Can you feel it? It's all culminating into something huge.

And you were in Montreal! Try living in Chicago, a cornucopia of Civilian Secondary Targets.

Geez, the OP should look at the maps published on the front page of the newspaper showing the radii of various sorts of destruction from a single 20 megaton blast over the Loop. And then imagine trying to absorb its meaning when he was a little kid. Maybe he’d not get all worked up over NOTHING.

Starting a war because of some pirated media? Really?

These kids today.

Why, back when I was your age, we had real things to worry about. In the 1980s, Reagan was going to wake up from a nap and press The Button (possibly by accident) and start The Big One. Really.
Before that, Iran was holding American embassy workers hostage. We expected one of our maverick military leaders to start a shooting war over that, as they tried to cowboy in to rescue them. Luckily (?) the helicopters broke.
Before *that *we were going to have a real class and race war in the US.

And you are worried about some recorded music and movies. Geepers.

When I was in 6th grade all of the teachers in my school had long, serious talks with the classes of 4-6 graders (we had a shared area) about how we all needed to go home and do anything we could to get our parents not to vote for Ronald Reagan, because he was going to start a nuclear war and kill us all. My 6th grade teacher, possibly the most evil and hateful teacher I ever had, also told us that if we didn’t convince our parents to vote Democratic for “Congress” then if Reagan was elected no one would be able to stop him, and we were all going to burn in nuclear fire. She even passed around civil defense books that showed us horseshit like how to build fallout shelters from couch pillows and how to recognize the 7 stages of radiation poisoning (IIRC, there was a page on how to dig a proper grave to prevent rotting corpses from spreading disease). Somehow, none of us either told our parents, or had parents who cared.

Election day came and our elementary school was the polling site. My mother commented on all the children’s artwork which lined the walls while waiting in line to vote, which was the result of “class projects” which had us draw how Reagan was going to basically roast humanity in the atomic ovens. Kids liked drawing mushroom clouds, so my only real memory of the posters was every single hallway lined with giant Crayola images of stick-figure Reagans and mushroom clouds.

Part of me wants to be charitable and believe these cackling middle-aged ignorant-assed hens really believed this, but the cynical side of me says their local NEA was behind it. Or perhaps not - I mentioned this event decades later to friends who were the same age as I was, who grew up 200 miles away, and was shocked to find out that they experienced the exact, same thing: teachers holding study sessions for how to convince our parents to vote Democratic to keep them from becoming human candles lit by the nuclear flame.

Unlike Iran, the USSR leaders were rational. Oh, North Korea too.

I lived through the Nixon era. I don’t think things were near as bad then. Much of the dissent then came from a hand full of young people. Today, both the Tea Party and government employees have wide support with Occupy a third front. We lack a common consensus of what constitutes decency.

The internet allows kooks of all stripes to find one another and work together.

Look, humanafterall, most people are against pirating media. I know you live in a bubble of Redditors, but in real life, most people think pirating is stealing. You should get out more.

Kim Jong Il was rational :confused: ? As for the Russians, well, they were near pathologically paranoid. Not that they didn’t have a good reason to, since you really *were *out to get them.

Funny. I was in high school in Canada and some of the teachers were spouting the same shit about Reagan. It actually had me worried, because, you know, teachers were supposed to know what they were talking about.

It’s probably something you ate. Better run to the bathroom now!

Except that most people also think it’s totally fine to make mix cd’s, download a song or two, and so on. It’s the kind of thinking that gets you dry counties bordered by a solid line of liquor stores.

Little things cause little problems. Big things cause big problems. (Or in organized pirating’s case, medium things cause medium problems but that’s not as catchy.)

Well, nobody’s going to man the street-barricades with a hunting rifle over that.

Iran’s leaders are religious nuts, but they’re behaving rationally if you try to understand what they’re thinking and what they want to do. Keep in mind: these people were revolutionaries decades ago, but now they’re old men who’ve been running a country for 30 years. They’re not in any hurry to get themselves blown up. What they do want is to increase their own regional power and prevent other countries from thinking about messing with them. Is that more nutty than holding a country hostage in exchange for food aid while telling the population that the leader just played golf for the first time and shot eight holes in one? I guess that’s a matter of taste.

We have heard all these things before, to the extreme you have people standing on street corners saying that all the signs are right and the end of the world near, usually with a accept Jesus angle in that. My take is that’s a reflection of what is going on in their own life. The person sees everything happened all around them, all the signs, but they are projecting signs of their own life onto everyone else, causing the ‘world is ending’ trait, instead of your world ‘as you know’ it is ending.

And for many it is ‘the world as you know it’ that is coming to a end at this point, usually it is time to let go of the past patterns and embrace change, once they do it and are comfortable with change they usually do OK if not outright prosper.

“may you live in interesting times” is not a curse for everyone, though I do understand the context, but it is the beginning of living for many who are ready.

I lived through the Cuban missile crisis, where the Soviet Premier said the US blockade of Cuba was “an act of aggression propelling humankind into the abyss of a world nuclear-missile war”.

By comparison stopping software piracy doesn’t bother me at all.

I was once as young and as hopelessly naive as yourself. It’s a disease you just have to let run its course, I guess.

So, if pirating media is the beginning of the Apocalypse, does that mean that all of us who don’t care what a torrent is will soon be Raptured up to the great big iTunes in the sky?

OP is way off the mark moaning about the current situation, but all the ‘you young squirt we lived through Reagan and the Cuban missile crisis and the cold war and blah blah blah’ advocates are just as bad. Try being born In Uganda with AIDS, to a mother who died in childbirth and a father hacked to death by militia-men, with the possibility that you’ll die before your 10th birthday. Even if everyone’d died in a nuclear apocalypse, at least you lived a relatively good life up 'til then. 1st world problems for 1st world people

Pffff. Try living in a shoebox in the middle of the road.

You have a SHOEBOX? Luxury! I only wish I had a shoebox.