Here’s a thread for SDMB posts proven wrong by history.
I’ll start with one of mine that I noticed today when I was looking for something else
Oops…
… This one comes to mind …
… and one might even argue the case that in the long run it will age well, but for the time being, I am getting disappointed on a nearly daily base…
I think nearly any hopeful political prognostication of the last 20-ish years will have aged badly. So far.
Many of the pessimistic ones have aged badly too. I recall a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth about how impossibly awful Bush-2 was; the bar could never sink lower than that. My, how the scales have been ripped from our eyes.
No doubt - but mine was really wrong
I started the “Compendium of Horrors” thread in P&E shortly after the 2024 election to try to summarize the horrors that Trump would likely inflict on the US and the world based on the gross incompetence demonstrated in his first term and the general messaging of the campaign.
It was a pretty pessimistic screed, but in retrospect it was incredibly naive in the extent to which it underestimated just how horrifically insane, lawless, and incompetent this regime would be. I could never have believed it could be this bad. Every single senior appointee is a criminally unethical and incompetent toadie, and the Orange One himself appears to be in the grip of dementia.
This thread would probably be fine in the pit, but i doubt it’s going to be okay on MPSIMS.
@Andy_L , please DM me if you want this reopened in the pit, or if you have a vision for it that we can clearly articulate that will keep it here.
Moved to the pit, with the permission of the OP.
I sometimes see old threads I contemplate bumping because of just how outdated they are. Here’s one that I searched down yesterday before I came back and found the thread closed:
Oh, wow! Your thread about camera phones is from 2004 and I didn’t even get my first cell phone until 2005. I rarely ever used the camera on my Motorola Razr but these days I frequently use the one on my iPhone. Predicting the future is hard.
To be fair, I don’t think it was. Because Trump had two nonconsecutive terms, he didn’t really “swap out” a VP; at least not to the extent that his VP was fired or had to step down. He just picked a different person to run with him the second time he ran as non-incumbent.
It’s more like someone running for office twice, and each time having a different VP. Which has happened since the mid 20th century. When Nixon ran in 1960, his running mate was Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. When he was elected in 1968, he ran with Spiro Agnew (who then became VP when Nixon won).
If Trump had chosen a different VP than Pence when he won in 2020, that would have certainly been remarkable, but I don’t think it was at all remarkable when he chose a different running mate in 2024 after he was unsuccessful in winning reelection with Pence.
I Pit Over the Top Anti-Trump Hysteria
As more and more time goes by, it becomes more and more apparent to me that there is no “over the top” to go over. LOL
Which is itself an over-the-top statement, but discussing that risks turning this thread into yet another one of those threads. Nothing in the OP of the thread you linked to has happened since then, so it’s a bad example.
The closest is that Trump threatened a nuclear war (or at least strongly hinted at it) but backed off faster than you could blink after he got pushback from everyone, even his biggest sycophants.
To be fair, Aeschines owned up to it in in that thread.
“The opera ain’t over till the fat lady sings.” — Ralph Carpenter
Oh, I don’t disagree with you at all! I’m not saying that any of that is out of the realm of possibility, not with this administration at least. It’s at least certainly not beneath them. It’s just that none of it has come to pass yet. It’s hard to say that something has aged poorly when (at least so far) it has been accurate.
Is it scary to think that any of it could plausibly happen? Absolutely fucking terrifying in my opinion.
Thanks
P.S. It’d be too easy to pick on the various posters picking now-past dates for the end of the world