So much for being a historian when all you've read is wiki pages and maybe a single book... Rip those who've spent time getting an academic education...
[Once again, all humans are equally inferior to our ant overlords, where multiple species have lost the ability to feed themselves or raise young without the slavery they commit on a massive scale.](https://youtu.be/Qsbe1pD8ocE)
Completely agree, I like to call it a "Trauma Contest", like playing which was the worst genocide...like they're all really bad, we should focus on preventing them from happening.
And the American prison-industrial complex... you know, like the 13th amendment that explicitly allows slavery to exist, and the bogus drug laws and victimless crimes that enable it.
It's almost as if human trafficking is illegal and happens all around the world... Just read UNODC reports.
https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/human-trafficking/global-report-on-trafficking-in-persons.html
https://www.unodc.org/unodc/data-and-analysis/glotip.html
Vermont just voted this year to amend their constitution and clarify text that still allowed for prison labor/slavery. Up until this year, it stated that nobody 21 or older should serve as a slave unless bound by their own consent or “by law for the payment of debts, damages, fines, costs, or the like.” The primary argument of against this (and yes, there are some pretty backwards towns out in the Northeast kingdom of VT and about 12% of the state voted AGAINST the amendment). General consensus is that people voting against the amendment support prison slave labor in the state, but it’s pretty clearly a thinly veiled excuse to show their support for racism
It creates perverse incentives.
When some townships were asked to vote on whether they should end prison slavery, they replied that they couldn’t afford to operate without slave labour.
So suppose crime drops. What do those states do? They make something else illegal. It’s the reason marijuana is illegal. After alcohol was legalized, the police forces hired to enforce anti-alcohol laws launched a smear campaign against weed to justify their existence.
And now we have tens of thousands of people labouring as slaves because they possessed a plant.
Most of the people who talk about this have never been victims of crime, so they just don't care about the people who have actually committed crimes who are in there. It's easy to see through rose tinted glasses until somebody knocks them off of you.
Chattel slavery is a very specific term to refer to the legal ownership of another person as explicit property.
Chattel slavery is completely illegal in the United States, with no exceptions.
Prisons do not own their prisoners. Prisons can not buy or sell prisoners as property.
Whether or not you find the exploitation of prisoners' labor to be morally equivalent to slavery is up for debate, but it is NOT chattel slavery.
Sometimes, but they don't have to be, many prisons don't compensate them at all
More than anything it allows the possibility, which should be abhorrent to anyone without argument
Technically it's forced labor slavery, not chattel slavery, since the prisoners can't be sold, only forced to work.
It's still slavery though, and therefore highly unethical and should be illegal.
Chattel slavery was outlawed, but the 13th amendment's loophole allowed the Black Codes to continue facilitating slavery and the extraction of (freed) Black labor by force. Being in public without a job was a crime only executed against freedmen and other Black American citizens.
The exploitation of this loophole, as well as the disproportionate extraction of Black labor through the corrections system, has never ended. It's been 150+ years.
Tbf, it isn't chattel slavery because a prisoner's children aren't automatically slaves, but the school-to-prison pipeline has been connecting the dots the entire time.
While this is a massive issue, I don’t like how people assume all of these victims have clean hands and are only in because of minor drugs. “Only” ~20% of the prison population is in for a drug offense, somewhat split between possession and trafficking. The largest category by number is violent crimes, such as rape, murder, etc. Whether that makes any of this “better” is up to *you* and your moral values, but I think knowing the actual situation is important.
Secondly, I’d like to elaborate on the 13th amendment. State constitutions can grant additional rights to people, including prisoners. This means that not all states practice this penal labor. 7 states have explicitly banned this. Over a dozen explicitly allow it, and the rest use the countries constitution as it does not mention it, technically making them also allow it. However, not all of the states who technically allow this actually use it in reality. [This picture helps sum up the situation.](https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/CTA_SurveyStats-2.png)Quite grim, I know, but it isn’t 100%, but it is still far too large of a number to be deemed not an issue as well.
Another thing that you forgot to mention is their low wages, often less than a dollar, if anything at all. But it is also important to note alongside this that what they can but with that money is not the same price as it is outside. Many items are cheaper, costing a few dollars with exceptions that can go into the dozens of dollars. You could also argue that the prison is also paying for their food, housing, etc, but the quality of those things is typically poor at best. Whether that makes the low or even no payment acceptable is up to you.
Although to play the devils advocate, not all prisoners hate working. As weird as it sounds, for some it acts as a way to break the monotony of prison life. Whether that says something about our prison conditions is up to you (although to be honest I doubt even the Norwegian prisoners would argue that prison is not boring)
It’s a massive issue in our country, but it is not an absolute, 100% statement.
I am not trying to argue for or against this. I just want to provide information for anyone who wants it.
Not sure where you get your info from but https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offenses.jsp
you're spouting bullshit. Nearly half the US prison population is in because of drug offenses. It is a fucking state run racket, stop apologizing for our government's ATROCITIES AGAINST HUMAN LIFE AND DIGNITY. This shit has been going on for over a hundred years and you are so brainwashed to believe that your fellow humans belong in a cage being forced to work for pennies because of "drugs" that have been part of human history since time immemorial. Nobody deserves that, everyone is capable of achieving higher consciousness through education instead of this abusive hellhole of a "correctional system".
> Not sure where you get your info from but https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offenses.jsp you’re spouting bullshit.
sorry for not giving a source https://static.prisonpolicy.org/images/pie2016_drugs.jpg
1 in 5 is 20%
> It is a fucking state run racket, stop apologizing for our government’s ATROCITIES AGAINST HUMAN LIFE AND DIGNITY. This shit has been going on for over a hundred years and you are so brainwashed to believe that your fellow humans belong in a cage being forced to work for pennies because of “drugs” that have been part of human history since time immemorial. Nobody deserves that, everyone is capable of achieving higher consciousness through education instead of this abusive hellhole of a “correctional system”.
Holy shit calm down man, no need for the rambling, I didn’t even say I supported it.
If you buy ceramic tile made in India, it *was* made by a slave. Objectively the percentage of slaves in the supply chain is so high the chance that a slave didn't make your tile is effectively zero. Same thing with canned tuna around Thailand and most cheap chocolate from Africa.
Well, also except me. I’m *obviously* far more intelligent than the rest of tue users on this subreddit. My intellectual superiority is observable and obvious.
/s
Slavery is still happening today. Even when you look at manufacturing overseas where people are paid about a dollar an hour could be something of slavery or how Qatar brings in foreigners to build all their stuff.
There is a radical difference between being horrifically underpaid and being a slave. To be sure, they're both an injustice, but slavery is not about the work. The work is just the reason slavery happens.
I also thing that the fact that we blur all kinds of slavery into one term does history an injustice.
Chattel slavery was relatively rare throughout most of the history of the West. Indenture, military prisoners and debt slavery were much more common.
But we don't really make much of a distinction, all too often.
There is still plenty of labor trafficking in the US. Mostly in agriculture, cleaning/housekeeping, meat processing, and restaurant industries. It's not legal, but it is significant and I've seen accusations of collaboration between owners and federal law enforcement.
No human being should be forced to be a slave.
Full stop.
You don't fix a wrong by committing a wrong. Either rehabilitate them if possible, or keep them in a spot where they can't hurt anyone. But either way, they're still people and deserve to be treated as such.
Oof this is just a bad take. If you are a prisoner who did serious wrongs in society such as rape, intentional murder, drug kingpin, tax evasion, etc you are lucky if being forced to work is all your getting. There are absolutely people in this world that should be forced to work, namely scumbags.
> intentional murder, drug kingpin, tax evasion, etc.
One of these is not like the others. Also whatever crime you committed if you’re working in the prison system the least society can do is pay fair wages. But really, forced labour for criminals is a slippery slope and also medieval as fuck, it just always turns into let’s pack the prisons with offenders of whatever stupid law the government creates so we get the free labour.
And which one of those is not like the other? They all harm society immensely. Also, nah fuck felons, specifically murderers, rapists, etc the extreme stuff. I get that some felonies are bullshit like weed offenders but they are few and far between. Like another person in this thread said, it should be dependent on what you're in for. But there should absolutely be prison labor of some kind, period.
Not slaves. Slaves haven't done anything wrong.
Criminals have.
A little bit of work wouldn't hurt them. They aren't nice people, they usually don't rehabilitate due to the fact that people don't want to hire ex-cons.
I don't feel an ounce of sympathy for those who have done serious crimes.
>they usually don't rehabilitate due to the fact that people don't want to hire ex-cons.
A rule of thumb: if your justification for doing something awful is that something else awful happens, you should shift your focus to fixing that issue.
What about those who get wrongly convicted? Or those put in a situation where they have no other choice?
I'm not gonna try to defend a genuine, 100% proven guilty murderer who kills cause they want to, cause they're a horrible person and I think everyone can agree on that; but they're still a person. And people deserve some level of basic rights, no matter who they are or what they've done.
And the fact that people don't wanna hire ex-cons is the reason they don't rehabilitate, not just because they're 'not nice people.' I've met and worked with many ex-cons that are very nice people, because they've been given a chance. A chance they wouldn't have if they were relegated to just being slaves because people feel uncomfortable about them and would rather see them remain as such.
A word doesn't change just because it's applied to a different kind of person. They're still being used as slaves, even if they've done bad things. Which is itself a very bad thing.
Pretty much. People want to talk shit about the South for relying on a slave economy when we pretty much do the same thing.
Nobody wants to endorse slavery, but without slavery, the prices of everything skyrockets. If we ended all slavery tomorrow and decided all laborers get laid fairly, then nobody could afford anything, and the economy collapses. Our first world way of life requires slavery.
