As someone who lives part time among the Amish, I will point out that the Amish benefit from being surrounded by a society of technological abundance. They sell their pies and corn and home made aprons to us, the English, who make our money in the world. They put roofs on our houses and build sheds for us. We give them rides - I've driven so many Amish folks into town I've lost count. We provide Medicaid for their healthcare.
If we all became Amish I think the shock would be seismic. Not that most of us want to live in a bunkhouse with our 16 brothers anyway.
For what it's worth, my understanding is that the Amish don't necessarily shun all new technology, contrary to popular belief. They just have a very long, deliberate, and considered process for evaluating whether new technologies should be integrated into their way of life. Accepting a ride in a car and benefiting from some modern health care is not at all contrary to their way of life. People have a mistaken view that the point of their faith is to be stuck in the 18th century, but that's not the case at all. I grew up around lots of Mennonites and they have a similar approach. I'm not saying I agree with everything they do, but I think their process for evaluating technology within the community is something we could learn from. Our modern culture does pretty much the opposite.
"I've driven so many Amish folks into town I've lost count."
I feel quite strongly that this should be considered cheating.
It reminds me of a very self-congratulatory article that some guy wrote about spending a year getting away from technology and living with nature. The byline even glowingly noted that he'd handwritten the article. I was able to read it because he sent it to the Guardian, which published it on the internet.
They have a strong culture of providing neighborly help, and accepting it in return. I’ve had a plethora of beans this summer from my neighbor, and I don’t mind driving him and the kids to town, either.
The Amish (at least in my area, I believe it differs with different communities) are separate, but not at all isolated from the greater community.
Yes, each settlement has slightly different rules. The ones in Lancaster PA, for example, will wear reflective vests as they use their scooters. Their buggies have windshields. The ones near where I live in WV have no windshields and won't use any reflective clothing (they've been asked as the roads are narrow and deeply shaded in spots and the local drivers are not as careful as they should be [I say this as someone who walks 4-8 miles most days on said roads with reflective safety gear]).
The really low tech ones won't use the reflective triangles on the back of their buggies (went up to the Supreme Court and they won).
S. M. Stirling's Dies The Fire is a good exploration of what would happen if we were all forced to, in novel form.
A self-congratulatory tone is really annoying, I agree. But we weren't evolved for modern technology; being reminded that just because we can do something, like sitting all day staring at screens, doesn't mean we often should is a good thing.
There I agree. We're supposed to get lots of fresh air and natural light, we're evolved to live in groups of 100-odd people, and so on, and a lot of this is reflected in how happy people are or aren't.
It's the reason I have more time for the Paleo diet, compared to other trendy diets. I don't think we should literally only eat things that were available to us as hunter-gatherers (just because something's new doesn't mean it's bad for you). But the basic principle behind it makes sense, and it seems like a good starting point.
And on that healthcare - they do go to hospitals and otherwise benefit from modern medicine. So it's great that they want to live as tech free as possible, but society would be worse off if we all adopted this lifestyle.
They don't "want to live as tech free as possible," that's an incorrect view. They just have a long process for evaluating whether and how to integrate new technology. It's much more deliberate than what our culture does.
Yeah, I think it’s telling that they have no qualms with modern medicine. And due to the fact that the community tends to marry others in the community, healthcare organizations in Amish areas do a lot of studying and treating genetic abnormalities in their population.
I think Mao claimed they were eating all the planted seeds, when in reality they ate insects. No sparrows, no pest control, and the results were disastrous famine.
The Marxist/Leninist-engineered famines of the USSR and Red China are a pretty good example of what happens when hard sciences like agriculture and biology are rendered 100% subordinate to soft sciences like economics. And to pseudo-scientific nostrums like historical materialism.
Exactly, and thanks to those soft sciences’ replication crisis and obvious political bias, now regular folks are losing faith in science in general. :(
It is a truth universally acknowledged (or should be) that creators of fiction are terrible at figuring out whether a particular policy would be a good idea or not because they're so adept at creating worlds and playing God in them that they forget that in this world they don't get to write the characters.
