- 8 hours
I’ve heard some stories from friends of mine (mostly Romania and Poland, which is not the USSR, I know), but it turned out (I wasn’t so sharp on the timeline) that they were between sth like 2 and 9 when communism fell. And it’s still interesting to hear these stories, but when I think about my views and knowledge of the world when I was 6, I don’t come up with much that’s worth listening to. So I appreciate meeting someone who remembers the USSR!
Were you politically active? Was that possible at all? Did you have a strong opinion on Gorbachev? Did it change in 1991?
- 12 hours
Is it not obvious that it was sarcasm??? REAL in allcaps should have given it out for sure, no tankie talks like that
- 19 hours
Communism is stateless. Which stateless state in the USSR was communist?
- 2 days
The flip side of this is hearing an adult give an unhinged and personally biased account of an event or time that is super well documented. For instance older family telling you that Reagan’s election healed the country, and immediately boosted the economy.
Yeah, if I have kids and my dad starts talking to them about what “really happened during the pandemic” I’m yanking them out of that conversation as quickly as possible to prevent them going down some idiotic rabbit hole.
2 daysYeah, human memory sucks. If someone tells me that something I remember clearly was totally wrong, it’s likely enough that they’re right that I have to look into it every time.
You make a great point. In court cases human memory is notoriously unreliable (any lawyer will probably tell you this) and usually lead attorneys on cases rely on evidence like logs, communication, photos, videos, etc. to make their case.
And I am guilty of thinking highly of my memory as well, I really ought to be more critical of my memory.
- 2 days
“Events you can personally remember pretty well” may not be the ironclad argument you think it is
- 20 hours
I’ll have you know I remember the fall of Rome like it was yesterday.
- 2 days
No dude, I obviously got transported into a new nearly identical parallel timeline where Nelson Mandela didn’t die in prison. Its the only explanation that makes sense.
- 2 days
I bet a lot of white people in the south remember segregation as a good thing. They didn’t have to see how “dirty” their communities are.
God, I cringe just typing that, it’s disgusting.
- 2 hours
“When exactly was America so great that you think we should go back to it?”
They then proceed to tell you about some time when women, minorities, and children were things with no rights and were treated like slaves.
I know a guy, late 50’s, who believes the Stolen Generations was one of the best thing to happen to Australian black children. That it’s only because they were given to white families that we have a portion of decent native black people in Australia.
Frankly, I know more terribly uneducated and, with the advent of the internet, wilfully ignorant older people than not.
- village604@adultswim.fanEnglish2 days
I’ve been confidently told that I was wrong about working all day in the fields when I was in high school, in triple digit temps (F) with extremely high humidity, and not dying.
“But the wet bulb temp…” It’s like the LD50. You’re way more likely to get heat stroke, but it’s not a guarantee.
- 2 days
I had something similar. I was in this “eat healther class” and the person kept going on and on about how healthy China eats. So finally I’m like, yeah I lived there for almost a decade before coming back to America. It isn’t anything like you’re describing, so much shit is deep fried, re-served to the next customer, or dyed to look fresh when it’s not. Most foreigners get very sick the first few weeks in country because of the lack of enforced food regulations, like using “gutter oil” to save money. Yes, it’s exactly how it sounds, they skim off the floating oil in trash and sewers to reuse it, especially in street food to save money.
But I’m wrong, because she has TicTok and had never met anyone who lived there.
- 4 hours
From what i’ve read about gutter oil; it was illegal from start, traded in black markets and China cracked down on it? It’s also long-term damaging, carcinogen and whatnot.
- 8 hours
they skim off the floating oil in trash and sewers
There is not a meaningful amount of oil in random sewers.
Resturaunt grease traps are often located under sidewalks. It gets sold to companies that refine it for industrial uses, but some restaurants were buying that refined product for food. It makes absolutely no sense to put your grease into the grease trap, and then take it back out to reuse it when you could just not change your oil in the first place.
There was a backlash, it probably doesn’t happen anymore.
