Slavery

>What is the difference between "obey their owners," and "obey the government," aside from the fact that the government murders and robs--and has always murdered and robbed--more people for worse reasons?

The government is generally rule-bound to some extend on account of needing a working system of bureaucracy, so even the worst system has some predictabilities. But usually, there's a system of checks-and-balances in place which grants citizens the means to demand compliance with said rules from said institutions.
Also under peacetime-conditions, there's a pretty large space of behaviour that still passes the smell-test of compliance.

The only thing that keeps a slave holder from not having dickwolves rape you into sleep every night is that that isn't his fetish. You can't even demand to be raped into sleep either once you've gotten used to it, because whether that happens or not is completely up to him.

>Chattel slavery is a social contract too
Even a regime that has no roads would insist that you should be able to refuse to sign that contract, which clearly isn't the case with slavery.

>You sup on human flesh
How dare you call me Catholic!

Except the bible gave permission to own slaves.

How is that any of my responsibility?
Do you want the western countries to invade them?
Killing a shitton of civilians and destroying the infrastructure went great for Iraq, afghanistan and Vietnam.
We are not responsible for a bunch of sand people doing sand people things.

>A government infringes on the rights of the individual, because that is necessary for a civilization to work.
Interesting, I'm POSITIVE that the Romans would've said the same thing about the hordes of slaves they worked to death manually turning water-wheels to supply their aquaducts.

> if you want to play hunter gather, go live in the forest, nobody cares.
Actually, they do care, because every square meter of land on the entire continent is owned by a government, and if I went off to live in the woods, I'd be tracked down by game wardens and probably shot, and if I weren't, every beaver or squirrel I ate or every tree or thatched hut I tooled would be an indictment against me in a court of law.

I can't actually go off into the woods, even if I were being serious.

You obviously miss the stroke of my hyperbole however, which is that calling something "Evil" when it is simply a mild permutation on what you yourself believe is cringeworthy. The norms and standards of civilization differ, but ultimately EVERY system consists of the forced reallocation of human labor to differing degrees, and pretending that one is intrinsically superior to another is ridiculous, especially when couched in the purple language of "good" and "evil."

What you have in fact is a society into which you are born, and whose rules you follow because those are "the rules." The easiest way to display the stupidity of taking a moral highground because you like your society's rules better is through Ancapistan rhetoric.

Ancient economies were slave economies. feudal economies were serf powered.

Yup, we got a lot to fix.

There are room for edge cases, but yeah.

I agree with you, I am merely pointing out a painful double standard. The same people who will condemn le racist west are suddenly as silent as the grave about the hideous crimes of the third world, and the same people who defend the sociopathic nature of old world/new world governments will demand "moral clarity" when dealing with retarded tuskan raiders brutalizing people to build skyscrapers in the middle of the desert.

The only logical answer is to stop apologizing for the past, AND to stop interfering in the affairs of other nations. It doesn't have to be either-or, but this posturing must end. There is no coherent moral case for historic guilt that does not include adventurism, and both of these things are empirically evil forces.

Yay, you discovered yet another way to sneak /pol/ into Veeky Forums! You must be so proud of yourself!

Not exactly. The bible commanded slaves to respect their masters and masters to be kind to their slaves. Contextually one must remember that this was written in an era in which slavery was a social system as ubiquitous as, say, consumerism is today.

It wasn't that the bible said that slavery was okay, it was that the people writing the works that were later assembled into the bible at the Council of Nicaea had literally no concept of a society WITHOUT slavery, so it never occurred to them to suggest that it was wrong. It would be like suggesting that exchanging goods and services is evil today.

By the standards of the day suggesting that you not beat the living shit out of your slaves for fun was basically Jill Stein tier progressivism.

Hey, all you have to do is sage, like I am, and this thing would be on page 8 already.

If you tried hard enough, i'm sure you could find a nice place on this big blue marble where nobody would bother you.

The amount that modern western civilizations forces people to reallocate their labor is minimal.
Our rights, although infringement in a limited sense, are also protected by the system.
This can not be said of a majority of our history or other countries, where actual forced labor and slavery is a real physical thing.

We can't judge their culture if their culture is abducting and raping boys and killing American soldiers, user.

