The idea that medieval peasants somehow had more free time than the average modern american still is absolute bullshit
Paleontologists will tell you otherwise. One reason you had all those giant cathedrals going up in the Medieval Era stemmed from the enormous excess labor just wasting around in between harvest seasons.
Agricultural surplus creates free time. It’s the whole reason why people opt for farming over hunter gathering.
There’s a staunch libertarian view on Lemmy, wherein people will advocate for personal liberty ahead of technological progress. The Country Mouse has it better than the City Mouse, because he can own a gun and drive a big truck and smoke weed without the neighbors ratting him out to the cops. The lack of basic amenities - subways and school systems and high speed internet and big medical centers - is worth the increased personal autonomy.
The “Serfs had it better” trope takes this to its logical conclusion. Rolling back the technological frontier 500 years is worth it, because the surveillance/police state and the corporate oligopoly even on the fringe of society is seriously that bad.
I don’t agree. But I can’t really argue against it. This is just a personal preference. Its not any kind of objective truth.
So you’re not really a serf if you’ve got plumbing? The labor relationship with your employers isn’t the issue?
The dark cowboy rides again.
I’m willing to believe he asked ten of his VPs and nine of them agreed with him. Also, that he’s currently looking to fill a newly opened tenth position.
Amazon policy is to stack rank all of its employees and regularly fire anyone in the bottom tranche. So any kind of deliberate slowdown would need to be incredibly well-coordinated. Even then, there would inevitably be a ton of attrition as the automatic Fire Everyone triggers started kicking in.
Its not enough to play by the rules with a company as vast and encompassing as Amazon. You need to take it a step further and start sabotaging the anti-organizing functions of the company. Start shoving monkey wrenches in the employee monitoring systems. Start dismantling the automation that allows the business to function at such a breakneck pace. You’ve got to get in there and break the machine before it breaks you.
It works, in no small part, because the community is small and people have known each other by handles for years now.
But the flip side is that a few of the mods on Hexbear can be just as draconian in their administration policy as anyone on old-school Reddit. So you periodically see otherwise friendly and active members vanish from the site.
I just remember, in the very early days of these kinds of online communities, that people would actually try and organize to do shit. Like, you’d have folks on /r/Houston talking about a bunch of redditors going down to the Houston Food Bank to volunteer. Or you’d have some serious fucking shit out about a landlord with folks offering to come down and help out. I even caught a “my car is broken, I don’t know what to do” with a “don’t worry, I can help out” and a final “omg, its fixed, thank you so much!”
Now its all talk. Nothing is real, its all just fucking ads and Mr. Beast style stunts. Nobody has any kind of trust or empathy for anyone else online. The closest you get to a material social network is people on Nextdoor screaming about how a strange car drove down the street and desperately asking everyone on the block to call the police and report it at once.
Shit fucking sucks.
Adding anyone reading this to the Victims of Communism memorial.
But the works and practice in mobilizing the workforce in the new deal played a big part in the US having industrial capability prior to WWII.
Hard to power the 1940s industrial economy without coal. And hard to generate coal without an electrification of the Tennessee Valley. Without a doubt.
Hell if there’s a miuntain range in your state you’re almost certainly getting some of your power from a hydro plant made in the 30’s.
Given his attitude towards public works, it’s very funny that Hoover has the nation’s largest dam named after him.
In fairness, if you get under the hood of the New Deal benefits, they relieved a lot of immediate suffering and mobilized a workforce that had been functionally abandoned by the private sector.
But they didn’t “grow the economy” in the same way as the enormous investment in the Military Industrial Complex achieved. The Citizens Conservation Corps and the Social Security Administration didn’t create the kind of high paying engineering and manufacturing jobs that state demand for thousands of new tanks and ships achieved.
WW2 full mobilization of the economy wasn’t just taking in the slack of a depressed market. It was a command economy in all but name, dictating every aspect of the industrial chain, from extraction to expenditure to recovery and recycling.
The tragedy of WW2 is that we could only permit this kind of logistical achievement for the purpose of joining a bloodbath in Europe, North Africa, and East Asia. As soon as Roosevelt passed, Truman began reprivatizing the economy as quickly as possible.
