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The Amish make an interesting testbed for nature-nurture studies, since the plain people so radically social engineer their environments to equalize them. The Amish are like 18th Century SJWs who, rather than just complain like 21st Century ones, actually built a sustainable culture that minimizes inequality. When progressives say things like, “All we have to do is create a culture that minimizes inequality,” well, the Amish more or less did that. (The Amish are like the Mormons, who do an impressive job of reproducing 1950s American mass middle class prosperity, on steroids and CRISPR.)

One of the late anthropologist Henry Harpending’s later theories (with Greg Cochran) before his recent death was that the Amish over their 10 generations in America have been evolving toward being more naturally Amish-acting. (The Amish have little in the way of gene flow in from the outside because they don’t pursue converts, and they let their teens who find the plain lifestyle personally intolerable leave.)

A major problem facing medical studies, whether of genes or diets or whatever, is self-selection messing with our understanding of the arrow of causality. For example, if people who have a certain genetic mutation live ten years longer, is it the gene variant, or is it because the gene encourages them to choose for themselves a certain lifestyle? Or because a certain lifestyle is statistically correlated with a certain gene for coincidental reasons?

But studies of gene variants among Amish populations suffer less severely from those problems of deducing causation from statistical correlation. The Amish don’t allow much in the way of self-selection of one’s lifestyle, however, so nature-nurture conundrums are slightly less complicated in the case of studies of the Amish.

This is another version of the general conundrum in nature-nurture related studies that as the environment becomes more equal, genes become more important. The heritability of height, for example, used to be only moderate due to poor environments, such as malnutrition, keeping individuals from reaching their genetic potential for height. But, since most forms of height-reducing inequality have been greatly diminished, height is now much more heritable (a.k.a., genetically determined) than only a few generations ago.

Amish carriers of the mutation live on average to age 85, about 10 years longer than their peers. Among the Amish who did not have the mutation, the rate of Type 2 diabetes was 7 percent. But for carriers of the mutation, the rate was zero, despite leading the same lifestyle and consuming similar diets. Tests showed that carriers of the mutation had 28 percent lower levels of insulin, a hormone whose chronic elevation can lead to Type 2 diabetes.

The article suggests the sample size was only 177, so I’m not sure how trustworthy these results are.

… Amish men and women who inherit two copies of the PAI mutation, one from each parent, for example, produce no PAI-1 at all and develop a bleeding disorder similar to hemophilia. So-called carriers who inherit just one copy of the mutation, however, produce less PAI-1 than the average person but still have enough of it to avoid any obvious clotting disorders or other downsides.

So, this mutation is like the sickle cell mutation that evolved in Africa as a desperate stopgap against falciparum malaria: inheriting one copy of the mutant gene gives you a better chance of surviving the most dangerous form of malaria, but two copies kills you young (without modern medical intervention).

The researchers of this Amish mutation are hoping to come up with a pill you could take that would mimic in effect the one allele version.

This appears to be related to the tendency of modern civilized humans to have blood that clots too easily for our easy lifestyles. Our ancestors evolved hunting large, dangerous beasts and then wielding dangerous farm tools. They presumably got wounded all the time, and therefore they needed blood that clotted fast. But we don’t need quite as much clotting ability anymore. (Of course, we’d need some or we’d be hemophiliacs, which is not good.)

Was it an accident that Trump had to override autocorrect to come up with the one distinctively Jewish spelling? Freud would say it was at least subconsciously antisemitic. I’m inclined to agree. https://t.co/hMhUr24EiT

To give it validations, I used Frankinstein, Franlenstein, Frankensteen, Frankenstien, and Frankenstein .

Oops.

The autocorrect flagged every spelling except Frankenstein. So, the autocorrect must be subconsciously antisemitic. But, at least the autocorrect doesn't discriminate. It flagged "autocorrect".

"Franken" is flagged as well. So, the autocorrect is well on the way to being politically correct.

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(I was going to use a more traditional cliché, but was unsure if the Amish smoke. Seems they’re unsure as well: Amish-born scholar John Hostetler notes that Amish are more likely to smoke cigars or pipes, seeing cigarettes as more “worldly” (Amish Society, p. 165).)

“the general conundrum in nature-nurture related studies” “But, since most forms of height-reducing inequality have been greatly diminished, height is now much more heritable (a.k.a., genetically determined) than only a few generations ago.”

If the Left has its way and creates an egalitarian society the nature-nurture dispute will be moot and paradoxically all will be about nature because the only remaining differences will be genetic. Subsequently traits like intelligence will have near 100% heritability.

I wonder at what number Amish population growth at current pace will become unsustainable. Probably somewhere between 1 and 5 million. Maybe it could be calculated from potentially available to them land that fits their needs? And when they hit their high number what then? 3 children policy? Emigration? Reformation?

Perhaps certain Amish groups would adapt by pursuing farming methods and/or lifestyle that requires less land. Perhaps if this is continually refined, you will eventually see the rise of the urban Amish, or would they no longer be consider Amish at this point?

Of all the groups making demographic inroads in the US (Muslims, Mexicans, Mormons) the only one I think are unstoppable are the Amish. I'm not expert, but my understanding is that they view agricultural work as being the highest form of work, but if that isn't available they are OK with manufacturing or construction work. (finance, massage therapy, blogging? Not OK.) While these jobs have declined there are still plenty of those jobs around, and there always will be, and if you have to choose between Mexicans or Amish for your framing crew who ya gonna pick?

I don't even think they'll have to do that, though, because of their style of farming--they could conceivably take over the whole agricultural sector in North America. Their style of farming is incredibly inefficient from a labor perspective--the guy in Illinois who grows 1000 acres of corn/soy obviously produces much more per unit of labor. However it is very capital efficient--Amish guy doesn't need a $100,000 combine with GPS and air conditioned cab, diesel fuel, GMO seeds, roundup, etc. He needs a horse and some basic, basic equipment, and he can easily supply pretty much all of his own capital; the only exception is land, but since these are relatively small operations they don't need much land per family and they tend to use it quite efficiently ($ output per unit land compares favorably with modern commercial operations.)

Because of the religious angle, the relative labor inefficiency doesn't matter--Amish guy doesn't care that he's making less than minimum wage for backbreaking labor because he views it as a religious calling. He's not going to be driven out of the field by low wages like you see in most labor markets. So commercial farmer's labor advantage doesn't mean much in the real world--furthermore commercial farmer's 1.9 kids might run off to the big city if they can make a few more bucks but Amish guy's kids won't. Or rather a few might, but since he has 7 one of the kids steps up. And as mentioned above he doesn't really need outside capital. So slowly, inexorably, things flip Amish.

What's gonna stop them? Oil goes to $300/barrel? Commercial farming is dead, Amish are fine. Global warming? Central Valley agriculture is dead, Amish tend to stick to cooler areas, Amish are fine. Leaders make bad decisions? They don't have central leadership that can go full retard as has happened in the US 1968-present. So a few sects will shrivel and the rest will be fine.

200 years from now I think we'll be marveling about how 90% of the agricultural caste is descended from two Amish families in the mid 19th century.

Anyway, the lesson is: control your own stuff (no debts, no technologies you can't maintain yourself), control yourself (no vanities), control your women, and you'll take over the world, albeit slowly.

Hmmm… maybe the trick is to get an ethno-state by means of theo-state.

Except the problem of trying to emulate the Amish is that many of the protections and exemptions they have are essentiallly "grandfathered" in. As commenter "Mercy Vetsel" said in reply to the second part of Scott Alexander's review of David Friedman's Legal Systems Very Different From Ours:

” it’s important to keep on remembering the degree to which you can still pretty much do whatever you want. [cites Amish]”

Yes, anyone could start a modern alternative system equivalent of the Amish. Just plan out your system, collect your followers and elect a bishop. Then you’ll need to head out to the barn, grab the phone and make yourself comfortable — you’ve got some calls to make:

1. Call the SSA. Inform them that you’ll be opting out of Social Security including the 13% payroll taxes as well as the benefits. Ask them to inform the IRS that you won’t be getting Social Security numbers.
2. Call HHS. Inform them that you’ll be opting out of Medicare taxes and benefits. Let them know that you’ll also be declining all aspects of the Obamacare mandate.
3. Call the USDA and FDA. Explain to them that you won’t be following their mandates, that you’ll be selling raw milk, butter and other products in your community as you’ve always done.
4. Call the EPA. Inform that their runoff regulations and waterway won’t be applicable to your farms but that you will be workers will seem quaint and organic to city-dwelling environmental activists.
5. Call the Federal and State Dept of Education and your local school district. Tell them that you will won’t be using state-certified teachers, that you’ll completely ignore state and federal curriculum and testing mandates. Also they’ll only go to school till the age of 13.
6. Call the Bureau of Labor and tell them that you aren’t going to follow child labor laws.
7. Call the Federal Courts and explain that you won’t be following the ADA and some provisions the 1964 Civil Rights act and expect to exempted from lawsuits.
8. Call the state board of insurers and exempt yourself from their life, health and casualty insurance regulations. You’re approach will be different.
9. Call the local planning committee and exempt yourself from zoning and land use ordinances.
10. Call the SEC and Federal Reserve to let them know that you’ll be dealing largely in cash and bank alternatives while ignoring their regulations.

Of course, you’ll have to modify this for your own group preferences that may not be looked upon as favorably as the deviations the Amish make from modern norms.

Also, plan on being very persuasive since you won’t have a 500 year tradition including over 300 years in Pennsylvania, the sympathy of millions of Mennonites, Brethren, ex-Amish and half the people in PA who have Anabaptists roots and 70+ year tradition of being exempted from the modern fascist/socialist programs starting with the New Deal.

The simple reality that there is NO room in the modern centrally regulated system for a group like the Amish or Orthodox Jews without very significant grandfathered exemptions for non-voluntary rules.

