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.
There were protests nationwide, at many college campuses and federal courthouses.
We had over 4,000 people protest at some podunk town. We even had a bunch of news cameras cover it.
He was easily the most identifiable “bad guy” in the middle east aside from Yasser Arafat in the public’s imagination. Probably contributed to it a bit…
So many young people have no clue how fucking terrifying it was, and Bush’s image has been somewhat rehabilitated as well. People are afraid of Trump bringing about a fascist revolution, but he’s a clown compared to the Bush crowd. A lot of the shit we’re dealing with today got started or really accelerated under Bush. Reagan is in a similar position.
Rumsfeld… that guy just seemed to straight up want to kill people…
Very respectable and dedicated man, professional public servant who’s hollow in the inside and only wishes for the blood of the innocent. Classic “banality of evil”.
Yep, never forget it was the elder Bush’s regime that brought us the Sonic Youth song “Youth Against Fascism” 30 fucking years ago
They’ve been at this shit a loooooong time
Bush’s image has been somewhat rehabilitated
They’re doing for Bush what they did for Reagan
Well they’re not trying to name everything they can get their hands on after Bush, yet…
Yep, I was fired up, on board.
“So, Iraq…”
Wait, what?
I remember watching CNN and seeing “evidence” of WMDs found. It was some piece of shit flatbed truck with a load of pipes covered by a tarp: dirty, crudely cut, metal pipes. Apparently they were possibly raw materials for … missiles.
Yeah.
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.
And it was obvious that they’d already decided to invade Iraq long before Powell’s infamous UN presentation.
The US has contingency plans filed to invade every country on the planet.
Would like to see the Vatican ones lol
His career really got started with covering up the May Lai massacre and got worse from there.
So you’re telling me the “a” is a conspiracy? Interesting… nods profusely
I think that’s the craziest thing. Significant numbers of people were calling them out on their lies while they were saying them and they still managed to get massive amounts of support to invade Iraq.
That’s because Saddam did have as chemical weapons program, it just wasn’t advanced as the US/UK governments wanted to believe it was…
I’d have to double check, but I’m pretty sure everything they found was just old stock they already knew about that hadn’t been safely disposed of yet.The US finally got rid of the last of it’s chemical weapons stock.
They made a big deal about high grade aluminum cylinders they found because they could have been used for uranium enrichment, but they were really just intended for components in regular missiles. The guy who ordered them got needlessly high quality aluminum basically because when you live in a dictatorship failure could end in your execution.
David Kelly, the UK weapons inspector, who lead dozens of UN teams to Iraq and inspected facilities and sites first hand said Saddam was committed to developing chemical and nuclear weapons. That’s the guy who’s been there under the UN banner, the guy judged trustworthy to lead an international team. And that was partly based on what they found, partly on how Saddam had excavated previous weapon decommissioning sites to recover parts, and partly because Saddam and his team would repeatedly lie at every turn. Kelly regarded all of the “ready to launch in 45 mins” as made up bullshit, and he repeatedly contradicted the UK and US governments when they tried to make the threat sound more immediate. So despite calling out all the politics bullshit, Kelly was still a supporter of regime change because it was - speaking as someone who’d dealt with Saddam repeatedly - the only way to stop a man who’d used chemical weapons before using them again…
Got any book recommendations or anything? I’d love to read more.
I’ve heard Sam Harris talk about how we only knew the end story was bs afterwards, and that there was no credible opposition…
Canada Not following USA into that war should should have been a good clue
France as well! Republicans gave us French so much shit for standing up to the US and refuse to support the invasion. “Freedom fries”, “Surrender monkeys” and all that crap.
Freedom fries… hehehe je trouve encore ça drôle. À bien ý penser c’était un des premiers signes de la transformation débile de la politîque américaine.
Well, there was trickle down economics before that. Reagan was the downfall.
Refusing to get pressured into wartime adventurism was absolutely the right move, and the French said so at the time despite the juvenile insults being tossed their way by our dimmest politicians.
I remember when Republicans tried to hit Obama for going on an “apology tour” after W and his clowns trashed our most cherished alliances.
The worst part is that they’re too cynical or stupid to be embarrassed for themselves.
You hear all about Freedom Fries, but I’ve never heard of Freedom Toast.
Or Freedom Kiss.
Sam used to be cool. I’m so disappointed in him.
Sam was never cool. You were duped.
You’re right.
I’ve heard him say so many bad takes. I used to really like the guy too
What do you mean someone who tries to sell a theory on objective scientific morality has many bad takes?
