#10

You should ask Francis Fukuyama!! :crazy_face: lol

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#11

I’d say history ending is fairly unprecedented!

There may be some application of a Kurzweil curve here though, because while history hasn’t ended it feels as though it’s speed is increasing exponentially. Of course, it’s impossible to adequately determine that from a viewpoint placed in the epoch you are assessing - events are always occurring but which will be viewed as ‘historically relevant’ in the way that we see history from our vantage point is impossible to say. Basically, this sums it up:

:man_shrugging:

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#12

I don’t know, you had the Kosovan air war then. Things got really scary for a moment

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#13

Yeah I’m not up on the Uigur situation but I don’t doubt it. I think at any time you’ll find a part of the world where it must have felt like armageddon- anyone who’s been to Sarajevo has probably been in tears at the thought of what it must have been like to live through that. Thing about now is it feels like you have some massive fucking players ready to kick off - apart from China, you’ve got Trump in the US, Putin in Russia, and if they draw in a bunch of other little fires around the world things could go south pretty quickly, especially given the prevailing nationalism that seems to be resurgent every fucking where.
But you never know, there’s a lot to lose as well and that may act as a brake. Cuban missile crisis probably felt like the beginning of the end of the world at the time.

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#14

The perils of big predictions!

#15

We’re always in unprecedented times. Lot of shit going on in 1999 as well tbf:

China started restricting internet use
Clinton nearly impeached
Amadou diallo, unarmed black man, shot dead in nyc, by street crimes unit
Kosovo war
London nail bombings
India and pakistan at war - come close to nuclear war
Columbine
Pakistan military coup
Putin becomes acting president

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#16

Ok then…mid 97 to mid 98?

#17

And the year before all that you had ol’ Bill Clinton bombing Iraq during the Lewinsky scandal.

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#18

Last episode of Seinfeld

#19

…four days around November 1997-February 1998?

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#20

Brief simmering of the Balkan Wars, but yeah bombing of Iraq. Asian financial crisis in 1997

#21

My mum was a kid at the time - at the height of it her whole school were taken out into the playing field, headmaster told them a lot of people might die and then they all prayed. Must have been absolutely terrifting.

I lived in pretty much constant fear of nuclear war as a kid in the 80s too.

#22

:man_shrugging:

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#23

Same, joined the Nuclear Disarmament Party at the age of 12 or something. Chernobyl didn’t help even though it wasn’t really anything to do with nuclear weapons. Then they give you so much dystopian fucking fiction to read as a kid, I swear the first three novels I ever had to read for school were I Am David, Bridge to Teribithia and Z For Zachariah. Holocaust, death and nuclear holocaust. Somehow avoided The Diary of Anne Frank but it was on the curriculum.

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#24

Yep. For me it was when the wind blows, threads and brother in the land.

Vividly remember all the disasters that seemed to be happening every few months in mid to late 80s too:

Challenger
Piper alpha
Herald of free enterprise
Hungerford
Kings x fire
Chernobyl

Then all the worries about acid rain and ozone layer…

Havent even mentioned general grimness of life under thatcher - my dads job constantly being at risk… yeesh.

#25

Reckon @eltham cracked it first try with sometime in the late eighteenth century

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#26

I’m going with April 1954

#27

At least we dodged that bullet, with a Labour government from 1983-1996. I remember the night they were elected, my mum alternating between unbridled laughter and tears of happiness, ringing all seven of her surviving siblings to share the joy and rub it into the one Liberal voter among them. Bob Hawke had been persona non grata a couple of months earlier when he’d knifed the incumbent Bill Hayden but all was forgiven now.
But by the end of the decade as I was getting ready to finish school, mortgage rates were 17% and youth unemployment was over 20% and things were looking grim. It’s actually remarkable they held on until 1996.

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#28

wouldn’t say it’s been that long but can’t really nail down a date.

#29

forgot about this, all-timer headline

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