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Harsher in Hindsight/Real Life: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
* September 11. As you've seen above, the September 11th attacks in 2001 left a lot of ill tastes in a lot of media. Even having a birthday on that day is considered a downer (cf. [[wikipedia:Ludacris|Christopher "Ludacris" Bridges]]).
** [[It Got Worse|It gets worse.]] Americans actually ''backed'' (re: funded, armed, and trained) some of the people who would eventually become the Taliban against the Soviet Union when they were fighting in Afghanistan. ''Yeah''.
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* "Hitler indicates only one way out of the over-population of Europe, primarily of Germany, and that is the East. (...) The Nazis are against assimilation but not against annexation. They prefer the extermination of the conquered 'inferior' peoples to their Germanization. For the time being, fortunately, [[World War II|this is only a matter of hypothetical conquests]]." [[Leon Trotsky]] on [[Adolf Hitler]]
* ''War of Machines'' contains the line "Japanese scientists further advised their government that neither the Germans nor the Americans could possibly deflect enough of their productive resources to a bomb project to have a weapon [usable] in the current war."
* During [[World War One]], the Entente frequently propagated lurid stories claiming that Germany and its allies were committing genocide in its occupied territories. They were, but nowhere near the level that they were accused of being, which ironically led to most dismissing the entire issue out of hand, and thus [[Crying Wolf|when the same accusation was made three decades later, not a lot of people believed it.]]
* An American journalist, [http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,764628,00.html Eugene P. Lyle Jr.], wrote that by 1938 a defeated Germany would rise again to start [[World War II|a war of "monstrous proportions"]]. This was in 1918, ''two months'' before the end of WW1 (which caused everyone to forget about the article, according to the link). Clearly, this guy was one [[Genre Savvy]] propagandist.
** He wasn't alone in this prediction, either--the list of people who expected this to happen (especially at the end of [[World War One]] as the peace was negotiated) is sufficient and push it through this trope and into wondering how ''un''[[Genre Savvy]] you'd have to have been to think it really ''was'' going to be the War to End All Wars.
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* [[Sarah Palin]]'s "Take Back the 20" website showed crosshairs over various states, including the very district in Arizona Gabrielle Giffords was elected for. A fundraiser event for Gifford's opponent, Jesse Kelly, featured shooting a fully automatic M15 with Kelly. Then Mrs. Giffords was shot in the head...However, she survived.
** Just for the record, defenders of Palin's map claimed that they were surveyor's symbols, a common element of maps. Compare [http://bigjournalism.com/files/2011/01/Picture-910.png surveyor's symbols] with actual [[wikipedia:File:Reticles vector.svg|crosshairs]]. [[Your Mileage May Vary]] on which side is more truthful, [[Rule of Cautious Editing Judgment|notwithstanding that this has nothing to do with the man who shot Representative Giffords]].
* Related to the above note, a blogger had stated that Giffords was, "dead to me", just days before her shooting [http://twitpic.com/3o7s5c
* In January 2001, Oklahoma State University basketball coach Eddie Sutton aired a broadcast of his regular OSU Basketball show, which opened with a CGI plane flying over an open field. The guest was OSU point guard Nate Fleming. The show ended with Coach Sutton thanking the OSU donors who provided the planes to transport the OSU players and staff to and from various road games. However, on the return trip from the following road game, one of the planes crashed in a field, killing ten passengers, including Nate Fleming.
* The fact that [[Demi Lovato]] has been criticized for being 'larger' than the average Disney star, when in reality she actually has an eating disorder.
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* In her book, "Forever Barbie", author M.G. Lord remembers cross-dressing her Ken and Barbie dolls in order to cope with her [[Tear Jerker|mother's Breast Cancer treatment and later death]]. When she took her old dolls out again, she found Ken dressed as [[Wholesome Crossdresser|Marlene Dietrich, Midge as a preppy male,]] and Barbie dressed as more "[[Tomboy and Girly Girl|Martina than Chrissy]]. (Barbie wore a tiny tennis skirt, but it was under Ken's sweatshirt)." Her logic being [[Break the Cutie|"Femaleness, in my eight-year-old cosmos, equaled disease; I disguised Midge in men's clothes to protect her."]] The reference made was to Tennis player [[Lesbian Jock|Martina Navratilova]]; the fact that in 2010, Martina Navratilova announced that she was fighting a treatable form of breast cancer, makes the 1994 book a lot more acute.
* [[Leon Trotsky]] wrote in 1936 that "Stalin... seeks to strike not at the ideas of the opponent, but at his skull" Four years later...
* Ernest Rutherford used to say "All science is either physics or stamp collecting." Half a century later, specifically nuclear physics largely turns into collecting of exotic high-energy particles, i.e. metastable artefacts - which ''is'' potentially important for understanding of nuclear reactions (just like the equivalent in chemistry - study of free radicals - is necessary for better understanding of chemical reactions), but not as much of digging into foundations of the Universe as the pop science press would make it sound - and even this gradually slowed down.
* Another from Rutherford:
{{quote|'''Ernest Rutherford''': [[HAD to Be Sharp|We don't have the money, so we have to think]]. }}
** Fast forward to 2016 (mind you, as recently as the period of active development in computers and software MIT was one of the keenest and most productive crowds - the place where [[UNIX|GNU]] and many other great projects were born):
{{quote|'''Richard Lindzen''': Remember this was a tiny field, a backwater, and then suddenly you increased the funding to billions and everyone got into it [...] Even in 1990 no one at MIT called themselves a ‘climate scientist,’ and then all of a sudden everyone was. They only entered it because of the bucks; they realized it was a gravy train. You have to get it back to the people who only care about the science. }}
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