domain:ashallowalcove.substack.com
thejdizzler
3d ago
Yes, I think this began with the Industrial Revolution and the decline of Artisans as a social class.
thejdizzler
3d ago
Oh I see I misunderstood what you were saying there originally. That is a good point. I would say that the reason that people don't choose that path probably only has a little to do with alienation. Despite the discomfort with alienation, I think the modern people do enjoy distinct material advantages (that they would not have as a subsistence farmer) that make them not want to give up that lifestyle, at least voluntarily. There are however a lot of examples in the 19th century, mainly in Chile and Argentina, of kidnappings of white settlers by native Americans where the kidnapee preferred to stay with the subsistence tribe rather than return to industrial abundance.
My view on why specialization causes alienation is because specialization tends to disconnect you from the product of your labor. A craftsman is going to feel much less alienated than an assembly line worker, even though the later is far more productive, because he gets to see the finished product and feel responsible for it. The same I think is true in knowledge work. A research scientist 50 years ago could do experiments and publish largely independently. But now, at least in my field, papers routinely have over twenty authors: the work no longer really feels like it's yours.
There's gotta be some spiritual way around this phenomena though. One counter example I can bring to mind from the Middle Ages are the stonemasons who worked on cathedrals. They didn't get to see the finished product of their labor, as cathedrals routinely took hundreds of years to build. Nor did they really get to feel responsible for the work that they were doing: there were hundreds if not thousands of people working on these buildings. Yet from what I've read, most of them did not feel very alienated from the work that they were doing. For the glory of God was a very powerful motivator.
aqouta
3d ago
Do you imagine there is some kind of "diplomacy" slider in the Knesset that the Israelis just refuse to toggle? Who are they doing diplomacy with? Iran? Hamas? If you think this is their best plan surely you have developed it past one word.
Your 'solution' is the fastest and surest route to disaster for Israel by torpedoing the source of Israeli strength, American support.
Israel won wars before America became involved in the region buying arms from places like Czechslovakia although they have a sophisticated home grown arms industry now. Maybe they could keep the Iron dome going without US support, maybe they couldn't and then they'd suffer more casualties. Despite what you seem to think those casualties would incentivize them to be more aggressive not less due to the asymmetries involved.
TowardsPanna
3d ago
I suspect that "being alone, and still getting shit done" is a skill that the kids are no longer 'taught' or expected to master or, as it is difficult and scary, forced into.
Nowadays the average person has non-stop access to superficial but pervasive socialization and distraction. They don't have to remain bored anymore. Part of the brain will respond to the stimuli as a welcome gift rather than delay gratification; other parts will rot from non-use.
There may also be a lack of societal purpose that plays a part. What are we working towards? There is no over-arching meaning.
TowardsPanna
3d ago
Wasn't severe alienation and mental issues a common theme during the industrial revolution; when everyone started working in dangerous factories, in smog filled urban areas? I don't have specific sources to pull up right now, but I vaguely remember this being taught in school.
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
3d ago
It's not just grandstanding, the administration has done remarkable things like detaining and attempting to deport students who committed no crimes for simply criticizing Israel. They have crushed the anti-Israel college protests, the eternally divided US Congress somehow always comes together to give more handouts to Jews and money/weapons to Israel. The contrast between government treatment of Jews and everyone also is so stark it's undeniable at this point.
Columbia's settlement with the government includes tens of millions of dollars of payments to undisclosed Jews at Columbia for having to bear the burden of people protesting a foreign government they are loyal to.
They just did so a few days ago for that case with the viral footage of some black people attacking that white couple in Cincinnati.
Pam Bondi ordered an investigation of this crime- note that it's an actual crime and not Jews just being offended for being criticized for wearing the T-shirt of a criminal organization. She also handed the investigation to appropriate authorities, compare that all the civil rights departments in the DOJ that are getting involved in the case of this girl who has been suspended/trespassed from campus and will almost certainly get expelled.