I wonder at what number Amish population growth at current pace will become unsustainable. Probably somewhere between 1 and 5 million. Maybe it could be calculated from potentially available to them land that fits their needs? And when they hit their high number what then? 3 children policy? Emigration? Reformation?

Two days after visiting the Amish heartland in Ohio, I saw an Amish family on the Colorado-Utah border, presumably scouting for affordable farmland on the upper Colorado River.

Steve the Amish, numerous south of Buffalo along the state sponsored Amish Trail have made great inroads along Lake Ontario where there were many abandoned orchards. The Amish around here are not just farmers but have furniture factories and "travel to site" construction crews.

I think you are right, this guide doesn't list any Amish settlements in Arizona or Utah. I don't know if weather is a factor for them, but they seem to be sticking to areas that won't have oppressively hot summers.

The Amish make an interesting testbed for nature-nurture studies, since the plain people so radically social engineer their environments to equalize them. The Amish are like 18th Century SJWs who, rather than just complain like 21st Century ones, actually built a sustainable culture that minimizes inequality. When progressives say things like, “All we have to do is create a culture that minimizes inequality,” well, the Amish more or less did that.

You know who else did that?

America from around 1930 through 1980.

Unions, high taxes, government stimulus spending, semi-socialization of the economy, wage & price controls, GI bill of rights, building public infrastructure.

There was a lot of “big government” and “socialism” back then. So some of the posters here might not have liked it.

The Amish are like 18th Century SJWs who, rather than just complain like 21st Century ones

I wonder if anyone here ever complained about the government.

I also wonder how many posters/bloggers here have gone into the wilderness to build a rural, sustainable community for white nationalists.

I also wonder how many posters/bloggers here have gone into the wilderness to build a rural, sustainable community for white nationalists.

Do you mean like the one you built? Oh, and did you share the longitude and latitude of your utopian paradise?

I want to live free, and you want to be a slavemaster. It has not occurred to you that no one will elect you as the great overlord, or even a petty overlord; you will be a slave. In fact, you already are one.

Unions, high taxes, government stimulus spending, semi-socialization of the economy, wage & price controls, GI bill of rights, building public infrastructure.

If I remember correctly (I was young at the time), the unions loved price controls but hated wage controls. So it's weird to see you praise them.

There was a lot of “big government” and “socialism” back then.

It's fun to read about the Philadelphia transit strike of 1944. After a "vote for Negroes to get your jobs" was successful, the remnant whites in the clerical department walked out. But this embarrassed the President, what with his overseas adventures dependent on docile labor at home, so he had the leaders arrested, and threatened to use the draft to fill the positions.

You want to go back to that?

You might have loved the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but your counterparts a few degrees of latitude to the south did not. And the simultaneous immigration act-- WTF?

The prosperity which you celebrate owes at least as much to the Republicans slamming the immigration door in the early 1920s as to anything the Democrats did later. Indeed, FDR's single smartest decision (for the country, not the party) was to leave them in place, untouched.

Yeah, but the 1950's being equal is a myth. In the 1950's they allowed more flop houses. So, many people were renters with about 300 to 500 square apartments. Most 1950's tract houses were about 700 to 800 square feet. Also, the south was still very rural. Overall poverty rate was higher in 1959 than today. The low point was in the early 1970's, Both the left and right have a romantic view of the 1950's. Also, many apartments in the 1950's had a hall bathroom that everyone shared. You might as well live in a motel in Anaheim at least the room is bigger than apartments in the 1950's. Plus you have your own bathroom.

I wonder at what number Amish population growth at current pace will become unsustainable. Probably somewhere between 1 and 5 million. Maybe it could be calculated from potentially available to them land that fits their needs? And when they hit their high number what then? 3 children policy? Emigration? Reformation?

They have been expanded west for several years now. As long as they can afford to buy farmland, I think they can keep expanded and I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

The Amish make an interesting testbed for nature-nurture studies, since the plain people so radically social engineer their environments to equalize them. The Amish are like 18th Century SJWs who, rather than just complain like 21st Century ones, actually built a sustainable culture that minimizes inequality. When progressives say things like, “All we have to do is create a culture that minimizes inequality,” well, the Amish more or less did that.

You know who else did that?

America from around 1930 through 1980.

Unions, high taxes, government stimulus spending, semi-socialization of the economy, wage & price controls, GI bill of rights, building public infrastructure.

There was a lot of "big government" and "socialism" back then. So some of the posters here might not have liked it.

The Amish are like 18th Century SJWs who, rather than just complain like 21st Century ones

I wonder if anyone here ever complained about the government.

I also wonder how many posters/bloggers here have gone into the wilderness to build a rural, sustainable community for white nationalists.

The average Amish person does more manual labor in a day than the average SJW will do in a decade.

The average Amish person does more manual labor in a day than the average SJW will do in a decade.

That's something a lot of "preppers" and "survivalists" can't understand.

Living off the land in any form-besides modern petro-chemo agriculture, to an extent-is very hard constant physical work. If you didn't grow up doing that, your body likely won't take it for very long, even if you get really buff in the gym and wolf down lots of vitamins and run and eat this or that diet.

The joints, muscles and sinews need to be subjected to heavy manual labor consistently during the formative years of adolescence, or you will never be capable of working like these people. Not over any great length of time. The office worker who grew up as a nerd or grind can get in better shape, and they can make a show out of the back-to-the-land thing, but if they start doing real farm work, or serious construction work, things are going to start falling apart. They will have back problems, torn ligaments, their knees will fail, etc and they will wind up in a wheelchair or undergoing various surgeries from which healing will be slow. In a real survival situation, they will become a group liability, starve, or be offloaded, euthanized, or eaten depending on how bad things get and how ruthless the group is.

The Amish are much better physically prepared for hardship, but because they eschew all education and avoid much modern technology, they have always been dependent on the "English" world for a lot of things and absent that world functioning they will be in for some grief. They will have to learn a lot of new things, like field medicine, they have avoided so far.

A friend does a lot of work with the Amish in Pennsylvania. He describes watching the children walk home from school and immediately separate into working parties. Girls making dinner (pulling feathers out of pheasants, etc.), boys building Adirondack chairs. My friend is very handy but is stunned at how quickly and expertly the boys, some of them pretty young, can put together the chairs and how nice they turn out. And watching them put together pole barns in my neck of the woods is impressive.

As an aside, one Amish guy I worked called me from a community cell phone that they kept in a mailbox. They had some justification for it. Interesting people.

I wonder at what number Amish population growth at current pace will become unsustainable. Probably somewhere between 1 and 5 million. Maybe it could be calculated from potentially available to them land that fits their needs? And when they hit their high number what then? 3 children policy? Emigration? Reformation?

Perhaps certain Amish groups would adapt by pursuing farming methods and/or lifestyle that requires less land. Perhaps if this is continually refined, you will eventually see the rise of the urban Amish, or would they no longer be consider Amish at this point?

And one pillar of that is to discourage formal education past the eight grade. Everybody learns the ABCs but there’s no further differentiation, and the bookish life is not rewarded.

Now ultra-orthodox Jews may dress like the Amish, live apart like the Amish, and again like the Amish insulate themselves from mainstream culture. But in the education dimension they couldn’t be further apart; the Jews have elevated lifelong study of the Law to the status of a holy obligation. (Fortunately) what they study doesn’t confer much in the way of economically valuable skills (like knowing how to build a bridge or fix plumbing) so it doesn’t tend to generate much inequality (by itself). Prowess at Torah and Talmud does get rewarded on the marriage market though.

I take your point, but unless I am utterly confused, engagement with the actual Bible stands at the core of Amish life. I think they are certainly not "studying" it as many ultra-orthodox Jews do, and I do think that is a crucial distinction. But I also think that engagement with the book itself is at the core of life for the Amish. I mean this is in a strong sense - they are not simply very "religious", but they are engaged with the Bible itself.

I think I am right, but maybe I'm confused. If I am right, then there is a crucial similarity, and a crucial difference, with ultra-orthodox Jews.

The Amish make an interesting testbed for nature-nurture studies, since the plain people so radically social engineer their environments to equalize them. The Amish are like 18th Century SJWs who, rather than just complain like 21st Century ones, actually built a sustainable culture that minimizes inequality. When progressives say things like, “All we have to do is create a culture that minimizes inequality,” well, the Amish more or less did that.

You know who else did that?

America from around 1930 through 1980.

Unions, high taxes, government stimulus spending, semi-socialization of the economy, wage & price controls, GI bill of rights, building public infrastructure.

There was a lot of "big government" and "socialism" back then. So some of the posters here might not have liked it.

The Amish are like 18th Century SJWs who, rather than just complain like 21st Century ones

I wonder if anyone here ever complained about the government.

I also wonder how many posters/bloggers here have gone into the wilderness to build a rural, sustainable community for white nationalists.

What could be more antithetical to sustainable community than mass third world immigration?

Forming a rural community isn't really an answer, at least not a society-wide level. Action needs to happen on a national and on a political level. We have to "complain" more. A lot more.

If SJWs want to "complain" about inequality, that's not a bad thing. They just need to be louder and more aggressive in their agitiation. Retreating into the wilderness, like the Amish, isn't a realistic answer to society's problems.

I like the Amish, but they're not a realistic model for us or for SJWs.

The researchers of this Amish mutation are hoping to come up with a pill you could take that would mimic in effect the one allele version.

This appears to be related to the tendency of modern civilized humans to have blood that clots too easily for our easy lifestyles.

Pills that cure type 2 diabetes already exist. They are called vitamins and minerals.

Type 2 diabetes can be cured in one to two weeks. Drink large amounts of alkalizing fluids on an empty stomach – green juices, a lemon blended in water, or a tablespoon of baking soda mixed in water. The supplements that should be taken with food are the ones that promote blood flow and reduce clotting: magnesium, calcium, vitamin B complex, vitamin C, vitamin D, and vitamin E. In addition, with the right amount of these supplements, neuropathy, pain and numbness of the extremities, can be cured in as little as three days. Gone. Drink protein powder to heal neuropathy, sores, and uclers.

