At the risk of making some people feel old, to me (as a 25 y/old), 2001 feels very long ago, and conjures memories of cassettes and big CRTs.
It's one of my few memories from that far back, actually. The television news, I remember seeing the attacks. Mom was folding laundry, I recall. I wonder sometimes if it's a "fictitious memory", but I think it's real.
Interesting how inverted things are, not even my parents watch TV much anymore, now the normal is getting notifications from whatever social media app.
But that's not quite right though. I think I get the sentiment, but it's not that people in 2001 weren't using socials as much as TV for news because of popularity. It was because they didn't exist yet. That's like saying that in 2001 the ratio of smart phone users to dumb phone/land line users were inverted compared to today, but yet smart phones weren't a thing then so it's not a good inversion comparison.
I have 5 years on you, and as a fifth grader who was in school that morning, it definitely was a few flashbulb memories for me as to the events of the morning and my early return from grade school that day. The rest was much more of a blur, except the next day was absolutely my first realization as a person that “the daily news” doesn’t “reset” to a totally new/different set of topics each day. I truly didn’t understand the scale of that event at the time, and how long it would continue to be newsworthy.
I think some of this is just how one processes notable events at different ages. I have similar childhood memories, which might be tainted by subsequent coverage, of the John Lennon murder and the Ronald Reagan assassination attempt. But I also have similarly vague memories of the hospital where we went to see my grandfather after a stroke when I was <5 years old. There was later family discussion but no visual records to give seed my impressionistic memory of the street and entrance to the hospital.
I was slightly older and have unambiguous memories of Mt. Saint Helens erupting, the Iran Contra hearings, etc. My fourth grade class submitted our teacher's name as a candidate for the Challenger mission, and I was in
middle school when that mission disaster occurred. I was in high school when the Berlin Wall came down, and also high school for the first Gulf War, which was my first taste of endless, wall-to-wall TV coverage. I was waking up for work on the west coast when the 9/11 news came. The post-9/11 coverage was a weird echo of the Challenger disaster coverage (endless replay of explosion and crowd response) and the Gulf War coverage. And, I was just the right age to form a very cynical and jaded attitude towards all this, seeing it as a formulaic media orgy.
Similar to the Fark thread, the breaking news was also followed on other news aggregator and discussion sites like Slashdot. I don't really think the chatter and flood of links to articles or reference to real-time TV broadcasts was that much different than what people do with Twitter and other social media today. Aside from obviously having simpler text and images and less online video content, the difference was only in the percentage of the world population using the tools.
I remember that morning very vividly. My dad was dropping me off at high school and it was my senior year (I didn't own a car). My dad was listening to AM radio as he always did and I wasn't really paying much attention. When the report of it happening came over the radio my dad was just pulling into the parking lot of my high school and he had a shrill in his voice that I hadn't heard before telling me "did you hear that?". It was a really odd feeling. This was the most peaked I had ever seen my father and he dropped me off. It when I got into the cafeteria at school everyone was hunkered around a wood grained TV that was on in the mornings to watch the news. Within an hour the principal came in and waited for a break in coverage to tell us school cancelled for the day and that our parents would be contacted to get us or that we would drive home.
In response, it is kinda odd that this historical event started for me from an AM broadcast and then a wood grained tube tv in a school cafeteria. All of which changed in how feel about them. Even today, hearing AM radio puts me on high alert because the last time I didn't pay attention to it a big event happened.
I have a memory of attending a preschool in somebody's house in 1986, and one day the teacher's son ran into the room saying that the space shuttle Challenger had exploded. The memory is so vivid, but I have no idea if it is accurate at all.
In the new market, perhaps, but we still listened to "books on tape" in our minivan for another ten years. When the library started switching to carrying CDs, we had to use one of those cassette-to-aux adapters plugged into a portable CD player.
My childhood was full of both, actually! My elder sibling is a decade older, and I sort of "inherited" their stuff. It had definitely been replaced at this point for most people, but at least in my family, we kept using tapes (both kinds) way into the 2000s!
(For context, this was the rural US southeast, and our family did have disk players, we just kept using tapes for a while. I remember the library had a lot more children videos and audio books on tapes than disks.)
Interesting! We definitely still had a pile of audio tapes laying around but they belonged to my mom.
Our family was gifted a CD player in 94 or 95, and all my music that I purchased with my allowance from that point was on CD, even though the unit had 2 tape decks. Mom only bought CDs from that point as well. Then when I got my first car in 01, I installed a radio that was CD only, no tape deck.
