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| ▲ | asadotzler 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The point was not to say USA was special, only to refute the claim that it was all flowers and sunshine at the founding of this country. | |
| ▲ | tim333 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | As a kid in the UK one of the main ideas I had of the US was Cowboys vs Indians either as a show or a game, and the establishment of the US was largely that - white guys killing the native Americans and taking the land. | |
| ▲ | komali2 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Well only a couple countries participated in the creation of the Atlantic slave trade, and very few in history have engaged in chattel slavery to the scale the USA did. | | |
| ▲ | throwaway48476 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Slavery in the USA was but a tiny fraction of contemporary slavery not to mention historical slavery. | | |
| ▲ | komali2 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Per capita you are wrong. The Atlantic slave trade enslaved 12 million people. An astounding volume of unique and unnecessary misery and evil. |
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| ▲ | AlexandrB 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Seems like a very Americentric perspective. There's still plenty of chattel slavery out there right now[1]. In that respect, the idea that the US is uniquely bad is like the "evil twin" version of American exceptionalism[2]. [1] https://corpaccountabilitylab.org/calblog/2025/8/7/widesprea... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism | | |
| ▲ | frmersdog 5 days ago | parent [-] | | It's hard to find other examples of it (or at least the inherent natural inferiority of one group of residents) being written into the country's foundational legal document. We are indeed exceptional in that regard. | | |
| ▲ | eadmund 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The Constitution doesn’t mention slavery once. That’s intentional. | |
| ▲ | xvector 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's time to get off your high horse. If you eat meat, future humans will regard you the same way as we regard the slave owners of yesteryear. Perhaps even worse. Judge people by the ways in which they push their society's morals forward, not retroactively after hundreds of years of morals evolving. | | |
| ▲ | komali2 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | No. Slavery is a unique evil and people knew it was a unique evil since the time of the ancient Greeks. I refuse to accept "it was just the way things were at the time" when there were people opposed to slavery thousands of years ago. Aristotle wrote about them: > others however maintain that for one man to be another man’s master is contrary to nature, because it is only convention that makes the one a slave and the other a freeman and there is no difference between them by nature, and that therefore it is unjust, for it is based on force. There were abolitionists in the first days of the United States through to the civil war. People knew it was wrong or had ample opportunity to hear it argued that it was wrong, and furthermore, the inherent wrongness of it should be obvious to anyone that encounters it, and I don't give a moral pass to anyone that brushes it off because it was common any more than I do for American politicians that brush off school shootings because it's common. | | |
| ▲ | xvector 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Incorrect. There were some people that understood slavery to be a unique evil. The vast majority of humanity understood it to be "just how things were." Really, not much different from how we view factory farming today. | | |
| ▲ | komali2 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Slavery is evil though. It's pretty straightforward. People that participated in it were wrong to do so, and that should be self evident to all participants. I don't accept any excuse for participating in the slave trade. I'm not special or unique to point this out, it's obvious no matter the century. Would you like to argue that it isn't? The floor is yours. Otherwise your point about consensus is moot. Evil then, evil now, evil forever. | | |
| ▲ | xvector 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Slavery was obviously wrong but you cannot judge those that didn't understand this. Consensus matters. The morals of the time matter. It was a societal failing over a personal one. If you think you can judge someone by the morals of today, you must then accept you are evil as well, since societal morals will continue to evolve. You never answered the question: are you vegan, or do you contribute to the immense suffering and death of ~70b sentient beings a year? The suffering hours inflicted every few days exceed that of any atrocity in human history. It is the industrialized torture of billions of innocent beings for your pleasure. If veganism becomes the norm, is it fair for future humans to judge your whole life by your consumption of meat, leather, or other animal products when there are so many people today that recognize it as a "unique and horrifying evil?" It is a strange form of exceptionalism for you to judge those in the past but not yourself, because the delta will be similar over long enough timeframes, and if you do partake in any of these things you won't be seen as much different. | | |