In the documentary Simply Raw , Dr. Gabriel Cousens reverses diabetes with a raw vegan diet. Sergei Boutenko eliminated juvenille diabetes with a raw vegan diet. For exercise, walk up stairs every day until tired. This may take less than a minute in the beginning.

A hundred years ago in the American South, tens of thousands died from pellagra , an illness caused by niacin deficiency. The sufferers mainly lived on diets of corn bread, grits, salt pork, and syrup. The cure was meat, milk, and eggs.

Two days after visiting the Amish heartland in Ohio, I saw an Amish family on the Colorado-Utah border, presumably scouting for affordable farmland on the upper Colorado River.

Steve the Amish, numerous south of Buffalo along the state sponsored Amish Trail have made great inroads along Lake Ontario where there were many abandoned orchards. The Amish around here are not just farmers but have furniture factories and “travel to site” construction crews.

Years ago I went to see a family member in St. Mary’s County. Drove south on old Maryland Highway 5. Came around an S-shaped bend and saw a horse drawn Amish carriage coming towards me. It was right around dusk. Carriage had its lamps lit. Young male holding the reins.

Two days after visiting the Amish heartland in Ohio, I saw an Amish family on the Colorado-Utah border, presumably scouting for affordable farmland on the upper Colorado River.

That may be what you saw, but you also may have seen some fundamentalist Mormons. Lots of people confuse the polygamists with Amish since they tend to dress very similarly.

The state and feds came down hard on them and basically destroyed their communities in Utah / Arizona. They are now buying up farmland all over Utah and Colorado trying to make a new go of it.

I think you are right, this guide doesn’t list any Amish settlements in Arizona or Utah. I don’t know if weather is a factor for them, but they seem to be sticking to areas that won’t have oppressively hot summers.

And one pillar of that is to discourage formal education past the eight grade. Everybody learns the ABCs but there's no further differentiation, and the bookish life is not rewarded.

Now ultra-orthodox Jews may dress like the Amish, live apart like the Amish, and again like the Amish insulate themselves from mainstream culture. But in the education dimension they couldn't be further apart; the Jews have elevated lifelong study of the Law to the status of a holy obligation. (Fortunately) what they study doesn't confer much in the way of economically valuable skills (like knowing how to build a bridge or fix plumbing) so it doesn't tend to generate much inequality (by itself). Prowess at Torah and Talmud does get rewarded on the marriage market though.

Anyway, just some thoughts I think are interesting.

” the bookish life is not rewarded”

I take your point, but unless I am utterly confused, engagement with the actual Bible stands at the core of Amish life. I think they are certainly not “studying” it as many ultra-orthodox Jews do, and I do think that is a crucial distinction. But I also think that engagement with the book itself is at the core of life for the Amish. I mean this is in a strong sense – they are not simply very “religious”, but they are engaged with the Bible itself.

I think I am right, but maybe I’m confused. If I am right, then there is a crucial similarity, and a crucial difference, with ultra-orthodox Jews.

A major difference between the Amish and Haredi Jews is that the Amish refuse to take a dime from the government and the Haredi are a bunch of welfare moochers and all-around scammers, both here in the US and in Israel.

...as the environment becomes more equal, genes become more important.

Put that on your star and nail it to the barn!

(I was going to use a more traditional cliché, but was unsure if the Amish smoke. Seems they're unsure as well: Amish-born scholar John Hostetler notes that Amish are more likely to smoke cigars or pipes, seeing cigarettes as more “worldly” (Amish Society, p. 165).)

I think you are right, this guide doesn't list any Amish settlements in Arizona or Utah. I don't know if weather is a factor for them, but they seem to be sticking to areas that won't have oppressively hot summers.

I take your point, but unless I am utterly confused, engagement with the actual Bible stands at the core of Amish life. I think they are certainly not "studying" it as many ultra-orthodox Jews do, and I do think that is a crucial distinction. But I also think that engagement with the book itself is at the core of life for the Amish. I mean this is in a strong sense - they are not simply very "religious", but they are engaged with the Bible itself.

I think I am right, but maybe I'm confused. If I am right, then there is a crucial similarity, and a crucial difference, with ultra-orthodox Jews.

17 Anonymous > engagement with the actual Bible stands at the core of Amish life

am I the only one here who has sold stuff wholesale, to the Amish?

Am I the only one here who has attended Old Order Mennonite church services?

Hmmm... maybe the trick is to get an ethno-state by means of theo-state.

Creed shapes Breed.

Hmmm… maybe the trick is to get an ethno-state by means of theo-state.

Except the problem of trying to emulate the Amish is that many of the protections and exemptions they have are essentiallly “grandfathered” in. As commenter “Mercy Vetsel” said in reply to the second part of Scott Alexander’s review of David Friedman’s Legal Systems Very Different From Ours:

” it’s important to keep on remembering the degree to which you can still pretty much do whatever you want. [cites Amish]”

Yes, anyone could start a modern alternative system equivalent of the Amish. Just plan out your system, collect your followers and elect a bishop. Then you’ll need to head out to the barn, grab the phone and make yourself comfortable — you’ve got some calls to make:

1. Call the SSA. Inform them that you’ll be opting out of Social Security including the 13% payroll taxes as well as the benefits. Ask them to inform the IRS that you won’t be getting Social Security numbers.
2. Call HHS. Inform them that you’ll be opting out of Medicare taxes and benefits. Let them know that you’ll also be declining all aspects of the Obamacare mandate.
3. Call the USDA and FDA. Explain to them that you won’t be following their mandates, that you’ll be selling raw milk, butter and other products in your community as you’ve always done.
4. Call the EPA. Inform that their runoff regulations and waterway won’t be applicable to your farms but that you will be workers will seem quaint and organic to city-dwelling environmental activists.
5. Call the Federal and State Dept of Education and your local school district. Tell them that you will won’t be using state-certified teachers, that you’ll completely ignore state and federal curriculum and testing mandates. Also they’ll only go to school till the age of 13.
6. Call the Bureau of Labor and tell them that you aren’t going to follow child labor laws.
7. Call the Federal Courts and explain that you won’t be following the ADA and some provisions the 1964 Civil Rights act and expect to exempted from lawsuits.
8. Call the state board of insurers and exempt yourself from their life, health and casualty insurance regulations. You’re approach will be different.
9. Call the local planning committee and exempt yourself from zoning and land use ordinances.
10. Call the SEC and Federal Reserve to let them know that you’ll be dealing largely in cash and bank alternatives while ignoring their regulations.

Of course, you’ll have to modify this for your own group preferences that may not be looked upon as favorably as the deviations the Amish make from modern norms.

Also, plan on being very persuasive since you won’t have a 500 year tradition including over 300 years in Pennsylvania, the sympathy of millions of Mennonites, Brethren, ex-Amish and half the people in PA who have Anabaptists roots and 70+ year tradition of being exempted from the modern fascist/socialist programs starting with the New Deal.

The simple reality that there is NO room in the modern centrally regulated system for a group like the Amish or Orthodox Jews without very significant grandfathered exemptions for non-voluntary rules.

That is a very salient point, one which I have never seemed to drive home with gentile reactionaries who fall into that "back to the land," mode of thinking. Many know I have orthodox relatives and think it is as simple as figuring out what's done and how. Few accept the answer that what's done is, by in large not legal for anyone else. Age-old anti-modernist sects have long been tolerated as special cases and everyone else who attempts to follow in their footsteps is branded as a cult and generally dispersed or destroyed.

It is a hard lesson for many conservatives or libertarians cum traditionalists to swallow, but the door will not be opened before them. The dystopian modern world that they inhabit is all that they will ever know. The time for running and finding cover in the riverbeds and oak-groves of tradition are long past. Given enough time, even these grandfathered and storied traditionalist sects will be grabbed up and made to genuflect to the new g-d of progress. Many Amish were convinced to come out and vote for Trump with good reason. The writing is on the wall. Western people can join the struggle to take back their political self-determination or they can be folded into future history books as a foot-note.

The Amish make an interesting testbed for nature-nurture studies, since the plain people so radically social engineer their environments to equalize them. The Amish are like 18th Century SJWs who, rather than just complain like 21st Century ones, actually built a sustainable culture that minimizes inequality. When progressives say things like, “All we have to do is create a culture that minimizes inequality,” well, the Amish more or less did that.

You know who else did that?

America from around 1930 through 1980.

Unions, high taxes, government stimulus spending, semi-socialization of the economy, wage & price controls, GI bill of rights, building public infrastructure.

There was a lot of "big government" and "socialism" back then. So some of the posters here might not have liked it.

The Amish are like 18th Century SJWs who, rather than just complain like 21st Century ones

I wonder if anyone here ever complained about the government.

I also wonder how many posters/bloggers here have gone into the wilderness to build a rural, sustainable community for white nationalists.

I also wonder how many posters/bloggers here have gone into the wilderness to build a rural, sustainable community for white nationalists.

Do you mean like the one you built? Oh, and did you share the longitude and latitude of your utopian paradise?

I want to live free, and you want to be a slavemaster. It has not occurred to you that no one will elect you as the great overlord, or even a petty overlord; you will be a slave. In fact, you already are one.

People in upstate NY hire them for cheap labor( they save money until they can buy their own farm). You will see them going to jobs in the worst weather ( often travelling with their black carriages in dusk conditions) with their home made clothes and occasional umbrella. I truly feel sorry for the horses, they don’t have the ramspringen option.

Hmmm… maybe the trick is to get an ethno-state by means of theo-state.

