What's a time when someone predicted something correctly, but was ridiculed at the time?
What's the biggest case of "I told you so" in human history?
Washing your hands before surgery is a good idea
Not directly related but I always remember the surgery with a 300% mortality rate, during the civil war ( I think ). Amputated leg doctor knicked himself and his helper. All died of sepsis.
Correction, not the doctor who died, but someone watching who died of shock.
Life is utterly bonkers sometimes.
Nuke it! Why? I told you so? .. ... I said so then do it!
Wdym?? Youre telling me that sepsis isnt cool??
“Are you stuck in the dryer sepsis?”
Joseph Lister washed his hands 🎶
Is that who Listerine is named after
Maybe it's him. Maybe it's Listerine.
Lister didn’t develop Listerine, but it was named after him
Listerine was invented by 2 guys from St Louis, one of whom the airport is named after.
What sucks is, the Romans were pretty aware of infection prevention and had sterilization practices in their hospitals, ie. Applying high heat to surgical implements. This knowledge was lost among all the other insights and technologies that disappeared with the empire.
It's almost like humans go through cycles of learning things and then deciding to ignore science, leading to millions of unnecessary deaths until they learn it again...
One of my favorite historical facts is that Jews had a high survival rate during the plague because of bathing and hand washing rituals.
It is insane how long it took them to figure that out. Especially bc 4000 years ago ppl were seemingly better at practicing hygiene before surgery then they were in the late 1800s
Cigarettes causing cancer or Spanish Flu second wave.
I still can't believe people still smoke. Literally suicide
NICOTINE IS AN ADDITIVE SUBSTANCE
It is also addictive
Makes my head feel funny 😄 (and addiction)
The story of Alfred Wegener comes to mind. He proposed continental drift in 1912, but experts laughed him off. Years later, plate tectonics confirmed his theory!
Reminds me of the theory that earth was not in fact the center of the universe. Proposed circa 230 BC and again in 1543. Took another hundred years to escape the Church's censorship.
Yup. Aristarchus proposed a heliocentric model and was basically laughed at. Probably better than Bruno's fate.
John Adams worried that “a division of the republic into two great parties … is to be dreaded as the great political evil.
Powerful
I was thinking today how different the US political system would be if there was preferential voting.
When they reassured Europe that Germany would not start another world War after the first one!
Well guess what!
The Challenger Explosion.
To many issues reported and ignored. Then after the explosion happened, they said it was all due to “miscommunications” when evidence said otherwise. They just wanted the rocket lifted up in the air.
R.I.P. to those who lost their lives and the trauma and loss the families and friends had to go through after witnessing their death.
It wasn't just the families and friends traumatized; kids all across America watched it on live TV!
I’m one of them. They gathered us all in the gym to watch it on three TV’s spaced among us. (Only about 100 kids at that school.) we all just watched in shock and the teachers were equally as shocked. Nobody did anything for the longest time and then finally, a teacher turned the TVs off and told us to go back to our classrooms. I do not remember what happened after that, but I imagine our teachers talked to us about it.
I remember that. I was in 2nd grade.
Yep, we just went back to class like nothing happened.
We watched it from outside here in Florida. When the smoke happened everyone kept staring at the sky like an answer was going to come. No one knew wtf happened at that point.
“Staring at the sky like an answer was going to come” beautiful visual of the human condition
I was one of them. I think that’s our generation’s “The day JFK was shot”. We all remember where we were.
I was sick that day, at grandma's house, and watched it. I'm not sure there are any other tragedies I will remember where I was for, except that and 9/11.
Titanic, for that matter.
it caused a huge culture shift in NASA apparently, yet still sick and twisted that it took fatalities for that to happen
Most safety rules and procedures are written in blood.
Except for Cole's Law. That's written in cabbage.
Well kind of. Columbia pretty much demonstrates the command structure at NASA was pretty f’d.
