posted on March 09, 2021 08:25 PM by
u/ReactionaryRoaster
76
u/JohnPaulJonesSoda62 pointsat 1615325837.000000
We may never know because it might be that almost all our historical
primary sources are cherry-picked stories from one or the other side in
the conflict, so we will never know what represents the typical
experience. If the slaves narratives had been recorded in the 1880s when
those who experienced slavery during its peak were still alive, maybe we
would actually be able to know for sure. But unfortunately the
narratives weren’t recorded until the 1930s when only people who were
children during war-time slavery could be interviewed.
Absolutely astounding that you could be aware of all this and not
ever think to ask yourself the question, “gee I wonder why we
don’t have many slave narratives that get written before the 1930s and
whether that says anything about the conditions those people were
in”.
Also, we have quite a few slave narratives from before the 30s, and
they’re all pretty horrifying! How many does this dope need to see
before he’s willing to acknowledge that maybe what we have is a pretty
representative sample?
> Also, we have quite a few slave narratives from before the 30s, and they're all pretty horrifying!
I swear, I was reading most of your comment and thinking exactly this. There was literally a whole fucking genre of American literature that was slave narratives. *Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass* was selling by the thousands in the first four months. I expect the usual Lost Cause hack politics about abolitionism and shit but just to deny their existence is infuriating.
As I mentioned in another comment: former slaves like Frederick Douglas were literally going on tour OUTSIDE THE US, IN MY HOME COUNTRY OF THE UK, WHICH WAS AS COMPLICIT IN SLAVERY AND *BEFORE* THE PEAK OF EMPIRE IN THE RAJ
It is fucking astonishing that people can be *this fucking confident* in being absolutely, entirely, wrong and still think they’re the smartest people in the room sometimes
Beep. Boop. I'm a robot.
Here's a copy of
###[Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass](https://snewd.com/ebooks/narrative-of-the-life-of-frederick-douglass-an-american-slave/)
Was I a good bot? | [info](https://www.reddit.com/user/Reddit-Book-Bot/) | [More Books](https://old.reddit.com/user/Reddit-Book-Bot/comments/i15x1d/full_list_of_books_and_commands/)
The mere existence of the labour movement's history alone would show them they're wrong at every level, but this is about othering and covertly demonizing Black Americans so it doesn't matter.
Right but have you considered that that looking at widespread public narratives is "cherrypicking"? Obviously what we need is a widespread independent survey of a group of people who wouldn't be allowed to participate in such a thing if it even had existed.
It’s also kind of weird to assume that if it wasn’t written down, and it *was* written down, it’s unknowable.
Like, there’s a whole field of study whose entire purpose is to figure out what life was like beyond the historical record. Maybe go look into what they have to say about the experience of enslaved people?
The other side being that what happened in the South in the late
1860s was a preview of what happened to the American cities like Detroit
and St. Louis in the 1960s and 1970s. (See books like Devil’s Night or
Detroit: An American Autopsy ). Immediately after the war when the
government was in the hands of Northern “carpetbaggers” the South
experienced rampant corruption, a break down in any capabilities of
government, massive increase in crime (and in particular, black crime
and rape), lots of people getting off with little punishment for crimes
because the government was in the hands of people who hated the Southern
whites. But instead of the 1970s where the whites simply fled to the
suburbs, in the South in the 1870s the whites formed paramilitary groups
to retake the government.
Again I’m not sure how much I agree with this other side – but
overall the post-war era seems much more like a tragedy with terrible
mistakes and bad deeds by both sides, rather than a morality play of
Southern whites being the pure villains and blacks being the entirely
innocent victims. But again, you cannot say this in the current
year.
That’s an argument victim blaming black southerners and white
unionists for the Ku Klux Klan.
> See books like Devil's Night or Detroit: An American Autopsy
I'm not sure whether to cry or laugh about the fact that this guy's entire argument is apparently based on wild misreadings of a couple of books of stories by journalists rather than anything resembling actual history or sociology.
edit: oh wait is he just saying "see these books for more on what happened in Detroit and St. Louis in the 60s and 70s"? In which case - those are still pretty terrible sources, neither of them is about St. Louis, one of them is about contemporary Detroit, and he didn't need to cite a couple of books for what could have been covered with a quick Wikipedia link, unless he's just trying to look smart without actually saying anything intelligent.