To be fair, I was a fan before that point.
Was he wrong though? I recall plenty of people were against the war in principal, and loads of people were sceptical of the government’s WMD line (am speaking from a British point of view). But there was not as I recall any actual evidence that the wmd thing was made up. David Kelly (UK weapons expert) leak didn’t happen till after the invasion. As well as the invasion itself obviously turning up no evidence. But before there were no leaks or counter claims. It was just down to whether you trusted the government or not. Which is what I think Sam’s right about - if that’s what he’s saying.
A lot of people knew it was utter bullshit then. Millions of people protested the war and close to 50% of people were opposed it in many of the countries which participated.
Sam Harris’s whitewashing of his cheerleading of a war which resulted in a million deaths and destabilisation of an entire region is sheer cowardice.
UN weapons inspectors prior to the invasion found no evidence of WMDs. If I recall correctly, there were also quite a few leftist publications that were correctly calling out the lies told. Don’t have time currently to dig.
I think it definitely is the more widespread story that the lies were only identified after the fact, especially with publications like the NYT carrying water for the Bush administration.
You see… this is the issue. This idea has been passed around second hand so many times people are convinced there was no evidence or reason to suspect a WMD program. The idea the US government made it all up out of thin air for neocon warmongering reasons is too juicy to ignore…
HOWEVER
The UN weapons inspections DID find plenty of evidence to be concerned about, and Saddam’s provable track record of chemical weapon use AND lying AND concealment only made it harder to know what was going on. One of the lead inspectors, British weapons expert David Kelly, who led missions to Iraqii factories and staff sites dozens of times said…
“despite the steps taken, Saddam refuse[d] to acknowledge the extent of his chemical and biological weapons and associated military and industrial support organisations [and there was still a concern about] 8,500 litres of anthrax VX, 2,160 kilograms of bacterial growth media, 360 tonnes of bulk chemical warfare agent, 6,500 chemical bombs and 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical and biological warfare agents [which] remained unaccounted for from activities up to 1991”
David Kelly thought the “launch in 45 minutes” claim was bollocks. He also thought various US attempts to say certain equipment could be quickly turned into launch vehicles or chemical weapons processing plants was also bollocks. He also said the link to Al-Qaeda was bollocks.
However, he wrote an entire article for a British newspaper outlining how based on evidence he had personally seen as a part of UN sanctioned missions, Saddam was committed to a chemical weapons programs, their use was inevitable, and only regime change would stop it.
“Iraq has spent the past 30 years building up an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Although the current threat presented by Iraq militarily is modest, both in terms of conventional and unconventional weapons, it has never given up its intent to develop and stockpile such weapons for both military and terrorist use…The long-term threat, however, remains Iraq’s development to military maturity of weapons of mass destruction—something that only regime change will avert.”
You can read it yourself here: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/aug/31/huttonreport.iraq
David Kelly killed himself shortly after the war started because he name was publicly outed as a critic of the “45 minute” dossier. Conspiracy theories abound. But centre on Kelly undermining the British and American governments - which is why “supposedly” they had him killed.
But even he - a distinguished weapons expert, known internationally, with decades of experience, dozens of missions to Iraq, who inspected Iraqii equipment personally, and who thought the US and UK governments were full of shit exaggerating - even he believed the evidence was such that regime change was the right thing to do, to avert chemical / nuclear disaster.
There was never any good evidence, it was always “trust the CIA!”
Well, if you put it that way… no.
Iraq is nowhere near Afghanistan either. And the US has international weapons inspectors in Iraq annually after the first war. They posed no threat to us… we still had a frickin no fly zone over half the damned country, what were they going to do?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_no-fly_zones_conflict
Fascinating history, but the war against Iraq never really ended. We were constantly bombing Iraq on the daily 1999 through 2003.