In all seriousness, is it actually possible to just convert to Anabaptism and join an Amish community? I'd always had the impression the Amish were quite insular and cautious with outsiders. Maybe if there were an Amish recruitment drive they'd get more takers?
Wikipedia claims that "Only a few hundred outsiders, so-called seekers, have ever joined the Old Order Amish. Since 1950, only some 75 non-Anabaptist people have joined and remained lifelong members of the Amish."
I googled this specifically for this article, and: Yes! You can do it. But you really do have to go live with them -- it's not like becoming Presbyterian, you can't just show up at church one day and write your name down.
You also are going to need to learn *Pennsilfaanisch-Deitsch* - commonly called Pennsylvania Dutch - which is actually a dialect of Palatinate High German, which is different enough that learning standard German isn’t going to get you far.
Interesting fact - there were plenty of non-Amish speakers of it in the US until WWI, when anyone speaking anything vaguely German was suspected as a spy. That part of my family came to PA in the 1720s, and continued to speak it until the war - almost 200 years in America.
You wouldn't like it. So many of them are assholes.
Signed, someone who was (technically still is) a member of a Mennonite church, no not that kind, but Mennonites always have distant cousins who are Amish.
Leaving aside the nut-picking of that particular woman - who, despite lacking a better explanation for her troubles, is still clearly trying to express some kind of fear that the congressman is trying to empathize with - I think this whole line of argumentation really misses the point. People fear that technological systems are now being widely adopted without proper safeguards and that they will seriously disrupt the things that make people’s lives meaningful. I think there’s ample evidence that the people running these companies do not, in fact, care about what they are “disrupting”, and to the extent that our political leaders fail to respond to those fears, people will find many other (perhaps less palatable) ways to express them. Just because people “participate in society” to some degree doesn’t mean they don’t feel trapped by these systems or, occasionally, have worthwhile arguments about what should change. You’ve picked on one crazy-sounding woman, but there are tons of people making actual, serious arguments and/or simply choosing other ways to live that are counter to this “modernity is inevitable” narrative (cf. the woman in Kentucky who turned down multi-millions of dollars to not convert her family’s farmland into a data center).
And yet all of us collectively let the poor knocker uppers lose their jobs collectively. We could have stopped it. We don’t need alarm
Clocks. We could all pay someone to knock on our windows to get us up for work. But we don’t we embraced the alarm clock. We were selfish. We didn’t put the proper safeguards in place to make sure that the knocker upper was properly preserved as a career for all eternity. And now what do we have to show for it? Timeliness? No thank you.
That is not the kind of disruption I'm talking about. This isn't about preserving some particular arrangement of jobs or the economy in amber; this is about technologies that purport to interrupt the very process of thinking for ourselves, exhibiting creativity, and forming relationships with other human beings. Tech CEOs would rush us headlong into not just a technological future, but an anti-human future, and several of them have said so out loud. That is the root of these fears, in my view.
Yes. It is. Because and I cannot stress this enough “it’s real this time”. Is the battle cry of every fear of new technology disrupting things.
We even made a very bad parable about it in the oddly celebrated story of John Henry beating a machine in driving railroad spikes. And dying to do it. And somehow that’s noble.
The thing is. Creativity is highly overrated. Most things we call creativity is just repackaging old stories with new names. Same with art. Sure we interact with it in interesting ways. But “creativity” has always been downstream of a species that is just very good at patterns.
Horseshoe theory proving itself true again, both the Degrowthers on the left and the trads on the right secretly want us to be Amish with the arguments they make, they just come at it from different directions.
I read that Times column. If crap that bad can get a column in the Times, Maurer is a genius by comparison. My already low opinion of The Times is now even lower.
That’s a round about way of saying “public choice theory was and always is right. People say things and do things. Ignore the saying. Watch the doing”.
