Artists have historically performed many important functions, such as drawing pictures for young women to show what their future husband will look like naked.
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Note that the above drawing will be "hand made." No computers involved. The artists will "read your future by aura and tap into the source" in order to provide you with:
The huge demand for such information has been a major source of revenue for traditional artists:
You'd think such an important role for art would be safe from incursion by cold Artificial Intelligence. After all, what kind of person would trust a machine to tell them whether their future husband will be overweight or have a tattoo on his butt? Only a true artist could know such things.
Despite this fact, today there are numerous AI image generators offering a variety of "clothes removal functions" which you can use to learn intimate details about your potential life partner.
With the click of a button, Nudify.online will strip the clothing in a photograph in less than a minute. And Soulgen reminds you that after you've used their software to create a NSFW image from a photo of your beloved, if you have some really detailed questions "you can reuse the image and write a text to create exactly what you want with that character."
I can understand how people interested in a meaningful lifelong commitment would want to seize upon this information to help them make their choices. But how can they be so easily duped into believing that AI will give them reliable information? Better to stick with authentic art, made by a genuine artist.
These tendencies both examplify a Baudrillardian variant of the Barnum effect. So much meaning produced, so little meaningful production.
ReplyDeleteHilarious. They're both fakes.
ReplyDeleteJSL
I gotta know about this BONUS option (very powerful)!!!
ReplyDeleteWhen you curse the darkness instead of lighting a candle, the darkness stares back into you.
ReplyDeleteBuckle up folks for the ride into Hades.
ReplyDelete"Let me sketch your soulmate naked!"
ReplyDeleteGotta admire the entrepreneurial spirit, not letting those figure class drawings go to waste.
Show some charity. So many young people these days can't afford a talented artist who is also a psychic. Computer-generated nudity may well be all their budgets will permit--and computer-generated naked people are a lot less likely to sue than ex's with birth certificates and legal standing.
ReplyDeleteFor myself, having seen what Hollywood and the major book publishers are doing these days, I'm about ready to pay for computer-generated fiction. How much worse can it be?
Anonymous-- Thanks for not one but two new concepts.
ReplyDeleteJSL-- You skeptic!
Richard-- Yes, I was kind of wondering about that myself. Each of the more enterprising ads offers some tantalizing little twist.
Kev Ferrara-- The comments from several of the (apparently satisfied) purchasers for this kind of art suggest that they were living in their own version of darkness and despair, but were given fresh hope by these pictures. Some women say, "I can't wait to meet my guy. He's so handsome!" Others say, "Gosh, my future husband isn't at all the type of guy I thought I would go for, but now I know who I should be watching for." One knew that this process was legit because his favorite sex position was also hers! Don't you believe that art should spread a little happiness and good cheer?
ReplyDeletechris bennett-- I take your point. But isn't it also possible that after a few years of disappointment and heartbreak, the general dating public will become less gullible and more worldly wise? After a while, people became more skeptical users of dating Apps, just as 13 year old girls learned it was a big mistake to text nude pictures to that cute boy in class.
Seg-- I gather these are highly lucrative-- or at least they were until AI came along to corner the market.
Don't you believe that art should spread a little happiness and good cheer?
ReplyDeleteThe only levity I could find was the idea that the original cost of the service was $44.64 but now it's $17.86, a savings of $26.78.
There's more creativity in those numbers than in the entire rest of the enterprise.
But mostly it all just makes me sad and I'd rather not dwell on it.
But isn't it also possible that after a few years of disappointment and heartbreak, the general dating public will become less gullible and more worldly wise?
ReplyDeleteThe confidence tricksters, endlessly adaptable anyway, now have a shiny new powerful gadget to carry on their dirty, foul work. Their disappointed and heartbroken victims will either move on or, more likely, have any cynical or nihilist view of the world they hold vindicated and thereby reinforced, and as they move on so the naivety of the younger will take up their ranks.
