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Comment by dsfyu404ed | Hacker News Reader

>as a kid I heard it more than once, but now few admit the scare existed.

People very rarely admit to backing the wrong horse that. Nobody will tell you they sold AAPL and MSFT stock in the 90s. Nobody will tell you they believed the racist propaganda back in the 60s. Nobody will tell you they believed Iraq had WMDs in the 00s. Nobody will tell you that they believed the people who were saying Long Island would soon be under ice in the 70s.

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There was like one story in a popular science magazine once that got a lot of play, and many people heard about it because it's a vivid story. That's about the extent of it.

Climate change deniers also keep it alive because enlarging it validates their distrust of scientists.

It was more than one story. PBS programs and other sources ran with it.

Notice that i'm careful to say it was the media, and not sound science.

No, the stories also made it into Newsweek and Time, which were pretty much the dominant credible news weeklies at the time, circulated to many millions of households. It's easy to look back now and say that was just sloppy work with little impact which has since been overblown, but I remember some academic authority figures in my young life taking the idea seriously a decade later as a result.

It was delivered with an imprimatur of authority from multiple sources and left an imprint for a long time.

I certainly advocated for action in Iraq in the early 2000s. I have a naive world view, informed I guess by a lot of 90s American media output, about America saving the world, Iraq was one of those opportunities.

I they hadn't totally botched it post invasion, maybe it would have worked too.

But let's see, tell 800k armed angry men they are out of a job and tell them to "go home, please don't steal any AK47s on your way out, mmmkay thanks goodbye go home and be a good boy now"

That was definitely one of the bad ones, but I think the root problem (which continues to this day) is that US foreign policy somehow manages to blend black-and-white moral histronics with an extremely shaky grasp of morality. The US can't work with moderates and pragmatists because anybody who's less than a pro-US liberal is beyond the pale, and it can't work with idealists because it spent the whole GWOT trumpeting about its torture program.

Would love to hear what you think about the Ars Technica article linked in another reply to GP, and how it relates to what you and GP said.

I always figured it was a Y2K style "experts make narrowly scoped statements and journalists blow it out of proportion and make it look like the world is ending" type panic. The article doesn't really look into that side of things other than to say it happened.

They didn't address the popular media of the day, only what science was really saying.

Scroll down to "This journalist wrote a story, and you won’t believe what happened next"

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