Bingo. Like many in my generation, I used to not worry about it at all. Now I am a bit obsessive—constantly checking my name, number, and address on people finder sites and sending takedown requests when they pop back up, and currently trying to transition all my online accounts to use e-mail addresses provided by Hide My E-mail on iCloud (which is quite the project). Seems like changing my e-mail on different accounts could be useful, since people would be less likely to connect those different accounts. I keep reporting the links to the doxxed info on pastebin, Twitter, and google (pro-tip: you can ask google to remove doxxed information from their search results). I know I will never be able to ask the actual extremists to take down my name when I am mid-identified as that other person, which sucks. And it still feels like there might be some other exposure that’s just waiting to blow up in my face. Open to suggestions on the subject if anyone has any.
I was advised by multiple sources not to try. The initial people took down the info pretty immediately, but now it persists over a lot of forums, blog posts, etc., so I imagine it would be a game of whack-a-mole that would require significant legal resources, and it would draw a lot of attention, which would be unpleasant.
>but they were also made of vastly better materials than modern home construction
No way this is even close to being true. Newer houses with all the advancements in materials and construction science are much better than the post-war garbage that was spewed out.
I made a small fortune in my early 20s fixing and renovating those post-war houses. They're almost universally junk in comparison.
>One surprising thing, for example, is how much the VC and later PAVN controlled the initiative.
That's how a lot of defensive wars go. The US was not strategically attempting to be on the offensive.
>With a few exceptions (which Hollywood tends to highlight) the initiative, when to engage and how, was Vietnamese, not American.
Even this is somewhat revisionist. At the end of the war the US was overwhelmingly leading in engagements and pushed the VC out of huge swaths. The VC were so decisively beaten back that they ceased to be an effective fighting force, almost disbanding entirely.
>No surprise they won.
Except they lost essentially all the battles.
The Vietnam War is a war where the US won almost every single tactical engagement, but lost the over all strategic war. Very few wars in history end that way.
>Another remarkable thing is how well the Vietnamese air force did against the Americans.
Initially. At the end, the US airspace was essentially unobstructed.
Seems a bit denialist. The VC effectively ended after Tet (which was a military blunder, but a propaganda triumph), but the PAVN took up the fight in their stead.
If you never have the initiative, defensive or offensive, it's hard for the war to go your way. You're essentially letting the enemy dictate the terms of most engagements.
The Vietnamese didn't "lose all the battles". Aside for effectively winning the most important battle, i.e. the battle for Vietnam, they also didn't lose many of the battles they picked. The US wanted pitched battles where its army fared better, but with few exceptions they were denied them. Was it unfair? I don't think so: there's no fairness in war, and it's stupid to meet the enemy where he is strongest, and wise to meet him where he's at his worst. Which is what the Vietnamese did.
Body count? Sure, Vietnam lost there. No surprise, the US was essentially out to kill as many Vietnamese as they could -- the only metric they could muster -- and there's no denying they were good at killing them. Unfortunately, short of killing them all and leaving not one single soul in Vietnam, that wasn't the way to win.
I don't think it was possible for the US to win; they were just one grain of sand in Vietnam's long struggle against foreign invaders.
The "won all the battles but lost the war" narrative is a mistaken claim by the US, which can mostly be explained by the lost face and the painful and almost unprecedented defeat they suffered.
> Initially. At the end, the US airspace was essentially unobstructed.
No such thing as "US airspace" in Vietnam, but I get what you tried to say. It doesn't matter if after years of war the USAF gained dominance over Vietnam's skies: the popular narrative ignores how well the Vietnamese did in the air war against the US, that they had fighter aces and scored many kills. A remarkable feat against the world's largest military power.
Virtue signaling about the topic de jure (BLM, Women at Atlassian, etc.) and how they've sunk hundreds of engineering hours into changing all their repos from "master" to "main" thanks to the heroic work by their Diversity Inclusion and Equity in Engineering team.
Bet they wished they spent those hours elsewhere now.
