Remember how the Mainstream Media said they won't be coming for Jefferson and Washington Next?

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

again, I was raised to judge people, past and present, ONLY as individuals. in my mind, there is no other way to judge people.

How do you feel about someone throwing trash on the ground?

that's such a small transgression, I don't feel anything either way. what's that have to do with this anyway?

Well it's not a certainty or anything, but a lot of people do have a reaction to it. It's certainly not uncommon.

So do you make no associative judgements?

[Dragon Ball Fan]

again, I was raised to judge people, past and present, ONLY as individuals. in my mind, there is no other way to judge people.

How do you feel about someone throwing trash on the ground?

that's such a small transgression, I don't feel anything either way. what's that have to do with this anyway?

Well it's not a certainty or anything, but a lot of people do have a reaction to it. It's certainly not uncommon.

So do you make no associative judgements?

no, I would not at least, I would not make any judgements of that person AS a person.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

again, I was raised to judge people, past and present, ONLY as individuals. in my mind, there is no other way to judge people.

How do you feel about someone throwing trash on the ground?

that's such a small transgression, I don't feel anything either way. what's that have to do with this anyway?

Well it's not a certainty or anything, but a lot of people do have a reaction to it. It's certainly not uncommon.

So do you make no associative judgements?

How do you feel about religion?

[Darth Wedgius]

and I admit that I can't defend all the things slavery entails but what if certain slave owners never ever did the rape and beatings part? is it okay to apply mitigating factors and moral gray areas then?

Slaves rarely lived past their early to mid 30s. They lived in terrible conditions, ate bad food, got minimal medical attention, and constantly labored. That's a recipe for an early death, and slaves died very early - worked to death by their masters. So how did slaves make up 40% of the population?

Babies. Lots of babies. And how do you get babies? Well... you get the idea. They literally had breeding schedules, would pick which slaves breed, would rape the slaves to get babies. This is all rape. All of it.

As for beatings, how do you get slaves to work? It's not money, you're not paying them. So... beatings. Violence. Every slave plantation had overseers, and all slave labor was enforced with threats and violence.



Looked like that. Exactly like that, because that's a photo of a former slave. One of the only ones - photography didn't have a big overlap with slavery, but there it is. Slavery. In all its naked glory.

No mitigating factors. No grey area. This was atrocity on a daily basis.

I still can't believe literally every single slave owner was like that. and for a while, it was okay to set your slaves free, which we no for a fact some slave owners did so on moral grounds around the time it ended, at least.

even if it mostly wasn't true, the idea that slaves didn't mind being slaves had to come from SOMEWHERE, the human brain is completely incapable of making stuff like that up whole cloth. like how the idea of unicorns came from something real.

again, I was raised to judge people, past and present, ONLY as individuals. in my mind, there is no other way to judge people.

and aren't we all taught to judge people as individuals as kids and not by what group they belong to? what happened to the woke crowd when they grew up?

Not every slave owner was like that. After George Washington died, Martha freed many of the slaves. Most left within months, but some stayed on. One said he was "a much happier man when he was a slave than he had ever been since", because he then "had a good kind master to look after all my wants, but now I have no one to care for me". Another expressed considerable bitterness not at how she was treated, but that she had been a slave.

When Harriet Tubman was running part of the underground railroad, she had to threaten one runaway slave with a revolver when he got cold feet and wanted to go back. Understand that she did so out of necessity. To invoke an old cliche, he knew too much. He could have gotten other "conductors" killed and part of the railroad shut down. And I don't want to underestimate how scary it must have been to leave everything he knew for an almost completely uncertain future, but if beating that brutal was part of his normal life, I doubt he'd want to go back.

Obviously, a lot of brutality did happen. There was usually no penalty for accidentally killing a slave while punishing them... which I suspect says a lot about how brutal treatment usually was.

And even with the kindest owners, I strongly suspect most slaves wanted freedom even given the uncertainties making a new life involved.

As to the new left's tendency to treat people as members of groups foremost, individuals second... Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't. The first people to cry out, "Not all muslims," will also say, "Yes, all men." or "Yes, all cops." They won't notice the contradiction, or will excuse it.