Which is hilarious, because even if you hadn't read those books, a quick Google will show that we're not exactly talking about scholarly histories or anything. At least pretend you read _Origins of the Urban Crisis_ and it matched your opinion, sheesh.
The glossing over of the massive violence against Black Americans, who suffered exponentially more than the whites during Reconstruction, to the point of tapping into modern racist myths about people "getting away with" crimes and eliding how this was all about white southerners being mad they lost a right to keep people as property...
That the Rationalists are that easy to coax towards naked bigotry should stop being surprising at some point, but at least their slouch down to Hell is illustrating how little "intelligence" or "reason" has to do with anything in Euromerican society.
As a result of the civil war, the constitution was amended to make forced labour contingent on having been convicted of a crime. Afterwards we saw huge seasonal crime waves perpetuated by black people, around the times cotton fields needed picking.
One possible explanation for this is that black people just cannot bring themselves to abide by law. I deduced this hypothesis from the first principles using my giant brain so we can consider the issue as good as settled.
Also the idea that the people who were born into slavery shouldn't be seen as the victims when they were raped and murdered as a vent for injured pride and pique by their former captors is some hot and loose horseshit.
BUT, it's completely out of touch with any rigorous history of Reconstruction published since, to pick a date, the 1930s (when "rigorous" meant something slightly different)... so there's that
I'm late to the party, but if you read through his comments, that user is using the entire exchange as a front to launder literal scientific racism through what looks on the surface like a debate over primary source readings on American slavery.
He ends with the assertion that the failure of Reconstruction is evidence suggesting that black people are *biologically* less capable of democratic self-governance, and promoting his version of "Human Biodiversity."
> Maybe they could understand symbolic violence if it's directed at them, but somehow I doubt it.
they fully understand that stopping them from saying the N-word is unambiguous symbolic violence
if only there were an internet community geared towards helping dumbasses learn how to examine their own biases in a thoughtful and detached manner and actually change their minds and -
This is the fascinating bit, that makes it into a parable.
The Rationalist project starts out introspective, takes a Messianic turn, develops a literal and actual cult around that Messianic vision, enters into political writing, creates a community full of not just normal human bias and ignorance, but _exceptionally complex_ forms of denial and poor argument.
As if the tools they learned were not meant for people that stupid.
I don't know what to make of it. Part of me says "everyone should shut up forever about everything" but part of me says we can't yield the floor to perpetual nonstop fuckery.
The lesson of the era is that if you deliberately give a big microphone to an idiot, you're an idiot. Now our discourse is full of idiocy.
I just don't know. I know I want to say something about this mess but I'm not sure what.
I think about this a lot. When I see less culty (in general) rationalists encounter criticism of their thought, they get upset instead of curious. I occasionally poke them to see if some spark of self-awareness will flash, but in the end I'm forced to remember that these people admire and follow a narcissist who literally pathologized *not liking their Harry Potter fan fiction*.
um hm.
When they compare slavery to the industrial conditions at the time,
they have a point, but it’s not that slavery is good, it’s that the
industrial conditions were really really bad.
This is literally the quality of the racism and slavery
discourse that used to be in the comments of literally neo-Nazi blog The
Right Stuff, before it was just the site for their podcast The Daily
Shoah.
(They also used to produce a gossip site, The Right Drama, which took
the piss out of Michael Anissimov. Just to be super on-topic.)
I'm guessing that that user *does* in fact get a bunch of their talking points from the types of far-right blogs you're describing, along with the "Human Biodiversity" blogosphere.
Their language and the way they try to use sources is too specific.
Well, the CEO of this website has said that he would "probably be in charge, or at least not a slave, when push comes to shove". So I feel like maybe he's not super motivated to get rid of ideological arguments that "slavery is good, actually"?
