Slashdot Mirror
4chan Gives 90-Year-Old Vet a Great Birthday
Hugh Pickens writes "Members of 4chan aren't known for doing things that are cute and heart-warming and when they decide to go after someone, it's typically to subject them to ridicule. But not this time. Someone at 4chan decided that the Internet should get together and wish 90-year-old WWII veteran William J. Lashua a happy birthday, and soon Lashua's local branch of the American Legion was deluged by birthday calls from people as far away as Sweden. The account someone set up for Mr. Lashua's birthday on Facebook had 3,956 'likes' and over 500 comments, most of which wished him a happy birthday and thanked him for his military service. It's not clear how 4chan originally came across a photo of Lashua, but a member of the site posted a snapshot of a flyer that was on the bulletin board at a store in Ashburnham, Massachusetts asking for guests to attend the nonagenarian's birthday on at the American Legion hall and the post took off. In contrast to their usual behavior, 4chan members 'were giving him nice phone calls and sending him nice notes' and discouraging those who wanted to do something stupid or mean. 'They were all being.. well, shucks, awful nice.'"
Instead of wasting mod points on you, I'll just tell you:
It was for his BIRTHDAY. His birthday was yesterday, not on November 11.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
Reddit did it's part as well, example
I thought this started out as a post on Reddit - not 4chan. But I could be wrong and certainly don't want to piss off 4chan.
You make a lot of inane and ignorant ASSumptions here. The US also had a lot of money invested in Germany - ask IBM, because they were at the head of that list. Don't "Oh please" us - the world in 1942 was NOT the world we live in today, and the United States in 1942 was most certainly NOT the world we live in today. If you've read your history at all, you would know that the administration coordinated with the pentagon to MANEUVER us into that war. The losses at Pearl Harbor were preventable, but they were deemed "acceptable" because they would force the citizenry into accepting America's participation in the war. Oh, please, right back at you. Had the US cooperated with Germany, we could have been the third point of a power triangle for decades, even if we may have been less powerful than we were. World history would have been VASTLY different - starting with Iran, Iraq, and Israel. It's possible that you are unaware that the military/industrial machine that controls so much of American policy today ony came into existence during and after the world war - much of it in response to the communist threat. Had the Axis won, that communist threat would have been nonexistent!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br