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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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!
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)?
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 .
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
Like when someone starts working at your company and starts bagging out the process and whomever built a project they really really wanted to work on and it turns out it’s you who set it up.
for reasons such as budget cuts and you had to make it work and you managed to make it work on nothing but bubblegum and tape and here this person is saying how you did it wrong without knowing youre the person who achieved something really great against impossible odds.
I just walked away and worked somewhere else that had a better pipeline. I’ll let them figure it out the hard way. They can beg management how they need more money to achieve even half of what I did. Fuck em. I’m too old to debate for myself when I already achieved a lot to get them there.
Or: you explain it to them. If they are not a complete asshat you might even be able to teach them something and you cant blame newcomers for peaking on the dunning kruger curve.
No one owes you knowledge. I can walk out and work elsewhere. So You’re not my job. you could ask questions and be respectful to others as much as you expect it. Treat others as you want to be treated. Or not. I’ll just leave. And I owe you nothing for your Entitled attitude toxifying the workplace.
rudeness mixed with wild assumption is the unskillful calling card of an amateur.
Again: if you are faced with budget cuts criticism does nothing to fix that. Only ideas can. If you have time to stand and do nothing but criticize, you had time to help. If you didn’t then you’re not part of the team and should be shed for the health of the goal. Or have it your way: remain shitty and lose all your valuable players and lose the project. We owe you nothing.
Oh, I've had this. Specifically about art and media more than big events, though.
Like, I've had younger people project entirely anachronistic views on music or performances that were actively and explicitly the oppopsite. And it happens all the time about gaming. I think we're over it now and even Americans will openly acknolwedge this only happened to Atari, or in the US specifically, but that brief moment in time when everybody kept talking about the "videogame crash" and how videogames went away in the mid 80s is, to this day, the single largest bit of gaslighting I've personally experienced. It felt like I had jumped dimensions.
There was this one big political event where people tried to recontextualize a specific thing in history, but it's very country-specific, so going over it wouldn't be super helpful. Just know that even people who are roughly my age were clearly misrepresenting the intentions of specific historical figures in the context of a political movement and I spent a couple of years just begging people to read specific books written by specific people because man, it got weird with the revisionism for a bit.
Right, I remember living through the videogame "crash". As a kid, I had no idea about it; I just wanted to get my hands on anything computer or game-related, and only learned that the market "dried up" and so on maybe a decade later...all that stuff only mattered to companies and traders - not one person I knew in the target demo knew or GAF about any of this so-called "crash".
There's a video that tries to tell you the entire history of video games, and I love how, after a lull of bad things hapenning, they stop, go back a couple years, and start talking about PC Gaming, the european and japanese indie scene and so on and you just go "oh yeah, a world outside Atari".
And even videos like that will obviously miss things and places but hey, I'm proud to say I did laugh when someone on YouTube made a joke at the expense of the "Dendy-ass" aesthetic.
Tangential but saw an interesting TikTok about how we experience music in the moment verses people discovering an artist in retrospect. In moment we evaluate music against previous works, coverage in the media, other contemporaneous stuff. But people who discover an “established” artist after the fact can just listen to a catalogue start to finish.
So for example, Radiohead most of us at the time judged albums in relationship to OK Computer. Which a lot of people view as their best, but a lot of younger people getting into them now think In Rainbows is best, since they’re free of those associations.
Obviously it’s all subjective but interesting to see how people’s perceptions of things change.
Tangentially - I never listened to Fall Out Boy when I was a teen. I was much more into metal at the time and sort of dismissed them until 2013 or so.
I listened to their newest album (at the time) in 2013 and found that I liked a lot of their songs. It wasn't until like 2019 that I was like "Hey, didn't they have a bunch of older songs I never paid attention to?" (Of course, I knew the hits... but nothing pre-2013 that wasn't a single, basically.)
They recently released a new album that was inspired by their older albums (they basically said in an interview "this is the album we would've made if we didn't go on hiatus"). I didn't like it as much as I did their newer stuff, but that prompted me to actually listen to their entire discography. And yeah, I don't like their older stuff as much as I do their newer stuff. They have a couple bops, but nothing that really grabbed my attention outside the singles I already knew about.
But I know my perspective is different from a lot of old-school fans, who love old-school Fall Out Boy.
how we experience music in the moment verses people discovering an artist in retrospect
Reminds me that one of my favorite kinds of youtube videos to binge on for a while there was reaction videos featuring African-American folk in their 20s and 30s watching/listening to rock artists I grew up hearing (especially Rage Against The Machine) for the first time.
X/Twitter post by user brittany wilson @sameoldstory reading "One disorienting thing about getting older that nobody tells you about is how weird it feels to get a really passionate, extremely wrong lecture from a much younger person about verifiable historical events you can personally remember pretty well"
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Apparently they're teaching gradeschoolers that George W. Bush went into Iraq because of 9/11.
(The Iraq war had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.)
Also the CIA torture program had nothing to do with gathering intelligence. But that came out when Trump was pro-extra-torture, and his fans loved him for it.
If you talk to most boomers and even a lot of Gen X they'll say they remember that's what happened. Saying anything else at the time would get you called a conspiracy theorist despite the obvious demonstrable proof that the Iraq war had nothing to do with 9/11.
Even mentioning Abu Grahib would get eye rolls and be meet with coruses of "you just hate America" or "you are one of those 'blame America first' people!"
