What's the biggest plot hole in real life?

Probably the two a half billion people claiming to identify as christian while actively opposing and taking action against any of Christ's non-self-serving ideals.
- If there's one good thing about Maga it's that it clearly illuminated what a majority of these "Christians" actually are.
  
  They've been more than happy to illuminate themselves, sometimes via burning crosses, for some time. At least those ones have taken off the hoods now.
- There are some of us that don't do that. But yeah, even as an adherent, I see and feel what you mean.
  
  That must be painful and frustrating. An old coworker of mine was a “real” Christian (by that I mean kind, pleasant, and non-judgmental) and I often wonder what his take on the last several years would be.
  
  I feel like there was something in Revelations about how a powerful delusion would fall on people because they "loved not the truth".
  And I'm not saying this is the end times but I definitely feel like there wouldn't be much difference between how I felt right now and how I would feel if I knew for a fact it was the end times.
- Nah, that's not a plot hole. That's just a seed for the Act 3 twist we're due in about 2 years. When the Vatican incorporates and invades Yugoslavia.
  
  Fucking Papal States. I wish that I could play Florence without becoming Excommunication Simulator!
  
  HOI4 moment
- For real. I am no catholic or god worshipper but i feel like i am living a more religious life then them because I recognize the fiction of Jesus life for the vast inspirational philophies it contains and actually try to incorporate some of it in my life.
  
  Literally, all it boils down to is: Don't Be An Asshole.
  That's it. That's all you have to do.
- How does it feel to be on the same side as most preachers and weekly church-goers?
  Few things drives them more nuts than people who call themselves Christians and don't even attempt to be followers of Christ. Trying and failing is one thing, and always an embarrassment to the church, but living like the worst dregs of society, while using that name, is worse than an intentional smear campaign.
- Wow, top voted reply. Damn Lemmy is cynical. There are many people out there doing God’s work caring for each other for no recognition, no reward. And certainly there are many folks out there too that make things look really bad, and the media loves to tell that story, but don't for a moment think that that’s every Christian.
  
  I don't think it's fair to complain about assumed absolute statements and in the next breath say "damn lemmy is cynical".
  Obviously every christian isn't a hypocrite.
  Also obviously, too many are.
  
  The best thing these unrecognized christians "doing God’s work" you say exist could be doing to help the world right now is to be actively and vocally trying to oppose the Christians that are currently very loudly advocating for fascism. There is literally no bigger threat right now. There is a clear imbalance in voices in the Christian community. The good Christians could be just as loud if they wanted, they could be setting an example, but they aren't. People always say it's just a "few" loud voices when talking about the bad things being said, if it only takes a few to be that loud then why the fuck are the good ones silent?

The details around the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand really jump the shark. Must've been a drug-fueled writing session on that one
- When that one aired I assumed they were going to genre-shift into dark comedy or slapstick, but they... really, really didn't.
  
  You haven't seen Blackadder? I thought the whole plot was a set up to the series.
- one drunk dude with a pistol changing the course of the whole world?
  
  Don't ignore the whole other stuff with the failed bombing etc.
  From wikipedia:
  At 10:10 am,[75] Franz Ferdinand's car approached and Čabrinović threw his bomb. The bomb bounced off the folded back convertible cover into the street.[76] The bomb's timed detonator caused it to explode under the next car, putting that car out of action, leaving a 1-foot-diameter (0.30 m), 6.5-inch-deep (170 mm) crater,[75] and wounding 16–20 people.[77]
  Čabrinović swallowed his cyanide pill and jumped into the Miljacka river. Čabrinović's suicide attempt failed, as the old cyanide only induced vomiting, and the Miljacka was only 13 cm deep due to the hot, dry summer.[78] Police dragged Čabrinović out of the river, and he was severely beaten by the crowd before being taken into custody.
  Just the mental image of him chucking himself into a river after the failed bombing and then also failing his suicide on two fronts...
  
  Not at all. Things were a powder keg. If it wouldn't have blown at that point, then shortly thereafter.
- "The War to End All Wars" was a good season finale, but then just 20 years later they made a sequel with bigger effects budget and openly evil villains. Lazy writing. And the way things have been written towards WWIII but then backing off is a long season tease.

That DB Cooper storyline was never resolved.
- Lots of those. Characters just falling out of the narrative left and right.
  
  Those aren’t plot holes. They’re upper story windows conveniently located in Russia.

