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What if my ancestors didn't own slaves, and in fact fought to free them? Do I get a prize?
They weren't a problem when they were slaves. Your ancestors fighting to free them are why we're in this mess.
You know why the south lost and Rome fell right? Slavery is as bad for the owners as it is for the slaves. It stifles every good thing in humanity and promotes the bad. Most surviving cultures have figured that out.
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Slavery was a bad idea, and should never have been implemented. You might as well blame Kulaks and wreckers for the failures of Communism. Your ancestors should, in fact, have picked their own damn cotton.
You call it slavery, I call it animal husbandry. It worked just fine and while cruelty to animals sucks, domestication is not evil. Often it's a pretty great deal for the animals. Nature is harsh and wild animals are generally worse to each other than their human masters.
My ancestors are at fault inasmuch as they failed to adequately anticipate the fatal flaw in voting-based government, which is the incentive to expand the franchise to those who should never have had it in exchange for political support and dominance over the responsible opponents who refuse to stoop so low.
I'll go ahead and agree that modeling your fellow man as animals, or more specifically, social mammals, and then using animal husbandry techniques on them is valid. The same soothing and awareness and empathetic techniques work on both. I do notice that- "animals" being a slur is completely unfair both to humans and to non-human animals.
But chattel slavery was piss poor animal husbandry. As evidenced by its fruits. If your animals are suffering, you're not doing a great job. If you are in physical conflict with your animals, you have failed to engage with them emotionally. This is the smell of your mandate of heaven rotting beneath your mismanagement.
If your animals can learn read and write and become functional independent general intelligences that can potentially engage with high society and you aren't bothering to cultivate that. You fail druid class!
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We allow all kinds of hot takes, including "slavery was good, actually," as long as you can argue the case civilly and in accordance with our rules.
You've broken a few of those rules, notably "Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument" and "Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion."
Sometimes people really want to say something about a particular group of people, because this is what they really, honestly believe. Things like "Jews are vermin," "Women aren't sentient," or "Black people are animals." And when we mod them for saying these things, they complain that we are "protecting the feelings" of the group they despise. Well, no, we don't care that you might hurt someone's feelings (arguing that blacks have lower IQs and higher criminality, or that women are hypergamous, or that Jews have disproportionate power in Hollywood, likely hurts some people's feelings, but you are allowed to say that). But it's one thing to describe your grievances with the behavior of a group, and quite another to declare they are less than human and should be treated as such.
Assuming you are not just trolling, pretend there are black people participating here (sometimes there are) and that you aren't trying to insult and denigrate them (even if that's what you do want to do - you may not).
Yes, I think you're generally correct to flag me here as 'just being honest' isn't a great excuse for being so transgressive, though most of the rest of what you wrote doesn't apply in this case I think. This isn't an instance of me wanting to say mean things about a group.
Nor is my issue with 'black people' so much as... look, I'm having sincere trouble finding terminology that gets the idea across without being legitimately interpreted as 'antagonistic'. There's a continuum problem. "Human" is a fuzzy category and largely in the eye of the beholder. Is a gorilla which speaks sign language human? What about Lucy (A. afarensis)? Primitive Tanzanians who discovered fire, then lost the secret and apparently reverted to the lifestyle of other hominids generally not recognized as human?
Skin color is not especially interesting to me. But I agree that the language about human/non-human is inflammatory and doesn't really get the point across, so I'll try to refrain from it in the future. My sincere apologies.
There is a quality which is something along the lines of 'capacity for moral responsibility' that generally (but not perfectly) correlates with IQ and which I think is localized entirely within select groups of ancestries and almost entirely men. These embody and sustain priceless phenomena ranging from how they experience and perceive the world to cultural inheritances. This heritage is inestimably valuable, fragile, and, increasingly, endangered.
My take on 'humans' outside of those groups is that they're something more like children than like non-humans. The trouble, of course, is that they generally don't have the capacity to grow into members of those groups. So they're something else, a third category between children and animals. Something more like permanently disabled children which are helpful dependents at best and, if they get strong and numerous enough, serious existential threats to the system and individuals within it. Their existences are often improved by domestication (honest question: is that word okay? I feel like it's exactly the one I want, no shade) and in the process they can participate in the grand project and enjoy in many of its fruits.
Meanwhile, inability to see this picture clearly or even discuss it intelligibly is one of the greatest threats to the Good and I'm at great pains to figure out how to articulate it.
So that's the perspective, more or less.
