brazenautomaton:

kontextmaschine:

Thinking about how all the components of the September 11 attacks were all known factors. Like

• Militant groups might hijack commercial airliners. This happened reasonably regularly during the Cold War.
• Airplanes can destroy large objects by piloting themselves into collision with vulnerable locations. This was Japanese kamikazes in WWII
• Islamic militants might conduct suicide attacks. I think this actually started with the Tamils, but you heard about it all the time w/r/t the Palestinian “first intafada” around the turn of the 90s
• Obama bin Laden, specifically, wanted to pull operations to destroy the World Trade Center, specifically. There had been a car bomb attempt in the underground garage earlier in the 90s that was supposed to work like the Project Mayhem bombs at the end of Fight Club.

And it still blew everyone’s mind

we also know that everyone is going to die eventually and still find people’s deaths shocking, what do you think this insight is

Yeah this was apparently an issue for me, like child psychiatrists were consulted, but the thing is “I and everyone I know will die forever someday” seemed like such an obvious consequent of “people die” I’m not sure I ever had an expectation otherwise