Anarchapoop
Paul FairieA Brief History of We Are Raising a Generation of Wimps
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If you enjoy these threads, you'll enjoy the book I'm writing (almost finished a complete draft!).
All about our repeated complaints (nobody wants to work anymore! men today are too feminine!), our tendency to blame everything bad on anything new (jazz! bicycles!) and all the other weird and interesting things (Cronk!) we put in our newspapers.
Pre-order here:
https://unbound.com/books/thepressgallery?utm_campaign=thepressgallery&utm_medium=AuthorSocial&utm_source=AuthorActivity
TotallyObvious đłïžâđđłïžââ§ïžđșđŠđ”đž@paulisci and on and on, ad nauseum. Thanks for this, I will buy your book. We need more folks like you willing to do the research to show that today's tropes do not uniquely belong to today.
Clay Bergen@paulisci hurray for a draft!
GJ Groothedde đȘđș@paulisci Interestingly, somewhere between 1971 and 1984 weaklings morphed into wimps. I wonder if this is a belated heritage of J. Wellington Wimpy?
Andy Wootton@Eetschrijver @paulisci Nope. In the 1960s my mother was warned by her brother that letting me play with a doll would make me "a sissy". This may have included Action Man.
@Eetschrijver @paulisci I think people now consider 'sissy' to have meant 'gay' but I think it was a synonym of "lilly-livered", "Mummy's boy" and "limp-wristed". Unmanly, effeminate rather than a sexual orientation. I'm sure it meant that too but nobody talked about that possibility in front of children, in case they caught it.
nev@paulisci I kind of wanted this to keep on going all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia
Cameron MacLeod
Iivana Lemmetyinen@paulisci I once went through a week of a single newspaper (Helsingin Sanomat, the biggest one in Finland) for a week in 1936.
That was hilarious. There was discussion whether technology will take away jobs or create new jobs, complaints how the police won't investigate bicycle thefts etc.
My favourite was that a Soviet spy ring was caught in Vienna, and Soviet embassy said that the arrested were in the country only as private persons.
Made in DNA@paulisci
I feel naked.
I feel naked.
Chewie@paulisci ive just pre-ordered it :)
@chewie awesome, thanks! 2-3 weeks away from handing in a complete draft to the publisher (though still edits to do after that)
@paulisci I remember hearing about some of the jazz quotes when I was watching the Ken Burns 'Jazz' DVDs where it said Jazz and marijuana use was going to ruin the youth of the 1930s... very similar to the moral outrage about raves and ecstasy in the 90s....
@chewie yes for sure! One fun thing about putting the book together is seeing the complaints about jazz next to the ones about bicycles, kids these days, the radio, Halley's Comet... We sure do complain about a lot
@paulisci any news on the publication date?
coldclimate@paulisci tremendous work
David Hull èĄć€§èĄ@paulisci I Beiieve it.
LiverpoolWiz@paulisci Great to see that the habit of not proof-reading was going strong then, whenever that was.
walter4096you're right "next generation is weak" is a recurring fallacy.
but by my reckoning this guy was 100% right about cars back in 1971.They've increased obesity & produce CO2.Now people are waiting for electric car rollout, when we've got bicycles.e-cars wont fix peoples health.
Definitely a balance to be struck between embracing progress and not just becoming weak.
I'm much more on the progress side usually(i'm very pro AI and we'll have the 'machines thinking for us' accusation..)
Izzy@paulisci The wild thing about this one is that the person who wrote this is quite likely to have had PTSD himself.
catraxx 
@paulisci Oh yes, Mister Steroids talking about wimps. Sure.
Leigh Garland@paulisci I can only assume people in the 1870s were hard as nails, and it's all been downhill since then.
vox popsicle vox dei@toychicken @paulisci I mean, I take the point of this thread, but I think it's true that people were emotionally tougher in those days. What choice did they have, what with being unable to maintain close ties with their families after leaving home, increased mortality rates, much harder physical work, etc etc. I'm sure they all paid the toll in emotional baggage and I have no interest in returning to those days, but I don't think this is false.
Dean Johnson@toychicken @paulisci 1870âs folks would stroke out at modern life, given the speed of life and unlimited choices.
Greg Stolze@dtj @toychicken @paulisci If they tasted a single Cool Ranch Dorito their brains would melt out of their noses.
Michael Stanclift
Defiance!@paulisci Ah yes, the age old humble brag
Joe Beam@paulisci
Kids these days!
Kids these days!
darbyothrill@paulisci Are we raising a generation of simps?
Rob@paulisci This is a magnificent thread, đ đ
Good luck with your book
Good luck with your book
The Animal and the MachineMy main takeaway is that the story narrative is so old, that the phrase itself sounded antiquated, so the term âweaklingsâ was replaced with âwimpsâ in the 80âs. Probably also because itâs shorter and so allows for a bigger headline.
And yes, the generation of people who flew over Nazi Germany were called weaklings by some, the boomers are not that generation but wish they were for the heroics.
Tom Swerts
Taylor
Tim Kellogg@paulisci iâd be curious to see if this continues before the steam engine. hypothesis: when technology develops we worry about raising weaklings
if so, i bet you could almost use it as a proxy measure for technological development
Limey_Tank
Andreas Kröpelin@paulisci One of the most famous pieces of ancient Latin literature also features a similar statement: In De Bello Gallico, Caesar notes that the Belgians are the bravest of all Gaulls because they have the least contact with Roman civilisation and with merchants bringing goods that "effeminate the mind".
Wonkish@paulisci Weâre In Hell did a fun video on this recently:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsEmOQeBcRA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsEmOQeBcRA
A History of Men Not Being OK in America
Hein Ragas@paulisci Isn't it the whole point of progress to ensure the next generation is more secure and comfortable? Creating the circumstances under which they can be more 'wimpy' than us is exactly the goal.