I am not sure how to give you guidelines for how you can argue that blacks and women are incapable of functioning as fully sentient adults with agency, which seems to be what you're asking for. I mean, your post above would not, IMO, break any rules, much as I disagree with it. But I would suggest that if you want to argue that black people cannot and should not be free citizens and need to be "domesticated" to keep them in line, or that women should be property (not sure if that is your position, but it has been the position of some other posters), well, we've allowed those arguments, but it matters a lot how you say it.
"I don't think women are actually fully capable of expressing agency the same way men are" - probably okay. "Women don't have agency" - not okay.
"I question whether blacks are capable of building a fully functional civilization on their own" - probably okay. "Blacks are animals" - not okay.
Now, some of our critics will be quick to say "Aha! It really is just about using MOAR WORDS!" But it isn't. It's about expressing some epistemic humility, or put another way, allowing for the possibility that you might be wrong. And at least pretending that you believe those people are people who have a right to disagree with you.
If you said the first thing - "I question whether blacks are capable of building a fully functional civilization on their own" - a black poster here, assuming they were willing to engage, has something to engage with. They can disagree with your premise, they can offer counter-evidence, they can ask you why you think that.... But what is a black person supposed to say to "You're an animal"?
So look my response here (the one I'm writing at the moment) is not intended as a petulant argument, but I feel a bit frustrated and I'm trusting you to interpret it in the spirit in which I mean it, and thanks in advance for taking the time.
First things first, I appreciate the ethos you're laying out here. As I understand it, this space functions based upon an axiom that anyone should be able to participate in good faith without having to suffer what amount to unnecessary indications of being unwelcome. If someone is of the opinion that entire classes of people are fundamentally incapable of participating in valid ways, that's a problem, because The Motte takes as axiomatic that people of all classes should be welcome to participate as they're able and those who disagree damage the capacity of the site to fulfill that function.
I think this is basically good and right. Not for reasons of niceness, but for reasons of epistemic humility, as you say. It's all too easy for any of us to be flatly wrong about something if for no other reason than because we've simply never encountered someone who could have corrected us if we'd bothered to discuss the matter with them. And, particularly when it comes to evaluating such matters as the one under discussion at the moment (to what degree long-divergent ancestral groups should be considered as belonging in the same class), it's intuitively very important that those of the ancestral groups in question have as much of a chance at participation as possible in order to maximize the chances of this happening.
So far, so good.
Arguendo that was my position (it wasn't; see below), how about "I think blacks are animals"? It's a useful test case because we get to the heart of whether the issue is with the opinion or the phrasing. Though FWIW, again, I think the term 'animals' here was a poor choice which generates vastly more heat than light, at least without defining it in detail and in ways that would probably trigger a lot of disagreement per se.
I just don't think I ran afoul of this, is the thing. If I say that I don't think eight year olds (and those who are mentally at that level regardless of their adult bodies) generally don't have the capacity to function as responsible adults, I doubt anyone would react with horror and disgust, and I also think the difference is entirely political. Similar opinions about women and, er, genetically-less-mentally-developed ancestral groups were nothing if not mainstream and considered prima facie obvious not too long ago and for most of human history.
Yeah, saying that is gonna upset some eight year olds, who are a lot less likely to participate precisely because they are juvenile and react accordingly. And I'll even allow that somewhere out there are a few who would make better citizens than many existing citizens. But it would be crazy to object to the observation on those grounds. And the "I think" in the claim is qualifier enough, in my opinion, or in the case of my OP, "I call it". Hedging my statements like that is a practice I picked up here, actually, for exactly the reason that signaling epistemic humility by doing so is useful for the tone of the space and even as a little reminder to myself. I've gotten lazy about it, so again, I concede that you had grounds for correcting me.
All good and well.
They can disagree with my premise, they can offer counter-evidence, they can ask me why I think that...
In short, they can behave exactly as I'd expect myself to behave. Or, if they can't, well?
Finally, and I realize this is likely to come off as splitting hairs but I wasn't talking about 'black people', and frankly I sincerely doubt that any of the people I was talking about would ever show up here in the first place for the same reason that eight year olds don't. (Perfectly-lovely and intelligent black people do show up here from time to time and I consider a couple of them friends and hang out in other spaces and even occasionally go to one for advice on medical issues.) I'm talking about comparatively-genetically-mentally-incapable people. In this particular case, heavy overlap with black, yes. But slavery is not a uniquely black issue and neither is being what amounts to a feral savage who will behave as such regardless of attempts at forcible civilization. In any event there's enough admixture at this point that blanket statements about SSH-descended inhabitants of the US are a lot less appropriate than they were two hundred years ago.