As a millennial who grew up learning about the Challenger explosion in history books, I always thought things like this were behind us, like we’ve learned from history, and the next millennium will be a golden age for humanity. This was the 90s and everything was so optimistic…. Then 9/11 happened. Then Bush declared war on Iraq in 2003. I remember gas prices skyrocketing from $1/gal to over $2/gal. Gas stations now required you to prepay at the pump. A decade of inflation later, the 2008 Housing crash. I just graduated college. Couldn’t find work for a year. That’s when reality set in for me that the promised days were all gone.
probably Churchill warning Chamberlain about Hitler lying to him
Sokka-Haiku by TheUruz:
Probably Churchill
Warning Chamberlain about
Hitler lying to him
Remember that one time Sokka accidentally used an extra syllable in that Haiku Battle in Ba Sing Se? That was a Sokka Haiku and you just made one.
it’s crazy how little people understand about WW2
Can you expand?
That Chinese doctor (Dr. Li WenLiang) who warned the public about COVID being able to to spread between people in early 2020. He was silenced and later died from COVID.
Dr. Li Wenliang
There were other early whistleblowers too, one of whom was a journalist (Fang Bin) who livestreamed himself expressing his fear that the authorities were coming for him and then the moment they did. He was jailed for 3 years
Another was a journalist (Chen Qiushi) who camped out at the Wuhan hospital filming trucks and trucks of corpses pulling out going to the morgue. He was disappeared for months until finally being released and he fled internationally
There were so many more
The tragedy of the whistleblowers… they were heroes of this world
Yes and now 2 Boeing airline whistle blowers have died at a young age.
I’m out the loop. What’s going on with Boeing?
Boeing has quality issues with their planes and silences any employees that reports those issues
Dad: “Dont marry her she’s an evil bitch”
Me: “I’m marrying her…”
Pretty sure I alone made the biggest mistake in human history
My mom tried to warn me/scare me off my first boyfriend and I told her she was just trying to lay all the bad stuff guys did to her on his shoulders which was incredibly unfair to a teenager. A couple decades+ later and not only are we still going strong but he is an amazing dad too. TOLD YOU SO MOM.
Admiral Yamamoto trying to tell the Japanese government there was no way they could beat the USA in a war.
"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." - Eisenhower
And this is why I say Eisenhower was the last good President we had.
He was a Civil Rights advocate, he formed NASA he use a gentle quiet hand to move things along and took very little credit.
Myth busters proved women do fart
Some of the worst farts I ever fell victim to came from women. It was the fart of a pregnant woman that made me pull over on the side of the road to vomit once. It was rancid.
The single loudest belch that I've ever heard was from my sister when she was about six. We were at a local pizza buffet, and we were the only two sitting at the table at the time. I wasn't exactly paying attention, but looked up in the nick of time to witness it.
She had a straw and was tickling her throat with it (don't ask me why, she doesn't remember this) and just a split second later, she pulled it out and belched at a store-encompassing volume. We were as close to the middle as we could have been and every single person in the restaurant was looking at us wide-eyed.
It was actually pretty funny in retrospect.
I'm a guy but one time I was at a somewhat fancy dinner at someone's place when I was about 18. I thought I needed to use the bathroom. The bathroom was in the next room. I sat down and had a wall shaking fart.. Nothing but hot loud air.. somehow echoed off the toilet like a tuba with perfect sound amplification. I've never heard anything like it again. Could have been a record loud fart for all I know. When I came out people asked if I was okay... Never had a fart like that again. It was something you'd expect out of like a parody movie.
My sister is now 30, a professional adult woman who wears high heels 9/10 times I see her, and every day to work. She's gorgeous, and never leaves the house without a full face of makeup.
My husband has known her since she was 17, and he is lucky enough to still remember the girl who would rattle the walls with her belches. You could hear her all the way upstairs in her bedroom, even when you were downstairs in the living room with the TV on.
And I just know that if I were with someone who only knew the adult, fully-polished version of her that she shows the world, they would never believe me. But because it's him, and he's known her since she was a gross teenager, he knows 😆
because they hold them in for years
They proved it for pretty girls only.
Yah us ugly chicks would never
Haha if i could laugh. (I have a ex-wife you’re secret is out) or you’re not really ugly.
