Are old people just inherently retarded or what?

Are old people just inherently retarded or what?

Other urls found in this thread:

youtu.be/m6U9T3R3EQg
youtube.com/watch?v=K2QAMqTgPKI
youtube.com/watch?v=pnh7x8aU26g
vimeo.com/channels/1055902
m.youtube.com/watch?v=Nzd_VE-bfhA
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov
twitter.com/AnonBabble

They thought they could just ride it out and listen to the government like in WWII

Everyone else who could help them is dead or unable to get to them, and they thought they could believe what the government told them to do and survive.

It was the pre-internet era, and they were poor and old and there was a fucking nuclear war. What would you have done?

STOP SAYING THAT and fucking delet this

In fact, they were hyper aware of everything that was happening, and were going through the paces simple as a matter of staying civil and organized. And indeed they survived longer than most anybody else.

Briggs based them on his own parents.

I definitely see that. They remind me of my own grandparents, who are from the east Scottish countryside and also lived through WWII. It was a different time.

When the Winds Blows was also partly a damnation of the British informational services about nuclear strikes.
The instructions that these seniors followed were actual advice on a war pamphlet distributed in the UK at the time.

As you can see, they were grossly uninformed about the nature of nuclear fallout and made terrible decisions that exposed them to lethal radiation poisoning.

just finished this movie, sad fucking stuff man.

It's meant to be a general critique of war time propaganda during World War 2 and the Cold War and you could probably argue British philosophy in general, pointing out how general public was uniformed and the only advice they've usually been given and been raised with is to basically just put up with it and maybe things will get better.

It's basically one giant "Fuck you" to pic related.

Old people have about as understanding as toddlers(2-3 year olds). Parts of the brain just degrade over time.

These. It's not about the incompetence of the characters, it's about how laughable the government's reassurances to people that there was anything useful they could do in the event of nuclear war were.

If nukes drop on or near you, especially in a densely populated island with nowhere else to run like the UK, the vast majority of ordinary people are fucked. That would have been what the government would have said if they were being honest, but obviously they couldn't say that because it would have been admitting how irrational nuclear war would be and therefore that pretty much all governments of the world are run by psychopaths.

No they were optimistic because they were intentionally misinformed by their government and expected that things would work themselves out if they did everything right.

The whole reason why Nuclear War is so terrifying is that there is no surviving it. The pamphlets were propaganda designed to keep people like them from freaking out. Painting your windows isn't going to prevent your white cell count from dropping to zero once you start breathing in the fallout and a cellar door isn't going to prevent you from being vaporised if you happen to be within the blast radius.

why you gotta make me sad Sup Forums

Alright then smart guy tell me this, where exactly are they supposed to go?

This is a scenario where everyone but them is supposedly dead. The whole town is destroyed, so they can't drive out of their and even if they could they're already contaminated with radiation.

So their options are to sit there and unknowingly die of radiation poisoning or head out into the fresh Mad Max apocalypse world and then eventually die of radiation poisoning

The point of the movie is the irony that they were prepared and survived the blast but none of it mattered. No one can prepare for that and there are no winners

just watched it and I feel like shit, sad but good movie

anyone know of movies like this?

>no surviving it
Please, that's not any less bullshit. They got radiation poisoning because their makeshift shelter was made of doors and pillows.
Substances like lead, concrete, dirt, sand can potentially provide adequate protection against radioactive particles if you build the structure properly

you mean more movies that will make you feel like shit but are really good?
maybe the plague dogs?

Would your grandparents be able to whip up such a shelter in a week and with no help?

It was a satire

True, but they're super old and had like 3 days to prepare and no reason to doubt the government, so for them, yeah, pretty much screwed.

This is partly true.
Bunkers buried underneath at least six feet underground are capable of blocking nearly all radiation.
Problem is that the radiation lasts for years and years, and most bunkers are equipped for a few weeks of life.

ITT: Sup Forums proves to be a board full of underage b&'s

The whole reason why this movie is so heartbreaking is the fact that they (or at least the guy) are fully aware of what's going on and that they have no chance of surviving.

Yes, because everyone has the money and space to build a nuclear bunker, or the raw materials just lying around.

Especially in fucking England, where most ordinary people's houses look like pic related, and don't even have a garden let alone a basement.

