Stop The Slavers

Posted on by accordingtohoyt

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One of the many amazing things about the left is that they have an inborn sense that the most heinous things are okay for them to do.  Not anyone else, mind you. Just them.

A friend calls this “It’s all right when we do it because our hearts are pure.”

Another interesting — and by interesting, kindly read “appalling” — thing is how they make slavery the centerpiece of their “we have America show.”  In their concept of America, slavery is the one unforgivable sin that caused America to be born tainted, and the reason the entire American population needs to be replaced via open borders… by groups that still own slaves (a lot of Africa, and particularly the middle East) and groups that did truly horrible things to enslaved peoples (Aztecs) etc. etc.

Yes, the lack of knowledge of history is wonderful: as in, it causes wonder.  Terrific, even: as in it causes terror.

Look, I realize our schools go out of their way not to teach that slavery has existed since there have been humans on the planet.  Maybe since there have been hominids. (The excuse I was once given by a doctor of education is that this isn’t taught “So as not to make our students of color feel bad.” I don’t know about you, but thinking my race alone out of all the races in the world was enslaved WOULD make me feel bad. Also scared. So I’d probably want the government–  Oh, wait. I think I found the real reason.)

Yes, slavery was and is a horrible thing, but honestly until Western Civilization with its concept of the (literal, from Adam and Eve) brotherhood of humans (note Jewish slavery was also different. What we’d call debt slavery. And had an end) and its industrial revolution, there wasn’t even a lot of revulsion on slavery.  Look, I know whence I speak. I read a lot of poems about the slave taking of moors by Christians and Christians by moors.  Slavery just was.

And it was not — I know this shocks the living hell out of liberals, and to an extent all graduates of American education — RACE based in most cases. It was sometimes “ethnicity” based because of where slaves were most available from at the time.  Which is why Romans were likely to have Celtic slaves.  And yes, they had black citizens.

Also, when faced with the fact that the rest of the world also had slaves — I’ve come to suspect lately that the left  knows very well they’re lying, even the rank and file. Like, you know, they say that no one is going to take our guns, but if you hear a group of them talking and they don’t know you’re nearby, they’ll say they want to take our guns. In the same way when you confront them with the fact slavery is universal, they look upset to be found out, not surprised — they claim American slavery was the worst form and not practiced anywhere else.

Which means they’re crazy (and/or liars). Sure, it was pretty bad, but by and large it was worse to be a slave just about anywhere else. In the Caribbean it was a thing of horror. And in parts of Africa (Dahomey for instance) being a slave COULD mean being sold onto America and Europe OR simply being slaughtered over the tomb of one of their recently deceased kings.  Depending on when they arrived to Dahomey.  Which, you know, was also a fairly normal thing to happen in antiquity all over the world: slaves might be killed to the glory of their masters or the gods. Or worked to death.  Or….

But it goes beyond that. I really would like the left to answer ONE question: is slavery only bad when it’s done by one race to another? Or is slavery: the forcing of others to labor at things that benefit you for no or inadequate compensation, in general bad?  Like, for everyone?

They must think it’s bad for everyone, because they complain about the “wage slavery” of Capitalism.

First let’s dispose of that semantically f*cked up sentence. Capitalism is what communists (or Marxists) call the system of humans trading freely with humans. “Wage slavery” is what they call the fact that “if you don’t work, you don’t eat.”  I.e. the condition of humans on Earth, unless they’re very lucky to be born to very wealthy families.  I mean, look, seriously: there is no entitlement to be able to live without working. And unless you inherited a lot of money or land or other value that people want, you will have to trade your time and skill for the money that will allow you to live and get the things you want.

Is the compensation inadequate? Sure, in many times and places it has been. Arguably the compensation for unskilled work is now inadequate.  Do you know why? Because it obeys the law of supply and demand. The more unskilled workers the left imports (see, for instance the attempt to erase our borders and act like we’re some kind of charity organization, instead of a country) the less unskilled workers will be paid. Particularly since they can be undercut by people who are not trying to build a life here, but who are living 12 to a room and sending back what is to their coutnries a fortune, to build a life there.

You can’t repeal the law of supply and demand, anymore than you can repeal the law of gravity.  Saying it’s horrible and artificially raising wages just causes us to be more of an attractive nuisance to unskilled workers looking to send money back to their native depressed economies, and…

At any rate, absent monkeying by the state or other attempts to “help” the workers, wage slavery isn’t: you cannot be bought and sold. You cannot be forced to work against your will.  You strike a bargain to work for x amount.  Yes, the pay and the market can suck, but it is still not slavery.  Yes, trying to find a skill to learn that will pay, wihtout going into indenture (our current educational system is the result of government monkeying with it.) is difficult.  But you CAN.  It might be hard as hell — life is PAIN highness — but it CAN be done.

You know what IS slavery?

Well, most of the Democrat plans, really, now that they’ve gone full commie.

A planned economy is by definition slavery. You are told where to work.  The government has tables of how much you will make. What you will make.  In the crazier communist (or socialist, but they’re more subtle about it) regimes, you get told which of the “free education” you can consume. You’re selected to study this or that. You’re told if you can study at all. And if you study, you’re told how you can use it. And how much you’ll make.

HOW do you think “free college for all” will work?  Sure, we might have a generation or two of everyone taking whatever they want.  More likely 3 to 4 years.  And then?  Ah, and then…. the planned economy will dictate what you can study and when. Sure, everyone might go to college, but most of them will be taking some form of general studies. College will in fact become what High School has become. Not any kind of preparation for adulthood. Not even a last chance to teach people to read and write, but another four years “the better to indoctrinate you with.”

And in this brave new college, other than the few highly paid “political” professors, who do you think will make a living? (already assistants and adjuncts in college make next to nothing.)

What about doctors? Nurses? What do you think happens in socialized medicine?

Already the left, who are a kind of creature that is incapable of imagining anyone different from themselves, says things like “Why aren’t doctors paid the same as teachers?” Well, because no teacher in America (outside college professors, and even then) undergoes 8 years of under grad and post grad, plus 8 years of various kinds of training afterwards, years during which they are either unpaid or low paid. That’s why. Also because people, in general, are capable of teaching and learning, particularly at the elementary level, but very few people are able to do surgery.  Rare skills are paid more.  Supply and demand.

So, if you are going to make these people, after serious training, work at the same price as school teachers, you’ll be taking YEARS OF THEIR LIVES: the years they spent learning.  And forcing them to work at things they benefit you, at a salary you dictate.

There is a name for that: slavery.

No, I don’t care how “expensive” healthcare is (hint: get government out of it. Allow people to pay their doctors directly, in cash.  Get third party payers out of it period. The prices WILL come down.)  You can’t make it free without some degree of slavery.  And to make it wholly free, you need to enslave everyone providing it.  Which btw. explains the horrors we hear from NHS. And trust me, even those are shiny and great, compared to “socialized medicine” in most of the world.

Because — and this is another insanity the left doesn’t get when they say shit like “Slaves built our wealth” — slaves don’t work well. They’re not efficient. They’re not hard workers. In fact, if they can help it they don’t work at all or they do what we used to call “A zeal strike.” Its other name is “White Mutiny” — per Heinlein, but not in his words, because I read it in Portuguese and don’t remember the exact words — A “white mutiny” is conducted against a commander one lacks faith in. One performs the orders given with the exactitude of a computer; namely, what is ordered, exactly that, and nothing less and nothing more, using none of your own good judgement to temper the orders to fit the precise situation. The ship usually comes crashing down about your ears.

Slaves do that exact same thing. Which is why every slave society has to apply the lash and have spectacular executions, and– and– and–

And it’s why socialized medicine, despite the pretty numbers they like to try to fool us with, is in general a disaster. Socialized education, ditto.  In countries that have it, socialized housing sucks like a hoover too (as do our projects, which is our form of it.)

