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9/11 in Realtime

911realtime.org

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Re: 9/11 in Realtime

#101

Post by giraffe_lady »

sanderjd wrote: post #59
causi wrote: post #3

If you want to get a handle on how the War on Terror started and how everybody felt about it, I highly recommend listening to some of the live radio shows from that morning, such as the Howard Stern show. You look back now and question how we could've let it get so out of hand, but watching people react to it in real time takes you right back to the emotions it triggered. I don't think I've ever felt that degree of c…

I remember the feeling extremely clearly. And I still remember that feeling extending to the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, which I thought seemed justified and right. But I just as clearly remember how confused, frustrated, and just so disillusioned with the wisdom of my elders (I was still a teenager at this time) I felt when they were all so gung ho about invading Iraq, which clearly at the time had absolute…

Yeah like, is everyone forgetting how fucking insanely racist that moment was in the US. Brutal nasty racism, it was utterly foul and EVERYWHERE just completely normalized in every venue.

Unreal everyone is pretending to have been taken in by the "war on terror" kayfabe at the time. I knew 15-year-olds who clocked the whole thing as an opportunistic political scam. The correct stance is contrition and repentance. All these stories about what kinds of cereal people were eating that day disgust me. We killed tens of thousands, destabilized and destroyed entire countries, created millions of refugees with these stories as the excuse.

Re: 9/11 in Realtime

#102

Post by xeonmc »

blamazon wrote: post #35

There are so many incredible stories of heroism from this day, but, I will highlight that of Rick Rescorla. [1] After 1993, before 9/11: > Feeling that the authorities lost legitimacy after they failed to respond to his 1990 warnings, he concluded that employees of Morgan Stanley, which was the largest tenant in the World Trade Center, could not rely on first responders in an emergency and needed to empower themselve…

Video interview of him before 9/11:

https://vimeo.com/441396612

Re: 9/11 in Realtime

#103

Post by jrmg »

sanderjd wrote: post #59
causi wrote: post #3

If you want to get a handle on how the War on Terror started and how everybody felt about it, I highly recommend listening to some of the live radio shows from that morning, such as the Howard Stern show. You look back now and question how we could've let it get so out of hand, but watching people react to it in real time takes you right back to the emotions it triggered. I don't think I've ever felt that degree of c…

I remember the feeling extremely clearly. And I still remember that feeling extending to the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, which I thought seemed justified and right. But I just as clearly remember how confused, frustrated, and just so disillusioned with the wisdom of my elders (I was still a teenager at this time) I felt when they were all so gung ho about invading Iraq, which clearly at the time had absolute…

The BBC has an excellent series about this time, available as a podcast: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001k0ch/episodes/downloads

Re: 9/11 in Realtime

#105

Post by marssaxman »

sanderjd wrote: post #89
civilitty wrote: post #70

I was in elementary school on the West Coast at the time so by the time I was getting ready for school, one of the towers had already collapsed and I woke up to apocalyptic scenes on television that I first thought was a massive earthquake. In class, no one said a single thing about what had just happened which made me feel like I was going crazy. It still makes me feel sick to this day what happened afterwards. I wa…

I wouldn't say "even as a child", I would say "especially as a child". In my experience, this was a far more common experience among those of us who were not yet adults at the time, than among the adults. I have long felt that it is the greatest generational dividing line in the US. I was about half way through high school at the time, and the prevailing perspective of the march to war seems to be very different amon…

I was 25 then, but it seemed like mindless vengeful insanity all the same. The entire national character seemed to change, almost overnight, in a bleak and awful way; I felt like I was standing in the surf while a powerful wave receded, water and sand and gravel all rushing away around me, while I remained in place. I have felt like a foreigner here ever since, still a citizen but no longer an American.

Re: 9/11 in Realtime

#106

Post by ilc »

elromulous wrote: post #94
ilc wrote: post #47

I was working in the airline industry when this happened. My girlfriend (now wife) and I had just started on the way into work, we signaled each other over to the side of the road, and talked for a few moments... and I headed in to work. I was in shock for weeks. I was ontop of the towers but 2 months before that, and possibly one of the best pictures of the two of us was taken there. ... I've been there. I know that…

They encouraged us to give away our freedoms for the illusion of safety.

Updated my comment to reflect that. I agree with you.

Re: 9/11 in Realtime

#107

Post by sanderjd »

peterleiser wrote: post #99
sanderjd wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember the feeling extremely clearly. And I still remember that feeling extending to the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, which I thought seemed justified and right. But I just as clearly remember how confused, frustrated, and just so disillusioned with the wisdom of my elders (I was still a teenager at this time) I felt when they were all so gung ho about invading Iraq, which clearly at the time had absolute…

I encourage people to read about Project for the New American Century (PNAC). 9/11 gave PNAC and the neoconservatives the optimal opportunity to implement their stated objectives.

What makes you think I didn't know / read about it at the time?

All the comments here mentioning the neoconservative desire for regime change in Iraq predating 9/11 seem to imply that it was an obscure thing that people weren't very aware of at the time.

But that isn't true at all. It was broadly understood and frequently discussed. It's just that people were so generally scared, pissed off, and ready for vengeance against whoever, that nobody cared. (Not literally nobody, but I think I recall that the war had like 70% or 80% support, with strong majorities in both major parties.)

This is why I started out my adulthood libertarian-curious, because both parties and huge majorities of voters seemed insanely interventionist to me. But things have reordered a huge amount since then. (Basically everyone came around to my view of the war, in hindsight.)

Re: 9/11 in Realtime

#108

Post by Someone »

antomeie wrote: post #66
jcranmer wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If what is recorded is a news channel, the Web Archive already has the major news channel's coverage of 9/11 available for free: https://archive.org/details/911/day/20010911

Thank you for this! Really interesting. I'm having a look at it now. Although my initial thought was that it would be great if there was a way to watch the entire day (for one news station) in one clip, rather than have to click on multiple 30 seconds videos.

That’s what this site is, isn’t it?

Re: 9/11 in Realtime

#109

Post by zug_zug »

There's something so emotional and compelling about the spectacle of shared tragedy (even smaller ones like oceangate).

However there's always a reminder in the back of my mind that what makes our heart leap is very poorly correlated with what things ought to scare us.

I don't know if it's possible to "Reprogram" one's heart to worry less about very high-visibility low risk things (like air travel, or terrorism in the US) and care more about statistically probable ones that SHOULD scare us (heart disease and such), but I wish it were.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwKPFT-RioU does a great job of giving a sense of what the proportions are of relative tragedies in terms of loss of life.

Re: 9/11 in Realtime

#110

Post by Hammershaft »

mdaniel wrote: post #85
keepamovin wrote: post #14

That's incredible! What an amazing project. The classic Macintosh desktop is also very well done. Does anyone know the source code for the desktop used? I found the projects in the "About" open source notices section of the desktop. It uses: - https://github.com/robbiebyrd/platinum which itself is based on: - https://github.com/npjg/classic.css - https://github.com/ticky/classic-scrollbars for the scroll-bars

> The classic Macintosh desktop is also very well done Two things, in my opinion: trying to be whimsical and "fun" for such a grave topic is disrespectful, and I don't understand what value appropriating Apple's logo and the "finder face" in the corner add to the 9/11 retrospective experience So, fine, maybe I'm just not happy-go-lucky enough to appreciate why this needs to be a classic Macintosh theme, but I am 100%…

It's useful to situate younger people in a historical context.
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