How do you think slavery arose?

Post Reply New Topic

Certainly the roots of the tax system are grounded in slavery - a nation's army takes over another country and then extorts as much of the "surplus" wealth as it dares. And within a nation or fiefdom the ruling class do the same thing to their own people. These days egalitarian socialism has to a degree changed the tax system to a more redistributive model in which (theoretically) taxation is proportional to wealth and the tax money is given back to those who aren't so wealthy in the form of welfare payments and more or less free services, and thus the process by which the few have successfully exploited (i.e. somewhat enslaved) the many is mitigated.

But that only happens to a degree - e.g. the income tax threshold is set rather low and purchase tax is taken from everybody, often being applied to necessities such as food and basic heating. So yes, to some extent we still have slavery even if we don't get hunted down for quitting our crappy jobs. We're free to work for an exploiter or (more or less) starve unless we have the capital to run our own business. The main argument in favour of keeping things that way seems to be the idea that anything more egalitarian would diminish the economy so we'd end up with even less than we can currently get. Time was when many people thought we were evolving towards an equal society, but every attempt to get us there seems to fail. It's often said to be intrinsically impossible. There is evidence for that, but no absolute proof. I suspect it's just the exploiters who will say and do whatever they must in order to make it seem impossible.

You seem like a person that gets upset easy for no reason. Everyone has an opinion. They are like a**holes. Everyone has one.

Apparently genetic studies to proove that have yielded contrasting results. Also suppose she was indeed Jefferson's lover. The claim is that their affair started in France and she was a free individual since slavery was abolished there. Also Jefferson was widowed. Your complain that she was 14 years old is anachronistic. That was common at the time. For reference Shekspeers Juliette was also 14. It seems you aren't doing your research well enough either.

How did slavery arise? It’s because it’s in the nature of some people to want other people to serve their every need for free.

Jefferson was dependent upon slavery to keep his financial head above water. Without slavery, he would have been in deep doo doo.

Here is another day dream that is perhaps a small minute element to a bigger puzzle.

Under what circumstances do people decide to take on other people?

I sense that people in the past in rural areas that required labor were more likely to haphazardly pick a wife at random and she would haphazardly accept.

They would then proceed to have as many children as possible to be helpers. One of the Ten Commandments is honor thy mother and father and be prolific and multiply. The wife had to honor the husband.

Parents were more distant and they lumped children together in hoards by male and female.

Religion which is not necessarily a bad thing obviously has a patriarchy element to it. At least, the one I am familiar with.

Maybe you can’t separate religion from it. That seems fairly obvious to me.

I sure it was totally different with let’s say the earring North American Indians or something like that.

I know I know I am only suppose to think what I am told and not give anyone cognitive dissonance or be cancelled.

Fam, Shakespeare's Juliet is a fictional character, Shakespeare also wrote Romeo and Juliet in the 1590s, nearly 200 years before Jefferson and Hemings were in France.

More to the point, the whole claim that 'people in the old days would have sexual relationships with or get married to young girls' is literally a myth. I mean I'm not doubting that there haven't always been people like that, but to act like this is was just 'how they did things' back then is completely incorrect. (In fact, most of these marriages between a much older man and a young girl were in royalty and nobility and I don't think I need to say that the majority of people back in the day were not royalty or nobility)

It also doesn't matter if their relationship began in France where she was officially a paid servant or if it began soon after they returned to Monticello where she was, once again, an enslaved girl. The fact that you can't see the power a 44 year old man would have over a 14 year girl is really telling.

Up until about two hundred years ago (that's being generous, I think), life was cheap.

In most of world today, it is still the case that life is cheap.

I’m sure like everyone else he was making some kind of point. One of them was that the DNA analysis results were mixed. I find it interesting that someone could be a direct descendant of George Washington (who was sterile) but not have any of his DNA. That is an interesting fact about DNA. After a certain point you don’t necessarily have DNA from a given ancestor. There are people who claim to be descended from George Washington who was sterile. With George Washington they seem to narrow it done to some relative to George Washington which doesn’t mean much to me unless someone is trying to make something out of it.

I think your point goes along with mine that it was not normal for men to have sexual relations with younger women or women in general outside of marriage.

I have to ask myself if it was so rampant for slave owners to be raping people why don’t people show the genetic linkages? One of my answers to that maybe they were getting blowjobs. I can totally see that happening. Everybody wants to blow the boss. That is true today. It is a perfect explanation. That is probably making light of the subject but I don’t share everyone’s interests. Some things seems more pointless to contemplate than others. Everybody should get to decide on their own what they contemplate. It’s freedom versus slavery. I imagine that is offensive but I don’t find offensive interesting.

I don’t really find who has sex with who fascinating.

I know this is probably beside your point but in the present day when do people start having sex of their own volition? I don’t know the answer especially for women but it is definitely no later than sixteen. For a boy it could be prepuberty. I am not really sure of the ins and outs of that and don’t think it matters.

