Why the Nazis are back
This is the 50s, I think it’d be pretty easy to draw a line from casual racism to white supremacists. A key difference this time is that it’s not just Germans led by one insane man, it’s instead a bunch of redneck prices and conspiracy theorists.
Before the US got involved in WWII, there was a giant Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden…
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Also, for the red neck prick angle of it, check out this fucking moron from rural Wisconsin (who I originally learned of through this article about when a bunch of vets kicked his ass in 1946 for trying to hold a Nazi rally in Minneapolis).
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I presume you’re not talking about Russia? You’re going to have a hard time showing them those Nazis.
A person from 1950s will just be super confused when you say it because they’re going to ask you what country is Nazi. If you say the US they’ll just be confused further.
“Who are these nazis”
“Anyone that doesn’t have the same political beliefs as me!”
“…I see”
This denial is worse than any vulgar insult.
We’re talking about violent bigots. People responsible for mob violence against democracy, and state violence against women and minorities. Stop fucking pretending we ‘just don’t like it’ when you try to make us less than human.
…I see
Doubt.
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I doubt that someone that actually lived through WW2 would agree on that
Show them footage of January 6th.
I think that wouldn’t be too hard. He would just believe that they never left… which would be true
I’m going to go on a different angle on this one and say that we are much tougher on sexual harassment. I feel like a lot of people from the 1950s who have grown up on pulp sci-fi like Flash Gordon could accept a lot of modern technology and the internet as basically just magic. To be fair is how a lot of modern people also accept it. But I don’t think they would be able to process the move towards egalitarianism that we have taken.
That is not to say that modern society is egalitarian only that we have made good strides in achieving that aim.
Edit: Turns out Gordon is from the '70s, but other pulp sci-fi exist so my statement stands.
“Yes, they are allowed to be on the same bus as us. No, we don’t call them that anymore”
“Bus? No we bulldozed hundreds of neighborhoods to build highways so now everyone has to have a car”
And we had a pretty great black president.
I knew that would be the obvious joke but it’s not like that was unfathomable in the fifties. Desegregation was obviously where the world was headed and I’m sure everyone was expecting (or dreading) modern racial relations.
That smoking is bad for them. You’d just be banging your head against their socially-acceptable-at-the-time drug addiction.
Person from 2020 magically appearing in 2090 and being told caffeine/excessive sugar is now regulated and ID checked
I’d be okay without excess sugar, but I’m a firm believer that it is virtually impossible (for me) to function in modern society without caffeine. Our bodies want to sleep when we’re tired, but I have never had a job where I could say “I’m tired. I’m going to nap and come back in 8 hours.”
You know you can sleep at night and work during the day right?
Also napping isn’t sleeping for 8 hours.
You (and a lot of people tbf) need caffeine to stay awake mostly because your body gets used to it and then can’t function without it. Plenty of people do just fine without caffeine or other substances. It’s not magic and we’re not super humans or anything. We just don’t drink caffeine multiple times a day every day
I would argue those of us on a shifted circadian rhythm that lags 4 hours behind the farmer personalities in our society need caffeine to fit into the rigid corporate structure those first hours of the work day, and those high pressure professionals, VCs, high tech biotech silicon valley wall street types need caffeine (and cocaine for some lol) to function in their 17h 6-7 day work weeks (not me). I just take a caffeine break on vacations to reset my sensitivity and then slowly build up over the next 6 months to a pot of coffee all the way through before bed time to function.
90%+ of the population does not fall into that category though.
I guess my point is that with work, personal obligations, family, etc, there aren’t enough hours in the day to so what needs to be done and still just sleep and wake up when you’re no longer tired.
It’s great that it works for you, but it just never has for me. Also, to be fair, it’s been 20 years since I worked a job with a regular 9-5 schedule, so I’m admittedly biased.
How would you regulare excessive sugar? Have a weekly quota of sugar that can be contained in food you purchase? Are they going to ban growing fruits?
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Ration books. If they’re from the 50s they’ll probably understand.
Taxes on sugar beets and standards for manufactured foodstuffs, I’d assume. Chopping down the apple tree in your front yard is clearly absurd (or is it? I’m not sure what’s too absurd to happen anymore…), but saying that any loaf of bread with more than 20g of sugar must be labeled “cake” and taxed as such? That type of thing has already been happening for years.
I read your response and immediately thought of homosexuality. That would be hard to explain, why now we have a big pride parade celebrating it. (Im gay, dont com at me!)