It didn't matter if you did have a cellphone, the network was completely overloaded all day, getting a call through was unlikely.
I remember CNN.com being down for the longest time. I didn't have a television or radio so I ended up following along on the BBC website, which didn't crash. Kudos to the engineers behind that one.
As I recall, bbc.com was built with WebObjects and a heavy layer of static geneation/caching in front of it at that time, and probably served from Solaris or FreeBSD. This seems like the kind of forum where someone would know with certainty however!
> In case there are people here who are really to young to remember this
I'd guess there's quite a few of them here. Most current college age kids hadn't been born yet. College seniors were newborns. Those under age 30 probably remember it, but they were most likely too young to really understand what was going on at the time.
LiveJournal was quite large by then I believe, that along with the real-time messaging apps ICQ/AOL/MSN were beginning to become mainstream. I think I can remember reading about Habbo Hotel too around then.
Probably due to load, most of the big news sites wouldn't load. I ended up going to BBC.com to find out how bad it was. I heard about it from a very confused DJ on a radio station on my way to work.
Most households in the U.S. already had mobile phones by 2001. Market penetration was even higher in Europe. You're right about the smartphone thing, since they didn't really exist until 2002. In 2001 BlackBerry, the most popular smart-thing with its own mobile radio but no phone, had fewer than 200k subscribers world-wide.
I was 15, everyone at school (in the uk) had phones. I remember waiting to be collected from school and reading the latest updates from the BBC WAP website on my Trium Mars phone - that’s a technology that’s long dead.
At your school perhaps. I was slightly younger than you when this happened. I was home from school early for reasons I don't remember, and watched everything unfold on TV (I do remember that part).
I don't remember if I got my first phone before or after this - I think maybe after, but I am honestly very unsure. I can tell you it was a 2nd hand 3310. Not everyone in school had one, because not everyone could afford it. Some people's parents didn't have them; most people's grandparents didn't. Landlines reigned supreme, and MSN whenever that arrived (still had a few friends without internet then, I was on dialup, a few people got broadband the year after).
I don't remember anyone using WAP really ever^. I don't really remember when mobile internet actually took off seriously but I remember a friend posting to facebook and getting updates via SMS in 2008/2009. Cool that you did use WAP, but you were likely a minority and that's nothing compared to the ubiquity of LTE connections of today.
^One of my friend's Dads worked for Vodafone at the time. Their HQ was commutable from where we lived. I discussed C++ with him a lot. I still don't remember anyone using WAP and they had staff discount, so your 12p/10p SMS was 2p for them. I only knew what WAP was because I read about it in PC Pro.
Yes, I was a massive geek, I suspect I was the only kid using WAP at school…
I think we had gone from almost no one having phones to the majority of the year having them in the space of that year. A lot of hand me downs from parents, and a fair bit of being envious of kids with Nokias.
This submission actually unlocked a memory: I wasn't a regular Fark user but because social media and live blogs on news sites weren't a thing yet and TV coverage was lagging behind, I actually followed the Fark thread because it was the closest thing you'd get to a live updated news feed.
The more recent equivalent would be following Twitter hashtags during terrorist attacks (until they became unusable with people actively spreading disinformation).
I remember being told by a friend of my now-ex-wife that "hundreds" of planes had been "taken over" and would be crashed into state legislatures across the USA. It's very difficult to keep a cool head during an overwhelming crisis, and the world trade centre attack drives home how easy it is to get lost in rumour and fantasy.
That time period following the attacks was surreal. People were very scared of any plane noises, and a brown-skinned terrorist was imagined lurking around every corner. Then the anthrax attacks happened, and the DC sniper attacks too. It felt like the USA was paralyzed by fear, so I can at least appreciate the atmosphere that led to the "patriot" act and other rights-eroding laws.
COVID-19 felt like a natural disaster to me, with effects that are bad but not from malicious intent (ignoring the actions of various groups, I mean). The WTC attack and subsequent terrorism felt different, as they were caused by humans to inflict fear and chaos on us. It's amazing to me how different those 2 events felt.
I lived in a small town of less than 20,000 and two days after the attacks, a rock slide fell onto one of our buildings in the city. I remember many freaking out that we were under attack. It's hard for many people to realize how spooked everyone was when such an unprecedented attack took place. No one felt safe for weeks after.
I too recall seeing hysterical news cycles around that time. The reactions to the anthrax scares as mentioned: tons of people at Home Depot buying plastic sheeting and duct tape, etc. And the day of 9/11, I remember multiple people living in other states messaging me about a military target near me being a likely nuke target. Maybe I'm also around anxious people, but it really seemed to me that a certain level of hysterics was pretty widespread around this.