The fact the Pepsi at one point had the 6th largest military in the world, and did nothing to conquer Coca-Cola.
Like, why even start that storyline if you dont take it to the inevitable conclusion?
- Pepsi has also made huge profits in Russia since the west started sanctions.
  
  Yes, they have. That's why I don't buy their products anymore.

Are we supposed to believe the largest most dominant military force in the world, Kublai Kahn's Mongol fleet was defeated by some inclement weather... TWICE?? Lazy writing.
- Inclement weather, just FYI. Although, your spelling also makes a lot of sense in the current times...
  Not bashing your point though, that's a good one.
  
  My turn to learn a new fact today. Wild that I've never realised it was spelt that way.

Why would they just confirm all the fan theories about the world elite running a massive illegal money laundering ring spanning the globe, and follow it up by proving that the same elite are trafficking children for sex acts if they didn't plan to go anywhere with that storyline?
- It’s like the way they left Deadwood. They set it up for a righteous proper class war and then suddenly the series was cancelled.
  
  But they made a movie episode, in 2019, to try to finally round off the series (all the actors returned). Check it out, if you didn't catch it. It wasn't perfect, obviously, but it was an admirable attempt.
- Well... Epstein died and thus all wrongdoing and culpability died with him. Duh.

A few Prime Ministers have been peculiar plotholes. Harold Holt just disappeared. Whitlam got taken out by a madman influenced by the yanks and nominally working for the Queen. Sometimes it seems the writers just get bored of the storyline and drop stuff.
- Lol - found my fellow Aussie!

The whole wrapping up world war 2 using "the gadget" just reeks of writers struggling to wrap up after writing themselves into a corner.
- The end of WW2 was a complex political issue, and the atomic bombs were not the 'press here, end war' that most of us believe.
  The Japanese we're holding out hope (stupidly) that the Soviet Union would negotiate a conditional surrender with the united States as the end of the imperial system was unacceptable to them. The US had floated that if there was an unconditional surrender, that the imperial system would stay intact, but wanted it to seem like a US condition, not a Japanese one, because that would be a conditional surrender.
  The Soviets always intended to invade, but were held by a nonaggression pact they made with the Japanese. The US pressured the Soviets very hard to violate this and invade Manchuria.
  There was literally a Japanese war cabinet convened already when news of Nagasaki reached them. We have actual primary source for their reactions. They did not care.
  Only once the second bomb dropped and Manchuria was invaded did some of the cabinet manage to convince the emporer to intervene which was extremely rare.
  
  There's a video by Shaun that taught me pretty much all of this for the first time. It's kinda sad that my history education was like "Bombs dropped, war over"
  
  Bro, facts be ruining the joke. I’m not here to learn.
- Legend Of Korra season 4 vibes
- The writers keep doing this shit.
  The Berlin Wall arc just abruptly ended because they announced that East Germans could freely travel to the west and 'conveniently' forgot to mention there were still some regulations. Then the Border guards 'conveniently' said "fuck it" and let people pass without checking passports.
  They built up the Epstein island arc like mad only to end it with him killing himself in prison and then never mention it again.
  
  Eppstein didn't kill himself.

I don't know about this series, but I play a game with the same name and absolutely hate it. It's hugely pay to win with permadeath and the grind has nowhere near the payoff for the amount of effort you put in.

Nobody has figured out who the Zodiac killer is yet? Come on, people!
- I thought it was Ted Cruz
  
  Yeah pretty sure this was wrapped up in the comics

Probably the stars that are older than the universe.
- IIRC, they're too big to have formed in one of the ways we know and then continuously lost matter at the the rate they should have.
  So one or more of the assumptions about how they could have formed or how they lost matter over time is wrong, right?
  
  Nope. Older than the universe. Can't weasel your way out of this one science boy
  
  Or we have the age of the universe wrong.
- What
  
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_age_problem
  We estimate the age of some stars to be older than the estimated age of the universe. JWST observations have also made it "worse". https://youtu.be/hps-HfpL1vc?si=H9tdTD3DJYLkalvx

What did drugs ever do to start a war???
- Well, the British were able to use drugs to start a war on China once. All in the name of cheap tea.
  
  Some would say the fentanyl problem right now is payback for the opium thing
- Because Dewey Cox never once paid for drugs.

Just to emphasise:
from 1990 and before
- Folks can't read past the headline. Truly this site has arrived.
- Idk man I wasn't alive then.
- Why the weird arbitrary time?
  
  Because I didn't want people arguing about current events and the end of the Cold War seemed as good a cutoff as any.
  
  I remember 1990. There was nothing arbitrary about it.

