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Quark Bee @quarkbee.bsky.social · 13h

anyway, this is a still of Günter Schabowski accidentally ending the Cold War during a live news conference

grainy image of the most boring looking middle aged white man in the world, in a boring grey suit, seated at a microphone during a news conference, looking a bit confused in his reading glasses as he looks down at a handwritten note he is reading from

Quark Bee @quarkbee.bsky.social · 13h

- it could have ended in a bloodbath, but a lot of the guards were ultimately just ordinary young people themselves

I think that's the key point: ***they saw themselves as part of the same group of people as those they were supposed to shoot, so they chose not to***

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Quark Bee @quarkbee.bsky.social · 13h

and word spread like wildfire and people just got up and walked or drove up to the border, and the first thing the border guards knew about anything was when thousands of people showed up at the crossings demanding to be let through because Schabowski had said they were free to go

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Quark Bee @quarkbee.bsky.social · 13h

the whole sequence of events of that day is mindboggling: basically, a government official fucked up on live TV by accidentally saying that a decision to allow free travel taken by the regime was to appy "immediately", when it was supposed to have been implemented gradually

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Quark Bee @quarkbee.bsky.social · 13h

not only did they not use violence - they ended up lifting the barriers to let people pass, because they were overwhelmed with the sheer number of people, who they recognised as their peers

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Quark Bee @quarkbee.bsky.social · 13h

the East German border police didn't shoot anyone on November 9th, 1989 - despite it being part of their job to use whatever force necessary to prevent people from leaving without all the necessary permits

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Quark Bee @quarkbee.bsky.social · 1d

(just lemme get my damn reading glasses first)

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Quark Bee @quarkbee.bsky.social · 1d

nah - what WILL happen is that one day very suddenly all the damn writing on packaging is going to be too fucking small

and the perimenopausal rage will fire up with the glorious power of a thousand blazing suns and you'll gain the superpower of invisibility and together we shall burn shit down

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Quark Bee @quarkbee.bsky.social · 2d

can't wait for clients to wise up and just replace the "big 5" with ChatGPT right from the get-go

like, if the world is going up in flames I at least wanna see some dipshits cry because they can no longer afford their ski lodges

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Quark Bee @quarkbee.bsky.social · 4d

no, I haven't followed any of her recipes but her content has reminded me how much I like tofu when it's properly seasoned and then fried until crispy, so I am eating that more often now

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Quark Bee @quarkbee.bsky.social · 5d

you mean the skinny young German lass who puts cumin, garlic and paprika in literally *everything* and then goes "pepperrrr"?

I quite like her, and some of the food she makes genuinely looks like it tastes good.

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Quark Bee @quarkbee.bsky.social · 5d

autistic people are going to be next

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Quark Bee @quarkbee.bsky.social · 5d

literally what I was going to comment, too

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Quark Bee @quarkbee.bsky.social · 5d

urgh I have only seen like two or three short clips from the oevre of Mr Beast but it was enough to give me a visceral reaction whenever I see him mentioned or pictured - that guy has BAD JUJU and his degree of success genuinely terrifies me