I cleared up my misunderstanding. Anyone would think you’ve never made a mistake before in the entirety of your miserable existence.
We’re done here for a bit
4 Likes
Would you rather have no trackable ancestral history or one that can be chased back to raping, enslaving, massacring people as most white people do? Which is preferable?
Are tribal africans in extremely impoverished conditions with extremely high mortality and morbidity rates happy that they have kept their language and their history, or would they trade it for your situation and your ‘dark’ history?
This trying to re-write history or make retrospective moral judgments is absolute insanity. That, I think, is the heart of why people are upset by this ridiculous vandalism and statue destroying. It makes no sense to try re-write history in this way, to make moral judgments going back in time–I saw in the other thread @arsenescoatmaker say that Bezos etc. are no different than the slave traders of 400 years ago, in that they’re doing everything within the rules to get ahead, and he’s totally right, the later clarification that they are crossing some moral boundary by enslaving and thus worse those of 400 years ago is non-sensical, because they didn’t perceive it as a moral boundary, and nor did most of the world, just as 400 years later there will be lots of things we are doing now that we don’t perceive as moral boundaries which will be considered highly immoral–moral judgments are already a complicated and slippery slope as it is, because most moral arguments either have to rely on relativism (in which case these guys are certainly not immoral, relative to their time) or break down without a reliance on some God cop-out.
Another reason why the left is such an absolute joke nowadays: it’s almost entirely dependent on flimsy moral arguments that break down at the seams. Meanwhile minority and repressed classes get caught up in this no-win game where everyone’s just talking a bunch of bollocks and not getting anywhere or getting places extremely slowly, and the actual racists and people in power and with insane amount of wealth are content as fuck to let you all battle out your pointless little battle so long as they ensure that the current world order keeps serving them.
Just to take the US for an example, as @BigWeng_4LYFE mentioned, the one candidate with whom blacks really standed to gain was Bernie Sanders. What blacks would gain in America with a socialist-leaning president or someone who really disrupts the current capitalist set-up is far, far more than what they can even hope to gain with current protests.
Yet, what is it that gets people up in arms? A publicised murder, completely isolated from any information about stats about the progression of police brutality in recent years, completely isolated from other informations like the incarceration system in the US, health stats re: Covid and the black community, health stats re: economic prosperity and the black community, etc, which are far more revealing of actual systemic either racism or damage to the black community via the actual workings of the system in which they live in.
This shit serves the powers that be greatly. As long as black people or any other repressed group keeps getting up in arms about shit like this and getting into the moral arguments which basically all the territory of the popular left breaks down into these days and not putting money and manpower forward for actual causes that will disrupt things and really benefit them, you guys are just obedient pawns in the game.
3 Likes
It was argued that if we did not trade then other countries would and we would, so it was better for Britain to reap the benefits of this as it would make no difference. This is part of a speech to parliament in 1777.
Some gentlemen may, indeed, object to the slave trade as inhuman and evil ; but let us consider that, if our colonies are to be cultivated, which can only be done by African negroes, it is surely better to supply ourselves with those labourers in British ships, than buy them from French, Dutch or Danish traders.
Temple Luttrell, speech in Parliament (23 May 1777)
‘Retrospective’. Quote is from 1777.
I literally feel like modern day political climate can be summed up like this, and can more or less be summed up like this for a long time throughout history: the right* (or powers that be) says we’ll let them have their moral superiority, and dish them out little consolation prizes slowly but surely, enough to keep them hungry and arguing about their moral bollocks, and enough to anger our poor bases and motivate them against them and keep the argument going, as long as you let us keep our robust capitalism.
As long as people are getting in the streets for publicised murderers not candidates with a plan, as long as people are arguing about historical figures and what constitutes racism and what doesn’t and not real economic incentives that are ‘positively’ racist, the black community/poorer classes is literally right where they want you.
*I don’t consider US democrats like Clinton or Biden to be the left, I would put them more in the right.
2 Likes
Would the Netherlands/Spain/Portugal/England/France have gotten the prosperity that they currently have if they didn’t raid the world?
Absolutely fucking not. No one gets anywhere except at the expense of others. All of us are included in that. We live in a world with limited resources which are spread out inefficiently. We are all either getting places or not getting places at the expense/to the gain of others, by rule.
Another reason why almost any moralist stance is really ultimately a piece of hypocrisy, unless people are actively acting against their own interests, and even then humans are really bad at acting against their own interests consciously, and usually act against their own interests mostly unconsciously, ie, not when they’re concerned with conscious moral discussions. 
