What is something people think is true "nowadays" that has actually been true for a long time?

koreth@lemm.ee to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 148 points –
84

Nobody wants to work anymore!

(when the fuck did people actually want to work?)

Some time ago people merged contributing to society and being productive with work.

Work is doing something for money, but there are things I would do for free if I didn’t need to earn money to survive.

Teaching, community gardens, organizing social events. These are all things I’d love to do but I have to work like 50 hours a week to survive and safe for the future.

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

Said by - Socrates

The older generation has basically always resented the younger generation for:

  1. Their lives being easier,
  2. Their music and clothing being awful,
  3. Doing sex wrong.

It's like a constant of recorded history. The Romans said these things in ~300BC.

Also about the younger generation being too soft, which I believe ties with your first pint.

As a millennial I don't resent zoomers, I actually feel ashamed for not having done better by them

As for music and clothes... I mean... we had Gabbers...

As a fellow (albeit very late) millennial, what is a gabber?

I also never heard of Gabbers, my fellow millenianite. From a quick Google search it appears to be a style of EDM music.

Some people made it a lifestyle, with specific looks and clothing as well.

I hope the Gabbers are still out there? ... That is, if they used that amphetamine sparingly.

Trans people have existed for as long as people have existed.

Intersex yes. I thought trans was a relatively new (20th century, maybe 1930s) thing. What is the earliest recorded transition?

Chevalier d'Éon spent the last years of her life recognised by the king as a woman from 1777.

The term transgender is 20th century, but transgender people have always existed

I specifically mean trans people, not intersex people, though they have existed too. There are plenty of ancient cultures with evidence of what we would call trans people today, with some even being revered. Sorry to not give sources, but I'm just not invested enough to go research specifics at the moment.

I'm genuinely curious. Would you consider someone like Mulan trans? I'm from India and we have mythological stories of intersex and gods magically transforming to the opposite gender. None technically trans

No, Mulan's "male" side was only ever a disguise, not her actually being a man. She was manly/masculine perhaps, as she did end up being described well by the song "Be a Man", but ultimately her gender was never truly in question by herself or the audience.

As for history, this Wikipedia page is an excellent summary.

I know there was a Trans man that rode for the Pony Express. We just didn't call it that and if they were ever found out there us a good chance they would die.

are we stretching the definitions here a little bit? Would we call Mulan trans?

What do you call living your whole life with a binder on, going by your chosen male name, and wishing to die over having a doctor give them a look over?

Kindly let me know what the term is

You want me to tell you what you think the proper term is?

I don’t know what the proper term is. I’m sorry. Not trying to be rude or offensive. English isn’t my first language either

Understood. They were trans in the modern sense of the word. Ran away from home, took on a man's name and learned a "man's" trade to support himself. They didn't have the word trans back then, but no one other than his wife knew the truth until he died. But the word trans didn't exist back then. And there was no positive term for it until modern history.

Sorry to jump at ya.

the earliest i'm aware of off the top of my head goes back to around 300BCE, but i haven't exactly done any research to find the earliest example, and i'd expect there are earlier ones. just suffice to say we've been around a long time.

You're thinking of being g post-op. Not all trans people have surgery, and it's not a requirement for being trans.

Cancel culture. It's been around for a very long time, though it used to be expressed in shunning, banishment, or communal acts of corporeal harm (e.g. tarring and feathering, lynching, etc.)

Edit: just realized the question was for something true, not just something that's been around for longer than people think lol

I must be old. I remember when “cancel culture” was called “voting with your wallet”, and rich corporations used it to justify their own success.

I feel like that's more of a corpo relations phrase, cancel culture is more personal. Like that voting with your wallet was supposed to influence the behavior of corps, not individuals.

I think a good older example of cancel culture were the American red scares, especially the McCarthy trials. Although an extreme example of it, they were 'cancelling' people who's views they considered dangerous. People disliked by others would often be called a Communist and socially / economically harmed tremendously, regardless if they were actually a Communist. If you got to a McCarthy trial, you were doomed; that guy was cancelling with the power of the state, afaik knowledgeable to the fact many of the accusations were false

It's kind of funny when someone is commenting on two threads at the same time, and the subject is coincidentally tied.

I was discussing about Socrates' trial. "Socrates was cancelled" describes it perfectly. Cancel culture in Athens 399 BCE.

America's political system being fundamentally broken. People point to George Washington's farewell address like he was some 5d chess genius seeing into the future when really he was a dying old man who had just spent eight painful years watching the country shift into bipartisan gridlock

The Founding Fathers didn't really know what they were doing in creating the Constitution. They just kind of guessed based on what they saw as best practices at the time and compromised where they needed to.

And the Constitution was the scary document that gave more power to a federal government

Plus decorum in Congress. Elected officials were literally beating each other with canes.

