this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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On a more considered note after actually reading the thread (poor choice on my part, I know), it's hard not to connect this to the broader line-goes-up mentality that we see so often here. As evidenced by the long history of the "live free or die" ethos, whether enslaved people were/are actually better off than had they been killed is more of an open question than our friend's argument would imply. This is especially true if you ignore all the ways that chattel slavery was deeply cruel and inhuman even in the history of unfree labor to the point where historians consider it an abberation, closer to being worked to death in Mauthausen than being a medieval serf. I'm not qualified to talk about the history of dehumanization, but even in ancient Greece and Rome there existed some legal protections for slaves, provided you could find someone with citizen standing who was willing to plead your case, and this was thousands of years before the liberal ideas of what being a full human being and a free individual meant, so we need to understand the position of unfree people in those periods differently. But even if you ignore all that context and treat slavery like a universal practice from the prehistoric "sea peoples conquered my tribe" days to the antebellum American South, the primary benefits that you get from slavery don't go to the enslaved people, obviously. Rather it comes from the conquerors having a new source of labor to work their new fields, and the economic benefit they get from that. Rather than needing to allow population growth to expand your people's farms into new lands, you have a ready-made labor force to start (or in some cases continue) working there. It makes the line go up faster, in other words. The argument relies on ignoring all the questions of justice and the impact that these practices have on people's actual lives because it makes line go up, and in that sense it fits right in with all the other ways that ostensibly-libertarian ideologies end up supporting fascism.
Evidence for this is the comments we have from Athenians on the Spartans who they considered to be exceptionally cruel and bad re the treatment of their slaves. At least that is what I remember from reading Bret Devereaux blog.
Anyway, it feels really weird that ER (wait, I shouldn't abbreviate eigenrobot to that, that is the name of an anti-semitic youtuber), imagines some moment in time when there was no slavery where it had to be invented (see also the weird modern fetishization of inventions we have), which feels to me like inventing a period before we could lift our left arm upwards. And then also conflating all various forms of slavery with chattel slavery (as you mentioned) is just fucking silly. Reasoning from first principles because nobody in your community is a history expert.
E: Got distracted so forgot to mention two other things on why ER is dumb here. First of al it was in some slave taking customs the tradition to castrate slaves (the arab slave trade iirc), so that would still be a genocide with extra steps. And third, even if they didn't castrate people, taking away a whole community in chains, and enslaving them so they stop being that community/culture is still a form of genocide. A genocide is not just 'kill all X'.
Also reminder that ER has a checkmark, and that he prob is doing this for the attention so he can get some of Musks declining cash supplies, so don't interact, and just block. (I at least use an adblocker so I don't see any ads, but I doubt this will stop Musk from charging the advertisers for the blocked ads I don't get to see).
Not gonna lie, Bret was my primary source as well, particularly his two series on the civil structure of the Greek polis and the Roman republic .
We don't know much about Greece, but in Rome if you were released from slavery (by the master's will, contract expiring, etc.) you were treated equally to people that haven't been enslaved at all. And slavery was extremely common, independent of your state allegiance or color of skin.
That being said, we're talking about a deeply fucked up system where the paterfamilias held complete control over not only his slaves but his wife, children, the entire family. And being treated "equally" to other commoners in Rome isn't really saying that you were treated any good.
The main difference is that slavery as in the USA went through so many iterations of bad faith laundering that it had an entire ideology tacked on top to explain why it was good and Christian, actually. In Rome no one bothered, it was a clear power dynamic - we conquered you, now we own you because we have bigger dicks, simple as that.
That's why I meant by talking about the differences.in citizen status. The Greek cities had a lot of variation, but usually had a variety of free noncitizens as well as actual slaves, so the line between citizen and slave was wider than the line between slave and "person who lives and works here."
Also if memory serves the Roman aesthetic sensibility actually found bigger dicks weird and vulgar, but that's not important right now.