When Occasional Cortex runs her big ugly mouth on everything that the government should give you, what she’s saying is “We should enslave people to provide this for you.” Either enslave them directly, or enslave them sideways, by taking the majority of what they produce so the government can “give” people things.

The end result is always the same. Things produced by enslaved things suck.  “The ship comes crashing down around your years.” Even if it’s the ship of state.

The end stage of the Marxian economy is “guaranteed employment,” “Guaranteed education,” “guaranteed housing,” “guaranteed food” and “guaranteed clothing.”

And what all those guarantees amount to is the government assuring you that pine needles are fine and nutritious because everyone is starving, and they figure if you kill yourself eating those it’s fewer mouths to feed. It’s not like you, as a slave, have any value to the state. You’re just a debit that they have to provide all the free stuff to.

Because in end-stage Marxian economy, everyone pretends to work, and the government pretends to pay them.

So, when they say that the US is the only “advanced” (please define advanced? You mean “nation moving towards Marxian enslavement economy?” Are you advancing towards the rear, again?) economy without “free” education or medicine?

Hoist up your middle fingers at the slavers, my friends. Tell them Master Lincoln done freed the slaves.  And none of us, of any color, is hankering to go back into chains.

If they love slavery so much, they are invited to go to one of the countries that is walking into it, or has already walked into it. They’re welcome to partake of “socialized education and medicine” in Cuba and Venezuela. Hell, we’ll even splurge for a plane ticket. They don’t need to cross the waters in an inner tube or walk down the length of the Americas.  What the heck, we’re feeling generous: we’ll even promise to stand in the airport waving goodbye and singing cheery songs as they leave. We can come up with a playlist, I’m sure.

What they can’t do is enslave us.  Because their grandiose dreams do not make them our masters. Because their philosophy has never produced anything but mass graves.

Because America is the land of the free. Not the free stuff.  And we aim to stay that way.

You want free stuff? Go live where they give it. And pay the price.

Me and mine? We’ll pay the price for our freedom. Even if it turns out to be blood.

 

249 thoughts on “Stop The Slavers”

  1. I’ve always found it interesting how a leftist can go on and on about chattel slavery in the US, or colonization by European nations etc., but the moment you mention the Ottoman empire, they get all flustered and try to change the topic. I guess that’s one perk of being a Balkanite – we’re walking pieces of evidence why that particular leftist talking point is bunk. But of course, that’s “oppression olympics”; and we shouldn’t do that… likely because we’d win. (Really, it’s like one of the three disciplines the Balkans are traditionally strong in – wrestling and weightlifting, rhythmic gymnastics, and enduring the efforts of every wannabe empire under the sun.)

    For that matter, people from former Soviet client states tend to do that for their overall narrative. You just have to mention how all that guaranteed employment, housing etc. usually meant being assigned to some decaying small town in the middle of nowhere, living in a dingy apartment and working for scraps, with no advancement opportunities whatsoever. Oh, and being treated by the dumbest hack to ever hold a stethoscope, “for free”… meaning after you slide him a couple bottles of moonshine under the table. But of course, that wasn’t “real” socialism. Well, it felt pretty real at the time, I’d say.

    All in all, as in pretty much all issues, the last people the left would listen to for opinion on their policies, are the people with actual practical experience of their results.

        1. I was more concerned about his lack of any concrete achievement, myself. He was the perfect hollow man, wafted higher and higher without any visible effort on his part.

        2. Yep – that dude was a stoner loser know-it-all fool from Oahu who fell up the academic ladder and then into politics, but he was really, really lazy, so he never worked very hard to get all the magical arrow-of-history moved forward even when he had an unbreakable congressional majority, and in the end outisde O’care he only accomplished the pen-and-phone stuff, which has been trivial to reverse save a few rear-guard-activist-judge roadblocks (“I know the last guy implemented this by executive order alone, but you are not allowed to change it by executive order because of… um… hang on a sec… of precedent! That’s it!”).

          But those styrofoam columns are packed away in storage, and that cult of personality is still sittin there waiting for the next messiah. If the next one has some personal initiative we are all in trouble.

          2. > O’care

            That was originally Hillary’s plan, from back in 1992. She and her husband pushed it very hard, but with failure comes forgetfulness, I guess.

            I still think their main purpose was to make the HillaryCare card a de facto Federal ID, since every version of her plan made the ID mandatory.

            Obama was the leering grin on the face of the program, but the Democratic Party has been pushing for Federalization of healthcare for a *long* time.

            1. I’m inclined towards the “intended all along to fall apart, the wreckage requiring single payer” theory, which the various delays and not-implemented aspects staved off or averted, to the Dem’s vast disappointment.

        3. But using an actual fascist flag (viz the antifa bit of blackened cloth on a stick), why no, that *certainly* cannot be fascist. And so the hampster wheel of leftist logic goes…

        4. Hmm. If “using a lot of flags” makes one fascist, what does that say about the UN HQ in New York City? 😉

    2. The Ottomans and the Barbary Coast slavers–who raided European ports for slaves and hostages to ransom.

      The Lithuanian in me wants to sneer at these idiots that at least their ethnicity wasn’t taken to be so obviously meant for bound servitude as to give its name to the condition, as the Slavs were.

      The Irish in me wants to tell them that the draft riots during the Civil War weren’t because the (not considered white at the time) Irish hated black people, but because they had come to America to escape slavery and oppression and were being drafted to fight in a war for someone else’s freedom, with no one giving any thought to theirs at all.

      And all of me wants to tell them that slaves, being property, had *value*, whereas indentured servants or other forms of servitude, didn’t. And that I reject their attempts to make me into a valueless bond servant.

      1. Can someone confirm for me that “the draft” was an alien concept to America until the Late Unpleasantness?

        1. (Waggles hand) Depends on how you define a militia call-out.

          But what we think of as the draft was unknown until the ACW–and, interestingly enough, was first introduced by the Confederacy, about a year before the Union did.

          1. One of the great ironies of the War Between the States is that the Confederacy, supposedly fighting for the right to be a loose confederation of states instead of submitting to a strong national government, ended up intruding more deeply and strongly into the everyday lives of its citizens than the Union. Not that that should be surprising, given how the champions of “states’ rights!” cheered the Fugitive Slave Act which trampled on the rights of free states to limit slavery in their jurisdictions.

            2. We’re not supposed to get into ACW details here, lest it lead to a rematch… but I agree. I will also, point out the irony of the Union supposedly fighting to end slavery not only leaving slavery legal in its own boundaries for the duration but also becoming the largest slaveholding entity in the world.

          1. To the Best Of My Knowledge, “Press Gangs” weren’t done in the US.

            Now “Press Gangs” were used by the British Navy (and perhaps by other Navies) to get crews and could be considered a form of the Draft.

      2. Thomas Sowell observed* that the Ottomans typically gelded their male slaves. Not that Progressives would find anything wrong with that.

        *Black rednecks and White Liberals

        1. Does not the transgender movement result in largely the same thing? I’ve found it striking the M->F transitions almost always involve gelding while the F->M usually do not involve sterilization, at least depending on the drugs used.

          1. My understanding is that attempting to sterilize someone with XX chromosomes is always a bit chancy, and risky. The female body is built around the idea of producing a new egg every month. And trying to stop that – no matter the method – can backfire disastrously for reasons that are still poorly understood, and vary widely from person to person.

            Males, on the other hand, just require a bit of simple surgery.

        2. Clearly not. The Ottomans were showing their enlightenment by including gender reassignment surgery in the health plan for their involuntary workers.

          1. A good point. As everyone stationed inside a harem was, by definition female they were simply making the facts fit the theory.

