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And of course as is typical of late stage western cultural elitism there are 4000 words on sex and two for the mines. You'd think the place where slave lifespan

by srcthr 3y ago

And of course as is typical of late stage western cultural elitism there are 4000 words on sex and two for the mines. You'd think the place where slave lifespan was measured in years rather than decades would make for a more interesting story. A man drowning in the dark, trapped by a rock fall, seeing the crushed head of his foreman on the left and his best friend running on the right. But that would mean forcing readers to imagine a life where economics and not perversion were the driving force of history and we can't have that.

cafard 3y ago
"Late stage" or "late capitalism" always suggests to me that the user has inside information on the sell-by date. I don't disagree about the proportion of attention.
- GolfPopper 3y ago
  I suspect it's a combination of looking around and going "this can't possibly be stable" combined with a degree of wish-fulfillment.
  - nerdponx 3y ago
    It has more to do with the idea that the system has evolved and advanced for a while. It's not so much about the system ending soon, as it is about it being deeply entrenched and widely adopted, its long-term negative consequences having had time to manifest, and/or being the late stages of a deliberate long-term agenda.
    - Tronno 3y ago
      That might be reading into it too much. I'm pretty sure it's just a joke that capitalism is cancer. As in, "late-stage cancer".
      - nerdponx 3y ago
        Synonymous terms have been used in leftist/Marxist literature for a long time, that's always where I assumed it came from: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/05/late-capitalism/524943/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/05/late-ca...
  - c_crank 3y ago
    Is "this" capitalism?
- ch4s3 3y ago
  It's funny that the phrase was coined in 1902 and fell out of fashion by about 1970 and was revived in the 2010s. I guess what's old is new again.
- Der_Einzige 3y ago
  It's people who believe Marx's thing about how "boom-bust" cycles will eventually destroy capitalism. Unfortunately, Historical Materialism is utter and complete bullshit.
WalterBright 3y ago
Without economics we'd all starve to death. Edit: I submit "Alone", the TV show where survival experts are dumped out in the wilderness one by one, where they all starve and eventually get pulled out for losing dangerous amounts of weight. And this is despite bringing along survival gear made by an advanced economy.
- bruce511 3y ago
  Not sure why the down-votes, but I will point out they start in late fall, in areas uncolonised by people in 2000 years- which might infer some hint as to the desirability of said location.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    They were also severely restricted in what technology they could bring. But they still had fish hooks, survival clothing, advanced bow and arrows, an advanced saw or hatchet, fish line, and fire starter. Only one was able to make fire without a fire starter. After watching Alone, I bought myself a fire starter, to carry when hiking. I remember one father/son team. The son had some sort of fisheries degree, and considered himself a fishing expert. Father and son would fish, the father caught fish regularly, the son couldn't catch one. A lot of the fishing experts turned out to be not so good at fishing, the same for the hunting experts. What's kinda sad is how bad most were at building shelters. They'd spend all their calories building a magnificent log cabin, and then were too weak to continue. Season after season they'd do this. Or they'd spend time carving toys. Or they'd burn down their shelter with a bad fireplace or poison themselves with the smoke. The point is, humans have evolved to need an economy for mutual survival. Can't realistically do it alone, from scratch.
    - autoexec 3y ago
      > What's kinda sad is how bad most were at building shelters. Seems expected when you consider that most people have never built a shelter, and those that have aren't often doing it on a regular basis using whatever happens to be lying around. Same for fishers and hunters who are highly skilled in the environments they regularly work in. You can only expect them to struggle when placed in new environments with new added restrictions. You'd just hope they'd struggle a bit less than an novice would in that situation.
dan-robertson 3y ago
I’m very confused what your point is? It sounds to me like you either think the topic of this article is so trivial that it shouldn’t have been written or that any article on the time period has to cover everything that happened then. But I don’t really believe either of those could be true. I’m sure an article about the horrors of being a slave in a Roman mine would do fine, it’s just that it probably wouldn’t be able to rely on archaeology in Pompeii, which had little relation to mining. There was an article from a typical ‘western cultural elitism’ outlet that did well here and elsewhere recently about terrible conditions faced by illegal miners in abandoned South African mines, so I really don’t think the reason for the focus is preferences about topic so much as, you know, that you can have different articles about different things.

by srcthr 3y ago

cafard 3y ago

"Late stage" or "late capitalism" always suggests to me that the user has inside information on the sell-by date. I don't disagree about the proportion of attention.

