talkpolitics | Rendering Unto Caesar: The Essence of Slavery‏‏

People who have lived their entire lives in a slavish existence have no experience of what it means to live freely. If someone were to tell them that what they call freedom is actually quite unfree, they might respond with strong emotions. Their reaction could be so severe that they kill or injure the individual who delivers the message. They might go so far as to claim religious persecution and have the messenger brought up on charges of crimes against humanity. In a previous time and place, the messenger would be strapped to a pole atop a pile of flaming fuel or tacked to an artificial tree.

If you ask a chattel slave about slavery, he might speak of brutal punishment and loss of friends and family. If you ask a wage slave about slavery, he might speak of meager compensation and cutthroat competition. If you ask a chattel slave owner about slavery, he might speak of the innate inferiority of the laboring race. If you ask a wage slave employer about slavery, he might speak of the fear of labor organizers and the need for out-sourcing. None of this gets to the essence of slavery because it considers only surface phenomena.

Plato described the essence of slavery as an artificial system of deception. The chattel slave is deceived into fearing punishment. The chattel slave owner is deceived into controlling people. The wage slave is deceived into practicing cutthroat competition. The wage slave employer is deceived into sending his work to a more despotic domain. All of them are stuck in an artificial trap of slavish existence. Where Aristotle debits slavishness to human nature, Plato firmly places the blame on social structures that condition people to think and act in a narrow way.

What does this have to do with politics today? There is no slavery here and now. The problems of coerced and forced labor have all been solved by the miracles of modern science. Do you really believe that or do you see some room for improvement? A recent Time magazine article on labor conditions in India do not agree with that assessment. India is a hotbed of American and European outsourcing.

Links: Plato's famous cave analogy. Nilanjana Bhowmick on labor conditions in India.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Don't you know that neural wave gizmos are impossible? You could qualify for psychiatric observation by suggesting such a possibility.

Surf's up!

Tubular!

Maybe "circular" would be the better adjective for this series of posts.

I would not want them to be misconstrued as canonical.

Or factual, rational, and logical.

Deeper logic and reason come across as impenetrable to the uninitiated.

You mean like word salad? Oh yeah, I seem to recall lots of that.

One of our students observed that when a individual is afflicted with a beam in his eye he has difficulty distinguishing figure from ground. Without ears with which to hear signal comes across as noise.

Students from word-salad-tossing 101, no doubt.

Edited 2013-10-22 15:38 (UTC)

Doubt.

Ha.

"Deeper logic and reason," in order to be considered as such, needs to be explained with clarity and humility, rather than arrogance and dismissal.

Pardon me for arrogantly dismissing the arrogant.

That's my point. If you have something to say, that requires a slightly diagonal thinking from the mainstream, it requires that YOU provide a clearer picture of what you're trying to express. The way that you deal with criticism is very similar to Gunslnger's, i.e. "You obviously are too stupid to understand what I'm saying."

That's not debate, it's not education, it's arrogance and useless whaarrrgarbl at its worst. I'm sure you're capable of much better.

I could do much better, but it would not be as entertaining.

That's the definition of trolling.

Is it trolling, or is it troll baiting?

Baiting is trolling. And you've just admitted it.

I admitted to neither trolling nor troll baiting. I merely asked a question. When trolls get their knickers in a twist over one of my posts, please do not blame me.

Your posts are nothing but trolling. You make unsubstantiated assertions pulled out of thin air and then when called out on them you backpedal and refuse to provide evidence. And you've been pulling this trick for years. Don't blame people for responding to you the way they do.

These so-called unsubstantiated assertions that people get miffed about are typically unrelated to the topic I post on. They are nits that people attack rather than address the substance of the issue. I provide links to sources that substantiate the gist of the topics upon which I write. On a few occasions these sources have been arbitrarily dismissed by certain members of this community, but the linked sources are generally ignored.

And yet you make those assertions. If you don't want them attacked, don't make them.

One erroneous and unsubstantiated assertion is sufficient to erode the "gist" of it all. Especially when subsequently doubled down by yourself with further refusal for evidence as soon as it turns out you've been making shit up, or in other words, lying through your teeth.

That's a lame and lazy approach to posting, and you should only be blaming yourself for the reaction you're receiving.

(no subject)

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Do they make recreational models?

Neural wave entertainment is the bomb!