    3. Two words: Highland. Clearances.

      Or two more words: Scots-Irish.

      Or, if you want to get very snarky indeed and move to Canada: the Acadian Expulsion.

      More recently the Japanese Internment… I could keep going.

      Lots of examples where Man’s Inhumanity to Man got turbochaged with a nitrous shot by the government of the day.

      Or I could say two more words: Apple and Foxconn. Actual 2019 slavery, no end in sight. I see no appetite among Lefties to repatriate all those American businesses whose products are getting made by slave labor in China.

      In fact, all I see on the Left is people raging on and lying about the one and ONLY guy who has actually done something concrete about Chinese slaves. That would be Donald Trump.

      So, Lefties, you can pretty well suck it on the slavery thing.

      1. “Its not slavery if there is a vote and the government does it.” *No matter the validity of said vote or comparative size of mobs.*

        1. Thus the Bill of Rights. The Founders did NOT want a democracy (or, as they phrased it, “mob rule.”)

          See also: in-effing-alienable rights

          1. But that was like a hundred years ago. They didn’t even have iPhones. We can’t be held back by their backwardness

        2. Ever fail to strangle the urge to say that in that case, there would be nothing wrong with de facto slavery using chain gangs and threat of lynching for false rape accusations as a way to extract compliance from the innocent?

  2. Particularly since they can be undercut by people who are not trying to build a life here, but who are living 12 to a room and sending back what is to their coutnries a fortune, to build a life there.

    Which, notably, our unskilled are not allowed to do.

  5. Like, you know, they say that no one is going to take our guns, but if you hear a group of them talking and they don’t know you’re nearby, they’ll say they want to take our guns.

    It’s a side point here, but the Left has developed an interesting rhetorical trick on this one. They say that they’re not going to take guns from law-abiding people…they’re just planning to outlaw guns, so that anyone who still has them is by definition NOT law-abiding.

    This has since progressed to, “Well, if you would resist when we come to take your guns, clearly that’s proof that you never should have had them in the first place.”

      1. What we did to Dresden and Tokyo, we did to New Orleans and Richmond as well.

        No sane person would want to uncork that can of whoop-ass. But we know that, sadly, they’re not sane.

        1. As I’ve said before, there is an argument that the time the USG took off the gloves to the greatest extent was the 1860s unpleasantness. I believe today the gloves may come all off if the hotheads get antsy

    2. “they’re just planning to outlaw guns, so that anyone who still has them is by definition NOT law-abiding.”

      Well now, don’t that explain the sudden outburst around the local university campus of bumper-stickers proclaiming, “When Guns Are outlawed Only Outlaws Will Have Guns.”

      1. “When Guns Are outlawed Only Outlaws Will Have Guns.”

        Lots and lots and LOTS of outlaws will have guns. So many outlaws, so many really big, really black guns.

        And so many tragic boating accidents among the “law abiding.”

    3. the Leftoids : “We can’t go door to door and arrest 20 million illegals and deport them! It’s impossible! We couldn’t find enough law enforcement to do that, anyway!”
      Also the Leftoids: “We can so go door to door and confiscate 400 million guns from 40 million people, just you watch!”

      1. One is good at hiding and has experience with corrupt, commie/fascist regimes. The other has too much to lose still

    4. Robert Francis ORoark gave away the game plan.

      They won’t “take” or “confiscate” anyone’s guns.

      You will ” voluntarily” participate in the “buyback” where everyone will obey the “reasonable” law that removes guns. “Voluntarily”.

      Because they tell you so, thus will you do so, ” voluntarily” as a “law abiding citizen”.

      Properly educated folks understand all this. They just have to explain it to the slower uneducated folks confused by the Bad People.

      Orwell: ” Did I nail them or what….”

    5. The other trick is that they wouldn’t take all your guns.
      “Reasonable restrictions” means they might let you keep a single shot 20ga shotgun- after you complete 36 hours of inconveniently scheduled safety classes, fill in mountains of paperwork, pay a fortune in licensing fees, and keep it locked away unloaded (subject to random inspections), with ammo locked away accordingly (birdshot only, and no more than 20 rounds on hand at any time).

    6. When a former criminal like Beto is pushing gun bans, and the Left are pushing for impeachment without cause, and a long, long list of other similar things as well as forgiving crimes when it’s done by their side, it is clear that the Left are repeatedly declaring that they do not consider themselves bound by the law, nor do they respect the law.

      They only consider ‘other people’ (non-Leftists) bound by the law.

      They do not consider themselves ‘law abiding’ by tacit action.

      The question is, how long will those who are NOT on the Left tolerate this endless erosion of America’s rights, laws… everything that makes America America?

        1. But if you have a good idea for culling the Marxists from the herd, do let us know. Wait, that’s not the culling you’re talking about. Sorry. 😛

        2. If there are any relevant comments of mine that you might want to include, feel free. Even if you’re using them as an example of someone eaten up with the dumb-ass… let me know and I’ll send you a dead-tree release by USPS.

          1. Agree. Because there are a lot of “d”s out there. Just shred-then-burn-then-throw-away any direct reference pointing to me. Even if you are pointing to “this is stupid”, or examples of “facepalm”. I’m used to it.

            Otherwise. You know there is a reason I despise boats. Right? It’s those accidents we keep having. What can I say, we’re slow learners.

  7. “If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.” -Samuel Adams

  8. We are all the descendants of slaves, and of slave owners. Every. Single. Person. On. Earth. Slavery has been a part of life since before we were human, half a million years or more. It wasn’t until the last few hundred years that anybody realized something was wrong.

    I’m pretty sure the United States was the first country to explicitly prohibit slavery.

      2. The Brits banned the slave trade in 1807 and abolished slavery in all of the UK in 1833.
        Fun fact:
        n 1833, the British government used £20m, 40% of its national budget, to buy freedom for all slaves in the empire. The amount of money borrowed for the Slavery Abolition Act was so large that it wasn’t paid off until 2015.
        Great Britain actually went deeply in debt to compensate its citizens for the loss of their “property” when they ended slavery.
        In the US unless I’m mistaken we simply abolished the practice, freed all the slaves, and through constitutional amendment guaranteed them equal citizenship. Former slave holders, the losing side of the war, got reprisals and occupation by the winning side.
        You know, evil as the whole slavery business was, descendants of former slaves inherited a thing of great value, citizenship in a country that apparently the rest of the world is willing to spend vast sums and take great risks merely to reside in.
        We fought a long and bloody war, modified out constitution specifically to grant equal rights, institutionalized affirmative action to provide a boost for disadvantaged minorities, perhaps one might ask, if those are not sufficient reparations for the horrible crime of slavery, pray tell what ever would be?

        1. > what ever would be?

          As was carefully explained to me, the pre-Civil-War South of their imagination, except with the races reversed.

          2. This is the common answer for any of the oppression olympics. They build themselves into hyper downtrodden and relish the thought of taking same or worse actions on their oppressors even though it’s a load of bunk

        2. The Brits banned the slave trade in 1807 and abolished slavery in all of the UK in 1833.

          Ah. Thank you for providing some clarification, and historical details.

          Of course, during that time they also tried to re-assert their overlordship of ‘the colonies’ — what we call the War Of 1812.

          Former slave holders, the losing side of the war, got reprisals and occupation by the winning side.

          And then started their own reprisals. At night, wearing bedsheets. When they ran into problems, the southern Democrats passed some of the first ‘gun control’ laws, so they wouldn’t get shot at during their nocturnal festivities. In response, some Republicans started the NRA to guarantee the 2nd Amendment rights of ALL American citizens, including those new dark-colored ones.