Sorry to disagree David, but as far as my view goes on any imagined upside to such behaviour, generalizations like 'the general dating public will become less gullible and more worldly wise' just tries to polish the stinking turd this whole business, and others like it, is.
> The confidence tricksters, endlessly adaptable anyway, now have a shiny new powerful gadget to carry on their dirty, foul work.
ReplyDeleteWhat's so bad about selling sad people hope?
People find comfort in fantasy and spiritualism. It adds some meaning to life. Would you rather they just stare into the grave until diabetes or heart disease takes them?
This is just a modern twist on traditional religion or shamanism to me. It offers hope and meaning, but without the crusades, tithes or suicide bombings.
"What's so bad about selling sad people hope?"
ReplyDeleteFraudulent products are unethical and immoral.
Real social hope comes from eating right, getting fresh air, sleeping well, exercising, being amenable to friendship which includes being forgiving and somewhat outgoing, having interests which entail meeting new people in new places, staying away from negativity and cynicism, being clean, pressed, and coifed, networking, and having decent employment.
"This is just a modern twist on traditional religion or shamanism to me. It offers hope and meaning, but without the crusades, tithes or suicide bombings."
No, it's porn in a fortune cookie.
What's so bad about selling sad people hope?
ReplyDeleteHope, by nature not being a commodity, cannot be sold. It is engendered in a sense of purpose, belongingness and a sense of the sacred. What is being 'sold' here is distraction by means of delusion. So tell me what's so good about that?
This is just a modern twist on traditional religion or shamanism to me. It offers hope and meaning, but without the crusades, tithes or suicide bombings.
Crusades, tithes and suicide bombings have been and will be carried out under the banner of all sorts of things along with persecution, gulags and the extermination of millions, all in the name of one ideology or another. So it doesn't seem at all reasonable to use this argument as a means of saying that religion is, at best, a panacea no better than what might be called modern-day deceit soma. Such a view, I believe, stems from a total miscomprehension of why myths (a kind of patterning intuited about the way the world works) have survived over millennia, their metaphysical purpose and the ineffable mystery that necessitated their becoming.
"
ReplyDeleteReal social hope omes from eating right, getting fresh air, sleeping well, exercising, being amenable to friendship which includes being forgiving and somewhat outgoing, having interests which entail meeting new people in new places, staying away from negativity and cynicism, being clean, pressed, and coifed, networking, and having decent employment. "
That's not hope, that's a description of the behavior of high-status humans.
Outgoing people are often physically attractive and athletic or at least have good coordination.
High status people tend to have high status parents so a lot of their habits are hereditary. It is easy to be positive and outgoing when you're the son or daughter of a winner with winner traits yourself.
Losers can "improve their situation" by imitating the habits of successful people but they will never become high status humans unless they were really winners born into a bad situation and most losers are not diamonds in the rough. Sociologist (communists) promote this pov but is belief not a reality. When people are encouraged to closely imitate something they are not, it leads to fraud and unethical, ans immoral behavior. If you can't meet the sales target of the top performer, you will fake it. Faking it until you make it is fraud, unethical and immoral behavior. If you're born into the right kin-group, you can get away with it and it's called "failing upwards".
ReplyDeleteHow many bohemian artists were sickly or psychologically abnormal people with trust funds. Rather than casting these people as failures, they were used as secular prophets for Modernist philosophy by their Social Network. Most art is indeed propaganda, the propaganda may be truthful or fanciful like suggesting mentally ill people have incredible insight into the human condition or that private property needs to be abolished for the masses.
The movers and shakers of history were confidence tricksters and art was often away for them to persuade people to do [a certain thing]. Some people think religion and mysticism are grifts but think somehow that science, economics or politics can't be. Anyone heating their home with solar panels, right now?
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ReplyDelete"That's not hope, that's a description of the behavior of high-status humans.
ReplyDeleteOutgoing people are often physically attractive and athletic or at least have good coordination."