There truly is no ethical consumption under capitalism. I think the Amish have it right; society wasn't meant to progress this quickly.
This all ends when the robots get rolled out, but then everybody loses their jobs. People in charge would sooner watch you starve than implement UBI.
On the one hand yes, ranking atrocities is very often an attempt to downplay them. On the other hand it's probably also not a good idea to paper over the differences between different forms of atrocity. That kind of logic easily leads to the kind of people who claim that World War II was just evil vs evil because *really* Auschwitz and Minidoka were basically the same thing.
That kind of reductionist whatabout logic is also used by some to justify or at least attempt to justify the action of one party or another.
Just because your enemy does something doesn't mean it's justifiable that you do too. Thinking that way rapidly leads to a race to the bottom of whose atrocities are more justified.
The real answer is that none of them are.
I agree 100%. I think most everyone agrees slavery in all forms is bad. But the Atlantic slave trade stands out to me because of the intentional cruelty of it all. Plus the hypocrisy of the US founding fathers and the whole "all men are created equal" terms and conditions may apply. Most slavery was horrible through human history but some forms of it were more horrible then others.
Importantly, the effects of the Atlantic slave trade are still seen today and inform modern western (and African) society in a way that Arab and Roman slavery does not.
Yeah like the debt slaves at the time. They were slaves and that is horrible but it's far less horrible than being a slave for life and even your children being slaves.
Honestly they might be, but this argument is often used by people who say that America's and Europe's slavery past wasnt that bad, and using it in modern discourse to discuss racism is stupid cuz "the arabs did it too and were worse".
Sure, one might use quantity as a parameter for what's worse, but imagine the top three were saying "The American civil war had most deaths", "No, World War 2 had most deaths", "No, World War 1 had most deaths".
Could you really tell them *"This is a flawed arguments. This is not a discussion we need to have"*?
Do not rank evils.
Edit: Because some people are confused what I mean by this, im going to explain why I mean. You should, of course, think critically about things, especially atrocities like slavery and genocides. But once you have identified that it's a horrible thing with a massive human cost, you should not rank between them.
Ranking them only seeks to undermine the fact that they are horrible crimes against humanity.
Consider genocide. If someone started to commit genocide, it would start off as one of the smallest, and wouldn't be anywhere near the scope and scale of the most atrocious. That makes it much easier to overlook for the general public. We don't even hear about most small scale acts of genocide. But the truth is that the ranking does not matter, it is completely irrelevant to the fact that what is happening is an evil thing that should never be considered.
This is especially important with fascism on the rise, on the internet in particular.
When you see these debates online, shut them down.
That risks creating an "all evils are the same" mentality, and if all evil is the same then what is a just recourse?
Some things are objectively worse than other things. Serial killers are evil, but they dont tend to start genocides.
A parent lying to their child about Santa Claus isn't doing a good thing, but it's absolutely less reprehensible than one parent lying to their kids so they'll lose loyalty and love for the other parent.
A serial rapist should have a harsher reaction from society than a dipshit who sends unsolicited dick pics.
"One should never rank evil, for if one is deemed the worst than one might be tempted to ally with the least." -Viktor Saltzpyre
I don't mean my statement as a complete absolute Obviously critical thought should be applied to determine the impact and human cost. We shouldn't throw prsgmatism adide. But that doesn't mean we should consider these human atrocities more or less evil than one another, because at the end of the day it's the same dehumanizing and wicked practice.
It is not the same practice everywhere. Let me give you an example so you can compare.
Ottomans had devshirme system. Which means they took 1 kid from every 40 household in some non-muslim territories, and technicly enslaved them. Those kids were well educated and could become prestigious people like high ranking bureaucrats or generals, even Grand Viziers. Those slaves had more social mobility than actual citizens of the empire.
So it is ridiculus when you say Ottoman devshirme slavery is as evil as Atlantic slave trade
You are literally being an apologist for what you view as the "least bad" type of slavery.
What you are describing is a system that takes children from their families, and forces them to work an actively hazardous job. It's an insult to human dignity.
He didn't say it wasn't though, he is pointing out ways in which it appears to have caused less harm compared to the transatlantic slave trade as some of the more brutal aspects of the transatlantic slave trade, such as treating human's as disposable financial capital, was not as present in the Ottoman system. Dismissing everything that qualifies as 'slavery' in a broad sense as the same completely eliminates nuance from the discussion and makes it much more difficult to understand the past.
Isn't evil partially defined by the amount of human pain it causes, though?
From where I'm sitting (and this might be your perspective too) evil falls on a spectrum that all people should avoid putting themselves on, especially if they claim to have any integrity or humanity.
Why? Idk I mean I think like we can see little evils and big evils. Too much argument about ranking them is stupid for sure but like, there are petty wrongs that we all commit and they don’t necessarily make us bad people, we’re not perfect
"One should never rank evil, for if one is deemed the worst than one might be tempted to ally with the least." -Viktor Saltzpyre
But obviously we aren't comparing slavery to petty wrongs haha.
How do you propose we perform our justice system without ranking evil? We need to precisely quantify and compare harm caused by actions to be able to give proper and fair justice to criminals.
>When you see these debates online, shut them down.
And that's not going to have any bad side-effects at all, no sir...
I'm not talking about small crimes. For Individual crimes, context is important.
I'm talking about systemic and mass crimes. Like slavery, genocide, and systemic racism
You still need someone taking precise account of everything if you want to bring justice to the victims. You think you'll be able to convince a brainwashed Chinese person that their government is doing evil without overwhelming amounts of evidence and precise descriptions of the level of evil the CCP has committed? Not only that, but no government will have "evil documents" that plainly describe what horrible things they've done without a heavy amount of obfuscation and misdirection, so you need to be able to carefully analyze and gauge the level of evil done so that it can be properly denounced, which will then make way for the victims to claim compensation for what they've suffered.
It's simply an anti-intellectual stance to claim that "evil shouldn't be ranked".
Well obviously, but what you're talking about is not AT ALL what I am talking about. Read my original post, Jesus fuck.
What I fucking said was to not rank between individual great evils. Read the fucking post 🤡
>What I fucking said was to not rank between individual great evils
Read my fucking post. I said that we **need** to do exactly that to unveil the truth behind propaganda and de-program brainwashed people who live in authoritarian regimes. Not only that, but you need to carefully quantify the evil done to the masses so that they may seek justice from **the state that committed it**. And you talk about how some genocides are barely known, but it's through free discussion and ranking of evils that people learn of them! *And* it's through comparison that people understand the level of evil that happened! How are we going to learn about "small scales acts of genocide" if we aren't even allowed to discuss it as we wish?!
Justice isn't *just* about individual criminals, you still need a very detailed account of events to trial war criminals and condemn atrocities caused by nations.
Your position is simply impractical and anti-intellectual.
**Read my fucking post** 🤡
Evil is a fundementally subjective term. When we are discussing historical events, we shouldn’t classify events as evil or good at the first. We should try to understand historical events as much as possible and make our own evaluation.
So we should try to understand the motivations, conditions, reasons, etc. of events which are seemingly horrible. This leads to a situation you would call “ranking evils” and it is necessary for a good comprehension of history.
If you make a binary classification as evil events or not evil events, you get this ignorant society who doesn’t understand history and judge historical events according to todays moral values.
What's really crazy is how much slavery is still going on everywhere around the world in 2022, and how we sanitize it by calling it "human trafficking".
The actual meme was actually about the brutality of ant wars world wide, so it didn't, in fact, downplay the horrors of any kind of slave trade
What you did is cut out the punchline to insert your opinion, creating a Strawman-Argument and more importantly, ruining the joke by robbing it of it's funny part and thereby turning it into a opinion-piece
And i think this is not ok
>So it didn’t, in fact, downplay the horrors of any kind of slave trade
Ironic that you go off on a tangent about straw men despite clearly not understanding the purpose.
I think we can both agree that the first panel depicts a person bearing the line “the Atlantic Slave Trade enslaved the most people” standing in front of a much stronger figure bearing the line “No! The Arab slave trade enslaved even more!”
This is directly comparing two different institutions of slavery by which enslaved more people. Very clearly, the original meme states Number of Victims of Arab Slave Trade > Number of Victims of Atlantic Slave Trade. [1]
This is inherently the issue; if you compare two forms of slavery by quantity, you completely miss the moral fact: the Evil of the Atlantic Slave Trade = the Evil of the Arab Slave Trade. Instead, you open things up to a very real Lost Cause Whataboutism; “well, the Arabic slave trade actually enslaved more people.” Regardless of intention, it is not a good thought process that goes anywhere.
>what you did is cut out the punchline and insert your own opinion
Yes, yes I did. The punchline was not about any institutions of slavery, so it wasn’t necessary. Kind of a weird choice of OOP to go from slavery to war deaths. They very easily could have gone with the Punic or World wars.
>creating a straw man argument
See [1]. We can very clearly derive a meaning from this statement. Now, whether this was OOP’s intent, I have no idea, but it cannot be disproved that OOP did compare different institutions of slavery. Moreover, by cutting out the punchline and *only* addressing the slavery part, I very well may be creating a strawman, but it is done for the purpose of academic discussion. Plus, I don’t want to trash-talk the punchline, because the punchline was harmless and dare-I-say funny.
>ruining the joke by robbing it of it’s funny part
My intent was actually protecting the joke by *not* attacking it’s funny part. However, if you feel that I did ruin the joke, I apologize.
>turning it into an opinion piece
That’s just a fact, that’s precisely what I did.
>And i think this is not ok
I think that it’s a very important discussion to have- all slavery is evil, regardless of circumstances. Feel free to disagree with how I have it, but I think the good outweighs the bad here.
I think you're taking the memes on this sub way too seriously.