          We fought a long and bloody war, modified our constitution specifically to grant equal rights, institutionalized affirmative action to provide a boost for disadvantaged minorities, perhaps one might ask, if those are not sufficient reparations for the horrible crime of slavery, pray tell what ever would be?

          Having our money taken to provide all of their needs, forever? That’s really working out well, isn’t it?

          1. The NRA as founded was much less about protecting the 2nd Amendment and much more about assuring a higher level of marksmanship among the citizenry, so that they’d already be good with a rifle when the next war started.

            1. It is only relatively recently that the Second Amendment was perceived as under attack.

              Even the enactment of gun bans in the “Wild West” was considered a minor safety matter and not a threat to liberty — your firearms were returned upon departure, after all. But certain people pushed this genial recognition beyond the bounds of reason, which created resistance.

              Funny how threatening has that effect.

              Dem Senator Dismisses O’Rourke’s Gun-Confiscation Plan: ‘Beto’s Not Taking My Guns Away from Me’
              Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia dismissed fellow Democrat Beto O’Rourke as an extreme outlier on the issue of gun control on Wednesday, and said that even he would not comply with O’Rourke’s proposed confiscation of legally owned rifles. …

              It seems to me there have been a fair number of political ads in recent elections with Democrats proudly demonstrating their firearm expertise as proof of their affinity for guns.

              1. It is only relatively recently that the Second Amendment was perceived as under attack.

                Which is why anyone yearning for the Good Ole Days of the Second needs to be smacked with the wifflebat of cluefullness.

                Ok, EVERYONE yearning for Good Ole Days needs that. But especially the 2a ones.

                When this part of the long march got started the 2nd was not “strong”, but untested. And when put to the test the defences turned out to be constructed of balsa wood and wet toilet paper. The evidence is the shocking lack of mass graves in Washington or any of the state capitols.

                Of course this was also true of the 1st at one point, but it is mostly in better shape nowadays. Hopefully in the next century we can put 2A to rest and get to work on the 4th. I look forward to the national security conservatives screaming their heads off about that one.

                1. Of course this was also true of the 1st at one point, but it is mostly in better shape nowadays.

                  Except for all those ‘Safe Spaces’ and any conservative/libertarian speakers being hounded out of our colleges. Authors being blacklisted for defying the leftist orthodoxy. The insane bullshit cult that has sprung up around the delusion of ‘micro-aggressions’.

                  When we don’t say anything bad, they make up their own evil and claim that’s what our perfectly innocent words ‘really mean’.

                  Freedom of speech — for everybody that agrees with them! The Gulag for all the rest!

                  1. I didn’t say it was in perfect shape, or even that it hadn’t lost ground. I considered mentioning all that but thought it would distract from the main point.

                    And even with the current insanity you still don’t get hauled off to prison for being against military slavery.

                2. It is only relatively recently that gun owners stared fighting back effectively. Really, 1986 was the year the gun-grabbers’ hopes began to turn to ashes, and it picked up speed slowly. I don’t have the details straight myself, but I know that it took the NRA a while to get on board. They were too used to the ‘they’re going to ban handguns, and the best we can hope for is to protect hunting guns’ mindset.

                  1. California tried to go full Francis in 1982, for handguns. (Prop 15) It tanked 2:1 and helped Tom Bradley lose; former LA police chief and the owner of “the Bradley effect”. People might have said they’d vote for him as the first black governor of Cali, but they lied… It triggered my joining the NRA and got a reprieve from more crap for a few years.

                  2. I don’t have the details straight myself, but I know that it took the NRA a while to get on board.

                    The first thing that has to be kept straight about the NRA is that they were absolutely not and anti-grabber organization until the 1976 coup. Before then they actively participated in helping draft legislation so that it could step on snek without offending what we would today call fudds.

                    This is important for at least two reasons: The first is that it is unreasonable to impute crimes to a present day organization that were done before it’s purpose was changed. The second is because NRA shills will blather on about its “148 year history of protecting our rights!”. But you don’t get to have it both ways.

                    Either we ignore their pre-76 history. Or we hold them to account for backing NFA’34 and GCA’68.

                    What they have done since is an entirely different issue and rant.

                  3. A life member friend and I were discussing this in the late 1980s. It appeared to us that the NRA was reluctant to get a definitive ruling on the 2A issue because they were doing quite well fundraising off it.

                    I wasn’t a member when Heller and the Chicago law was settled, so I don’t know firsthand how NRA treated that victory (although I heard they were taking credit for other group’s actions).

                    I stopped letting the NRA send me email; the weekly mail drop generally includes one NRA fundraising pitch.

        3. This is covered in great depth in Amazing Grace, Eric Metaxas’ highly readable book about William Wilberforce’s battle to bring the British about on slavery. The forces of emancipation were blocked, to great extent, by the Admiralty, who believed the slave trade was an important source of experienced sailors required for the war against Boney.

          The absence of reparations for American slaveholders was largely made moot by their armed rebellion. Considering the money and lives wasted in that war and recriminations afterward it seems likely they’d have been better taking their argument to court. Surely they could have found sympathetic judges in Southern circuits to enjoin Lincoln and his Radical Republicans from effecting such mercurial and injudicious policies; according to readings from the period “Rail-Splitter” Abe was even nuttier than Trump.

          Homelier, too.

          1. The Emancipation Proclamation was only effective on January 1st, 1863 in areas of states currently in rebellion, so while the salves in areas not controlled by the Union government were considered free, slaves in the slave states that remained in the Union as well as areas of Confederate states already under Union Army military control were not then freed. Basically those freed southern slaves had to make it across the lines into Union controlled territory, which many did.

            The proclamation also enabled recruiting from those freed slaves, which the Union Army did, to the tune of a couple hundred thousand black troops.

            Slavery wasn’t ended in the entire U.S. until the 13th Amendment was ratified by the required 3/4 of the (non-rebel) states on December 6th, 1865. To cement that as reconstruction ended, Congress made ratification of the 13th Amendment a required precondition to readmission to the Union for the formerly-Confederate states.

            The absence of reparations for American slaveholders was largely made moot by their armed rebellion.

            It should be noted that the 13th Amendment made no provision for compensation to former non-rebel state slave owners along the lines of what the UK did – it just outlawed slavery period.

            I have wondered about the impact of this “taking” on the moneyed classes in places like Maryland, long a modern Dem stronghold.

            1. The 13th Amendment just limited the creation of new slaves to the government:

              “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

              Note that there’s no limitation on “duly convicted”; likely even a traffic court would be sufficient for Constitutional purposes.

              1. Look up the history of Chain Gangs.

                While the children of the people on the Chain Gangs weren’t “slaves”, the people on the Chain Gangs were Slaves (if not in name).

              2. Also note that the plain language reading of the 13th Amendment would seem to allow for punishment of an individual who is duly convicted of a crime to lifetime personal servitude to some random individual or corporation.

                Now that the City and County of San Francisco Board of Supes have shown the way, those 5 million NRA members are fair game for due conviction under 18 U.S. Code § 2339A material support of a terrorist organization, and can then be assigned as household servants and manual labor to party faithful.

                Of course, what’s good for the goose and all that – pity about the mass roundup, due conviction, and sentencing back in 2043 of those 500,000 ACLU members to the Spice Mines of Kessel .

                1. The Dem candidates for president are terrorizing me with every new utterance. Does that make them a terrorist organization? Can we round up their donors?

        4. Lincoln Couldn’t afford to free the slaves before the Civil War, there was no way that the US would be able to Pay for the slaves. Slaves were NOT cheap.

          1. Indeed – as I am discovering through my research for the next book – slaves were a high-value luxury good, for which their owners felt committed to care for, if not well, at least adequately. Unlike hired laborers, for which only paltry wages were necessary.