Hope is a kind of ongoing prayer for a little bit of luck.
View that in the context of Branch Rickey's famous aphorism that, "Luck is the residue of good design".
"Losers can "improve their situation" by imitating the habits of successful people but they will never become high status humans"
The point was not to be 'high status' but to find love and marriage from a starting position of being the type of person to pay $17 for online fortune cookie porn.
> No, it's porn in a fortune cookie.
ReplyDeleteYou could write a five part encyclopedia on the deities and ceremonies that amount to porn and fortune cookies.
> to find love and marriage from a starting position of being the type of person to pay $17 for online fortune cookie porn
Real romantic love is off the table for the portion of the population we’re talking about. Just because a girl is monstrously ugly, and mentally ill doesn’t mean she can actually fall in love with whatever poor stupid bald midget dude is sexually desperate enough to settle for her.
An ugly girl’s romantic interests are no different from the instamodel. She knows her spouse is a loser. She may pretend, sure, but that’s a pretty sad and desperate way to live. Those people are in hell, quite beyond their own control, and telling them to face reality is like telling the parent of a dead child to stop talking about Heaven. They have a core drive which categorically cannot be satisfied. Talking trash on people who buy these pictures is just punching down theology, like when a Catholic trashes a Scientologist, like they have any room to talk.
Apologies for typos. Typing on my phone in line.
ReplyDeleteKev Ferrara-- I'm suspicious about that discount. There's no such thing as a free lunch. I'm guessing that the artist short changes the client on that "very powerful bonus option" that Richard had his eye on.
ReplyDeletechris bennett-- why do people continue to buy lottery tickets when their odds of winning are about equal whether they buy a ticket or not? I suspect they get pleasure just from fondling the possibilities-- that is, until the lottery is held at the end of the week. Then they buy another ticket.
Obviously my post is tongue in cheek, but I do think one of the great roles of artists as image makers through the millennia is their monopoly (at least before the invention of photography) on the ability to make sexual images. Since the days of prehistoric cave paintings, men have gone gaga over explicit drawings as a variation on sexual experience. It seems to me that these women looking for naked pictures of their future husbands are just looking to add long term commitment to an otherwise timeless temptation. These women have as good a chance marrying the dreamboat in the drawing as men have of making it with a Playboy centerfold, but men kept buying Playboy.
The internet is a flat and smooth surface across which images are smeared. It really does not matter if the jpeg you're looking at originated on Jack Davis' drawing board or in the synthesizing algorithms of an "artificial intelligence", the ontology of this particular social relation annihilates all hierarchies, all categories. Whenever an experience is taken out of the real world and into this, it becomes a part of the simulation, at once absolutely devalued and commodified. AI art is certainly likely to replace Real Person art, not AIs are better, faster, cheaper etc, but because Real Person art cannot exist here.
ReplyDeleteThe teenager's crudely scrawled vagina on the bathroom stall wall is superior to anything and everything our little lamps can beam into us. Until it is photographed and uploaded, of course. It's a banal fact that social media is antithetical to the social, but it's perhaps less commonly understood that it, in void of this non-space, sharing is annihilation.
"These women have as good a chance marrying the dreamboat in the drawing as men have of making it with a Playboy centerfold, but men kept buying Playboy." That's not true at all. Many ugly women have at least one sexual partner that could be described as a dreamboat. The experience was only made possible with the use of drugs but it's something tangible that makes them think it's possible to land a dreamboat. They think "beauty standards" are what is keeping attractive men from committing to them.
ReplyDeleteMost ugly men don't even have that experience to fuel their expectations and will settle for anything.
> Most ugly men don't even have that experience to fuel their expectations and will settle for anything.
ReplyDeleteThe average dude has an IV drip of porn and movies telling them they could have a 10. Men may be more willing to settle, foregoing the near term search for romantic love to ensure they have a consistent supply of sex, but the same problem exists in either case. And in either case, the arts are there to make life livable by allowing the parties to believe love could be in their future.