Even the US Army brass agrees.

I'm sure I could go to Antarctica or something, but this is about as realistic as saying that a group of slaves could kill their master and then use his body as a puppet to convince the other white people that he's still alive while they run his plantation as their own.

But again, you're missing the point. The difference between "forced labor" and "work 40 hours a week and give half of it to the government so that they can blow up sand people with it or be homeless" is essentially semantics. All of civilization is predicated on exploitation, and all of civilization takes more of your "rights" from you than it protects. This is a simple fact.

Moralizing about the ebil of older systems is pretty ridiculous. How do you think 15th century peasants would look at, say, Child Protective Services? You speak of minimal reallocation of labor--that is flatly incorrect. Mark Twain was absolutely dumbstruck a century ago that the Italians tolerated the existence of income tax AT ALL. Most taxes thitherto had been flat, small, and on a per-head basis. Or, tariffs on imports, and the like. The American revolution was mostly fought over the right of the colonies to produce their own scrip--when was the last fucking time you heard about a state wanting to issue its own currency?

I am saying that there is no moral incline to history. Things aren't getting better, they're just changing, and pretending otherwise is dangerous and hypocritical.

They couldn't be killing American soldiers if American soldiers weren't there. I actually think Hitler was right about this one, just pretend the middle east doesn't exist, and try never to interact with them. Oil's on the way out anyway, soon we won't even need to trade with them.

mercantile economies were soldier/sailor powered,
industrial economies were sweat-shop powered
service economies are wage-cuck powered.

there's always a shit job in every era. the only difference is that slavery doesn't give you the option of going unemployed and starving on the streets.

>and all of civilization takes more of your "rights" from you than it protects.

Yes, mainly because rights were created by societies and people within societies in the first place. They don't exist outside of it and that you lack some only becomes apparent when you got the means to compare yours to other societies.

my ass.

the only slaves that get beaten are the ones that don't work. injured slaves pick less cotton and mine less salt. killing a slave in 1550 is the equivalent of pushing a photocopier out of the window today.

I think you two are in agreement. the airquotes are sometimes hard to convey in text, but it seems to me that doesn't believe natural rights (((exist))) either

>Do you want the western countries to invade them?
It'd be glorious. Neo-colonialism when?

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen dictates (in article 6 I think?) that any government that does not found itself on popular sovereignity is deemed to not have a constitution (and therefore be ripe for invasion). France already has a casus belli, now they just need to figure out where they left their spines.

>ctrl+f "Romans"
>this is the only result

Romans and Greeks are evidence that slavery isn't really that bad.

Yes, some humans were treated worse than others, but for the most part, slaves were treated as members of the household, and quite fairly, and often stood a high chance of being freed in later life if they were effective and loyal.

Slaves to wealthy owners often become heirs to much of their estate and became wealthy off the back of it.

Not to mention, many of these slaves were plucked from foreign cities where they were living in terrible conditions, to come to a place with better hygiene, medicine, etc.

Slaves were better off as slaves than they would have been as poor Romans.

What you mustn't forget is that historically speaking, slavery was a step up from the previous state of "They're not from our tribe - wipe em all out.". Just like "You need 3 men of standing from the community to speak on your behalf to get a trial." was a step up from "He's from out of town, just kill him if you want to.".

So what I am saying and what everyone arguing against OP has been saying is that if you don't want to be very placative and ignorant, arbitrarily setting modern morals and sensibilities as some kind of objective last best definite answer is a very self-centered, very ignorant thing to do. It is very likely that if humanity keeps on developing for a couple centuries, there is a ton of things that we today consider to be absolutely normal and moral, which will be considered to be barbaric, evil and stupid.

An evil god cursed an entire race of immortals to be wracked with eternal pain if they aren't owned by someone.

We can't kill them and if we let them go then they start suffering unimaginable pain. What do you want us to do, ignore the plight of them and let them suffer? They'd prefer being slaves over the agonising pain.

Oh, we have people working on curing it, but it isn't exactly easy.

So, tell you what, YOU can have this race of immortals and let them scream in unimaginable torment after you wipe us out. How does that feel?