2 Likes
Which explains why Africa has gone to shit. So don’t throw that in my face.
What about the ‘retrospective’ moral stance btw?
I didn’t respond because it’s a quote from 1777 and even then he was only saying it was arguably immoral. Whereas Colston or whatever that guys name was long before, when there wasn’t a discussion about that, similarly as among catholics we didn’t have any question if brutally killing arabs and ‘educating’ americans in our illuminated ways was right or not.
Anyways, if you want to waste time, I’m glad to get into retrospective moral discussions and discuss who you think is a racist and immoral for his time and who not. As long as we’re both clear that we’re wasting time and the person that will win the argument is just the person who’s more clever at arguing, because we’re really discussing fuck all.
Of course. And why it’s stayed there. Or why South America has ‘gone to shit’ and stayed there. Or why all of the world south of the equator basically.
The world history is written by the winners, not by the most moral, even if that actually existed. Asking people not to celebrate their own history is as logical as asking Man United not to celebrate their league titles because you’re Brighton.
In 1705 in Smith v Brown and Cooper , Chief Justice Holt stated: “as soon as a negro comes into England, he becomes free; one may be a villein in England, but not a slave”.
Colston lived from 1636 - 1713. When slaves came to England they became free. Why was that? If a court rules in such a way, is there really ‘no discussion about that’?
Right, so when he was 69 years old a practice that he used was deemed illegal.
I don’t know anything about the history of Colston except what I’ve read in this thread, and my english history is fuzzy aside from how it pertains to spanish, so I’ll just give you my take on the archetypal case:
Cristóbal Colón was not an immoral man. He was a man of his times, and a successful one at that. He was arguably unscrupulous at times, which, is a trait of many, many successful men and women of many races. As he was an extremely successful man of his times, he as such has a square with a statue and a few roads in every fucking city in the west.
Btw, while we’re talking about times of the conquistadors, here’s a fun fact: in Lima, Peru, 400 years ago, there were more hospital beds per capita than there are in the Los Angeles, California, United States right now. How good is the biggest power in the world at keeping your focus where it wants it and not where it doesn’t!
1 Like
Just to be clear here. The people who judge slave traders of that time are being told that they should place themselves in that time to understand that those were the times. I’ve given two examples, over a span of 70 years, that show that during that time, (some) people at least thought slave trade was a questionable practice. Only thing I get back is that Columbus was actually a great guy?
Yeah I am sure they also discussed the horrors of English soldiers misbehaving in colonies while sipping tea, procured by exploiting opium addicted Chinese farmers.
1 Like
What? The heatlh care system in the USA gets ridiculed all the time…especially because it’s the USA. Numorous documentairies about how bad their system actually is.
As if that were even possible. We have a hard time deciding if the creator of Friends was a real purveyor of white privilege or just someone making a popular television show, and that was 15 years ago. Give me a lot of fucking context (something, I’m sure, not any of those people doing the damage had), like a fucking lot, and I’ll make a decision on if Colston was a more or less moral or immoral man for his times. I give you Colón cause we actually have a lot of information on him, and because you can imagine which way I’ll go in most cases based on my view of morality in general and using Colón as a case sample.
Made my point for me basically. Documentaries. Not people up in arms and going out to vote en masse, unanimously against Trump to ensure Obama-care wasn’t overturned, not the black community going out campaigning for people who really support their interests.
If you choose to ignore the examples given why should I put in the effort to provide more?
In those docs they actually explain what the mentality of people towards a universal health care is and why it’s so difficult to establish. Big part of the American populous doesn’t want it, because individual freedom above anything…
But as an individual is it not your right to chose what you want for yourself?
With certain things people have to be protected from themselves. Health (care) is one of those.
1 Like
That’s certainly one interpretation. Mine would be more along the lines of: extremely selective individual freedom (which is a really hard thing to define in the first place) is a cultural property of the US culture, and is selectively obstinate about it towards certain things, because it has suited the US interests re: power/money/dominance/etc. These kind of attitudes don’t just develop and maintain in a vacuum, and they are a certain way for a reason.
(If I haven’t expressed myself very clearly here, which I don’t think I have: individual freedom is a hard concept to pin down and depends on how you define it/what barometer you’re using. Americans are “free” in some senses, very unfree in others. Certainly compared to any country in western Europe it is where most un-free I personally feel. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Americans protest greatly for their individual freedom when it comes to a things like health care and guns that only suit a very small percentage of the population and are happy to cede it in other cases).
To be even more clear, I think that justification is as superficial as can be, and exactly the type that suits the interests in power.
1 Like