| ▲ | acdha 4 days ago | parent [-] | | > If you think you can judge someone by the morals of today, you must then accept you are evil as well, since societal morals will continue to evolve. We can judge them by their peers at the time. The U.S. founding fathers didn’t unanimously support slavery, many of them opposed it but were committed to the idea of unity against England. Part of why we can be comfortable judging the slave owners is because their position was primarily based on greed - if we suddenly discovered that cows were sentient, a ton of people would stop eating beef but there was no doubt or ambiguity about black people in that regard, only ruthless awareness of how rich you could get without paying your workers. | | |
| ▲ | aziaziazi 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > if we suddenly discovered that cows were sentient People eat beef mostly because they’re used to it and they think it’s good for them. Everybody knows cow are sentient, there’s a strong intuition (why wouldn’t they like other animals ?) but also tons of literature. There’s not much doubt about it neither. I agree with the slave owners, however the spectrum of acceptance is large where it’s part of the society. What about someone that make profit by doing business with the slave owner? Someone that buy products coming ~probably~ from that work? Or someone assisting an "indigene showcase" because they know nothing about this humanoid that look, speak and act differently than the people they used to known (that are from 100km away max). Not different than a zoo, and both are tremendously cruel. | |
| ▲ | xvector 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Everyone knows cows are sentient (not sapient) in a way not dissimilar to a pet, everyone knows factory farming causes immense cruelty and suffering to them, our peers call this out and the text+video evidence is well documented and freely available, 20% of humans abstain, but most people eat it to satisfy their taste buds. So the cases are not dissimilar at all because your contemporaries do call this out. If causing such immense death and suffering for pleasure in the face of easily available alternatives is not greed, what is? You are only highlighting my point how you are seeing something as acceptable that will probably be viewed as an unspeakable cruelty in the future, and yet you feel comfortable judging past humans by an increased standard whereas you clearly are not comfortable applying an increased standard to yourself. You are a product of your society as much as the slave owners of the past were of theirs. This is why it is senseless and hypocritical to paint past peoples acting within the accepted mores of their society as evil - as if we are any better, relatively speaking! It makes sense to celebrate those that push things forward, as opposed to condemning those that are simply doing what they know to be normal. | | |
| ▲ | acdha 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Sorry, yes, I did mean to write sapient. I'm not sure that's a conflict, however, as much as further along a spectrum. Whether or not eating cows is ethical is possible to debate because there is valid question about how much of a mind they have but that was never honestly in question for humans. The people who kept slaves had to invent things like the “mark of Cain” theology _because_ they knew their victims were intelligent, feeling creatures like themselves and had to justify treating them in a very profitable way. All of those elaborate “the gods want this” constructions exist to get people to override their natural instinct to recognize someone as a person. | |
| ▲ | komali2 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | This point is moot because chattel slavery of humans is worse by a large degree than eating animals. We don't need to debate whether eating animals is bad, that's a distraction. We can judge past slaveholders. The shared humanity of another human is self evident the instant you behold a slave, whether 300 years ago or 3000. Everyone that participated was wrong to do so. | | |
| ▲ | xvector 4 days ago | parent [-] | | I think you're just deliberately being obstructionist and entirely avoiding the point I'm trying to make. Calling the core point of the argument a "distraction" is very convenient for you. Torture is bad no matter how you cut it, and it's especially bad if you torture a sentient being for your own pleasure. Can we agree on that? Saying whether it's better or worse than slavery is like playing the oppression Olympics, they are both atrocities and demonstrably evil actions. When you kill an animal, you can see it struggle, cry, suffer, die. You can hold and see its pain in your hands. To do so for your taste buds is another level of evil. To make it live an entire life of suffering? That's really not much different in terms of badness. The fact that you can't acknowledge this highlights the double standard you apply to people that came before you but not yourself. Everyone is wrong to participate in the systematic torture and murder of 70,000,000,000 sentient beings a year. Does that make all the participants evil? | | |
| ▲ | komali2 4 days ago | parent [-] | | > Saying whether it's better or worse than slavery is like playing the oppression Olympics, they are both atrocities and demonstrably evil actions. I'm not trying to engage in oppression Olympics, I'm just saying, slavery is basically the worst things people can do, so far beyond the morality of whether or not it's ok to kill animals, or even torture them, that I'm just confused why it's brought up as if it's relevant. I don't think killing animals is a great thing to do, and factory farms are awful. But humans are humans, and constantly just hitting this "what about animals" things is bizarre to me. I'm not trying to be rude, I just simply don't see the relevance. Slavery being just about the worse thing humans can do means that all the other bad things pale in comparison. I'm not saying it's always valid to apply modern ethics to people from various time periods - it's bad, but understandable, that people