> Quite a few more died in the end than a nuke could manage.
Are you including the ensuing occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq?
Even then, I think you're seriously underestimating the number of casualties a relatively low yield nuke (in the context of modern strategic weapons) would produce if it hit a city like New York.
Yes that was the implication. Depends who you ask and talking about it at the time was full of controversy, but I have seen half a million excess deaths in the end for Iraq and maybe half that for Afghanistan?
Because Salomon Brothers/Building 7 is the first and only steel building to completely collapse due to some uncontrolled fires and because the BBC reported about its collapse before it even happened because it's clearly visible behind her while she reports about it: https://youtu.be/TONMGGiKI7s
There was almost three and a half hours between the first signs (2PM) of collapse and the final total collapse (5:20PM). It began with bulges and inward collapse on upper floors and then the fire service evacuating and abandoning the building in anticipation of structural failure. It's easy to understand news services listening in to the radio traffic in the heat of the moment misunderstanding.
I remember that being reported on while the video was still seen standing in the live feed playing behind the reporter, and thought it was so curious because it hadn't, and then it falling.
I also recall there being a third or fourth plane that was diverted by a terrorist and perhaps two more crashes. At the time, on the live newscast, there was another plane headed toward the pentagon and one more headed somewhere else. One crashed in a field, one crashed into the pentagon and left a small hole in the wall. There are so many details from the news broadcasts that day that don't line up and don't get spoken about.
Partly the reason why there are so many theories out there about what happened that day is the amount of conjecture in the reporting never got rehashed, there was never an examination after the fact of who said what and why it was or was not the case.
I've always wondered what people think that this is supposed to mean - are they suggesting that there was a conspiracy to demolish WTC7 for whatever reason, and the BBC was somehow brought into the conspiracy for some inexplicable reason and were supposed to announce that it had collapsed at some planned time for some inexplicable reason and they either got the time wrong or the collapse was delayed and they reported it anyway for some inexplicable reason even though it was visibly still there? As opposed to the much more likely scenario wherein it was a chaotic situation, and the firefighters had decided to stop fighting the fire in WTC7 because they thought it was going to collapse, and either somebody had misheard over a scanner or the anchor misunderstood what they were being told and said the wrong thing? Because if so, that sounds like a failure of critical thinking, not evidence of a conspiracy.
And that's my problem with nearly all of the 9/11 conspiracy stuff - most of it is things where you say, "hmm, that seems a little strange" and then it falls apart completely when you really look into and/or think about it. Like, if you say to me, "The CIA was behind 9/11, they posed as a radical Islamic fundamentalist organization and found some guys who wanted to attack the WTC and bankrolled them and helped them plan and gave them advice on exploiting known problems with US security, and did some stuff to make sure that any investigation would be diverted, and they were successful and flew planes into buildings which burned for hours and then collapsed, killing thousands of people and justifying foreign wars", that's plausible. Could have happened. The CIA has probably done more evil things. Burden of proof is on you, of course, but it could be a thing.
But no, it's always "the towers were brought down by explosives", or "the planes were really missiles", or "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" or "the planes were flown by remote control and all the supposed passengers were just crisis actors" or, "they let random idiot x into the conspiracy for no discernible reason and he spilled the beans" or any one of a hundred improbable, unsupported-by-the-available-facts failures of critical thinking. I mean, I understand the tendency of the human mind, when faced with a chaotic situation with an unsatisfying outcome, to latch onto little odd things about the official explanation and expand them into a whole tale that wraps up the whole thing neatly, but man, this is just exhausting
Probably not clearly recognisable to a British reporter regardless of visibility, though.
“Collapse” in the sense of “caving in” can happen to just a part of a building. “Building 7 has collapsed” is shorthand for both “Building 7 has suffered a partial collapse” and “Building 7 is now a pile of rubble” - it’s not hard to understand that in the fog of what was a catastrophic event one is easily mistaken for the other, partially when the other is more “Get this on air now!” newsworthy.
I found out about the first plane hitting when my mother called me at work, on a land line I believe, just after I arrived. I fresh out of my BS and worked as a software developer at CMU at the time.
I went into my boss’s office and told
him, and I remember he thought it was a small plane. We had a test server room near our office that had a TV and original XBox. A few of us went into the server room to watch the coverage. Soon after, the second plane hit. I remember asking one of our senior managers if this was bigger than Pearl Harbor. He just looked at me dumbfounded. A while
later the towers fell.
