How America Fractured in 1968 • Hacker News Board

Re: How America Fractured in 1968

#11

Post by interfixus » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 6:22 AM UTC

I was eight in '68, and remember it well. The shootings, especially the Kennedy one, the strange Mexican olympics, the Czechoslovakia debacle, the American election, TV of longhaired protesters, and of course Apollo 8, which at the time I considered by far the most monumental event of the year- and still do.

The Vietnam war made no great impression. It was a constant stream of background noise in my European childhood, I don't recall one single specific episode of it, let alone any idea what the whole sorry thing was about.

Re: How America Fractured in 1968

#12

Post by kvartz » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 6:33 AM UTC

balance_factor wrote: post #10

> It was also the year of the Tet offensive, an enormous attack by North Vietnamese forces, and of more than 16,000 American deaths in the Vietnam War, more than in any other year. Sigh...half a century later the Tet offensive is called "an enormous attack by North Vietnamese forces". How about an enormous attack by "South" Vietnamese forces, like the National Liberation Front? Who took over the American embassy in S…

What about.... Article's point not being about Vietnam war.

Re: How America Fractured in 1968

#13

Post by plugger » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 6:52 AM UTC

balance_factor wrote: post #10

> It was also the year of the Tet offensive, an enormous attack by North Vietnamese forces, and of more than 16,000 American deaths in the Vietnam War, more than in any other year. Sigh...half a century later the Tet offensive is called "an enormous attack by North Vietnamese forces". How about an enormous attack by "South" Vietnamese forces, like the National Liberation Front? Who took over the American embassy in S…

> Sigh...half a century later the Tet offensive is called "an enormous attack by North Vietnamese forces".

> How about an enormous attack by "South" Vietnamese forces, like the National Liberation Front?

In fairness, wasn't Tet both the NVA and VC? And Tet was organised and executed from the North, predominantly by Giap, right?

Re: How America Fractured in 1968

#14

Post by InclinedPlane » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 6:57 AM UTC

balance_factor wrote: post #10

> It was also the year of the Tet offensive, an enormous attack by North Vietnamese forces, and of more than 16,000 American deaths in the Vietnam War, more than in any other year. Sigh...half a century later the Tet offensive is called "an enormous attack by North Vietnamese forces". How about an enormous attack by "South" Vietnamese forces, like the National Liberation Front? Who took over the American embassy in S…

Thanks for mentioning the Phoenix Program, I had never learned about it, it's crazy that stuff like this is just glossed over.

Re: How America Fractured in 1968

#15

Post by ambrosite » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 7:04 AM UTC

cryptozeus wrote: post #2

As side note: gif with nytimes article headlines are totally useless on phone, not readable at all

Ironically those graphics are the whole point of the article. It is supposed to simulate what the year 1968 might have looked like if there had been a Twitter feed back then. There is very little original content in the article text itself.

Edit: On further inspection, I am coming to the conclusion that the article is really a thinly veiled advertisement for TimesMachine, a subscription newspaper archive.

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com

Re: How America Fractured in 1968

#16

Post by xenadu02 » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 7:04 AM UTC

balance_factor wrote: post #10

> It was also the year of the Tet offensive, an enormous attack by North Vietnamese forces, and of more than 16,000 American deaths in the Vietnam War, more than in any other year. Sigh...half a century later the Tet offensive is called "an enormous attack by North Vietnamese forces". How about an enormous attack by "South" Vietnamese forces, like the National Liberation Front? Who took over the American embassy in S…

The strangest thing to me was how pro-US Ho Chi Minh was and how strongly we ignored that, largely for a policy of colonialism that everyone already knew was dead. France doesn't catch near enough crap for that.

We should have told France to stuff it.

Re: How America Fractured in 1968

#17

Post by ambrosite » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 7:15 AM UTC

godot wrote: post #5

allenz wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are graphics simulating push notifications of 1968 news every few paragraphs, captioned "Photo: Associated Press". They animate only once, so try reloading? I agree that it animates a tad too quickly, and that the animation really isn't needed.

I think figgis may be responding in a sarcastic way and trying to point out that those are not animated gifs, but are actual HTML page elements, animated with CSS. If you view on desktop and use a browser DOM inspector (like Chrome Dev Tools) you can verify that this is the case. To be honest I'm quite impressed that NYTimes went this length to create these technical widgets. Do they have software engineers or web de…

>> To be honest I'm quite impressed that NYTimes went this length to create these technical widgets ... Seems like a relatively high cost of production.

That's because the article is really just an advertisement for TimesMachine, a subscription newspaper archive. I didn't notice it at first, either.

Re: How America Fractured in 1968

#18

Post by IncRnd » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 7:24 AM UTC

If the NYTimes' tweets had the same level of quality as their pretend tweets from the past, I'd follow them.

Re: How America Fractured in 1968

#19

Post by evgen » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 7:25 AM UTC

xenadu02 wrote: post #16

balance_factor wrote: post #10

> It was also the year of the Tet offensive, an enormous attack by North Vietnamese forces, and of more than 16,000 American deaths in the Vietnam War, more than in any other year. Sigh...half a century later the Tet offensive is called "an enormous attack by North Vietnamese forces". How about an enormous attack by "South" Vietnamese forces, like the National Liberation Front? Who took over the American embassy in S…

The strangest thing to me was how pro-US Ho Chi Minh was and how strongly we ignored that, largely for a policy of colonialism that everyone already knew was dead. France doesn't catch near enough crap for that. We should have told France to stuff it.

Should have? Yes. Could have? Probably not. No one in the US gave two shits about French Indochina, it was all about Western Europe and containing the USSR/Communists during the scramble to pick up the pieces after the war. France had a large Communist party that was a key part of the resistance during the war and maintained a good reputation after, and large proletariat revolutions had a historical precedent in France that probably scared US government officials to death. No matter how much he was hated, you backed de Gaulle over the alternative so that you only had to worry about Eastern Europe and not have a grenade explode in the middle of the continent. Not a good choice, but even in hindsight it seems like there were not a lot of good options available to the US.

Re: How America Fractured in 1968

#20

Post by Moto7451 » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 7:50 AM UTC

IncRnd wrote: post #18

If the NYTimes' tweets had the same level of quality as their pretend tweets from the past, I'd follow them.

Do you mean the would-be push notifications? That’s the same level of quality as what they do for current events. The push notifications are in the top three reasons I pay for the Times. I can’t recommend a subscription enough.