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I was only 19 when 9/11 happened, but I don't think there was any lasting change that directly effected my day-to-day life. Airport security got much stricter,

• hobs 3y ago
  Being able to continue your life as normal is just a calculation of how insulated you are from the real world. The department of homeland security and basically everything snowden brought us. The war in Iraq. The war in Afhangistan. Millions of refugees and impacted soldiers and families at home. The bringing back of militarized equipment and approaches into the cops at home.
  • lkbm 3y ago
    This might shock you, but life and the world I live in is actually as real as the ones other people live in. You don't become real by serving in the military, or having a family member in the military. It affected people in the military a lot—I mentioned that. It massively effected people in certain other countries, as I mentioned. But for the majority of people living in the US, what changed?
    • phone8675309 3y ago
      > But for the majority of people living in the US, what changed? Everyone of a certain age knows at least one of their schoolmates or college friends that died in the war. The US government used the occasion to assassinate American citizens abroad with drones with no due process. Everything you say or do on the Internet is tracked not only by advertisers but by the US government itself. Trillions of dollars spent and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani civilians are dead thanks to the war and sanctions conducted by the US. This ended up being a complete waste in Afghanistan due to the Taliban immediately retaking the country. If you can't see these as impacts then it's because your separation from them is a privilege.
      • lkbm 3y ago
        > Everyone of a certain age knows at least one of their schoolmates or college friends that died in the war. What age? As I said, I was 19 at the time. For Americans, we're looking at ~2500 for Afghanistan and another ~5000 for Iraq. That's several times fewer than the number of high schools. A lot more were wounded. There's a good chance most people knew someone wounded in one of the wars. But "someone I know was killed" is true with or without the wars. If the number of fatal car accidents increased by 5%, would you say this was a major change to our day to day life? That would take about three years to exceed the total US deaths from both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars over their entire many-year time span.
        • dgfitz 3y ago
          It’s not about just the dead. Think about all the people who deployed, leaving family and friends behind. Kids didn’t see their parents for months to years at a time. People got divorced. PTSD is a very real thing. To couch your arguments in a death count is quite lazy.
          • lkbm 3y ago
            Reminder: this is the thing I'm responding to: "Everyone of a certain age knows at least one of their schoolmates or college friends that died in the war." I didn't come up with deaths as the metric. Notice that only one comment mentions people being wounded: mine.
    • deleted 3y ago
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    • nyc_data_geek 3y ago
      Police in the US have been drastically more militarized since 9/11/01. Also, we now live in a surveillance state to a degree inconceivable prior to the passage of the PATRIOT Act, which was rammed through in the days following that event, without scrutiny or debate. We are all subjected to drastically more surveillance, and militarized policing, as a result of the events that day, even those of us lucky enough to be insulated from the direct kinetic impacts of the war we started as a result of it. To say nothing of extraordinary rendition, extrajudicial killings, and the trillions of our tax dollars wasted on a war against a regime that had nothing to do with the event itself. We could have made a much better world, for that money. edit: "We" meaning citizens of the US, although to a large degree these impacts are not only felt by US citizens.
      • lkbm 3y ago
        Yeah, the militarization of the police is a good call-out. That's a big mostly-second-order effect of the 9/11 response. The surveillance and other Patriot Act changes were very bad. As much as I hate and have railed against them from the start, they don't have a real, tangible effect on most people in the way COVID did, but they're a real problem, and clearly direct result of 9/11.
    • tekla 3y ago
      Is this how the US devolves? 9/11 directly contributed to the massive increase in spying against citizens and illegal activities. The fact that you don't see an issue with this, means just how successful it was in doing so.
      • lkbm 3y ago
        No, I have a huge issue with it. I've been shouting on the internet about the Patriot Act and whatnot since it was passed. It's very, very bad. It also has no noticeable, tangible effect on my life, or the lives of most people. It's a big problem that fucks a small number of people in a way that's semi-random. Actually...this isn't 100% true. Abu Ghraib, and specifically Sen Inhofe's "outaged at the outrage" response, helped prompt me to donate 33% of my income to charity for several years in part. At the time, I thought that was the maximum I could deduct and I wanted to minimize the amount of tax dollars I sent to a government that was actively torturing people. My savings would be vastly larger if not for Abu Ghraib.
    • idontpost 3y ago
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  • deleted 3y ago
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• dgfitz 3y ago
  Yeah, the war. The impact it had on countless lives, directly and indirectly.
• phone8675309 3y ago
  9/11 brought back the US Imperial Presidency, the effects of which we are still feeling today Edit: Downvote me harder, fascists
  • lr4444lr 3y ago
    You are likely being downvoted just as much for the inaccurate implication that US Imperialism only started after 9-11 as the explicit accusation of US imperialism at all.
    • dragonwriter 3y ago
      The "Imperial Presidency" is a term that is entirely orthogonal to US imperialism, though I suppose it is possible that people are ignorant enough to downvote for both of the reasons you suggest.