            1. The Irish in America have numerous anecdotal recollections of the disparity between owned property and rental goods.

              I wonder whether Lincoln could have passed legislation banning the trafficking in slaves? There was already legislation barring importation, so buying and selling of slaves might not have been a bridge too far.

              Of course, one of the great overlooked facts about slavery is that among primary reasons it persisted were laws against simply freeing slaves — it was necessary to (effectively) dower them so that they would not become indigent burdens on the State.

              1. I suspect such a ban would have been questionable. I suspect a Dred Scott-style decision would have overturned it not long afterwards.

                1. I think such a ban on interstate commerce in slaves would have held up in court, but not for intrastate commerce. The Supreme Court hadn’t radically expanded the definition of interstate commerce yet.

                  1. The ban on importation of slaves fell neatly into the existing Federal anti-smuggling infrastructure of Revenue Cutters etc. Enforcement of intrastate trade ban would have been a job for Federal Marshalls maybe? That ban certainly makes sense as within the legal bounds of the time, though being the fellow assigned to enforce a Federal ban on interstate slave trading between, say, Georgia and Alabama would have been a character-building experience.

                    1. Under Dred Scott, you could take slaves that you owned to another state. I would imagine that most people who purchased slaves would do so only after inspecting the people that they were paying for. And that means that if the buyer and seller lived in different states, one of them would travel to the home state of the other before any purchase was made. So technically, the sale would not be interstate. And it could be argued that under Dred Scott, a slave could be moved across a state border so long as the owner was present the entire time.

            2. Not only high value, but “investment opportunities” as well; buy a mating pair, then breed for fun and profit! It went about as well as the “emu farming” thing in the late 20th century… people were no better at accounting then than they are now.

              When Abraham Darby kicked off the Industrial Revolution slaves became a much less valuable commodity; mostly used in agriculture. But the likes of Jethro Tull (not the band) , Eli Whitney, and Cyrus McCormick reduced the need for slaves in farming, too. It was way cheaper to use a machine than to maintain slaves, and it wasn’t like there was any work close-by enough to be able to rent them out.

              It was all over but the crying by the time the Civil War started, just to add another layer of meaningless misery to that unfortunate event.

              1. Um… no, that is incorrect.

                Actually, Southern factory work in big cities (such as in Atlanta or Richmond) overwhelmingly was worked by slaves, who were rented from their masters. Some of the slaves were also given bonuses that they were allowed to keep and use.

                Even before there were mechanical factories, most large Southern workshop industries were staffed by slaves. Obviously this stood in the way of skilled work businesses staffed by free persons.

                Similarly, many skilled slaves were rented out to the neighbor people. This happened to Harriet Tubman (I think I remember this?), who was used as a maid and nanny by several families, one of which was amazingly abusive. They paid her masters a flat rate for several months or a year, but she was supposed to get tips and presents to take home to her slave parents (who were also rented out most of the time).

                1. This is exactly why I doubt the Dogma that the Industrial Revolution would have destroyed Slavery.

                  It may be an accident of History that the Industrial Revolution started in England where slavery didn’t exist so that the workers were all Free Workers.

                  Of course, in the North (of the US) Slavery didn’t exist so the factories had to use Free Workers.

                  Therefore, a Slavery Society would have used Slave Workers in their factories.

                  While there is an argument that factories using Free Workers would more effective/productive than factories using Slave Workers that would not matter to a Society already possessing Slaves.

                  They use Slaves because that’s what Slaves are for. IE Doing work that their “betters” don’t want to do.

                  1. The higher the proportion of free workers the greater the incentive to industrialize — not only because the output is better but because it economizes on workers. The US had a particular advantage in that workers could always head west and start farming.

                    Probably no two societies ever had the same percentage of slavery. The freer one would benefit more.

                    1. Why a country “industrializes” can be a complex question.

                      But the idea that “industrialization automatically destroys slavery” is likely wrong.

                      IMO It ignores the moral reasons against slavery.

                      But then modern “thinkers” like to ignore morality. 😦

                    2. Has anybody explained to the Chinese that “industrialization automatically destroys slavery”?

                      I admit to being a trifle surprised that Tom Friedman has not used his insight that “two nations having McDonalds’ restaurants have never gone to war with each other” as basis to propose a UN program to install Mickey Ds throughout the world.

                      I probably ought not have said that.

                      Too many folks have lost understanding of the post hoc does not mean propter hoc principle.

        6. For the vast majority of the slaves, the United States pointed to the laws and customs of war and declared it was not freeing THEIR slaves, but ITS OWN.

          It’s no business of the prior owner what the government does with the contraband of war it seizes.

        7. Actually, the slave owners in Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky were on the winning side themselves and got to keep their slaves until the 13th amendment was passed. By which time Lincoln was dead, so he did not live to see slavery ended in the Union.

    2. >> “I’m pretty sure the United States was the first country to explicitly prohibit slavery.”

      Sort of. The British beat us to the first national ban, but some U.S. states beat them to the punch at the state level. I believe the first was Vermont in 1777. And as a bonus for Sarah, according to Infogalactic part of Portugal banned it the same year: https://infogalactic.com/info/Abolition_of_slavery_timeline#1701.E2.80.931799

      That Infogalactic page also claims there were much earlier bans elsewhere in the world but I have no idea how accurate that is. The one about the U.S. states is the only one I recall hearing elsewhere.

      1. Depends on how you count certain countries. France forbid slavery on its mainland back in the 14th century and took steps to buy back Frenchmen who were enslaved elsewhere, though from the example of Sally Hemmings it doesn’t appear that they freed other nationals’ slaves on their soil, and it didn’t stop them from creating slave economies in their colonies and even trying to demand reparations from Haiti for the wealth lost when the slaves freed themselves. And technically, Russia freed its serfs before America outlawed slavery, but the terms for the end of serfdom (have to buy back the value of their labor and the land they had worked) meant that most peasants remained serfs in all but name basically up until 1991.

        1. Peter the Great abolished slavery (because slaves were not taxed) and turned serfdom into a form of bondage very close to collective slavery. Which the Soviets decided was ancient Slavic tradition and served the State… (the legendary peasant collective…)

          Source: R. Hellie _Slavery in Russia_

          1. One of the early medieval Korean kings, King Gwangjong of Goryeo, emancipated the military slaves of nobles by reclassifying them as commoners. This meant that the Korean nobles were weakened, and the taxpayer base was widened.

            It shows up in South Korean historical dramas, as you would imagine.

            The ban didn’t really stick for long, unfortunately; the king after next brought slavery back. But it was a nice try.

            1. One of the more recent Korean dramas mentions that the Japanese banned slavery when they started to become more influential in the country around the turn of the century (culminating in the takeover of the government a little later). However, that’s pretty much the *only* positive thing that the Japanese did in the entire series (which included what I strongly suspect were some anachronistic attitudes by the Japanese that actually developed over the course of the next few decades).

        2. “Sally Hemmings it doesn’t appear that they freed other nationals’ slaves on their soil”

          Sally Hemmings isn’t a good example; she was there as the concubine of a diplomatic envoy and “diplomatic immunity” means something.

          1. Turns out that was a complete smear, although at least an old one.

            She was there to be a “companion” to Jefferson’s daughter– and the male-line descendants of the son she had from that trip do not have Jeffersonian Y-chromosomes.

            Those decedents who were tested and found to have Jeffersonian ancestors were descended from a guy, Eston, whose birth matches up with a visit from Jefferson’s brother Randolph, who liked to go fiddle around with the slaves on his plantation. (Literally fiddling, that is.)

            https://jeffersondnastudy.com/background-dna-study/

            1. Which in no way invalidates the main point: she was part of an envoy’s household, and applying one country’s laws to diplomats and their households is always the exception to the rule.

