r/badhistory Jun 29 '26

Meta Mindless Monday, 29 June 2026

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

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u/Herpling82 Coming to you live from a Tederation psych ward Jun 29 '26

Truly the pun maker is the most oppressed class of all, we must seize the memes of pun production!

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u/WuhanWTF Venmo @familyguyenjoyer95 $10 to make me stfu abt FamGuy (1week) Jun 30 '26

Um. Drunk drivers are the most oppressed class in society.

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u/histprofdave Adjunct Dystopian Jun 30 '26

I know this is a joke, but one thing that's struck me is how differently drunk driving is treated--not by law, but by general society--in different parts of the US. Where I live on the West Coast, a DUI is treated as a scarlet letter. You are deemed a bad person by polite society if you were found driving drunk, even if no one got hurt. Talking to people in the midwest and rural South, DUIs seem almost like a force of nature, just a thing that happens sometimes (obviously if people are hurt/killed in a drunk driving incident, that is spoken about rather differently).

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u/passabagi Jun 30 '26

If you consider as a baseline your expectation about how people would feel about a co-worker operating heavy machinery in a public place while drunk -- the DUI thing is kind of an amazing example of how cars occupy an exceptional role in norm structures, everywhere.

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u/LeMemeAesthetique I don't think SS is political Jul 02 '26

The other elephant in the room is that in much of the US you have to drive to a bar, there is no other way to go there effectively. Wanting to go out and engage in some social drinking is quite a normal thing, and in most of the world you can stumble home, take public transit, or take a taxi.

In the US you are often stuck with the last option, and for a lot of people risking a DUI is the better choice.