David Kelly, British weapons inspector who lead multiple UN missions to inspect Iraqi facilities (and deal with their bullshit) first hand…
- didn’t believe their mobilisation was advanced
- thought many of the exaggerations the US and UK came up with were utter bullshit
- didn’t believe there was any Al-Qaeda connection
- didn’t believe chem weapons could be fired in 45 minutes
But DID
- state the “concealed” Iraqii chemical weapons program was real
- said “8,500 litres of anthrax VX, 2,160 kilograms of bacterial growth media, 360 tonnes of bulk chemical warfare agent, 6,500 chemical bombs and 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical and biological warfare agents remained unaccounted for”
- believed Saddam was committed to deception around the program and had provably recovered chemical weapons equipment from decommission sites after inspectors had left
- stated Saddam’s use of chemical weapons was inevitable
- stated only regime change could stop it
And this is the guy conspiracy theorists think got assassinated because he was too opposed to the governments. Even he argued that what he’d seen showed Saddam should be forcably toppled…
Maybe it’s because I grew up in a conservative area, but most of the people in my area bought the WMD thing hook, line, and sinker. Granted, I don’t even think a lot of people needed even that much of an excuse to support going to war. There was a lot of anger after 9/11 and a lot of people who couldn’t tell the difference between Iraq and Iran wanted to bomb the middle east and the Dubya administration was more than happy to tap into that anger.
Aside from Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi meeting with Osama Bin Laden and being labeled as an extremist by him which led him to going back to Iraq to partake in leaving the Iraqi militancy movement.
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.
Most people don’t understand the events they live through let alone the background of them, so, no.
“Most” is not all.
Plus each person has their own perspective on an event, even if it is just their singular isolated life.
Til that most != all. Thanks for the English lesson.
To be fair. Truthers for 9/11 don’t disbelief in the event ala Holocaust Deniers or “Covid Truthers”
They believe that the event was arranged by the US government in order to go to War… which many believed at the time and still do “No blood for oil.”
January 6th too
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.
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.
To many of the users that claim Lemmy is like the early internet, I often see the year 2010 thrown around. Like, are you serious kid? I’ve been on the internet literally since 1991. I’ve seen some shit. Shit you wouldn’t believe.
I’ve seen things… seen things you little people wouldn’t believe. Sharing software off the shoulders of radio waves, bright as the EM spectrum… I rode on the back decks of BBS with a bell 103 and watched 300 bps content glitter in the dark near my Tannhäuser monitor. All those moments… they’ll be gone.
Shit you wouldn’t believe
Attack posts on fire off the shoulder of 4chan.
Goatse … many goats
Rick rolling is the kinder gentler Disney version of the early internet.
It was a time that had little regard for your feelings… not because people didn’t care, but because shadowbanning wasn’t even a thing yet.
Maybe they mean early social media. That term is somewhat misused, though… social media didn’t start with Facebook or Twitter, it began with Usenet and then forums. And yeah, it wasn’t halcyon days back then. We had the same abusive behavior like trolling, alts, bullying, spam, egos and arguing.
I don’t think Lemmy is like 2010 reddit culturally but more like traditional forums though, since on most instances, the regulars all kinda know each other and their admins as well as their personalities, whereas you rarely recongnize any username on reddit unless they are one of these novelty accounts like Vargas or shitty_watercolour or poem (there are exceptions like Unidan or Wil Wheaton but they are rare) and everyone just kinda blends into a blob there.
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.
People looking at the past through rose-colored glasses? You don’t say.
Yeah, the early Web was ass. No Wikipedia, no Internet Archive…oh, and it took forever to download anything.
Fuuuck you just made me remember the first time I encountered Wikipedia. It was a recommendation from a teacher in my first class of middle school to read some articles about the topic before writing an assignment. It was a literary life changing moment for me. All this knowledge… for free?
Not that there was anything much to download. But there was a good FTP site FAQ floating around. (for those that remember what the original FAQ files were)
We had to be good at spotting online threats. There were no systems, ai, or algorithms to detect child porn or extreme violence. If you were lucky there were mods. You had to be smarter. I still remember in detail the first time I watched a video of a child cutting a man’s head off. Plus if you broke the only family computer, may God gave mercy on your soul. That’s why I became as good with technology as I am, I broke the family computer and had to have it fixed before anyone woke up. Computers just work now. Remember when devices wanted the same memory so you had to somehow remap it. It was the wild west.
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!
Pamela Anderson nude or horrifying decapitation? Time to roll the dice!
Dick spin or Goatse? Oh boy, I love surprises!
Don’t kid yourself, it’s always the decapitation. Or the Korean scream webcomic. But you’re gonna try anyway
The one time it was a Pam Anderson nude was when I tried to download the music video of Linkin Park - Papercut, turned out to be the intro credits to Barb Wire on loop
napster darude sandstorm
I remember when Napster would let you browse the music folder of ANY computer running Napster. I have so much music still I downloaded from our universities intranet back in 1998 that way.
It was like if you were on a corporate network and everyone shared their music on the server shared folder. Was mind blowing even on 10base-T.