GolfPopper 3y ago
I suspect it's a combination of looking around and going "this can't possibly be stable" combined with a degree of wish-fulfillment.
- nerdponx 3y ago
  It has more to do with the idea that the system has evolved and advanced for a while. It's not so much about the system ending soon, as it is about it being deeply entrenched and widely adopted, its long-term negative consequences having had time to manifest, and/or being the late stages of a deliberate long-term agenda.
  - Tronno 3y ago
    That might be reading into it too much. I'm pretty sure it's just a joke that capitalism is cancer. As in, "late-stage cancer".
    - nerdponx 3y ago
      Synonymous terms have been used in leftist/Marxist literature for a long time, that's always where I assumed it came from: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/05/late-capitalism/524943/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/05/late-ca...
- c_crank 3y ago
  Is "this" capitalism?
ch4s3 3y ago
It's funny that the phrase was coined in 1902 and fell out of fashion by about 1970 and was revived in the 2010s. I guess what's old is new again.
Der_Einzige 3y ago
It's people who believe Marx's thing about how "boom-bust" cycles will eventually destroy capitalism. Unfortunately, Historical Materialism is utter and complete bullshit.

WalterBright 3y ago

Without economics we'd all starve to death. Edit: I submit "Alone", the TV show where survival experts are dumped out in the wilderness one by one, where they all starve and eventually get pulled out for losing dangerous amounts of weight. And this is despite bringing along survival gear made by an advanced economy.

bruce511 3y ago
Not sure why the down-votes, but I will point out they start in late fall, in areas uncolonised by people in 2000 years- which might infer some hint as to the desirability of said location.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  They were also severely restricted in what technology they could bring. But they still had fish hooks, survival clothing, advanced bow and arrows, an advanced saw or hatchet, fish line, and fire starter. Only one was able to make fire without a fire starter. After watching Alone, I bought myself a fire starter, to carry when hiking. I remember one father/son team. The son had some sort of fisheries degree, and considered himself a fishing expert. Father and son would fish, the father caught fish regularly, the son couldn't catch one. A lot of the fishing experts turned out to be not so good at fishing, the same for the hunting experts. What's kinda sad is how bad most were at building shelters. They'd spend all their calories building a magnificent log cabin, and then were too weak to continue. Season after season they'd do this. Or they'd spend time carving toys. Or they'd burn down their shelter with a bad fireplace or poison themselves with the smoke. The point is, humans have evolved to need an economy for mutual survival. Can't realistically do it alone, from scratch.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    > What's kinda sad is how bad most were at building shelters. Seems expected when you consider that most people have never built a shelter, and those that have aren't often doing it on a regular basis using whatever happens to be lying around. Same for fishers and hunters who are highly skilled in the environments they regularly work in. You can only expect them to struggle when placed in new environments with new added restrictions. You'd just hope they'd struggle a bit less than an novice would in that situation.

dan-robertson 3y ago

I’m very confused what your point is? It sounds to me like you either think the topic of this article is so trivial that it shouldn’t have been written or that any article on the time period has to cover everything that happened then. But I don’t really believe either of those could be true. I’m sure an article about the horrors of being a slave in a Roman mine would do fine, it’s just that it probably wouldn’t be able to rely on archaeology in Pompeii, which had little relation to mining. There was an article from a typical ‘western cultural elitism’ outlet that did well here and elsewhere recently about terrible conditions faced by illegal miners in abandoned South African mines, so I really don’t think the reason for the focus is preferences about topic so much as, you know, that you can have different articles about different things.