I once assumed that small incremental environmentally conscious steps in how people lived, worked, and played were inevitable. I'm talking smaller, more energy efficient, and safer vehicles, vegetable protein substitutes in place of industrialized meat products becoming generally accepted and even the norm, and I even had naive presumptions about some imminent expansion of mass transportation because it simply made more economic sense.
But that was all before I learned the power of 
"russia isn't going to invade ukraine, this is just nato paranoia to make the population anxious"
that aged like fucking milk
i posted that like a day or two before they rolled tanks across the border lmaoI still can't believe it. The only way it makes sense is if Putin thought he was going to end it in a week and was surprised when he didn't, and now I'm personally convinced that all postwar military strategy is basically worthless in the face of modern man-portable anti-tank and anti-air weaponry.
ikr
it looked like an obvious endless quagmire to me
and i'm a fucking idiot lolEven if Putin had occupied most of Ukraine I feel like it still would have been a quagmire just more of a CIA counterinsurgency quagmire (this was actually my day 1 prediction for how things would go)
I mean I'd say it's been a bit of a drawn out quagmire so far, shit's been brutal and I'm still surprised Russia has had the stomach to deal with it
when Zelensky started talking about acquiring nuclear weapons in the week before the invasion I think that kinda sealed it
I know I was wrong, but look, the approach I took to come to that conclusion has led me to be right about the last 10 similar things
MLism in action
i say this as an ML
(though i am veering wildly towards MLM tbh)Tbf it wasn’t even my MLism that brought me to that conclusion, it was just “Assume the US State Department is always lying”
I didn't post much about it because I thought it was that empty a threat.
"Russia won't invade Ukraine. Macron has multiple talks with Putin to diffuse tension and even the Ukrainian president Zelensky has called on the US to stop saying Russia will invade Ukraine. Are you saying we shouldn't trust the judgment of the president of Ukraine?" - Me the week before Russia invaded Ukraine
Boy did was I wrong on multiple accounts lol
I mean, IDK, Russia withstood the sanctions, NATO is running out of weapons to send, and dollar hegemony is waning steadily.
fair
though there will be a pretty much endless "insurgency" funded by the "international community" for decades to come
I was expecting maybe some escalation like sending some troops in Donetsk and Luhansk but not full scale war.
In hindsight I think leftists give anti-US powers like Russia too much credit sometimes just for being anti-US, they're just awful bougie states in the end and are gonna do evil bougie shit.
I thought for sure they were just rolling tanks into the Donetsk Oblast on a "peacekeeping and protection" style of operation, and that we were seeing a repeat of the Russo-Georgian War. No fucking way they would actually start a large-scale war, right? This is just typical western propaganda, blowing this way out of proportion. They can't be right about tank columns moving on Kiev, that must be Ukrainian tanks that some excited AP reporter accidentally reported as Russian. I lost a lot of influence among friends who usually wanted to know my takes about world events.
At first I thought it was going to be nothing, but my final pre-invasion prediction was that there was going to be an escalation in the Donbas (Russia annexes the republics, maybe goes for complete control of their respective oblasts, but overall that it would remain localised... and then Russia just did a mad dash for Kiev and I knew I'd been completely wrong
That there would be any kind of real response to COVID. I took it seriously the moment it entered the US because it showed how infectious it is. Was taking precautions the moment it did and was fine with my semester being cut in half for the lockdowns. For all the BIG GUBMINT conspiracies of the past 20 years on the right, when given a perfect opportunity to respond to a crisis the US pretended to care for a few weeks and then threw the workers to the wolves for treats. It was a big moment of jokerification when I realised how little would actually be done and that the only alternative to Trump was the party ratfucking the only candidate who wanted to give me healthcare during the biggest pandemic in a century.
I still have this saved from back then and it pretty much sums up how I thought things were going to go
Show
Close, except it's "See? It wasn't so bad! We overreacted!" on the red line.
I remember smugly declaring (during the GW Bush years) that Texas will inevitably go blue within 20 years due to demographic trends.
Tbf population wise it has, they really ramped up voter suppression though
I actually had an (American) colleague travelling around the world right at the beginning of 2020 when shit was starting to go down, he was seriously considering just flying back home and cutting his trip short.