I had a friend who lived in NYC and commuted to Jersey City via the PATH train, so I called him to make sure he was okay. He was. At the time, I didn’t understand that the towers had completely collapsed; I thought they were half standing. My friend from NYC told me I was wrong—-“they’re gone man.”
We continued watching the coverage together for a couple of hours until the University announced that it was closing for the day (I think it closed the rest of the week, but can’t remember). Then we all just shambled home, stunned.
I remember being surprised and a little heartened that the US waited a month the strike back at Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. By the time we invaded Iraq, I was no longer heartened, but completely disillusioned about the USA as a force for “good” in the world.
I mean to be fair, GP real did go out of his/her way to type specifically “original Xbox” in a story that had nothing to do with Xboxes. If he’s wants to include that, isn’t it a service to follow up on it?
not really, human memory is surprisingly non-linear, and temporal ordering is pretty poor. even for important events.
more importantly, making someone aware of their inaccuracy of something so close to them could quite possibly make them feel ashamed, or embarrassed, perhaps even disrespectful. but it’s just how memory works.
I didn't really know what it the WTC looked like, and by the time I had the TV on I just saw the second tower come down. I remember starting Simcity 3000 and placing the World Trade Center to see what is was supposed to look like.
At the time I worked for an ISP which was the primary ISP for most of the major media companies and for the largest consumer internet provider. It was a crazy day trying to keep things flowing under the demand. A lot of traffic engineering and rapidly bringing up additional bandwidth.
All this was done without access to the internet ourselves because early in the day my employer decided to pull the plug on our access. When they pulled the plug many employees went to the cafeteria to watch the TVs there. The company sent security guards to turn off the TVs and confiscate the remotes.
What was the reasoning? Did they not want people to be aware of the news? I'm imagining an exec glued to their TV thinking he has to keep his employees from doing the same thing.
The thought process was to keep people working. The reality was that about 40 out of hundreds of employees there were involved in keeping things flowing that day. The ISP was located in Northern Virginia near Dulles airport where the flight which crashed into the Pentagon took off from and a large percentage there knew someone that worked at the Pentagon including in many cases family members.
I love that the first instinct is that some country has to be attacked now. Then someone says that they will probably attack some wrong country. Prophetic.
> I love that the first instinct is that some country has to be attacked now
Also somehow end up blaming Palestine and praise Israel out of nowhere
> how much you wanna bet hammas is behind this
> Now I know how Israelis feel when they're bombed by lame suicide Palestines terriost.
> I also got 10 to 1 that the Palestinians are involved somehow.
> Yes, the Palestinians are all cuddly, and the Israelis are the bad guys. The NY Times and the rest of the media better get their heads out of their asses.
Anyone can invoke anything as a rationale for doing something. That doesn't automatically make it true, and it certainly doesn't make any parties they reference automatically culpable. There could be any number of reasons for citing an unrelated party, like to try deflect blame to a scapegoat or to try to motivate others to join one's cause. I don't think it's particularly controversial to suggest that there could be other motives for his statement than just wanting to clarify any confusion people might have.
I am providing additional context to the comment I replied to above. The comment points out that in the hours after the event there was discussion on the fark forum regarding Palestine. I'm merely stating a fact. No need for downvotes.
Yah, that was my reaction that morning, that the US would bomb the crap out of some random country. (In between trying to figure out what was happing to the inlaws, who were flying in from Ireland at the time)
As someon who was a child at the time, I remember September 11th in the context of fear and the sense of unity it created shortly thereafter. It's interesting to me to go back and look at the way adults reacted, which was mostly anger. It's surprising how calmly the US government reacted compared to normal people. When Afghanistan refused to extradite Bin Laden most of the people I knew wanted to start nuking Afghan cities one by one until they changed their mind.
In case you don't wanna have to keep clicking back/forth to go to the next page (the links aren't adjusted to point to the archived pages) there's a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHwF5NNAu5w
Then you realize there aren’t good guys or bad guys, there’s just a world of immense trade offs, and that on balance the US is a far preferable superpower than the other probable options.
I think the assumption that the US is a preferable superpower--likely true at one point--is what led to the US behaving increasingly badly, taking the wrong side of those trade-offs, to the point that I can think of several candidates I would prefer to the US as a world superpower--including no world superpower at all!
There aren't many that are always good, or always bad, but it's naive to suggest that "there aren't good guys or bad guys." No matter where in the world you are, you're in no danger of being shot by the Swiss government. That's a statement that's not true of the US, even in the US!