ControlsFreak
3d ago
alienation seems to be a distinctly modern phenomena that comes with specialization
How so? Does it still satisfy the following:
If someone has the subjective experience of feeling alienated from any work other than being a subsistence farmer, living off the land and only their own toil and sweat, they can choose to do so. Most people don't. They feel some stronger alienation that is repelling them from that choice. I don't see why we should force them to experience that greater alienation.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3d ago
I think your viewpoint slots into a general pattern of enlightened centrism chilling effects denial, where people of various colours explain to you why electing this or that candidate, winning or losing one token court case, or taking one town of 10k in Ukraine or successfully defending it will not actually make a difference.
In reality, so much political power is determined not by what battles you can win, but what battles you can avoid even having to fight because your enemy is demoralised about his prospect of winning. The superior fighter will win 100 battles and lose his 101st because he is worn out, while the superior posturer will be secure in his position without having to fight a single battle.
The whole Epstein situation is a fuck-you flag planted in the town square, saying "we can even get away with this sort of thing". That this is about pederasty doesn't even matter, except insofar as there is common knowledge that a majority of people considers it the most heinous of crimes. While the flag stands, how many people who might otherwise choose to expend effort to go after a politician or dignitary for some lesser conspiracy or abuse of power will wisely choose to not even try?
Magusoflight
3d ago
I don’t think any genomes are being fully replaced. It’s just people selecting for the best traits in their future offspring, which retains vast majority of the diversity of current populations.
Relatedly, is this not already a current concern with drop in fertility rates? Perhaps certain populations outbreeding others is creating a monoculture, yet I never hear this as a concern. Curious!
thejdizzler
3d ago
The thing is I don't think people felt alienated from their work in the past. Sure people were bored or unsatisfied, but alienation seems to be a distinctly modern phenomena that comes with specialization. The tough thing which I think Fromm is highlighting is that specialization is also really good for productivity.
Magusoflight
3d ago
Genetic catastrophe of what kind?
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
3d ago
Back in 2021, Reuters published the following about the Ghislaine Maxwell trial:
Shawn, now 38, recalled traveling to Epstein's house with Carolyn for the first time with a girl named Virginia Roberts and Roberts' boyfriend after Roberts told Carolyn the pair could make money by giving "a guy a massage."
"She was excited to make money," said Shawn, who has not been accused of wrongdoing in the case.
He added that he and Roberts' boyfriend saw Roberts and Carolyn go into Epstein's home, waited for them for more than an hour, and saw them leave the home with hundred dollar bills.
{snip}
Shawn's account of that first trip largely matched up with Carolyn's version. After that first trip, Shawn said he drove Carolyn to Epstein's home every two weeks, and that Carolyn would leave with hundred dollar bills. They would use the cash to buy drugs, Shawn said, echoing his former girlfriend's statement on the stand on Tuesday.
{snip}He said he also drove two other girls he was dating at the time, Amanda and Melissa, to Epstein's home.
{snip}He said he sometimes received calls from Epstein employees seeking to schedule a massage appointment for Epstein with Carolyn{snip}
"not accused of wrongdoing," LOL, when the guy's a f***ing pimp. The Online Right could use this to dunk on the dishonest mainstream media and in defense of high-minded Western ideals like telling the truth and not putting much stock in the testimony of admitted drug-using pimps and hookers. Instead, the Online Right has gone in a very different direction, being convinced that it would severely disrupt the status quo if they could prove the Epstein murder/pedo ring conspiracy is true. ActuallyATleilaxuGhola asserts that the only reason people would doubt that Epstein was murdered is a desire to avoid a backlash against the status quo or Jews:
I really think that, if Epstein were not apparently connected to intelligence, powerful people in government, and were not Jewish, nearly zero people would argue that he killed himself. There are simply too many "coincidences." But there are people who like the political status quo (or at least despise the upstarts trying to disrupt the status quo), and there are other people who perceive the emphasis on Epstein's Jewishness/Mossad connections as dangerous to themselves (I have sympathy for this second group).
I think it's the "Epstein was murdered" people who are engaging in motivated reasoning, since the evidence for the conspiracy is very weak. Instead of another perhaps pointless argument about the evidence, let's look at the underlying assumption that "exposure" of the supposed conspiracy would "disrupt the status quo." Would that actually happen?
Suppose the Clintons, New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, Prince Andrew, Jean-Luc Brunel, a few Democratic Senators and governors and a bunch of celebrities go to prison for "pedophilia."(more on that later) Throw in some top FBI/CIA people responsible for the Epstein murder.