", the ontology of this particular social relation annihilates all hierarchies, all categories. "
ReplyDeleteAre you talking about Marxism or Critical Theory?
Any form of egalitarianism has to over time deny there are in differences among humans.
Porn doesn't acutally tell anyone what to expect. You must be a feminist or something.
ReplyDeleteIt's really regualr entertainment that tells most ugly man that the loser can get the promm queen.
To be specific, it's Hollywood. It's very obvious why the want to to promote the idea of the underdog winning but I won't get into it here.
Any situation where men are expected to sacrifice their lives, there is an expectation of access to potential women. We see it with the Jihadists expecting virgins in paradise and we see it with militaries all over the world. Men don't expect prom queens they just expect to get laid for putting their lives on the line 24/7. This has been addressed with allowing them to use local prostitutes which are not, overall 10s, since 10s don't really have to go into sex work to get money from men.
Men expect to get laid and as many people note, will sleep with almost any woman.
Women are only attracted to men who are 10s.
P=on doesn't acutally tell anyone what to expect. You must be a feminist or something.
ReplyDeleteIt's really regualr entertainment that tells most ugly man that the loser can get the promm queen.
To be specific, it's Hollywood. It's very obvious why the want to to promote the idea of the underdog winning but I won't get into it here.
Any situation where men are expected to sacrifice their lives, there is an expectation of access to potential women. We see it with the Jihadists expecting virgins in paradise and we see it with militaries all over the world. Men don't expect prom queens they just expect to get laid for putting their lives on the line 24/7. This has been addressed with allowing them to use local prostitutes which are not, overall 10s, since 10s don't really have to go into sex work to get money from men.
Men expect to get laid and as many people note, will sleep with almost any woman.
Women are only attracted to men who are 10s.
the ontology of this particular social relation annihilates all hierarchies, all categories.
ReplyDeleteNo it doesn't. Quality is still quality and crap still crap. Easy to see. In certain aspects of the art experience online there is a squashing of difference: size of the image, glassy surface yes, access, etc. But obviously not in every aspect.
I presume you swallowed a bunch of Walter Benjamin.
"You could write a five part encyclopedia on the deities and ceremonies that amount to porn and fortune cookies."
ReplyDeleteI don't think so.
A great many traditional societies simply assign people marriage partners, or make arrangements, or otherwise help things along in some clandestine way. Thus, hope - real hope (in the marital sense we are speaking of here) - springs eternal among the traditionalists, even for the mirror-crackers.
Until very recently the simple overwhelming existential difficulty of living precluded people from asking too much of life and love.
I am not talking about Marxism or Critical Theory, no. The flattening I am referring to is, metaphorically speaking, the egalitarianism of existence at ground zero of a nuclear strike, where there are similarly are "no differences among humans". So, more (late) Baudrillardian, probably.
ReplyDelete"The average dude has an IV drip of porn and movies telling them they could have a 10. "
ReplyDeleteYou must beafeminst or something. Ugly guys, not "average" guys do not get their expectations from p0wm but from other parts of society. Hollywood repeatedly makes movies where ugly men get an attractive woman. Then, there is religion, particularly j ihad Islam, that tells men that they will get a harem of women if they are willing to die for the cause.
"Until very recently the simple overwhelming existential difficulty of living precluded people from asking too much of life and love."
ReplyDeleteNice insight. Could be said of alot of things we now take for granted. The "labor of living" was soul and body and mind crushing up until about a 100 years ago. Gratitude is one of the hardest lessons to learn.
"A great many traditional societies simply assign people marriage partners, or make arrangements, or otherwise help things along in some clandestine way. Thus, hope - real hope (in the marital sense we are speaking of here) - springs eternal among the traditionalists, even for the mirror-crackers." They assigned women men because if left to female selection, most men would never have children because they just aren't 10s. Women are only attracted to men who are 10 or close to 10. Before anyone chimes in with examples from their neighborhood of Lake Wobegon, I'd just like to point out that many straight women are with men they do not find physically attractive at all and have to be pressured into have children with. This has been the norm for most of human history.