Nothing has come close to repeating g that aside from hoarding music on my own computer.
The early days of Napster were actually good. Things started to suck by the time it got to Limewire or Gnutella, with “hotphotoofgirl.jpg.exe” and whatever. BitTorrent improved the situation.
There are even fewer of us that remember the totally text based forums and IRC that was in many ways the innocent Garden of Eden era, before Eternal September happened. I was very much a child, so I’m not really nostalgic about that era of the net, since it was far more of an echo chamber in many ways back then, but it was “safe” and “innocent” back then. You had to verify sources even more, since the majority of sources weren’t available online, but the vast majority of people using it were not only fluent in at least one human language, they were also fluent in multiple programming languages, Assembly being far more popular than than it is now. This is when you could trust any link. The false actors hadn’t managed to infiltrate the protected Geek Sphere, quite yet.
Then CompuServe happened, and it was no longer a refuge for us computer geeks, all of a sudden there were business people looking at our ideas. They didn’t like them much at all, to say the least. AOL followed and further saturated the net with people who had no idea what they could do with it. This is when us netizens started warning to check the link address before you clicked. Back then, you could easily keep a database list of the false actor domains.
Then the late 90s and mostly 2000 happened. That’s the Wild West you’re talking about. All of a sudden, you HAD to have antivirus programs, you needed many programs such as adblockers that wouldn’t exist for another few years, IRC and Use.net had been piracy hubs, but all of a sudden Napster and Bearshare made those archaic forums unnecessary. Metallica did their thing, accidentally creating a bunch of Metallica fans that would never buy anything by Metallica, but they had access to their entire discography. Hell discography downloads became a thing about this time. Don’t download the entire discography of The Kinks. That shit contains literally 40 to 120 gigs of MP3s across 40(?) albums, depending on compression quality.
I’m a Xennial being born in 1980 and on the net as early as late 1986, early 1987, my father was in the industry and literally helped code parts of UNIX, while he was in The Navy in the early 1970s. I’ve been shown evidence that we were the first household in a multi-state area, thanks to the meticulous data keeping of The Baby Bell that we were part of, that had two dedicated phone lines far earlier than anyone else except my father’s colleagues, all of whom lived multiple states away from us since my father has been remote working as much as he can since SSH was adopted as standard in UNIX. He rejects all technology that he can. He claims that it is all based on extremely faulty programming, and we can’t trust it.
There have been several periods as the net gets bigger, and I don’t doubt that we will look at right now as a “special time” in the future. I’m not sure if that will be because we finally found the limits of LLMs or if it’s because the net will evolve into something that is closer to the spirit of “a place to find the truth through facts,” which is what it started as.
Lol, that takes me back. I used to run a mIrc server for anime porn. 😅
“Margot Robbie teased Sonics longest spines.”
That’s Academy Award nominated character actress Margot Robbie to you!
Also, I don’t think the world is quite ready for that yet.
I’m in my 40s, a project manager at my company and half the time when I can. Tech support I have to send them the goddamn tech support article that I want them to follow.
Plus I have to train all these kids in their 20s on how to use outlook and various other software programs that I’ve been using for 20 years now.
To be fair, there might be an issue with the discoverability of these articles. Restructuring the documentation may lead to less of those issues. Though there is always someone who just opens a ticket before reading anything…
I am blaming chromebooks and iPads for that.
It’s stupid that kids learn to use chromebooks when they are relatively rare in enterprise environments.
Disclaimer: I’m also very young.
For real though! Also, can anybody give me a lead as to which instance on here where I can find bad fanfic? A friend of mine was wondering.
literature.cafe could be it. Their admin, Gabe, is a pretty cool dude.
phuckin’ THIS.
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 think it specifically referred to al queda or Iraq or whoever but yeah. Besides random terror attacks the idea of pretty anyone being able to truly project power in any meaningful sense to require us to “fight them over here” presumably in the streets or whatever is just, well like I said, preposterous. Whoever or whatever “they” might be.
This also precludes that “fighting them over there” will not itself create an deep-seated hatred of the united states in countries with now-unstable governments, radicalizing more people to a point they would be capable of committing terrorism on US soil, not less.
What I mean to say is that if I’m an Iraqi who grew up with my country being ravaged by a war it had nothing to do with in the first place, I’m going to blame the united states.
While propaganda at home tells us how bad the Iraqis, Saudis, afghanis, Russians, etc. are and how AMAZE-BALLS the USA is. We tend to forget that other countries are spreading their own propaganda on how amazing they are and how bad the USA is.