Chinese food is healthier than US food simply because there’s more veggies.
As far as the other stuff goes, I haven’t seen situations where those would be possible, but I understand things were very different 10 years ago.
- 1 day
Ahh damn, if I could say I’d only once had the screaming shits over a filthy squat toilet in China, and then had the dawning horror of remembering it’s a bring-your-own-toilet-paper country, I’d be a happy man… Truly there’s nothing like going into your mind palace to Numbers-style work out all the variables like p(shitting-yourself-in-elevator), p(shitting-yourself-in-car), v(elevator-over-45-floors), v(didi-in-mental-traffic), d(to-an-acceptable-toilet)…
I love the country dearly. But not for food hygiene or general cleanliness.
Perspective matters a lot.
I’ve heard a bizarrely high number of relatives and friends complain that they vividly remember people cheering right after the 9/11 attacks. And the folks cheering tended to be whomever this relative thought was problematic - stupid woke college kids, scary Muslims, scary Israelis, smug neocons, bitter aging Marxists, rural yokels, California/Texas shitheads - an absolute grab bag of People I Don’t Like.
Certainly, over the last 25 years, I’ve seen a lot of social media and partisan news advance the theory that someone was cheering after 9/11. In the same way, I’ve heard pundits insist people were spitting on Vietnam Veterans in airports back in the 60s/70s. Or the various Crime Wave / Drug Crisis horror stories of the 1980s that seemed to inspire every low-budget TV thriller and family drama show.
If you’re not even alive as this stuff happens, it’s easy to get all the wrong information from elder peers who did live through it. Or just through the increasingly distorted retellings offered up by a media more keen on selling narrative than document the recent past.
- 2 days
GenXr here. The only people documented as cheering for the 9/11 attacks were the “Dancing Israelis”.
This whole story hinges on the claims of a nosy housewife calling the police on some people she mistook for Arabs.
Out of that report, and the eventual deportation of the arrested Israel men, came a cascade of increasingly embellished accusations.
It’s all just layers of bullshit.
- 2 days
That’s what Donald Trump claimed. He claimed to have heard people cheering, even though he was miles away at the time. He’s repeated the story many many many times, and his supporters are repeating him.
That’s what Donald Trump claimed.
It was a regular FOX News Channel allegation. Afghans were cheering, Iraqis were cheering, Syrians were cheering, Libyans were cheering, Gazans were cheering, Somalis in Minnesota were cheering, Hasan Piker was cheering, Zohran Mamdani was cheering…
Pick your “Muslims I Don’t Like” Flavor of the Month. They were cheering, I tell you.
I distinctly remember hearing:
There were rooftop cheers from a Muslim community in New Jersey.
There was cheering in Gaza.
That rooftop thing was a continual news cycle item for weeks. I recall it being debunked but none of the details.
- 2 days
Edit- turns out I’m a purveyor of propaganda. Ignore the myths I spouted below.
Pretty sure there are documented cases of Vietnam vets getting abuse when they returned. Spit on or or called Baby Murderers. This was before airport security so anyone could just hang out at airport terminals. Mai Lai massacre was real and publicized before the end of the war and you had veterans testifying before congress like John Kerry or throwing away their medals in front of crowds. The famous photo of the girl on fire was widely publicized, it won a pulitzer award.
This might not have been the norm or even super common experience of returning vets, but I’m pretty sure it happened to more than a handful.
Maybe others heard stories in bars and VA halls and remember the trauma vicariously, but the nation was deeply divided over the war. Kent State shooting didn’t happen in a vacuum.
Pretty sure there are documented cases of Vietnam vets getting abuse when they returned.
There are scenes in Rambo: First Blood and Platoon that included this event. But there is no notable actual incident or documented recurrence of it happening IRL.
I’m pretty sure it happened to more than a handful
Congratulations, you’re experiencing the Mandela Effect.
- 9 hours
There’s also no documentation of chibattas in Italy before the 80s, but 100% of people who traveled to Italy say they were around.
If it didn’t happen, someone was certainly going around saying it did.