American Economics Professor: “We pulled ourselves out of the Great Depression by entering WW2”
American Economics Student: “I can’t afford my car payment and my rent just doubled. When can we re-invade the South Pacific?”
This period of peace in Western Europe
France: “We haven’t gone to war with Germany in decades!”
Me: “What about Libya?”
France: …
Me: “Algeria? Argentina? Rwanda? The Ivory Coast? Somalia? Chad? Basque Country? Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia?”
France: sound of FAMAS F1 cocking
there’s also the phenomena of older folks generally being more against change and clinging in the past more,
That’s more a consequence of the moment. Older people like stable material conditions. And with programs like pensions, public health care, and a safe suburban neighborhood with good amenities, they see the status quo as worth defending.
But swing through North Africa and the Middle East during the Arab Spring (anyone remember that?) or pop over to the UK in the wake of the last election cycle or visit an impoverished neighborhood in Haiti or a bombed neighborhood in Lebanon and you’ll find plenty of elderly revolutionaries.
you look towards the past and become nostalgic about it
People may be nostalgic for their youth, but they are rarely nostalgic for being treated like a child.
And you’re going to find it hard to locate a South African native nostalgic for Apartheid or a Pole or Romanian who misses occupation or a Chinese national who pines for the Century of Humiliation.
Westerners coming out of their post war pre-Reagan Golden Era just have more to be nostalgic for.
Makes me think of the old Samuel Clemmens quote
THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak;
whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
~ Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
It’s so easy to pretend the mob that turned on French nobility in the 1800s or the Qing Dynasts and Russian Tsars in the 1900s or the Arabs who lashed out at European occupation in the 2000s were simply seized by mania or some animal impulse.
It’s so easy to pretend they had no grievance, they suffered no generational atrocities, they had no motivation for their violent uprising, save the insidious Mind Virus of Leftist Agitation.
It’s romantic to see the aristocracy and the colonial governments of these nations as martyrs of a golden era. They were cruelly deposed by savages for the crime of living the gentile and sophisticated life. They were the Eloi, dragged into the dirt by vicious Morlocks who envied their perfect beauty.
But it’s all bullshit.
The aristocracy were monsters. They maintained their grips on the people through generation after generation of terror, torture, and enforced ignorance. They were cult leaders and warlords who claimed turf through centuries of conquest, inquisition, and cultural indoctrination.
When these archaic institutions failed, we like to blame the revolutionary leaders who happened to climb atop the ruins of their bloody legacy. But they were simply at the right moment in history to witness a corrupt edifice crumble under the weight of millions of their own dissatisfied subjects.
the party standing for freedom
That died with the Hayes Administration.
it is just becoming possible to have an infinitely persistent entity
You’re just describing a library. And we’ve had those for millennia.
That said… we’ve had libraries for millennia! Imagine all the alternative universes in which Euclid’s Elements or Plato’s Republic or The Analects of Confucius or Naturalis Historia or On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres were lost before they could become cornerstones of human understanding.
Imagine a world in which we never developed the capacity for language or the faculty for written text.
And yet, despite stockpiling weapons for the next eight decades, never again.
Maybe that’ll change in the next decade, but hopefully we can keep 1945 as the last year nuclear weapons were used for a bit longer.
They killed Lincoln but they couldn’t kill the abolitionist movement. Congress ratified three of the most progressive laws written in a century and the Freedman’s Bureau took to the job of enfranchising and rehabilitating millions of black ex-slaves in the subsequent decade.
Pick up a copy of W.E.B DuBois’s “The Souls of Black Folk”. What he describes is, at it’s heart, a revolution in how our country treated men and women of African descent. It set the foundation for the next century of civil rights and paved the way for a modern era in which the core racist underpinning of the country are totally upended.
That kind of fundamental change would not have been possible under a Breckinridge administration, nor would it have been possible if the Union had been crippled into submission at Gettysburg or Antitem.
Lincoln was the tip of the abolitionist spear and critical to what came after. But he was not alone. And he was by no means the most radical voice within his party. His martyrdom became the bloody shirt that Republicans rallied under long after the war had ended.
This but unironically. I’ve got a coworker who took vacation days to help build a temple up in Pennsylvania. He was incredibly proud of his contribution and happy to participate.