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…
There was a lot more than that. There were Nazi sympathizers, and saboteurs, and those who plotted to overthrow the US government. People like Father Charles Coughlin reading Goebbels’ propaganda on the radio to millions of listeners and forming an anti-government militia, and legislators like US Senator Ernest Lundeen working directly with Nazis and reading speeches literally written by them.
Highly recommend Rachel Maddow’s Ultra podcast if you want to say holy shit every few minutes.
they are the same picture
the og nazis were absolutely cooked full on conspiracy theorists, some of them were into occult shit and spend significant resources on that
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).
That’s easy, people still wave the Confederate flag and that happened 90 years before the 1950’s.
Ironically, the confederate worship started in the 50’s and 60’s during the civil rights era. It was basically a rebellion against the civil rights movement, and an attempt to intimidate black people back into silence. Like “oh you want to use the same bathroom as us now? Well you can’t stop us from erecting this statue of a confederate general, to constantly remind you where you came from.” So depending on when exactly they came from in the 50’s, the confederate stuff may also be a surprise.
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’m just going to steal the response I read years ago.
“I possess a device, in my pocket, that is capable of accessing the entirety of information known to man. I use it to look at pictures of cats and get into arguments with strangers.”
I’ve started l to realize that actual information worth reading is not available. Like I cant access in depth medical course or text book in engineering. Lots of beginner tutorials marketed as 7 minute abs.
Information is valuable and nobody gives it away for free. We have access to a worlds worth of crappy, unvetted trash information. But the vast majority of the good stuff is still locked away as it always was.
Does MIT not have open courses anymore? Besides that I wonder what you are looking for? I can find free scientific papers to improve my hobbies, watch along as professionals explain and do their jobs, graduate level math and computer science videos from the comfort of my home. As a student around 2000 (Google existed, barely) it was not so easy, even with access to university library you still had to find what you were looking for with worse tools and there was less of it. And who on earth was going to take the time to show you exactly how it worked their lab a thousand miles away? Once a week you could go to a seminar and a visiting scientist gives a slideshow. It’s better now.
Opencourseware is great. But what they’re a rarity instead of the norm. I think Stanford posted lectures for a bit too. Good sources of information exist. Just like there is research we all can access but there’s not as much as it appears without having to resort to piracy.
It became clearer to me when writing and researching topics. I still had to go to the university library and pour through books. Because that quality of information in their library is not there online. The internet didn’t replicate that knowledge. It gave us a surface level blog about topics. Don’t get me wrong. I know there’s lots of blogs and people giving in depth research for free on their speciality. But its still not a good source of knowledge like exists in academic libraries.
As an oncology researcher, to do my job I have to pay approximately $30-60 per article for about half the articles in my 1500 article library for my CAR cell therapy research.
The scientific field is slowly improving over the last 10 years, but it still sucks, and I can only read the abstract for free, which doesn’t provide enough details for my layperson research on topics like behavior or autophagy.
I’m one of the lucky few that has an institutional subscription, and most companies don’t pay for institutional subscriptions. Also, I can’t, as someone suggested, hack into the University wifi which is a half hour away and still do my job onsite.
Between Libgen and SciHub I’m interested in hearing an example of what you can’t find out there.
Like I cant access in depth medical course or text book in engineering
Why not? The common ‘hack’ is to join the wifi at your local uni if you don’t have the necessary subscriptions for the platform but lots of stuff is open-access
That’s true but what I meant was that when I went to school it opened my eyes to how there is internet information and then there’s this other academic information. My own opinion is that I see a distinction between what I can learn online vs what I can learn with a text book. The internet is good at making me think I’m getting this massive access to knowledge when its really more superficial factoids rather than actually knowledge. And that’s because knowledge is sold like anything else
This does make me think. I remember the days where I would turn up at the library to read books. With my phone, I can read and learn but instead I doom scroll.
We can’t use oil or gas anymore.
Also, there are 15 billions people on earth.
I don’t know if the Internet has made folks dumber per se. What we may be experiencing is the visibility of semi anonymous unfiltered thought. I’ve had conversations with individuals online who have made claims that are egregiously incorrect and will defend those claims to the death but when discussed in person, they are amenable to discourse and can change their opinions.
I’m not saying this is true for all cases but I think the is a lot more going on here in our digital age.
Edit: removed an embarrassing typo.
Nah, I’m sure it hasn’t. It just seems like it has.
Part of it is the fact that it’s easier for people speak freely to an audience, and…maybe some of them shouldn’t…
There’s also the fact that it’s a lot easier to consider oneself an expert. For better or worse, respect for authority has plummeted, and there’s so much information that anybody can find citations for just about any claim.
If you don’t believe me, I can link you to some articles about it…
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”
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
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?
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.
Seems like this was already know in '47
