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.'"

Re:4chan gets it wrong again...

[DarkKnightRadick]

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.

Reddit

[slime73]

Reddit did it's part as well, example [reddit.com]

Reddit... ?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Wow

[interkin3tic]

4chan being nice?!?

Hmm... I think good PR could spin a lot of their actions as "nice." Their efforts to combat the dangerous cult calling itself "Scientology" for instance aren't exactly greedy and evil. Maybe they're motivated more by a sense of superiority than a sense of justice, but they're still attacking an evil organization.

I haven't heard of 4chan, say, killing puppies or disrupting the flow of natural disaster relief supplies or flooding the gulf of mexico with crude oil. Whether that's because they don't do it or because I haven't heard of it, or because no one has yet realized they were behind the deepwater horizon spill, I don't know. It just seems to me (having never visited 4chan) that while they might be mostly rude, crude, and immature, they're not -evil-.

Pictures

[Anonymous Coward]

The event happened yesterday, there are pictures from it. You should have included a link to them: http://imgur.com/a/3Jc87/MP8VI

Re:Ugh.

[justinlee37]

Oh god shut the fuck up. He's right, Anonymous is unpredictable. What the hell part of his post made you think that he gives a fuck what Anonymous does, or that he was in the least bit annoyed? He is annoyed with YOU morons who seem to think that Anonymous is some sort of "organization." It isn't, it's just a flash mob.

"Shameless abuse of /b/ as his personal army" is a reference to a meme on 4chan. People come to the board with requests often, like "harass this guy because I don't like him" and so on. The standard response to these requests (if they don't sound like fun) is to say "/b/ is not your personal army."

Now kindly pull the stick out of your ass.

Not as unlikely as you think.

[flimflammer]

I know a most of the news stories that mention 4chan are generally in the negative, but people in that community do tend to do a lot of good, and much of it is rarely publicized. People attribute Anonymous to this large collection of like-minded individuals doing whatever they please but it's really couldn't be further from the truth. "Anonymous" is a loose many-minded collection of individuals who don't agree with each other. You'll get those trying to harass others and many stepping in to stop it, and you'll get those trying to do good and many stepping in trying to stop it.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Duke Nukem Forever is real and will be coming out for the PS3 and Xbox 360.

http://www.tgdaily.com/games-and-entertainment-brief/51395-holy-crap-duke-nukem-forever-gets-a-release-date-window [tgdaily.com]

Re:But tomorrow...

[Cwix]

Maybe this one.. but its old:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,253959,00.html [foxnews.com] (Linking to Faux news feels so odd)

Re:Puppy and veterans

[horza]

Yeah you're wrong. If you are looking any deeper than "because they can" then you are over-analysing.

Phillip.

Re:Reddit... ?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you're right. His grandson left a thank-you thread. [reddit.com]
You can trace the threads back a few days, Reddit did a LOT more than 4chan in regards to being there IRL, and sending nice gifts. I'd bet it was quite a tiny, minuscule fraction of anon who did anything besides posting in /b/ claiming they were going to do something.

Re:Huh?

[ductonius]

To paraphrase Spider Jerusalem:

Imagine an underground nightclub full of perverts and freaks and people with sexual organs you didn't know existed. Imagine you're standing in that nightclub and the time comes to vote for what you're all going to do that night. You vote to watch television, and everyone else, as far as the eye can see, votes to rape you with switchblades. That's 4chan. You're welcome.

Gatecrashers

[Sc4Freak]

It only seems nice until you realise that William J Lashua's family specifically asked [reddit.com] that random strangers do NOT show up. It was an event reserved for family and friends, and the internets basically gatecrashed what was supposed to be an old man's birthday party.

Re:Thank you

[LanMan04]

Indeed. Thank you for your service in the LAST WAR that protected American freedoms. Everything post WWII.....well, it's history.

Re:4chan gets it wrong again...

[Runaway1956]

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!

summary is wrong

[crgrace]

The summary is wrong. No one is a member of /b/.

Re:A drop of honey in a gallon of battery acid

[DurendalMac]

One counterexample. Just about everything else Anon has done says otherwise. Someone mentioned animal abusers, such as Dusty. This is while people post Zippocat, a series of images of a cat getting doused in lighter fluid and torched. Chanology started out as lulz and evolved further into the bigger protests, but you can bet that their primary motivation on that one wasn't to get the bad guys.

Re:Wow

[drolli]

Let me add:

4chan being nice.
Duke Nukem Forever possibly being released soon.
Microsoft supporting open source
Cats and dogs living together.

Re:4chan gets it wrong again...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't post this anon. A post like this should be submitted under your name. Grow a set.

Check out this YouTube video to see a happy guy

[yodleboy]

looks like he had a great birthday! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzqNkIkj3rE [youtube.com]

Re:4chan gets it wrong again...

[phantomfive]

Uh......have you ever read what life was like under Mussolini? They were killing people based on nothing but their race. I didn't say it was perfect now, certainly it's not, I just said it was better after the war.