> I can think of several candidates I would prefer to the US as a world superpower--including no world superpower at all!
No, you really really don't want this. I don't know what utopian partnership of nations you have in mind, but what you will get is World War 1 remastered.
The previous US President is currently being investigated for leaking nuclear secrets. During his tenure, he went from being a reality TV star to having control over the most sophisticated nuclear arsenal in the world, with a system expressly designed to enable the President to have unilateral control over the launching of nuclear weapons.[0]
Currently, a large portion of the voting age US citizenry no longer believes in the peaceful transition of power. The highest instance of the US judicial system is under the control of specific authoritarian and religious elements for the foreseeable future. We can't know how the US will evolve next, but the picture doesn't seem really rosy at all. We don't know when the next reality TV star or populist politician will take control there, or which ideological movement will capture the institutions in the next few years. Given the country's history of intervening in other nations, we can only guess at what the consequences would then be for the rest of the world.
Given all of this, having no superpower would seem preferable.
The breakup of the US and diffusion of its ability to exert influence would be a net positive in my opinion. It would no doubt cause a lot of pain in the US though (as the loss of the USD as reserve currency would likely be a consequence).
Good guys or bad guys we all live under the threat of total nuclear annihilation at any moment - of which the US has been at the forefront of advancement from day 1.
I am not American and I consider America to be preferable to just about any other contender. I'll take the EU, but if China were to ever take the role of the U.S., we are all in big trouble.
Yeah, also not American, but given that the options are the US, the Russians or the Chinese, then the Americans are the least worst option (from my perspective, at least).
I can't speak for the earlier commenter, but I think there is a large gap between what the EU does today and what it would need to do to be a "superpower". It is left to our imaginations to guess at such a future, and so disagreements may just stem from different imagined scenarios.
I don't think the US would be a superpower if the treaties, tariffs, and military control were parceled out to the individual states and each state governor and state assembly decided when to work as a block and when to act independently.
It's just not where the EU is right now. I was at an EU young people summit almost twenty years ago now, and I pointed out that the EU would need an army to stop future genocides like the Balkans. I was shouted down by basically everyone in the room.
I'm not convinced that much has changed since, and you definitely can't be a super power without an army.
Apart from the superpowers, there were also significant political forces that were supporting democracy and social justice. On the other hand, both USA and USSR actively (and succesfully) fought them. I don't see any sense in calling either of the superpowers preferable in this context.
I’d go further and suggest the US is only preferable so long as viable alternatives exist and without the other options (aka bad guys) the US would devolve into an authoritarian dystopia.
Yeah this seems compelling, though it’s odd that probably the largest steps toward authoritarianism have been in direct response to “bad guys” (real or imagined)?
In my opinion states slowly devolve into authoritarianism anyway and will give whatever reason suites them. Hence the expression “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants.” - Thomas Jefferson. Without opposition the state will no longer need excuses and simply impose what it wishes.
On the chance you have not, I'd highly recommend reading Plato's "Republic". If you're short of time, this [1] is "book" (more like chapter) 8. The section from "And democracy has her own good, of which the insatiable desire brings her to dissolution?" and onward is unbelievable. Aside from the language and handful of references to values that have changed quite substantially, one could easily dismiss it all as an edgelord writing an uninspired metaphor with hindsight of recent events, down to the exact roles and actions. But the words take on a different meaning altogether having been written 2,400 years ago!
It was this book that made me realize the old saying of history repeating itself was not in the sort of vague allegory that I once believed, but in very specific repeated actions in very specific orders - that keep repeating, separated by millennia. In an odd way it offers peace of mind. The world is not headed towards some unprecedented era of chaos. Instead the era we all grew up in (at least within the developed world), one of peace and relative stability, is what was unprecedented.
Hot take that might derail but honestly the EU would at this point be the better super power. I'm not sure how that can happen at this point or even if a stronger EU would be good for the member states but it would be hell of a better thing for the world.
Yeah I tend to agree minus the question of whether it could be the superpower. There’s an argument to be made that the EU was able to build the society that it has largely because of NATO (read: US) protection. IMO the Ukraine response has been pretty clear validation of this. The US has dumped far more resources into Ukraine than the EU has despite, obviously, the land army being zero threat to the US and existentially threatening to EU countries.
