The deliberately hidden history of slavery in Central and South America,

I really wish I had a slave or three.

CaseHardened said:

But I'll bet your first instinct would not be to kill them.

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I would treat them like family. They would just work very hard.

Slavery in the West was the worst mistake ever. Not because slavery is a bad thing either.

Firstly, you're conflating slavery and the wars of conquest. The first link is a good source with good info. Your second source is a garbage Ranker listicle that takes the cruel deeds of a few of the more depraved conquerors like Pizarro and tries to make it seem like their actions were more normal than outlier. You can see it in the people. There are Latin American areas where almost the entire population has mostly or at least a fair amount of Native American blood. There's less of that in the U.S. where most of the Natives were either exterminated or forcibly moved and segregated. Canada has a bit more Native American presence, and Jamaica has almost none with lots of African heritage. Anglo and Latin colonists had different styles of colonization. In Latin America the Native people were generally conquered and incorporated as subjects of the Spanish or Portuguese Empires if they didn't get wiped out in the conquest. In Anglo America, the Native people were treated as separate nations, not to be conquered and subjugated, but to be driven off the land and the land resettled by Anglos.


To go back slavery, the scale and cruelty of the slavery depended on the local economy more than anything. Where you had massive sugar and coffee plantations, you were more likely to see larger-scale, more dehumanizing, and crueler slavery. French Haiti stands out as a jaw-dropping example of how evil it can be on a mass scale, but similar situations existed in the rest of the Caribbean like Anglo Jamaica, Spanish Cuba and Santo Domingo, or down in parts of Portuguese Brazil.

The U.S. didn't have a huge sugar cane plantation economy outside of Louisiana where it was mostly inherited from the colonial French economy. The U.S. didn't have massive scale plantation crops that could compare with sugarcane until cotton. Cotton only became that big of a crop when the cotton gin came around. By then the U.S. was already independent. It had an anti-slavery political movement, banned U.S. shipping from participating in the slave trade that same year, and banned the import of slaves from Africa like a decade after the cotton gin was invented, but before the cotton production industry really blew up. That made the U.S. pretty unique in that its massive plantation economy only really started after slavery was already on its way out and it couldn't import tons of new slaves every year to throw into the meat grinder. Instead it mostly relied on getting the slaves that were already here to give birth to as many children as possible so the children could then be born into slavery.

If your point is "the U.S. wasn't bad because look at how bad these Spanish and Portuguese monsters were", that's some Black Legend BS that falls flat on its face. If your point is that libtards are morons because they point to the U.S. as uniquely evil, then yes, I agree, libtards are idiots in uniquely condemning the U.S. for practices that were horrible. The real truth is that every civilization is built on a foundation of blood and every group in the world can be driven to do horrible things given the right conditions. Some ideologies lend themselves to be better or worse, and in the grand scheme of things the U.S. has been pretty damned positive in the balance since it's been an independant country.

TEOTWAWKI inc. said:

I really wish I had a slave or three.

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Musk is working on it, but they'll be called "AI robots"

For once when the proponents say "they're not really human", they'll be right.

But, we absolutely need to decide how smart an AI needs to be before it has rights long before we get to that line.

spat said:

Musk is working on it, but they'll be called "AI robots"

For once when the proponents say "they're not really human", they'll be right.

But, we absolutely need to decide how smart an AI needs to be before it has rights long before we get to that line.

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Speaking for myself I will never have an AI robot. Ever.

tirwin1 said:

Speaking for myself I will never have an AI robot. Ever.

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I will never *trust* them, but I sure as shit wouldn't be shoveling my own driveway once they are available.

I think there is still some form of slavery in Puerto Rico. A couple of the guys that used to work for me would occasionally reference 'the slavers' back home.

TEOTWAWKI inc. said:

I think there is still some form of slavery in Puerto Rico. A couple of the guys that used to work for me would occasionally reference 'the slavers' back home.

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There has been and still is slavery all over the world folks.

GOPerfect said:

Slavery in the West was the worst mistake ever. Not because slavery is a bad thing either.

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Slavery is like cocaine.

You think it's letting you get a lot more work done, but what it's really doing is locking your society onto a dead end path to ruin.

A few years ago, I got bored with doing yard work and wanted to do something fun instead.

So I asked the people who were over visiting at my house and drinking my cold beer if any of them knew where I could buy a Mexican?

They all give me a dirty look, including my wife. Shit, C'mon man, I was half kidding. Sheesh.