brought Latinized Germans into the empire. While convenient for the empire that was desperately in need of farmers and fighters, the Germans came from various tribal societies that placed high expectations on those intended to lead them, which Rome and those from it were increasingly unable to fulfill, and what loyalty they felt that they owed the empire dissipated. It was the same for the Latins. As the government grew gradually more enfeebled, locals began looking for other solutions. For skilled peasants this meant selling themselves into perpetual slavery to patrician landlords, who eventually become medieval aristocrats. The Church picks up the pieces wherever the government fails and soon bishops were more prominent than prefects. The Germans too adapted to the power vacuum. Even with the depopulation there were nowhere near enough of them to displace the natives of the former empire and so they co-opted their old systems, as well as was possible at least, since structural decay had greatly hollowed out the empire even before it collapsed.

Tl;Dr, compounding material and social forces created feedback loops that ate away at the status quo, and people by and large dealt with it by finding local solutions to local problems

Yeah, really fucking glad I'm not goin back.

Imperial Decline and implosion
We'll probably have at least one more grand foreign adventure that ends in a horrific defeat for the US as the final nail in the coffin
I doubt the US will go as quietly as the USSR did, which in itself was an abnormal decline

And?

What's your fucking point, user?

abolish the prisons tbh

I tried to describe the mood of the liberal elite, many of them love scifi and scifi in general can act as a pretty good reflection of a societies mood.

You have to remember also that only half of the empire fell. As the Western empire decayed, the emperor's fled East to Constantinople, which was a powerful and influential empire for another thousand years. It ceases to be "Roman" (though no one told the Greeks that), but then the Roman empire hadn't been properly "Roman" for a long time.

Even if the US were to suffer a disastrous defeat, there's still wealth aplenty there. Short of a full scale nuclear bombardment, I imagine it's going to linger for a long time in some form or another.

Though I shudder to think of a neo feudal Corporate States of America.

Pretty sure they already beat it. At the height of Soviet incarceration 2.4% of the population was in some sort of prison (labor camp, gulag, etc). Presently the U.S. is pushing 2.8%. I'll post sources if you want, or you could look it up yourself

here's how it will be in 2100. there is literally no future in Louisiana. Everyone will have to abandon their homes and lives.

True, but the two halves of the empire were arguable separate entities long before "the fall"
I do think the US will continue to exist in some form, but we'll no longer be the power that we were. I'd say the US has already lost hegemon status that we had from the 90s.

It's really a question of how the decline happens. As much as Holla Forums claims to like the idea, I think civil war is unlikely without a major economic crisis and a greater decline in living standards for the average burger.

Well considering both of those things have already happened, and it's going to get ten times worse, it sounds like you're saying civil war is likely.

The thing with these numbers is that you always have to check if it's per adult population or total population. Also the USSR had several different punishment types, whereas America has just prisons.

Anyway, if it's not too much trouble, please post your stuff, every bit helps.

It really comes down to the material conditions, but that's something that could change within a year

But rising waters aren't real, Pinko.

If I had to guess right now, I think the most likely is a civil war between Republicans and Democrats, not necessarily because of ideological differences, but as two proxy armies for what seems to be the two largest wings of the national bourgeois. They're going to fight a destructive, wasteful war based on fantasies concocted by the bourgeoisie while thinking they're fighting for "freedom" or whatever. IMO this will be socialism's big break both in the wider world as well as the US as the military's attention turns inward and internal services are disrupted too.

But I don't have anything to really base that on aside from conjecture.

jacobinmag.com/2017/03/fiscal-conservative-social-services-austerity-save-money/

It's happening everywhere, where governments will get rid of programs that generate value and prosperity because "they can't afford it". The thing about neoliberalism and capitalism in general is that it will eventually eat itself due to its short-term profit motive. In my home province of Ontario, for example, the government is literally selling its income sources. Cost-saving measures may provide short-term budgetary solutions, but in most cases they'll actually lose the government money in the long run, meaning that they'll have to cut even more programs to stay relevant. The search for "efficiency" is actually a drawn-out suicide.

tfw human nature makes capitalism unsustainable

On that, I remember seeing somewhere that the two parties are often backed by two different wings of the bourgeoisie, with the Republicans taking the labour-intensive/financialized wing and the Democrats taking the capital-intensive side. Companies like Walmart tend to back the Republicans because they're directly threatened by worker gains, whereas industries like the defence sector, tech, and big pharma are traditionally Democratic because they can afford to pay people well and have a vested interest instead in acquiring good regulatory conditions and state contracts. I'll have to dig the article up at some point.

I think something like a techno-capital exit would be more likely. Imagine if the Northeast and West Coast states left the US, viewing Middle America as hopelessly racist, sexist, and reactionary. NYC, SF, Boston-Cambridge, etc. are attracting all the most talented people. I recently read that California is basically pricing out its middle class through housing costs and exporting them to Texas. I highly doubt that soldiers would be eager to go reclaim these places for Real America, given that they view them as godless liberal degenerate hellholes.

Wynne is gonna win again

I think saying America is going down in the next 20 years is a bit of an exaggeration, you can't go from being the most powerful and largest countries on the planet to fading in to obscurity that fast. Things are definitely going to take a hit with Trump though, and if the reactionaries try to keep pulling everything in to Republican hands then everybody is going to be dumb, dysfunctional beyond menial jobs, poor and in jail. Great country.