Except the problem of trying to emulate the Amish is that many of the protections and exemptions they have are essentiallly "grandfathered" in. As commenter "Mercy Vetsel" said in reply to the second part of Scott Alexander's review of David Friedman's Legal Systems Very Different From Ours:

” it’s important to keep on remembering the degree to which you can still pretty much do whatever you want. [cites Amish]”

Yes, anyone could start a modern alternative system equivalent of the Amish. Just plan out your system, collect your followers and elect a bishop. Then you’ll need to head out to the barn, grab the phone and make yourself comfortable — you’ve got some calls to make:

1. Call the SSA. Inform them that you’ll be opting out of Social Security including the 13% payroll taxes as well as the benefits. Ask them to inform the IRS that you won’t be getting Social Security numbers.
2. Call HHS. Inform them that you’ll be opting out of Medicare taxes and benefits. Let them know that you’ll also be declining all aspects of the Obamacare mandate.
3. Call the USDA and FDA. Explain to them that you won’t be following their mandates, that you’ll be selling raw milk, butter and other products in your community as you’ve always done.
4. Call the EPA. Inform that their runoff regulations and waterway won’t be applicable to your farms but that you will be workers will seem quaint and organic to city-dwelling environmental activists.
5. Call the Federal and State Dept of Education and your local school district. Tell them that you will won’t be using state-certified teachers, that you’ll completely ignore state and federal curriculum and testing mandates. Also they’ll only go to school till the age of 13.
6. Call the Bureau of Labor and tell them that you aren’t going to follow child labor laws.
7. Call the Federal Courts and explain that you won’t be following the ADA and some provisions the 1964 Civil Rights act and expect to exempted from lawsuits.
8. Call the state board of insurers and exempt yourself from their life, health and casualty insurance regulations. You’re approach will be different.
9. Call the local planning committee and exempt yourself from zoning and land use ordinances.
10. Call the SEC and Federal Reserve to let them know that you’ll be dealing largely in cash and bank alternatives while ignoring their regulations.

Of course, you’ll have to modify this for your own group preferences that may not be looked upon as favorably as the deviations the Amish make from modern norms.

Also, plan on being very persuasive since you won’t have a 500 year tradition including over 300 years in Pennsylvania, the sympathy of millions of Mennonites, Brethren, ex-Amish and half the people in PA who have Anabaptists roots and 70+ year tradition of being exempted from the modern fascist/socialist programs starting with the New Deal.

The simple reality that there is NO room in the modern centrally regulated system for a group like the Amish or Orthodox Jews without very significant grandfathered exemptions for non-voluntary rules.

That is a very salient point, one which I have never seemed to drive home with gentile reactionaries who fall into that “back to the land,” mode of thinking. Many know I have orthodox relatives and think it is as simple as figuring out what’s done and how. Few accept the answer that what’s done is, by in large not legal for anyone else. Age-old anti-modernist sects have long been tolerated as special cases and everyone else who attempts to follow in their footsteps is branded as a cult and generally dispersed or destroyed.

It is a hard lesson for many conservatives or libertarians cum traditionalists to swallow, but the door will not be opened before them. The dystopian modern world that they inhabit is all that they will ever know. The time for running and finding cover in the riverbeds and oak-groves of tradition are long past. Given enough time, even these grandfathered and storied traditionalist sects will be grabbed up and made to genuflect to the new g-d of progress. Many Amish were convinced to come out and vote for Trump with good reason. The writing is on the wall. Western people can join the struggle to take back their political self-determination or they can be folded into future history books as a foot-note.

I wonder at what number Amish population growth at current pace will become unsustainable. Probably somewhere between 1 and 5 million. Maybe it could be calculated from potentially available to them land that fits their needs? And when they hit their high number what then? 3 children policy? Emigration? Reformation?

Of all the groups making demographic inroads in the US (Muslims, Mexicans, Mormons) the only one I think are unstoppable are the Amish. I’m not expert, but my understanding is that they view agricultural work as being the highest form of work, but if that isn’t available they are OK with manufacturing or construction work. (finance, massage therapy, blogging? Not OK.) While these jobs have declined there are still plenty of those jobs around, and there always will be, and if you have to choose between Mexicans or Amish for your framing crew who ya gonna pick?

I don’t even think they’ll have to do that, though, because of their style of farming–they could conceivably take over the whole agricultural sector in North America. Their style of farming is incredibly inefficient from a labor perspective–the guy in Illinois who grows 1000 acres of corn/soy obviously produces much more per unit of labor. However it is very capital efficient–Amish guy doesn’t need a $100,000 combine with GPS and air conditioned cab, diesel fuel, GMO seeds, roundup, etc. He needs a horse and some basic, basic equipment, and he can easily supply pretty much all of his own capital; the only exception is land, but since these are relatively small operations they don’t need much land per family and they tend to use it quite efficiently ($ output per unit land compares favorably with modern commercial operations.)

Because of the religious angle, the relative labor inefficiency doesn’t matter–Amish guy doesn’t care that he’s making less than minimum wage for backbreaking labor because he views it as a religious calling. He’s not going to be driven out of the field by low wages like you see in most labor markets. So commercial farmer’s labor advantage doesn’t mean much in the real world–furthermore commercial farmer’s 1.9 kids might run off to the big city if they can make a few more bucks but Amish guy’s kids won’t. Or rather a few might, but since he has 7 one of the kids steps up. And as mentioned above he doesn’t really need outside capital. So slowly, inexorably, things flip Amish.

What’s gonna stop them? Oil goes to $300/barrel? Commercial farming is dead, Amish are fine. Global warming? Central Valley agriculture is dead, Amish tend to stick to cooler areas, Amish are fine. Leaders make bad decisions? They don’t have central leadership that can go full retard as has happened in the US 1968-present. So a few sects will shrivel and the rest will be fine.

200 years from now I think we’ll be marveling about how 90% of the agricultural caste is descended from two Amish families in the mid 19th century.

Anyway, the lesson is: control your own stuff (no debts, no technologies you can’t maintain yourself), control yourself (no vanities), control your women, and you’ll take over the world, albeit slowly.

the only one I think are unstoppable are the Amish… What’s gonna stop them?

How about overturning Wisconsin v. Yoder, which many legal scholars have argued is incompatible with modern jurisprudence and ripe to be overturned? Forcing the Amish to submit their children to the full course of Lefty public school indoctrination would likely have at least some negative effects. And plenty of people have argued that the Amish taking their kids out after 9th grade constitutes "abuse" (because it "cripples" their ability to fit in and compete in non-Amish society, "forcing" them to remain Amish). And look at what happened to the FLDS, where in at least one place "family serves" forcibly removed everyone under the age of 18 on the grounds that the entire community could essentially be presumed guilty of child abuse given their beliefs. You don't think there could be a similar campaign against the Amish.

Note also all the other "grandfathered" exemptions for the Amish that a hostile FedGov could remove. Remember the FDA/Amish "whole milk" incident? There's a whole mass of places that the ways the Amish make a living could be attacked for violation of the masses of Federal law and regulation out there if the government wanted.

In short, the Amish exist in America at the sufferance of FedGov; the moment they start looking like they pose a threat, they're toast.

Maybe what you say here, but ag overall isn't that large a segment of what the country does. Farmgate receipts aren't much more than 500 billion dollars, about one large corporation; full time farmers are getting to be less than one percent of the population.

The future is urban; unless it all burns; then it's back to the country.

Personally I'm not convinced that I can predict the future. Or I should say that I can predict the future easily but it never seems to work out quite the way I thought it would.

The idea that the Amish will come to dominate American agriculture ignores the obvious agricultural revolution bearing down on us fast. The combines of the future are not likely to be air conditioned because they are unlikely to contain humans. Surely this is obvious. Google and Uber and probably Elon Musk are all pushing hard for self driving cars. A self driving car is a tricky proposition (winding roads and traffic) whereas a tractor that travels a repetitive pattern should be easy.

When we have self driven farm machinery it's not just the Amish who will be affected - the much bigger impact will be on all Hispanic farm workers. My guess would be that in the near future there will be no people at all on great swaths of American farmland. Mexicans won't be needed to work on Americans farms in the numbers now required. They won't have a source of income so they won't have a source of funds to send back south to their impoverished families.

A self driving tractor-picker is a more sure anti-immigration technology than a "big beautiful wall".

What could be more antithetical to sustainable community than mass third world immigration?

That was sort of my point.

Forming a rural community isn’t really an answer, at least not a society-wide level. Action needs to happen on a national and on a political level. We have to “complain” more. A lot more.

If SJWs want to “complain” about inequality, that’s not a bad thing. They just need to be louder and more aggressive in their agitiation. Retreating into the wilderness, like the Amish, isn’t a realistic answer to society’s problems.

I like the Amish, but they’re not a realistic model for us or for SJWs.

The average Amish person does more manual labor in a day than the average SJW will do in a decade.

The average Amish person does more manual labor in a day than the average SJW will do in a decade.

That’s something a lot of “preppers” and “survivalists” can’t understand.

Living off the land in any form-besides modern petro-chemo agriculture, to an extent-is very hard constant physical work. If you didn’t grow up doing that, your body likely won’t take it for very long, even if you get really buff in the gym and wolf down lots of vitamins and run and eat this or that diet.

The joints, muscles and sinews need to be subjected to heavy manual labor consistently during the formative years of adolescence, or you will never be capable of working like these people. Not over any great length of time. The office worker who grew up as a nerd or grind can get in better shape, and they can make a show out of the back-to-the-land thing, but if they start doing real farm work, or serious construction work, things are going to start falling apart. They will have back problems, torn ligaments, their knees will fail, etc and they will wind up in a wheelchair or undergoing various surgeries from which healing will be slow. In a real survival situation, they will become a group liability, starve, or be offloaded, euthanized, or eaten depending on how bad things get and how ruthless the group is.

The Amish are much better physically prepared for hardship, but because they eschew all education and avoid much modern technology, they have always been dependent on the “English” world for a lot of things and absent that world functioning they will be in for some grief. They will have to learn a lot of new things, like field medicine, they have avoided so far.

Undoubtedly farm work is hard. My grandfather was a farmer, and I remember when we visited him over the summers and I had to help out on the farm, as a teenager, I'd wonder how the h*ll he could lug around bales of hay, herd cattle, work the fields, etc all day long in his 60s while I would get exhausted.