I'm a young Gen Xer and IIRC it was clear to half the country that the whole WMD story was bullshit, but for a lot of people that bit of clarity came in hindsight after the initial invasion.
I used to joke that Dubya used 9/11 as an excuse to "finish Daddy's work", given that even after the Gulf War Hussein continued to reign for 10 more years. But when Halliberton suddenly started getting all these contract jobs securing oil wells, it was pretty obvious what was going on at that point.
Its strange because I remember there was initial talks about going to Afghanistan to search for Bin Laden, but then suddenly the discussion shifted to the whole bullshit WMD story. IIRC the assigned UN commission that was supposed to do their annual inspections for nuclear and chemical weapons, found nothing during their visit to Iraq just a few months prior, but those chucklefucks in the WH kept pushing the narrative anyway. The Whitehouse did such a half assed job of getting their stories straight, I was sure someone was going to fuck up at some point, but the media kept pushing the assigned narrative and the public bought it.
I think it's safe to say that he used the reactionary climate of the post 9/11 mentality as a vehicle to help jumpstart OIF. But if not a catalyst, it had nothing to do with OIF, you're 100% right. We were taking big steps toward conflict and nothing that was used at that time to justify invasion would have been prevented in the absence of 9/11.
This is how I feel whenever Zoomers are nostalgic for the year 2016. The only reason 2016 looks good when you look back on it is that 2016 hadn't finished doing its damage at the time.
There's a meme from some other site about being old and telling the tale of 2016 to an inquisitive youth. If i remember correctly, it goes along the lines of:
Oh you you wanna hear about 2016? Takes 3 shots of tequila Well it all started in 2015 with this gorilla...
Everything since has been a fucking wild ride. Past couple of years have been relatively tame thankfully. But I can't help feeling like that story arc is not yet finished and it leaves me feeling apprehensive about the conclusion.
Literal war with Russia, a potential return of large scale Covid, unsustainable weather, fascism rising around the world, and you call it "relatively tame"? Compared to what, a supernova?
For some reason, the one that bugs me a lot is the number of people who can't spell Ronald Reagan's name correctly. Maybe because I remember his chief of staff, Donald Regan.
I still remember Toys R Us had a separate section for video games. I don't just mean a separate aisle. A separate corner of the store. Though I don't recall whether or not anything was locked behind glass. The more expensive stuff, like the consoles, was probably behind the counter, though.
Yeah - you had to take a paper ticket to check out and they would ring it up and give you a copy. Unless it was an older game. Then you could just grab it and take it to the counters
Wal-mart had a separate aisle. It was by itself, and the nearby aisles were kind of split 50/50 for "boy" or "girl" toys. Like I think lego and action figures were on one side, Barbie on the other?
If you were socialized and raised as a boy by your parents, then I don't think you can say your personal experience disproves that games were demonstrably marketed and targeted towards boys and not girls. It's gotten better with time thankfully but yeah not sure you can just handwave that away.
Problem with the episodes that it stated that the reason why video games were marketed towards a male audience, was because toy aisles were segregated by gender and video games were kept in the male toy aisle. And that it was this decision that led to Nintendo going all in on a male exclusive advertising campaign.
Which is not true, as video games were only ever stored behind safety glass in the electronic section.
They simply cost too much to be out in the open like that.
Video games were definitely marketed towards male audiences, and I think a part of that was because they were seen as an extension of computers and at the time stem Fields were seen as male only.
So it's not the issue of claiming a gender bias in gaming, it's that the logic behind it and the reason the episode gives for the bias, does not mesh with reality...
I'm against dishonesty on principle, especially if it's from a debunking show. I actually have gained myself a distrust of Skeptics and debunkers simply because I find that most of the time they're the biggest Liars in the room.
I'm old enough to remember when hand-held electronic games were just displayed in stores like any other items, making them easy to shoplift. I know this because I shoplifted a bunch of them. This was in the mid- to late-70s. I apologize for my role in ruining this shit for everybody else.
I had a joke during Plamegate (the burning of CIA Operative Valerie Plame as political revenge which was a gross intelligence-co munity faux pas) that we had an opportunity to change the naming convention for DC scandals from -gate to -cake (from yellocake, the processed uranium the Hussein was allegedly obtaining in Africa for WMDS (nuclear weapons) even though he had no way to process the stuff into weapons-grade enriched uranium.
A lot more and better cake jokes could be made, I argued, so the press agencies should just agree to the new naming convention. It didn't take.
Anyway, Bush got his Iraq war and once we had captured Hussein, Bush was cracking jokes about no-one finding the alleged WMDs, and we realized he sold the US a $3 trillion war without justification.
At that point I wondered how a Republican could ever get elected to the White House again. I was still pretty naiïve.
There are so many things on Know Your Meme that give me that feeling. Plenty of internet specific memes there that existed since the 90's but are attributed to be from the 2010's or later.
my grandad distinctly remembers walking uphill both ways. i just got done with a 48 hour youtube+wikipedia rabbit hole about routes children took to school in many different areas in that time period, one of which was the street he lived on. sure he was there and i wasn't and sure youtube and wikipedia aren't 100% guaranteed to be reliable sources but you have to see why i'm not quite as inclined to trust his firsthand account
Oh I have a "documentary" for you...But I'm convinced Bush Sr was there when JFK got, got and Prescott was part of a soft coup against FDR, so I'm pretty sure Bush's are just terrible in general.
I am aware of the coincidence of Bush Sr’s alleged position at the time of the assassination and his relatively quick transition to high profile politics that came after