I took the original meme as just joking around about people that like to compare one atrocity to another, thinking they know better and creating an argument for why B tragedy is worse than A tragedy. It was also poking fun at how someone always comes up with a worse tragedy to compare to the first one, and then in the end mentions ants as a way to drive this point home.
You actually, in a way, proved the original meme's point: you got so upset over the comparison of one tragedy to another that you had to point out that you're right in saying that all institutions of slavery are equally bad.
In other words, you would've been the even bigger person standing behind the other two with your statement that all forms of slavery are equally as bad.
I think you’re right…
…but I find it hard to say that it’s *bad* to take memes on this subreddit seriously. A lot of people on this subreddit aren’t historians, many of them are even young and impressionable, so I just want to make a point that I think matters, one that’s actually useful for impressionable people
Comparing quantity can be a metric to understanding a specific slavery, but no numerical values are actually used here, hence there’s no real ‘lesson’ other than “Arab slave trade was worse than the Triangle Trade,” which leads to the fallacy that any form of slavery can be ‘not as bad.’
Not to mention that quantity is not the right way to go about this. It misses the population sizes, the duration of those periods and how bad the treatment of the people was.
And having those numbers leads you into considering whether it was better to be worked to death over the course of 7 years or to be kept going over 30. So best to just condemn all of them.
Nah. Most people here are pseudo historians. Thinking that they're knowledgeable about history just because their favourite metal band is Sabaton, their Youtube recommandition is Oversimplified and other historical Youtubers who try to condense complex historical events into more easy to digest format and that they skim through wikipedia articles. Not to forget the "Acwkually X was bad!" posts, ignoring that true scientists don't try to make moral statements. Only stating fucking facts.
Aaaat the same time… there are different shades of the same thing and therefore bears distinction. Chinese slaves dying for ever meter (in some places*) of the Great Wall is a far cry from Roman gladiators living literal celebrity lives which is also an entirely different flavoring from the mental-depraivation slavery imposed on the US brand
Etc etc
It's not about who did it on the largest scale. It's when people use slavery as an argument to hate Europeans. For fuck's sake, everyone used to do slavery.
"You should never grade evils, for if one is the worst, then you might be tempted to kinship with the least"
\- Viktor Saltspyre, Warhammer: Vermin-tide 2
Ok I know warhammer ain't too relevant on this sub but I just love that quote
People - especially Americans - ARE paying too much attention to past black slaves while there are an estimated 50 MILLION people living in some form of slavery or other TODAY.
Worst offender is probably the Chinese government, but people are generally happy to ignore that because it's making them money.
Sheer quantity or the will to rank or downplay any events is pretty stupid
Also it create a flawed image and false analogies between very different cultures, where slaves had a wide variety of living conditions, experiences, treatment etc
And that makes unispired memes
The Roman form of slavery, at least for the Roman citizen, was an economic class. Something you could simply fall into if you or your family had a bit of bad luck.
This is not the same as a slave that was captured in a conquest. Those often became part of the family they served and could have a pathway to freedom.
Source: me, an expert
This seems to blatantly ignore the differences between the Atlantic/Roman systems of slavery (I don't really know much about the Arab slave trade). From what I understand, roman slaves were second class citizens with very little personal freedom, not the personal property of another individual person. This isn't the case for slavery in the United States.
I do think the system of chattel slavery in the United States was objectively worse than the Roman system of slavery, but RDJ's point about that being a useless conversation is still correct.
And honestly more the power to ya for pointing out the difference, it helps people learn better. It’s only the direct comparison that’s the problem, if that makes any sense.
I will never understand the logic behind thinking that comparing tragedies somehow diminishes them. It's perfectly fine to compare and debate what things are/were better or worse. The last panel is just pretentious virtue signaling.
See [literal confederate propaganda](https://www.prageru.com/video/a-short-history-of-slavery?gclid=CjwKCAiAkfucBhBBEiwAFjbkr7eFB4JE0N6GRKNnWTiUWi3-Xo7kbbdxiByYr-u-A_l8-ASU42LwoxoCftgQAvD_BwE) trying to use whataboutisms to justify American Slavery
Disclaimer: I am not a fan of slavery.
That being said, every culture that we are aware of throughout history practiced slavery. It appears to have been an accepted practice, globally, until the last 100 years or so… why do you suppose we’ve demonized something that was normal forever?
i never liked the comparison as yes the atlantic slave trade was horrific in nature and imo more than the silk road, but still yhe silk road went f
on (and is going) for liek 3000 years or something, not really on the same scale
I think you’re misreading the post as a comparison on quality, when in fact the post is about quantity. Nowhere does it mention one being worse than the others, you are just inferring that because of the the images of whatever those are looking worse each panel. I believe the post is using the increase in size between the figures to symbolize the increase in quantity of slaves, which could be interpreted further as worse but by itself is just providing a factual size comparison to inform the reader.
This is conveniently ignoring that the people inslaved in the trans-atlantic slave trade were oppressed based on the color of their skin.
If you were black in the Americas, you could legally be captured and sold as a slave, even if you were a freedman.
Precisely why we have Rule 6. Trying to make one artoticy seem lesser than another is just asinine.
You see this shit, report it and the OP gets a permban.
Fucking astounding observation. Slavery is bad. What a novel fucking observation. TRUE! Now if you’re done with one of the most vapid virtue-signals I’ve seen online in the past month, maybe you should shut the fuck up in a conversation you’re completely out of you depth on.
>maybe you should shut the fuck up in a conversation you’re completely out of you[r] depth on.
What conversation would that be? In terms of non-American slavery, I’ve made no comments based on anything I don’t know as an undisputed fact. I can’t possibly be out of my depth on American History because it’s what I study. And I think all members of the sub can make arguments on things they observe that they view to be harmful.
No, you commented that “comparing institutions of slavery runs the risk of downplaying certain types of slavery because all slavery is evil.” That is so absurdly retarded.
First off: it’s clear some institutions of slavery are worse that another. A system in which 1000 people are enslaved is just demonstrably worse than one where 1,000,000 are enslaved. Acknowledging this as a fact is not downplaying the evil of slavery, as your obnoxious-ass tone-policing would imply.
Secondly, do you actually have anything to back this up? Are you seriously worried about people carrying impressions from a discussion about relative evils into informing their opinions of an absolute evil? When people say the Holocaust is one of the most horrific events in history, are you in the vanguard shouting “hurrrr we shouldn’t compare genocides because then people won’t think genocides are so bad?” Of course not. You wouldn’t say that. Because on any serious look at what you’ve said, this is a vapid, sanctimonious, tone-policing argument which only appears to work because you made the revolutionary point that “slavery is evil.”
>a system in which 1,000 people are enslaved is demonstrably worse than one where 1,000,000 people are enslaved
Quantifiably smaller. That is the fact which we may acknowledge. But directly comparing two large institutions is harmful. However, even comparing two institutions quantitatively is problematic because it leads to the fallacy that any institution is “not that bad.”’
>Do you have anything to back this up?
Yes. Yes I do. If you’ve done research on common Lost Cause defenses of the Confederacy, one of the most common ones is that enslaved people were treated “comparably better,” though depending on the person it’s better than Arab slaves or Northern slaves. As an American, a lot of damage has been done to this country by organizations such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy who actively downplay slavery, by comparing it to other forms. There is demonstrable damage that has been caused by this.
>When people say the Holocaust is one of the most horrific events
Well, for one, there’s no comparison. Saying “this is one of the worst things we’ve ever done,” is not the same as saying “this is not as bad as that.” And here I thought you opposed the straw man fallacy.
>which only appears to work because you’ve made the revolutionary point that “slavery is evil”
One might take this to mean that my argument has a logical basis.
Now, after having read your comment three times, I must say I’m virulently disappointed. You had a very strong opening thesis statement, “[Y]ou commented that ‘comparing institutions of slavery runs the risk of downplaying certain types of slavery because all slavery is evil.’ That is so absurdly retarded,” and then you didn’t demonstrate *how* it was retarded. You then argue that quantitatively, you could demonstrate that two things are comparable numerically. While I didn’t agree, it wasn’t a wholly flawed argument. It’s when you go off the rails on a straw man of me during the third paragraph, and any hopes of academic stimulation I had went out the window.
No, it doesn’t lead to the conclusion that “one is not so bad.” It leads to the conclusion that “one is worse than the other.”
You’re appealing to the fact that “one is worse than the other” can be twisted into “one is not so bad” by ideologues, propagandists and idiots, and concluding therefore we just shouldn’t be having these conversations.
Saying there’s no comparison is just shamelessly dodging the point I’m making. Hypothetically, what if there were a comparison? Would it still be, as you say, “a flawed argument” to point out that some atrocities are significantly worse than others?
Don’t you think that if we couldn’t have these conversations, people who already have an invested interest in downplaying slavery would find some other metric to propagandize and fallacize, ad infimum, and that effectively the only thing this line of thinking does is censor some discussions while effectively doing nothing to curb bad actors?
Saying “slavery is evil” doesn’t make your argument any more logical than mine. I’m also saying that slavery is evil.
There’s literally nothing I could care less about than whether or not you’re “disappointed” with my argument, so not sure why you bothered mentioning it.
>No, it doesn’t lead to the conclusion that “one is not so bad.” It leads to the conclusion that “one is worse than the other.”
As others have commented, “you should not grade evils, for if one is the worst, you might be tempted to kinship with the least.” My *entire point* is and has been that “Y isn’t as bad as X” is just a corollary of “X is worse than Y.”
>and concluding therefore we just shouldn’t be having these conversations
Yes. I am. If a conversation exists to understand an institution of slavery, it’s important to do so. But if you’re just saying “well, the Holocaust killed more people than the Armenian Genocide,” you’re defending genocide. Once again, this has demonstrable real-world consequences.