That being said, your body can and will adapt to the environment. Whole reason why weightlifting works. Of course, the Amish undoubtedly have been selecting for/maintaining selection for the physical fitness required for this work, whereas the last few generations everyone else has not. But this doesn't mean much in an evolutionary time frame. If the average American under 30 suddenly had to live off the grid as a farmer, and had the knowledge, equipment, land, etc to do so, they could adapt, given they had the time to acclimate and recondition themselves to it before starving to death.

There was a show called Living with the Amish, about diverse British teens who go to live with the Amish for a while. A reality TV show, but, nevertheless, iSteve readers might get some interesting observations from it, more than your average viewer and even than the creators.

A British show, so there are only 6 episodes, which can probably be found on youtube.

I was struck, a couple of times, by how much the Amish seemed like hippies, but without the sexual equality and free love. Unlike the hippies, their culture is sustainable.

In one episode the British teens take an amish girl to a mall (iirc) and her reaction to an advertisement featuring a sexy woman with makeup on is not much different to lefty talking points.

One of the teenage British girls, a partying type, admits to envying the Amish girls in some ways.

The black British girl says, at the end, that it taught her to be more sympathetic to conservatives.

The Amish make an interesting testbed for nature-nurture studies, since the plain people so radically social engineer their environments to equalize them. The Amish are like 18th Century SJWs who, rather than just complain like 21st Century ones, actually built a sustainable culture that minimizes inequality. When progressives say things like, “All we have to do is create a culture that minimizes inequality,” well, the Amish more or less did that.

You know who else did that?

America from around 1930 through 1980.

Unions, high taxes, government stimulus spending, semi-socialization of the economy, wage & price controls, GI bill of rights, building public infrastructure.

There was a lot of "big government" and "socialism" back then. So some of the posters here might not have liked it.

The Amish are like 18th Century SJWs who, rather than just complain like 21st Century ones

I wonder if anyone here ever complained about the government.

I also wonder how many posters/bloggers here have gone into the wilderness to build a rural, sustainable community for white nationalists.

Unions, high taxes, government stimulus spending, semi-socialization of the economy, wage & price controls, GI bill of rights, building public infrastructure.

If I remember correctly (I was young at the time), the unions loved price controls but hated wage controls. So it’s weird to see you praise them.

There was a lot of “big government” and “socialism” back then.

It’s fun to read about the Philadelphia transit strike of 1944. After a “vote for Negroes to get your jobs” was successful, the remnant whites in the clerical department walked out. But this embarrassed the President, what with his overseas adventures dependent on docile labor at home, so he had the leaders arrested, and threatened to use the draft to fill the positions.

You want to go back to that?

You might have loved the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but your counterparts a few degrees of latitude to the south did not. And the simultaneous immigration act– WTF?

The prosperity which you celebrate owes at least as much to the Republicans slamming the immigration door in the early 1920s as to anything the Democrats did later. Indeed, FDR’s single smartest decision (for the country, not the party) was to leave them in place, untouched.

The University of Chicago has been studying the Hutterites for a long time. One of their more interesting findings I ran across 20 some years ago was that the population frequency of deleterious recessives was higher than expected from the phenotype frequencies. They figured that it was due to some capacity in the females for sexual selection that avoided bad matches.

I posted this stuff with cites to Usenet back then but, of course, Google’s Usenet archives are unusable because they can’t get their *ahem* search engine to work with it.

Of all the groups making demographic inroads in the US (Muslims, Mexicans, Mormons) the only one I think are unstoppable are the Amish. I'm not expert, but my understanding is that they view agricultural work as being the highest form of work, but if that isn't available they are OK with manufacturing or construction work. (finance, massage therapy, blogging? Not OK.) While these jobs have declined there are still plenty of those jobs around, and there always will be, and if you have to choose between Mexicans or Amish for your framing crew who ya gonna pick?

I don't even think they'll have to do that, though, because of their style of farming--they could conceivably take over the whole agricultural sector in North America. Their style of farming is incredibly inefficient from a labor perspective--the guy in Illinois who grows 1000 acres of corn/soy obviously produces much more per unit of labor. However it is very capital efficient--Amish guy doesn't need a $100,000 combine with GPS and air conditioned cab, diesel fuel, GMO seeds, roundup, etc. He needs a horse and some basic, basic equipment, and he can easily supply pretty much all of his own capital; the only exception is land, but since these are relatively small operations they don't need much land per family and they tend to use it quite efficiently ($ output per unit land compares favorably with modern commercial operations.)

Because of the religious angle, the relative labor inefficiency doesn't matter--Amish guy doesn't care that he's making less than minimum wage for backbreaking labor because he views it as a religious calling. He's not going to be driven out of the field by low wages like you see in most labor markets. So commercial farmer's labor advantage doesn't mean much in the real world--furthermore commercial farmer's 1.9 kids might run off to the big city if they can make a few more bucks but Amish guy's kids won't. Or rather a few might, but since he has 7 one of the kids steps up. And as mentioned above he doesn't really need outside capital. So slowly, inexorably, things flip Amish.

What's gonna stop them? Oil goes to $300/barrel? Commercial farming is dead, Amish are fine. Global warming? Central Valley agriculture is dead, Amish tend to stick to cooler areas, Amish are fine. Leaders make bad decisions? They don't have central leadership that can go full retard as has happened in the US 1968-present. So a few sects will shrivel and the rest will be fine.

200 years from now I think we'll be marveling about how 90% of the agricultural caste is descended from two Amish families in the mid 19th century.

Anyway, the lesson is: control your own stuff (no debts, no technologies you can't maintain yourself), control yourself (no vanities), control your women, and you'll take over the world, albeit slowly.

the only one I think are unstoppable are the Amish… What’s gonna stop them?

How about overturning Wisconsin v. Yoder, which many legal scholars have argued is incompatible with modern jurisprudence and ripe to be overturned? Forcing the Amish to submit their children to the full course of Lefty public school indoctrination would likely have at least some negative effects. And plenty of people have argued that the Amish taking their kids out after 9th grade constitutes “abuse” (because it “cripples” their ability to fit in and compete in non-Amish society, “forcing” them to remain Amish). And look at what happened to the FLDS, where in at least one place “family serves” forcibly removed everyone under the age of 18 on the grounds that the entire community could essentially be presumed guilty of child abuse given their beliefs. You don’t think there could be a similar campaign against the Amish.

Note also all the other “grandfathered” exemptions for the Amish that a hostile FedGov could remove. Remember the FDA/Amish “whole milk” incident? There’s a whole mass of places that the ways the Amish make a living could be attacked for violation of the masses of Federal law and regulation out there if the government wanted.

In short, the Amish exist in America at the sufferance of FedGov; the moment they start looking like they pose a threat, they’re toast.

Forming a rural community isn't really an answer, at least not a society-wide level. Action needs to happen on a national and on a political level. We have to "complain" more. A lot more.

If SJWs want to "complain" about inequality, that's not a bad thing. They just need to be louder and more aggressive in their agitiation. Retreating into the wilderness, like the Amish, isn't a realistic answer to society's problems.

I like the Amish, but they're not a realistic model for us or for SJWs.

Action needs to happen on a national and on a political level.

But what “action” can we do on the national, political level, that can’t be countered and defeated by the vastly-more-powerful Left?

the Amish over their 10 generations in America have been evolving toward being more naturally Amish-acting.

IME that’s an effing nightmare. They work their animals to death, their children to tears then beatings for tears, and their women into early graves.

Nobody knows how rife these communities are with sexual abuse, because reports of incest, pedophilia, and rape lead to shunning or worse.

They’re also shrewd with the shekels, use more damn crop chemicals than Frito-Lay or any CAFO, and refuse to manage their livestock manure with concern for anyone downstream…or even their own families.

In fact of all the counties that drain into the Chesapeake Bay, the #1 worst for runoff pollution was for many years Lancaster County, PA–and not because of the big CAFOs or industrial farms there.

Amish farmers persist with moldboard plowing that fosters both soil and manure/pollutant runoff. Their communities have E. coli and high levels of nitrates in most of their wells (remember that in discussions of them selling unpasteurized milk). They don’t fence their animals out of riparian habitat. They track animal dung between animal and produce operations.

Finally, if you really want to look at the Amish and DNA, take a peek into their puppy mills. Between the grotesquely isolated and greedy Amish DNA and the use of dogs as a cash crop (leading to widespread genetic erosion in the animals), it’s what I’d call a nightmare.

The idea of these people becoming more firmly what they already are is ghastly.

Plus you should thank me for having drawn the line before mentioning the bestiality.

Ah, but they are a Protected Minority with special laws applying only to them and exemption from others…and good PR about what fine simple people they are. So who cares!

It seems in Ohio that there are no amount of horror stories to keep morons from purchasing puppies from the (very) unscrupulous Amish.

As well, when we first got married my wife and I would travel to Amish country for munchies, but after I paid attention to the ingredients label once I gave up. It's all a scam as Amish themed baked goods could have been cranked out by the worst ConAgra lab.

The average Amish person does more manual labor in a day than the average SJW will do in a decade.

A friend does a lot of work with the Amish in Pennsylvania. He describes watching the children walk home from school and immediately separate into working parties. Girls making dinner (pulling feathers out of pheasants, etc.), boys building Adirondack chairs. My friend is very handy but is stunned at how quickly and expertly the boys, some of them pretty young, can put together the chairs and how nice they turn out. And watching them put together pole barns in my neck of the woods is impressive.

As an aside, one Amish guy I worked called me from a community cell phone that they kept in a mailbox. They had some justification for it. Interesting people.

I had always heard as a kid that the Amish didn't believe in any technology that's not in the Bible. But, instead, they have debates and disagreements over which technology will help them achieve their community goals and which would be detrimental.

