Comment on Don't Look Up
Jesus_666@lemmy.world 5 days agoI remember the early 2000s when basically 90% of all Americans were absolutely certain that jihadists were going to attack their local supermarket any minute now because Power Cable, Nebraska was such a strategic target.
Heck, there was a bomb scare because of an advertisement campaign for Aqua Teen Hunger Force that involved placing PCBs with LEDs on them that would display characters from the show. Because surely Al Quaeda would put conspicuous LED displays on their bombs.
News media want people to panic so they keep tuning in. Panicked people tend to come up with remarkably stupid scenarios like “Al Quaeda have unlimited resources and can show up anywhere to shoot people at random” or “Hamas want to take Dorcester as a strategic location to strike at Israel from”.
In Nate Bargatze’s recent standup special he talked about how he, a water meter reader at the time, was tasked with protecting his town’s water tower after 9/11. With a flashlight. He did a much better job making it funny than I can, but I remember that level of fear. “It’s called terrorism because they make you afraid they can hit anywhere!” I remember hearing.
Which is silly in retrospect, Al Qaeda only hit major, symbolic targets in the US and never did “hit anywhere.”
No. 90% were not scared. It was the corporate media that hyped up every single flimsy lead. The rest of us knew that we would be perfectly fine.
Fair enough. The dumb ones were just loud enough to sound like 90%. But I sure did talk to some panicked dumbasses online back then.
I was working for a company that was renovating and upgrading the water filtration system in the ass end of nowhere and we had some official show up to ask us what we were doing b/c someone called us in thinking we were terrorists sabotaging the water system.
That’s reasonable I think, if people are messing with infrastructure, it’s good it’s being verified they are doing legitimate work. Though don’t call them on a hunch terrorists obviously…
Rusty@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
I remember in 2008 when Putin was invading Georgia (the country) there were some confused and scared people from Georgia (US state).
ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
Ah the 20 upvotes to 14 down. Good ol’ reliable internet.
joel_feila@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Well tbf i woke that morning and saw the head lines on the news and thought what the fuck when did the cold start again. Then. Minutes I learned there is a country named Georgia
uuldika@lemmy.ml 4 days ago
tbf that was around the time the cold war resumed.