used to beat their kids, or waste food by sacrificing animals and leaving them out to rot "for the gods." My point is that slavery simply is a massive exception, it's second-to-second murder, taking a human and trying to make them not-human. So that's why anything you could throw at me that we do today that people in the future might say is wrong - jailing people, not housing the homeless, killing animals for sport, engaging in capitalism, you name it, none of them come close to slavery in terms of sheer evil. And my point is that this isn't modern ethics, this is as self-evident a moral fact as is possible for morality. Many things in morality are grey, debatable. Not slavery. It's the One of Two things that are bad in every century, alongside rape. The wrongness of slavery, and rape, are immediately evident no matter what culture or era you come from. And the reason people do this is usually to justify slavery. "Well they didn't know any better, so they had slaves." Justifying slavery with ANY reason is also bad. So I refuse to accept any attempt to do so, including comparisons to other things that happen to be bad, or possibly considered bad in the future. | | |
| ▲ | xvector 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I guess our difference is that I don't view the suffering of humans as any more exceptional than the suffering of other sentient beings. | | |
| ▲ | komali2 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Yes, that is then the difference. The humanity of a human is self evident to any other human instantly. The humanity of an animal is debatable to this day. That's why slavery is inexcusably bad - the badness of it is also immediately self evident upon encountering it. | | |
| ▲ | xvector 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I don't think "the humanity of something" is a factor that plays any role in whether something is morally okay or not. Suffering is the factor that matters. | | |
| ▲ | komali2 3 days ago | parent [-] | | The reason slavery is bad isn't because of suffering, depending on how you define suffering. There were "house slaves" that had relatively comfortable lives. Slavery is bad among other reasons because it strips away someone's humanity and completely takes away their liberty, subjecting their life to the will of someone else. It's a constant ongoing theft of a human life, a reduction of a human life to property. I'm glad you brought up suffering, I'm realizing better now why so frequently I hear these two ideas brought together by people inadvertently finding themselves on the same side as folks minimizing slavery in attempts to argue against harming animals (by engaging in debate about moral relativism). Purely from a suffering standpoint slavery doesn't necessarily have to be "that bad." Drawing comparisons between it and arguments against harming animals are nonsensical because we're not talking about suffering, we're talking about other things that can only possibly involve humans. Thank you for sticking around and exploring your viewpoint with me so I could understand that better. |
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| ▲ | dlock17 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Do you think Charlie Kirk was pushing society's morals forward? I don't think dismissing chattel slavery or it's ramifications on the modern day will improve the morals of society either. | | |
| ▲ | xvector 5 days ago | parent [-] | | If you think I'm dismissing chattel slavery, you're misinterpreting my argument. |
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| ▲ | tomrod 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > This is the kind of rhetoric which seriously undermines the history of American philosophical thought. Hard disagree. Ignoring it is what allows systemic injustice to persist -- why do we care, today, what Eugenicists in the early 1900s had to say? Jim Crow implementers and supporters? Daughters of the Confederacy? If the reality of history undermines your respect for American philosophical thought, then perhaps the American philosophical thought is not quite worthy of the pedestal it was placed on. | | |
| ▲ | nis0s 5 days ago | parent [-] | | You’re right that it’s important to acknowledge the pain and suffering caused by bad policy and practices, and it’s important to examine what went wrong so we don’t repeat those mistakes. That said I think it’s important to separate good ideas from their troubled past and use them where they still apply. People are not perfect, but a good idea is good no matter where it comes from. Those good ideas shape culture and shape the destiny of nations. That’s what happened in America, and there’s a lot to be learned from the past. Unless the point is to undermine the recipe that made America into what it is today, then it doesn’t make sense to measure people who didn’t live in our time by our sensibilities, morality or ethics. We can learn their good stuff, and improve on what they didn’t do well. | | |
| ▲ | tomrod 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Maybe it would help to pluck out the few good ideas from the bad slop. What do you consider specifically unique in the American experiment that transcends the toxic swamp of suppression of freedoms America often engages in? | | |
| ▲ | nis0s 5 days ago | parent [-] | | > the toxic swamp of suppression of freedoms America often engage Seems extremist to take that view, especially when all nations have just as bloody or dark histories. But a lot of what shaped initial American thought were Enlightenment ideals, primarily the works of John Locke. So the foundation is solid enough, but is there more that can be done to produce effective implementations? Definitely. It’s important to note that there are good ideas everywhere, and no one culture or nation has had hegemony or monopoly on producing the best works over time. I personally also like the fact that the way the American revolutionaries thought shaped the progress of American science up to the 20th century. Here’s a recent lecture on this, but there’s no recording that I can find. https://www.sciencehistory.org/visit/events/americas-scienti... https://www.usahistorytimeline.com/pages/the-impact-of-the-r... | | |