Not everyone loves us, no matter how much the media portrays us as the “good guys.” Situations are not black and white, there is no ultimate right or wrong. There are infinite shades of gray, infinite opinions, and infinite means of achieving things. You can look at our politics are and how much discourse and compromises there are.
Though most people think they are the good guys and most people aren’t running with malicious intentions. Even doing what we do, thinking we are the good guys. Means we’ll run up against people that disagree and we are always going to make enemies.
Propaganda can be a hell of a drug. Just look at the Russians and kyiv during the literal opening shots of the war. They were told and hyped up that the Ukrainians would be welcoming them with open arms and they even brought along their parade uniforms expecting a quick victory…well reality sunk in when in a way Ukraine did welcome them with arms, just not the kind Russia expected.
This is very funny since the 9/11 terrorists were from Saudi Arabia and not Iraq.
Yup :/
Yeah people talked about how “there’s a billion Muslims!” all the time, as if all of them were personally dedicated to serving as soldiers to invade the US. That’s not hyperbole btw, that’s literally what people believed.
Yes if a billion people want us dead, we’d be dead.
Last time I looked into it, it was around 1.5 billion worldwide.
I just checked again; estimates in 2020 were around 1.9 billion.
And yeah, it’s silly to believe that that many people would be a monolith.
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
As someone who served for 20 years, I’ll tell you that almost no one in my last unit was voting red. Republican politicians use “support our troops” to win votes, but they don’t give a shit about us. Behind the scenes, they’ve been pushing policies to take away our programs and benefits. Democrats are the sole reason we still have any benefits left.
I mentioned in another thread, when the govt shutdown happens, service members don’t get paid until the shutdown ends. But they’re still required to go to work and act like nothing’s happening. And who keeps forcing govt shutdowns as leverage to get their way? Republicans.
As a currently 100% disabled veteran who relies on my VA benefits to survive, I’ll never vote red again.
EDIT: My uncle retired from the US Air Force in the early '90s and they gave him free medical and dental for life as one of his retiree benefits. He applied for VA disability and barely qualified for 10%, which he doesn’t even use.
I retired last summer (July 2022) and I needed to qualify for 100% disability to get the same deal (which is very hard to acquire). Otherwise, they’d only cover whatever long-term ailments I could prove happened during my service and I’d need to pay medical insurance to cover any other medical issues. This was one of the main benefits that encouraged me to join, and Republicans have screwed most people out of it over the past few decades.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Those Jerb Creaturs need those tax cuts to make jerbs. And we’re not talking about the real victims here: the shareholders. We got a Feedouchery Reesposibiluhtee to maximize them profits.
I feels you. Didn’t get in until 2003, but that was in time to take part in Op Phantom Fury, and then do a 2nd tour when Anbar was getting ugly.
Awful lot of misery for a bunch of bullshit. Alls I have to show for it is knee and back problems, and occasional panic attacks if/when stuff looks like tracers; a nephew damn near gave me a heart attack playing with some broken fairy lights one time. Still not comfortable with fireworks or FPS shooters.
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Makes me think of a family thing where one young cousin of mine was obviously baked. And everyone knew it. Everyone could see, everyone could smell it. But nobody cared. So the lil fella just sat in the corner the whole time slyly grinning to himself and giggling. Some months later I joked about it in another family gathering and the guy was shocked to find out we knew about weed and what it smelled like.
Weed, ah, what a new fangled thing. Tbh I’ve been in the almost exact position. Something comforting how it keeps happening.
As a teenager a friend and I made up some excuse to sneak away from the adults to go get high. One of the adults knowingly mimed smoking a joint to us.
“How did you know,” we asked.
“I’ve been 16. You’ve never been 40,” he said.
I always laugh at kids who think casual sex was somehow just invented last year.
I always used to smoke at work when I worked as a janitor in my 20s. One time my manager grinned at me as I was coming back in from my break and asked if I was feeling tired. I can keep it together, but the droopy eyelids are a dead giveaway lol
Congrats on cleaning up while still keeping it real
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Ah my mistake. Good clarification. I’ve never been one to wear my interests, so it didn’t occur to me.
Cool that you’ve been straight edge your whole life! So many people take a detour into abusing mind altering substances, especially at a young age.
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 doubt someone without serious mental problems would be permanently scarred by that.