> But instead of doing that, once-and-possibly-future-congressman Tom Perriello nodded like a bobblehead doll on a cabbie’s dashboard and then produced this video, which — of course — required God-knows-how-many data centers.
It’s more profitable to pander to the masses and sell fear and anger than it is to work for progress. People respond to incentives. Where’s the mob to cancel Tom Perriello for being a moron?
I hope nobody tells that dumb old bitch that she has a form of electricity in her body right now and that she wouldn't be able to think or move her body if not for it. Who knows what she might do to herself.
We don't have to retard society back to Amish levels. All we need is for people to know how to perform simple tasks if the grid goes down. Can a person cook without electricity, or get from point A to point B by looking at a map instead of using a GPS? I'm not confident that most people under the age of 30 are aware that you can manually put water into a toilet tank using a bucket so that you can flush it.
If any of you know the environmentalist Derrick Jensen, you probably know of the concept he speaks of that I will paraphrase: Consumers don't defend the source of their resources, they defend the system that delivers the end product to them. Back to the under 30 idiot: he isn't bothered by the fact he can't cook nor that he is too lazy to leave his house BUT HE WILL FREAK THE FUCK OUT if something prevents DoorDash from overcharging him to deliver a panini.
"I'm not confident that most people under the age of 30 are aware that you can manually put water into a toilet tank using a bucket so that you can flush it."
Under-30 here. Isn't that what you do when the do-hickey don't do?
(Sorry, not sure what to call the flushing/pumping mechanism in a toilet.)
A ringing endorsement of becoming Amish would be the fact that America began to rot from within when the highlight of the 20th century was a Microwave in every household!
It’s been all downhill since then. It’s a fact and undeniable. Viva La Amish!
Now, as my other comment implies, “being heard” can quickly lead to “finding a scapegoat” and then “punishing/exterminating that scapegoat”, and allowing Israel to be a catch-all boogeyman is a huge red flag (which the DSA thinks looks totally rad, man!)
But if people want to get their ya-yas out by fighting a data center that will just get built somewhere else…OK? Although even there it’s a small jump to real online censorship, which left-wingers still seem to want.
One last point: Both Data Centers and Israel are downstream of narratives pushed by a fairly small number of people. That’s not unusual, and even someone like myself who believes the populace need to be heard, needs to have a say, has to come to grips with the idea that Strauss was right, and even democracies are run by elites who’s ideas filter down to the hoi polloi, whether those elites claim to speak for them or not.
As you're in roughly the same age category as me, I assume you recall the glory days of people protesting against phone masts being built in their town, while complaining about the crappy reception their phone got.
As someone who lives part time among the Amish, I will point out that the Amish benefit from being surrounded by a society of technological abundance. They sell their pies and corn and home made aprons to us, the English, who make our money in the world. They put roofs on our houses and build sheds for us. We give them rides - I've driven so many Amish folks into town I've lost count. We provide Medicaid for their healthcare.
If we all became Amish I think the shock would be seismic. Not that most of us want to live in a bunkhouse with our 16 brothers anyway.
For what it's worth, my understanding is that the Amish don't necessarily shun all new technology, contrary to popular belief. They just have a very long, deliberate, and considered process for evaluating whether new technologies should be integrated into their way of life. Accepting a ride in a car and benefiting from some modern health care is not at all contrary to their way of life. People have a mistaken view that the point of their faith is to be stuck in the 18th century, but that's not the case at all. I grew up around lots of Mennonites and they have a similar approach. I'm not saying I agree with everything they do, but I think their process for evaluating technology within the community is something we could learn from. Our modern culture does pretty much the opposite.
"I've driven so many Amish folks into town I've lost count."
I feel quite strongly that this should be considered cheating.
It reminds me of a very self-congratulatory article that some guy wrote about spending a year getting away from technology and living with nature. The byline even glowingly noted that he'd handwritten the article. I was able to read it because he sent it to the Guardian, which published it on the internet.