Most of the EU depends on Russian oil, gas and wheat; we're slowly building independence from Russia, but it takes time. In the meantime, sanctions are slowly consuming Russia's economy and their ability to pump resources into their military; but they require time as well.
vs. other frivolous things that are hot topics in the US, like whether it's divisive to call an ideology that lead an assault on its capitol dangerous? I'll take the olive oil
The EU has had the chance to step up to defend Ukraine with military aid, but seems to be hamstrung by entrenched interests in its nuclear powers, and a lack of desire to act outside the shadow of the US. I've been first in line to criticize the US military over the past few decades, including for its sheer size that makes it ripe for abuse (eg invasion of Iraq), but genocidal-resurgent Russia has shown that history hasn't ended quite yet.
I apologize for having phrased my comment such that it implies European countries are not contributing. The Baltics, Poland, and Norway [0] are contributing outsized amounts to Ukraine. Russia's (most recent) invasion hits close to home for them, and it shows.
Your chart actually illustrates what I was trying to say, which is that some of the largest EU countries, namely Germany, France, and Italy, have been hesitant to act on a larger scale that would possibly put them in the crosshairs of Russian retaliation. France, being the only sovereign nuclear power remaining in the EU, is particularly important. Having its largest countries be more willing to flex military power would let the EU act outside the shadow of the US and be considered a superpower in its own right.
So many answers seem to be rooted in the 50-year Cold War period, and none of them seem to address the 30 years since.
If you have two evils, you choose the lesser of two evils. If you eliminate the greater of the two evils, all you're left with is evil.
Saying that the country which dropped two atomic bombs on civilian populations is better than a hypothetical in which some other other country dropped more of them, it's... I mean, we're still the only country that ever dropped atomic bombs on civilian populations!
Considering in recent history the other contenders were imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, the USSR, or communist China… yeah the US is preferable to all of those by a wide margin.
You know, simple things like 1) not forcing their own women and children to march into machine gun fire [Japan], 2) not building concentration camps and exterminating whole races [Germany], 3) not building a prison state that people regularly got shot trying to escape [USSR], or 4) a combination of all of those prior “techniques” plus a highly capable surveillance state [China]
This seems like moving the goalpost a bit from the original statement. Surely, US is preferable when comparing them to our foes during WWII and the Cold War -- that is a pretty loaded comparison. I think the original assumption was that you were comparing US to modern-day nations. We can argue back and forth all day about the weight of the sins of the past.
It’s not moving the goalposts at all. There are a million alternate histories that were extremely unlikely to ever come true, like benevolent EU sprouting out of nowhere and providing free healthcare all over the world, or there are the “almost-true” alternate histories, like Germany winning WW2 or USSR winning the Cold War or Japan conquering and holding all of Asia.
Of the almost-true scenarios that were available in actual reality, we got a pretty good one with regard to US hegemony.
Sorry, seems like we are speaking past each other. Considering that everything you have just said may very well be true, I believe what the original question meant to ask is "how is the [modern-day] US a preferable super power to [the other modern-day options]". I do not think the original question was engaging in a thought experiment of "almost true" realities or alternate histories.
Nope can’t remember the last time (1) or (3) happened. The treatment of Natives long ago comes close to (2) but obviously is not ongoing (not to imply the effects aren’t still disastrous). And no, when Americans complain about the US surveillance state they’re either talking about a much different thing than China, or they’re an idiot.
However much of an injustice they were, the US closed its internment camps (via constitutional balances) without the need for coersion by foreign powers. That to me makes them much more forgivable than Jim Crow or Gitmo.
These were not an extermination campaign and so are not really analogous to Indian reservations or Nazi concentration camps. Obviously they were awful!
All the other contenders that I'm aware of do these things, except much worse, and then on top of it, hide it much better (because that's possible to do if you're a one-party system)
While the CIA did do some influential things, it seems like most of the damage was caused from within... what the CIA did was tantamount to leaning on the Tower of Pisa until it toppled
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it's crazy to think that until the 2nd plane hit, everyone was thinking about _just_ a bad tragedy, and then came the 2nd explosion and the world changed completely.
That’s exactly what it was like. I was at work and had a big project due for client delivery that day that I was finishing up. When the first plane hit, it was definitely “oh man, what a weird thing to happen; what a tragedy.” When the second one hit, it was, “oh shit. Wait what??? That can’t be an accident??”
I would compare the “oh shit, what does this mean” feeling to how I felt to March 11, 2020, when the NBA announced it was cancelling their season That’s when it became definite to me that the pandemic was real and unavoidable.
In the same way, the future of war for America started to seem unavoidable as one realized the planes were an act of war. Especially when the Pentagon was hit and then later that week when people were getting Anthrax in their mail. That’s something I never hear people talk about, but was just as scary and only added to the chaotic feeling of “wtf is going on?”
