This was a rumor created and disseminated by children. I think that context is pretty important when you're using it to gauge naivety.
this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
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There were multiple genocides going on too buddy
Whyyyyyyyyyyyyy did they have to teach us that “never again” and “lest we forget” are but rhetorical kindnesses and also poisonous lies??!
I have a strong feeling that if we were to re-live the 90's right now we'd quickly realise it wasn't so "innocent" after all. People just had thicker skin back then and recreational outrage wasn't really a thing due to how slow news and trends speaded at the age of early internet.
For most of the 1990s the internet wasn't much of a factor in pop culture or daily life. Email was something of a newfangled gimmick in the movie You've Got Mail.
In the 90s, I remember going to rotten.com and seeing dead bodies. Kids these days don't know about the wild west world web.
Not to mention the granddaddy of link pranks, Goatse. This excerpt from Wikipedia gives a nice little window info how the web operated back then:
The goatse.cx image has been used by website authors to discourage other sites from hot-linking to them. By replacing the hot-linked image with an embarrassing image when hot-linking has been discovered, an unsubtle message is sent to the offending website's operators, visible to all who view the web page in question. In 2007, Wired.com hot-linked to another site in an article about the "sexiest geeks of 2007"; the site subsequently swapped the hot-linked image with one from goatse.cx.
Man, I miss the early Internet.
2007 was early internet???
It wasn't that early but early enough that a) a major news site hotlinked an image from some random website and b) that website redirected the image to point at a sexually explicit shock image without anyone panicking.
That still has early Internet energy to it. Not quite Mahir Çağrı energy but still markedly different from today's relatively sanitized interactions.
I was usually pretty good about avoiding those things, but that fucking sloth guy still haunts my nightmares.
In Tombstone, when Wyatt threatens to turn that dude's head into a canoe? I saw that exact pic on rotten.com. Looked like: U
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What? The Rodeny King beating and subsequent riots, OJ Simpson murdering 2 people, Columbine, the first time the WTC was bombed, 1500 people died near Mecca, and like 3 civil wars in Africa
Rawanda, South African Apartheid. Those two alone...
Not to mention all the shit that wasn't being captured on any kind of recording at the time.
The rose tint feels so fuckin good tho, right?
There's only a single decent quality video of the first plane on 9/11. Because in a city of millions of people, only 1 person in the area was recording at the time.
I can't even imagine how many videos there would be if it happened today.
More videos. And yet somehow
less agreement on what happened.
"obviously fake ai sludge"
yeah and for a lot of people who'd be using lemmy, the reason they weren't aware of all this shit is our parents kept us safe from it
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Why does EVERYONE forget about the oklahoma city bombings???
I was in 3rd or 4th grade at the time and happened to be sick that day. Freaked me out that people were going to think I did it.
Oh god, I can't tell if that would be an epic prank, or a traumatizing nightmare.
Your teacher gets a cop, and all your classmates to go in it. Everyone acts like you did it.
Then a cop comes in, and arrests you. Throws you into the back of his car....then DRIVES YOU TO DISNEY WORLD!!!!
Which, might be kind of a long drive now that I think about it. I have no idea where you lived in 1995.
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I mean as bad as those things were, none of those things come close to recent events. Look at your examples and compare them to "worldwide virus kills millions and the entire planet goes into quarantine for a couple years" or "president of the United States fails to get reelected so he foments a literal coup on the US government and his rioting mob breaks into the capitol building trying to stop the transfer of power. And then 4 years later that criminal gets elected to be president again".
AIDS has killed many more than COVID-19, albeit slower. Gingrich and Justice Thomas are responsible for a lot of the degradation of our institutions that allowed for trump and his ilk. Gay and Trans rights were essentially non-existent compared to today.
We are worse off in many many ways, but for me personally that last one means I am much better off at this moment (this may not last).
And most of history is worse than any of that. Other than climate change, we are not living in unprecedented times.
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Shock marketing and the release of hyper gory “banned” vhs tapes was a big marketing tactic for music in the early 90s. There’s a great NIN documentary that covers this.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find out this rumor was somehow disseminated by labels.
A group of friends and I had a little website we used as a precusor to modern day social media. I made a comment on a post on there where I linked to an image on SA. Little did I know that Lowtax didn’t use goatse. No he used a very high resolution close-up image of the head of a penis with a drop of pre-finishing liquid oozing out.
So I post this comment from my desk and go back to work. About 30-minutes later, my roommate, who sat a few cubicles down from me says my name. Not like normal, his voice broke as he was saying it. I’m like, “what?” He says, “what did you post to the site?” I told him and he says that is not at all what he’s seeing. I go over there and holy shit all 1600x1200 pixels of his 21” CRT is filled with this engorged dickhead!
We reached out to the site admin and told him what happened. He deleted the image ref and I posted a comment explaining what happened.
Another time, at my same cubicle desktop, I updated my Linux workstation and went to lunch. When I get back, my screensaver is just a whole bunch of very explicit porn images. Apparently Jamie Zawenski(sp?), the maintainer of xscreensaver, thought it would be a good idea to introduces a new screensaver that went out and eandomly pulled images from anywhere on the web. So that was fun.
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Sorry bud, but I think you just used to be more innocent.
Just look at the celebrities and culture of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s... Even the whole outrage culture pushed by conservative media like Fox News also goes that far back!
The fashion of the day changes but humanity itself.. not so much!
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It was a long time before that when (allegedly) a rib was removed from a man to create the first woman so he wouldn't have to suck it himself.
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