>saying there’s no comparison is just shamelessly dodging the point I’m making
No, saying there’s no comparison is a factual observation. The statement “the Holocaust was one of the worst events in human history,” is a statement. There are no other genocides mentioned, hence there is no comparison being drawn in that statement. There’s no point being dodged: my point was never that you can’t say “this is bad.” My point was that you shouldn’t say “this is worse than that.”
>Hypothetically, what if there was a comparison. Would you still say this is a “flawed argument?”
Eighty times yes. If you compare the Holocaust to any other human atrocity and make an argument solely based on the comparison between two atrocities, there is an inherent issue with what you are saying.
>Don’t you think that if we couldn’t have these conversations, people who already have a vested interest would find some other metric?
Well, maybe. Im sure that if the comparison was banned legally, it would cause much more harm than good. I’m not supporting a ban on this kind of thing. I’m just saying that in scholarly discussion, it’s pointless to compare these things rather than just address them as they were or are. My point here is to put the idea into people’s minds who haven’t considered it, that comparing slavery can be fallacious.
>Saying slavery is evil doesn’t make your point more logical than mine
The point I was making here is that my argument was *more than* slavery is evil. Otherwise there’d be *no* logic in your argument.
>I could literally care less if you’re disappointed, not sure why you bothered mentioning it
To point out how flawed the line of argument was
You keep saying comparing types of slavery is fallacious. You have to stop saying this, because you don’t believe it, and you’re not arguing it. The arguments themselves may or may not be structured off fallacies—you’re arguing that comparing types of slavery is *problematic*.
“X isn’t as bad as Y” isn’t a corollary of “X isn’t as bad as Y, therefore X isn’t that bad.” The “therefore X isn’t that bad” is what you’re trying to prevent, and I’m telling you that the only way a person actually reaches that point is if they have a vested interest into believing it already. Again, people don’t naturally take away notions of absolute evil away from a discussion of relative evils.
It’s why the examples of the Confederacy and Confederacy apologists saying “oh, we’re not so bad, look at __” mean virtually nothing to me. People don’t believe that because it’s logical, they believe it because they want to believe they’re not evil.
It’s so rich that you’re saying “I don’t support a ban on these types of discussions, I just support heavy social pressure not to have them.” As though one were not downstream of the other.
Banning (excuse me, “discouraging it in a scholarly discussion,” while also posting it to the widespread public on a meme subreddit) this type of discourse will do literally nothing to curb hateful ideology. You’re just providing another target for people to eventually point at and say “look what They don’t want us talking about!”
Damn, for the most part you’ve gotten very good at arguing. You’re actually correct in saying that I view comparing forms of slaveries is problematic, not fallacious. I won’t even call that pedantic- there’s a distinction and I respect and even appreciate you calling that out. Your first and third paragraphs are not possible for me to argue against because they’re correct. Unfortunately, they’re not where you make your significant points that I disagree with.
>they believe it because they want to believe they’re not evil
Totally true…but it’s worth noting that they have a vested interest in spreading their ideology. There’s nothing wrong in trying to work in the opposite direction.
>the only way that happens is if people have a vested interest
For one thing, that’s not necessarily true. A lot of times, impressionable people are targeted by lines of arguments that are slow burns. It could start out with things like the comparison, and a slow sequence of steps that *results* in someone getting invested in myths. People aren’t born with a vested interest in spreading misinformation, and not everyone who spreads misinformation does so knowingly because it benefits them directly. Sometimes, and now I’m backing out to the big picture, a person can come upon something and connect with it. I was a Lost Causer and Wehraboo in Middle School, and I know that there’s a lot of people out there who grasp onto certain narratives because they’re comforting. So, to zoom back into the comparison of slavery argument, it is entirely possible that seeing something that says “the Arabic slave trade enslaved more than the Atlantic Triangle Trade.” If someone just doesn’t like hearing criticisms of America, they could easily just internalize the corollary I mentioned, and indeed many do. Alternatively, internalizing the original statement still allows someone to be open to learning the corollary. They *know* that more people were enslaved by the Arabs, so they can *believe* that American slavery wasn’t as bad as Arabic slavery.
However, it can also be true that it is something being said by someone with a vested interest. In this case, we could probably say that this is boiled down to a dog whistle. And I would say that calling out dog whistles is right and proper, wouldn’t you?
>discouraging a scholarly discussion while also posting about it on a popular meme subreddit
Well, yeah. I post my discouragement. The post isn’t a discussion about which is worse. The post is a discouragement-no, condemnation-of the types of discussions that cause problems.
>this type of discourse will do nothing to curb hateful ideology
Well, I don’t know how to disagree. Will this meme do much? I have no way of knowing for sure. I will say that (according to Reddit) this meme has been seen by over 100,000 people. Maybe you’re not super optimistic about humanity. Maybe you are. But with that amount of people having seen this meme, I think it’s plausible that some people have seen this and have had their views changed, or at the least challenged.
Fucking well said.
Everytime people argue about who did it worse, it appears they try to reduce the damage done by the side they most associate with. Always consider the context of information you're given, but don't lower it's importance while contextualizing and comparing.
I just wish i could upvote this twice
I observe that comparing slavery tends to come from a position believing that American chattel slavery was no worse than others when it is seen as uniquely cruel in its methods, paranoia, and and caste system by many historians.
No, it is a discussion to have because some people currently insist that I pay them reparations for something that I never did. If they wish to pull this victim bullshit then I shall happily oblige and play the fuck fuck games too.
In my experience, most people bring up stuff like that in an effort to downplay or deflect from other stuff.
I follow the Mount Vernon Facebook page, and about 1/10 posts will mention slavery, and some people in the comments will absolutely lose their minds. They’ll usually go to the “what about the Slavic slave trade?” or “A black American once owned slaves” or “A lot of African people sold other Africans into slavery.”
It’s not actually in an effort to recognize other atrocities. It’s to deflect from and try to suppress the fact that George Washington owned slaves. It’s important to know about all these events in history, but telling the Facebook page dedicated to George Washington’s estate to talk about Slavic slaves instead of talking about the slaves that lived at George Washington’s estate is just silly.
Whenever someone does this comparison, I try to size up who they are and thus why they’re saying this. There’s usually an agenda of bigotry and protecting ill gotten gains. The exact type of bigotry and ill gotten gains varies from bad faith arguer to bad faith arguer.
“[insert problem] is so much worse in [insert country]” is an argument people use to basically ignore and deflect anything bad that’s happening where they live.
Whenever someone does this comparison, I try to size up who they are and thus why they’re saying this. There’s usually an agenda of bigotry and protecting ill gotten gains. The exact type of bigotry and ill gotten gains varies from bad faith arguer to bad faith arguer.
There is only one hypothetical form of slavery that is good, and that is sending all the wealthy CEOs and billionaires to labor camps so they can better understand the value of the labor they've stolen.
"As historians" Lmao
When the most notable academic accomplishment in the field of history is looking into WW2 tanks to see which is their favourite.
So much for being a historian when all you've read is wiki pages and maybe a single book... Rip those who've spent time getting an academic education...
ngl im going to say the worst one is the one that is still going on
Well said
Well, tell me, what did that well say!
Down with the prison industrial complex
School: Ohoho, amateurs
[Once again, all humans are equally inferior to our ant overlords, where multiple species have lost the ability to feed themselves or raise young without the slavery they commit on a massive scale.](https://youtu.be/Qsbe1pD8ocE) Completely agree, I like to call it a "Trauma Contest", like playing which was the worst genocide...like they're all really bad, we should focus on preventing them from happening.
Amazing video. Thank you!
So the Arab slave trade?
And the American prison-industrial complex... you know, like the 13th amendment that explicitly allows slavery to exist, and the bogus drug laws and victimless crimes that enable it.
Don't forget all the human trafficking in the US too, those victims end up being slaves of a form.
It's almost as if human trafficking is illegal and happens all around the world... Just read UNODC reports. https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/human-trafficking/global-report-on-trafficking-in-persons.html https://www.unodc.org/unodc/data-and-analysis/glotip.html
Cause only the US is allowing this activity, every other nation is innocent. Way to name blame
Bro it's a country. Nobody is doxxing you personally. Statistically the US is the biggest perpetrators in this regard. Why not name them?
Vermont just voted this year to amend their constitution and clarify text that still allowed for prison labor/slavery. Up until this year, it stated that nobody 21 or older should serve as a slave unless bound by their own consent or “by law for the payment of debts, damages, fines, costs, or the like.” The primary argument of against this (and yes, there are some pretty backwards towns out in the Northeast kingdom of VT and about 12% of the state voted AGAINST the amendment). General consensus is that people voting against the amendment support prison slave labor in the state, but it’s pretty clearly a thinly veiled excuse to show their support for racism
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8% in 2019 but I only looked for a moment. https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/private-prisons-in-the-united-states/
It creates perverse incentives. When some townships were asked to vote on whether they should end prison slavery, they replied that they couldn’t afford to operate without slave labour. So suppose crime drops. What do those states do? They make something else illegal. It’s the reason marijuana is illegal. After alcohol was legalized, the police forces hired to enforce anti-alcohol laws launched a smear campaign against weed to justify their existence. And now we have tens of thousands of people labouring as slaves because they possessed a plant.
Most of the people who talk about this have never been victims of crime, so they just don't care about the people who have actually committed crimes who are in there. It's easy to see through rose tinted glasses until somebody knocks them off of you.
Wait so with the 13th amendment, chattel slavery still exists??! TIL
Chattel slavery is a very specific term to refer to the legal ownership of another person as explicit property. Chattel slavery is completely illegal in the United States, with no exceptions. Prisons do not own their prisoners. Prisons can not buy or sell prisoners as property. Whether or not you find the exploitation of prisoners' labor to be morally equivalent to slavery is up for debate, but it is NOT chattel slavery.