So -- I guess I just want to get the above off my chest. This isn't really an objection to anything you said in particular, I again acknowledge your correction, and (hopefully obviously) I don't intend any kind of gotcha argument. It's just a difficult situation. I'm glad to be in a place where we're at least trying to navigate such a thicket together in good faith.
Without trying to get bogged down in debating the specific claims you are (or aren't) making, I think the basic problem here is the way you expressed yourself, because yes, often it is about the wording. Because this place is explicitly tone policed and not content policed, tone is important. Consider the difference between "You're fat" and "I'm concerned about your health." Arguably they are communicating the same message, but one is being insulting without regard for how it's received, and the other is at least pretending to be offered with good intentions.
So with regards to saying "You're an animal," okay, I suppose a black person could, as you say, politely debate the proposition that they are an animal and not a human being, but I don't think anyone would deny that calling someone an animal is straightforwardly an insult. People here are expected to engage politely even with opinions they strongly disagree with and find offensive, but they are not expected to accept being told they're subhuman.
Granting that that wasn't exactly what you meant, if you want to discuss specific subsets of the population which happen to be majority black and argue that they are, essentially, subhuman, you can do that if you take the trouble to qualify your statement with behaviors you believe justify such a categorization, but you cannot just make a broad generalization about "blacks." Given that two mods read your original post as saying "Blacks are animals," it's fine if you want to walk that back a little, but hopefully you see why it matters what words you use.
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There is not a continuum problem, and "human" is not a fuzzy category largely in the eyes of the beholder. Awareness, sense-of-self, language, volition and Will are obvious and inescapably significant, despite more than a century of extremely popular lies to the contrary. The evidence you are gesturing at simply does not exist, and claims to the contrary have long been established as lies that no one bothers to maintain or defend any more.
There are not, nor have there been, any gorillas that can speak sign language. Claims to the contrary appear to be a more elaborate form of Clever Hans, and more generally yet another example of how Psychology and Sociology are grifts that have polluted our society for more than a century.
We have no observations of Lucy's behavior or capabilities one way or the other. What we can observe is current humans, and the observation shows that while their capabilities may differ, the cluster is still significant and very, very well-separated from all other animals.
I observe capacity for moral responsibility in my wife, and in the females of my family generally. They make choices and live with the results. That does not mean there is a difference in how they think versus how I and the males in my family think, but the difference is not a matter of "greater" and "lesser" in the way you seem to be claiming.
If domestication is a thing, it is a thing that all humans require. I can identify ways in which I myself have been "domesticated", how my instincts and desires have been shaped away from raw selfishness and self-gratification toward responsibility and care for others. in this sense, I see no way to argue that domestication is something white men do to white women in particular and blacks generally. In other senses, I cannot see support for an argument that "domestication" exists at all.
Well, firstly, thanks, because now I feel like we're having a good, interesting, and productive conversation.
What do you think about Alex the parrot, who (allegedly, and feel free to object) combined words to make neologisms?
And what's your take on humans with nasty FOXP2 mutations such that, uh, let me grab a quote,
I don't think capacity for language is magic and I don't think it's a good yardstick for humanity. And I don't think awareness, sense-of-self, or volition are uniquely human either. As it happens I work with animals and have a lot of time to consider this. Their internal experiences are indeed very different from ours, but not, I think, in the ways you're proposing.
I don't think about Alex the parrot at all. To my knowledge, no parrot has ever used their language to organize a rebellion against their human owners, something human slaves have done repeatedly. By language, I am not referring to words, but rather to the ability of humans to communicate their internal state to others, to build communicable models of the world that coordinate large-scale cooperative action. Neither parrots nor other animals do that.
I'm not sure what your excerpt about genetic defects is supposed to communicate.
Whether it is "magic" is an interesting question. I'll agree that it alone is not a good yardstick for humanity; large language models are not human and I don't care much about them. I care about language because it interpenetrates and mutually amplifies the rest of the items on that list. Language, in the sense I am using it, is one of the reasons tyranny is not sustainable: people can formulate moral arguments, and those moral arguments retain weight. They can make blood-guilt immortal beyond the imagining of any individual human, and are part of why justice is, in every practical sense, inescapable.
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Humans aren't animals. Animals can be safely disregarded. Humans cannot. That is the distinction.
And yet, they don't seem to have appreciated it, and because they are humans and not actually animals, their lack of appreciation is in fact dispositive.