>What is the difference between "obey their owners," and "obey the government,"
>I can't actually go off into the woods, even if I were being serious.
>I'm sure I could go to Antarctica or something
Idiocy is a poor method of sharing your opinions.

>If the answer is "Yes", then said civilization is Evil.
You need to work on either your use of alignments or your use of logic.

Let's accept that: "Slavery is always an Evil practice."
Therefore, any civilization that allows slavery is committing an evil practice.
However, in order for that alone to mean that the civilization is evil, it would have to be true that: "Committing an Evil act (or practice) makes you Evil."
This is not true.
One Evil act does not necessarily make a person Evil.
One Evil practice does not necessarily make a civilization Evil.

This citizen cites fine examples.

I'm not saying I know what civilization is or is not Evil.
I'm just pointing out where things are not as simple as OP suggested.

Slavery is a system in which you are legally bound to the whims of another person.

Legal subjugation is evil and sentient life will always strive to eliminate it.

>display the stupidity of taking a moral highground because you like your society's rules better
"Progress" is a meme and America's Mideast wars are bad, but this is essentially asking people to not believe in anything. Moral relativism can only go so far. If you really believe in and prefer your society, of course you'll take the high ground, at least some of the time. Only a demoralized and weak nation would have no one to defend it, and that state of affairs can't last.

Giving a starving cattle thief a choice between a year of slavery as punishment or cutting off his hand.
>Aw sorry pal, they just decided that slavery is evil, off with the hand.
The starving thief dies of malnutrition and an infected wound in the gutters.

And before you get up on your high horse demanding alternative punishments,
This world is cruel and that thief was stealing the food out of the mouths of the farmers kids.
Nobody got the money to feed a penniless thief that is rotting in jail.

>image
Welcome to democracy, where you actually get to choose between bad and worse!

Sentient life will always have those who want to subjugate others. I would go as far as to say that what many slaves end up thinking is that being a master is awesome, not that slavery is bad.

It depends on the setting. Specifically, the technological/cultural development on the setting.

Do you know what happened to a conquered people before slavery was a thing? Every man, woman and child was either slaughtered, or driven into the sea. As a cultural invention, slavery was actually the more humane option for the longest time.

To say flat out that any group with slavery is automatically Evil-with-a-capital-E is foolish, and completely ignores the broader context of the world and that society in it, or the particularities of the system of slavery in question.

>if you want to play hunter gather, go live in the forest, nobody cares
This is also illegal according to the government.

religion
Their priests say they are the chosen ones and all should be delighted to be able to serve the divine race.

So? It's not like they'll be able to enforce that law, what with you living in the middle of fucking nowhere.

You'd be surprised at what lengths it is wiling to go when someone doesn't pay their taxes.

What taxes from what income? You're basically homeless if you're living innawoods, and we all know how much the government cares about them.

>The only thing that keeps a slave holder from not having dickwolves rape you into sleep every night is that that isn't his fetish.
user, being a slave does not equal not having rights. Usually government still limits the things one can do with his slaves.

>If the answer is "Yes", then said civilization is Evil
Why?

It's been a thing for half a century. It differs from classical colonialism in that the invading force won't bother defending you and expects you to take loans from them so you could hire their contractors to build infrastructure they'll use to exploit you, all the wile fermenting social unrest so you can't form a strong government that could theoretically stand up to this.

I wonder if we'd be retroactively labeled as evil by people in the future for shit we've done that's considered harmless or even humane right now

Unquestionably.
>don't discipline our young
>don't care well for our elders
>don't protect our way of life to the death at the slightest provocation
>don't worship the gods regularly and well
>don't respect the keepers of our lore and teachers of our people
The problem, of course, is that this is exactly what Sharia law is all about, and it does not fare well in a modern society.

Extremely likely. Sentencing people to jail for usage of drugs is one such issue where the winds seem to be currently turning for example.

We don't call past medical practitioners evil for horrific and often lethal tortures they inflicted upon their helpless wards because they didn't know better. Likewise, absent some massive scale brain degradation in mankind, we'll probably be pitied for our monkey fits, but not reviled.