ReplyDeleteEvery society that doesn't do some form of coercion in terms of marriage, and leaves things up to female choice, has a very low birth rate. In the past, that would mean an entire tribe disappearing. Today, that is not a problem since we are told most places are overpopulated.
"They assigned women men because if left to female selection, most men would never have children because they just aren't 10s. Women are only attracted to men who are 10 or close to 10."
ReplyDeleteReally now. It's like you've never been out of doors.
> Until very recently the simple overwhelming existential difficulty of living precluded people from asking too much of life and love.
ReplyDelete> The "labor of living" was soul and body and mind crushing up until about a 100 years ago.
I think that because we are so divorced from the traditional knowledge of farming and food preservation, that pre-industrial survival appears to us insurmountably difficult.
I think the reality of survival was usually simpler than we would imagine. Take the pumpkin.
A single pumpkin seed, planted in good earth, will produce a vine which sprouts five to ten pumpkins. Each pumpkin provides about ~2000 kcals. Which means each seed alone produces between five and ten days of food for a large adult man, with almost no labor necessary. Quite passively, by replanting the seeds of a single pumpkin (say a mere ~50 pumpkin seeds), a man can produce most of his annual caloric needs on pumpkins alone.
Add other preposterously easy to grow and calorically dense foods like potatoes, winter squash, sweet potatoes, corn, grapes, etc., as well as a well-sized flock of chickens and an apiary, and a man can have all his family's nutritional needs met all year long, mostly passively. Before the collapse of our river, bay and sea fish populations, one could also survive with trivial effort on fish, shellfish, and crustaceans.
Starvation happened, but it is my reading of history that most famines were the result of government missteps (potato famine, Great Leap Forward) not the difficulty of acquiring food. To wit, life expectancy was not terribly different in prior centuries versus today, when you correct for deaths at childbirth and in the first 5 years of life.
We've had a habit since the Renaissance of describing prior periods as overly rough to prove the exceptionality of the present sciences. But man in prior times danced, drank, partied, flirted, read and wrote poetry, played and listened to music, and engaged in all other manner of entertainment and civic life. I see no compelling information to suggest that young men and women should not be preoccupied with romantic love -- from period journals, as well as the writings of Rabelais, Chaucer, Shakespeare, the Mabinogion, etc. we see a preoccupation with exactly the same sorts of concerns which plague our minds today.
"I think that because we are so divorced from the traditional knowledge of farming and food preservation, that pre-industrial survival appears to us insurmountably difficult."
ReplyDeleteMy mother picked on my Great Grandfather's farm during summers growing up. I know a hundred and fifty real life farm stories. And almost every one has the same basis; Farm life is absolutely brutal. Dangerous, exhausting, totally time consuming and fickle as hell. Weather is lifeblood to a farmer. If the weather goes bad, your entire family might go without food and you might lose your farm. The soil of a farm is constantly being depleted and it became increasingly hard to replenish it every year. And good luck farming scientifically before soil science. Forget even the logistics of getting goods to market while fresh, and competition, and insects and animals, and blight and spoilage, and thieves and the mob wanting a cut (my family's farm was extorted by Legs Diamond's mob in the 1930s). And so on.
My mother prayed for rain so she could sit inside for an hour and read a book. During winters the males chopped wood in the cold until their fingers bled and the smell of soot was everywhere. As soon as they could, every member of my extended family lit out for, so to speak, greener pastures.
"Survival was usually simpler than we would imagine. Take the pumpkin. A single pumpkin seed, planted in good earth, will produce a vine which sprouts five to ten pumpkins. Each pumpkin provides about ~2000 kcals. Which means each seed alone produces between five and ten days of food for a large adult man, with almost no labor necessary."
