Get in here chapos! Any memes, rants, quips, jokes you have, let’s fuckin hear them! That shit is funny.

  • BountifulEggnog [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    There’s a distinct lack of rants, so I’ll toss my annoyance out there.

    There were days where covid in the US was killing a 9/11 amount of people every day and so many of the chuds who act like 9/11 was the worst thing ever did not give a fuck. And it pisses me off so bad. It’s the perfect “one death is a tragedy, a million a statistic” trap so many people fall into and that always pisses me off. One person dies because of weed - nation wide story. Tens of thousands die from alcohol - who gives a damn.

    • cosecantphi [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      My interpretation of these people is that they actually don’t give a shit about anyone who died in the attacks. They pretend to, but what they’re really mad about is the fact that it was a successful attack on a widely recognized symbol of United States hegemony.

    • neo [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      IMO there are two reasons why the 9/11 attacks resonated. The first one is crucial for the second.

      The first is that it was spectacle, literally. It is impossible to deny that the image of a large passenger aircraft flying straight into a building and exploding is simultaneously nauseating, enthralling, and “better than fiction” in the emotional response it can get out of anybody. The second reason is that once cable news had that spectacle to get their viewers, it was like chefs-kiss for them. Just play it back. Replay it. Play it again. Run that another time. Get the second angle. Get the third angle. Play it again. Play it another time. The ad money coming in at that time must’ve been tremendous. It was really time for the fourth estate to shine. Judith Miller can tell you all about that.

      COVID deaths? No spectacle. It doesn’t matter that well over a million Americans died from it, as well as millions more globally (and we still are dying, too). It’s undeniable that COVID had media coverage, but it wasn’t like CNN was sending in camera crews into hospitals to catch people’s last gasps of air before they perished. Abstract reasoning is too hard. We need to see the explosion and the building collapse, not reason about a number.

      • star_wraith [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        10 months ago

        I was in college on 9/11. If you weren’t old enough to know what was going on, it’s impossible to communicate how much of a “spectacle” it was. The closest I can come would be to say imagine if you woke up and aliens landed on earth. It wasn’t just that everyone was glued to their TVs set. It was just this… thing that was happening. In my dorm, everyone just watched it on their TVs alone. Got lunch with my friends and no one spoke hardly at all. Just a completely surreal day that’s hard to describe to anyone who didn’t live it.

        Edit: to further emphasize the “spectacle” part, later in the day I had to run an errand with a friend. On that drive he confided in me that “I kinda want to see the number [of dead] go a lot higher”. He wasn’t saying that because he wanted a reason to start a war. And he wasn’t some weirdo. He was a very thoughtful, empathetic person (but brutally honest about things, like Jan Maas in Ted Lasso). I think a TON of people felt that way but didn’t say it out loud. I don’t buy that people were traumatized that day or anything. I think they were captivated by the spectacle and were mad that our collective ego was bruised, and didn’t really care about actual dead people.

        • 420blazeit69 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          10 months ago

          There was also that odd time between the first plane and the second. You hear “a plane hit a building in New York” and you think it’s a tragic accident. Then a little later you hear about the second and you realize immediately it’s something else.

          • neo [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            10 months ago

            It is still wild to me that the port authority did not immediately order the evacuation of the south tower after an explosion in the north one.

        • axont [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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          10 months ago

          That event changed everyone I knew as well. Everything because about America. The nice Syrian family down the street became an object of suspicion, more than they already were.

          9/11 wasn’t just that September either, I remember that general unease and media coverage lasting at least until September 2002.

        • Agreed. Lived it from a Nordic European perspective and we were similarly glued to our televisions.

          But I do remember we were actually terrified of what the US will do to the world because of this. Will they start a world war over it. It wasn’t at all about the spectacle of it alone, but mostly the fear of what Bush will do (everyone saw him as unhinged). I remember how we sighed from relief after he did the speeches after it and did not bring about nuclear winter.

          This was pretty much the most common reaction in my family and friends. Also the whole way in which the world police finally got to feel a bit of what it does all over sure was mentioned, nobody was honestly surprised.

          Sympathy for the civilians of course, but I can’t claim there was any love for Murica the nation at the time or all the warmongering.

          • star_wraith [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            10 months ago

            And those fears turned out to be completely justified, because the reaction from Bush and the American people was completely unhinged.

            And that was over a little less than 3,000 deaths. What frightens me about the US trying to start shit with China is how Americans will respond to losing the entire Pacific Fleet in a matter of days; because all those fancy aircraft carriers that are the backbone the American military are just sitting ducks for hypersonic missles, et al. I worry that if that happens, Americans will demand that every city in China be nuked, even if that means nukes get fired back at them.

            • Very true. It is scary. It’s scary to think there is a country in this world that could pretty much annihilate anything over hurt pride and as a show of force, on a whim. That day re-revealed this. Not that it was ever really hidded.

              I think the vibe from smaller countries at the time was very much “who needs enemies when this is what these gyus are like”. It also showed what people really think, my country tends to be very US friendly thanks to all sorts of propaganda, but on this day and after it the mood was mostly “what will the arrogant unhinged and self-assigned world cops do now”. It was perfectly clear to everyone that this insult on US hegemony was a huge deal, not the lives lost. Up until this point they thought they were untouchable, never any real skin in the game.

          • BelieveRevolt [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            10 months ago

            I’d like to add that the real scary part was all the people who thought Bush might do something unhinged, but that it’d be okay because the bad guys deserved it.

      • Red_Eclipse [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        10 months ago

        I was just a little kid when it happened, and in my house the TV was on all day every day. I saw it happen over and over and over and over again, before I could even spell my own name, drilled into my mind forever. :/

        Looking back at the live news footage, it’s nauseating the way they show it, like a feeding frenzy of vultures on corpses. I think I know why I had so many violent nightmares as a kid now.