  • dragonwriter 3y ago
    > 9/11 brought back the US Imperial Presidency The "imperial presidency" was pretty much a linear progression for decades before 9/11; 9/11 didn't materially impact it, and definitely didn't "bring it back" as if it had gone somewhere between when it was first identified and 9/11,
  • Mountain_Skies 3y ago
    Centralization of power in the presidency had been going on for a long time before 9/11, motivated by two things: nuclear weapons and a semi-permanent Congress. Because of the need to be able to respond quickly during a nuclear attack, much of Congress's oversight in military matters were transferred to the presidency. Also, because congress critters tend to be cowards who want to avoid doing things that would upset the voters in their district, the presidency has been given lots of regulatory power it shouldn't have. Congress critters love giving presents to voters far more than they enjoy slapping them with a bunch of regulation and restrictions. Let the president and the Executive Branch's bureaucracy take that heat. 9/11 gave the government, especially the federal government, much more power than it had before, which means everyone's slice of that power grew, but I'm not convinced that it's all that responsible for the slice for the executive branch having grown to be such a large share as it was already there before the attack.
• vikingerik 3y ago
  Try taking a photograph of any piece of transportation infrastructure since 9/11. If any law officer sees you, you'll be drummed out of there posthaste. (Even if it is in fact legal, in which case you might be able to stay after an extensive argument.) Or try entering any New York City subway - there are random bag checks and inspection points created as a direct response to 9/11.
  • lkbm 3y ago
    > Try taking a photograph of any piece of transportation infrastructure since 9/11. If any law officer sees you, you'll be drummed out of there posthaste. (Even if it is in fact legal, in which case you might be able to stay after an extensive argument.) I think this was medium-true for a couple years, and now very rarely true, though depends exactly what you mean. People take photos and videos inside airports and subways all the time—I've never been accosted when doing it. I see videos of trains stations, subway stations, and railroad tracks all the time. > Or try entering any New York City subway - there are random bag checks and inspection points created as a direct response to 9/11. There definitely is much more surveillance and random security nonsense than before. It's a valid point that it's not something you only come across with the TSA. A lot of this security nonsense should be rolled back, obviously, but the reason people don't rebel is because....it mostly doesn't affect most people. Helps to be white, of course. As I said, Arabic people, and anyone who even looks possibly-Arabic, had a really hard time for a while, and are still facing a lot of unearned abuse.
• shaftway 3y ago
  Militarization of the police was a pretty big change. It's less noticeable in most rural areas, but some places the police have unexpected access to hardware. Think of towns of ~1000 people that have anti-riot vehicles. That kind of access came after increased security spending after 9/11. A lot of police departments saw it as money from the heavens and were worried that if they didn't spend it, they wouldn't get more of it. There has also been an increase in police officers carrying gear that used to be restricted to SWAT teams. I've worked in a couple major cities where every day I had to walk past cops that were basically just standing around with an M4A1 strapped across their chest and their hand resting on the grip. --- The mortgage crisis around 2008 completely changed the way that homes are bought and sold. If you bought a home before that time you had to do way less paperwork and way less work to prove that you can afford the McMansion you just bought. --- The dot-com crash in the 90's fundamentally changed how startups are funded and valued. Before that crash startups didn't need to have any plan to profitability. VC decks were basically: 1. Steal underpants 2. ??? 3. Go public 4. Profit VCs still invest in bubbles, but you need a much clearer picture of how you'll become profitable one day. Amazon is a notable hold-over from those days. They've never technically turned a profit, and have no real plans to.
  • shaftway 3y ago
    https://www.nationalpriorities.org/blog/2020/08/27/small-towns-dont-need-military-helicopters/ https://www.nationalpriorities.org/blog/2020/08/27/small-tow... > Winthrop Harbor, Illinois, with under 7,000 residents, received 10 helicopters, a mine-resistant armored vehicle, two Humvees, and other equipment worth over $6.5 million. Officials claim these transfers help with “counterterrorism” operations, but it seems unlikely that Winthrop Harbor has a terrorism problem that requires 10 helicopters to address.
    • wglb 3y ago
      I live in Winthrop harbor and would love to know where this stuff is. I am reasonably familiar with the area and it would be a significant challenge to find anywhere safe to land a helicopter and nowhere to store them. I am highly skeptical of this claim.
• lr4444lr 3y ago
  I was the same age. The military police with fully automatic weapons that to this day patrol Penn station still give me the creeps.
• atq2119 3y ago
  > I don't think there was any lasting change that directly effected my day-to-day life. True, but only because you misspelled "affected" ;)
• cykros 3y ago
  The KYC/AML stuff got stepped up a lot -- more just a time waster for a lot of people, and a drag on the financial industries, for better or worse (and hey, militant groups still get funding!). I think more of what 9/11 did is change the trajectory of the many systems that didn't yet exist at the time it happened. And it's hard to say what would have been had it not happened, and had we not seen the rise of the surveillance state. But you don't end up with the apparatus that Snowden revealed without at least some of that underlying architecture affecting the end-user experience.