Pumpkins are more than 90% water, almost zero protein, and don't grow well in the cold. Good luck harvesting pumpkins for more than a few weeks in the fall. And good luck eating them as a kind of squash meal for more than a few days without projectile vomiting. There's a reason pumpkin pie is popular for a brief period during the fall. That's the season for it. And the most important part of the pie is the eggs, flour and sugar, not the pumpkin. Because that stuff will turn almost any garbage vegetable or fruit into a treat. Even so, note that pumpkin pie in peak season is nowhere near as popular as carving pumpkins for Halloween and then throwing them away when they rot.
it is my reading of history that most famines were the result of government missteps - potato famine, Great Leap Forward
You do understand that the world didn't start in the 1800s, right? And that traditionalism isn't exclusively western?
But man in prior times danced, drank, partied, flirted, read and wrote poetry, played and listened to music, and engaged in all other manner of entertainment and civic life.
When we start flipping back through the pages of history, we find that the chroniclers sought to preserve not the ordinary, but the extraordinary; the highlights. The blanks are left blank because redundancy and brutality are too depressing to set down in anything like their true relation to existence.
> Pumpkins are more than 90% water, almost zero protein, and don't grow well in the cold. Good luck harvesting pumpkins for more than a few weeks in the fall.
ReplyDeleteSteak is 70% water. A 2000 calorie diet of pumpkin alone would provide ~72g of protein a day, higher than the recommended intake of 56g for an adult man.
Prior to the 1800s, it was possible in many parts of the western west for a single fisherman to catch tens of large fish a day with a good net. Cockles, mussels, and frogs could all be collected by the basketfull by children. This is all well attested in the daily diaries of various colonists.
Outside of the west, the Hadza Hunter Gatherers of Tanzania live off of about 3 hours of hunting a day.
"I think the reality of survival was usually simpler than we would imagine."
ReplyDeleteMaybe, but we are actually pretty close to the time when life was "brutish, nasty (and often) short." That close distance constitutes our "bank of fortitude" that we should remember, for we have escaped much of what our grandparents had to suffer. Our grandparent's stories are accurate -- and we should listen to them. Much has changed and improved in the last 150 years, but people forget. When one mentions appreciating our "civilization" in conversation, its common to get the blank stare of forgetfulness.
Steak is 70% water. A 2000 calorie diet of pumpkin alone would provide ~72g of protein a day, higher than the recommended intake of 56g for an adult man.
ReplyDelete1 cup of beef has 32 grams of protein.
1 cup of pumpkin has 2 grams of protein.
So you'd need to eat 16 cups of pumpkin for every 1 cup of beef.
I wouldn't advise eating 16 cups of pumpkin, dear sir.
To get to 72 grams of pumpkin protein - which I really wouldn't advise - to meet your 2000 calorie set point, you'd need to eat 36 cups of pumpkin - which is approximately two whole 20 lb pumpkins (eaten as chunks) or 10 large pumpkin pies - a day.
Incidentally, at 12 grams of carbs per cup, 36 cups of pumpkin would be 432 grams of carbs. (Equal to two and half 19 oz Entenmann's Iced Chocolate Fudge Cakes a day) So even if you could hold all that fibrous vegetable matter down as a "pumpkin-only diet" and somehow digest it, you'd be diabetic in no time.
"the Hadza Hunter Gatherers of Tanzania live off of about 3 hours of hunting a day"
And after 3 days by a fire, a Hadza couple is considered married. And then children are squat-birthed in the bushes, which accounts for the very high mortality rate of children, very few of which make it to 15 years of age. Which (nobody ever points out) goes a long way to explaining why Hadza adults are so healthy and still able to find enough food.
Yes, it is true that you should not eat exclusively pumpkin meat. I would also not advise eating uncooked pumpkin (your 36 cups).
ReplyDeleteBroiled pumpkin has a similar GI to whole wheat bread. Carbohydrates are not all created equally.