              1. You’ll notice I didn’t say it invalidated your point about diplomatic immunity.

                It did, however, completely invalidate your point about her being a concubine. If “member of an envoy’s household” was more than enough for your point, maybe you should’ve stopped there?

                  1. I was tired of it when it was as presented, that “descendants of Sally had Jefferson-family Y chromosomes.”

                    Finding out that the facts were “ONE of Sally’s sons, born when she was an adult, working in his home and surrounded with several other Jefferson family males, had Jefferson genetics” really, really pissed me off.

                    Because it makes it obvious that they deliberately lied. The story they wanted to tell was that Sally was in a long term relationship (character depending on the story teller) with Jefferson– and the evidence didn’t show that at all.

          2. No, that’s pretty much a perfect example of what I mean. France may have banned Frenchmen from owning slaves in France, but it didn’t make a point of “once a slave gets to France, he’s automatically free” the way that free states did until the Fugitive Slave Act. Slave owners didn’t bring their slaves to their summer homes in Rhode Island for that very reason.

      2. I believe Georgia attempted to ban slavery — or the importation of slaves, which is not quite the same thing — before the Declaration of Independence, and that refusal to permit that action was one of the complaints against the Crown.

        I recently searched for support on the idea and came up empty-handed, but it was a very casual search and Georgia, being mostly established as a “haven” for those transported for debt and criminality seems an unlikely enthusiast for slavery.

        1. You’re right. Edmund Burke pointed out to Parliament

          Slaves as these unfortunate black people are, and dull as all men are from slavery, must they not a little suspect the offer of freedom from that very nation which has sold them to their present masters?—from that nation, one of whose causes of quarrel with those masters is their refusal to deal any more in that inhuman traffic? An offer of freedom from England would come rather oddly, shipped to them in an African vessel which is refused an entry into the ports of Virginia or Carolina with a cargo of three hundred Angola negroes. It would be curious to see the Guinea captain attempting at the same instant to publish his proclamation of liberty, and to advertise his sale of slaves.

  9. Why I am not a socialist:
    1. The experiences of folk who have left socialist or communist countries. There’s a large Ukrainian population, many of whom grew up before the Berlin Wall came down.

    2. I can’t look past the mountain of corpses.

    2. Same here – I grew up knowing too many refugee Cubans, Russians, and Vietnamese to ever consider socialism/communism a Good Thing.

      Humans are imperfect, individual. Any system based on the notion of ordinary and random humans being perfectible creatures will fail. Such a system (unless it depends on volunteers only) eventually depends upon force to discipline the imperfect into obedience to the system.

  10. Well said, and I ‘love’ the ignorance of the left. None of them ever mentions the Brits enslaving the Irish, and the fact that the FIRST slaves sold in America were actually Irish people, sold by the Brits as workers to the companies that were setting up in the new world. Slavery still exists today in MANY parts of the world, and as Indiana said, they DO get flustered when you counter them with facts. Us grumpy old farts have fought for YEARS against communism, and aren’t about to stop now. Our oath was enemies foreign AND domestic.

  11. “It’s all right when we do it because our hearts are pure.”

    Minor typo there.

    It’s all right when we do it because our hearts are pure we directly benefit from it.

    Fixed it for you.

  12. A “white mutiny” is conducted against a commander one lacks faith in.
    A common term for that practice is “malicious compliance.”
    There is an entire Reddit sub category on the subject with hundreds of stories about employees who when faced with a domineering or unreasonable boss or company decide to resist by following the established rules and regulations explicitly and to the letter. In general the situation turns into a classic case of be careful what you wish for.

    2. I suspect the term Heinlein used, in the untranslated reading, might have been “Irish Mutiny” but my [search engine] efforts can find neither support nor refutation.

      Then again, those efforts were not particularly strenuous.

      1. The original text (I read the first edition when it came out) was “white mutiny.” I’d never heard the term before, but promptly appropriated it.

      2. I found it in my (somewhat beat up) first printing of the trade paperback with the Powers illustrations: “white mutiny”. I never saw any other editions.

        1. A lot of expressions using “white” are opposing it to “black” or “red,” in the sense of seriousness of a crime, not skin color.

          So it’s a “white mutiny” because it isn’t bloody. Your hands stay nice and clean.

          1. Was just the term I had always associated with the idea. But it’s more “accidents” and such than work to rule that white mutiny describes. So I was a bit off

    3. Several if the GILES cartoon annuals I have mention one or another Union “working to Rule”, which I take to be much the same thing.

      Anybody know different?

    4. I may or may not have participated in such action during my final weeks working in The Supermarket after our manager gathered the whole department for a meeting where she lauded praise upon the most useless employee in said department (who’d gone out of her way to be besties with each and every manager we’d had) and made it clear that she believed that a) said employee was the only thing holding the department together, and b) everything we did (a not insignificant amount of which was fixing her mistakes and doing stuff she forgot to do during her shifts) didn’t matter and was going to be overlooked and ignored.

  13. Up until about 200-250 years ago every civilization in the world had slaves. Sometimes it was limited, sometimes your children were “free”, sometimes slaves even got paid. It all depended but it was universal.

    There’s a very good argument that says that the Industrial revolution killed slavery because it made it uneconomic in the large scale. And without the large scale the infrastructure for the rest was unsupportable and thus while you get the occasional slave maid (and more of the same or similar in places that are still not very industrialized) it has more or less died.

    The fact that Europeans – British and French primarily (plus their US abolitionist descendants) – were the first groups to look at it and say this is wrong on moral grounds so therefore we should stop it, is something these idiots seem to ignore

    1. This makes some sense out of the Left trying so hard to destroy all the benefits of the Industrial Revolution, because that will allow them to bring slavery back.

    2. One way Romans would smear a political rival was to claim that he mistreated his slaves (or worse, slept with them, which was illegal and could get your Roman citizenship revoked).

      Also, why does the “fill in your details” form no longer remember anything?

      1. One way the Greeks would was to accuse someone if having been a slave. Because one you were a slave, or acted as if one were, then you were never eligible for citizenship or holding office. Didn’t matter if you bought your freedom or were granted it, the mere experience was sufficient.

    3. Europeans? The first to say “this is wrong on moral grounds” were the Cappadocian Fathers, in particular Gregory of Nyssa, in the fourth century. So technically Asian, but Christian, which is the real point.

      It worked, too. The Mediterranean nations made the transition to Christianity at a fairly unforced pace, so you don’t see laws banning slavery (Romans were always very reluctant to actually repeal laws – they just quietly put them away. They might always come in useful later). You do see slavery de facto abandoned over the next several generations.

      Later, norther nations on a fast-track to Christia civilisation did feel the need to pass such laws, so you get a rash of them in northern Germany and Scandinavia in the tenth-eleventh century or so.

      Once the “Renaissance” enthusiasm for classical Roman social mores took hold, all bets were off. Slavery was re-introduced, women re-subjected, and war re-normalised as an instrument of policy. Hooray for the modern age.

  14. “I realize our schools go out of their way not to teach that slavery has existed since there have been humans on the planet.”

    Doesn’t the Left assert that male/female marriage is slavery, the tool of the Patriarchy used to keep women down?

    So slavery has been practiced as long and as ubiquitously as opposite-sex marriage, right?

    Do these twits never cross-reference their denunciations?

    1. “Do these twits never cross-reference their denunciations?”

      Very rarely, and they usually flub it even then.

      Basically, they have told so many thumping great lies over the years that they simply can’t keep them straight.

  15. “[Slavery] was sometimes ‘ethnicity’ based because of where slaves were most available from at the time.”

    That, and because warfare (the chief source of slaves) was generally tribal. Presumably the Left thinks conquering tribes who had successfully defended themselves against unprovoked aggression by imperialist invading tribes should have slain all captives — after fair trials with due recognition of the rights of the detained.