Most people already have basements, that's half the work done right there

That ultimately depends on how far from the blast you would be, at a certain distance fallout is pretty much the only concern and that dissipates in a week or less

IIRC the old couple even has a basement but chooses not to use it because one of them has breathing problems. They seriously underestimate what a nuclear bomb is because it's nothing like the bombs they remember.

its just a reminder that we're living in a world where war has moved from the battlefields to the cities held hostage by weapons of mass destruction

the mid-eighties were an especially dire time because, while government propaganda about nuclear war being survivable was nothing new, governments being run by people who actually BELIEVED that propaganda WAS new and scary as fuck. Reagan in particular horrified the soviets so bad they actually felt it necessary to add a dead-man mechanism to their nuclear deterrent just in case he really WAS stupid enough to think WW3 was winnable (joke's on them, dude was a potato and in charge of nothing)

we are good at that

How did they even survive? Wouldn't that blast have obliterated them and their house instantly?

It was a weirdly unprecedented time that we haven't really left.

Here's the stuff the BBC actually put out youtu.be/m6U9T3R3EQg

As you can see none of it is really going to help. But what's the government supposed to do? It has to at least seem like it's informative. It has to at least convey a little hope

If the government had actually combined the cold-war era fearmongering with the truth of "by the way if nuclear war occurs all civilization is 100% doomed," chaos would have broken out. They had to lie and pretend it was no big deal, they had trapped themselves in a corner.

Even a 25 megaton bomb won't do any direct damage if you're any farther than 25 miles away from the impact site

I still wonder what the fuck they were smoking when they came up with THE WORLD'S MOST SINISTER FUCKING SIGNATURE TUNE for videos designed to reassure people.

youtube.com/watch?v=K2QAMqTgPKI

Obviously they didn't want people to panic, but wouldn't have being honest about the reality of a nuclear blast acted as a good deterrent against it? There would probably be fewer war-mongers if they knew the damage a nuclear bomb would actually cause.

The original video to this came out when I was a kid, and it scared the shit out of me.

Fuck, I just realized that's the wrong version, this is the one with the Protect and Survive audio clips:

youtube.com/watch?v=pnh7x8aU26g

A nuclear war is winnable though.

Please, define the victory conditions, Dr. Strangelove.

I guess if "winning" counts as decimating an entire population and making the land uninhabitable forever- then yea. can't have wars when you're enemy is like, obliterated

For Britain, the setting of this comic? Because we were really little more than an airbase for the USA, and in the event of a nuclear war between the USA and the USSR we would have been obliterated. The Soviets had more than enough nukes to spare to destroy or irradiate the entire country completely.

What all that filling containers with sand or earth and place around your shelter stuff for? That can help against heat and impact if the bomb should go off closely but outside of direct vaporisation zone to you- but against the fallout? That is dust, not speeding bullets and the most of the radioactivity can even be blocked by a piece of plywood, danger comes mostly from directly absorbing or especially consuming by eating or breathing in the radioactive material. Don't build thick walls, make sure that the dust cannot enter your rooms!
So why waste peoples' times with that advice instead of telling thme to make their homes hermetically sealed?

Destruction of the enemy, and the continuation of Nation.

The land wouldn't be uninhabitable forever, that is propaganda. Casualties upon yourself are acceptable, with the destruction of the enemy. No your entire population would not be decimated, and largely the enemy would be defeated, and you would survive what they throw at you. Their means of war would be unable to act after the first strike. Doesn't even need to be a full-scale exchange, a limited exchange is more than enough to win. Afterward, your economy and state would continue, battered but would still continue. Also there would be no nuclear winter.

That is an acceptable loss, even still the nation would largely survive.

A nuclear bomb was a new thing for them, how could they know what would happen?

Holy shit how is this allowed? If a fire starts in even a single one of those then the whole block could be wiped out.

They were built during a time in UK history when fires were seen as a necessary force of nature to keep the working class population under control, like forest fires.

Brick walls. It's actually pretty rare for any more than a single terraced house to be affected by a fire. They're no more dangerous than apartment blocks, probably safer.

Also they were mainly built during the industrial revolution, when nobody fucking cared about things like fire safety.

>telling thme to make their homes hermetically sealed
Because then you get idiots like that guy in America who sealed his home too tightly and it killed his wife and children in the night, over the idea that Al-Qaeda would terrorism his home in the suburbs

Here's the thing, government officials honestly didn't give a shit about millions of people dying from radiation poisoning because they could all hole up in nice bunkers and keep launching nukes until someone won the war.
It was a "fuck you, got mine" situation.

Someone get this guy a Tic-Tac-Toe set, he needs to understand.

Britain has a thing for setting itself on fire.

Hey, that was back when our houses were made of wood.

Like America.

>wood
*vinyl

You don't win at tic tac toe. Nuclear war is winnable though.

That Beautiful Day one.