I do not believe Abolitionism won because its supporters expected to reap new voters. All evidence I've seen indicates that it won because its supporters considered chattel slavery an intolerable evil, and were willing to make considerable sacrifices to eradicate it. I believe they were correct in this estimation. If you wish to disregard the humanity of Africans, I certainly cannot stop you. Leave them in Africa, and it's no business of mine what happens on the other side of the world. Bring them here and you make them, and by extension yourself, my problem.
I know you know you're arguing by defining things in a way I wouldn't agree with, so what's the point?
That was the popular justification, yes, and for the same reason that people become vegetarians or vegans or join PETA and try to ban pet ownership: we're incredibly prone to anthropomorphizing animals.
The power politics behind the war were rather different. Regardless, my point has less to do with why the war was fought and more to do with what happened afterward. "Send them back to their native habitat" was a great idea with plenty of support and should have happened, though FWIW I think we owed it to them to administrate for their sakes. Whatever they are, they're close enough to us that I don't like the thought of leaving them to their own wretched devices. Perhaps in time, and with guidance...
But even people who cared very much for them often understood that treating them as equals, let alone giving them the franchise, would be insane. But it happened. So with women &c.
You offered an implicit argument by definition by calling blacks animals. I pointed out a salient distinction between humans, including black humans, and animals: humans, including black humans, have awareness, will and volition, and so they cannot safely be discounted under any system mankind has yet devised. The only truly safe human is a dead human, and the dead cannot be enslaved.
I am not arguing by definition. You are, and you are refusing to address a salient distinction that your definition cannot account for.
You argue that they are animals, and yet you are unwilling to treat them like animals. Why? Your "guidance" didn't work before and won't work now. Why persist in your folly?
It isn't about caring or not caring. My care leads me to wish to leave them alone. Your care demands domination, and has led to this disaster every step of the way. I certainly have no interest in joining you in your folly, or of protecting your from its consequences.
The franchise is largely irrelevant. What's killing it would have killed it regardless, although racial and sexual politics clearly accelerate the process.
I don't really understand what you think animals are or why they wouldn't have awareness, will, and volition. It seems pretty clear to me that they do.
Compassion, which I have for plenty of other animals as well.
It didn't? I think it did.
I think that would be incredibly cruel.
I just have no idea what you're talking about.
We can cage animals indefinitely. We cannot cage humans indefinitely. It's a bit unfair to claim that no state based on slavery has ever survived long-term, because no state has ever survived long-term, but states that came to depend on slavery consistently experience serious, long-term problems with stability caused by trying to keep a large population of hostiles intimately intermixed with their society. To the extent that this has been maintained for any significant length of time, the tradeoffs pretty clearly aren't worth it.
Your compassion for other animals results in benign neglect. Why is that not good enough in the case of blacks?
Slavery resulted in catastrophic failure in Haiti, and it resulted in a less-catastrophic but still quite thorough failure in America. Slavery demands repugnant levels of tyranny over fellow humans, such that slavers couldn't convince non-slavers to adopt the practice or even to tolerate it long-term. Doing horrible things to blacks to keep them from doing possibly-less-horrible things to each other is not an obvious win, to put it mildly. "domestication" since then has been a complete failure. The black underclass remains a mess. Harsh measures aren't an improvement, and less-harsh measures clearly don't work. The premise is invalidated by the accumulation of actual evidence. We should let the blacks choose whether to follow society's rules among us, or follow their own rules among themselves. Those who wish can be productive citizens, and the rest can do as they please away from the rest of us, black and white alike.
Then make your case to the blacks themselves, and let them choose voluntarily if they agree with you. I doubt they're interested, but am happy to be proven wrong.
People justified slavery, claiming it was for the slaves' benefit. It wasn't, and that's why slavery brings serious, unsustainable problems wherever it is implemented. People have claimed and continue to claim that some people are fundamentally more people than others, and that the lesser sort can be manipulated and shaped according to their betters' preferences. This view is unsupportable from an evidentiary perspective, and disastrous from a historical perspective.
Consider the Swiss. They do not enslave, and they do not rule. They keep to themselves, defend themselves, and let the rest of the world enjoy their benign neglect. Why should anyone prefer to do other than as the Swiss do?
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I'm still waiting for my prize for being the first of my ancestors to even be born in the western hemisphere, so I'll let you know.
You're your own ancestor?
Though art God. Drink water, grow closer.
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No, you can sit in the same bucket with the white Ellis Island immigrants, who also never owned slaves.
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