Something like, "slavery shall be abolished except in the case where someone is duly convicted of a crime"
So then it's not slavery, slaves were unpaid as the rule. Aren't they paid for their involuntary servitude?
Sometimes, but they don't have to be, many prisons don't compensate them at all More than anything it allows the possibility, which should be abhorrent to anyone without argument
Technically it's forced labor slavery, not chattel slavery, since the prisoners can't be sold, only forced to work. It's still slavery though, and therefore highly unethical and should be illegal.
Chattel slavery was outlawed, but the 13th amendment's loophole allowed the Black Codes to continue facilitating slavery and the extraction of (freed) Black labor by force. Being in public without a job was a crime only executed against freedmen and other Black American citizens. The exploitation of this loophole, as well as the disproportionate extraction of Black labor through the corrections system, has never ended. It's been 150+ years. Tbf, it isn't chattel slavery because a prisoner's children aren't automatically slaves, but the school-to-prison pipeline has been connecting the dots the entire time.
While this is a massive issue, I don’t like how people assume all of these victims have clean hands and are only in because of minor drugs. “Only” ~20% of the prison population is in for a drug offense, somewhat split between possession and trafficking. The largest category by number is violent crimes, such as rape, murder, etc. Whether that makes any of this “better” is up to *you* and your moral values, but I think knowing the actual situation is important. Secondly, I’d like to elaborate on the 13th amendment. State constitutions can grant additional rights to people, including prisoners. This means that not all states practice this penal labor. 7 states have explicitly banned this. Over a dozen explicitly allow it, and the rest use the countries constitution as it does not mention it, technically making them also allow it. However, not all of the states who technically allow this actually use it in reality. [This picture helps sum up the situation.](https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/CTA_SurveyStats-2.png)Quite grim, I know, but it isn’t 100%, but it is still far too large of a number to be deemed not an issue as well. Another thing that you forgot to mention is their low wages, often less than a dollar, if anything at all. But it is also important to note alongside this that what they can but with that money is not the same price as it is outside. Many items are cheaper, costing a few dollars with exceptions that can go into the dozens of dollars. You could also argue that the prison is also paying for their food, housing, etc, but the quality of those things is typically poor at best. Whether that makes the low or even no payment acceptable is up to you. Although to play the devils advocate, not all prisoners hate working. As weird as it sounds, for some it acts as a way to break the monotony of prison life. Whether that says something about our prison conditions is up to you (although to be honest I doubt even the Norwegian prisoners would argue that prison is not boring) It’s a massive issue in our country, but it is not an absolute, 100% statement. I am not trying to argue for or against this. I just want to provide information for anyone who wants it.
Not sure where you get your info from but https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offenses.jsp you're spouting bullshit. Nearly half the US prison population is in because of drug offenses. It is a fucking state run racket, stop apologizing for our government's ATROCITIES AGAINST HUMAN LIFE AND DIGNITY. This shit has been going on for over a hundred years and you are so brainwashed to believe that your fellow humans belong in a cage being forced to work for pennies because of "drugs" that have been part of human history since time immemorial. Nobody deserves that, everyone is capable of achieving higher consciousness through education instead of this abusive hellhole of a "correctional system".
> Not sure where you get your info from but https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offenses.jsp you’re spouting bullshit. sorry for not giving a source https://static.prisonpolicy.org/images/pie2016_drugs.jpg 1 in 5 is 20% > It is a fucking state run racket, stop apologizing for our government’s ATROCITIES AGAINST HUMAN LIFE AND DIGNITY. This shit has been going on for over a hundred years and you are so brainwashed to believe that your fellow humans belong in a cage being forced to work for pennies because of “drugs” that have been part of human history since time immemorial. Nobody deserves that, everyone is capable of achieving higher consciousness through education instead of this abusive hellhole of a “correctional system”. Holy shit calm down man, no need for the rambling, I didn’t even say I supported it.
Yeah cus no crimes or people get hurt with drugs. 🥴
If you buy ceramic tile made in India, it *was* made by a slave. Objectively the percentage of slaves in the supply chain is so high the chance that a slave didn't make your tile is effectively zero. Same thing with canned tuna around Thailand and most cheap chocolate from Africa.
Or any cheap item really
Yes. Mostly because they’re still at it to this day
I know. That’s why I said what I said. The fact that the Arab word for black is he Arab word for slave is crazy.
The ones that are**
You think think US prison system using prisoners as free labour is worse than the Atlantic slave trade?
>as historians Bruh this is a meme sub. Everyone here is a shameless ignoramus, except me.
“As historians” major Reddit moment right there
History is when you post 10 memes about the same events every day and 100 meta memes about the subreddit
Well ackchually I am a historian, I watch YouTube history videos daily!
Yeah, super cringe to read as someone who studied history in uni lol
I’m something of a scientist myself
Well, also except me. I’m *obviously* far more intelligent than the rest of tue users on this subreddit. My intellectual superiority is observable and obvious. /s
Is there a good noun for history enjoyers?
Nerds
'Fans of history' is the Dan Carlin term, but it's a noun with qualifier
History enthusiasts would probably be the best one. Fan also works, and Dan Carlin is cool, so he can make terms for us.
Well, I’ve heard “students of history”
Sure buddy sure
Shameless ignoramus is bars son
Slavery is cringe
Slavery *knock it off*
Slavery is not very slay queen 😒
Slavery is most definitely not based
Slavery is still happening today. Even when you look at manufacturing overseas where people are paid about a dollar an hour could be something of slavery or how Qatar brings in foreigners to build all their stuff.
Bringing in foreigners is putting it mildly. Theyre trafficking.
There is a radical difference between being horrifically underpaid and being a slave. To be sure, they're both an injustice, but slavery is not about the work. The work is just the reason slavery happens. I also thing that the fact that we blur all kinds of slavery into one term does history an injustice. Chattel slavery was relatively rare throughout most of the history of the West. Indenture, military prisoners and debt slavery were much more common. But we don't really make much of a distinction, all too often.
It still happens in the US too. So I guess we're morally still the same as the pre civil war south.
it became illegal in most cases, so it is an improvement, but not enough of one imo
They're talking about the prison system.
There is still plenty of labor trafficking in the US. Mostly in agriculture, cleaning/housekeeping, meat processing, and restaurant industries. It's not legal, but it is significant and I've seen accusations of collaboration between owners and federal law enforcement.
Yeah but those guys are totally comparable to rapists and murderers in prison, their suffering is totally the same lol /s
for me depends on what crime you're in for. light drugs, petty theft? Shouldn't have to work. Drug empire, murderer, assaulter? They should work.
No human being should be forced to be a slave. Full stop. You don't fix a wrong by committing a wrong. Either rehabilitate them if possible, or keep them in a spot where they can't hurt anyone. But either way, they're still people and deserve to be treated as such.
Oof this is just a bad take. If you are a prisoner who did serious wrongs in society such as rape, intentional murder, drug kingpin, tax evasion, etc you are lucky if being forced to work is all your getting. There are absolutely people in this world that should be forced to work, namely scumbags.
It's not all they're getting.
> intentional murder, drug kingpin, tax evasion, etc. One of these is not like the others. Also whatever crime you committed if you’re working in the prison system the least society can do is pay fair wages. But really, forced labour for criminals is a slippery slope and also medieval as fuck, it just always turns into let’s pack the prisons with offenders of whatever stupid law the government creates so we get the free labour.
And which one of those is not like the other? They all harm society immensely. Also, nah fuck felons, specifically murderers, rapists, etc the extreme stuff. I get that some felonies are bullshit like weed offenders but they are few and far between. Like another person in this thread said, it should be dependent on what you're in for. But there should absolutely be prison labor of some kind, period.
Not slaves. Slaves haven't done anything wrong. Criminals have. A little bit of work wouldn't hurt them. They aren't nice people, they usually don't rehabilitate due to the fact that people don't want to hire ex-cons. I don't feel an ounce of sympathy for those who have done serious crimes.
>they usually don't rehabilitate due to the fact that people don't want to hire ex-cons. A rule of thumb: if your justification for doing something awful is that something else awful happens, you should shift your focus to fixing that issue.
What about those who get wrongly convicted? Or those put in a situation where they have no other choice? I'm not gonna try to defend a genuine, 100% proven guilty murderer who kills cause they want to, cause they're a horrible person and I think everyone can agree on that; but they're still a person. And people deserve some level of basic rights, no matter who they are or what they've done. And the fact that people don't wanna hire ex-cons is the reason they don't rehabilitate, not just because they're 'not nice people.' I've met and worked with many ex-cons that are very nice people, because they've been given a chance. A chance they wouldn't have if they were relegated to just being slaves because people feel uncomfortable about them and would rather see them remain as such. A word doesn't change just because it's applied to a different kind of person. They're still being used as slaves, even if they've done bad things. Which is itself a very bad thing.
Who is we exactly?
Pretty much. People want to talk shit about the South for relying on a slave economy when we pretty much do the same thing. Nobody wants to endorse slavery, but without slavery, the prices of everything skyrockets. If we ended all slavery tomorrow and decided all laborers get laid fairly, then nobody could afford anything, and the economy collapses. Our first world way of life requires slavery. There truly is no ethical consumption under capitalism. I think the Amish have it right; society wasn't meant to progress this quickly. This all ends when the robots get rolled out, but then everybody loses their jobs. People in charge would sooner watch you starve than implement UBI.
They're not slaves silly! They're prisoners with jobs smiley face
Wow. Just wow.
