Oh shit! Was 9/11 really 22 years ago? And are the kangaroos ahead, I thought they were behind?

An Australian (former) Major General and current analyst that I follow (and you should too) posted this:



Completely took me by surprise. Hadn’t even thought about it.

Which got me thinking. Was 9/11 not as big of a deal as it seemed at the time OR have subsequent events (Patriot Act, Iraq invasion, GITMO, DHS, NSA spying, CIA Black Sites, shitty exit from Afghanistan, etc. etc.) kinda just made us want to memory hole all that business?

I think it's a good thing we don't whip that drum any more. It was very important at the time, embroiled half the world in conflict, got a lot of awful people and way too many innocent ones killed, and for the most part stopped Islamic terrorism in the West. It just wasn't worth it to them.

The latter.

I don't dwell on it (and never have) but I'm always cognizant of the date each year. Same with 7 December, 22 November, etc.

I think about Salvador Allende almost every day.

Well yeah… I would of course recognize it the day of.

What got me was this Koala mentioning it being the first I had put 2+2 together. Maybe I am just not as in tune to 24/7 media (I mostly do podcasts as y’all might have noticed) so maybe there was as much pre-hype as there used to be.

But for me this seems like the first time it took me by surprise (even though a day early) so thus the thread.

There isn't and hasn't been for a very long time except for the 20th anniversary two years ago.

Let us never forget the loss of @El Chup's second cousin's brother's neighbour's son.

When the twentieth anniversary happened, I was shocked that it had been twenty years. For the longest time the anniversary would come by and it would feel like no time had passed at all, but now it does feel like a lifetime ago. 9/11 was a big deal and it changed the world in what I think is not for the best for the reasons mentioned. I'm glad that Islamic terrorism has basically been stomped, but it costed us (the western world and the US. in particular) a lot in terms of freedom. I think the mid to late 2010s did a lot to put terrorism out of the minds of most Americans and the focus has shifted to domestic problems which is why you don't hear much about 9/11 anymore. At some point, the world has to move on.

I do often think of what people like my grandparents thought about Pearl Harbor in the 60s. I mean my parents' generation never forgot where they were when JFK was killed (by the CIA).

I think the answer to that is "yes".

Between our monthly mass shootings we do nothing about, a 2 year forever war that ultimately meant nothing and COVID pushing 9/11 out of the top ten deadliest days in US history, no 9ne who wasn't directly impacted has any right to wax poetic and milk wound forever. Plenty of Afghans and Iraqis have been though years of 9/11s because of us.

I know. Those of us who lived through it often have a hard time explaining the horror of that day to folks like yourself, who hadn't been born yet.

Reminds me of this:

But how long should we continue to remember historical events in a significant way? Pearl Harbor was nasty, but it doesn't compare to some of the other horrors of WWII. Why should we give more focus to it than we do the first liberation of a death camp? How about an act of genocide that happened 2K years ago?

I know there are some people who were effected by it and always will be because they were there or lost people.

I got real tired real fast of the professional victim squad who watched the shit on TV from thousands of miles away pretending it was the worst thing that ever happened to them.

Domestic terrorism has always been more dangerous and a bigger issue to my life, and I actually knew people who died and were involved in local fire department and ems service. I do not whine every year at the anniversary of the Pulse nightclub shooting, I do not even know when it is. However, anti GLBT terrorism is actually an issue and is still growing. Most of the profesional victim squad who complain about how it was so horrible to see footage of 9/11 on the TV and how that scarred them for life are the same assholes who feel that seeing a trans person or drag queen causes them mental distress and now they have to kill people over it.

It is just an excuse for the nazi conservative trump lovers to threaten some rando muslim because they hate them.

God damn, if we end up like the so called greatest generation bitching at our grandchildren or great grandchildren about how horrible the japanese are because of Pearl Harbor it will be pathetic. I grew up to the old pissbaby fit about buying japanese cars because pearl harbor. Funny those people think it was awesome we had to melt two cities worth of people just to wave our atomic bomb dick around over an island bombing that was nowhere near the continental US.

The fucking assholes in the heartland pretend like they were in danger from any of these attacks when no one but american mass shooters wants to bother with nowhere arkansas.

Given that I lost one friend and several coworkers that day, it still seems pretty fresh to me.

Ghengis Khan skinned a guy alive, rendered his fat, shot the burning fat out a catapult, and burned down a city, which killed 100,000 people.
He's a lovable scamp in "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure" now.

The brits made a sitcom out of Hitler FFS. You cannot really go by that sort of thing.

True, but no one directly affected by Ghengis Khan was alive to see Bill and Ted either

I have long argued for the former. The loss of some buildings and 3000 people is a tragedy, but not a game changer. Conversely, it was America's overreaction to it that changed the course of world history. You might even say that bin Laden was successful in triggering America to repeatedly shoot itself in the foot over the next generation.

https://x.com/mkstnr/status/1701243840894583163

Wow.

Wowwwww…..

South Park's rule was it has to be 22.3 years for a tragedy to be funny.
There's three more months.

9/11 was funny as early as like 2008.

Then the strikes need to end in three months.

I feel like people were posting memes of the Death Star blowing up the WTC on the evening of 9/11. Definitely didn't take long for Something Awful and sites like that to jump on it.

It was probably the pivotal event in terms of shaping the culture and politics of the U.S. for that decade:

1) It sparked the resurgence of an aggressively militaristic, jingoistic form of patriotism ("we'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way").

2) Though it was not the beginning of this phenomenon, it was an inflection point in white America's fawning worship of law enforcement. For the next several years, police departments in every podunk rural town were getting federal money to buy tanks that they hauled out every time there was a parade; every last patrol officer was lauded in the media as a "Hometown Hero."

3) It's harder to remember now that Trump's stuck-in-the-'80s mentality has the right shrieking about communism again, but there were a couple of decades where "the commies are coming!" ceased to be the Republicans' favorite bogeyman. With the fall of the USSR in the early '90s, they were left casting about somewhat aimlessly for a new way to distract people from the results of their shitty economic policies. First they tried "good old-fashioned family values" and that didn't really stick, but starting in 2001 they latched onto "the terrorists!" and that worked pretty well for the next several years.

Overall, I think 9/11 and the Bush administration are inextricably tied together in creating the overall zeitgeist of the 2000s, and without 9/11 the culture of that decade would have looked very different.

This has aged well.

These days I can't forget about 9.11 because ever since Musk took over Twitter it's full of awful 9/11 conspiracy theorists

I didn't even realize that was still a thing

In a staff meeting this morning, one person said something, then it was just like JFK and "where were you when ...". We each gave our respective autobiographies for that morning then we all looked at Kyle who literally just graduated college May 2022 (just before taking this job) and he was like "what?" Which is basically the same response I give when asked about JFK - I wasn't even born yet.