Billy Joel - We Didn't Start The Fire (Official HD Video)

What people said

somenameforme · 2022-05 · Reference

Consider the early 20th century. Some ostensibly irrelevant political figure was assassinated which rapidly spiraled into the "war to end all wars" in which about 20 million people were killed, in a world population of 1.7 billion - so more than 1% of people. In relatively short order this led to the Great Depression in which over 10 years the global economy collapsed leading to mass suicide, starvation, and disorder. And we were just warming up. After that it turns out that the war to end all wars was just the pregame show. An eccentric vegetarian artist with a knack for riling up crowds decided to declare a literal genocidal war on the world, and for some time it looked very much like he was going to win. It only ended after another 80 million deaths (about 3% of the world population this time), the deployment of nuclear weapons, and countless war crimes. And then? Decades of people got to live in the great times where every day there was a real and legitimate concern of imminent nuclear war (which did nearly blast off multiple times) to the point that nuclear drills were a part of the classroom, and people building their own nuclear doomsday bunkers was not only not eccentric but just plain ole pragmatism. The point of this is not just to emphasize that the past was unimaginably and exponentially worse than the present in every imaginable way, but rather that there was no widespread mental health collapse. And there was no "shielding" kids from anything, when the world was

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oramit · 2022-01 · Joke / meme

Another comment somewhere else in this thread mentioned 2008 and the bailouts for banks, bankruptcy for the public, as the place we should look at. With big society wide trends like this it's impossible to have a clear cause and effect. It's all a muddle which is why I've listed a few different ideas all of which contribute in their own way. Covid is such a unique situation though and I think it will serve as a clear turning point where preexisting trends were shattered and others were turned up to 11. But ultimately, we didn't start the fire, but we can try to fight it. [VIDEO]

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kongin · 2021-09 · Joke / meme

That's because you were young and had no idea what was going on. A hilariously depressing exercise is just reading old news paper headlines from whatever decade you want to pick and seeing what the world was like then. I've yet to see a decade where the average person wasn't a hairs breadth away from dying in various unpleasant ways, some musical accompaniment: [VIDEO]

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