But user, American prisons are their future.

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Holy shit. It's beginning to look like Civil War 2.0: Electric Boogaloo in here the more you look into the material conditions and influences of the two Americas.
Remember, the North (Republicans at the time) were the financial and industrial capitalists of the first Civil War; conversely, the South (Democrats at the time) were the agricultural / labor-intensive capitalists.

please find the article.

She makes me wanna fucking die, but considering the NewDems are actively shit and Patrick Brown is an ultra-reactionary cumwad I know I'll have to suck it up and vote for her. Still leaves me wanting to end myself tho

I'm taking a dig, but given that my entire history is this huge strange snarl of leftypol, Jacobin, leftbook links, and moeshit torrents I'm gonna have to dig pretty heckin' hard comrade

As for the civil war, I doubt it. The whole thing with capital is actually changing again because there's no longer a radical labour movement that can impel capital-heavy industries to make livable concessions, and the Repubs are almost as happy to splash subsidies around as Dems are. At this point, the Democrats are increasingly leaning on the support of an extremely unreliable class, and as a whole their status as capital's second-favourite party is becoming increasingly clear.

Actually, gotcha! Pretty solid Jacobin article on the deep failure of entryism in the past and the current two-party system's political economy. People can shit on this magazine all they like, but it provides some priceless ammunition for screaming at liberals.

jacobinmag.com/2016/02/democratic-party-realignment-civil-rights-mcgovern-meany-rustin-sanders/

Chinese lies you CUCK

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I think we've been seeing the initial fraying of those two sections of the bourgeoisie for a while now. It's only recently come to a head with the election of Trump, which I think few people really expected. The dichotomy is only going to grow sharper.

States I believe are going to fall by the wayside as a vestige of the medieval era. I think it's only a matter of time before big corporations cut out the middle man and just administer their Private Property :^) directly. Or rather, via other licensed affiliated groups and corporate bodies.

I think it's the only natural conclusion as the American government increasingly loses efficacy and the corporations starve it of income.

I don't really want to imagine a private company motivated purely by profit having control over any nation's nuclear stockpile.

Something to consider though is that the US is much more culturally homogeneous now than in the middle of the 19th century. There isn't as great a cultural divide that separated the North and the South then, especially with the tremendous influx of Carpet Baggers coming to the South to enjoy our "lower cost of living."

That's what makes it so slippery to me, is that we have these previous conditions on which to model, but our current conditions *might* be an echo of those times, but they're also significantly different.

The US is going to be beyond civil war. Every power on the planet is going to try and get in on the action, selling drugs, weapons, food, whatever. The ironic thing will be that the American bourgeoisie gave them all the ability to do so. I suppose that will be somewhat amusing in a dark sort of way as we starve to death, if our own government doesn't bomb us all to ash first.

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Man, I hope not, but that's how I see things going.

One of the things I dislike about my experience with Holla Forums is the insistence of putting everything in the terms as Marx understood them over a hundred years ago. I don't think it should be discarded, but as has been brought up here before, things don't fit quite so nicely into lumpen/prole/petite/bourgeois categories these days in my own imperfect opinion. I think we need to completely reexamine the class structure of our current capitalist paradigm, what produces them, and what logically follows from the material interests that produced them.

It's also interesting given that the Dems are increasingly realigning away from their traditional industrial corporate backers and towards Silicon Valley, hedge fundies, and other professional-class organizations. Although they pick up working-class voters, their main focus now seems to be a particular kind of "entrepreneur" and professional, along with New York banking elites. It'll be interesting to see where this particular structure goes.

I live in California, and even before I had a basic gist of actual Leftist thought I knew that that the Democrats and their spokespeople were directing their attention away from their original base.
Living relatively close to Silicon Valley and how all the left-liberal people fetishize and idolize their future technocratic overlords made me sick to my head. If California further descends into this Silicon worship, I urgently need to get out of this place.
Hopefully, it all comes burning down to the ground by my breaking point I wouldn't count on it, however

*by the time I reach it, I meant to say

Honestly if the revolution ever did actually happen one of the only things I'd let myself look forward to would be Bob Avakian and his legions of highly disciplined post-hippies torching every last fucking square meter of Silicon Valley, with their Ayn Rand-themed company names and their vile computer fetishism. Technology's only as good as the people who use it and the ends towards which they direct it, and this particular caste of horrendous lolberts kinda need to go.

If the revolution came they'd probably be torching the places themselves to burn all the evidence of collusion.

Selling the rope and all, eh?

Well, if social engineering and mass surveillance equipment is the 36 dimensional rope, yes!

Now there's some masturbation-worthy material

bob avakian revolutionary communist party fanart plz

That feel when they make the security state so comprehensive that it captures all their misdeeds and then some day some badly-paid hick-ass NSA staffer spills coffee on his computer and accidentally leaks their sins to McInternet, provoking a revolution

FeelsGreatMan.jpg

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Can't wait until they start selling "nuclear capability stocks".

Hedge funds bailing out rogue-state nuclear programs on the brink of failure and then seizing their assets once they finish the bomb?

I was thinking more like "you pay us and we give you turn-key access to some of our nukes", but your idea has promise as well.

Someone help, I can't stop screaming!

autism

spending isn't the issue with America's education, there is a fundamental problem that money is only making worse

:^)