Or that they're naturally inclined towards such behavior even without outside interference?
Basically this.
The Quakers were the OG cultural progressives. The American Civil War was largely instigated by rabble rousers from the London Yearly Meeting that travelled America inciting abolitionists. The Civil War was a Quaker holy war, if such a thing could exist. It annihilated us; many enlisted (during the early "the union generals suck" phase; and worse, most of them fought under Grant). Those who didn't die were largely converted by the much more militant Methodist and Lutheran preachers that joined the Union army as Chaplains.
The Friends are by far the most pacifistic, egalitarian, idealistic, and utopianist branch of Christianity. We were egalitarian about race and gender for a couple hundred years before any other branches were.
To put this in perspective, Quakers were not welcome in Unitarian, Universalist, and Puritan colonies (Pennsylvania was very Quaker, everyone else was very NOT). They were so radical, the Massachusetts Bay Colony had a law that if a Quaker was caught in Massachusetts... on the first offense they'd be kicked out. Second offence they'd be whipped to the border. Third offense, death.
King Charles II ultimately had to send them an order demanding that they stop executing Quakers for visiting Boston. You can beat 'em, just stop killing them.
Before I say Quakers sound based
Don't, cuz the majority of the Yearlys are really, really pro-BLM. Paradoxically, the "conservative" Quakers are the most radically progressive because of what "conservative" means in the context of the Friends. The Conservative Friends rejected the shift to evangelicalism (like having pastors and programmed worship) but because of it they're the MOST culturally progressive.
Yearly: Every Friends church participates in a larger "yearly" meeting. The specific yearly they participates in denoting their specific branch of the faith. In the US there are a couple dozen yearlys, roughly grouped into four basic camps. These are the Conservatives, the Evangelical Friends, the Friends United Meeting, and the Friends General Conference. I for example grew up with the Iowa Yearly (Conservative) but right now I don't attend meetings because Iowa Yearly is... pretty leftist and I don't have any other meeting options.
saying it's because the calendar told me to cheapens whatever I did
Yes, precisely.
Now, you'd be hard pressed to find quakers who are SO uptight about fun that they don't do kids birthdays. But, like, worthy events to gather for would be accomplishments: graduations and weddings for example. Also Easter. Easter and the concept of the resurrection is waaaaay more important than Christmas, because part of our thing is that god is among everyone.
So we just cancel it all because le consumerism?
Also paganism.
Basically what I'm saying is that my position is that celebrating these holidays should be beneath any Christian, or at least any who claim to not be Catholic.
I mean, cuz let's face it, we've been fighting the Catholics for five hundred years, they're not gonna change.
This originally WAS our utopia. Iowa was mostly Quaker in 1850.
Maybe if we hadn't sacrificed an entire generation cleaning up the founders' mess we'd still be the largest denomination in the midwest and people would say first day instead of sunday.
Because by and large they were hijacked by brazen consumerism decades ago.
Better to end the public observance, give people a month of personal holiday each year, and let the people who actually do give a shit about this or that holiday celebrate as they will.
I'm Quaker. Holidays kinda aren't a thing for us.
Imagine each year having the exact same days/dates. Every 14th would be a Thursday every year for eternity.
You mean every 12th. And every month has a Friday the 13th.
And the Cotsworth Calendar is actually cool and we should totally adopt it. Here's how it works:
There are 13 months of exactly 28 days. At the end of the year there are one or two leap days that operate on the Gregorian system. The leap days are considered to be part of a "14th" month that is generally treated as a holiday, and/or lumped into the preceding month for purposes of billing.
From an accounting and scheduling perspective it would be much simpler to have fixed length months with a holiday leap. It would eliminate the "three check month" phenomena that hits most employees roughly quarterly, where the difference between biweekly pay and monthly bills results in a sudden jump or drop in cash on hand.
Factory farming is propped up purely based on government funding and censorship of the negative aspects of it
No, it became the norm post-Borlaug because its efficient as fuck.
If the cities vanished, right now, 75% of the population vanished and food demand dropped accordingly, do I believe that rural farming would go back to yeoman farmer America?
No, I don't.
Oh, you'll see SOME reductions of the extremes. Fewer feedlots, fewer high density hog enclosures. But will farmers stop using glyphosate? No. Fuck no. No chance, as long as the energy industry is there to produce it.
Why? Because it's efficient. Spraying isn't free. They're not doing it because they feel pressured by demand to do it. They're doing it because if they don't their yields drop. In other words it costs less to buy spray then the drop in yield would cost them if they didn't spray. It's a completely cold economic assessment, cost of spray vs cost of lost yield.
THAT WON'T CHANGE.
At least not without a total collapse in the energy sector. Or a precipitous drop in demand and prices such that it's no longer economical to spray.