Tic-Tac-Toe ends in deadlock, with everyone out of moves and no winner, build up with no resolution.

Nuclear war ends with mutual destruction, it's very easy to fuck over the other player, but not to keep yourself from being fucked over by the other players. You can kill the other, but it takes just long enough that there's no real way to stop the other from killing you.

Well thankfully for us all the people in charge of these things happen to disagree with you and your armchair

The question is not one of surviving comfortably, but barely keeping enough elements of state and society alive to continue. That is possible.

They actually did care about fire safety and many terraced houses are built to higher standards than new builds today.

In the UK brick is used as dividing walls rather than dryboard and wood. It's also been a building regulation for decades to have 'fire walls' in lofts to prevent fire spreading that way. It's incredibly uncommon for fires to spread in terraces.

to what end

Continual survival of state and governance and continuation of your nation with your largest rival removed. Of course, you'd also have to target South America, Africa, Asia as well, hitting their centres of production and population to ensure you maintain equilibrium and prevent economic dominance in the post war era.

Who would want to live like that

That's not winning by any definition of the word, that's just making everyone else lose so your loss is more acceptable

Sounds like an amazing future for the world. I think I'd hope to be vaporized as close to one of the bombs as possible.

This. I've seen fires in terraced houses and usually you'll have one gutted out house while the other houses on either side might have some smoke and scorch damage, but are otherwise fine.

People in the past were well aware of the dangers of fire and such and planned for them. In fact, a Victorian firebrick is usually of much higher quality than modern bricks; I helped out an electrician trying to install new wiring in a Victorian terrace and he blunted three drills just trying to get through the brickwork because it was built at the same time as a nearby railway embankment and used the same bricks.

It achieves the end goal of removing the threat of an enemy nation and surviving with enough assets to ensure some form of continuation. I never said it was good, or that it was the optimum solution. I merely supported that other user's assertion that a nuclear war is winnable. It's still awful and to be avoided. But it is winnable. Not to mention Reagan's comment was a limited nuclear war, ie upon initial exchange, both sides head to the negotiating table.

I'm not supporting nuclear war. I'm just saying it's winnable.

At some point in that the global fallout wouldn't result in any kind of nation to govern.

There's the 1984 British movie Threads, link below. I don't think we Americans have made a nuclear war movie as unsettling as this one.

vimeo.com/channels/1055902

Usually having a basement or going to a bomb shelter in a public building is enough, since its only really the gamma rays which penetrate everything, and those have a pretty short half-life. Theres a common misconception that fallout is a giant tsunami-wave of radiation when its actually all the tiny speckles of debris getting irradiated, so its more like a swarm of invisible fireflies with small radius of radiation. Both alpha- and beta radiation are easy to block but the first one is super-dangerous once ingested.

It all depends on the winds and how much radioactive particles and dust fall on top of your house or your hideout. Unless you get really unlucky, you should be okay. The REAL challenge in surviving nuclear fallout is having enough food and water for 2-3 weeks at least. Thats something a lot of people can't afford in a short notice.

The Day After was pretty bleak.

I think that's down to a combination of knowing we'd be fucked (see ) and the experience of actually having our cities bombed during WWII.

This is probably a generalisation, but I feel like for a lot of Americans war is something that happens elsewhere, whereas in Europe people were actually having the shit bombed out of their homes by an external enemy, something that hasn't happened to the US yet (at least not in the modern era of warfare, the Civil War was a very different time).

americans were told duck and cover would save them, same thing would happen

>it's a "I'm 16 and I'm an immortal genius because I have pink hair and a sleeve tatoo" episode

>The instructions that these seniors followed were actual advice on a war pamphlet distributed in the UK at the time.
But didn't they misread the pamphlets?

>Bloggs' earlier book Gentleman Jim offers a reason for Jim's completely supine approach to officialdom, establishing him as an unusually pure example of a Failure Hero. In it, we see that Jim's job is a lavatory attendant. Bored of being this, he decides that he wants a better job, and after going through various options which are hopelessly unrealistic for a poorly-educated middle-aged man, (including "Exec-tive", because executives drive cars where the "gear stick is always in a little leather bag" and Jim would love to be able to drive a car, "even without the little leather bag"), he decides to become a highwayman who will rob from the rich and give to the poor. This involves getting a horse, a costume, a sword and a gun. Jim can't afford a horse, a proper costume and is unable to obtain a real sword or gun, so he makes do with a donkey; a costume adapted from a curtain, a pair of Wellington boots, one of Ethel's old blouses and a modified ARP helmet; a plastic toy sword wrapped in tinfoil, and a toy pistol that fires rubber sucker darts. All along the line, however, he comes up against authority: a park keeper won't let him graze the donkey on parkland, and in a case of Strawman Has a Point, an RSPCA inspector insists that the donkey must be properly housed and fed and not just tethered in Jim and Ethel's front garden (although this means that Jim has to spend a lot of money on building materials and food, which he can't really afford.) When at last he's ready, he goes out on the public highway and is immediately arrested, the police putting the worst possible construction on his getup (e.g., Jim's toy sword wrapped in tinfoil is described as 'a nine inch rubber cosh sheathed in metal', etc.) and he's sent to jail. Oddly enough, it's clear at the end of the book that he quite likes it in jail, because he no longer has to make any decisions for himself. If Jim learns anything from this, it's that he's always in the wrong with respect to authority.