My nephew (23) to this day said if there was anything I taught him of my own endeavor, is that chicks do fart. I have stood a little taller since he told me that. I can’t figure out why it is such a secret. We can’t let that be taken from us. Stand proud and just let that flatulence out. If it is in a public setting it will get blamed on the dude closest to the occurrence. I have a true story to back this statement. There is an art form to keeping the same facial expression before and after. As I was advised, no one would ever believe someone that pretty would commit such a ghastly act.
Not true, girls don't fart
The Confederate States believing the King Cotton theory.
Save me a Google and explain??
"King Cotton" is a slogan that summarized the strategy used before the American Civil War (of 1861–1865) by secessionists in the southern states (the future Confederate States of America) to claim the feasibility of secession and to prove there was no need to fear a war with the northern states. The theory held that control over cotton exports would make a proposed independent Confederacy economically prosperous, would ruin the textile industry of New England, and—most importantly—would force the United Kingdom and perhaps France to support the Confederacy militarily because their industrial economies depended on Southern cotton.
Roger Boisjoly and Al McDonald both warned 51L would explode for a very specific engineering reason but were overruled by NASA/Thoikol committees.
It blew up for that exact reason.
Churchill was mocked pretty harshly for his warmongering against Hitler.
Until Hitler had to Hitler.
I seem to remember there was someone who told General Custer not to attack at the Little Bighorn.
I could be wrong, was that the guy infamous for overthinking and being paranoid? Didn't he think it was some grand scheme to divert him when he stumbled upon information about enemy movements, or am I thinking of someone else?
I went on a Google search for a name, but I didn't find anything. So, unfortunately, I don't have any documentation for it.
I.P. Semmelweis trying to convince doctors to wash their hands because the “invisible particles of death” were spreading disease has got to be on the list, surely….he was laughed at and committed to the asylum
He noticed that women who were attended by midwives during labor were less likely to die than those attended by doctors. Which seemed backwards, so he investigated. While yes, doctors could perform some incredible procedures, the midwives kept the delivery room spotlessly clean, and washed their hands thoroughly and frequently. Under the nails and all.
But no one wanted to listen to him.
If I recall there were doctors going directly between the morgue and the birthing suites, resulting in higher infant mortality rates. He was showing direct evidence of this but everyone was offended at the idea that doctors, who were “gentlemen”, could be dirty. I had to do an assignment on this era once and let me tell you, this guy was really done dirty by everybody
You're absolutely right. Doctors went from wards of contagious disease straight into surgery, from the morgue into the delivery room. Midwives, however, were more specialized, so they were generally only dealing with pregnant women, infants, and new mothers. And washed their hands.
Ego has been the single biggest problem with medical advancement, across centuries. Even today, you have doctors refusing to use checklists because it's insulting... and then they forget something that should have been on the list.
Drs typically have problems listening and believing woman
Copernicus, Kepler, and a number of other scientists and scholars and observers who were ahead of their time about planetary motion and were persecuted for their correct beliefs
All the people who warned against Hilter & the Nazis.
French army adopting bright red pants before WW1.
It's gonna be a bit too long to fully type out but easily how Dr. John Snow discovered how Cholera was tied to the drinking water in London
Brexit being colossally stupid and putting Britain in a much worse situation than it was at the time.
Many of the the yes voters still think they were right - there is literally no evidence that would prove otherwise since they did not rely on logic in the first place. Even immigration is worse now - around three quarters of a million people last year, amidst a housing crisis.
I don't know much about british politics, but what were the supposed benefits of breixit? Is a referendum to re-enter the EU possible?
We wont ter tek our sovrinty back from them foriners
The leave campaign was basically a bunch of outright lies, for example, stating that we pay billions to the EU each year and that money would go directly to the NHS which obviously never happened.
Even little things like they said the EU forced us to change the colour of our passports and if we left we could change them back to blue. At no point has the EU ever stated what colour a UK passport should be and we could have changed it to any colour while we were in the EU 😆
Mainly though, it was down to bigotry and the sentiment that we were being overrun by Polish and Romanian immigrants taking all the jobs.
I don't think there were ever any real, tangible benefits. Any advantages were wishful thinking.. I mean, pursuing trade deals with America or countries the other side of the world... absolute madness!