I'm a decent amateur carpenter. If I constructed an Adirondack chair as seen on 'This Old House' or in one of the hundreds of YouTube construction videos available, it would probably be a pretty poor chair.

At first.

But the advantage the Amish have in adopting a static technology is that they get lots of practice. After a dozen or so chairs I imagine I would become quite expert - as good as any Amish kid.

I worked with Amish construction crews for several years and found them both interesting and parasitic.
I’ve always been fairly religious, and they are quite happy to discuss most anything. As for the Bible, they use Luther’s version, and most I spoke with believe the Bible was literally written in German. Which is to say, they take it literally, but not deeply, except insofar as it confirms their way of life.
They are remarkably decentralized as each community sorts out the compromises they must make with modern life. Many of them are hysterical, but there is always a kind of logic to it.
They do work hard, and are capable of a long days’ work, but I did too. There were many days that I would show up for work (they needed me, because I could both work and drive) and they would simply say they had community things to do, so no work today. In other words, lots of off days, not to mention Sunday.
I had lots of discussions with them about the sustainability of a lifestyle that required farming combined with having sometimes up to 20 kids. I worked for families that had anywhere from 12-18 kids. There are living Amish with over 1000 descendants.
They tend to view outsiders (their white host nations) as any other non-whites would, in a similar situation-with disdain, suspicion, and they not afraid to cheat them if it’s necessary-say, to sell a horse. Obviously, since they are completely reliant on the host nation for their safety and money, they are outwardly circumspect towards outsiders.
In the end, I would say that the Amish are quite similar to Mexican laborers, in that they are able, due to their lifestyle, work for less than modern white Americans. Mainly, it’s due, in both cases, to the willingness to work intense manual labor jobs, combined with a willingness to house lots of people in one dwelling unit. The rule in the community I worked in was that kids under 18 were obliged to give all pay for work to the parents. Since they all start taking jobs at 14, this can create a significant revenue stream for adults, which, for now, allows them to buy up cheap farmland. I built a few houses with an Amishman and his four teenage sons. He was bringing home $150,000 a year, with several sons right being them.
So, the Amish are fascinating, from many points of view-especially from a racial angle. In 500 years of genetic/culture feedback, they’ve become non-European.

A friend does a lot of work with the Amish in Pennsylvania. He describes watching the children walk home from school and immediately separate into working parties. Girls making dinner (pulling feathers out of pheasants, etc.), boys building Adirondack chairs. My friend is very handy but is stunned at how quickly and expertly the boys, some of them pretty young, can put together the chairs and how nice they turn out. And watching them put together pole barns in my neck of the woods is impressive.

As an aside, one Amish guy I worked called me from a community cell phone that they kept in a mailbox. They had some justification for it. Interesting people.

I had always heard as a kid that the Amish didn’t believe in any technology that’s not in the Bible. But, instead, they have debates and disagreements over which technology will help them achieve their community goals and which would be detrimental.

I worked with Amish construction crews for several years and found them both interesting and parasitic.
I've always been fairly religious, and they are quite happy to discuss most anything. As for the Bible, they use Luther's version, and most I spoke with believe the Bible was literally written in German. Which is to say, they take it literally, but not deeply, except insofar as it confirms their way of life.
They are remarkably decentralized as each community sorts out the compromises they must make with modern life. Many of them are hysterical, but there is always a kind of logic to it.
They do work hard, and are capable of a long days' work, but I did too. There were many days that I would show up for work (they needed me, because I could both work and drive) and they would simply say they had community things to do, so no work today. In other words, lots of off days, not to mention Sunday.
I had lots of discussions with them about the sustainability of a lifestyle that required farming combined with having sometimes up to 20 kids. I worked for families that had anywhere from 12-18 kids. There are living Amish with over 1000 descendants.
They tend to view outsiders (their white host nations) as any other non-whites would, in a similar situation-with disdain, suspicion, and they not afraid to cheat them if it's necessary-say, to sell a horse. Obviously, since they are completely reliant on the host nation for their safety and money, they are outwardly circumspect towards outsiders.
In the end, I would say that the Amish are quite similar to Mexican laborers, in that they are able, due to their lifestyle, work for less than modern white Americans. Mainly, it's due, in both cases, to the willingness to work intense manual labor jobs, combined with a willingness to house lots of people in one dwelling unit. The rule in the community I worked in was that kids under 18 were obliged to give all pay for work to the parents. Since they all start taking jobs at 14, this can create a significant revenue stream for adults, which, for now, allows them to buy up cheap farmland. I built a few houses with an Amishman and his four teenage sons. He was bringing home $150,000 a year, with several sons right being them.
So, the Amish are fascinating, from many points of view-especially from a racial angle. In 500 years of genetic/culture feedback, they've become non-European.

In other words, lots of off days, not to mention Sunday.

That’s my impression of medieval Europe: lots of days off due to feast days.

He was bringing home $150,000 a year,

That’s pretty interesting. I’ve never seen an income estimate for anybody Amish before.

I have done some business with a handful of them, and my impression is that many of the Amish are quite wealthy, at least in Pennsylvania. They have a monopoly on shed and barn building businesses in Pa, Del, NJ, NY, and MD, and do well making furniture. Like some of the more enterprising immigrant groups, like the Indians, they also have access to interest-free loans from community pools to start businesses or buy a home. Combine all of that with cheap living and it is easy to succeed, even with large families. They don't waste money on college either.

One of the men in my crew was an actual convert, and he offered some interesting insights into Amish life. He told a story about a family that was purchasing a farm for $150,000. They arrived with a plastic 5 gallon bucket filled with cash, and counted it out, but it was only $100,000. The husband looked at the wife and said, "you brought the wrong bucket".

Of all the groups making demographic inroads in the US (Muslims, Mexicans, Mormons) the only one I think are unstoppable are the Amish. I'm not expert, but my understanding is that they view agricultural work as being the highest form of work, but if that isn't available they are OK with manufacturing or construction work. (finance, massage therapy, blogging? Not OK.) While these jobs have declined there are still plenty of those jobs around, and there always will be, and if you have to choose between Mexicans or Amish for your framing crew who ya gonna pick?

I don't even think they'll have to do that, though, because of their style of farming--they could conceivably take over the whole agricultural sector in North America. Their style of farming is incredibly inefficient from a labor perspective--the guy in Illinois who grows 1000 acres of corn/soy obviously produces much more per unit of labor. However it is very capital efficient--Amish guy doesn't need a $100,000 combine with GPS and air conditioned cab, diesel fuel, GMO seeds, roundup, etc. He needs a horse and some basic, basic equipment, and he can easily supply pretty much all of his own capital; the only exception is land, but since these are relatively small operations they don't need much land per family and they tend to use it quite efficiently ($ output per unit land compares favorably with modern commercial operations.)

Because of the religious angle, the relative labor inefficiency doesn't matter--Amish guy doesn't care that he's making less than minimum wage for backbreaking labor because he views it as a religious calling. He's not going to be driven out of the field by low wages like you see in most labor markets. So commercial farmer's labor advantage doesn't mean much in the real world--furthermore commercial farmer's 1.9 kids might run off to the big city if they can make a few more bucks but Amish guy's kids won't. Or rather a few might, but since he has 7 one of the kids steps up. And as mentioned above he doesn't really need outside capital. So slowly, inexorably, things flip Amish.

What's gonna stop them? Oil goes to $300/barrel? Commercial farming is dead, Amish are fine. Global warming? Central Valley agriculture is dead, Amish tend to stick to cooler areas, Amish are fine. Leaders make bad decisions? They don't have central leadership that can go full retard as has happened in the US 1968-present. So a few sects will shrivel and the rest will be fine.

200 years from now I think we'll be marveling about how 90% of the agricultural caste is descended from two Amish families in the mid 19th century.

Anyway, the lesson is: control your own stuff (no debts, no technologies you can't maintain yourself), control yourself (no vanities), control your women, and you'll take over the world, albeit slowly.

Maybe what you say here, but ag overall isn’t that large a segment of what the country does. Farmgate receipts aren’t much more than 500 billion dollars, about one large corporation; full time farmers are getting to be less than one percent of the population.

The future is urban; unless it all burns; then it’s back to the country.

the Amish over their 10 generations in America have been evolving toward being more naturally Amish-acting.

IME that's an effing nightmare. They work their animals to death, their children to tears then beatings for tears, and their women into early graves.

Nobody knows how rife these communities are with sexual abuse, because reports of incest, pedophilia, and rape lead to shunning or worse.

They're also shrewd with the shekels, use more damn crop chemicals than Frito-Lay or any CAFO, and refuse to manage their livestock manure with concern for anyone downstream...or even their own families.

In fact of all the counties that drain into the Chesapeake Bay, the #1 worst for runoff pollution was for many years Lancaster County, PA--and not because of the big CAFOs or industrial farms there.

Amish farmers persist with moldboard plowing that fosters both soil and manure/pollutant runoff. Their communities have E. coli and high levels of nitrates in most of their wells (remember that in discussions of them selling unpasteurized milk). They don't fence their animals out of riparian habitat. They track animal dung between animal and produce operations.

Finally, if you really want to look at the Amish and DNA, take a peek into their puppy mills. Between the grotesquely isolated and greedy Amish DNA and the use of dogs as a cash crop (leading to widespread genetic erosion in the animals), it's what I'd call a nightmare.

The idea of these people becoming more firmly what they already are is ghastly.

Plus you should thank me for having drawn the line before mentioning the bestiality.

Ah, but they are a Protected Minority with special laws applying only to them and exemption from others...and good PR about what fine simple people they are. So who cares!

That's my impression of medieval Europe: lots of days off due to feast days.

He was bringing home $150,000 a year,

That's pretty interesting. I've never seen an income estimate for anybody Amish before.