[GreyICE]

and I admit that I can't defend all the things slavery entails but what if certain slave owners never ever did the rape and beatings part? is it okay to apply mitigating factors and moral gray areas then?

Slaves rarely lived past their early to mid 30s. They lived in terrible conditions, ate bad food, got minimal medical attention, and constantly labored. That's a recipe for an early death, and slaves died very early - worked to death by their masters. So how did slaves make up 40% of the population?

Babies. Lots of babies. And how do you get babies? Well... you get the idea. They literally had breeding schedules, would pick which slaves breed, would rape the slaves to get babies. This is all rape. All of it.

As for beatings, how do you get slaves to work? It's not money, you're not paying them. So... beatings. Violence. Every slave plantation had overseers, and all slave labor was enforced with threats and violence.



Looked like that. Exactly like that, because that's a photo of a former slave. One of the only ones - photography didn't have a big overlap with slavery, but there it is. Slavery. In all its naked glory.

No mitigating factors. No grey area. This was atrocity on a daily basis.

I still can't believe literally every single slave owner was like that. and for a while, it was okay to set your slaves free, which we no for a fact some slave owners did so on moral grounds around the time it ended, at least.

even if it mostly wasn't true, the idea that slaves didn't mind being slaves had to come from SOMEWHERE, the human brain is completely incapable of making stuff like that up whole cloth. like how the idea of unicorns came from something real.

again, I was raised to judge people, past and present, ONLY as individuals. in my mind, there is no other way to judge people.

and aren't we all taught to judge people as individuals as kids and not by what group they belong to? what happened to the woke crowd when they grew up?

Of course the idea that "the slaves liked it" came from somewhere. It came from their ideology. They believed that black people were a different species from white people - literally a different type of human. Animals, not humans. The religious explanation was that they were marked by God as evil, from their black skin. So what the slave owners were doing is using them as livestock, as God intended. And since God intended them to be livestock, and they weren't really human, of course they naturally sought that role. It's just nature. If they didn't enslave black people, they'd just be wild animals. (enhanced by tales of "savage Africa" of course)

I do judge slave owners by their actions. They had to threaten violence. They had to make the slaves fear them. They had to breed more slaves. What they did to the slaves to make them work did cause them to die at a very young age.

These were their actions. Was there perhaps a slave owner who didn't use whips? Maybe. But there was always the threat of the whip. There was always the threat of being sold to someone who would whip you - "sold downriver" as it's described by Twain. And those threats worked because there were slave owners who beat their slaves.

Yeah, I judge them by their actions. And again, there were MANY contemporaries of the slave owners who saw how horrible slave owning was, and spoke out against it. Before America was founded, after America was founded, all the time leading up to the civil war. There's a reason the South went to war to preserve slavery, and it wasn't because public sentiment was 100% pro-slaveowning.

[Dragon Ball Fan]

and I admit that I can't defend all the things slavery entails but what if certain slave owners never ever did the rape and beatings part? is it okay to apply mitigating factors and moral gray areas then?

Slaves rarely lived past their early to mid 30s. They lived in terrible conditions, ate bad food, got minimal medical attention, and constantly labored. That's a recipe for an early death, and slaves died very early - worked to death by their masters. So how did slaves make up 40% of the population?

Babies. Lots of babies. And how do you get babies? Well... you get the idea. They literally had breeding schedules, would pick which slaves breed, would rape the slaves to get babies. This is all rape. All of it.

As for beatings, how do you get slaves to work? It's not money, you're not paying them. So... beatings. Violence. Every slave plantation had overseers, and all slave labor was enforced with threats and violence.



Looked like that. Exactly like that, because that's a photo of a former slave. One of the only ones - photography didn't have a big overlap with slavery, but there it is. Slavery. In all its naked glory.

No mitigating factors. No grey area. This was atrocity on a daily basis.

I still can't believe literally every single slave owner was like that. and for a while, it was okay to set your slaves free, which we no for a fact some slave owners did so on moral grounds around the time it ended, at least.

even if it mostly wasn't true, the idea that slaves didn't mind being slaves had to come from SOMEWHERE, the human brain is completely incapable of making stuff like that up whole cloth. like how the idea of unicorns came from something real.

again, I was raised to judge people, past and present, ONLY as individuals. in my mind, there is no other way to judge people.

and aren't we all taught to judge people as individuals as kids and not by what group they belong to? what happened to the woke crowd when they grew up?

