The flip side of this is hearing an adult give an unhinged and personally biased account of an event or time that is super well documented. For instance older family telling you that Reagan's election healed the country, and immediately boosted the economy.
“Events you can personally remember pretty well” may not be the ironclad argument you think it is
Was born in the USSR, tankies know better evidently
Perspective matters a lot.
I've heard a bizarrely high number of relatives and friends complain that they vividly remember people cheering right after the 9/11 attacks. And the folks cheering tended to be whomever this relative thought was problematic - stupid woke college kids, scary Muslims, scary Israelis, smug neocons, bitter aging Marxists, rural yokels, California/Texas shitheads - an absolute grab bag of People I Don't Like.
Certainly, over the last 25 years, I've seen a lot of social media and partisan news advance the theory that someone was cheering after 9/11. In the same way, I've heard pundits insist people were spitting on Vietnam Veterans in airports back in the 60s/70s. Or the various Crime Wave / Drug Crisis horror stories of the 1980s that seemed to inspire every low-budget TV thriller and family drama show.
If you're not even alive as this stuff happens, it's easy to get all the wrong information from elder peers who did live through it. Or just through the increasingly distorted retellings offered up by a media more keen on selling narrative than document the recent past.
I bet a lot of white people in the south remember segregation as a good thing. They didn't have to see how "dirty" their communities are.
God, I cringe just typing that, it's disgusting.
I had something similar. I was in this "eat healther class" and the person kept going on and on about how healthy China eats. So finally I'm like, yeah I lived there for almost a decade before coming back to America. It isn't anything like you're describing, so much shit is deep fried, re-served to the next customer, or dyed to look fresh when it's not. Most foreigners get very sick the first few weeks in country because of the lack of enforced food regulations, like using "gutter oil" to save money. Yes, it's exactly how it sounds, they skim off the floating oil in trash and sewers to reuse it, especially in street food to save money.
But I'm wrong, because she has TicTok and had never met anyone who lived there.
I've been confidently told that I was wrong about working all day in the fields when I was in high school, in triple digit temps (F) with extremely high humidity, and not dying.
"But the wet bulb temp.." It's like the LD50. You're way more likely to get heat stroke, but it's not a guarantee.
I know a guy, late 50’s, who believes the Stolen Generations was one of the best thing to happen to Australian black children. That it’s only because they were given to white families that we have a portion of decent native black people in Australia.
Frankly, I know more terribly uneducated and, with the advent of the internet, wilfully ignorant older people than not.
pretty much everything about 9/11 and the subsequent wars
Joke's on me, I'm wrong half the time
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