Talk:Good old days/Archive1

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Mission

Mission: While mildly amusing, and mentioning some missiony things, this isn't actually "about" anything. Might be better at BlightNet? ħuman 06:27, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

I think it's perfectly on mission and topical, it just needs a little improvement.--^talk 06:47, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

How is it on-mission, besides using missiony words? ħuman 07:49, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

The continually-refreshing myth of the "good old days" justifies a lot of bad attitudes and bad science. I actually think there has to be some kind of better name for it - I'm gonna look.--^talk 08:01, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

OK. I'm not gung-ho to delete or anything yet, I'd just like to see "more" I guess. Especially of what you are referring to, whatever that may turn out to be. ħuman 08:21, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

I'm now looking forward to a few new articles! "Things just aren't the same any more", "Life's like that", "Shit happens", "When I were a lad." and "Come the revolution".--Bob^{Spring is sprung!} 11:21, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

This article could potentially be pretty useful. Plenty of people hark back to times that likely never really existed, such as the utopian conservative 1950s and the overly romaticised (and disease free) medieval times when everyone was a knight with their own horse and their own teeth. Might be best moved to Nostalgia though.--^{Ask me about your mother} 11:34, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

It were all fields round here when I wrote Golden age. Some sort of merge is in order, sez oi. Totnesmartin (talk) 13:14, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Verily, thou speaketh truely.--Bob^{Spring is sprung!} 13:26, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Ooh-aar! You moide oi larff. --PsyGremlin講話 13:23, 27 March 2010 (UTC) (been ages since I spoke Wiltshire)

(undent) Definitely. Kids in 2009 had respect for their elders, and Skittles tasted more fruity.--^{Ask me about your mother} 13:23, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Drink up thy zoider! Totnesmartin (talk) 13:24, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

In the goode olde daze I didn't have to argue with all these sockpuppets to stop them from breaking my wiki. Thus spake Zaroastrianica. ħuman 02:31, 28 March 2010 (UTC)

Rome and Athens

I am not a great writer, but if someone wants to add these two that would be nice. Rome because of the much imagined great empire, most a collection of quarrelling states. And Athens the Great Democracy, except if you happened to be one of their neighbours. 04:00, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

Those would both be great ideas for this article. ħuman 07:05, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

The pre-aspie days of Rationalwiki

Back when the site was full of vigorous debates, covering all points of view, rationally argued out, and there were no rules, templates or bickering, everyone was equal and the mob was wise and fair. - π 06:50, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

There was always bickering, but it was done with good humour and no malice. I hear ya....Ace^ace 07:34, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

I think Pi was being ironic, Ace. (At least, I hope he was.) Radioactive afikomen ^{Please ignore all my awful pre-2014 comments.} 07:39, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

It was mostly a piss take of the version of RW's history on the McWiki. - π 07:43, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

So fucking what? I was being serious damnit. This hollow husk of RW is a mere shadow of its former fun loving self. ~

(EC)Still is done with humour, sometimes. The only major cultural change is that people now perceive someone as having it in for them or having a vendetta against them. - π 07:42, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

A succinct way of putting it. Radioactive afikomen ^{Please ignore all my awful pre-2014 comments.} 07:44, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

It is possible that some things were better in the past, and RW may well be a case in point. I find the level of simple personal abuse that seems to get thrown around now to be pretty unpleasant. It's one of the reasons that I don't contribute so much any more.--Bob^{Spring is sprung!} 12:10, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

Life expectancy

A BoN amended "Low life expectancy" to "Low average life expectancy due to infant mortality". I reverted this on the grounds that life expectancy was lower than today because of poor diet, health care, etc. However, I'm quite happy to be persuaded other wise. Bad Faith (talk) 09:16, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

There are a lot of examples of people living well into their 70s back in, say, Ben Franklin's time, Ben Franklin being one of them, and I think we can agree that that was before anything we'd call modern healthcare or dietary knowledge. Generally, once you survived childhood and all of the horrible diseases the anti-vaxxers want to bring back, you were good to pretty much what we'd consider fairly old age even back to the Middle Ages. Wikipedia has a pretty good article; they say that by the early 1500s people could expect to live to 71 assuming they survived to age 21. If not, they likely died before the age of four.

