And when they perform raids, they should be required to shout “This is a F.A.C.T. jack”! Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

  • elephantium@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    11 months ago

    Technically, all times are unprecedented since we don’t repeat years!

    The times we’re living in? Definitely tumultuous, definitely not unprecedented. Political strife? There are obvious comparisons being made with the 1930s or the 1850s. Covid? The Spanish flu ravaged the world a century ago. Drug legalization? How about the end of Prohibition?

    It turns out that a lot of people really just like shouting “unprecedented” because it makes their speech sound more dramatic.

    • Hylactor@sopuli.xyz
      2·
      11 months ago

      Well, there’s more people now then ever. The environment is either at or past an irreversible tipping point. Every year being either the coldest, the hottest, the wettest, or the driest in recorded time. We have too much CO2 and not enough potable water. The ice caps are melting, the choral is bleaching, the sea is rising, and bugs are on the ropes. We’ve got fascism problems in basically every country simultaneously. Not to mention there is frank discussion about not whether or not there are aliens, but what about them should be declassified and discussed with the public. Our terrestrial telescopes can’t see shit because of the sheer volume of satellites blanketing the night sky. And we’ve got cascading humanitarian crisis being captured in high definition and beamed to our 24 hour pocket sized global information machines, but all anyone seems to care about is what genitals you pledge allegiance to.

      There may be precedents for these times, but they are the type of precedents that immediatly precede a global cataclysms. If anything your average person is not being dramatic enough.

      • elephantium@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        climate change, tipping point

        Yeah, fair point. The bit about “coldest, hottest, wettest, driest” is pure BS, though. I need receipts if you honestly believe that, but I think it’s just an ill-considered rhetorical flourish.

        fascism problems

        Definitely not unprecedented.

        aliens

        OK, now you’ve lost me. I’m not terribly interested in going into conspiracy-theory land.

        • Hylactor@sopuli.xyz
          1·
          11 months ago

          The 10 warmest years in the historical record have all occurred since 2010.

          https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-temperature

          In July, David Grusch, a former intelligence official, testified that the U.S. government was holding nonhuman bodies taken from U.F.O. crash sites, that the military is misusing funds to cover up a “U.A.P. crash retrieval and reverse engineering program,” and that people had been injured in efforts to conceal these operations. He also alleged retaliation from his superiors for previously making similar claims. The Pentagon has denied the allegations.

          On Friday, some lawmakers saw tantalizing hints in Mr. Monheim’s presentation that there might have been something to Mr. Grusch’s claims and, while the rules of a classified briefing barred them from actually repeating what they had learned, they suggested the inspector general had found some of the claims credible. Which ones? No one would say.

          https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/12/us/politics/ufos-aliens-classified-briefing.html