| ▲ | tomrod 5 days ago | parent [-] | | First off, not extremist. Let's give you the benefit of the doubt there, perhaps you simply didn't recognize you undercut your credibility in a discussion when you dismiss people having a different view of history by assigning them to an extremist bucket -- nowhere left to learn or discuss when you start there. Further, mild whataboutism doesn't support your case either. Second, the Scottish enlightenment wad wonderful! Not unique to America, so recognizing that the darkest parts of our history are decidedly not representive of the Enlightenment, my classical liberal ideals, and I suspect yours too, does nothing to the case that America did a good job adopting some of the ideals of the Enlightenment in the constitution. We could have gone the French route with the horrors of Robspierre, but we didnt, whether due to lack of population density, aristocracy, or any number of factors. We agree completely that cultural differences, known as diversity, have outsized benefits. I'll review the science idea. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts. We really aren't far apart. I simply see slavery, genocide, and other horrors of the American past as necessary to recognize in order to set context, and in no way does that diminish the astonishing success of our American experiment. Indeed, in spite of these stains on our history, we remain a nation that does the right thing, as Churchill puts it, after exhausting all other options. And that's a uniqur thing to history. In my view, if we can't acknowledge our past deficits, in no way can we comprehend the present flaws sufficiently to motivate action and collaboration. | | |
| ▲ | nis0s 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Genocides are a human problem, and not distinct to any one particular culture or people, they’ve occurred everywhere and across all times. https://casbs.stanford.edu/genocide-world-history It’s better for people to acknowledge that such a problem can span all types of people and cultures, so we can perform root cause analysis without being biased or disingenuous. There’s also the question of when we classify group killing as a war vs. as a genocide. There are schools of thought on this https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14623528.2020.1.... For example, see the hesitation of scholars in classifying Mongol invasions as a genocide. Is it the case that only white settlers committed genocide across history? If we think of it that way, then we’re ignoring atrocities committed by inter-group violence (war crimes), or same ethnicity violence. The goal should be to prevent violence between groups of people. Regarding slavery, again it’s a problem that has occurred across time and cultures. Why were different ideologies and cultures unable to prevent slavery? It’s a disgusting stain on human history. https://historycollection.com/the-evolution-of-slavery-from-... |
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| ▲ | mike_d 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | tomrod 5 days ago | parent [-] | | > Fascism has never in history been stopped by scholars. It is uncomfortable to directly acknowledge "what worked well." Your comment maps precisely to: we've had zero network intrusions, why are we paying these cybersecurity professionals? So much fascism and authoritarianism was blocked since WW2 because scholars called it out early. Guess what scholars called out in the US in 2016, but most politicians put party over country? "We scaled back our cybersecurity professionals and saved a ton of budget! On an unrelated note, do we have data breach insurance?" There is certainly room to punch fascists in the face when hostilities are hot. We can't start there and remain a tolerant society dealing with the paradox of tolerance. The first steps are shunning and ceasing support, isolating the infected into appropriately deprived states of resource loss, and not political violence. There is a great case study in Daryl Davis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis | | |
| ▲ | mike_d 5 days ago | parent [-] | | I agree that civil debate and cooler heads deterred and delayed fascism in many cases. I was referring specifically to when it has taken hold and needs to be stopped. An apt comparison would be instituting mandatory cybersecurity training for employees as a direct response to a breach. That is a great step to take post-cleanup but does basically nothing to address the issue at hand. |
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| ▲ | halico_chops 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [flagged] | | | |
| ▲ | deadfoxygrandpa 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | nis0s 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Civil wars have often occurred with war crimes (like killing non-combatants) with the purpose of performing ideology annihilation. At least one example is here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torre%C3%B3n_massacre Creating distinct categories (ethnic cleansing or genocide etc.) of terrible things is an important exercise, but it can also dilute our overall understanding of human behaviors. The categories are useful for geological or historical analysis, but not for understanding baseline human behaviors. |
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