Accidentally got my mom with meatspin since she was stalking my AIM lol. Serves her right 🤣
www.whitehouse.com anyone?
Two people down voted this. I assume they are unaware of the history of that domain.
Hint - you did NOT want to use the wrong TLD at work or school.
Hint - you did NOT want to use the wrong TLD at work or school.
Or maybe you did. 😉
Torrent sites are safe and sane compared to Kazaa or Gnutella in the early 2000s.
F.O.S.I. Apps (in the 90s) was super reliable
also the Phrozen Crew “We always get what we want”
fond memories
Don’t google on goetse, and don’t google on lemonparty.
I can never see wedding bands and old folks homes the same way ever again.
Don’t google “blue waffles” or “crusty pizza.”
Do Google your username because that skit is hilarious.
Tubgirl
Consumption Junction was a window into a very dark world.
I remember “Disney Princesses” did not yield the expected results.
Go to DDG
Go to search
Type in Disney Princess Rule34
Turn off safe search
Your Welcome 😘
I accidentally saw an old woman being fucked by a German Shepherd when I was 12. Life was wild back then
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)?
"install CD’
Oh, my sweet summer child …
Wait until they hear about the install case sets of 5.25" floppies.
And then going home and praying it didn’t stall overnight.
When hacking write protect involved Scotch tape.
But why does DOS 3 need more than one 5.25" disk? Too much bloat if you ask me!
Yeah I’ve been thinking about just getting a CD drive on my desktop installed because it just feels weird not having one
I bought my first laptop that doesn’t have an optical drive last fall. I haven’t missed it…yet.
It also doesn’t have an ethernet port, so I bought a usb ethernet adapter for it. I’m not ready to let go of that. (And I often find myself diagnosing network issues, so I do need it occasionally.)
I live in an ETHERNET ONLY HOUSEHOLD
(Also wireless still sucks for gigabit)
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.
You aren’t kidding. My city was really slow on the Internet so i was using aol. Asking for certs and using CC generators. It was good times actually.
Then I tried IRC and kept getting kicked from every channel and someone finally gave a reason before before kicking me. When i messaged them explaining how i have no other way to access the internet they were actually really cool and invited me back to the channel. I didn’t go back as I knew i carried an unacceptable tag.
A year or 2 later we finally got a provider and oh wow now i remember trumpet windsock and the chaos of trying to find anything.
I still remember seeing a Toyota commercial with a web address and being like wow this internet thing is really taking off!
Now we’ve come full circle and i have to argue with my parents about the “truth” on Facebook. It’s got its perks but terminals and desqview times make me miss the simplicity… or complication. Depends how you look at it .
Oh god I erased winsock from my memory! Our little local ISP had spotty access with weird tools and I also moved to AOL haha.
AOL was a blast at the time. Warez and MFT rooms could fill an inbox with every piece of software you wanted to play with. How about what you could do with LuciferX? Hah
As for winsock, same here. It’s funny how a random post can unearth memories like that. Just one of many reasons I’ve come to enjoy the fediverse. Makes me feel like I should be using Netscape
Pull up a chair son, I’ll tell you a tale of Trumpet Winsock.
Oh fuck. Totally forgot about that! Think I blocked out how bad it was to connect in Win3.1…but those sweet mIRC windows were worth it.
That was before my time, but my early schooling still had some marks from that era. Instead of giving links, we were taught to type out the entire URL. HTTPS and all. I didn’t understand why at the time, but it makes perfect sense. You really didn’t want to have a single wrong letter sometimes. Legally.
Oh there was no one looking at what anyone was doing it was truly the wild west!
At my high school, we installed doom on all the school computers and used to play deathmatch games in computer class.
I can still vividly remember the sounds of the modem connecting
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
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
- Pillip K. Dick
It seems that if there’s enough people that believe in something, that reality hitting can be delayed quite some time. Something like the Idiocracy Effect, if you will.
Yeah the thing is “living through” something doesn’t really mean anything unless you were personally involved in it. Like I remember being in school on 9/11. I was a kid at the time, and everything I learned about it was from like CNN or similar. That doesn’t make me an expert. There are definitely younger people who have studied history who will know more about it than me.
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.
“Is this Roblox?”
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!”
My dad is who introduced me to columbo, but knows nothing about Internet culture, so the conversation with us would be more like:
“They’re making memes about Columbo!”
“What’s a meme?”