Of course the idea that "the slaves liked it" came from somewhere. It came from their ideology. They believed that black people were a different species from white people - literally a different type of human. Animals, not humans. The religious explanation was that they were marked by God as evil, from their black skin. So what the slave owners were doing is using them as livestock, as God intended. And since God intended them to be livestock, and they weren't really human, of course they naturally sought that role. It's just nature. If they didn't enslave black people, they'd just be wild animals. (enhanced by tales of "savage Africa" of course)

I do judge slave owners by their actions. They had to threaten violence. They had to make the slaves fear them. They had to breed more slaves. What they did to the slaves to make them work did cause them to die at a very young age.

These were their actions. Was there perhaps a slave owner who didn't use whips? Maybe. But there was always the threat of the whip. There was always the threat of being sold to someone who would whip you - "sold downriver" as it's described by Twain. And those threats worked because there were slave owners who beat their slaves.

Yeah, I judge them by their actions. And again, there were MANY contemporaries of the slave owners who saw how horrible slave owning was, and spoke out against it. Before America was founded, after America was founded, all the time leading up to the civil war. There's a reason the South went to war to preserve slavery, and it wasn't because public sentiment was 100% pro-slaveowning.

Darth Wedgius already expand on most of my points better then I could have. but it seems you missed my one point that I judge people as individuals only. sure I judge their actions but I also judge their nature as a person, if they were ultimately a good person despite their actions or an inherently bad person.

and to put this back to the point of this thread, if you're gonna pull down statues, keep it to the statues of people who only did bad things, not George Washington or other Founding Fathers. their statues do not symbolize the bad things they apparently did but the good things they did.

[GreyICE]

Darth Wedgius already expand on most of my points better then I could have. but it seems you missed my one point that I judge people as individuals only. sure I judge their actions but I also judge their nature as a person, if they were ultimately a good person despite their actions or an inherently bad person.

and to put this back to the point of this thread, if you're gonna pull down statues, keep it to the statues of people who only did bad things, not George Washington or other Founding Fathers. their statues do not symbolize the bad things they apparently did but the good things they did.

Well I hope you scroll up, and take a good, long look at that picture. You're willing to say that some of the people who did that are good people.

Remember that the next time anyone tells you they have to have long prison sentences for crimes to "keep criminals off the streets". Did they steal? Did they hurt someone? What crime did they commit? Scroll up, look at that former slave's back, and remember that you're willing to grant that some of the people who did that had "good natures". Because there are serial killers who don't have the kill count that many of those slave owners wracked up.

In another thread you asked me "why are the protesters so violent?" You accused and attacked protesters based on stereotypes. You're willing to let SLAVE OWNERS off the hook, and you attacked protesters because of the existence of looters. Not even attacking just looters (who are still better than slave owners) but the entire group of protesters, as a whole.

So if you want to say some slave owners have good natures, show me your radical peace. Some looters have good natures. Some people who broke windows have good natures. Some people who set cars on fire have good natures. And they all deserve the same sort of second chance you're giving here to show their good natures. Because all of those are much, much, much lesser crimes than slave owning. Show me by thought, by words, by reactions, that you believe that anyone, no matter how serious their crime can have a good nature, and that you're trying to look for it in everyone.

Because right now I think you have a certain blinder where you look for "good nature" in people that are like you, but in people that aren't like you, you assume they don't have a "good nature" until proven otherwise. And if you don't want to be the sort of person that behaves like that, don't behave like that. And show it, and live it.

[Dragon Ball Fan]

Darth Wedgius already expand on most of my points better then I could have. but it seems you missed my one point that I judge people as individuals only. sure I judge their actions but I also judge their nature as a person, if they were ultimately a good person despite their actions or an inherently bad person.

and to put this back to the point of this thread, if you're gonna pull down statues, keep it to the statues of people who only did bad things, not George Washington or other Founding Fathers. their statues do not symbolize the bad things they apparently did but the good things they did.

Well I hope you scroll up, and take a good, long look at that picture. You're willing to say that some of the people who did that are good people.

