• jasondj
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • aidan@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      “I am alive during the invasion of Ukraine, therefore I must know more than someone who spends massive amounts of time researching it 20 years from now.”

      Not assuming what they’re saying is well researched, they’re probably not- but being alive during an event doesn’t exactly make you an expert on it just because you watched the news.

      • t_jpeg@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It’s honestly the equivalent of saying that because you lived in a country you know more about the sociopolitical status of it and why it got there thab someone who doesn’t. Like when people say “you never lived in X type of country, so you have no idea why it was so bad.”

        I’d trust a sociology professor from the UK about why living conditions in America are so bad for the average working class person much more than a MAGA conservative nutjob who believes in the deep state trying to replace white people. Just like how this post doesn’t really prove that just because you were there means you’re an expert in that event or why and how it happened.

        • idiomaddict@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          It depends on what you want to know. A UK sociologist could absolutely explain the school to prison pipeline better than a maga nutjob, but they won’t talk about how the crosswalk light has been broken in town for two years, but the cops have new cars.

          To be clear, the sociologist is more important for being well informed about a subject, but the individual stories are more interesting for me every time.

          • t_jpeg@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I absolutely don’t doubt that individual accounts will have useful lessons to learn. But personal experience will always have personal biases. People will literally change the way they experience reality to facillitate their world view, which is why the sentiment of this post is stupid af. Just because “you were there” doesn’t make you any more of an arbiter of truth than someone who wasn’t. At most it provides you with the advantage of a perspective more directly affected by said events.

            • idiomaddict@feddit.de
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              1 year ago

              I don’t disagree, and I know that what a history class wants to know isn’t likely coming from a random person’s account.

              I do think that’s why I thought history was boring in school though- I care very little about the date of the signing of the magna carta, but I would have loved a rogue priest writing about how he thought things changed. Literally, if all he cared about was that they now had to pay less taxes or got less support, that would be cool to know. I know that learning about appeasement is important, but I got much more out of memoirs from people during the holocaust. Reading about one of the imprisoned Jews being really irritable in (I think) Night was a revelation for eleven year old me- I’d only previously read about them being afraid and meek, and that wasn’t the full spectrum of emotions, so it felt shallow comparatively.

              My sister teaches at a historical magnet school, and one of the things they do is group events differently, so you might learn about the magna carta, blair mountain, and occupy Wall Street together, to look at power in collectivity, for example. I hear about this and see the value, but it does feel subjectively wild to include occupy there. I think the proper way to voice that is through a light hearted tweet, not rejecting immediately any differing view.

            • aidan@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Individual experiences definitely have biases, but time and time again history textbooks have also been shown to have significant biases. Not to invalidate them, but any source will have a bias, and you can have a bias yet still be accurate.

      • jasondj
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        1 year ago

        If it’s any consolation, I was a Junior in HS.

        I was in English class and that teacher also taught an elective on Film History, so she had a big screen TV in the room (big, for the time and for being in a classroom…It was probably a 40” tube). A couple of the adjacent rooms came in and we watched the second tower get hit with Katie, Matt, Al, and Ann.

        • I_Fart_Glitter@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I was at an Evangelical Bible college, my first month away from home. People genuinely thought it was the end times and Jesus was coming back that day.

              • systemglitch@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                It was all a lot of us watched in the commons room I was in. Others kept playing Kaiser, and daily routine was uninterrupted otherwise.

        • evidences@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I was a freshman in high school at the time and ironically was in my third period social studies/American history class.

    • scottywh@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Lol… I was lying in bed with my (now ex) wife 2 days after getting home from our honeymoon in Costa Rica