Some news that would be completely mundane today but scary or shocking in the past.
A convicted rapist (also charged with 91 other felonies) running for president, with as much chance as winning as the other guy.
Thanks for saying this. I bet most americans dont know that a convicted rapist was their president. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/19/trump-carroll-judge-rape/
I’m not an expert on the nuance of the US legal system, but “convicted” probably applies to the criminal system, right? What would it be in this scenario? A confirmed rapist? Just “a rapist”?
Still, the guy raped some lady and he’s actively running for president. That one would be shocking any time before the mid 2010s, honestly.
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Yeah, “civilly liable rapist” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it
Civil was the case that they gave me
What’s my motha-fuckin name? “Civil Suit Loserrrrr”
Well, that’s not so bad then… /s
They know . A huge chunk just doesn’t care.
I have family in the US (who are not trumpets afaik) and they wouldn’t know that he actually got proven guilty for doing it. They‘d probably assume he made a deal.
Isn’t it a civil trial tho and not a criminal trial? Meaning that the bar for evidence is just “more than likely” and not “beyond a reasonable doubt” right? I mean it’s still very damning but he has not (yet) been found guilty of the crime, just liable.
There is an important distinction of being “convicted” and “proven guilty” though. You can get off a conviction through multiple means, one being a mistrial and so on. I think there is no two ways about this after reading:
A judge has now clarified that this is basically a legal distinction without a real-world difference. He says that what the jury found Trump did was in fact rape, as commonly understood.
Was there a criminal trial, that ended in one of these other ways?
So in this scenario you’re back in 1923?
I’m pretty sure it’d be anything including the words “World War II”.
Bonus points if it also includes a date.
You might be able to streamline the process by saying “fears of World War III” and letting them fill in the gaps themselves.
I might find that reassuring in 1923, if the world makes it a full 100 years with only one global scale war. It’s a great run by historic standards.
Not really. Global Scale Wars were a unique thing back then. The Great War, the war to end all wars, was thought (hoped!) to be the only one of its kind. They had a lot of conflicts between major powers, but at least for the west, 17 million deaths excluding the spanish flu epidemic was a massive outlier.
Even the Mexican Revolution, listed on Wikipedia with an upper estimate of 3.5 million, wasn’t a quarter of that, and it wasn’t global. The last thing in the west that came (somewhat) close was the Napoleonic Wars with an upper estimate of 7 million, a hundred years earlier. China has had several massive death counts in various wars and rebellions, but that won’t have been very present to the average western civilian.
WW1 brought with it a slew of new developments in military technology and capability for destruction. For the world to have not just one, but potentially two conflicts considered at least on par with The Great War would be very concerning.
We should start talking about World War IV then
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. World War V will be fought with crossbows, World War VI will be lasers, and World War VII will be blowguns. I don’t know about World Wars VIII through XI. World War XII will use the same weapons as III, but will be fought entirely within underground tunnels. World War XIV will—Hey, come back! I have a whole list!
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. ~ Albert Einstein
Yeah, like in that Doctor Who special where they tell the WW1 soldier “Now let’s get you back to your first world war” and he goes “FIRST world war?!”.
Wasn’t it known as the Great War until after WW2?
And yes, I am fun at parties.
I am assuming they’d put two and two together.
On account of the number 2, and how all their male relatives have been dead for less than ten years, that stuff is probably pretty top of mind.
Especially if they have boys aged below 10 in the family
Few people would be surprised by it happening. They hoped it wouldn’t be for many decades but it was just known as the way future wars would go.
future telling is kind of a lame answer
“Man fired for criticising homosexuality”, or maybe “man imprisoned for refusing to hire black person”.
People are thinking about technology, but in 1923 people were very familiar with breathtaking technological change. The complete reversal of some social norms, on the other hand, would be almost existentially disturbing to these dudes who believe in the great benevolent Christian empires, and in some cases thought ending slavery was a mistake.
I have to wonder what the residents of the 1920’s third world would think. I’m sure there would be many interesting perspectives.
Those type of headlines upset way too many people today. It’s the point of the make America great again slogan.
The Titanic sinking kills five more
Lol, brilliant answer. I never would have thought of that.
Oh, snap!
Crackle, and pop.
Only the richest people have horses. Most just use cars.
That Germany is Europes biggest economy. 100 years ago Europe was fresh out of WW1 and Germany was bankrupted as punishment.
Mid 1930s that headline would also be quite disturbing
Mid 1940s it would’ve been a great laugh.
How pervasive surveillance and tracking of people (and their data) is in todays society. We’ve become accustomed to it but I’d bet people a century ago would be shocked at the idea of stuff like regular people being filmed from multiple angles when just going to the shops, having a device in their pocket constantly recording their location, receiving targeted advertising based on what information they’ve looked at previously, etc.
It wasn’t really that strange, people got tailed all the time during the nuclear weapons program and after, to make sure that they weren’t gay. Shit was wild in the early 50s. A senator committed suicide because his son was outed as gay, getting dirt on people was hardcore. People got fired on the flimsiest of claims.
Physical surveillance was pretty bad, even then. Digital surveillance has gotten worse today, but it’s much more fragmented and not so…eerily similar to the CCP. Also, fuck McCarthy. The book on this timeframe is a wild read, highly recommend it as it explains the postwar era and cold War paranoia.
https://www.amazon.com/Lavender-Scare-Persecution-Lesbians-Government/dp/0226401901
People were shocked about stuff like that in the eighties!
At risk of being a broken record, a reminder that OG fascism was cool and on the rise at that point. The surprise would be that you can opt out of all that stuff, people will just think you’re weird.