Hey, everyone needs a Shabbos goy from time to time
Like the people in Blue states when they need their budget balanced and hire a Republican governor.
They have a strong culture of providing neighborly help, and accepting it in return. I’ve had a plethora of beans this summer from my neighbor, and I don’t mind driving him and the kids to town, either.
The Amish (at least in my area, I believe it differs with different communities) are separate, but not at all isolated from the greater community.
Yes, each settlement has slightly different rules. The ones in Lancaster PA, for example, will wear reflective vests as they use their scooters. Their buggies have windshields. The ones near where I live in WV have no windshields and won't use any reflective clothing (they've been asked as the roads are narrow and deeply shaded in spots and the local drivers are not as careful as they should be [I say this as someone who walks 4-8 miles most days on said roads with reflective safety gear]).
The really low tech ones won't use the reflective triangles on the back of their buggies (went up to the Supreme Court and they won).
Even Thoreau cheated and went to his mom’s house for dinner regularly!
Probably because he couldn't cook.
You were able to read it, yes, but the point of his article was about his experience.
Which would have been fine, if it wasn't so self-congratulatory and trying to suggest that we don't need technology.
(The other issue: this stuff doesn't scale. 70 million Brits can't all live off the land.)
S. M. Stirling's Dies The Fire is a good exploration of what would happen if we were all forced to, in novel form.
A self-congratulatory tone is really annoying, I agree. But we weren't evolved for modern technology; being reminded that just because we can do something, like sitting all day staring at screens, doesn't mean we often should is a good thing.
There I agree. We're supposed to get lots of fresh air and natural light, we're evolved to live in groups of 100-odd people, and so on, and a lot of this is reflected in how happy people are or aren't.
It's the reason I have more time for the Paleo diet, compared to other trendy diets. I don't think we should literally only eat things that were available to us as hunter-gatherers (just because something's new doesn't mean it's bad for you). But the basic principle behind it makes sense, and it seems like a good starting point.
If you live part time among the Amish, does that mean you have short quilts and smaller than average circumference pies?
Ha! The pies are indeed small but mighty!
And on that healthcare - they do go to hospitals and otherwise benefit from modern medicine. So it's great that they want to live as tech free as possible, but society would be worse off if we all adopted this lifestyle.
They don't "want to live as tech free as possible," that's an incorrect view. They just have a long process for evaluating whether and how to integrate new technology. It's much more deliberate than what our culture does.
Yeah, I think it’s telling that they have no qualms with modern medicine. And due to the fact that the community tends to marry others in the community, healthcare organizations in Amish areas do a lot of studying and treating genetic abnormalities in their population.
Building barns their way actually looks fun, though.
"Could you make people afraid of bluebirds?"
Mao Zedong made people afraid of sparrows. Does that count?
Haha -- good point! And not exactly a policy master stroke.
Never even heard of this one! Did he discover that their flight patterns were not in keeping with Marxist theory, or something?
I think Mao claimed they were eating all the planted seeds, when in reality they ate insects. No sparrows, no pest control, and the results were disastrous famine.
The Marxist/Leninist-engineered famines of the USSR and Red China are a pretty good example of what happens when hard sciences like agriculture and biology are rendered 100% subordinate to soft sciences like economics. And to pseudo-scientific nostrums like historical materialism.
Exactly, and thanks to those soft sciences’ replication crisis and obvious political bias, now regular folks are losing faith in science in general. :(
It is a truth universally acknowledged (or should be) that creators of fiction are terrible at figuring out whether a particular policy would be a good idea or not because they're so adept at creating worlds and playing God in them that they forget that in this world they don't get to write the characters.
In all seriousness, is it actually possible to just convert to Anabaptism and join an Amish community? I'd always had the impression the Amish were quite insular and cautious with outsiders. Maybe if there were an Amish recruitment drive they'd get more takers?