I mean what is the fucking point of this beyond sheer
contrarianism
It certainly has fuck all to do with the most basic level of research
you could possibly imagine somebody doing in the name of being
“rational”
I learned about the horrors - and I mean specific, well documented
events - of chattel slavery in secondary school that this
shithead is just now finding out about, and I’m not even fucking
American
But they just double-down anyway
Christ these people make me so fucking angry I get sick of SneerClub
sometimes, if I didn’t have fuck all else to do I’d suggest to
/u/completely-ineffable to just shut the sub down because as the years
have gone by they get so much worse it isn’t even fun anymore
It is literally willed fucking ignorance permitted and in fact
encouraged by a parliament of idiots sucking each other off over their
ridiculous egos: and I say that as a man who likes sucking
dick
Leaving aside the ethics and racism; slavery apologia always has the
same issues as pro-feudal neoreactionaries: everyone imagines that
they’ll end up on top. But the reality is that most positions in the
societies they’re imagining sucked.
Sure, if you were a large plantation owner, slavery was great. Even
small hold slave owners had it pretty good, comparatively. But none of
these people ever imagine themselves being in the class of
undifferentiated labor that got squeezed out economically thanks to the
free labor provided by slaves. Oh, and they never imagine themselves as
being enslaved either, go figure.
It’s the same issue with the NRX crowd. Being pro-monarchy if you’re
a duke or knight makes sense. But they never seem to imagine themselves
as being serfs, which is what actually would happen statistically.
Monarchy might seem kind of cool when you look at all the propaganda
produced by monarchies, but they actually suck if you look at the
experience of a typical person living under them.
Absolutely astounding that you could be aware of all this and not ever think to ask yourself the question, “gee I wonder why we don’t have many slave narratives that get written before the 1930s and whether that says anything about the conditions those people were in”.
Also, we have quite a few slave narratives from before the 30s, and they’re all pretty horrifying! How many does this dope need to see before he’s willing to acknowledge that maybe what we have is a pretty representative sample?
That’s an argument victim blaming black southerners and white unionists for the Ku Klux Klan.
[deleted]
When they compare slavery to the industrial conditions at the time, they have a point, but it’s not that slavery is good, it’s that the industrial conditions were really really bad.
This is literally the quality of the racism and slavery discourse that used to be in the comments of literally neo-Nazi blog The Right Stuff, before it was just the site for their podcast The Daily Shoah.
(They also used to produce a gossip site, The Right Drama, which took the piss out of Michael Anissimov. Just to be super on-topic.)
Isn’t this exactly the kind of sickening bullshit that Reddit isn’t supposed to allow on the platform?
I mean what is the fucking point of this beyond sheer contrarianism
It certainly has fuck all to do with the most basic level of research you could possibly imagine somebody doing in the name of being “rational”
I learned about the horrors - and I mean specific, well documented events - of chattel slavery in secondary school that this shithead is just now finding out about, and I’m not even fucking American
But they just double-down anyway
Christ these people make me so fucking angry I get sick of SneerClub sometimes, if I didn’t have fuck all else to do I’d suggest to /u/completely-ineffable to just shut the sub down because as the years have gone by they get so much worse it isn’t even fun anymore
It is literally willed fucking ignorance permitted and in fact encouraged by a parliament of idiots sucking each other off over their ridiculous egos: and I say that as a man who likes sucking dick
Literally the same arguments as George Fitzhugh and other slavery apologists of the day. If you’re gonna go caliper, go all the way I guess.
Wow it is Tuesday already?
E: iirc the last time there were also hints being made to the lost cause thing.
Ooh, I can’t wait to meet this mysterious “HBD”
Leaving aside the ethics and racism; slavery apologia always has the same issues as pro-feudal neoreactionaries: everyone imagines that they’ll end up on top. But the reality is that most positions in the societies they’re imagining sucked.
Sure, if you were a large plantation owner, slavery was great. Even small hold slave owners had it pretty good, comparatively. But none of these people ever imagine themselves being in the class of undifferentiated labor that got squeezed out economically thanks to the free labor provided by slaves. Oh, and they never imagine themselves as being enslaved either, go figure.
It’s the same issue with the NRX crowd. Being pro-monarchy if you’re a duke or knight makes sense. But they never seem to imagine themselves as being serfs, which is what actually would happen statistically. Monarchy might seem kind of cool when you look at all the propaganda produced by monarchies, but they actually suck if you look at the experience of a typical person living under them.