>criticizing european houses when american gaffs are literally made of tinder

fire walls you clown

In a few cases. But in others they point out how the pamphlets are unclear or contradictory.

If only they hadn't early on when the west had a large advantage over the east.

>When the Bloggses think they can smell roast pork, it's heavily implied to actually be the seared flesh of the dead, cooked by the heat of the blast.

Wasn't the last US mainland city(as in not Pearl Harbour) to be bombed by an enemy military actually cannoned by British frigates?

Not counting the time American warships cannoned New York, of course.

Where's that pic from?

I know I could have just walked away from this thread, not opened it, because someone would mention this movie. This is the only film that is genuinely terrifying to me.

Threads and The Day After should be mandatory viewing for everyone in a government position.

It didn't help that about the only alternative source of information on the subject at the time would have be groups like CND who were equally full of shit. Just bullshit of a slightly different flavour

You're likely right. I was born in the mid 70's and we had the cold war drills a few times in school, but the reality of it wasn't there. We're pretty lucky to have those ocean buffers.

I guess what got me with Threads was how they showed everyday life going on as tensions rise, and the matter-of-fact way they describe bombing targets and blast effects. There's some kind of brutal honesty there that I've seen in more than a few British programs.

>tfw you will never know a time before nuclear war was a possibility

How old were you when you realized civilization could be wiped out?

I watched Terminator 2 with my old man when I was about five. Sarah Connor's dream about being nuked terrified me. I asked my Dad if that's how it would 'really happen'. He tried to assure me that it would be an instant death, that you'd be dead before you realized what was happening. This did not help.

In 1965 the BBC produced The War Game in an attempt to educate citizens on the events of a nuclear strike on Britain. Due to the upsetting and bleak message it presented it was banned for 20 years.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=Nzd_VE-bfhA

Shit got real when they announced the bomb was gonna hit on the radio and his wife tried to get the washing in and he called her a stupid bitch.

Was pretty jarring seeing them talk with nostalgia about how great WW2 was and how they'd just wait it out for the army to go give the enemy what for.

>gets mad at him for using such foul language
>upset that the cake will be burned

It was one of the most British things I have ever seen in my life.

That's winning like flipping the board over in Monopoly when you're losing.

If only the filename would give some kind of clue.

They had one of those old school relationships where the wife was basically his mum and he was expected to talk to her and treat her as such.

>He tried to assure me that it would be an instant death, that you'd be dead before you realized what was happening. This did not help.

That's the only thing that helps me. Like, I'd be fine going out hugging a nuke because I assume there'd only be time for a micro-second of pain. But just how far from the epicentre of the blast can you be before you're just blasted to pieces that live for half an hour of excruciating pain?

I'd much rather go out hugging an A-bomb than die trapped under rubble or burnt to death in an ensuing firestorm. Especially burning to death. Fuck That.

Would it really be that much better beforehand?

In the old days you had regular old subjugation and invasion to worry about more. It's maddening to think about, but as stupid as the politics of the Cold War were in hindsight, it did manage to avoid actual nuclear war.

Hell, even Pakistan and India haven't gone at it. I think people realize that there are some lines that you can't risk crossing (until the space colonies are up and running)

>Tony's just jerking off behind the sheds while an air-raid siren is going off

Was it autism?

My nan used to tell me during WWII the women were most worried about being perpetually raped by the Germans if they ever made it onto the island.

Guess you don't have to worry about that with nukes.

>even Pakistan and India haven't gone at it.
They have come damn close to it though, way to close for comfort.

Yeah, that's the mentality of the people who make these decisions. But keep in mind, people on both sides show tremendous restraint in terrible moments.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov

Fake shows, totally made up, sad.

>Most people already have basements, that's half the work done right there
Not in the UK. Having a basement in the UK is pretty unusual.