Things they considered morally fine (smoking, dropping litter, 40 year olds dating 16 year olds) is morally reprehensible, while things they thought were morally wrong or even outlawed are totally acceptable (homosexually, porn, divorce).
You just explained a large selection of boomers.
Yeah, a lot of them were born in the 1950s.
My comment now in retrospect was asinine. Yeah. True boomers are in that bracket.
Charlie Chaplin’s daughter died recently and I looked him up on wikipedia. Charlie married last wife, and the mother of the recently deceased, when he was 54 and she was 18.
It may not technically be pedophilia, but it damn sounds like it.
Depends where they live, too
Depends a lot on the color of their skin.
Why the Nazis are back, and in America of all places
Seeing how much overlap they have with the KKK, I don’t think it’d be that surprising
They are back In germany too. Although I wouldn’t call it they are back, but they are open about it again
We walk around with a little rectangle in our pocket that gives us access to the sum total of human knowledge, but we mostly use it for looking at funny captioned pictures, the same pictures over and over just with different captions.
It’s called a phone but no one ever uses it as one.
Also, the “video telephone” that everyone always so desperately awaited from the future? Yeah, we have that; no, nobody uses it, because we can’t be bothered to dress up for a phone call.
I also thought no one used facetime until I worked retail recently… The amount of people I saw come in on a facetime calls where they both just had their cameras pointed at the ceiling was bizarre and boggling.
Tell that to the tonnes of people that facetious in public but neither them nor the person they are calling are actually in frame
That pretty much sums it up.
The phone never leaves my side, but I dread getting an actual phone call.
#3 Why we still haven’t got colonies on the moon
#2 Climate change
#1 That fascism is back
they knew about climate change in the 50’s- actually, greenhouse gases were first proposed in the 1820s.
You’d think most of them are more fascist than the people you consider fascist now. Remember what England did to Alan Turing. They’d be amazed we let women and minorities work with us and we don’t persecute gays. They’d think the commies won.
The Internet, social media and how we can access absolutely everything from this tiny device
Plenty of SF writers lived in that era and they predicted the Internet.
For example: I can name the writer and his novel where he predicted AI writing engines.
Can you really though?
I mean, no jokes though, why don’t you just name him instead of saying you could? Lol
For real “so and so wrote about this” instead of whatever ambiguous nonsense that was lol
Found it and translated the relevant section:
So it is necessary to write something. It’s seemingly very simple - to write something. You stand in front of the conceptor, press a few keys at random and after ten seconds a slate pops up with a ready-made scheme, let’s say a novella, with developed plots, psychological character, the duration of the plot, an attractive point… Then the slate is thrown into a dialogoscript, which, having filled in the empty framework of the scheme with a record of the “verbal meat”, feeds it further, to the visionary and phonocombi… Then it is only necessary to teach the actors personalities, roles and twist it all with a copiosynchronization camera. Novelvision is ready.
Do remember that it comes from OLD times. Certain words are archaic now, certain were invented to sound futuristic and have no good equivalent.
…and I’d really prefer for people to come out with their own findings of similar predictions. The more the merrier.
That’s a cool section, thanks. Which book/story is this from?
Witold Zegalski “Wyspa Petersena” (Petersen’s Island). It wasn’t translated to English, but it’s easy to find and modern online translators are quite reliable.
The book is a compilation of short stories. 2 or 3 from them describe the vision of a future world that seems to be the direction we’re heading to. The excerpt was taken from one of them.
Coolio, thanks! I love old sci-fi like this. Specially the crazy sciency words lol
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“You see, the file itself can be copied by anyone, but this one little piece of metadata can never be duplicated. That means you own the file.”
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The price of housing
Also nearly everything else. Computers would be an obvious exception, a couple years ago I paid USD$40 for a smartwatch with specs exceeding a $2000 computer from around year 2000, and millions of times more powerful than computers from the 50s which cost millions of dollars at the time.
How easily we can know anything, yet how diligently we fail to learn anything.
Nothing as sobering as showing a techno-optimist what the future really looks like
That we’ve been to the moon - in there 60s - but haven’t been back or been out further. I think it would just be against all their expectations.
There were several places in the media that had stories of landing on the moon as a real possibility. Almost a forgone conclusion.
I believe that the area of disbelief would be that we just… stopped.
Unmanned space exploration is amazing, and we’ve done a ton in LEO, but we haven’t put a person out past the Hubble telescope since Apollo 17, which was 1972 if I remember correctly.
“Yeah, we went there a few times, there was nothing there besides a bunch of rocks. We brought some back for study, and spent the next few decades on more obviously productive pursuits. Like putting robots on Mars!”