So, yes, our lifespans that now push past 80 are modern, and a result of a lot of improvements, but taking a rock-dumb arithmetic mean of a population that had massive infant mortality and using that to prove they were all dropping dead before the age of 30 is idiotic. —207.196.184.152 (talk) 08:04, 5 May 2012 (UTC)

Then the correct phrasing would be more like "Low average life expectancy (primarily due to high infant mortality)". Peter ^{is procrastinating.} 08:13, 5 May 2012 (UTC)

What the hell happened here

This article has become more larded up than Bubba the Love Sponge's veins.--^talk 09:57, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

I did a bunch. I will soon condense the various American sections, and integrate the politics section with the selective memory section.--^talk 10:37, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

The bad old days

Could there be a piece on the bad old days (not just because RW and WP 'fount of all confusion' did not then exist) as it seems to be a trope. 'Before there was knowledge of Christianity, Communism, Feminism, (things being advertised) etc.

How do 'the good old days' link up with Utopia?

Perhaps a few 'ancient quotes' could be included (there is a Roman one which surfaces regularly). 171.33.222.26 (talk) 14:53, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

Something To Think About

It's important to remember that after that inscription was written by the Egyptians, that Egyptian civilization did collapse and fall. There were probably folks at the decadent time of the Caesars who said "Oh, sure, lots of power and corruption going on but no biggie". So there can be a danger in thinking that decadence or decay don't actually exist. I think it's also important to remember that while there are some positive myths about the past which don't line up with reality, many of the negative ideas about the past aren't particularly truthful either. Burkean (talk) 05:38, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

Education and the Service Economy

I noted this particular section and thought I’d leave a few comments on it:

Also, while economically the US peaked from the end of World War II to the early ‘70s, this was because everywhere but the US and Soviet Union had their infrastructure bombed to smithereens, not because of conservative culture ruined by teh leebrals. And the economy hasn’t been destroyed since then, just shifted to the service sector (which is why free higher education has suddenly become such a politicized issue, as agriculture and manufacturing doesn’t require much education, while service work does).

Up until the part about the economy not being destroyed, the content is, as far as I can see, trivially true. The picture painted of the service economy and education, however, is not as simple as presented.

First off, farming does indeed require a high degree of knowledge obtained either through formal education or tradition (basically apprenticeship). What did not require much training was the mass use of unskilled labour prior to the mechanisation of agriculture (this generally occurred in the West during roughly the first half of the 20^th century) with the US being an early leader. Hence, the blanket statement that farming is necessarily a low skill sector is simply wrong; especially since the focus is basically on the era in which the sector was already well on the way to becoming or already had been extensively mechanised in the US.

Secondly, manufacturing may also require a high degree of skilled labour, depending on the specifics involved. True, the classic “Fordism” with its assembly lines and mass production was geared towards using a minimum of skilled labour, but this was and is merely one particular type of manufacturing.

By contrast, the claim that a service economy necessarily requires a more educated workforce is equally wrong, because a hell of a lot of these service jobs are designed with the exact same view as the Ford assembly lines of yore, namely that the work should require only a bare minimum of training. Indeed, this is the core philosophy of several of the biggest US service companies; McDonald’s and WalMart being just the most obvious examples.

So, the simplistic narrative of the changes merely coming down to well-educated youngsters zooming ahead of contrarian nostalgics due to a shift to a service economy is just as much of a rosy coloured morality play as the good old days myth. This Panglossian depiction of a “brave new service economy” sorely reminds of the “professional” liberal bias lambasted by Thomas Frank in his polemical Listen Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (2016). ScepticWombat (talk) 01:18, 26 February 2018 (UTC)