  16. “they claim American slavery was the worst form and not practiced anywhere else.”

    Because Americans practiced “Race Slavery” they could eschew branding their slaves to distinguish them. That is obviously far worse. The Left adores personal branding.

    1. Anyone who believes that the Islamic world has given up the practice of slavery probably also believes in the tooth fairy and the immaculate conception of Democrat politicians.

      1. Especially as one of teh many unintended consequences in the aftermath of the The Dowager Empress of Chappaqua’s “We came, we saw, he died” no-code-pink-protests war in Libya was the multiple videos of slave auctions recorded on cell phones.

        1. I think ‘unintended’ is unproven. I can think of many reasons why The Anointed would want to scare the Unwashed that way…while keeping their non-Islamophobic halos polished.

          Not saying they arranged it, or foresaw it. Just that ‘unintended’ is unverified, given their twisty little minds.

          1. I don’t disagree – I originally had “unintended consequences” in scare quotes.

            That entire crew always thought themselves vastly smarter than they actually were, and assigning any degree of cleverness is always apriori false when The Dowager Empress is anywhere in the mix.

            Overall I think they just did whatever they wanted, no matter what deals or assurances were given in the past or what the actual siuation on eth ground was, not caring what happened as a result as they knew their progressive motives were pure.

  18. “… the planned economy will dictate what you can study and when.”

    This is already in effect in Med Schools.

    Change my mind.

    1. Anywhere there is a training bottleneck, if you assume that Progressive ideology and special-interest protectionism are in bed together once more, you won’t be wrong often enough to matter.

    2. No, you’re right. It has nothing to do with market forces. The government with the collusion of the AMA decides how many doctors will graduate and how many we’ll import from shitholes where the training is completely different.

      1. The AMA should note what the same gatekeeping and credential-control process has accomplished over at the ABA.

        1. Despite what the Gaslight Media and the AMA would have you believe, a majority of doctors are not members of the AMA. Best estimates run from 15 – 30% of doctors are dues-paying members and, as you will doubtless be surprised to learn, not even all members agree with the association’s policy preferences.

          From 77 Percent Of Doctors Say AMA Does Not Represent Their Views
          SEP 7, 2011, 2:14 PM
          Seventy-seven percent of physicians “say the American Medical Association does not represent their views, according to a new volunteer-based online survey by the physician staffing firm Jackson & Coker. Just 11 percent said AMA’s stance and actions reflects their beliefs.” The doctors also rated AMA as ineffective in lobbying for their priorities, including tort reform (72 percent called AMA ineffective), physician practice autonomy (69 percent), physician reimbursement (68 percent), protections from insurance company abuses (75 percent), and “intrusive government regulations” (78 percent).

          The AMA took a big hit after it failed to secure a deal to stave off reimbursement cuts (changing the so-called SGR formula) as part of the Affordable Care Act and that did nothing to stop the slow bleed of doctors turning their backs on the organization. While it theoretically represents all physicians, the AMA’s paying membership comprises somewhere between 15 to 18 percent of doctors. Consequently, member dues accounted for a relatively small percentage of AMA revenue. The rest of its funds come from things like billing codes, CMS payment negotiations, and other non-membership-related operations.

          1. Same think on the law side: I have talked to lots of lawyers, and many opine that the far-left-lurch into SJWyness has turned the ABA into a laughingstock. The only reason they are still so powerful is inertia.

          2. It’s not as much qty members as their gatekeeping. Even if 0 members but still could affect slots still be hyperpowerful

  19. Optional additional recommended reading on this topic:

    The 1917 Project: ‘Founded On Slavery’ Looks Like Communist Russia
    If America was created for capitalism and liberty, the USSR’s founding idea was state control, of which slavery—or serfdom, as it is known in Russian context—was the inevitable result.
    The New York Times’ 1619 Project is an ambitious attempt to rewrite American history as defined by slavery and racism. Yet it cherry-picks historic events and offers questionable interpretations. It also offers a deeply parochial view that holds American history as the measure of all things.

    Yes, slavery is a dark stain on American history, but our ideals always stood in direct contradiction to it. Slavery existed everywhere in the world at the time of our country’s founding, and once the institution was grandfathered into the American South, getting rid of it was not an easy undertaking.

    To understand what real “founded on slavery” is like, look at the Soviet Union. If America was created for capitalism and liberty, the USSR’s founding idea was state control, of which slavery—or serfdom, as it is known in Russian context—was the inevitable result. …

    1. Yes, slavery is a dark stain on American history,

      Frankly, I think we should stop accepting this. Yes, slavery existed in early American history, and yes it was bad, horrible, terrible, extra-plus-ungood-evil. (is everyone satisfied that I’m anti-slavery enough??? good)

      However, during that time in history, with few exceptions slavery was common across the entire world. Eventually, humanity started seeing slavery for what it was (namely bad, horrible, terrible, extra-plus-ungood-evil for the pedantic). The United States then dis-united over that fact and had a big, bloody, terrible, war with itself that resulted in an end to slavery in the US.

      Pointing the US out as having a “dark stain” of slavery, is like picking one kid in a 4th grade class and pointing THAT ONE KID out as having the “dark stain” of having once worn diapers. F#@K those people. We ALL WORE DIAPERS!

      1. Slavery is a dark stain in the Democrat Party’s history. A stain they generally made worse at every turn with Jim Crow, the KKK, and similar shenanigans.

        Hell, even NOW they seem to consider Blacks to be their property, and get deeply indignant when on of them goes ‘off message’ and shows he doesn’t just LOOOOOOVE Massa!

  21. I thought of The Green Millennium by Fritz Leiber when Sarah was talking about “Bad Covers” in Mad Genius Club, but IMO the actual book fits into this topic.

    In the book, Green Space Cats invaded Earth and since they could control other species emotions, they took over Earth “for our own good”.

    As I remember it, Leiber wrote the book in terms of this invasion being a good thing.

    After all what’s wrong with “feeling good”. 😈

    Is it still slavery if the masters make you “feel good about it”?

    1. There’s a lot of older SF where the “good guys” have mind control powers and have no problems casually using them on anyone and everyone. For the good of society, of course.

      It is, in the sense of involuntary invasion of another person’s body, rape. And it doesn’t matter if they’re Smith’s Lensmen or Piper’s Paratime cops, once I identified one, they’d better hope their detection range exceeded my rifle range. (and if it did, there’s always a drone or IED…)

      No. Rapists are not the good guys, no matter how much pixie dust you sprinkle around it.

      2. Mercedes Lackey had a character use a “mind control” spell on an entire kingdom so that they’d “forget” magic (besides the Heralds’ mental powers) really existed.

        Of course, this was “for their own good”. 😦

        1. I can see a justifiable form for this… it would involve enchanting the thing to be forgotten, though, not everybody else.

          It’s still massively gray and on the dark end, though. Like, that area of theology where you have to figure out if it’s lying when you prevent someone have information to which they have no right, AKA the lying-to-Nazis-about-Jews-in-the-attic field.

            1. Yes, the traditional “he’s in front of you” would avoid the area, but magical forgetfulness of a fact would be pretty solidly in the “untruth” area.

    2. In Terry Carr’s “Some Are Born Cats” uncounted numbers of Earth’s cats are in fact, aliens, of the Australian chain-gang deportee variety. Except self-deporting, because it’s such a sweet gig.

  22. I’ve carved out space in my curriculum to do a lesson on slavery in the global context. You can hear minds being blown from the other end of the school. We go back to Classical Greece, Vedic India, ancient China, and work forward to about 1800 or so. The part about the Tatars and Ottomans carrying off up to (some years over) 100,000 Russians and Poles per year from the 1300s until the early 1700s makes people really boggle.