When you put that way it does sound like a bad deal.
Nigel Farage also said as part of the deal the NHS would receive a payment of hundreds of millions of pounds to improve its services. He later admitted this was a lie to get people to vote for Brexit and there was never any money.
Aristarchus gazed at the stars and planets and noticed an anomaly in the sky. Some planets managed to change their direction of movement and perform a little loop in the night sky at certain points. He made models to try and explain it and proposed that the Earth and planets must revolve around the sun. For centuries before this, people believed the world revolved around the Earth. And for centuries after, the old theory prevailed.
Aristarchus proposed his theory around 230 BC. He was treated like a heretic. In 1543, Copernicus wrote about his 30-year-old theory that the Earth is a planet and revolves the sun along with them. People who agreed with him are treated as heretics.
It wasn't until 1610 when Galileo found moons around Saturn that he was able to convince more people that planets revolve the sun. If a planet that isn't Earth can have moons, that means there are things that don't revolve the Earth. Galileo was placed under house arrest by the Roman Inquisition.
It wasn't until Newton built on another mathematician's work and used gravity to explain the force that causes celestial bodies to revolve around others. This was in 1687.
It took around 1900 years for Western humans to adopt what Aristarchus showed with his models that replicated observations anyone could have made.
treated like a heretic
>230 BCE
What does that mean in the context of 230 BCE? At most people would be mildly miffed but as long as he made the right sacrifices no one would give a shit. The loop thing was well-noted before then. The word “planet” means “wanderer” in Greek and the model proposed by Aristarchus was one of many made by scientists trying to make sense of the world. His work was lost to medieval Europe and was more forgotten than despised.
And the thing is the earth-centric Ptolemaic model stuck around because the math made more sense. It wasn’t until Kepler realized that the orbits were elliptical and not perfect circles that the heliocentric math started mathing.
Anyway, it’s really easy to see the history of knowledge as a straight line from darkness to light, but even when it takes a generation to die off most people will eventually accept the observable phenomena around them. Some times and places are more tolerant than others, but there are always people who want to know the closest to the truth regardless of what that means. Sometimes the information is incomplete and you end up wrong but for the right reasons.
Galileo is up there
The guy who said that ulcers were caused not by stress, but by h. pylori bacteria. He was almost disbarred from medicine entirely at first. We'll, guess who was right all along.
Wasn't he the guy who proved it in rather spectacular fashion by infecting himself, showing the ulcers, and then curing himself?
And at the time, the three top-selling drugs (or maybe 3 of the top 4) were proton pump inhibitors - ulcer meds. Weird huh?
The people who claimed that Covid wouldn't become a problem.
I remember thinking “This shouldn’t last more than a couple months!”
Haha same here. I got sent home from work with my laptop on March 13, 2020, and they were like, Just work at home for a couple weeks! We should all be back in by April!
4 years later, I'm still working in my PJs
I was pretty excited to not have to wait tables for awhile. My mental health wasn't good from doing that work for 15 years, I had never been happier during the lock downs. Going back and having to wear a mask made all that turmoil come back 10 fold nit to mention people became more of a nightmare to deal with.
What’s funny is humanity did this twice. Our Neanderthal selves reacted the same exact way with the pandemic of 1918.
“On January 25, 1919, approximately 2,000 members of the "Anti-Mask League" packed the city's old Dreamland Rink for a rally denouncing the mask ordinance and proposing ways to defeat it. Attendees included several prominent physicians and a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.”
They still think they were right
Yup. We’re paying badly for it now
They still say masks don't work. 100 out of 100 surgeons would disagree.
Well, I've got it right now, not super fun if you ask me
The only problem is what we did, not what covid did.
COVID killed over a million Americans.
And caused long term issues in more than that, including 2 of my kids.
Yeah... but covid wasn't spreading itself. People were refusing to shelter in place, refusing to wear masks, even not washing their hands. People are dumb.
I remember reading about it back in Dec 2019... just a blip on Slashdot I think... of a concerning outbreak in the Wuhan province... I was like "oh shit", because it had all the hallmarks of something nasty.