I have done some business with a handful of them, and my impression is that many of the Amish are quite wealthy, at least in Pennsylvania. They have a monopoly on shed and barn building businesses in Pa, Del, NJ, NY, and MD, and do well making furniture. Like some of the more enterprising immigrant groups, like the Indians, they also have access to interest-free loans from community pools to start businesses or buy a home. Combine all of that with cheap living and it is easy to succeed, even with large families. They don’t waste money on college either.

the Amish over their 10 generations in America have been evolving toward being more naturally Amish-acting.

IME that's an effing nightmare. They work their animals to death, their children to tears then beatings for tears, and their women into early graves.

Nobody knows how rife these communities are with sexual abuse, because reports of incest, pedophilia, and rape lead to shunning or worse.

They're also shrewd with the shekels, use more damn crop chemicals than Frito-Lay or any CAFO, and refuse to manage their livestock manure with concern for anyone downstream...or even their own families.

In fact of all the counties that drain into the Chesapeake Bay, the #1 worst for runoff pollution was for many years Lancaster County, PA--and not because of the big CAFOs or industrial farms there.

Amish farmers persist with moldboard plowing that fosters both soil and manure/pollutant runoff. Their communities have E. coli and high levels of nitrates in most of their wells (remember that in discussions of them selling unpasteurized milk). They don't fence their animals out of riparian habitat. They track animal dung between animal and produce operations.

Finally, if you really want to look at the Amish and DNA, take a peek into their puppy mills. Between the grotesquely isolated and greedy Amish DNA and the use of dogs as a cash crop (leading to widespread genetic erosion in the animals), it's what I'd call a nightmare.

The idea of these people becoming more firmly what they already are is ghastly.

Plus you should thank me for having drawn the line before mentioning the bestiality.

Ah, but they are a Protected Minority with special laws applying only to them and exemption from others...and good PR about what fine simple people they are. So who cares!

It seems in Ohio that there are no amount of horror stories to keep morons from purchasing puppies from the (very) unscrupulous Amish.

As well, when we first got married my wife and I would travel to Amish country for munchies, but after I paid attention to the ingredients label once I gave up. It’s all a scam as Amish themed baked goods could have been cranked out by the worst ConAgra lab.

Of all the groups making demographic inroads in the US (Muslims, Mexicans, Mormons) the only one I think are unstoppable are the Amish. I'm not expert, but my understanding is that they view agricultural work as being the highest form of work, but if that isn't available they are OK with manufacturing or construction work. (finance, massage therapy, blogging? Not OK.) While these jobs have declined there are still plenty of those jobs around, and there always will be, and if you have to choose between Mexicans or Amish for your framing crew who ya gonna pick?

I don't even think they'll have to do that, though, because of their style of farming--they could conceivably take over the whole agricultural sector in North America. Their style of farming is incredibly inefficient from a labor perspective--the guy in Illinois who grows 1000 acres of corn/soy obviously produces much more per unit of labor. However it is very capital efficient--Amish guy doesn't need a $100,000 combine with GPS and air conditioned cab, diesel fuel, GMO seeds, roundup, etc. He needs a horse and some basic, basic equipment, and he can easily supply pretty much all of his own capital; the only exception is land, but since these are relatively small operations they don't need much land per family and they tend to use it quite efficiently ($ output per unit land compares favorably with modern commercial operations.)

Because of the religious angle, the relative labor inefficiency doesn't matter--Amish guy doesn't care that he's making less than minimum wage for backbreaking labor because he views it as a religious calling. He's not going to be driven out of the field by low wages like you see in most labor markets. So commercial farmer's labor advantage doesn't mean much in the real world--furthermore commercial farmer's 1.9 kids might run off to the big city if they can make a few more bucks but Amish guy's kids won't. Or rather a few might, but since he has 7 one of the kids steps up. And as mentioned above he doesn't really need outside capital. So slowly, inexorably, things flip Amish.

What's gonna stop them? Oil goes to $300/barrel? Commercial farming is dead, Amish are fine. Global warming? Central Valley agriculture is dead, Amish tend to stick to cooler areas, Amish are fine. Leaders make bad decisions? They don't have central leadership that can go full retard as has happened in the US 1968-present. So a few sects will shrivel and the rest will be fine.

200 years from now I think we'll be marveling about how 90% of the agricultural caste is descended from two Amish families in the mid 19th century.

Anyway, the lesson is: control your own stuff (no debts, no technologies you can't maintain yourself), control yourself (no vanities), control your women, and you'll take over the world, albeit slowly.

Personally I’m not convinced that I can predict the future. Or I should say that I can predict the future easily but it never seems to work out quite the way I thought it would.

The idea that the Amish will come to dominate American agriculture ignores the obvious agricultural revolution bearing down on us fast. The combines of the future are not likely to be air conditioned because they are unlikely to contain humans. Surely this is obvious. Google and Uber and probably Elon Musk are all pushing hard for self driving cars. A self driving car is a tricky proposition (winding roads and traffic) whereas a tractor that travels a repetitive pattern should be easy.

When we have self driven farm machinery it’s not just the Amish who will be affected – the much bigger impact will be on all Hispanic farm workers. My guess would be that in the near future there will be no people at all on great swaths of American farmland. Mexicans won’t be needed to work on Americans farms in the numbers now required. They won’t have a source of income so they won’t have a source of funds to send back south to their impoverished families.

A self driving tractor-picker is a more sure anti-immigration technology than a “big beautiful wall”.

A friend does a lot of work with the Amish in Pennsylvania. He describes watching the children walk home from school and immediately separate into working parties. Girls making dinner (pulling feathers out of pheasants, etc.), boys building Adirondack chairs. My friend is very handy but is stunned at how quickly and expertly the boys, some of them pretty young, can put together the chairs and how nice they turn out. And watching them put together pole barns in my neck of the woods is impressive.

As an aside, one Amish guy I worked called me from a community cell phone that they kept in a mailbox. They had some justification for it. Interesting people.

I’m a decent amateur carpenter. If I constructed an Adirondack chair as seen on ‘This Old House’ or in one of the hundreds of YouTube construction videos available, it would probably be a pretty poor chair.

At first.

But the advantage the Amish have in adopting a static technology is that they get lots of practice. After a dozen or so chairs I imagine I would become quite expert – as good as any Amish kid.

Of all the groups making demographic inroads in the US (Muslims, Mexicans, Mormons) the only one I think are unstoppable are the Amish. I'm not expert, but my understanding is that they view agricultural work as being the highest form of work, but if that isn't available they are OK with manufacturing or construction work. (finance, massage therapy, blogging? Not OK.) While these jobs have declined there are still plenty of those jobs around, and there always will be, and if you have to choose between Mexicans or Amish for your framing crew who ya gonna pick?

I don't even think they'll have to do that, though, because of their style of farming--they could conceivably take over the whole agricultural sector in North America. Their style of farming is incredibly inefficient from a labor perspective--the guy in Illinois who grows 1000 acres of corn/soy obviously produces much more per unit of labor. However it is very capital efficient--Amish guy doesn't need a $100,000 combine with GPS and air conditioned cab, diesel fuel, GMO seeds, roundup, etc. He needs a horse and some basic, basic equipment, and he can easily supply pretty much all of his own capital; the only exception is land, but since these are relatively small operations they don't need much land per family and they tend to use it quite efficiently ($ output per unit land compares favorably with modern commercial operations.)

Because of the religious angle, the relative labor inefficiency doesn't matter--Amish guy doesn't care that he's making less than minimum wage for backbreaking labor because he views it as a religious calling. He's not going to be driven out of the field by low wages like you see in most labor markets. So commercial farmer's labor advantage doesn't mean much in the real world--furthermore commercial farmer's 1.9 kids might run off to the big city if they can make a few more bucks but Amish guy's kids won't. Or rather a few might, but since he has 7 one of the kids steps up. And as mentioned above he doesn't really need outside capital. So slowly, inexorably, things flip Amish.

What's gonna stop them? Oil goes to $300/barrel? Commercial farming is dead, Amish are fine. Global warming? Central Valley agriculture is dead, Amish tend to stick to cooler areas, Amish are fine. Leaders make bad decisions? They don't have central leadership that can go full retard as has happened in the US 1968-present. So a few sects will shrivel and the rest will be fine.

200 years from now I think we'll be marveling about how 90% of the agricultural caste is descended from two Amish families in the mid 19th century.

Anyway, the lesson is: control your own stuff (no debts, no technologies you can't maintain yourself), control yourself (no vanities), control your women, and you'll take over the world, albeit slowly.

Does anybody know if the Amish farm organic? If they do, it seems they ought to be able to market their products to the hipsters for a premium.

“Our products are not only organic, they’re produced without evil fossil fuels!”

the Amish over their 10 generations in America have been evolving toward being more naturally Amish-acting.

IME that's an effing nightmare. They work their animals to death, their children to tears then beatings for tears, and their women into early graves.

Nobody knows how rife these communities are with sexual abuse, because reports of incest, pedophilia, and rape lead to shunning or worse.

They're also shrewd with the shekels, use more damn crop chemicals than Frito-Lay or any CAFO, and refuse to manage their livestock manure with concern for anyone downstream...or even their own families.

In fact of all the counties that drain into the Chesapeake Bay, the #1 worst for runoff pollution was for many years Lancaster County, PA--and not because of the big CAFOs or industrial farms there.

Amish farmers persist with moldboard plowing that fosters both soil and manure/pollutant runoff. Their communities have E. coli and high levels of nitrates in most of their wells (remember that in discussions of them selling unpasteurized milk). They don't fence their animals out of riparian habitat. They track animal dung between animal and produce operations.

Finally, if you really want to look at the Amish and DNA, take a peek into their puppy mills. Between the grotesquely isolated and greedy Amish DNA and the use of dogs as a cash crop (leading to widespread genetic erosion in the animals), it's what I'd call a nightmare.

The idea of these people becoming more firmly what they already are is ghastly.

Plus you should thank me for having drawn the line before mentioning the bestiality.

Ah, but they are a Protected Minority with special laws applying only to them and exemption from others...and good PR about what fine simple people they are. So who cares!