>Slaves to wealthy owners often become heirs to much of their estate
I'd like to know where you get this from, because Gaius' Digests mention something like this but contradict you. Slaves *can* be appointed heirs, but their property is your property so you inherit it. For example, your grandpa could appoint you as his heir to his vineyards, or he could appoint one of your slaves. The end result is the same (if you're wondering why anyone would pick the slave detour, I don't know. A possible theory is that your grandpa decides he can't leave you empty-handed when he dies but wants to make sure it's known he doesn't like you very much). Gaius discusses this scenario in the context of damages, focusing on what happens when someone kills that slave. Gaius concludes that the killer will have to pay the worth of that slave back to you, plus the worth of whatever that slave would inherit (because with the slave gone you can no longer indirectly inherit it).

I can't recall Gaius mentioning scenarios with slaves directly inheriting things and keeping it for themselves. Can you mention sauce?

ITT: Bumhole SJWs who can't get over history.

Well if somebody wasn't whining about racism and all that we could just genocide them of the face of the earth which is a premanent solution to the slavery issue.

Besides, slavery is still practiced in most of the muslim world from Saudi Arabia to Bosnia.
They do jack shit to enforce their own slavery bans and only made it illegal to get the international community of their backs.

>and it does not fare well in a modern society
Compare 50 years ago with today. Islamic societies in Europe barely hit 15% of total demographics and the majority is already bending over backwards to conform to their backwards ways.

I'm more worried about modern society than I am about Sharia law, which will almost certainly replace Napoleonic law in Europe.

The IRS wouldn't harass someone from the woods just like they don't harass the homeless. There's nothing to collect, since their near zero assets fall under the threshold for taxation.

What drives people out of the woods is themselves. Eventually hunger, sickness, lack of shelter, and loneliness bring people back into civilization. Or they don't know what they're doing and they die (see Into The Wild). Those who "make it" often have deep anti social problems (similar to the homeless), so they arent really a beacon of ideal living. Humans need the "social contract" because they need eachother. The difference between slavery and modern day consumerism is the participation in said social contract, even if that participation is largely symbolic.

Does a civilization heavily tax it's citizens, sometimes over half their income, and jail anybody that refuses to pay?

If the answer is "Yes", then said civilization is Evil.

Tanstaafl, motherfucker.

um... ok? Is this thread here just to get that off your chest or... what?

I'm glad that the way we do things know is objectively right and moral. What a blessing it is not to be born in the evil part of human history.

Hopefully humanity will be around long enough that the obscene wealth disparity in the world today will come to be seen as quaint.

As a Brit all I can say is
You could have had it good. It could have been perfect.
Instead you had to riot over tea to the benefit of the corporations and now it's all up the shit pipe.
We were weaning the world off slavery, we'd managed to get shit working in India, if you'd been with us in WW1 and WW2 the empire would have survived intact.

You made the bed, now get fucked in the ass on it.

no, fuck off.

>muh slavery is always evil

debt slavery:

You have a society where a debtor can be forced into slavery when he fails to make his payment. This slavery is temporary and there are strict standards for this form of slavery. No beatings, good food etc.

Not necessarily an evil society.

>Does a civilization allow some sapient beings as property that can be bought and sold and are required to obey their owners?
>If the answer is "Yes", then said civilization is Evil. Some slave owning societies might be worse than others but they're all bad and all need to be invaded and their populations Equalized.
yes, and?

>civilization
>slave owning

That's a contradiction. If you suffer slave owners to live, let alone allow them a place in your society, you are a savage, not a civilized person. What you are describing is like being an illiterate novelist. Incidentally, knowing how to read and right is as much a prerequisite for civilization as euthanizing slavers.

And then they buy evangelical pastors of another religion who brainwash their flock into believing it as well

>pre-modern sensibilities and ethics are barbaric and evil
Are you the guy who shows up to a medieval fantasy campaign with an egalitarian atheist who thinks the kingdom should be democratized?

Freedom is a privilege for the worthy, not a right for the mundane.

>We were weaning the world off slavery, we'd managed to get shit working in India, if you'd been with us in WW1 and WW2 the empire would have survived intact.
What's that? You let Canada and India and Australia go AFTER world war 2? So the empire DID survive intact?

