re: What’s an American history hot take you’ve got?

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a good farmer doesn't abuse his tractor

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A good farmer from my age or older does not.

First vehicle I learned to drive was an old red Farmall not long after I got out of diapers. You learned how to fix it and take VERY good care of it at a very early age as that is how your family hoped to break even at the end of the year so you could pay the bank debt, and put food on the table the rest of the year.

Maybe now with these huge corporate farms, the labor is different in this view, but based on modern equipment costs, my first guess is no.

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but slavery could be and was as horrible here as anywhere else

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I won’t argue against the fact slavery was horrible, but I will point out that while slavery was bad here, it was downright barbarous in the Middle East. For example, they castrated their male slaves, both from Africa and Europe. And almost all of their female slaves were used as sex slaves, even the young girls.

Between the 7th and 20th centuries as many as 18 million Africans were imported into the Middle East as slaves. As many as 10 million of those were forced to cross the Sahara Desert on foot, the rest were transported by ship.

Despite the fact 18 million Africans went to the Middle East as slaves going back to the 7th century, today blacks make up only 1% to 5% of the Middle East population.

Compare that to the US which had only 450,000 African slaves imported between the 17th and 19th centuries, but blacks make up roughly 13-14% of the population today.

That shows that blacks sent to the Middle East were given a virtual death sentence. It’s not a stretch to call what happened to them in the Middle East a genocide. I mean, where are the descendants of the 18 million African slaves in the Middle East?

So while slavery was bad here, it was far worse, and lasted far longer, in the Middle East.

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A good farmer from my age or older does not.

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are all farmers good ones?

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Darth_Vader

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And this thread is about American history So what happens in the Middle East has no relevance Saying that American slavery wasn't as bad as Middle East slavery doesn't negate the fact that American slavery is bad which was the point I'm making

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Saying that American slavery wasn't as bad as Middle East slavery doesn't negate the fact that American slavery is bad which was the point I'm making

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Bad is relative. That’s the point. For every human that was caught and enslaved- they were gonna be sent somewhere… as far as places go, the colonies/states was far from the worst.

But this conversation is about American history which means the past
and this part of the conversation is specifically around slavery

so I ask you where all the farmers back in the days of plantations and farms and slavery were all of them good? Obviously, they weren't they didn't know what they were doing; they were just trying to scrape out a living on the land

for fricks sake,, you people

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ok but that's a different argument. you also arent accounting for the risk to life of the thousands of servicemen flying that mission vs the handful of guys in the Enola Gay. how much were they worth? when you get into the mathematics of war, it gets pretty sticky.

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Agreed.

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i guess one man's "perpetual state of war" is another man's "unusually peaceful in context of recent centuries". sure there were wars, but on a tiny scale in comparison. the reason the Vietnam War and the Korean War didnt expand into major wars was due to the ever looming threat of nuclear exchange between superpowers. that's literally the entire reason we fought in such a limited measure in both wars.

i'm not saying it was pretty, and i'm not saying that the existence of nuclear weapons is a good thing. but knocking Japan out of the war with a couple planes and a couple bombs was an easy choice when put against losing hundreds of thousands if not a million Marines and soldiers in a mainland Japan invasion. and if you are saying that we would have won the war without invading Japan OR dropping nukes, then that is simply revisionist history.

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But you are missing the entire point of calling it peaceful. We were spending on WW1 & WW2 because it was a massive destructive war. Here's the kicker, they never stopped spending like that, without the massive destructive war. We still spend like we are at war, have been since the end of WW2, and will continue to do so. That's not peace, and nukes did nothing to stop the spending. If anything, they kicked it into ultra high gear. It's the ultimate boogeyman. Keeps everyone super duper scared, while all the superpowers that have them agree to to never use them, and just keep like it's war time for profit for them and their deep state buddies. This ain't peace.

History is written by the victors. WE say the nukes stopped the war dead in it's tracks. Because WE stood to make massive amounts of money from owning this technological terror and perpetuating it's role as the ultimate check mate (when we didn't have anymore, and couldn't for the foreseeable future until production was scaled up). It's written fact that Japan worried that invasions on both fronts would cause more damage and loss of life. Not the bomb saving the loss of life as the ultimate sacrificial lamb. That fricking lie has kept the world poor while the elites continue to harvest.

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March 9-10th alone killed 100k in Tokyo and did far more damage as most of their houses were...WOOD AND PAPER. It's extremely apt comparison, and historically accurate.

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You're 100% right.












And the Japanese STILL didn't capitulate after the firebombing campaigns. It took the overwhelming power of the A-bombs to realize that they couldn't continue.

And given the scientific thinking of the day, nuclear weapons would have eventually been developed anyway. Germany was working on them as was Russia. It would have happened, it was only a matter of time.

And finally, I would argue that it took humanity seeing the devastating effect of nuclear weapons and the horror of their use on human populations that kept us from using them again. Had that not happened, one could argue that it would not have been 2 bombs dropped on 2 cities, might might have been hundreds of bombs dropped on dozens of cities. The use of nuclear weapons to end WWII galvanized the world against them because of the horror of their use.

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But this conversation is about American history which means the past
and this part of the conversation is specifically around slavery

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Which slavery?

After the Indians immigrated here in the last Ice Ace, the vast majority came from the Atlantic in 1 of 4 groups

Group 1 - landed gentry, the 1% folks we still discuss today

Group 2 - bound slaves, from Africa

Group 3 - bonded slaves, from Europe

Group 4 - criminals (see also Georgia and South Carolina) in the original "Transportation" system the UK would later use to settle Australia.

One we became a country, and a 2 party system

Group A = Federalist (basically Group 1)

Group B = Democratic - Republicans (basically Group 2, 3, and 4)


FWIW, the worst plantation in the South (if my memory is working today) was in Louisiana and the owners were absentee Yankees from the East Coast.

FWIW II, Most folks have no clue how slavery worked in the South

Say you had a town in Alabama with 2,000 humans. 1,000 were white, and 1,000 were black

Not like ever white person owned a black person. More like 1% of the white humans owned 99% of the black humans in that town.


The more things change, the more they stay the same

The 1% wealthy in a town have been replaced by the 1% wealthy in the country / world

Bonded slaves and bound slaves have just become black and white wage slaves. Criminals are still trying to work out of a system that would land them in slavery if they played by the rules of the 1%.