Oddbean new post about login | logout People are not attempting to legitimize slavery because of the past, it's because they want to do it in the future.
@3967703f this is 100% correct. Too many liberals and never Trumpets think the Right has a different idea of what government can be under the Constitution. They hate the Constitution. That's why they rebelled against it in 1861 and why they still wave the flags from that rebellion. They want the Confederate States of America and the CSA had only one priority: enslaving and owning humans.
@3967703f you probably know this history, but I didn't, and it's the part of US history that racist fascists like DeSantis don't want us to know... because he and his gang intend to reinstate it https://petroskowo.pl/display/810fc51c-9065-112c-b9a1-8f8152612764
@3967703f 💯 The mechanism is already on the books. Combine that with private for-profit prisons, and it's almost an inevitability. "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"
@3967703f People can be replaced with machines but then you have to dispose of all the surplus, non-productive people. In the 19th century, colonisation was the answer. Many of the convicts Britain sent to its colonies were farm workers made redundant by mechanisation, who'd resorted to petty crime to support themselves. Other unwanted people like the rebellious Scots and Irish were given subsidised passage to the colonies. Not so easy to do now, though witholding welfare and health care can raise the death rate, as can inhuman working conditions like requiring people to work outside in the hot sun with no water breaks. These kinds of policies see human life as disposable.
@3967703f Well and truly said, Still! The ONLY reason to forbid teaching children about evil in the past is because you want to do said evil in the future. The same people banning books that talk about slavery are also banning books that talk about the Nazi Holocaust. I guess wage slavery is no longer enough. They want literal slavery again.
@3967703f What's the current talking point now? That slaves received skills and knowlege to benefit them in life that they could not have received without the boon of a master's employ? Sounds an awful lot like simping for Capitalist exploitation. They're trying to combine the two and create a huge power imbalance, so they can relive the glory days of slave ownership through worker exploitation with all of a person's basic needs in the hands of the Capitalist Masters. Privatize all needs!
@3967703f Now this may shock you, but it's still a thing in many places of the world and in a certain lens it never fully went away in the united states. Why americans beat their chests in pride about their nation very few people outside of that nation will never know.
@3967703f some might say it's already happening in the present, it's just soft-pedaled or called something else. american prisons, thai fishing trawlers, press gangs in MENA oilfields, human trafficking - one way or another, the necessary engine of capitalism continues to be #slavery
@3967703f Yep. Especially women. This was a picture taken at the University of Kentucky campus recently. https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/131/000/383/405/372/original/fc3bd1e12f0a9d48.png
@3967703f Big corps have made workers wage slaves, tied to jobs bc of housing, healthcare, and credit debt. The huge Strikes that have hit this year were a wake up call, no industry is immune and there's a sense of "fed up with the oligarch boardroom" that does not look good for Republicans in the '24 election.
@3967703f Christofero Columbo nodding in "these naked natives are Cannibals who sodomize, they are better off slaves", 1493-1499.