Wikipedia claims that "Only a few hundred outsiders, so-called seekers, have ever joined the Old Order Amish. Since 1950, only some 75 non-Anabaptist people have joined and remained lifelong members of the Amish."
I googled this specifically for this article, and: Yes! You can do it. But you really do have to go live with them -- it's not like becoming Presbyterian, you can't just show up at church one day and write your name down.
You also are going to need to learn *Pennsilfaanisch-Deitsch* - commonly called Pennsylvania Dutch - which is actually a dialect of Palatinate High German, which is different enough that learning standard German isn’t going to get you far.
Interesting fact - there were plenty of non-Amish speakers of it in the US until WWI, when anyone speaking anything vaguely German was suspected as a spy. That part of my family came to PA in the 1720s, and continued to speak it until the war - almost 200 years in America.
You wouldn't like it. So many of them are assholes.
Signed, someone who was (technically still is) a member of a Mennonite church, no not that kind, but Mennonites always have distant cousins who are Amish.
I don’t know Jeff, this veers kinda close to the “Yet you participate in society!” meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-somewhat.
Leaving aside the nut-picking of that particular woman - who, despite lacking a better explanation for her troubles, is still clearly trying to express some kind of fear that the congressman is trying to empathize with - I think this whole line of argumentation really misses the point. People fear that technological systems are now being widely adopted without proper safeguards and that they will seriously disrupt the things that make people’s lives meaningful. I think there’s ample evidence that the people running these companies do not, in fact, care about what they are “disrupting”, and to the extent that our political leaders fail to respond to those fears, people will find many other (perhaps less palatable) ways to express them. Just because people “participate in society” to some degree doesn’t mean they don’t feel trapped by these systems or, occasionally, have worthwhile arguments about what should change. You’ve picked on one crazy-sounding woman, but there are tons of people making actual, serious arguments and/or simply choosing other ways to live that are counter to this “modernity is inevitable” narrative (cf. the woman in Kentucky who turned down multi-millions of dollars to not convert her family’s farmland into a data center).
And yet all of us collectively let the poor knocker uppers lose their jobs collectively. We could have stopped it. We don’t need alarm
Clocks. We could all pay someone to knock on our windows to get us up for work. But we don’t we embraced the alarm clock. We were selfish. We didn’t put the proper safeguards in place to make sure that the knocker upper was properly preserved as a career for all eternity. And now what do we have to show for it? Timeliness? No thank you.
That is not the kind of disruption I'm talking about. This isn't about preserving some particular arrangement of jobs or the economy in amber; this is about technologies that purport to interrupt the very process of thinking for ourselves, exhibiting creativity, and forming relationships with other human beings. Tech CEOs would rush us headlong into not just a technological future, but an anti-human future, and several of them have said so out loud. That is the root of these fears, in my view.
Yes. It is. Because and I cannot stress this enough “it’s real this time”. Is the battle cry of every fear of new technology disrupting things.
We even made a very bad parable about it in the oddly celebrated story of John Henry beating a machine in driving railroad spikes. And dying to do it. And somehow that’s noble.
The thing is. Creativity is highly overrated. Most things we call creativity is just repackaging old stories with new names. Same with art. Sure we interact with it in interesting ways. But “creativity” has always been downstream of a species that is just very good at patterns.
Horseshoe theory proving itself true again, both the Degrowthers on the left and the trads on the right secretly want us to be Amish with the arguments they make, they just come at it from different directions.
Speaking of the 1881 Akron Stillbirths (they never had much hustle), I leave here this celebrated homage to the 1864 Wabash Mashers.
https://youtu.be/GS39vMhag-A?is=4rjRDBnVQe3Ix2ji
Name inspired by the "Chicago Orphans", BTW -- the sometimes-used 19th century nickname for the team that's now the Cubs.
I read that Times column. If crap that bad can get a column in the Times, Maurer is a genius by comparison. My already low opinion of The Times is now even lower.
