Living through an event isnt the same thing as being knowledgeable about it. eg. There are plenty of 911 truthers that were around when 911 happened.
And they think everyone just ate the WMDs in Iraq thing. No, I was there at the protests. Many of us knew it was a bullshit excuse.
The only thing Iraq and Al Qaeda had in common was the Q. We knew that then.
Many of us knew it was a bullshit excuse.
This fucken clown.
Yep, I very distinctly remember watching this speech on the TV in the breakroom at work, thinking, "Hold up, what the fuck do WMDs in Iraq have anything at all to do with the people who crashed those planes?" But the general vibe of people actually cheering as they listened to the beat of the war drums was terrifying. There were a lot of us who never bought that bs
So many people back then thought Saddam had something to do with 9/11. Poll after poll showed it. It was so damn depressing.
They were pushing that narrative pretty fucking hard. At the same time some clown was sending anthrax letters around and they used that too. There were also protests at the white house before the invasion about no war for oil, so it's not like support was universal and plenty of people saw through the ruse.
But then there was that whole freedom fries thing... dear God.
He maintained that he really brought anthrax to the UN that day. Which either means he was one of the most reckless people on the planet or that you can't trust a word he said. We'll probably never know now.
So you're telling me the "a" is a conspiracy? Interesting... nods profusely
Living through an event isnt the same thing as being knowledgeable about it.
But it can definitely help to understand the background before the event which is something that wouldn't typically be captured by regular news reports.
There are dangers with just "experiencing" a thing. Most of us that experienced it were just watching whatever news cast or government speech we chose that was currently being broadcast. Even if you were directly affected by 9/11 by being near it, you really didn't have any more tangible information about what caused it than all the stuff that's come out since then.
I saw the rubble in person, I smelled the fuel/whatever that stench was. (seriously I've smelled decay, that wasn't decay) But for seeing it I got no better information than someone sitting at home watching a TV.
In fact it might have been worse because at the time we were all blindly angry. We weren't wrong to be angry, but people don't think clearly in those conditions. Meanwhile politicians are brainstorming spin and advantage. Military contractors are spinning up presentations to prepare for the upcoming bids.
I think zoomers are generally great, but they really underestimated how much of a Wild West the Internet was back in the day, when everybody has their own Angelfire or Geocities website with bad HTML and clipart gifs and people blogged on their LiveJournal and wrote bad fan fictions on forums and all that.
You just kinda learned to be tech savvy for things like "Don't open random links" and "don't believe everything you read on the Internet" through trial by fire or having to explain why you broke the computer, and it's not exactly a skill that you forget. So it's kinda weird for them to assume that they are better at tech just because they are younger.
I do like this place, gives me nostalgia of the Wild West of these early days. Needs more bad fanfictions here though.
Before itunes really caught on and ages before something like spotify would rise up, millenials cut their teeth on kazaa, limewire and a host of other p2p services trying to get digital copies of our music and movies. Is this really just a low quality pirate rip or is a virus laden exe? ONE WAY TO FIND OUT!
Oh, man, I both agree AND think this post is one of those things.
See, people around Mastodon keep saying "everybody is nice, like in the early Internet", and my memory of the Internet is full of drive-by porn and gore, weird political takes, illegible websites and malware.
Apparently some study recently flagged zoomers as being worse than even boomers at spotting online threats, with millenials being best, and that checks out to me for the reasons you list.
I joined the US military literally a month before 9/11 happened. The day I felt really old was the day we started getting new enlistees who weren't even born during 9/11. One of them told me they didn't understand why "ancient US history" was so important in our modern military climate.
This January, Biden officially declared an end to the "War on Terror" that Bush Jr. started, which was a response to 9/11. The way our military operates today is mostly thanks to America's response to 9/11; we evolved so much in the past 2 decades to keep up with a dangerous new decentralized threat to our nation. It's kind of a big deal.
While that response is probably very relevant to current US military doctrine, I feel compelled to mention that the "threat" was very centralized in Saudi Arabia, and that while its sad that many innocents died in 9/11, at no point during the last 22 years was an actual credible threat to america. W's lies and subsequent invasion of Iraq no doubt shaped the US military into the fedex-on-steroids that is is today's as well as destabilized the entire middle east (and maimed and killed countless people on both sides), but ultimately they were just that - lies. None of the countries the US has fought in since 2001 have ever been an actual threat to the nation.
Remember that sound bite people were being fed, and repeating all the time: I'd rather fight them over there than over here. Preposterous
It also assumes the same "them" - because of course the type of moron to share/believe this message thinks all brown people are a singular terroristic honogenate.
I feel you with my August 27, 2001 enlistment date. Thought I was getting easy college money instead I got a lifetime of mental problems from a war we shouldn’t have been in.
And the people who supported those wars now don't and nobody wants to pay for the human costs of that clown show.
Treatment of veterans in the US is tell tell signthis country is ran.
When you got the money but you won't provide social support that was EARNED, you know what sort of people are in charge and who supports them
The birth of the internet, it was not easy getting on the internet back in the day.
There was a very high technical bar to get everything working, everyone was actually really cool, supportive, and generally nice.
