You see how there’s a difference between saying slavery was good and saying that slaves developed skills that could be applied for their personal benefit?
Those are absolutely not the same positions.
@volkris @InkySchwartz @futurebird Furthermore, enslaved people brought skills to the New World. You’re making the racist assumption that Africans are animals who didn’t have civilizations of their own. Africans knew a lot more about how to make subtropical land that is the southern United States agriculturally productive than Europeans.
@volkris @InkySchwartz @cadenza
No.
Every person who has been forced to do something learns something from it. What is the point of pointing that out?
@futurebird @volkris @InkySchwartz he’s gaslighting. “See, you learned from your abuser so it can’t be all bad!” Africans already had skills. They didn’t need to be beaten, tortured, raped, and had their families taken away to learn new ones.
Can you quote a mainstream conservative saying otherwise?
Again, it seems like you’re arguing against a stance that isn’t being taken, arguing against a strawman.
@volkris @futurebird @InkySchwartz Fucking DeSantis says this. Every conservative in Florida says this! But you are being willfully obtuse by quibbling over semantics. You are arguing in bad faith and always have. You keep whitesplaining genocide and slavery to us, spitting out what is said with either no knowledge or no concern over historical context. Must be nice to be so privileged that you can live in a context-free universe and not pay the consequences. Go ahead and pal around Nazis and debate them. Try to befriend them and convince them to drop their genocidal hatred. Go be their useful idiot. Don’t come crying to me when it bites you in the ass, and it will.
Please quote him saying this.
You say DeSantis and all of the other conservatives say this, so please quote them.
Because all of the reporting that has been cited says otherwise.
What do you know about the: 1906 Atlanta Race Riot
1919 Washington, D.C. Race Riot
1920 Ocoee Massacre
1921 Tulsa Massacre and the 1923 Rosewood Massacre?
How would you describe these events?
I mean, that just agrees with them.
What’s the point of pointing it out? I don’t know, if nothing else, showing that sides can come together on points of common agreement?
I’m not here to judge WHY you’re agreeing. I’m just interested that you are agreeing with them now.
@volkris
Um, they are not the same, obviously, but the one logically entails the other.
If you argue that there was a benefit to enslaved people of being enslaved, then you are also committed to saying that slavery is at least in part, good.
My advice to you is not to try arguing the merits of enslavement, especially to a population that includes the descendants of slaves.
Well no. Just because one receives a benefit doesn’t mean it’s overall for the best. There are examples all throughout life where a person benefits from one thing even though it is on the whole for the worse.
It is entirely reasonable to say that slavery is bad even though there were some minor benefits to individuals in the course of that overall terrible institution.
The two statements are not mutually exclusive, and it’s apparently very worthwhile for our education system to point that out, since so many people on here seem to overlook that.
@volkris
Sorry, but you are wrong at several levels.
Viz.
"Just because one receives a benefit doesn’t mean it’s overall for the best."
Nobody said anything about best. The point was that saying that slaves received benefit from enslavement is EXACTLY to say that there is good in slavery.
You cannot say that this one sliver of potential benefit accrued to this one hypothetical individual without normalizing the greater harm they suffered.
/2
@volkris
"It is entirely reasonable to say that slavery is bad even though there were some minor benefits to individuals"
NO
It is absolutely NOT reasonable to say that. You cannot itemize ANY supposed good from a root of evil in any universe of ethics. You cannot absolve Nazi cold-immersion experiments by saying the data was later used to improve maritime safety. You are welcome to USE evil to do good, but you cannot place the benefit on the evil root.
"The two statements are not mutually exclusive, and it’s apparently very worthwhile for our education system to point that out, since so many people on here seem to overlook that"
WTAF?
Are you seriously suggesting we teach kids that slavery was a good thing because we cannot eliminate the hypothetical and arguable possibility that some slave, somewhere, at some time, may have gained in some way?
That is completely bonkers!
I have a different suggestion.
Let's teach kids that some people are foolish and immoral enough to argue that a huge evil is actually good because they can imagine some potential sliver of good that may possibly have accrued to someone who was the victim.
We can explain why this thinking is immoral
Why it is irrational
And why thinking that way is a strong predictor of ending up in jail
Who is arguing that a huge evil is actually good?
@volkris
You are, mate.
You are
Huh. You’ve misunderstood my position, and really if you so misunderstand my position it makes me suspect that you’ve misunderstood so many others’ as well.
@volkris
No, your position is just not quite what you imagine it to be.
You think you are arguing for logical purity, but in fact you are being an apologist for slavery
I makes me wonder what other really bad ideas you have, and it makes me wonder what bad things you may have done.
I think, all in all, that you have amply informed on yourself here
Well that’s a pretty naive take on things, and arguably exactly the sort of position that this curriculum helps guard against.
If this education helps students realize that things can be bad overall even though there are minor, individualized benefits against the overall negative, then that’s a net gain of education.
I’m sorry you seem to have missed out on that realization, but let’s hope the students down in Florida are educated with a broader perspective on the world than you’ve come across.
@volkris @mloxton @InkySchwartz @futurebird it is inexcusably RACIST to suggest that a slavery, which systemically raped, tortured, and killed enslaved people was in any way good. Especially the racist canard that they “learned skills” as if Africans were tabula rasa and had no skills that enabled them to build the empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai. They were not savages that needed civilizing. I’ve been discussing this with you in good faith that you were merely ignorant, but you have shown time and again you are utterly unwilling to learn and have been arguing in bad faith all along. YOU! ARE! RACIST!!! And I’m muting you because I’m sick of your sealioning. You are no better than the Nazis trying to take over our government.