The truths of that one are buried under so much official horseshit. Easier to ask now, "who benefited?" and check their subsequent records to see what else they were involved in.
This looks like an edited thread. I remember on IRC it was nothing but towel wrapping/turbin winder / sand nggr / islam insults after the second one hit.
It's not a leap, considering his group had already been tied to the 1993 WTC bombing by 1996[0].
This reminds me, I've always been curious that in the year leading up to the attacks, the Taliban was a frequent feature on ABC News. Mostly for their defacing ancient historical sites from what I fuzzily remember.
The WTC was attacked in ‘93 by people affiliated with Bin Laden and there were numerous attacks on US interests leading up to 2001. In 2000, the USS Cole was attacked, for example, with a string of embassy bombings throughout the 90s.
It's not a wild reach - OBL was behind the 1998 embassy bombings (Kenya, Tanzania) and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole, making him pretty much the "badguy de jour" by 2001.
I don't think we knew, but it wasn't hard to guess.
Osama bin Laden declared war on the United States in 1996. He, and Al-Qaeda, had been connected to multiple terrorist attacks throughout the late 90s. The people who had bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 were trained by Al-Qaeda.
Massoud, the Taliban's sworn enemy in the North of the country, had just been killed by suicide bombers on September 9th. BBC World News were reporting about his murder while the 9/11 attacks were happening. Earlier in the year, he spoke at the EU Parliament and warned the US against Osama Bin Laden.
What I'm trying to say is that there were breadcrumbs in the public arena to make an educated guess the moment the second tower was hit.
Al-Qaeda had already bombed US embassies and the USS Cole, and affiliates were responsible for the WTC bombing. It's the first group you'd look to blame.
IRC was the source there for a couple weeks. Slashnet's channel was pretty good. You could see the fingerprints of the "unofficial releases" when the same story (often verbatim) hit all 4 IRC networks at the same time; then the news within the day. The "Let's Roll" story was conspicuously seeded.
Major media was sending out copyright takedowns within hours, often for photos they had no rights to in the first place. Our photo page got "we own this you can't show it" letters from multiple publishers, often on the same photo, several times for photos given to us (as public domain) by the people who took them.
Yep, I remember all the news sites like the BBC and CNN were failing to load and Slashdot was one of the best ways to stay up to date in the first three or four hours or so.
Slashdot was sufficiently lightweight and special-interest to stay usable.
My hero of the day - because I did not have cable, and the major networks were not too wonderful on reporting - was someone at CNN who hacked together a system that spat out the closed captions onto a moderated IRC channel. You could at least stay up with what was happening, scrolling back up to catch more info.
One of my friends and colleagues had just finished a large, years-long IT consulting project with Marsh. Not long after the towers fell he received a request to join a group of people who had worked closely with some of their IT staff killed in the attack. The task: come up with a dictionary of possible passwords the deceased may have used based on everyone's recollection of their private lives and habits around passwords they may have shared (character substitution habits, etc.)
It was grim and my friend was shaken by the experience for some time.
I found out while on a plane that had just left Hawaii headed for Sydney. I couldn't understand why the flight attendants were walking around with manifests, then talking at length with select passengers. Turns out they had identified those traveling through NYC and wanted to ID those with family there. In the airport 10 hours later saw what I thought were incredibly bad-taste tabloid newspapers headlines. Add in jet lag and it was probably 2 days before I understood what had happened.
So on that day, I was homeless and I woke up on a park bench with the dawn. I went to Mass in the morning where they had the custom of allowing anyone pray for any intention, and so someone mentioned an explosion or bombing in NYC and I didn't think much of it, considering the backdrop of regular terrorist bombings and such.
Then I made my way up to the library and logged onto a public computer in the lab. There was a volunteer at the front desk making many phone calls in an attempt to organize an emergency blood drive, which I thought was notable, but by this time (late morning in Arizona) I didn't really grasp the magnitude of what was going on, until I logged on to a news site or a chat room with my friends and then it all became clear. That afternoon I went to the student lounge at church where the TV was just nonstop replaying footage of the aircraft smashing into buildings. That continuous replay was profoundly traumatic for me and doubtless other people; I do not know why we persisted in viewing it.
I woke up the next day (I'm in Australia) and saw the footage. I remember listening to Sydney's Triple M radio network and callers were being comforted by Andrew Denton and Amanda Keller. Blue color workers were crying on the line. One of the worst days I've experienced.
I remember that day very vividly, I was going to court against my father that day. Waiting to get called into the court room for the start of the day when suddenly a bunch of police pop up and say "Everyone must evacuate the building immediately, court is dismissed for the day."