      • AfricanExpansionist@lemmy.ml
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        10 months ago

        This is bang on

        I don’t think anything will ever match the spectacle of seeing that second plane hit. It was a total surprise and just AWESOME in the literal sense of that word.

        • neo [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          10 months ago

          I believe that’s correct but I would not have been old enough to pay attention to that, specifically. But the coverage of 9/11 did not end on 9/11, of course.

    • RyanGosling [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      The “one death is a tragedy” quote is often attributed to Stalin among many other Hollywood capeshit tier quotes. But the US continues to lead by example. 40,000 people each year from car accidents, no one cares. But a tragedy with hundreds of deaths involving a train of plane and it’s a matter of national debate for 6 months. Same with gun deaths.

  • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    No innocent civilians in the planes or towers deserved to die in 9/11 obviously (and I hope everyone agrees here), but what I despise about the event is how the American civil religion lionised it and reacted afterwards. The attack was carried out by a US asset gone rouge and a direct result of US meddling and old school imperial conquest in the Middle East, which included killing many innocent civilians there themselves. The 9/11 attacks were not some unforeseen unprovoked event.

    Then there’s the response. It’s quite clear that the main issue with 9/11 to American leadership was not the number of lives lost, but the fact that it was a successful attack on Americas biggest symbols symbols of global financial and military domination. It was about the message that sent. A successful attack from the “jungle” on the “garden”, as old school racist imperialists would say. And how did America respond to that? By invading two countries that had nothing to do with the event, while becoming even closer allies with the country that the majority of 9/11 hijackers were from. Hundreds of thousands killed in Iraq over a lie about WMDs. Afghanistan pillaged for two decades before returning to the exact same position, Taliban rule. Osama was in Afghanistan by the time the US showed up? Yes, and I’m going to be a billionaire tomorrow. More instability, more US funded terrorist groups. The response was just to go and loot and pillage the Middle East 100 times harder with false righteous fury. Like bombing an entire neighborhood because you got mugged by one of its residents.

    And that really showed the true character of the US as a country. Just how much bloodlust they had after 9/11. They just wanted to go out and kill a nation, any nation from the region would’ve sufficed. The were calls on national radio and TV programs for glassing and nuking the entire region. Around 75% of Americans supported the invasion of Iraq at the time. An invasion clearly based on lies. But they didn’t care, they just wanted revenge. To kill someone, anyone. If you compare how the US reacted here, to how other countries reacted in the face of hardship, attacks and near civil war (see South Africa during the end of apartheid) it’s clear that the character of the US is rotten deep down.

    • star_wraith [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      And that really showed the true character of the US as a country. Just how much bloodlust they had after 9/11.

      I would add that it wasn’t just the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that showed Americans’ character. After it was widely known and accepted that there were no WMDs and so many people had already died, Americans’ response was basically “whoopsie daisy”. Americans accepted, likely just as cope, that Bush and Cheney didn’t lie, the CIA didn’t lie, etc. No one did anything maliciously. Everyone was just doing their gosh darn best and they just got it wrong; like ordering some bad soup at a deli. So there has been zero accountability at all. Hell, I can’t imagine the President of the US just writing a letter of apology to the Iraqi people without most Americans losing their shit over it.

      Bad countries refuse to acknowledge their faults and certainly don’t do anything about it. For as incomplete as de-Naziification was at least in West Germany, I do believe German society - even in the West - did try and come to grips with the horrors of the Nazi regime and do something about it. You’ll know about this much better than I, so please correct me if I’m wrong, but in the 90s it seemed at least to an outsider that there was at least some attempt for South African society to understand the scope of evil of apartheid, come to grips with it, and move forward in healthier ways. This is the sort of baseline requirement to being a good country and the Americans can’t even come close to this low standard.

    • Assian_Candor [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      Yes it was a reaction to imperialism, but it’s even more farcical bc in this case the US trained and armed the attackers. They didn’t only create the conditions for blowback they supplied the means for its execution!

      Oh well at least we learned our lesson. It’s not like we’re blindly pouring billions of dollars of weaponry directly into the hands of right wing fanatics in war zones to intentionally protract a conflict being waged by our geopolitical rivals oh wait

      Jk I’m sure all that stuff will stay in Ukraine they need it. Slava ukraini

    • RyanGosling [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      The attack was carried out by a US asset gone rouge and a direct result of US meddling and old school imperial conquest in the Middle East

      It goes back even further. The flight company that some of the terrorists used to train was owned by a CIA pilot whose son was connected to the Belgian Brabant serial killings/terrorists.

  • StalinForTime [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    9/11 was proof that America is one of the most self-absorbed, narcissistic societies to ever exist. They suffer what they inflict upon others in an afternoon of ignorance or infantile righteous judgement, and they start foaming at the mouth to cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war, gloating over how they will ‘send them back to the stone age’. It’s sometimes difficult to put into words how repulsive Americans can be.

    Does that mean that everyone who died on 9/11 had it comin? No. But the event was beyond illuminating of how America is an imperialist beast with a Narcissus complex.

  • LGOrcStreetSamurai [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    The unchecked, uncurtailed, ceaseless and boundless of expansion of the surveillance state due to 9/11 doesn’t get talked about enough. I don’t have a joke here, I am just saying it sucks so much man.

    panopticon

  • Zrc [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    guy who gets angry at “Bush did 9/11” memes because he views Osama bin Laden as a hero and wants him to get the credit he deserves

  • Pastaguini [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    My older Cuban relatives were staying with us in NY the month of September 2001 from Havana. We actually took them to the World Trade Center a few days prior to the attacks. My principle memory of 9/11 was them laughing and celebrating and my dad getting mad at them.