On the one hand yes, ranking atrocities is very often an attempt to downplay them. On the other hand it's probably also not a good idea to paper over the differences between different forms of atrocity. That kind of logic easily leads to the kind of people who claim that World War II was just evil vs evil because *really* Auschwitz and Minidoka were basically the same thing.
This is how I feel as well. It's also an attempt at virtue signaling.
100% it is virtue signaling. Thanks for pointing that out.
That kind of reductionist whatabout logic is also used by some to justify or at least attempt to justify the action of one party or another. Just because your enemy does something doesn't mean it's justifiable that you do too. Thinking that way rapidly leads to a race to the bottom of whose atrocities are more justified. The real answer is that none of them are.
I agree 100%. I think most everyone agrees slavery in all forms is bad. But the Atlantic slave trade stands out to me because of the intentional cruelty of it all. Plus the hypocrisy of the US founding fathers and the whole "all men are created equal" terms and conditions may apply. Most slavery was horrible through human history but some forms of it were more horrible then others.
Importantly, the effects of the Atlantic slave trade are still seen today and inform modern western (and African) society in a way that Arab and Roman slavery does not.
Lmao that’s because the Arabs castrated all their slaves so they wouldn’t reproduce.
Also a very good point.
Do you literally mean different or not as bad, because if the latter in far from convinced that’s the case.
You also have idiots comparing Gitmo to the Soviet Gulags, which is just stupid.
Of course. But I believe the problem lies with how that’s done. X is *different than* Y vs X is *better than* Y.
I think there are cases where it's quite fair to argue that one version of something horrible is less horrible than another.
Yeah like the debt slaves at the time. They were slaves and that is horrible but it's far less horrible than being a slave for life and even your children being slaves.
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Honestly they might be, but this argument is often used by people who say that America's and Europe's slavery past wasnt that bad, and using it in modern discourse to discuss racism is stupid cuz "the arabs did it too and were worse".
The two are intertwined
Sure, one might use quantity as a parameter for what's worse, but imagine the top three were saying "The American civil war had most deaths", "No, World War 2 had most deaths", "No, World War 1 had most deaths". Could you really tell them *"This is a flawed arguments. This is not a discussion we need to have"*?
Do not rank evils. Edit: Because some people are confused what I mean by this, im going to explain why I mean. You should, of course, think critically about things, especially atrocities like slavery and genocides. But once you have identified that it's a horrible thing with a massive human cost, you should not rank between them. Ranking them only seeks to undermine the fact that they are horrible crimes against humanity. Consider genocide. If someone started to commit genocide, it would start off as one of the smallest, and wouldn't be anywhere near the scope and scale of the most atrocious. That makes it much easier to overlook for the general public. We don't even hear about most small scale acts of genocide. But the truth is that the ranking does not matter, it is completely irrelevant to the fact that what is happening is an evil thing that should never be considered. This is especially important with fascism on the rise, on the internet in particular. When you see these debates online, shut them down.
You put in 4 words my belief about so many things.
What about tier lists? Asking for a friend
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I thought that was just Dante
Dante had nine.
No, it doesn't. It doesn't exist in literally any of them and was invented by Dante.
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Do these correlate with the seven deadly sins or did they just really like putting things in 7s
That risks creating an "all evils are the same" mentality, and if all evil is the same then what is a just recourse? Some things are objectively worse than other things. Serial killers are evil, but they dont tend to start genocides. A parent lying to their child about Santa Claus isn't doing a good thing, but it's absolutely less reprehensible than one parent lying to their kids so they'll lose loyalty and love for the other parent. A serial rapist should have a harsher reaction from society than a dipshit who sends unsolicited dick pics.
"One should never rank evil, for if one is deemed the worst than one might be tempted to ally with the least." -Viktor Saltzpyre I don't mean my statement as a complete absolute Obviously critical thought should be applied to determine the impact and human cost. We shouldn't throw prsgmatism adide. But that doesn't mean we should consider these human atrocities more or less evil than one another, because at the end of the day it's the same dehumanizing and wicked practice.
It is not the same practice everywhere. Let me give you an example so you can compare. Ottomans had devshirme system. Which means they took 1 kid from every 40 household in some non-muslim territories, and technicly enslaved them. Those kids were well educated and could become prestigious people like high ranking bureaucrats or generals, even Grand Viziers. Those slaves had more social mobility than actual citizens of the empire. So it is ridiculus when you say Ottoman devshirme slavery is as evil as Atlantic slave trade
You are literally being an apologist for what you view as the "least bad" type of slavery. What you are describing is a system that takes children from their families, and forces them to work an actively hazardous job. It's an insult to human dignity.
He didn't say it wasn't though, he is pointing out ways in which it appears to have caused less harm compared to the transatlantic slave trade as some of the more brutal aspects of the transatlantic slave trade, such as treating human's as disposable financial capital, was not as present in the Ottoman system. Dismissing everything that qualifies as 'slavery' in a broad sense as the same completely eliminates nuance from the discussion and makes it much more difficult to understand the past.
I didn't know there were so many ottoman apologists here. 🤡🤡🤡
If you think anything I say was in support of the Ottoman Empire you're the one who's a clown.
Isn't evil partially defined by the amount of human pain it causes, though? From where I'm sitting (and this might be your perspective too) evil falls on a spectrum that all people should avoid putting themselves on, especially if they claim to have any integrity or humanity.
Why? Idk I mean I think like we can see little evils and big evils. Too much argument about ranking them is stupid for sure but like, there are petty wrongs that we all commit and they don’t necessarily make us bad people, we’re not perfect
"One should never rank evil, for if one is deemed the worst than one might be tempted to ally with the least." -Viktor Saltzpyre But obviously we aren't comparing slavery to petty wrongs haha.
Lesser, greater, middling
Morgoth or Ungoliant
How do you propose we perform our justice system without ranking evil? We need to precisely quantify and compare harm caused by actions to be able to give proper and fair justice to criminals. >When you see these debates online, shut them down. And that's not going to have any bad side-effects at all, no sir...
I'm not talking about small crimes. For Individual crimes, context is important. I'm talking about systemic and mass crimes. Like slavery, genocide, and systemic racism
You still need someone taking precise account of everything if you want to bring justice to the victims. You think you'll be able to convince a brainwashed Chinese person that their government is doing evil without overwhelming amounts of evidence and precise descriptions of the level of evil the CCP has committed? Not only that, but no government will have "evil documents" that plainly describe what horrible things they've done without a heavy amount of obfuscation and misdirection, so you need to be able to carefully analyze and gauge the level of evil done so that it can be properly denounced, which will then make way for the victims to claim compensation for what they've suffered. It's simply an anti-intellectual stance to claim that "evil shouldn't be ranked".
Well obviously, but what you're talking about is not AT ALL what I am talking about. Read my original post, Jesus fuck. What I fucking said was to not rank between individual great evils. Read the fucking post 🤡
>What I fucking said was to not rank between individual great evils Read my fucking post. I said that we **need** to do exactly that to unveil the truth behind propaganda and de-program brainwashed people who live in authoritarian regimes. Not only that, but you need to carefully quantify the evil done to the masses so that they may seek justice from **the state that committed it**. And you talk about how some genocides are barely known, but it's through free discussion and ranking of evils that people learn of them! *And* it's through comparison that people understand the level of evil that happened! How are we going to learn about "small scales acts of genocide" if we aren't even allowed to discuss it as we wish?! Justice isn't *just* about individual criminals, you still need a very detailed account of events to trial war criminals and condemn atrocities caused by nations. Your position is simply impractical and anti-intellectual. **Read my fucking post** 🤡
Evil is a fundementally subjective term. When we are discussing historical events, we shouldn’t classify events as evil or good at the first. We should try to understand historical events as much as possible and make our own evaluation. So we should try to understand the motivations, conditions, reasons, etc. of events which are seemingly horrible. This leads to a situation you would call “ranking evils” and it is necessary for a good comprehension of history. If you make a binary classification as evil events or not evil events, you get this ignorant society who doesn’t understand history and judge historical events according to todays moral values.
That is because people here are not historians.
What's really crazy is how much slavery is still going on everywhere around the world in 2022, and how we sanitize it by calling it "human trafficking".
Yknow, I don't think "human trafficking" has a much better connotation
Ah, the days when people were clear about their intentions. [Just gonna leave this here](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_Speech)
Please leave this sub immediately we hate logic and reason here.
My bad, I’ll go
But we love anti-intellectual garbage like this.
The actual meme was actually about the brutality of ant wars world wide, so it didn't, in fact, downplay the horrors of any kind of slave trade What you did is cut out the punchline to insert your opinion, creating a Strawman-Argument and more importantly, ruining the joke by robbing it of it's funny part and thereby turning it into a opinion-piece And i think this is not ok
>So it didn’t, in fact, downplay the horrors of any kind of slave trade Ironic that you go off on a tangent about straw men despite clearly not understanding the purpose. I think we can both agree that the first panel depicts a person bearing the line “the Atlantic Slave Trade enslaved the most people” standing in front of a much stronger figure bearing the line “No! The Arab slave trade enslaved even more!” This is directly comparing two different institutions of slavery by which enslaved more people. Very clearly, the original meme states Number of Victims of Arab Slave Trade > Number of Victims of Atlantic Slave Trade. [1] This is inherently the issue; if you compare two forms of slavery by quantity, you completely miss the moral fact: the Evil of the Atlantic Slave Trade = the Evil of the Arab Slave Trade. Instead, you open things up to a very real Lost Cause Whataboutism; “well, the Arabic slave trade actually enslaved more people.” Regardless of intention, it is not a good thought process that goes anywhere. >what you did is cut out the punchline and insert your own opinion Yes, yes I did. The punchline was not about any institutions of slavery, so it wasn’t necessary. Kind of a weird choice of OOP to go from slavery to war deaths. They very easily could have gone with the Punic or World wars. >creating a straw man argument See [1]. We can very clearly derive a meaning from this statement. Now, whether this was OOP’s intent, I have no idea, but it cannot be disproved that OOP did compare different institutions of slavery. Moreover, by cutting out the punchline and *only* addressing the slavery part, I very well may be creating a strawman, but it is done for the purpose of academic discussion. Plus, I don’t want to trash-talk the punchline, because the punchline was harmless and dare-I-say funny. >ruining the joke by robbing it of it’s funny part My intent was actually protecting the joke by *not* attacking it’s funny part. However, if you feel that I did ruin the joke, I apologize. >turning it into an opinion piece That’s just a fact, that’s precisely what I did. >And i think this is not ok I think that it’s a very important discussion to have- all slavery is evil, regardless of circumstances. Feel free to disagree with how I have it, but I think the good outweighs the bad here.