Randy Brown was the parent of Brooks Brown, a classmate and friend of the two shooters at Columbine.
Randy Brown saw the threats one of the shooters was making online, went to the police, and the police did nothing.
The guy who said Japan would attack us in 1941
Told ya
“This time when we deregulate the banks they will be responsible. They’re doing well with this derivative market and things can only improve as we head into 2008.”
Not sure if it counts but Hitler attacked Russia in winter after Napoleon learning the hard way.... That's kind of a big "told ya"
No, he attacked in June. He just assumed he could blitz his way through, like he had with France, and wrap things up before winter hit. The Russians dragged things out until Old Father Winter handled the rest for them.
And now putin thought he could blitz Ukraine.
Aw, they'll never get rid of ROE, you are just exaggerating!
Yamamoto telling the Japanese military how attacking America would go, being ordered to carry out the attack anyway, and then things went pretty much how he said it would go.
Zimbabwe seizing land from foreign farmers knowing full well the local farmers could not sustain the agriculture necessary for the population of the country simply following in the steps previously demonstrated by literally every socialist country in the history of the world....
Venezuela: Hold my beer. Not just seize farms, but tell the urban poor we've given the farms to what to plant, and those are chosen based on some national pride.
Basically everything the Allies did after WW1 despite people telling them not to. Germany, Hitler, the Middle East… they kinda fucked up all the way around.
Genghis khan saying" Pay me tribute, or I'll burn your city down. "
Don’t fuck with Americans boats.
This guy Fat Electricians!
John O'Neill repeatedly warning the American government about terrorism, al-Qeada, and Osama bin Laden, before retiring from the FBI to be the head of security at the World Trade Center and dying while rescuing the occupants of the tower he worked in after it was bombed. Around the same time that he took the WTC job, while talking to a friend, he was quoted assaying, "They'll probably try to finish the job", meaning bomb it again after the 1993 incident.
Global warming
Yup and it'll only cost us everything
Nearly my entire immediate family (all adults, educated and reasonably intelligent in other areas) don't believe in global warming. I get ridiculed if I bring it up. I've stopped trying.
My older brother has a plastics engineering degree and works as a plant manager for a company that makes stuff from plastic. I'm afraid to bring up the environmental impact of plastic with him.
Tell him that microplastics and nanoplastics are in most foods people eat (especially seafood), and in any liquid stored in a plastic container. Plastic has been found inside more than 50% of plaques from clogged arteries. Plastics have also been linked to thousands of preterm births.
I already know that stuff. It's about maintaining a relationship with a family member whose livelihood, and those of my nieces, currently depends on plastics.
Wait, we’re all dead now? dammit
6000 years of recorded human history to draw from, and half the comments are about the current American president or the last one.
The Supreme Court overturning Roe vs Wade after Trump appointed three Justices. Practically every liberal political pundit, reporter, and news organization said so. Same thing applies to all the conservative states going after pregnant women who seek out abortions, anyone who's LBTGQ, and anything else that doesn't smack conservative.
Up next! Reversing the right to birth control stay tuned!
Full on Handmaid's Tale if we let them keep going
And the right to no fault divorce
That's on many state legislatures dockets!
Toss in Trump's first impeachment for extra credit. Susan Collins , a Democrat, voted not to remove Trump from office because "I think he learned his lesson". A few months later Trump was impeached a second time for disrupting the peaceful transition of power with his Jan 6 coup.
Edit: a correction
Susan Collins is a Republican from Maine, she's not a Democrat
Thanks for that reminder, I forgot.
This November we need to Roe, Roe Roe the vote in the states where abortion rights is on the ballot
it was to uphold states rights 🙄🙄🙄 definitely not to bring back the horrid law from 1880. maybe it was a whole plan or something, gee i don’t know
Leave The Atom Alone...
Me to my friends when they told me we'd never have an actual lockdown during covid
Obesity is a disease of poverty.
That's been known since the early 20th C. Religious and political domination of obesity research has just made people sicker and sicker.
People stopped vaccinating their kids, now we are getting outbreaks of diseases we had more or less controlled for years.