Even getting the parts for a computer to work right was an ordeal. You could spend months researching parts and power supplies and cases then it only beeps or whirs when you try to boot.
Not to mention installing Windows required boot floppies before you could put in the install CD. Remember Win95/Win98 bootdisks we kept in our backpacks for emergencies?
Remember borrowing time on the mainframe or programming on a punch card (granted, I was in Junior high when I did that)?
My college had gopher early on. You could poke a South African college's Goper service a few times to tie it up and it'd drop you to a telnet prompt. where I had an early email address from University of Boulder who were just handing them out to whoever wanted one.
One day, there was a pile of people standing arounda computer in the library. Some admin installed mosaic on one of the library computers and we all sat around watching some people hit super early pages, mostly internet project pages. It was a few years before stuff really started getting interesting.
I saw someone the other day claiming that the WWW was always as sanitized as it is now and I was like like "lol... no."
I remember when you could very easily just stumble upon CP, or bestiality, or any number of disgusting, fucked up shit doing a Yahoo search for something totally inocculous.
I think it was Behind the Bastards that hit the nail on the head about this in an episode in the last couple of weeks: Rick Rolling is goatse for normies. Even the links you trick people into clicking have become relatively sanitized as the web democratized.
And honestly, goatse was far from the most extreme thing that was completely commonplace on the old web. Turn of the century Internet culture was wild.
Sometimes I wonder if all the random murder/gore/beastial shit we stumbled into will be the millennial version of boomers leaded gas fumes, causing some underlying mental issues. Bet a psychology student could get a couple papers out of that.
I sort of enjoy it when my daughter watches a YouTube video about something I knew about in the past and tries to talk to me about it as if it's a new discovery. "Yes, I've heard of Oingo Boingo before."
My nephew tried to introduce me to Minecraft. It was cute. I tried to tell him I knew about it but he insisted it was this new thing that I couldn't possibly have known about.
Hell I'm 31 and still do this with my own father.
"They're making memes about this show Columbo... ever hear of it?"
And my dad's like "I love Columbo!"
I usually suffer the other way around, with older people saying very wrong stuff "they saw", but that are very factually wrong
They had it wrong their entire lives, never had it right, or they picked up the narrative somewhere along the way to suit their worldview.
That’s not going to stop happening. “Alternative Facts” is proof that some people never stop trying to block out the reality around them.
E: typo
If I ever have a child, I cannot for them to discover things like Pokémon or some other game/anime/cartoon series I was there to witness and then think I'm so old I don't know about it.
It's happened to me with friends kids. Asking me if I've heard of Pokemon. Kid, I was your age when Pokemon first came out.
Yeah... my young nephew just recently asked me if I ever heard of Minecraft.... kid, I was playing Minecraft before it was "infinite".
My little cousin asked santa for a pikachu, as the grown adult I am I obviously asked for a pikachu too
Oh, I've had this. Specifically about art and media more than big events, though.
Like, I've had younger people project entirely anachronistic views on music or performances that were actively and explicitly the oppopsite. And it happens all the time about gaming. I think we're over it now and even Americans will openly acknolwedge this only happened to Atari, or in the US specifically, but that brief moment in time when everybody kept talking about the "videogame crash" and how videogames went away in the mid 80s is, to this day, the single largest bit of gaslighting I've personally experienced. It felt like I had jumped dimensions.
There was this one big political event where people tried to recontextualize a specific thing in history, but it's very country-specific, so going over it wouldn't be super helpful. Just know that even people who are roughly my age were clearly misrepresenting the intentions of specific historical figures in the context of a political movement and I spent a couple of years just begging people to read specific books written by specific people because man, it got weird with the revisionism for a bit.
There's a local burger place that has a burger called the Royale with Cheese,after Pulp Fiction, and one night I overheard some kid in there telling his friend it was named after some movie from the 1980s. I could not stop myself from yelling "You're about 15 years off the mark".
It definitely has an 80's vibe to it, which I think is part of what Tarantino was going for. His movies are usually a satire/parody of certain genres, and Pulp Fiction is definitely an homage to the crime/mobster movies of the 80's.
Kids on lemmy these days telling me about 9/11. Dude I was in school that day. I remember it quite well. You weren’t even in your dads balls yet. Stfu.
Apparently they're teaching gradeschoolers that George W. Bush went into Iraq because of 9/11.
(The Iraq war had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.)
Also the CIA torture program had nothing to do with gathering intelligence. But that came out when Trump was pro-extra-torture, and his fans loved him for it.
Tangential but saw an interesting TikTok about how we experience music in the moment verses people discovering an artist in retrospect. In moment we evaluate music against previous works, coverage in the media, other contemporaneous stuff. But people who discover an “established” artist after the fact can just listen to a catalogue start to finish.
So for example, Radiohead most of us at the time judged albums in relationship to OK Computer. Which a lot of people view as their best, but a lot of younger people getting into them now think In Rainbows is best, since they’re free of those associations.
Obviously it’s all subjective but interesting to see how people’s perceptions of things change.
Kinda like comparing my grandfathers journal from when he lived in the USSR to what hexbears say.
Apparently he wrote this journal as propaganda before hiding it away at the bottom of his trunk.
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