Good.
Supply chain collapse, and or extended down comms
Realistically this won't happen without a collapse of the energy economy. Oh, we can have shortages, or complete runouts. But the system keeps churning as long as people can get food, which is predicated on energy. Fuel to move food around, and electricity to keep it cold (and/or make it hot). If people can't buy clothes, widgets, or shit from ikea, modernity doesn't end, people just go without shit they probably didn't need anyway.
Loss of communications is itself not sufficient to trigger a total failure of energy and food distribution. Because those systems operate partly on MOMENTUM, whether bureaucratic or mechanical. Piggly Wiggly opened decades before they had computers in every store and they did fine. Hell, the store I worked in as a kid only had a proper actual computer to track video rentals. Whenever we got a truck, we gave the driver our (on paper) order for the next shipment. Literally sneakernet.
Now, as for your point about a biological attack... unlikely to happen. Explaining WHY it's unlikely to happen would require going into pages about R0. Oh, you can make deadly biological agents. But they generally have to be deployed in the same fashion as chemicals. They're paradoxically TOO lethal to actually spread in the wild. LIke, literally, a virus that deadly is not likely to be that transmissible.
You could pick up a handful of dirt and there are deadlier viruses in your hand then man could think up. But they're too deadly to be effectively weaponized on a large scale, you have to keep manufacturing it, it's R0 in the wild will simply be too low.
Spanish flu is the sweet spot. You really can't expect more from a readily transmissible virus. There are deadlier, they don't spread anywhere near as fast or easily. There are faster spreading, they aren't as deadly. It's a biological balancing act.
I have no horse in that race.
Yeah I'm still trying to figure out what race you're running.
My perception is that you want to return to a pre-Borlaug yeoman farmer America. But you're being evasive on how the fuck that would happen.
That hasn't even happened in fucking South Africa. WAR IS NOT ENOUGH to bring that kind of backslide. It's too slow.
If you want Amish America, great as that may sound, you need to explain what you are envisioning will happen to make it so. Because I don't see any way of that happening short of OVERWHELMINGLY catastrophic instantaneous damage that knocks out the energy economy on a global scale. War alone won't do that.
You missed my point entirely.
You assume that there would be an infrastructure collapse to the point where the energy economy cannot sustain post-Borlaug farming.
That won't happen unless the disruption happens so instantly that the energy sector doesn't have time to backslide to Victorian era technologies that could sustain it (like bringing back coal gasification for example).
You don't get the yeoman farmer back unless the entire energy sector is an instant smoking crater. And even that will only be temporary.
I think people who think like you do get too hung up on the performative, de jure aspects of governance, rather than focusing on the de facto reality on the ground.
You haven't spent enough time out in the corn.
The previous nullification battle was marijuana. It is now the case that, in many states, the federal government has been shown to be completely toothless. The laws are still on the books, but you can go buy an ounce openly, on a credit card even.
The next hurdle will be firearms. I believe in the next ten years the reality on the ground will diverge radically from BATF rules. In 2040, there will be states where you'll be able to procure suppressors, SBRs, and open bolt full autos openly. The laws will still be on the books, but local law enforcement cooperation will be zero in the red states.
Assuming Washington hasn't already given up the ghost at that point and admitted that the country as a whole has become ungovernable.
That's not going to happen.
Do you know what the reality of "agrarian culture and economy" looks like today?
It's a neo-baron sitting fifteen feet in the air on a bigass harvester that weighs as much as a locomotive and costs about a million dollars. It drives itself and he's just there to sip coffee and listen to the talk radio, and push the brake if a deer gets in the way (or maybe not; corn heads can handle ingesting smallish animals).
Hundred years ago a farmstead was measured in acres. Nowadays it's in square miles. Typical farmer today can work a knight's fee worth of land with just a couple helpers with CDL's to drive the grain trucks.
I know there are whole TOWNSHIPS worth of land (essentially, baronies) under single ownership out in Nebraska. At that scale, it isn't even about the grain, they're usually feeding pigs or chickens.
Obviously this is just the stay decision, not a permanent injunction.
But the language in the stay shows very clearly that the court is likely to ultimately rule against the government.
"On the dubious assumption that the Mandate does pass constitutional muster—which we need not decide today—it is nonetheless fatally flawed on its own terms."
Cordell Hull (SecState) and Roosevelt wanted them to do it.
US Ambassador Joseph Grew sent Hull a message that basically amounted to "WTF ARE YOU MADMEN DOING?!" (in a lot more words) after they snubbed Fumimaro Konoe's negotiation attempts. Grew realized that Hull wanted the Konoe government to fail, so they'd get Tojo who would give them the war they wanted. Grew was furious about being led on by Washington and went to Hoover with a tell-all.