"Haven't they got anything better to do" - a spinoff from the fascism thread

[San Bernardhinault]

Being excessively nostalgic is not a trait exclusive to the old. I’ve seen enough “If you grew up in the 80s...” posts, and even 90s, to know that.

[ursus arctos]

Neither is being racist AF

[Cal Alamein]

That has got to be the Big bender in a Bun hasn't it? We laughed at that 30 years ago never mind today. We have four Wimpy's in my town and the Big Bender in a Bun isn't the reason I haven't been in for decades.

I made the mistake of googling a B B in a B. Yeesh, that "food" product looks vile even by our low US standards.

[Lang Spoon]

It's come up here before, but I'm in awe there are still a few Wimpy's in existence. It felt tired and old in the 80s.

[Patrick Thistle]

A Wimpy OPENED in Shrewsbury a couple of years ago. I went in just for giggles and the menu is the same. No Mr Wimpy though.

[Lang Spoon]

Well that's shit then.

[Eggchaser]

Being excessively nostalgic is not a trait exclusive to the old. I’ve seen enough “If you grew up in the 80s...” posts, and even 90s, to know that.

I have just taken over managing the trainee solicitor as she's joined my department for her next six month stretch. During the welcome spiel (crap doing it over Zoom) we somehow got onto the topic of Friends (the number of divorces of Ross) and she said she was binge watching it, and then asked if I had seen any of them. I replied yes, but of course that was back in the early days, it started before you were born. And felt ancient.

[WOM]

I had a student who was a massive Pink Floyd fan, and I naively asked if she had ever seen them live. "How would I have done that?" Ummm...

[Patrick Thistle]

Ah we need an "oh shit, we're old thread". My moment was explaining to a fellow student on my masters how I'd graduated first time round 5 years before Google was invented.

I have also made a group of teenagers gasp when I said that when I was at school not even the teachers had a mobile phone.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

I used to be in a couple of local history groups for my hometown and where I now live. The pattern was always:

1) Someone posts old picture, asking for info on the people or place
2) Someone adds a general nostalgic comment of how innocent everyone/everything looks
3) Someone says 'these were the good old days'
4) Someone says 'before immigrunts were here'
5) Someone adds 'the gays too'
6) fascism ensues

That half of these people are immigrunts in the costa del old english cunts is lost on them. I checked out.

My auntie in NZ has started posting memes from a group that seems to be all about growing up in the late 60s and early 70s. It's mostly about 'who can remember condensed milk' twee bollocks, but I'm waiting for it to take a darker turn. Hopefully not, but it does seem to be the way. I almost wonder if its a deliberate strategy for Kippers and other nascent Uk fascists, or just that those political identities that fixate on nostalgia are just very very happy hunting grounds for radicalisation.

The irish versions of these things are a bit different, because our versions of these old photos reveal a nightmarish hellscape of misery and poverty. A land where no-one smiles, and everyone looks older then than they do now, and they're 80 now. We have to have different ways of channeling the same impulse. The version of this covering my home town features a mixture of old pictures, and people from eastern Europe alerting people to dogs or cats found wandering, or people announcing that bankcards or keys had been found, and they had been left into the gardai.

[WOM]

I have also made a group of teenagers gasp when I said that when I was at school not even the teachers had a mobile phone.

I felt like Bob Newhart when I was explaining to my daughter how you met up with people before cell phones; "Well....you.....you made a plan to meet at a certain place....at a certain time....uh...and then you met there." 'And what if you were late?' "Well....you'd usually wait ten minutes and then...you know....leave, and go to the club / restaurant / movie without them."

[Benjm]

A Wimpy OPENED in Shrewsbury a couple of years ago. I went in just for giggles and the menu is the same. No Mr Wimpy though.

One year, Mr Wimpy came to my junior school fete and handed out loads of free cheeseburger vouchers. This was during the period when Wimpy tried to go head-to-head with the rapidly expanding McDonalds doing counter service fast food, so redeeming the vouchers was less depressing than one might imagine.

[laverte]

A few years ago i was trying to work out the precise location of the shoe shop my grandfather owned in downtown Algiers, and what was there now in its place. So i joined a pied-noir nostalgia group. Now, this is a people who underwent a traumatic experience, so i was prepared to give them some leeway. But i did think they might make room for some ambivalence in their recollections of how much better Algeria was in the 1940s and 50s than at any time since. i couldn't think what had changed around 1962 or so to make everything so much worse, but fortunately the members of the group spoke with one voice in choosing where to lay the blame.

i left the group without finding my grandfather's shop. But i did discover there are a lot of second-generation pieds-noirs my age or younger who are doing the same as me, looking for a piece of property to connect to, a plot of land, a gravestone. All of this sorrow and mourning is healthy and needs to be teased out of us. But it comes with a massive, indigestible side-order of racism, and it makes me feel that no-one has learned anything.

[ursus arctos]

That is one group that I would expect to change considerably as time passes (as it likely already has).

Those communities that haven't been marked by similar events seem less open to a change in attitudes.