Here's what won't happen. They will not go to white separatists, revolutionary communists, trad Catholics, and the Nation of Islam and say "your hands are clean, now it's your turn to exercise power." Governors will appoint replacements for Senators. Minor actors will receive major actors' roles. The bank's vice president will replace the imprisoned CEO. Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg, who were too unimportant at the time to be associated with Epstein, will still be there. It might even benefit the Democrats by clearing out the gerontocrats.
You may say that, over the long term, voters will be more open to anti-establishment voices. I wouldn't be so sure. Won't take long for the establishment to come up with its equivalent of "the Soviet Union failed because it wasn't communist enough." They'll point out that the vast majority of the accused/convicted individuals are men, so we need more control of male sexuality. Most of the Epstein victims were 16 or 17. "Pedo ring" people don't talk about this fact, gambling that fear of being called a pedophile will dissuade people from bringing it up. But if you want there to be a "reckoning" over this, it's unavoidable. If it's your position that attraction to 16-17 yo girls is "pedophilia" and there's a national emergency of "pedophiles" in positions of power, why not just bar heterosexual men from positions of power? After all, most are "pedophiles" by that definition. Indeed, the establishment might use the necessity of preventing further pedo rings as justification for Patriot Act-style restrictions on civil liberties. You might not fall for that, but what about the average 55-year-old woman who gets all her news from the MSM?
Thankfully the pedo rings don't in fact exist. Hopefully Rightists will grow more comfortable in saying so. Epstein conspiracism is not only wrong on the facts, it's a pointless political dead-end.
2rafa
3d ago
That’s a third party video and there’s no evidence the MAGA hat wearer reported it to the police or turned it into a media event, nor that it was (like this) deliberate bait for the AG team’s X accounts.
When it has happened, the justice dept has 100% grandstanded about it. They just did so a few days ago for that case with the viral footage of some black people attacking that white couple in Cincinnati.
FlailingAce
3d ago
Isn't it the case that as a society we want people to be altruistic, so we teach them to feel good/get a positive reinforcement from what they perceive as good acts? The ethical question of 'purity' is interesting if you're a philosopher but doesn't seem practically useful. Even martyrs hold to their faith because they have a belief in a higher/eternal good that outweighs the temporal loss. Indeed, anyone who trades good for bad is making an error - I don't think anyone does so deliberately.
There's a general argument pattern that goes like this: "here's a problem, look how bad it is, we need to do something!" and then "this is something! I'm doing this to solve the problem, how can you oppose what I'm doing? Do you think the problem is actually good?" Finding a problem in the world does not give you a blank check to do whatever you want as long as you can write some words arguing its related to solving the problem.
So the answer here is they should do nothing until they find an action that's actually effective and doesn't have much worse side effects than the actual problem. This is same thing anyone trying to fix any other problem in the world should do.
You are giving the impression that the culture war is so important to you that it's worth burning the world to make sure your side wins. There are other things in the world that are important besides the culture war and once you start destroying those other things as part of some sloppily-targeted crusade, it's a pretty reasonable conclusion to say that you shouldn't have power.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
3d ago
I'm not convinced. Humanity has a long and successful history of breeding for strict usefulness - which often ends up being the same as fitness.
We also have a history of breeding fragility. Dogs are the usual example. As far as I know, wolves (or sometimes hybrids) remain more fit anywhere with their range, and a lot of dogs are useless (e.g. toy breeds) or damaged (e.g. overly-large German Shepherds with hip dysplasia). Ornamental plants, too. Sometimes they seed and "go wild", and typically later generations lose their showiness very quickly.
ControlsFreak
3d ago
However, just paying people more doesn’t change the fact that you are paying them for their labor, meaning they are making themselves into a commodity, a thing, which cannot have anything but bad knock-on effects on the psyche.
It's not the case that capitalism is "just paying people more". There's no real mechanism to accomplish that. One cannot simply come up with a deus ex machina to keep everything else the same, but just increase how much you pay people.
Instead, what "paying people more" means is that people increase in productivity, usually via specialization and trade. The trade part is then integral to the means by which people get "paid more". The only real way we know of to increase productivity is specialization and improvement of ideas.