  23. our friendly neighborhood dear doddering national socialist presidential candidate has proposed that the federal government will regulate the price of land, the price of rent, and needs to start massive new public housing projects…

    dunno about you but i dont want to live in grey stack-a-prole boxes

      1. Hey, Communism is great if you are one of the Nomenklatura.
        You get power over people, a nice dacha, a car, and access to the special stores.
        Life sucks for everyone else, though.

  24. “we’ll even promise to stand in the airport waving goodbye and singing cheery songs as they leave. We can come up with a playlist, I’m sure.”

    ‘’Cause you’re already gone
    And we’re feelin’ strong
    We will sing this vict’ry song
    Woo hoo hoo, my my, woo hoo hoo’

    Anyone feel like negotiating with The Eagles for the rights to do a coer?

      1. Think it’ll take more than a whip-round at the airport?

        Anyone want to take on responsibility for the pre-printed ‘protest’ signs?

        Or ideas for ‘em?

        I’d like one saying “Please, forget to write!”

      1. I was sure there was a Country song about not letting the door hit you on the way out, but this subject is richer than I’d thought …

        Ya got your Blues version …

                  1. Two links to Travis Tritt’s song, and Give a darn is busted, in two comments are temporarily (???) being held by WP. At least they haven’t shown, yet.

  26. Who pays the bills makes the rules, even if they don’t *let* you pay your own bills.

    So college… no one is going to pay for everyone to follow their bliss or “find themselves”. No one will. So yes, you’ll have to compete for limited choices.
    Medicine? That will be controlled, too. Now it might bankrupt you, but you have a choice and if you’re bankrupted, hopefully you’re still alive for it. Will other people agree to be bankrupted *for* you? No. They won’t. So what you get or can get will be limited choices.

    1. “So college… no one is going to pay for everyone to follow their bliss”

      But it is likely that Politically Correct people and scions of Party members in good standing will be granted extra consideration in acknowledgement of their earnest desire to become good contributors to Society.

      1. Right up to the moment that Stalin arrives, whereupon the existence of so many social parasites in the Intellectual Class will be used as a pretext for liquidation.

    2. > medicine

      The Voices presented an image of groups of Christian Scientists, Amish, and Mennonites looking at the Affordable Care Act and saying, “Who’s laughing *now*?”

      The Brits have already shown a willingness to deny “public” healthcare for political reasons; the Democrats are probably staining their underwear in joy at the thought.

  27. This is how I know some people don’t know history-

    1)They think slavery is a unique institution to the West, and to America as well.
    2)Western chattel slavery was bad, no arguments. Slavery in (and currently being practiced) in Islamic countries, quite a few places in Southeast and Southwest Asia, South America, etc, etc, etc…
    3)The American Civil War was fought-more or less-over the issues of slavery. Anybody that believes otherwise (i.e. State’s Rights/Lost Cause/Northern Aggression) has a very…jaundiced view of history. Even people at the time acknowledged that slavery was going to either die or start to die very soon and the Southern aristocratic class (which was almost entirely Democratic) didn’t want to lose their power base.
    4)The Industrial Revolution and it’s ilk has probably done more to liberate people from the conditions that make slavery viable outside of a few specialized circumstances.

    If they don’t know these things, they don’t know history. Or they’re a graduate of most colleges in the United States.

    1. By far the most important state’s right at issue was…the right to own slaves. The Southerners held that it was constitutionally protected. They had held off Congressional action for decades by having equal numbers in the Senate and a series of Presidents who were more sympathetic to the South than not, but then Lincoln, who was known for his anti-slavery positions, was elected President. The south foresaw that that would be enough to swing the Federal government from benign tolerance to active restrictions on slavery. That would mean the end, sooner or later.

      1. Y’all ever read the Constitution of the Confederate States? Negro slavery is enshrined, in perpetuity, right up there in something like the third paragraph. That’s why, for all the “Cultural Richness” of the South and the very legitimate principle of “States’ Rights” under the Federal Constitution, I have little to no respect for the attitude that says (in Hank Jr’s phrase), “If the South woulda won, we’d’ve had it made!” Bullcrap. The Confederacy needed to be put down like a rabid dog, just like the Baathists in Iraq did, fifteen years ago.

        1. And your point is…?

          The Union’s Constitution had also slavery written right in, and after the war they added the 13th Amendment to explicitly permit the practice.

          The Confederacy’s Constitution included slavery? My goodness, how horrible! For shame!

          Note that, other than a few bits here and there, the two Constitutions were identical.

          1. Let’s drop this subject as the American Civil War generates more Smoke Than Light and also generates more Blue-On-Blue Attacks.

          3. … the presence of slavery. I’ll have to dig it out, but the Confederate Constitution is quite explicit in ensuring that their Peculiar Institution was to be maintained thereafter.

      2. Southern threats of secession over slavery preceded the election of Lincoln, and date to the formation of the Republican Party. Quite a few Southerners said they’d secede if a Republican was elected president. That didn’t happen in 1856 – John C. Fremont was a sacrificial candidate, and knew it – but it sure enough happened after the 1860 election.

  29. A great many of the socio-commie-fascists that are trying to drive us pell-mell into that cliff face know PERFECTLY WELL what kind of mud-grubbing nightmare these ideas would create. But they don’t care because they believe THEY will be the ones pointing at an applicant and intoning “street sweeper”, “gardener”, or “plumber”, instead of having a finger pointed at them.

  30. I have been there and have seen it all. I was in the Central Asia right after the breakup of the USSR. The Stans were really just colonies of the USSR supplying them with cotton, wine, vegetables, and natural gas. They shipped the wine out in tank cars and cotton went to the textiles. The communes owned everything, so there was no separation between government and production. Also no division between the party and administration.
    Who got a dacha or apartment, was a worker or and education was all directed. Production decision were not determined by economic. There was a poultry operation on the edge of the desert where all the feed had to be shipped in. In addition the desert is hot and dry, so not suited to raising chickens. Capital never wears out. Tractors were refurbished every night 7 years, so technology hardly change. One of the Commune leaders proudly pointed out a 1935 tractor that was still in use. The dairy processing plant was the same as the 1950’s that we sent milk to.
    I also worked in Egypt, where they had free university education, at the time and everyone was guaranteed a job in the government. The result was huge universities with many students, but not much for facilities or supplies. Students often bribed their way to get a degree, so in the end, a university education was not much better than high school her. As for that job in the government, there was a long waiting line and if you got a job, you had to share a desk with another person
    In Albania, where my wife is from, it was illegal to even own a chicken and if you had a bad biography (you did something) you were sent to the camp or mines to labor, no chance for eduction and you were not allowed talk to anyone outside the camp. I could go on and on but need to stop. Bunkers anyone?

  31. As far as I can tell, everyone has always seen the problem with them personally being enslaved. Seeing anyone being enslaved as a problem is a rather recent* development.

    *As far as history goes.

  32. “Zeal strike” or “white mutiny”. This is apparently what in Hebrew we call an “Italian strike” and in Dutch a “punctuality action”. I’ve read it translated as “work-to-rule strike”. This type of strike usually involves doing everything by the book, and preferably very slowly, such as to create lots of queueing and aggravation.

  33. We’ll pay the price for our freedom. Even if it turns out to be blood.

    At this point in our sociocultural devolution, the odds that the price will be blood — to be more specific, mass bloodshed that embraces the civilian population — is higher than ever before. The three currents that suggest it:
    — The political Left’s unwillingness to accept a duly elected president;
    — The activist Left’s resort to defamation and boycotts of the Right;
    — The “street” Left’s open and unabashed use of violence;
    …are converging on a “grand unified solution.”

    Before all else, be armed. — Niccolo de Macchiavelli

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