That Times article refers to a “$40 trillion deficit,” which is a common mistake, but one that shouldn’t be in the Times.
Government’s repudiating their debts is not a rare thing - more recently:
-Philip II of Spain
-Multiply Holy Roman Empires
-Nazi Germany (pre war).
Including just deciding to pay debts - Argentina being in default more than not for the last 100 years.
Note that none of these places are picture of prudent policy.
“Could you make people afraid of bluebirds?”
Me, a Jew waiting for the wheel to turn once more: “It could be worse”
That’s a round about way of saying “public choice theory was and always is right. People say things and do things. Ignore the saying. Watch the doing”.
I mean you stated the problem up front:
> But instead of doing that, once-and-possibly-future-congressman Tom Perriello nodded like a bobblehead doll on a cabbie’s dashboard and then produced this video, which — of course — required God-knows-how-many data centers.
It’s more profitable to pander to the masses and sell fear and anger than it is to work for progress. People respond to incentives. Where’s the mob to cancel Tom Perriello for being a moron?
I hope nobody tells that dumb old bitch that she has a form of electricity in her body right now and that she wouldn't be able to think or move her body if not for it. Who knows what she might do to herself.
We don't have to retard society back to Amish levels. All we need is for people to know how to perform simple tasks if the grid goes down. Can a person cook without electricity, or get from point A to point B by looking at a map instead of using a GPS? I'm not confident that most people under the age of 30 are aware that you can manually put water into a toilet tank using a bucket so that you can flush it.
If any of you know the environmentalist Derrick Jensen, you probably know of the concept he speaks of that I will paraphrase: Consumers don't defend the source of their resources, they defend the system that delivers the end product to them. Back to the under 30 idiot: he isn't bothered by the fact he can't cook nor that he is too lazy to leave his house BUT HE WILL FREAK THE FUCK OUT if something prevents DoorDash from overcharging him to deliver a panini.
"I'm not confident that most people under the age of 30 are aware that you can manually put water into a toilet tank using a bucket so that you can flush it."
Under-30 here. Isn't that what you do when the do-hickey don't do?
(Sorry, not sure what to call the flushing/pumping mechanism in a toilet.)
The flushing mechanism is actually called a floogle-poozle.
It's actually the doo-doo-hickey.
Knowing basic math is something, at least.
Nice handle.
A ringing endorsement of becoming Amish would be the fact that America began to rot from within when the highlight of the 20th century was a Microwave in every household!
It’s been all downhill since then. It’s a fact and undeniable. Viva La Amish!
I take your point, but you also sound a bit like this guy: https://youtu.be/sOt-G2LVgfI?is=A_nDJk55IxM2_Uhz
Ned Beatty’s character isn’t wrong, and yet we sense something doesn’t quite fit in his eschatology: Us.
I almost never agree with Brian Beutler, but his post today is correct: People just want to feel like they’ve been heard: https://www.offmessage.net/p/people-power-data-centers-affordability-donald-trump-david-crowley-tom-tiffany-amazon-meta-openai-artificial-intelligence-ai
Now, as my other comment implies, “being heard” can quickly lead to “finding a scapegoat” and then “punishing/exterminating that scapegoat”, and allowing Israel to be a catch-all boogeyman is a huge red flag (which the DSA thinks looks totally rad, man!)
But if people want to get their ya-yas out by fighting a data center that will just get built somewhere else…OK? Although even there it’s a small jump to real online censorship, which left-wingers still seem to want.
One last point: Both Data Centers and Israel are downstream of narratives pushed by a fairly small number of people. That’s not unusual, and even someone like myself who believes the populace need to be heard, needs to have a say, has to come to grips with the idea that Strauss was right, and even democracies are run by elites who’s ideas filter down to the hoi polloi, whether those elites claim to speak for them or not.
As you're in roughly the same age category as me, I assume you recall the glory days of people protesting against phone masts being built in their town, while complaining about the crappy reception their phone got.