Get in the car, turn on the radio, and right about then news of the second plane dropped. I knew that was going to be a change across the country right then and there.
Never actually got back to that court case. I think literally every case got an emergency dismissal outright due to that event, as neither myself nor my father ever walked back into the courtroom after that event.
It's for this reason I strongly prefer asp.net razor pages to MVC.
queue morpheus voice
What if I told you back in my day you could generally find the code by looking at the URL structure before this routing stuff became such a big deal?
imo razor pages hits the right balance. Generally speaking it's auto-routed based upon the URL, but you CAN hook into the routing in the razor page itself for fanciness for those few occasions where you need it.
Everyone always takes a good idea and runs too far with it, but I feel like the routing for razor pages pulls back to reasonableness.
I'd say advertising based on intrusive surveillance, rather than particular frameworks, have ruined the web. These new frameworks merely make it easier to trick you into staying on a page longer.
PHP sucked and was notoriously bad for security. And of course there was Flash. The web has had some dark times before.
Slashdot was one of the few sites to witstand the onslaught. I was using an iPaq with an IR connection to my Nokia phone while sitting in the luggage claim at Denver International…we were supposed to fly out to Seattle that day. Didn’t obviously happen.
Watching the night sky to the West and seeing NO air traffic was surreal.
I was viewing an 800x640000 pixel image of Jim’s long ass face (rest in rip) in MSpaint when the 2nd plane hit the tower. It took me four minutes to scroll to the bottom of the picture.
I was in Europe, and I knew it was middle of the night in Australia, the Australian news websites were loading, it was a static picture of the 2 towers with smoke billowing out of them...
Ironically, my strongest memory of 9/11 (from the UK) was watching the BBC and relaying blow-by-blow, over IRC, to friends in the US who were already in the office.
It wasn't a connectivity issue from my memory, it was most major news sites being completely flattened.
Bear in mind that all news channels were broadcasting constantly at least - would still be pretty rare at the time to find a household without a single TV.
Fark was pretty popular at that point as I recall, but I had no idea they were livethreading this at the time, so this is a neat discovery for me, although I'm already shuddering (I lived near NYC at the time)
I remember not being able to reach disinfo.com. I remember some arabic satellite channels being used as a covert channel for transmitting informations probably to terrorists (one of them had the logo blinking in a pattern that looked like morse). I remember strange people at airports asking you if you can please take a letter with you to your destination where someone would collect it.
> At least the terrorists dont seem to know too much about physics. Had they hit the buildings down lower to the ground, they could have structurally weakened them to the point where they wouldnt be able to bear the weight of the rest of the building. So far both buildings seem to be holding up.
Probably one of the comments that aged the worse in the entire internet
They could have waited till 3pm and hit lower to kill a lot more people.
The typical occupancy of the buildings was 50k workers and another few tens of thousands were going through it as visitors/tourists [0]. At the time of the attack there were only ~15K inside the buildings. Of those ~2k were killed.
[0] I had a picture of me on the roof two days before the attack.
> I had a picture of me on the roof two days before the attack.
I almost visited them the week before, but we were running late and didn't have time on that trip.
My Sept 11 experience was not actually realizing anything was really wrong until the afternoon.
I had classes all morning that semester; there were snippets of conversation, a "did you hear" buzz, but nothing really penetrated until I got back to the dorm and found my roommate glued to the TV.
Hum, which event are your referring to? I think there were fires and bombings on the WTC before 9/11 but no event where a jetliner dropped tons of jetfuel for a fire to be intense enough to melt the steel structure.
"The lack of water to fight the fire was an important factor. The fires burned out of control during the afternoon, causing floor beams near column 79 to expand and push a key girder off its seat, triggering the floors to fail around column 79 on Floors 8 to 14. With a loss of lateral support across nine floors, column 79 buckled – pulling the east penthouse and nearby columns down with it. With the buckling of these critical columns, the collapse then progressed east-to-west across the core, ultimately overloading the perimeter support, which buckled between Floors 7 and 17, causing the remaining portion of the building above to fall down as a single unit. The fires, which were fueled by office contents and burned for 7 hours, along with the lack of water, were the key reasons for the collapse."
- NIST followed by a peer-reviewed summary in the Journal of Structural Engineering
Although 2001 doesn't seem too long ago, most people didn't have cell phones still, and those that did were signor feature phones.
Social media didn't really exist yet, at least not as we understand it today.
Many people had internet speeds that would be unusable today, so most information still came through the TV.