Old Order Mennonites sacrifice a lot of 21st century conveniences: electricity, motorized vehicles, modern dress and entertainment. One thing they don’t need to worry about, though, is peanut allergies.

Allergies of any kind, in fact, are nearly nonexistent in Mennonite communities like the one in Penn Yan, Yates County, and they are five to 10 times less likely to develop asthma. Now, a University of Rochester Medical Center researcher has a $2.4 million grant to better understand why that is.

Kirsi Jarvinen-Seppo, an associate professor of pediatric allergy and immunology, will compare the early immune system development in Old Order Mennonite infants with that of suburban Rochester babies who are at increased risk for allergies. The hypothesis is that the Mennonites ingest and inhale certain farm-life microorganisms that boost their immunity.

That is known as the “microbiome hypothesis,” Jarvinen-Seppo said, and she is interested in learning more about it.

There has been a great deal of research on immunity among farm families in general; Old Order Mennonites are an even more refined interest. They typically consume raw milk, have large families, deliver babies at home and seldom use antibiotics.

“We need to do this study to understand what it is about farm life and (its) components that are protective against allergies,” she said. “What immune compartment is it impacting in what kind of way? Ultimately as we find those mechanisms for protection, we may be able to target some specific interventions that would have the same effect.”

The study follows two earlier, less invasive investigations in the same community. This one will involve blood, stool, saliva, skin and breast milk samples from infants and their mothers, both before and after delivery.

I take your point, but unless I am utterly confused, engagement with the actual Bible stands at the core of Amish life. I think they are certainly not "studying" it as many ultra-orthodox Jews do, and I do think that is a crucial distinction. But I also think that engagement with the book itself is at the core of life for the Amish. I mean this is in a strong sense - they are not simply very "religious", but they are engaged with the Bible itself.

I think I am right, but maybe I'm confused. If I am right, then there is a crucial similarity, and a crucial difference, with ultra-orthodox Jews.

A major difference between the Amish and Haredi Jews is that the Amish refuse to take a dime from the government and the Haredi are a bunch of welfare moochers and all-around scammers, both here in the US and in Israel.

The Amish make an interesting testbed for nature-nurture studies, since the plain people so radically social engineer their environments to equalize them. The Amish are like 18th Century SJWs who, rather than just complain like 21st Century ones, actually built a sustainable culture that minimizes inequality. When progressives say things like, “All we have to do is create a culture that minimizes inequality,” well, the Amish more or less did that.

You know who else did that?

America from around 1930 through 1980.

Unions, high taxes, government stimulus spending, semi-socialization of the economy, wage & price controls, GI bill of rights, building public infrastructure.

There was a lot of "big government" and "socialism" back then. So some of the posters here might not have liked it.

The Amish are like 18th Century SJWs who, rather than just complain like 21st Century ones

I wonder if anyone here ever complained about the government.

I also wonder how many posters/bloggers here have gone into the wilderness to build a rural, sustainable community for white nationalists.

Yeah, but the 1950′s being equal is a myth. In the 1950′s they allowed more flop houses. So, many people were renters with about 300 to 500 square apartments. Most 1950′s tract houses were about 700 to 800 square feet. Also, the south was still very rural. Overall poverty rate was higher in 1959 than today. The low point was in the early 1970′s, Both the left and right have a romantic view of the 1950′s. Also, many apartments in the 1950′s had a hall bathroom that everyone shared. You might as well live in a motel in Anaheim at least the room is bigger than apartments in the 1950′s. Plus you have your own bathroom.

Yeah, but the 1950's being equal is a myth. In the 1950's they allowed more flop houses. So, many people were renters with about 300 to 500 square apartments. Most 1950's tract houses were about 700 to 800 square feet. Also, the south was still very rural. Overall poverty rate was higher in 1959 than today. The low point was in the early 1970's, Both the left and right have a romantic view of the 1950's. Also, many apartments in the 1950's had a hall bathroom that everyone shared. You might as well live in a motel in Anaheim at least the room is bigger than apartments in the 1950's. Plus you have your own bathroom.

Jackie Gleason’s apartment in the Honeymooners was about as well-decorated as an apartment building laundry room is today.

The average Amish person does more manual labor in a day than the average SJW will do in a decade.

That's something a lot of "preppers" and "survivalists" can't understand.

Living off the land in any form-besides modern petro-chemo agriculture, to an extent-is very hard constant physical work. If you didn't grow up doing that, your body likely won't take it for very long, even if you get really buff in the gym and wolf down lots of vitamins and run and eat this or that diet.

The joints, muscles and sinews need to be subjected to heavy manual labor consistently during the formative years of adolescence, or you will never be capable of working like these people. Not over any great length of time. The office worker who grew up as a nerd or grind can get in better shape, and they can make a show out of the back-to-the-land thing, but if they start doing real farm work, or serious construction work, things are going to start falling apart. They will have back problems, torn ligaments, their knees will fail, etc and they will wind up in a wheelchair or undergoing various surgeries from which healing will be slow. In a real survival situation, they will become a group liability, starve, or be offloaded, euthanized, or eaten depending on how bad things get and how ruthless the group is.

The Amish are much better physically prepared for hardship, but because they eschew all education and avoid much modern technology, they have always been dependent on the "English" world for a lot of things and absent that world functioning they will be in for some grief. They will have to learn a lot of new things, like field medicine, they have avoided so far.

Undoubtedly farm work is hard. My grandfather was a farmer, and I remember when we visited him over the summers and I had to help out on the farm, as a teenager, I’d wonder how the h*ll he could lug around bales of hay, herd cattle, work the fields, etc all day long in his 60s while I would get exhausted.

That being said, your body can and will adapt to the environment. Whole reason why weightlifting works. Of course, the Amish undoubtedly have been selecting for/maintaining selection for the physical fitness required for this work, whereas the last few generations everyone else has not. But this doesn’t mean much in an evolutionary time frame. If the average American under 30 suddenly had to live off the grid as a farmer, and had the knowledge, equipment, land, etc to do so, they could adapt, given they had the time to acclimate and recondition themselves to it before starving to death.

That's my impression of medieval Europe: lots of days off due to feast days.

He was bringing home $150,000 a year,

That's pretty interesting. I've never seen an income estimate for anybody Amish before.

One of the men in my crew was an actual convert, and he offered some interesting insights into Amish life. He told a story about a family that was purchasing a farm for $150,000. They arrived with a plastic 5 gallon bucket filled with cash, and counted it out, but it was only $100,000. The husband looked at the wife and said, “you brought the wrong bucket”.

Undoubtedly farm work is hard. My grandfather was a farmer, and I remember when we visited him over the summers and I had to help out on the farm, as a teenager, I'd wonder how the h*ll he could lug around bales of hay, herd cattle, work the fields, etc all day long in his 60s while I would get exhausted.

That being said, your body can and will adapt to the environment. Whole reason why weightlifting works. Of course, the Amish undoubtedly have been selecting for/maintaining selection for the physical fitness required for this work, whereas the last few generations everyone else has not. But this doesn't mean much in an evolutionary time frame. If the average American under 30 suddenly had to live off the grid as a farmer, and had the knowledge, equipment, land, etc to do so, they could adapt, given they had the time to acclimate and recondition themselves to it before starving to death.

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"All that unreinforced concrete is just dead weight."
Unreninforced or lightly reinforced concrete above the neutral axis provides compressive strength where it is needed.
I agree with your last paragraph. Contractors are very negligent about pouring concrete and ensuring that it cures properly.

Metro Seattle and Portland are tiny islands out of a vast, largely unpopulated region. And when you get out of the cities and the college towns it gets pretty different pretty vast. I don't know if the locals are white nationalist, but they are certainly not very worldly, educated, or curious. ...

This Indian subcontinental female columnist is writing about a black woman who feels out of place due to the presence of so many thin, white women. See below quotes.
I didn’t have another woman who looked like me, who understood my struggles, my insecurities.”
And like Rice, other f...

It is clear that the golf club itself, the one with a long shaft and a wooden face at one end, could only be explained as a product of evolution if encountered by a civilization of octopae at the bottom of the ocean. A strange object that.

Institutions matter, but they do not survive on their own. At the moment, the Anti-Defamation League is an institution under concerted attack — and it is not being defended. And so far, nothing else has arisen to forcefully take a stand in the Jewish fight against bigotry. … Truth must also b...

On "60 Minutes" today they had on the student leaders of the "Children's Crusade Against the Second Amendment" and it's interesting that the most simple question of who was financing them still remains unanswered; only that they accepted money, much from "Hollywood" to keep their activities in f...

It is apparently considered racist to think diversity should include different ages.
The age when white men are no longer wanted in tech is getting younger all the time. I know of execs who won't hire sales reps over 34 and marketing types and engineers over 40. After all there are still many ...

I once thought I was making fun of clickbait when I wrote, "Why is my hot nude yoga class still hideously white?"
Judging from this, we are this close to that becoming a reality.
Boutique exercise classes are "too white" because urban white people don't want to share the premises with the...

I have a friend (actually he’s my law partner) who is Jewish and follows the movements and polemics of white nationalism and the like with a passion. He’s convinced that there is going to be a white nationalist uprising in the Pacific Northwest very soon based on what he’s been reading.
...

I work for a big corporation and share an elevator bank with some of our tech departments, and the number of Indians is astonishing. I am sure they are nice enough people, but I look at them and think of the Americans who can't get decent jobs because of their presence. Even Cesar Chavez was ag...

People talk about "Black Twitter", but "Jewish Twitter" is something largely unspoken of. Not having an account myself, I've still seen enough screencaps to believe that it is a thing.
It is quite interesting and revealing to see journalists and media figures speaking with less of a filter.

Y'all are way smarter than me, but I bet I'm the only one here who was ever asked to play on an all-black team (both basketball and baseball) So let me clue you in on something: the main reason black people, including women, don't engage in the type of exercise that whites seeking thinness do is ...