Well, stands to reason, I guess we were with you in both wars.

>As a Brit
Not even American, but nobody cares. America is quite literally the center of the world and Brits are just perpetually buttmad about it.

>You made the bed, now get fucked in the ass on it.
The difference between Britain and America: if that happens, the American police will side with you and not the rapist.

>adventurism
>imperialism
>bad

>magic moral book from perfect moral magic man doesn't have explicit condemnation of obviously horrific institution

Then what's the fucking point of super magic book if it never had answers even today's children think are incredibly obvious?

>magic moral book from perfect moral magic man doesn't have explicit condemnation of obviously horrific institution
So next you're going to criticize it for not explicitly condemning communism? There's a reason why scholars keep studying and debating it until the cows come home: it was inherrently written for a 1st century audience in a 1st century social and political context. What you want is some kind of anachronistic manifesto that encourages the overthrowing of the roman state, like some kind of Rabbinic Jew.

>pre-modern sensibilities and ethics are barbaric and evil
Well, yes. Civilization is a work in progress.

>The myth of progress
Marx, get the fuck out of here.

There is no such thing like responsibility in digital capitalism. Every relation you get into, you are simply required and obliged to choose the one option that is offered to you. And refusal, objection or rejection all count as picking that one same option.
The only people today that can really be said to be responsible for their actions are those that are not bound by normal society, like hobos, gypsies or the criminally insane.
Google zizek - the freedom of false choice.

Though on the other hand, it can be said that slavery is not part of the capitalist system. In fact, it's a distortion of the principle of labor through free association (and of course the neccessity of wageslaves who buy products with their meagre earnings as opposed to actual slaves without property). The equivalent of slaves in a capitalist ideal would be sweatshop workers, not actual slaves.

>Rejecting an option is the same as picking that option
*SNIFF* and so forth and so forth

> Weekend at Massa Bernie's

I'd watch it.

The closest equivalent to slaves in digital capitalism would be society itself. With the education system in a very close second place.

Maybe it's more of a Nietzsche thing, the idea that Christianity popularized the concepts of good and evil in the West, whearas before the concept was a binary of good=noble=power vs bad=low=weak, and not specifically the slavery idea.

In b4 Butthurt Indians complaining about the famines cause by their own shitty farming practices.

You stupid burger.
>>but for the most part, slaves were treated as members of the household

"O Good Gods, what a sort of poor slaves were there ; some had their skin bruised all over black and blue, some had their backs striped with lashes and were but covered rather than clothed with torn rags, some had their members only hidden by a narrow cloth, all wore such ragged clouts that
you might perceive through them all their naked bodies, some were marked and burned in the forehead with hot irons, some had their hair half clipped, some had shackles on their legs, ugly and evil favoured, some could scarce see, their eyes and faces were so black and dim with smoke, their eye- lids all cankered with the darkness of that reeking place, half blind and sprinkled black and white with dirty flour like boxers which fight together befouled with sand."

The Golden Ass by Apuleius, approx AD 170. After many reforms from the early classic era had been made improving the lot of slaves.

You stupid burgers who think that slavery only got unpleasant when it was racial slavery in your country are idiots.

Romans had slaves in:
Mines
Farms (Latifundia)
Bath Houses
Galleys
The aforementioned water-wheels.

These were the majority. Rome was an agrarian society. These people were not cared for, they were not part of the family. The fucking chains didn't even come off when they were thrown in a shallow grave once worked to death.

Slavery wasn't stopped just because it was "wrong," it also demonstrably causes lower productivity and higher corruption.

It got competed out by free laborers and an understanding that as technology advances the usefulness of unskilled hands over raw mechanical labor shifts.

Plus handling miscellaneous events - injuries, accidents, unexpected events and theft - are all better handled by workers who are paid reasonably and in a decent mood.

The only time slavery can reliably be employed if it's a class thing offering a set of advantages (read more ancient history) and/or you're a lower tech level society with population issues derived from constantly kidnapping your neighbors or not enough death.

Maybe it's more of a Nietzsche thing, the idea that Christianity popularized the concepts of good and evil in the West, whearas before the concept was a binary of good=noble=power vs bad=low=weak, and not specifically the slavery idea.

that's what D&D was built on aight

Whig history is the last bastion of the brainlet.