I honestly don’t find a 44 year old man sleeping with a 14 year old too awfully interesting other than the drama that would ensue. He would either get killed by the parents or go to prison. In countries with law and order it is automatic prison. It is not like there are not protections for that sort of thing so why would it be interesting for me to focus on that and worry myself with it. Jeffrey Epstein must have been bat s**t crazy to think he wasn’t eventually going to prison. I have no idea why that guy was not in prison from day one. Why fight for stronger laws when they are already strong? That is my contrarian thought on that.

Personally, I feel no need or desire for underage women. 18 is plenty young. To me 30 and 18 looks the same. Adult is Adult. Post puberty is the same as 30. 40 compared to 18 looks different. Obviously, there is more to age than appearances. I am an equal opportunist for pointing out absurdities. When someone in there twenties asks me how old they look I think somewhere between 16 and 33. That is my contrarian thought on that one.

Supposedly, females are hard wired to choose their mates wisely. Maybe that is why they have an interest in how that goes about and getting upset about it when it doesn’t go their way. I theoretically would lack the same hard wires. I have the male imperative instead. It makes perfect sense to me.

Last edited by JimJohn on 30 Jan 2023, 2:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.

You are being terribly anachronistic. And obviously you haven't read much history. Girls getting married at that age was common in the West until fairly recently and it is still common in the middle East.

Juliette was indeed a fictional character but it's popularity indicates public acceptance. Public acceptance indicates common practice. As another user mentioned, life was cheep. People lived at an average up until ther 30's. A woman would give birth to a dozen of children to just have one or two survive. People died from catching the flu. We are talking about a very different reality.

Did you know that the Liberal Arts are the arts that free people could pursue because they were not slaves? And without Slavery Athenian Democracy could not have happened, or the philosophical schools. Slaves during that time could be rewarded with freedom, but no one ever even thought about emancipation. They wouldn't have understood the concept.

America was an unusual case in that somehow one race became the enslaved people. My sister's DNA analysis shows 1% Black DNA though we know of no ancestors who owned slaves.

The original post mentioned the Aztecs. It is interesting that people willingly walked in line toward the pyramid to be murdered. That was a cultural thing.

About taxes. I have heard a historian use the term Tribute taking states. Because the first empires were formed by a powerful kingdom conquering g their neighbors and then forcing them to pay tribute in order not o be beaten up again.

Taxes you can compare to slavery. You can compare them also to racketeering. You can also compare racketeering to slavery.

People did not live on average into their 30s, while it is true that the average life expectancy in the past was lower than it is in modern developed nations, the data itself is skewed by the high rates of infant and adolescent mortality. (I might not be remembering this 100% exactly but I recall reading an Englishman who was 20 years old in the Middle Ages could reasonably expect to reach like 65 years, lower than nowadays but not 'on average living into their 30s')

Like if you're just gonna peddle long debunked historical misconceptions that can easily be disproven with a bit of research, I really don't know why I should bother to reply.

I can't remember exactly where I heard this but I'm pretty sure it was one of Prof Gilbert Morris's discussions with Daniel Schmachtenberger.

The understanding goes like this - for a long time what you did when you defeated another tribe was kill all of the men and possibly all male children and take the women as war trophies.

At a given point afterward either circumstances or moral development caused people to not do this anymore, and the main idea was that men who were taken in as conquered needed to be subjugated for several generations as to not sow sedition among the ranks of the population. Being that there was always a lot of work to do slavery ended up being the solution - ie. we let you live and in turn you do all of the work that we'd rather our young not have to devote their time to (for example - having more men in the military ranks rather than working the fields).

In that discussion this is part of where they drew a sharp distinction between slavery as it existed in places like Greece and Rome, which were on the model described above, and what came from colonialism in Africa which was something closer to selling people as commodities. Yes, slaves in the US were being put to similar use as were Greek and Roman slaves but the context of how it was happening wasn't extension of empire so much as resource drain on the territories, somewhat similar to neocolonialism in the ways that we have dodgy mining practices in places like DRC / former Zaire. Colonialism and neocolonialism seem like they're much more simply resource extraction rather than acquisition of empire.

The other part with colonial history in Africa - there was a game theory / multipolar trap going on with firearm sales, where the arms dealers told the tribes that everyone needed to buy them because if you didn't you'd be subjugated by those who did. While I doubt they were perfectly peaceful toward one another before this point the guns amplified things, in that case Africans were taking prisoners in the way the Greeks and Romans did but not having as much of a means to put them to use, and being able to turn a profit by selling them to Arabs and Europeans, that's what they did.

That's why I specifically mentioned "at an average". I know pretty well my history so don't bother.

That was interesting on a whole another level than me. Anyway, back on my level I saw in a Joe Rogan video that the majority of world’s cadmium comes from slave labor in the Congo. Supposedly, the entire green revolution is premised on slave labor. That’s interesting if true.

As far as life being cheap until recent history, I would date widespread use of electricity and indoor plumbing at 100 years or less except for the Greeks and Romans who had plumbing earlier. My facts and dates are obviously off a little.

Yep…high infant mortality did skew the “life expectancy” statistics.

Many people lived to at least their 60s even during medieval times.