Just one more thing…
Spent some bank — I got a high powered jumbo/Rolled up a wooly and I watched Columbo…
I just tell my cousins I’ve never heard of the things they talk about. Minecraft? Never heard of it. Is it one of those Korean animays you kids like?
I love when their eyes light up after doing that. You just KNOW they’re about to tell you absolutely everything that they’ve learned about it, in as much detail as possible haha.
A few years back, my cousin learned about star wars. He became obsessed with it, and he figured that adults were too old to know about it. My cousin was APPALLED when I jokingly asked him who Star War’s version of Santa Claus was. Poor lil’ dude almost blew a gasket over that one.
I was teaching swim lessons to some four year olds when one of them asked me if I played minecraft. I told him I do, and he got so excited to tell me all about it.
These kids were good enough that I had them doing laps, but this kid was so excited that he decided that telling me about minecraft was much more important than breathing or staying on top of the water. His mom asked me not to talk about minecraft after that
Lol
I have a 4 year old but he has been shielded from all video games so far.
Hoping he will enjoy playing outside for a little longer tbh. Also we’re doing Legos now.
Animaymays are like so cool and hip
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Completely irrelevant to the topic, but I only ever hear about magnet schools in the context of LA- do they only really exist there?
This one is very far from California :)
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.
I was at work listening to it on the radio 💀
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 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.
I was spending 11 days in jail when it happened. My entire life felt like it was upsidedown.
I am so curious: did they tell you? Did your routine change? Did everyone care?
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.
I was a freshman in high school at the time and ironically was in my third period social studies/American history class.
I was heavily hung over and spent all day in my pajamas watching TV.
Dude I had a flight booked that day, and my birthday was later in the week.
That shit changed EVERYTHING.
Lol… I was lying in bed with my (now ex) wife 2 days after getting home from our honeymoon in Costa Rica
ok boomer
Found the dumbass kid 👍
ok boomer²
ok boomer
YOU DAMN KIDS, GET OFF MYSPACE!
ok
boomermillennial
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.
Obviously he knew that, some day, his grandchild would spread his propaganda far and wide for the glory of this great nation!
Bingo. No room for occam’s razor here!
Happens to me with Venezuela. I lived there before and through/ during the glorious revolución bolivariana and here come the champagne leftists from 8 thousands kilometers away to tell me that it wasn’t real socialism, that apparently I am a CIA agent (where my money at?), that I didn’t got held at gunpoint many times in my life there for attempting to escape the country as many others and that the government didn’t murder my family members haha. Yeah it’s not funny at all
Being the victim of American propaganda does not make you an employee CIA agent. But the fact is that America is fundamentally responsible for most of the problems in Venezuela, both via CIA meddling, and letting our capitalists decimate their economy for their own personal gain. Its the same story across almost all of South America. Sometimes it’s staging coups on their elected leaders, sometimes it’s leveraging the power of a fruit company in order to rewrite their laws to be favorable towards said fruit company.
Listening to Behind the Bastards has taught me all I think I need to know to understand where the blame lies for the economic shit of the last 100 years in South America.
What do they say if they’re saying it’s not real socialism?
I would assume something along the lines of - autocracy, authoritarianism, and corruption do not describe what socialism portends to be.
That said, I did read something the other day about how Marxist Leninism in reality relies on the concept of an authoritarian that creates the framework, stays in power to enforce the will of the worker, and gradually relinquishes power as it is no longer required. Interesting.
I know enough about socialism to know that it is as homogeneous a concept as a bloody Mary from a gentrified cafe. Someone saying they know more about socialism than another simply because they lived through one of the scant few representations of it has about as much reason as someone saying they’re an expert in capitalism or patriotism because they live the US. So, I can appreciate the perspective that someone from a socialist country can offer, but it in no way defines socialism as an ethos, IMO.
Or maybe your grandfather just had a perspective that was skewed by either wealth or propaganda. From context in going to guess that he attributes a lot of the negatives caused by capitlaists during the cold war to simply being fundamental facts of socialism/communism
Yea, that’s the one thing he didn’t mention in the journal or bring here with him; loads of cash.
You’re a fucking tool.
I was trying to give him the benefit of the doubt actually. You’re the one saying he isn’t merely the victim of propaganda. Its entirely possible he was just an idiot. Or a massive piece of shit. Most of the people who were “driven out” of communist countries were just business owners who were trying to hoard all the food they grew, during a famine. So yes, now that you bring it up, it is also possible your grandfather was just a massive POS, rather than a victim.