Remember that the next time anyone tells you they have to have long prison sentences for crimes to "keep criminals off the streets". Did they steal? Did they hurt someone? What crime did they commit? Scroll up, look at that former slave's back, and remember that you're willing to grant that some of the people who did that had "good natures". Because there are serial killers who don't have the kill count that many of those slave owners wracked up.

In another thread you asked me "why are the protesters so violent?" You accused and attacked protesters based on stereotypes. You're willing to let SLAVE OWNERS off the hook, and you attacked protesters because of the existence of looters. Not even attacking just looters (who are still better than slave owners) but the entire group of protesters, as a whole.

So if you want to say some slave owners have good natures, show me your radical peace. Some looters have good natures. Some people who broke windows have good natures. Some people who set cars on fire have good natures. And they all deserve the same sort of second chance you're giving here to show their good natures. Because all of those are much, much, much lesser crimes than slave owning. Show me by thought, by words, by reactions, that you believe that anyone, no matter how serious their crime can have a good nature, and that you're trying to look for it in everyone.

Because right now I think you have a certain blinder where you look for "good nature" in people that are like you, but in people that aren't like you, you assume they don't have a "good nature" until proven otherwise. And if you don't want to be the sort of person that behaves like that, don't behave like that. And show it, and live it.

you didn't pay attention to my points. SOME slave owners were monsters but SOME others were probably good people still. that's why I judge people individually. "this person is bad, this person is good, good, good, bad, good" obviously, the owner of the slave you showed was a bad person but my contention was that ALL slave owners were that brutal.

and on the other thread, I did back off on my criticism of the protestors, pretty much for the reasons you say I should.

[phantom000]

I think a symbol, of anything, only means what you want it to mean. Originally the swastika was about Tibetan spirituality, not white supremacy, and the cross symbolized Roman authority and brutality.

So to me a lot of these Confederate Memorials are not about glorifying slavery, or even the Confederacy itself, they are an acknowledgement that these men were human beings just like anyone else. Even if you want to argue; it does not change the fact that they fought and died for a corrupt cause, that just adds to the tragedy of it. They were good people fighting and dying for a cause that was not theirs since most of the confederate soldiers were slave owners or even worked for one.

[Antiboyscout]

By that logic, why did the North's entire economy slow and not actually regain its growth pace until 1870?

The north recovered, the south did not. How is this evidence against me?

I also note you are simply ignoring the fact that 4 in 10 people in the South were slaves, and were thus living in some of the most horrible conditions imaginable, and had no economic agency whatsoever. 4 in 10 had no money, no resources, and no rights. That's your starting point for measuring the economy - 40% of it had wages of zero, and were literally beaten, raped, tortured, and killed. Once you realize that that was 40% of the population, suddenly the economic picture not quite so good, eh?

Yeah, it sucks. You want to then tell me why the economy of the south and the prospects of the poor did not improve with the introduction sharecropping? Switching to debt slavery isn't really so much solving the problem as hiding it with laws and contracts.

Reparations was proposed on the basis of slavery being evil. It's like locking someone up in prison on bullshit charges for 20 years. You know how the state has to pay millions of dollars when it's proved that they locked someone away for 20 years on false charges? It's not because falsifying evidence brought the state so much economic activity, it's because locking an innocent person up is fucking wrong.

That is a good argument. Too bad it isn't the one black activist are using. They're sticking with, "amerikkka was built by slaves so we are owed a piece of the pie."

OF COURSE economic growth was hindered when 40% of the population had no economic agency. That's just obvious. As I said, setting aside the morality, any economist would tell you that that sort of system is garbage. It's like the worst form of USSR communism times twenty - "We say peasant work in factory or we shoot peasant." It's not good economic policy.

Thank you for proving you know little to nothing about economics. The problem with the soviet system wasn't people were not allowed to pick what job they wanted. It was, every industry was state owned and there for could not fail no matter how poorly run they were. Each failure added up until the whole thing collapsed instead of letting one or two die.

If slave farms were state owned or propped up by the state in some way you might have had a point. Unfortunately for you, the Feds were not so keen on subsidies back then and there are examples of
many plantations going bankrupt. The ones that survived had to have been profitable.