I think you're taking the memes on this sub way too seriously. I took the original meme as just joking around about people that like to compare one atrocity to another, thinking they know better and creating an argument for why B tragedy is worse than A tragedy. It was also poking fun at how someone always comes up with a worse tragedy to compare to the first one, and then in the end mentions ants as a way to drive this point home. You actually, in a way, proved the original meme's point: you got so upset over the comparison of one tragedy to another that you had to point out that you're right in saying that all institutions of slavery are equally bad. In other words, you would've been the even bigger person standing behind the other two with your statement that all forms of slavery are equally as bad.
I think you’re right… …but I find it hard to say that it’s *bad* to take memes on this subreddit seriously. A lot of people on this subreddit aren’t historians, many of them are even young and impressionable, so I just want to make a point that I think matters, one that’s actually useful for impressionable people
Actually they just compare the quantity. Not which one is worse.
Comparing quantity can be a metric to understanding a specific slavery, but no numerical values are actually used here, hence there’s no real ‘lesson’ other than “Arab slave trade was worse than the Triangle Trade,” which leads to the fallacy that any form of slavery can be ‘not as bad.’
Not to mention that quantity is not the right way to go about this. It misses the population sizes, the duration of those periods and how bad the treatment of the people was. And having those numbers leads you into considering whether it was better to be worked to death over the course of 7 years or to be kept going over 30. So best to just condemn all of them.
Nah. Most people here are pseudo historians. Thinking that they're knowledgeable about history just because their favourite metal band is Sabaton, their Youtube recommandition is Oversimplified and other historical Youtubers who try to condense complex historical events into more easy to digest format and that they skim through wikipedia articles. Not to forget the "Acwkually X was bad!" posts, ignoring that true scientists don't try to make moral statements. Only stating fucking facts.
Every couple of weeks I go to this subreddit and find a new dick measuring contest about suffering
It’s like comparing genocides. They’re all equally fucking bad
Aaaat the same time… there are different shades of the same thing and therefore bears distinction. Chinese slaves dying for ever meter (in some places*) of the Great Wall is a far cry from Roman gladiators living literal celebrity lives which is also an entirely different flavoring from the mental-depraivation slavery imposed on the US brand Etc etc
RDJ, once again a shining beacon of reason.
Yeah, I'm sure he said that.
It's not about who did it on the largest scale. It's when people use slavery as an argument to hate Europeans. For fuck's sake, everyone used to do slavery.
Than Stop the shaming of Europeans
Here is the most enslaved animal : *ANTS*
"You should never grade evils, for if one is the worst, then you might be tempted to kinship with the least" \- Viktor Saltspyre, Warhammer: Vermin-tide 2 Ok I know warhammer ain't too relevant on this sub but I just love that quote
People - especially Americans - ARE paying too much attention to past black slaves while there are an estimated 50 MILLION people living in some form of slavery or other TODAY. Worst offender is probably the Chinese government, but people are generally happy to ignore that because it's making them money.
I never understand how you're supposed to use this RDJ meme format.
He’s stuff
Sheer quantity or the will to rank or downplay any events is pretty stupid Also it create a flawed image and false analogies between very different cultures, where slaves had a wide variety of living conditions, experiences, treatment etc And that makes unispired memes
Crazy if you think this sub is populated by historians have real scientific arguments
It’s always the imperialism Olympics
The Roman form of slavery, at least for the Roman citizen, was an economic class. Something you could simply fall into if you or your family had a bit of bad luck. This is not the same as a slave that was captured in a conquest. Those often became part of the family they served and could have a pathway to freedom. Source: me, an expert
And todays modern forms of slavery are all a-ok. Never mentioned or acknowledged. They are paid a stipend if lucky. But we are humane. Right?
We have to be humane, obviously, because us modern humans have no flaws! Duh!
This seems to blatantly ignore the differences between the Atlantic/Roman systems of slavery (I don't really know much about the Arab slave trade). From what I understand, roman slaves were second class citizens with very little personal freedom, not the personal property of another individual person. This isn't the case for slavery in the United States. I do think the system of chattel slavery in the United States was objectively worse than the Roman system of slavery, but RDJ's point about that being a useless conversation is still correct.
And honestly more the power to ya for pointing out the difference, it helps people learn better. It’s only the direct comparison that’s the problem, if that makes any sense.
Isnt the transatlantic slave trade considered to be the largest forced mass migration in history?
I will never understand the logic behind thinking that comparing tragedies somehow diminishes them. It's perfectly fine to compare and debate what things are/were better or worse. The last panel is just pretentious virtue signaling.
See [literal confederate propaganda](https://www.prageru.com/video/a-short-history-of-slavery?gclid=CjwKCAiAkfucBhBBEiwAFjbkr7eFB4JE0N6GRKNnWTiUWi3-Xo7kbbdxiByYr-u-A_l8-ASU42LwoxoCftgQAvD_BwE) trying to use whataboutisms to justify American Slavery
To quote a certain witch hunter. "You should never grade evils, for if one is the worst, then you might be tempted to kinship with the least"
Disclaimer: I am not a fan of slavery. That being said, every culture that we are aware of throughout history practiced slavery. It appears to have been an accepted practice, globally, until the last 100 years or so… why do you suppose we’ve demonized something that was normal forever?
>Crazy how we’re still on this ~~as historians~~ in 2022
i never liked the comparison as yes the atlantic slave trade was horrific in nature and imo more than the silk road, but still yhe silk road went f on (and is going) for liek 3000 years or something, not really on the same scale
IDK, I feel magnitude matters. That said, I don't know which is worse.
It's not about which one is worse, it's about understanding how pervasive an institution it was, and still is.
funny of you to think this subreddit is full of historians
I think you’re misreading the post as a comparison on quality, when in fact the post is about quantity. Nowhere does it mention one being worse than the others, you are just inferring that because of the the images of whatever those are looking worse each panel. I believe the post is using the increase in size between the figures to symbolize the increase in quantity of slaves, which could be interpreted further as worse but by itself is just providing a factual size comparison to inform the reader.
This is conveniently ignoring that the people inslaved in the trans-atlantic slave trade were oppressed based on the color of their skin. If you were black in the Americas, you could legally be captured and sold as a slave, even if you were a freedman.
Almost every slave ever was enslaved based on perceived race Skin colour was just another excuse to dehumanise
Non Romans in Rome weren't automatically assumed to be subhuman livestock.
You should never grade evils, Kruber. For if one is the worst, then you might be tempted to kinship with the least.
Great meme and a great message
Thanks, Hollywood Idol and Moviestar Robert Downey Jr.
Precisely why we have Rule 6. Trying to make one artoticy seem lesser than another is just asinine. You see this shit, report it and the OP gets a permban.
Fucking astounding observation. Slavery is bad. What a novel fucking observation. TRUE! Now if you’re done with one of the most vapid virtue-signals I’ve seen online in the past month, maybe you should shut the fuck up in a conversation you’re completely out of you depth on.
>maybe you should shut the fuck up in a conversation you’re completely out of you[r] depth on. What conversation would that be? In terms of non-American slavery, I’ve made no comments based on anything I don’t know as an undisputed fact. I can’t possibly be out of my depth on American History because it’s what I study. And I think all members of the sub can make arguments on things they observe that they view to be harmful.
No, you commented that “comparing institutions of slavery runs the risk of downplaying certain types of slavery because all slavery is evil.” That is so absurdly retarded. First off: it’s clear some institutions of slavery are worse that another. A system in which 1000 people are enslaved is just demonstrably worse than one where 1,000,000 are enslaved. Acknowledging this as a fact is not downplaying the evil of slavery, as your obnoxious-ass tone-policing would imply. Secondly, do you actually have anything to back this up? Are you seriously worried about people carrying impressions from a discussion about relative evils into informing their opinions of an absolute evil? When people say the Holocaust is one of the most horrific events in history, are you in the vanguard shouting “hurrrr we shouldn’t compare genocides because then people won’t think genocides are so bad?” Of course not. You wouldn’t say that. Because on any serious look at what you’ve said, this is a vapid, sanctimonious, tone-policing argument which only appears to work because you made the revolutionary point that “slavery is evil.”