Yep! Measles was largely eradicated until the damn anti-vaxxers started doing their thing. Then kids started dying from it again.
In recent memory, Trump warning Europe not to get too reliant on Russia for energy and telling them they needed to rebuild their militaries.
I forgot about this shit.
Every single conservative justice calling Roe vs Wade settled precedent and then immediately overturning it as soon as they possibly could. Alarm bells were tried to be rung and we were told we were overreacting hysterical snowflakes and how bad would it be anyways if it was returned to the states? The left was fed complete bullshit and told to like it
We had three Supreme Court nominees lie to Congress, flat out. It’s simple really.
The covid-19 pandemic in 2020.
Every major Medical professional advised caution. Every one of them was mocked, intimidated and threatened into silence.
We didn’t learn from our bad decisions in 1918. As a result, millions more died needlessly despite medical science’s ability to protect us via vaccination and via preventative steps we knew would reduce spread of disease.
It could’ve truly been the undoing of most of the world. And yet we refuse to learn still, allowing politics to overrule and invalidate the advances of medical science.
And it’ll happen again, the next time we have one. Because we never learn. And we never admit that we never learn.
Churchill to Chamberlain
Regarding how to deal with Germany during the time leading into the second world War.
Chamberlain promised "peace in our time" Churchill warned, " you think by choosing dishonor you will have peace, but you will have dishonor and war." (And that is not the exact quote but close)
Wasn't there exactly one prominent economist who predicted the Great recession of 2008, while practically every other economist insisted that the opposite was going to happen?
Hilary's warning about Trump being Putin's puppet.
The Germans invading Russia in the winter
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Me warning my red state fam about the previous Prez.
They probably still think they were right though
Al Gore promising Manhattan would be under water in 2017.
it will soon be Trump
AI will end us before global warming.
Yuri Bezmenov
Chernobyl
“I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” - Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who planned the attack on Pearl Harbor.
AI will be out of control
I told my husband if he keeps smoking cigarettes he will get bladder cancer! He didnt quit--6 weeks stage 4 cancer--he died.
Tim warning Arthur about the Rabbit of Caerbannog
Maybe not the biggest, but up there: Markopolos warning SEC about Madoff multiple times.
Julius Ceasers Wife begged him to stay home the day he was killed
Drake the self proclaimed “Certified Loverboy” being accused of running a human trafficking ring by Kendrick Lamar. Loverboys (also called Romeo pimps) are human traffickers who usually operate by trying to make young girls or boys fall in love with them over a lengthy period of time in order to exploit them sexually later on. Drake has been doing suspicious things with underaged girls for a long long time (receipts ) so to finally see it out and addressed is a major I told you so from everyone who’s Been calling him extremely suspicious but was shut down for so long.
50 cent calling out Diddy
Mitt Romney telling Barack that Russia was a problem. Barracks response was, "The eighties are calling and want their cold war back."
Brexit?
Climate change, still ridiculed even as we are seeing it in real time. Fouled water, pesticides, additives to plastics, airborne chemicals, extreme weather; corporate has done a number on people.
And then there are the flat-earthers ... did these people ever get through elementary school?
Pretty much everything P01135809 did
the earth is round. you said it and got executed or sent into jail. now its common knowledge. cant remember the dudes name who first said it and got treated like a fool but he had the biggest i told you so
John Snow and germ theory. Poor guy was hated, but he was right.
OJ did it.
Jan 6
Ross Perot warning so called free trade and NAFTA would lead to a massive loss of jobs.
I'm gonna be that guy. All the thousands of people who died from not wearing masks and getting vaccinated during COVID.
In the US, we're almost to 1.2 million directly from COVID. Don't even get me started on excess deaths.
Nuts to think about all the people who died on the side of the road because an ambulance couldn't make it due to all the covid transports. I live next to the closest trauma center to Navajo Nation on the Arizona side. I remember a time when your never saw the sky without a helicopter moving covid patients. People from all over were going to the local hospital or transported from ours to another one. I only bring up Navajo Nation because it was such a crisis there and you just couldn't move people that far with ground transport.
I’ll also be “that guy.” Covid didn’t get enough of them.
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