The universe is not locally real*.
*Locality and reality are defined in specific ways within quantum physics, and "not locally real" doesn't necessarily mean 'illusory' as you might expect. Look into it, it's some crazy shit.

If most people are good why doesn't the world get better without violence?
- There’s a saying in German that my grandmother sometimes used, it roughly translates to “The person is good but the people are bad” (Der Mensch ist gut, aber die Leut sind schlecht).
  
  I like that.
  Another quote that comes to mind is this, from the movie Men in Black (1997):
  A person is smart; people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.
  – Tommy Lee Jones, as Agent K
  
  "Germans: so estimable in the individual, so execrable in the aggregate". -- paraphrase of Goethe
- Most people regularly eat dead animals, so violence is still everywhere. In fact, there's more now than ever before. :(
  
  Would you prefer they eat live animals?

The Space Race ended without closing ceremonies.
- That happens when goal posts are moved until both sides lose interest.

duck billed platypus

That one on 25th Street that I hit the other day. Oh wait, you said "plot". Nevermind.

The low entropy of the past

Where all the aliens are.

That there wasn't a single mainstream Republican who stood up to Trump during his presidency.
I mean, come on. Who wrote this?
We're supposed to believe that EVERY SINGLE REPUBLICAN in government went from taking about how unfit Trump was when he was a candidate ... to standing behind him 100% even when he cozied up to Russia, paid hush money to a porn star, and lied about a Presidential election?
- How does this fit the prompt? They specified before 1990.
- Some voted for impeachment. Still, far more should have defended democracy, decency, and the rule of law.

Hard problem of consciousness
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/
We experience first-person sensations (consciousness/qualia) and it's a big mystery what's up with that.
- My 6 year old was asking me about this a few weeks ago. He's asking, how do our minds work? How did we come to be thinking and feeling and thinking about thinking? He says, "I know we're made of cells, but how did the cells... find their voice?" He's so fun.
  Like a year prior to this, I stayed up all night trying to Google it, I guess for some reason I thought the answer would be a little clearer but apparently it's highly debated and mostly unknown.
  
  One approach that I'm reasonably sure is correct is "emergence". A bunch of simple systems come together in a way that forms a more complex system than any of its individual parts. You can find this in many areas:
  computers are made up of very simple basic units that come together to do incredible things
  games can have simple systems that produce complex behaviour when taken together
  biological systems follow similar patterns
  It just seems right that consciousness isn't something that evolved as a standalone thing, but instead is the result of more and more simple systems coming together. We didn't wake up screaming one night in the face of the sheer terror of existence, it was a choir that gradually got louder :)

The popularity of Harry Styles
- Lead singer of a mega famous boyband and one of Taylor Swift's most famous exes.
  
  We've def got a real mystery on our hands, Grommit
- Which was tough to achieve before 1990, but Harold Styles of Sioux Falls South Dakota pulled it off.
  That guy was a king in South Dakota.

Feeding incubated humans to produce more energy than what is inputted.
Couldn't they just suggest the computer overlord prime directive was hard-coded to keep humans alive at whatever cost?
- Originally the machines were going to use human brains for processing, but apparently the explanation was deemed too technical, so they changed it to some mumbo jumbo about power, which also let them use the nickname Coppertop.
  
  That is even better. Making humans into some perpetual energy machine seemed silly. If you are going to break a fundamental law of physics, why not use animals. At least they won't fight back.

Id argue the last season ended with the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, if the season started with 9/11.

The Trump storyline is taking way too long to reach a definitive conclusion, and I’m not even confident that it will be a particularly satisfying one.
- I know time got weird with the pandemic, but that was not actually before 1990, believe it or not.
  
  I mean I was aware of him before 1990 and really could not understand how he was famous or successful. My brother is older than me and Trump came up on the news one day and he said "he's either a criminal or his bankers are idiots". We grew up quite a ways from NYC if you're wondering.
  The older you are the more insane this timeline seems. I knew he'd get elected. Racism and sexism put him over the top. Still felt like I was going crazy watching it.
  
  Ha ha ha I totally misread the title. I thought it was 1990 and beyond. Whoops! Thanks for pointing that out!
  
  That statement was also true before 1990, though.

Jet fuel can't melt steel beams 😔
Edit - too soon?
- That's not a plot hole, even after 1990. There's no reason to melt it. Weakening is enough.
- Well yeah, the question specified 1990 or before.
- It's too soon to be sure you mean it ironically. Did you?
- Gross

from 1990 and before