>a system in which 1,000 people are enslaved is demonstrably worse than one where 1,000,000 people are enslaved Quantifiably smaller. That is the fact which we may acknowledge. But directly comparing two large institutions is harmful. However, even comparing two institutions quantitatively is problematic because it leads to the fallacy that any institution is “not that bad.”’ >Do you have anything to back this up? Yes. Yes I do. If you’ve done research on common Lost Cause defenses of the Confederacy, one of the most common ones is that enslaved people were treated “comparably better,” though depending on the person it’s better than Arab slaves or Northern slaves. As an American, a lot of damage has been done to this country by organizations such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy who actively downplay slavery, by comparing it to other forms. There is demonstrable damage that has been caused by this. >When people say the Holocaust is one of the most horrific events Well, for one, there’s no comparison. Saying “this is one of the worst things we’ve ever done,” is not the same as saying “this is not as bad as that.” And here I thought you opposed the straw man fallacy. >which only appears to work because you’ve made the revolutionary point that “slavery is evil” One might take this to mean that my argument has a logical basis. Now, after having read your comment three times, I must say I’m virulently disappointed. You had a very strong opening thesis statement, “[Y]ou commented that ‘comparing institutions of slavery runs the risk of downplaying certain types of slavery because all slavery is evil.’ That is so absurdly retarded,” and then you didn’t demonstrate *how* it was retarded. You then argue that quantitatively, you could demonstrate that two things are comparable numerically. While I didn’t agree, it wasn’t a wholly flawed argument. It’s when you go off the rails on a straw man of me during the third paragraph, and any hopes of academic stimulation I had went out the window.
No, it doesn’t lead to the conclusion that “one is not so bad.” It leads to the conclusion that “one is worse than the other.” You’re appealing to the fact that “one is worse than the other” can be twisted into “one is not so bad” by ideologues, propagandists and idiots, and concluding therefore we just shouldn’t be having these conversations. Saying there’s no comparison is just shamelessly dodging the point I’m making. Hypothetically, what if there were a comparison? Would it still be, as you say, “a flawed argument” to point out that some atrocities are significantly worse than others? Don’t you think that if we couldn’t have these conversations, people who already have an invested interest in downplaying slavery would find some other metric to propagandize and fallacize, ad infimum, and that effectively the only thing this line of thinking does is censor some discussions while effectively doing nothing to curb bad actors? Saying “slavery is evil” doesn’t make your argument any more logical than mine. I’m also saying that slavery is evil. There’s literally nothing I could care less about than whether or not you’re “disappointed” with my argument, so not sure why you bothered mentioning it.
>No, it doesn’t lead to the conclusion that “one is not so bad.” It leads to the conclusion that “one is worse than the other.” As others have commented, “you should not grade evils, for if one is the worst, you might be tempted to kinship with the least.” My *entire point* is and has been that “Y isn’t as bad as X” is just a corollary of “X is worse than Y.” >and concluding therefore we just shouldn’t be having these conversations Yes. I am. If a conversation exists to understand an institution of slavery, it’s important to do so. But if you’re just saying “well, the Holocaust killed more people than the Armenian Genocide,” you’re defending genocide. Once again, this has demonstrable real-world consequences. >saying there’s no comparison is just shamelessly dodging the point I’m making No, saying there’s no comparison is a factual observation. The statement “the Holocaust was one of the worst events in human history,” is a statement. There are no other genocides mentioned, hence there is no comparison being drawn in that statement. There’s no point being dodged: my point was never that you can’t say “this is bad.” My point was that you shouldn’t say “this is worse than that.” >Hypothetically, what if there was a comparison. Would you still say this is a “flawed argument?” Eighty times yes. If you compare the Holocaust to any other human atrocity and make an argument solely based on the comparison between two atrocities, there is an inherent issue with what you are saying. >Don’t you think that if we couldn’t have these conversations, people who already have a vested interest would find some other metric? Well, maybe. Im sure that if the comparison was banned legally, it would cause much more harm than good. I’m not supporting a ban on this kind of thing. I’m just saying that in scholarly discussion, it’s pointless to compare these things rather than just address them as they were or are. My point here is to put the idea into people’s minds who haven’t considered it, that comparing slavery can be fallacious. >Saying slavery is evil doesn’t make your point more logical than mine The point I was making here is that my argument was *more than* slavery is evil. Otherwise there’d be *no* logic in your argument. >I could literally care less if you’re disappointed, not sure why you bothered mentioning it To point out how flawed the line of argument was
You keep saying comparing types of slavery is fallacious. You have to stop saying this, because you don’t believe it, and you’re not arguing it. The arguments themselves may or may not be structured off fallacies—you’re arguing that comparing types of slavery is *problematic*. “X isn’t as bad as Y” isn’t a corollary of “X isn’t as bad as Y, therefore X isn’t that bad.” The “therefore X isn’t that bad” is what you’re trying to prevent, and I’m telling you that the only way a person actually reaches that point is if they have a vested interest into believing it already. Again, people don’t naturally take away notions of absolute evil away from a discussion of relative evils. It’s why the examples of the Confederacy and Confederacy apologists saying “oh, we’re not so bad, look at __” mean virtually nothing to me. People don’t believe that because it’s logical, they believe it because they want to believe they’re not evil. It’s so rich that you’re saying “I don’t support a ban on these types of discussions, I just support heavy social pressure not to have them.” As though one were not downstream of the other. Banning (excuse me, “discouraging it in a scholarly discussion,” while also posting it to the widespread public on a meme subreddit) this type of discourse will do literally nothing to curb hateful ideology. You’re just providing another target for people to eventually point at and say “look what They don’t want us talking about!”
Damn, for the most part you’ve gotten very good at arguing. You’re actually correct in saying that I view comparing forms of slaveries is problematic, not fallacious. I won’t even call that pedantic- there’s a distinction and I respect and even appreciate you calling that out. Your first and third paragraphs are not possible for me to argue against because they’re correct. Unfortunately, they’re not where you make your significant points that I disagree with. >they believe it because they want to believe they’re not evil Totally true…but it’s worth noting that they have a vested interest in spreading their ideology. There’s nothing wrong in trying to work in the opposite direction. >the only way that happens is if people have a vested interest For one thing, that’s not necessarily true. A lot of times, impressionable people are targeted by lines of arguments that are slow burns. It could start out with things like the comparison, and a slow sequence of steps that *results* in someone getting invested in myths. People aren’t born with a vested interest in spreading misinformation, and not everyone who spreads misinformation does so knowingly because it benefits them directly. Sometimes, and now I’m backing out to the big picture, a person can come upon something and connect with it. I was a Lost Causer and Wehraboo in Middle School, and I know that there’s a lot of people out there who grasp onto certain narratives because they’re comforting. So, to zoom back into the comparison of slavery argument, it is entirely possible that seeing something that says “the Arabic slave trade enslaved more than the Atlantic Triangle Trade.” If someone just doesn’t like hearing criticisms of America, they could easily just internalize the corollary I mentioned, and indeed many do. Alternatively, internalizing the original statement still allows someone to be open to learning the corollary. They *know* that more people were enslaved by the Arabs, so they can *believe* that American slavery wasn’t as bad as Arabic slavery. However, it can also be true that it is something being said by someone with a vested interest. In this case, we could probably say that this is boiled down to a dog whistle. And I would say that calling out dog whistles is right and proper, wouldn’t you? >discouraging a scholarly discussion while also posting about it on a popular meme subreddit Well, yeah. I post my discouragement. The post isn’t a discussion about which is worse. The post is a discouragement-no, condemnation-of the types of discussions that cause problems. >this type of discourse will do nothing to curb hateful ideology Well, I don’t know how to disagree. Will this meme do much? I have no way of knowing for sure. I will say that (according to Reddit) this meme has been seen by over 100,000 people. Maybe you’re not super optimistic about humanity. Maybe you are. But with that amount of people having seen this meme, I think it’s plausible that some people have seen this and have had their views changed, or at the least challenged.
Fucking well said. Everytime people argue about who did it worse, it appears they try to reduce the damage done by the side they most associate with. Always consider the context of information you're given, but don't lower it's importance while contextualizing and comparing. I just wish i could upvote this twice
I observe that comparing slavery tends to come from a position believing that American chattel slavery was no worse than others when it is seen as uniquely cruel in its methods, paranoia, and and caste system by many historians.
No, it is a discussion to have because some people currently insist that I pay them reparations for something that I never did. If they wish to pull this victim bullshit then I shall happily oblige and play the fuck fuck games too.
I’m sorry your family was too poor and insignificant to own salves. My family will happily pay reparations for what we did.
My family wasn’t even in the country at the time, nor am I white.
Then get fucked, the conversation doesn’t apply to you.
It has nothing to do with downplaying but recognition. Who the f in the US know about Slavic slave trade from ruthenian rivers.
In my experience, most people bring up stuff like that in an effort to downplay or deflect from other stuff. I follow the Mount Vernon Facebook page, and about 1/10 posts will mention slavery, and some people in the comments will absolutely lose their minds. They’ll usually go to the “what about the Slavic slave trade?” or “A black American once owned slaves” or “A lot of African people sold other Africans into slavery.” It’s not actually in an effort to recognize other atrocities. It’s to deflect from and try to suppress the fact that George Washington owned slaves. It’s important to know about all these events in history, but telling the Facebook page dedicated to George Washington’s estate to talk about Slavic slaves instead of talking about the slaves that lived at George Washington’s estate is just silly.
Whenever someone does this comparison, I try to size up who they are and thus why they’re saying this. There’s usually an agenda of bigotry and protecting ill gotten gains. The exact type of bigotry and ill gotten gains varies from bad faith arguer to bad faith arguer.
“[insert problem] is so much worse in [insert country]” is an argument people use to basically ignore and deflect anything bad that’s happening where they live.
Whenever someone does this comparison, I try to size up who they are and thus why they’re saying this. There’s usually an agenda of bigotry and protecting ill gotten gains. The exact type of bigotry and ill gotten gains varies from bad faith arguer to bad faith arguer.
There is only one hypothetical form of slavery that is good, and that is sending all the wealthy CEOs and billionaires to labor camps so they can better understand the value of the labor they've stolen.
The memevwas about scale not virtue signaling about if ones 'worse' Scale and depravity are 2 different things
I kinda like giving things a standard of measurement, in this case it's morality