I'm not sure I agree (observing from the outside as a Brit). I feel like Citizens United is the origin of a lot of the problems in modern US politics and that was only 2010.

For those who don't know it, it's a landmark legal case that basically allowed a lot more money into politics. When you make winning politically about who can raise the most money you take power out of most poeple and put it in the hands of rich people. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

Yeah no. I don't want to say that money and politics hasn't gotten worse. But our first past the post voting system has been documented as being inappropriate for selecting leadership basically all along

Recorded media, electronic media, is something the founding fathers never had to deal with.

Painful years because of bipartisan gridlock, or his teeth?

Slightly different tack ... by the time most people recognise a problem, and feel like it's happening "now", the reality is that it started long ago, has been ramping up gradually for a while, but most people didn't want to bother thinking about or doing anything about.

Climate change being kinda obvious. The thing with Google and Chrome lately has been like 10 years in the making at least.

Generally, IME, when something goes wrong even in someone's personal life ... there was something wrong the whole time being ignored. Just recently I spoke to someone about a recently divorced couple who were buying houses and planning long term things months before the divorce. I pointed out that it had to be that way as they were desperately hanging on to the idea that the marriage can work when in reality it had died years before.

I had someone talking to me refer to 2020 as when the Black Lives Matter movement started and I just got so mad. I was just feeling like... Movements don't start when you find out about them and join up. And also where you been? How much had this person been living with their head in the sand? It baffled me

Yea … it’s a thing … “history and reality are my history and reality” in some sort of narcissistic presumption of being plugged into anything that matters, when in reality, just about everyone knows very little of the totality of what’s bubbling along in human affairs.

Kids misbehaving in school. "Kids are so rude these days." "Young people don't show respect anymore."

I'm pretty sure that every generation had its bad eggs in the classroom and nothing has changed.

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

  • Socrates, ancient Greece

Idk when else in history one can say "kids watching videos on endless scroll on their mobile phone while they listen to music and their parents will yell if you take away their $1,000 pacifier"

4 more...

"Fake News"

There's been good and bad journalism for as long as there's been journalists

Yup. Only the different names for it are relatively new. The term “Fake News” didn’t become popular until The Mango Mussolini was President.

Mmmmmmh, true. But it has generally been regarded as something bad. And it is not any more.

It's been condemned regularly for the last few hundred years. This feels like there's a need and desire for it along with a revulsion about it from others

I feel that with the advent of social media and the freedom to read same news incident from multiple sources in a matter of minutes, the news sources are forced to pick a side. There's more activism and less journalism.

There used to be 1-2 activist newspapers, but now even the big ones have to choose sides

For sure, at least in the past journalists would maintain a pretense of impartiality

No they didn't. There's a famous quote that in the early 20th century newspapers didn't just report the news they made the news. Newspapers have always had "fake news" and they've always taken sides and had agendas

It got so bad we had a war because of fake news, so we passed some laws to not let it happen again, then Ronald Reagan got those laws removed, and we are back after it.

To me the term "Fake News" means "News that is true, but I don't want you to think is true".

That seems to be how it is used by the guy who made the term popular.

Let's get Philosophical...

All of reality is perception, a point of view.

I immediately think of butter, fat, dairy, and eggs. We were all told around the 1980's to avoid them as they will make you obese, raise blood pressure and cholesterol levels. Until pretty recently the American FA was still saying are all bad, then it went to "in moderation" etc. In fact it was all enjoyed and quite healthy up to the late 1970's and now again it is basically back in most people's diets.

Actually, we're discovering, other foods are often the cause of those symptoms, but don't let me knock the advertising industry for fast and processed foods ;-)

Gotta love how sugar is never on the list of things to avoid.

sugar industry pays big money to blame everything else while they dump sugar in EVERYTHING

even bread is sweet

Anything with a "Foundation" or a "Board of" behind it, seems to get lobbying rights to veto any changes, i.e. to preserve their status quo ;-)

Supposedly too, you used to be able to commission a "research project" and define it's scope nice and narrow, and get just the results you'd like to have published to support the "no change". It does take a lot of money to be able to do this, though.

Fat was attacked by big sugar.

Dairy and Eggs are very bad for you and it's only recent that it's been taken off of Canada's Food Guide.

Eggs are pretty nutritious actually (as long as not too many, like many other things) and yes they contain some cholesterol, but a body with zero cholesterol is a dead body. The brain needs cholesterol to survive. It's all about moderation, as the dieticians love to say.

Nowadays, everybody is trying to talk, like they have something to say. But nothing comes out when they move their lips, just a bunch of gibberish, like they forgot about Dre.

So what do you say to somebody you hate?

Politics is too divisive, politicians are untrustworthy, political campaigns are too negative

Police reform has like a century of the same rhetoric without actually fixing the problem. You can read about it in old archives, and sounds hauntingly familiar to what you'd read from a modern reformist who opposes abolition