And yes, traditional diets included amounts of plant matter that would today seem mind boggling to us. It is regularly remarked by anthropologists that the size of dumps taken by tribal people are freaking enourmous.
Broiled pumpkin has a similar GI to whole wheat bread. Carbohydrates are not all created equally.
ReplyDeleteIndeed. Speed of carb absorption is the crucial issue. The more thoroughly that carbs are tied up in their natural plant fiber, the slower the absorption and the more they are essentially fiber, which is to say, tied up in cellulose; indigestible vegetable matter.
The more processed (cooked, broiled, baked, ground, milled, bleached, smooshed, matured, irradiated, or by other means broken down chemically or physically) the more easily absorbed and the more the carbs become like sugar.
Thus, in its healthiest form, pumpkin is barely digestible. And thus it would be impossible to actually get 2000 calories digested out of 2000 calories worth of raw pumpkin. I should have mentioned that above. (So far more than 2 whole 20 lb pumpkins would need to be eaten to get the actual calories you targeted. But the 10 large pumpkin pies is probably accurate because it is already heavily processed.)
Once cooked, the fiber/cellulose starts to break down, and the sugar absorption starts to go up. I'm sure well-cooked pumpkin does near Whole Wheat Bread on the GI scale. But then again, "Whole Wheat Bread" is a tremendously processed carbohydrate-based food, and is one of the premier fraudulent health foods in the grand agribusiness con game.
Yes, again, you should need eat a diet of exclusively broiled pumpkin.
ReplyDeleteAnd whether pumpkin or wheat bread or rice have sufficiently low Glycemic Index to be your ideal staple carbohydrate doesn't seem all that relevant. East Asians have lived on a diet based in Congee for hundreds of years, which has a GI higher than Krispy Kreme Donuts.
My point was only that achieving the caloric and nutritional needs for survival in a pre-industrial society are much simpler than modern people imagine. Pumpkin is a good example since most of us live in the United States, and pumpkin was the go to crop for hungry and lazy people in the United States for hundreds of years.
When the European poor landed in the colonies they'd be given a small plot of land and told to grow four crops: Pumpkin, Squash, Corn, and Potatoes. European observers regularly remarked how Americans, left to their own devices from the crown and armed with only these simple crops, managed to not have any issues with starvation.
Survival is a very low bar and wasn't the original point. Suffering is survival.
ReplyDeleteLife in the premodern world was not much easier or freer than people have been led to believe. Not at all. That it was easy to farm anything is absurd, even pumpkins (Raccoons wiped out my brother's pumpkins last year, for instance.) And pumpkin was never a "go-to" crop. Rather, it was - as one historian called it - the "food of last resort." It could do a lot of essential things poorly in a pinch. So it was handy to have around and the colonists were lucky that it was an indigenous crop.
No offense, but I don't think you'd last two days as a farmer using the tools, knowledge and methods of the 1650s. One day of tilling and tending the land from morning to night would make you stiff as a board for a week. I think you'd have a whale of a time just mashing by hand enough pumpkin puree to give you a day's calories.
The idea that one can just live off mashed pumpkin, corn, and rice goo and be perfectly healthy - because, the argument goes, people did it - is also absurd.
Congee is and was used to pad out protein meals. Same as bread, potatoes, rice... and vegetables (which were considered a peasant food prior to the 20th century). The more carb and cellulose padding of the protein, the worse the diet and the more destitute the dieters. No significant protein in the diet for a few days and the body starts cannibalizing its own muscles and then, soon enough, edema, open sores, hair loss, fatty liver, and a cascade of additional horribles.
You should look up the amount of diseases and suffering that attended such life, and then add via imagination all the disease and suffering that went unremarked upon. You should consider every invention and technology created and every essential resource made plentiful after 1650 and then consider life before all those inventions came on the scene. Heck, just consider Winter without refrigeration and heating oil deliveries.
Loved your post! Your writing is both informative and captivating. Keep it up and write more!
ReplyDelete