Hahaha sure dude. Whatever you say. I’m sure you know much more about the trials and tribulations that happened before you were born than the people who lived through it.
I’m super happy to be living in this country after having read about my ancestors experiences. He took a risk by coming here, but we all have benefitted from it.
You’re still a fucking tool, though. 🤡
Yeah, that kind of thing can happen when you actually research history rather than ask one person. There’s a reason anecdotal evidence isn’t given much credence.
So my options in this scenario:
-
read a first hand account from my ancestor and parse out any personal feelings that cloud the truth
-
read an opinion from a nameless stranger online who has done nothing but doubt what I have read with my own eyes
As you can see here, the ‘anecdotal evidence’ is coming from you, and the historical truth that actually existed is documented in this journal.
Get your head out of your ass.
Why are those your only options? You already ruled out researching what the actual truth is? Don’t take my word for it, prove me wrong. If I can be proven wrong, I want to know. My evidence is empirical, but 2nd hand. Better than anecdotal, but not proof in itself. Your grandfather’s journal is primary, but anecdotal. Would you rather be right, or be correct? I’d rather be correct.
-
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”.
Back when it actually got dark at night. Before it ran my adhd ass off by adding too much shit to do.
Once you had to feed the player I was overwhelmed.
I think I started playing around the1.1 or 1.2 release updates, but with the whole chat reporting, the chat/sign censorship, and now the terms of service changes, I just completely dropped the game. That, and Minetest runs more smoothly on my current desktop.
I played alpha based on this guy I worked with. He came to work almost hungover from lack of sleep. He said that this sandbox survival game had him hooked. I believe I paid $8 back I’m October of 2009.
I have nieces and nephews who ask me about minecraft now. It’s comical. I’ve played longer than they have been alive…
Yeah, that’s about when I picked it up too. My now wife and I played it one night. I got into it, she didn’t.
My little cousin asked santa for a pikachu, as the grown adult I am I obviously asked for a pikachu too
My 6-year-old niece was shocked to learn I knew all about My Little Pony.
Even something as recent as nephews getting into Minecraft because of the Caves & Cliffs update, like please, I remember when 1 block of water could ruin an entire server
don’t forget how a single flint and steel was the most devastating weapon available in forest biomes
I remember staying up all night chopping a firewall into our mega forest, trying to stay away from the chunks that were on fire
I had a sort of backwards version of this, see I was the first born come and only to my mother, but the first one to any of those sired by my grandparents. (I think Dad was like 19 she was 18… something around then)
So fast forwqrd like 30 years later my 50-something aunt suddenly is supper knowledgeable about pokemon, when I clearly remember her just not getting it way back then. And I ask her how the hell does she know all this stuff about evolution and regional variants…
And she reminds me that her son is like 12 now… and I’m like “That scans”
Yeah, that’s one of the things that make me sad that i don’t have children. When i watch friends with their children, i’m truly envious of the experience with mini-me
10 facts about sex
old person: “i remember how it was”
sex=dirty
air=clean
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.
Yes but I just couldn’t let it slide.
Honestly, good for you. I’ve been burned so many times by thinking “oh, it was recent,” then I guess that the new grinch movie came out in 2014.
I tried to make that a real guess, then I looked it up, and apparently there was another one in 2018, but rest assured, I meant the one from 2000 (?!)
1994, so five years off the mark
At best. At worst 14 years off. Split the diff and call it 7.
1987 felt like a different universe to me than the mid '90s. (I’m mid 40s, so grew up during that time.)
I dunno, purple was still a popular fashion color well into the 90s. That and teal.
Just wait until they start lecturing you on things you taught them.
My mom is 70 and she’s still fucking lectures ME on shit that she can’t even get straight.
Her new one: don’t eat salmon, it causes salmonella.
We used to eat Salmon like at every major holiday.
I can remember the first time a young person tried to tell me about some Booth fella was the one that shot JFK.
And I was like oh no son, you’re severely mistaken. It was Lincoln that assassinated Washington, I was there on the banks of the Potomac and watched the whole thing unfold.
If only there was some way to easily confirm that by typing it into a search engine
That’s hogswash, Bobby. I assassinated George Washington. Abraham Lincoln is the devil!!
I was there when Lincoln became a Vampire Killer - can’t fool me
Jesus was an architect previous to his career as a prophet.
That’s the Wright Brothers’ plane! In Kitty Hawk in 1903, Charles Lindbergh flew it 15 miles on a thimble full of corn oil. Single-handedly won us the Civil War, it did.