Is slavery worse than killing every PoW to the last man, woman and child?

Too bad, fuccboi; still in national territory, so you still have to play by the same laws.

>boohoo the government doesn't provide a separate reserve for me and all the other anarchists to live in without law

>Women in the early medieval period
>Being able to walk the length of the country unescorted without being raped

What is that guy smoking?

Horrific punishments don't deter crime. In fact, in this instance, since rape is usually commited by someone familiar to the woman, either a family member or friend, and this is true across all cultures, a horrific punishment would likely deter women from reporting rape, either from compassion i.e. sure he raped me but I don't think it deserves *Excessively Gorey Punishment* or from fear of retribution or ostracisation by their common aquaintances if they get their cousin brutally killed by the local sheriff's men.

For example, Georgian English law handed out death penalties or transportation (essentially a death penalty) for pretty much anything, in the belief that harsh punishment = less crime. Didn't happen, because juries knew they'd be condemning a (potentially innocent) man to hang if they found guilty, would always err on the side of caution in all but the most clear-cut cases.

Likewise, defendants NEVER pleaded guilty, which mean many, many cases that could have been successfully prosecuted with a guilty plea, were instead thrown out by judges due to insufficient evidence.

tl;dr lawful good shouldn't execute people in messy ways so the 'example deters further evil'. That shit is lawful evil justifications.

>US and Brazil being the most evil of them all.
HAHAHA no

No, the US did not practice slavery nearly as much as other civilizations.

Shh, you'll upset conservafags with your 'reality' meme

USA was founded by Satanists though. That's pretty evil.

I don't include slavery in my settings anymore. It like catnip to my group, they either try to end slavery or set up a slave trading business. It's a 50/50 chance on which way they'll go but it massively derails my campaign either way.

In D&D.

>How is that any of my responsibility?
It isn't, but you could boycott the event
>Do you want the western countries to invade them?
No I want fifa to show some decency and refuse to let an event be built upon slave labor.

>fifa
>decency
Pick one.

I mean, really, this is far from the first time that organization has been directly involved in some really shady, human rights-violating, business.

Do you know who will suffer the most under a boycott?
I'll give you a hint, it's not the rich.

Look that shit works for child workers. You can guilt people into feeling bad for a kid that supported their backwards family losing a job because of child labor laws.
Not so much when the people dying to bring you the football are literal slaves.
They're slaves man. If they aren't building a stadium they'll be doing something else, and they sure as fuck weren't going to see any of that fifa money to begin with. Because you don't pay slaves.

Exactly. Not my fault you lack the moral compass to reject such an organization.

This, the US hasn't existed long enough to have caught up to the evil committed by European, Asian, Native North and South American, and African cultures. Almost all other cultures have been around for hundreds of years, sometimes thousands, while the US has only been around for a couple hundred.

The worst, most evil people on this planet are not of any one culture, or country, but rather they are anti-culture and anti-sovereignty gloabalists who claim to want whats best for humanity while ignoring the fact that brtween them (many being multi-billionaires) they could solve many of the worlds problems in just a few years. Akon, the fucking rapper, with only a few million dollars, was able to lift whole regions in Africa out of absolute poverty and provided hundred of thousands with clean water, all in the span of like ten years.

Meanwhile the global charities and rich assholes like Bill Gates have been "helping" the world for thirty or more years and have basically nothing to show for it other than deeper pockets. The globalists want EVERYONE to be lower class so that EVERYONE ia effectively their serf (glorified slavery). It's why first world countries are being flooded with low-class migrants in the name of "diversity" while places like Nigeria and Brazil are almost 100% the same race but you never hear about them needing greater "diversity".

That sounds reasonable. Don't want to have another Feels Goodman situation.

I mean, the US was partially British until it budded off via revolution, so it may have "washed its hands" as far as history, but the cultural influences are there.
As far as globalists, I don't think they want to screw whole countries over, but in fact wants everyone to gain. The potential problem here is that there are those who will benefit disproportionately and may have way more power and money than they deserve.
Also, Brazilians are mixed as fuck, so they aren't really the same race.