He was in India when I told him that it was just another bullshit media scare virus that will blow over in a few months. Don't worry, just enjoy your trip.
Fortunately he did not heed my advice.
I never thought that Russia would actally invade Ukraine - and when the American intelligence started saying that Russia will invade I took that as confirmation that Russia was not going to and I doubled down.
I posted that video of the truck approaching the bollard filmed from different angles and never hitting it to a thread about the situation and they invaded some time in the next 3 days or so.
Yeah I went kind of hard on this one. I also maintain that it won't lead to WWIII so I guess we're fucked.
I still maintain that even in retrospect that was the right stance to take: everyone claiming it would happen were the same people always claiming bad country would randomly attack wherever. They were just not reliable sources at all, they had every reason in the world to lie, a track record of lying constantly, no track record of ever not lying, and there was no reason to think things were gonna be any different this time around.
I mean, the reasoning for why it wouldn't happen, because it would be a stupid war that would ultimately undermine the Russian state domestically and globally, was solid. Turns out Putin is just another world leader.
I thought we wouldn't see macro-scale effects from global warming for another 20-30 years. Oopsie.
I thought the same in the early 2000s. Then statistics showed me the error of my ways in 2005-2010. In terms of variance and heat extremes etc. it was a bit earlier noticeable tbh, which I didn't know. Looking back only a minority of political reports I got is talking about effects in 2020, most are like 2035-2050 or even later.
I thought Trump had the 2020 election in the bag (granted this was earlier in the year but still). In my mind he'd found the perfect strategy, just keep pumping out stimulus checks with his name on them and secure an easy victory... and then he fumbled it
He was dumb af and stopped negotiating for another stimulus check until after the election. Imagine a world where checks are going out 3 weeks before Election Day. The amount of tactical fumbles that man is capable of is unreal
I thought the dems would get stomped a lot harder in 2022 than ended up happening, mostly due to Dobbs and abortion
also think it's because republicans went all in on transphobia and it's really not popular (not saying the American population is pro trans rights generally, just apathetic)
to be fair...
Russia's strategy was to try to do one quick and decisive push to the capital, to take it over in a week, and they nearly did exactly that. They just got stalled out with fighting at Kiev, and their logistics suck shit and weren't set up (or frankly even capable) of keeping their field army supplied for anything beyond a few days.
I thought the 2010s were going to be the decade where the acceleration of computing and depth of programming would make self-driving cars less dangerous than human-driven cars.
Thought Turkey would actually keep blocking Sweden from joining Nato.
Turkey got a ton out of it though. I think many people here are a bit idealistic in terms of what they think is possible and what not. States do barter all the time.
Turkey got new F16s, a modernization of its fleet, and it also got Sweden to criminalize the PKK and since it is Turkey we talk about, also the HDP and others. Including support for Rojava (which is now 11 years old btw).
Basically Turkey traded NATO membership non-veto for continuing to keep migrants and asylum seekers out of the EU and more control about its excursions into Syria.
I thought that after the US pulled out of Afghanistan, the opioid epidemic would mysteriously taper off.
Now it's a synthetic opioid epidemic instead.
I didn't think Roe v Wade would ever get overturned because it was too big of a single issue voter fundraising tool for the right. Though I guess they didn't need it anymore after going all in on killing trans people instead.
You should have been right, lol. The GOP should have never let that happen. They forgot that holding red meat in front of the hogs is what drives votes, not giving them the meat.
In highschool around 2013, a bunch of my friends told me to get Snapchat but I didn't because I thought it would be a short fad like Kik Messenger
i also did this one. in my mid 20s now tho and no one I know uses Snapchat anymore so ig i was kinda right?
I thought that Rojava and some SDF forces would continue receiving support and that Turkish engagement with kurdish groups would be prevented by NATO actors. With Syrian under Assad creating a semi-stable state in which the east gets a quasi-autonomous region in trade for taxes and secured region, which might have led to Assad being replaced in skewed elections, he himself for political reasons living out his life in peace in Syria, Swizz or alike and a bit of spending cash.