One then must consider the separate question of alienation. In a world of specialization and increasing of ideas, there are many opportunities, some of which are highly specialized, and some of which are the production of ideas. There are now strictly more types of things one can choose to do. I find that alienation seems to be a subjective attitude toward the things that one does. One person may feel alienated from the work of a research scientist; another may feel alienated from the work of a farmer. A thousand years ago, if you were someone who had the subjective experience of feeling alienated from the work of being a farmer, tough luck. Now, you have options. If someone has the subjective experience of feeling alienated from any work other than being a subsistence farmer, living off the land and only their own toil and sweat, they can choose to do so. Most people don't. They feel some stronger alienation that is repelling them from that choice. I don't see why we should force them to experience that greater alienation.
The more general spiritual malaise many feel probably does arise from the abandonment of religion and even half-hearted metaphysics/metaethics. That's pretty orthogonal to questions about wealth, productivity, and what people do for work.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3d ago
No, this really wasn't much better than posting a LMGTFY. Don't do this.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
3d ago
I suppose if you place zero or negative value on the lives saved by PEPFAR, then yeah, obviously. End it yesterday.
How much of the lives of the Americans paying are you willing to sacrifice to allow Africans to have happy fun times without consequences?
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
3d ago
Even refrigerants that completely satisfy our modem sensibilities (low global warming potential, zero ozone depletion potential) work as well as they always did. There's no magic sauce in those old fluorocarbons.
Part of the magic sauce is that they work at lower pressures. Other magic things include that they don't form HF if there's any water in the system, they're compatible with less expensive non-hygroscopic (remember that HF?) oils, they're single component so there's no need to replace all the refrigerant if there's a leak, and the very fact that the environmentalists hate them most makes them cool better. OK, maybe the last one is a myth.
Hell, even propane and CO2 are basically ideal refrigerants (but require a complete redesign of the cooling circuit, with much beefier parts to allow for much higher pressures).
Propane runs fine in a system designed for R-12. The issue with it is flammability.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
3d ago
Slavery was universal in the ancient world, and in some form (state slavery, chattel slavery, serfdom/peonage) right up until shortly after the Industrial Revolution. If non-slaveowning societies really were so much better than slaveowning ones, you'd think some great emancipator would have come along and started wrecking all those slave societies, but they didn't. So slavery's economic inferiority is not inherent in the human condition but a product of modernity. Probably before you have machines, treating people as machines pays off.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
3d ago
As a matter of basic logic and follow through, I get a little peeved that if one agrees with the stance that "we, via the coercive power of the state, need to do something" then by god one should make sure it actually is effective. Frequently, this evaluation step is skipped.
Or the evaluation is done and it says the thing was effective. Regardless of whether it was. Because the institutions that do the evaulation are captured by the proponents of the proposal.
GoofyGoose
3d ago
How is monetary policy an accounting identity?
Crowstep
3d ago
When the hot woman engineer turns 40 or gets chubby, she will be nothing - literally will be able to say a thing in a meeting and have nobody hear it at all, until Bob repeats it and people listen with interest
I realise I'm replying quite late (got here for the Quality Contributions thread) but I don't think this is the case. There are plenty of studies that show that gendered opionions (both positive and negative) neutralise with age. Older women are treated like men. Not worse than men, the same as men.
Shakeri and North found that, in general, women were viewed more positively than men, and younger and middle-aged adults were viewed more positively than older adults. However, when looking specifically at intersections of age and gender, the results revealed a more nuanced picture. Younger and middle-aged women were both rated more favorably than their male counterparts. But when it came to older adults, perceptions of women and men were virtually identical, suggesting that gender differences in attitudes tend to level out in later life. This pattern provides empirical support for what the authors call the “gender convergence effect,” where distinctions in attitudes based on gender diminish with age.
TLDR: Women are wonderful, until they get old, at which point they lose the benefits of their femininity and get treated like men. At no point are they treated worse than men.
Is it usual for the Attorney General to personally get involved in requesting an investigation into a late night downtown brawl? Widely retweeted case involving perceived opponents of the current government, AG says she’s on it.
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