Most international experts consider the outbreak of a third world war unlikely in spite of global surges of violence
Not mundane, but the implications would be horrifying to 1923 society still recovering from “The Great War”.
And funny enough, still misleading about how soon the next one is. Nukes really changed the game (for better or worse) and they don’t have them yet.
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Quite a few people would be probably surprised that colonial empires are no more
as for headlines: British PM Rishi Sunak negotiates Scottish independence with First Minister of Scotland Humza Yousaf
also anything involving european union
in 1923 that idea was not really that shocking and already talked about.
The only known sentence that is fatal to white british men circa 1900.
Neocolonialism is alive and well though. Today we have more slaves making more products, than ever before !
Climate change, same sex marriage (though, perhaps not as shocking as some might expect, ditto anything trans related), potential mars colonization, coming off the heels of the Spanish flu, COVID news would probably freak em out. Ooh, the USSR being gone, and China being a world super power. The USSR would have been new to them, and it collapsing less than a century later would probably feel quite odd, especially if you could make them understand just how incredibly advanced the USSR got in such a short amount of time. Tons of stuff.
In the 1920s a state fresh off a recent regime change disappearing would have been extremely par for the course. You telling that to someone from the 1960s would probably have more of an effect.
I mean, if you showed them a map it’d look nothing like their current political divide. I’m not sure they’d be more shocked by the state of what then was Soviet Russia than by Czechoslovakia being broken up or the other half a dozen changes in Europe alone.
I’m Czech, and exactly 105 years ago (October 30, 1918) the approximately dozen nationally aware Slovaks met in an inn and wrote a letter to Prague that they agree to be part of Czechoslovakia as the “Czechoslovak nation” because they knew they couldn’t form a state on their own, and split off the hated Hungary. The 4 people who signed our “Declaration of Independence” 2 days prior needed someone to represent Slovakia so they went in the streets searching for a Slovak. Vavro Šrobár, a nationally Slovak lawyer who incidentally just arrived to Prague, came forth and signes the document, and became Minister of Slovakia a few weeks later.
The Republic helped Slovakia reach its industrial potential and gave its people democratic values (except for WWII, we don’t talk about Slovakia in WWII). Eventually, Slovak politicians wanted power so they broke off after true democracy was restored in 1989. The Velvet Divorce was so uneventful compared to the end of Communism that people did not really care at all.
So I agree that to informed people in 1923, Slovakia being separate a century later would be no surprise. However, the formation of USSR (which I know much less about) was pretty controversial and involved a civil war so they might be actually be surprised it did last 80 years.
On the other hand, the other changes you glossed over are quite significant, especially with Germany and Poland.
Yeah, that’s a fair point, they may be more surprised that either example lasted that long.
And yeah, like I said above, the entire concept of World War II would blow their minds, let alone the redrawing of maps worldwide afterwards.
Show them a time lapse animation of the countries borders as they changed in real time such that a second equals one month. Two minutes of “what the fuck just happened‽‽”
potential mars colonization
Yeah because we’re real close to doing that in 2023
Yeah because we’re real close to doing that in 2023
has been hyping Martian adventures only 20 years from now for… over 20 years now.
potential mars colonization
That isn’t a new thing to hype and there was even an actually-competent grifter of his time as the basis of it.
1923, virtually every capitalist country in the world had just invaded the USSR 5 years ago, Japan only pulled out in 1922.
The USSR being gone only becomes shocking post WWII when they went from an agrarian nation wracked by civil war and famine, with zero tractor factories to sending 100,000 tanks into Germany 20 years later to putting a man in space 20 years after that.
– “You can freely marry a Black person in most of the civilized world.”
– “Why would you?”
Most?
Probably all the climate change shit
Also if you told a guy from 1923 that the world’s most industrialized nation was China they’d probably accuse you of lying
And even nowadays they’d be right to do so…
Least ignorant liberal
What does it say on all your consumer goods again?
Taiwan, Germany, Canada, EU…
I take quality over slave labor and shit falling apart after a year…
I’m sure you don’t own anything made in China then. Canada, famous producer of consumer goods
Whatever little is actually made in Western countries anymore is shit quality designed to fall apart to make more profit just like everything else.
winnie pooh is pleased with your doing
Nothing never happened day:
WINNIE THE POOH TAIANAMMENNMEN 1989 CHINESE CAN ONLY DO BOOTLEGS
(totes not racist to show an Asian man with yellow skin btw)Can you do
SOCIAL CREDIT so we can do all the greatest hits?China is such an excellent test for how gullible someone is. So many people will believe any bad thing they read on the internet about it, no matter how absurd, and no matter how easy it is to disprove.
https://www.shanghaidisneyresort.com/en/entertainment/theme-park/characters-meet-pooh/
So there’s a whole fucking Hundred Acre Wood exhibit, Pooh and all, but I guess if you text someone about it Xi appears from under your bed and black bags you?
have you even seen the video of the thing that never happened?
You guys sure love your emoticons
You can buy groceries from a mechanical grocer, but it’ll accuse you of shoplifting like three times while checking you out.
while checking you out
I’m sick of those suggestive robotic winks, and the vulgar gestures every time I scan a banana
Many countries all around the world possess weapons that could obliterate an entire other country, or their own country if detonated by mistake, and possibly destroy the whole planet.
Well, I don’t think any of the nuclear countries are small enough to be obliterated by an accidental detonation. It would just but a nice hole in Nebraska or Omsk or whatever.
Perhaps Israel?
Israel wasn’t a country back then so it’s additional surprise
Yeah, that’s true actually. Assuming they have nukes like everyone thinks.
South Africa being the most progressive country in the world, in that regard, may be a bit shocking a well
Brexit would have confused a lot of people.