My dude, please.
I lived in Apartheid South Africa, I have lived on three continents, and I have seen and experienced a great many things in a great many cultures.
I most certainly do not need you eulogizing slavery or playing the amateur apologist to it.
I have seen your ilk before, I have heard these same arguments for decades, and I have seen that they always just devolve into base racism.
But you are My Dude, and several independent people are telling you as much.
You are eulogizing, platforming, and acting as an apologist for slavery.
The sooner you come to terms with that and correct your behavior and thinking, the better for all.
@volkris @mloxton @InkySchwartz @cadenza
What were the benefits of slavery? The ones that are *so important* that we tell kids about they need to be outlined in the state mandated curriculum?
Why is it important that young people know that slavery "had benefits?"
@futurebird
Excellent questions.
May I also add - what possible decision would such an argument hope to inform?
Like would this be used to say that we should do slavery again, since there were these supposed benefits?
Because maybe we want students of history to know more about nuances of the world, beyond the simple, often politicized black and white narratives that are as convenient for politicians as they are misleading?
Maybe it’s so important that in the education system we let students know what actually happened?
What’s so important about that? Well, honestly that seems self-evident to me as a proponent of liberal education.
Yes, let's teach them exactly what happened.
That people were violently abducted from their families and homes, trafficked to foreign lands, sold, and suffered further harms and atrocities including being used as breeding stock, raped, flogged, worked to death, and just killed outright.
Let's specify WHO did this, and to whom
Let's explore the lasting harms to subsequent generations.
Let's explore what current things are also bad
Let's do those
YES, and the curriculum does teach that.
Like, you’re on their side. You’re in agreement with them. They work to teach those horrors.
You are in agreement.
The fuck it does.
The new curriculum emphasizes that nothing in the teachings may make anyone feel bad about themselves.
I put it to you, Mr. Amateur Sophist, that if education doesn't make a person feel equal measures of wonderment and embarrassment, then it isn't doing its job.
If you aren't a bit embarrassed about your previous state of knowledge after a course, then the course failed to achieve its goals.
Why in the world do you want to make people feel bad about themselves? That’s bizarre, sounds flat out sociopathological, that you have a goal of making children feel bad about themselves, or at least, you are disappointed that the state is not making children feel bad about themselves.
I mean wow.
Because that is how personal growth and learning work.
Equal measures of wonderment and embarrassment.
Are you really such a wilting flower that your ego cannot tolerate the embarrassment of finding out you are wrong, that you have been ignorant, or that you were unskilled?
Do you really believe that children are such delicate snowflakes that they must be protected from learning anything that isn't a resounding compliment?
Keep in mind that I would be on equal ground of asking you the exact same questions.
Are you really such a wilting flower that your ego cannot tolerate the embarrassment of finding out you were wrong, as proven by the sources cited here, do you really believe that children are such delicate snowflakes that they must be protected from learning what really happened instead of your own narrative that it clearly refuted by the record?
Oh please.
Try harder, and at a higher level.
You are presumably not 8yrs old, so kindly stop wasting my time with this childish stuff.
The new curriculum and all the fetid tripe that hangs from it in a reeking wreath, is specifically engineered to pretend slavery didn't happen, that it was actually good in some absurd way, and that if anything makes a student feel bad about race, it should not be taught.
For general awareness, I approach this from the pov of a quality & safety researcher and a professional trainer in qualitative research methods.
If you cast this in those terms, it is absolutely a fact that if someone commits and unsafe act leading to an adverse outcome, we do NOT sift through the outcomes looking for some tiny sliver oi good and then use that to say that maybe the unsafe act wasn't all bad.
No
We state unequivocally it was bad
We furthermore look for root causes and ways to eliminate or mitigate any recurrence.
If some good thing was found, we look for the mechanism that caused the good thing, and we seek to replicate that. If someone learned how to be a blacksmith (as the quote went), we would look at what things enable people to become skilled INDEPENDENT of the slavery. We would look at training, policies, mentors, etc.
The good it pegged to the causal mechanisms, not the bad
@volkris @mloxton @futurebird @InkySchwartz @cadenza
Why should kids feel bad to learn that their ancestors committed evil? Unless you want them to feel good about repeating it. Why do you want that history sugar-coated? Does it hurt your feels?
Hit dogs holler, volkris, and you are proof.
@volkris @InkySchwartz @futurebird @cadenza no, i see how you're pointing out a trivial and pointless difference and pretending it matters. If this were a legal case, and we were doing statutory interpretation, you would have an argument (that you would likely lose, depending on a lot of things.) But this isn't a legal case, and I don't have to take serious you pretending these minor linguistic differences matter.
This says a lot about you.
You're looking only at the literal content of the assertion, and not at the structure of the discussion which would position that assertion as a point worth making.
YES! I am looking at exactly what is being taught and what is being proposed, and I am not looking at any sort of theory behind why they would teach it, or any theory of motivation or conspiracy or any other abstraction.
I honestly don’t care why they would be teaching something true. All I care about is that they are teaching something true.
@volkris @InkySchwartz @futurebird THEY. FUCKING. ARE!!!! Or are you going to be the dweeb who’s going to say Auschwitz couldn’t be all bad because Arbeit Mach Frei?