'Tis seven years hence

Having some spare time, it being an overcast July weekend under shelter from several elements, I'm revisiting some Radish classics of yesteryear. Let's start with "Slavery Reconsidered" (2013).

Author Karl Boetel here brought two silly arguments against slavery, at least as North American Anglos practiced it: what slavery was actually like; slavery contradicts ... miscellaneous abstractions. To the former, Boetel compares this institution to its contemporary alternatives, like working life in the North and, of course, slavery as practiced back in the Ashanti kingdom. The latter can be, and is, dismissed as holy cant and humbug. They're not straw arguments, mainly because silly people were constantly re-running them in 2013, so they did need rebuttal, which Boetel supplied.

At risk of playing the Stonetoss meme, in the evidence Boetel brought to us, I can see two more reasons against racial chattel slavery.

One argument was already I think made at the time, which still crops up in books like Escape from Rome and other indictments against that earlier slave-dependent empire. As long as you can force a man to do your work, you're not in the market for a robot. Moldbug back then countered, what to do with the Dire Problem of surplus labour; lately we have Fred Reed. Still. That just shifts the burden on those researchers studying the cognitive sciences. John Calhoun was never going to the Moon and neither were his followers.

Boetel had earlier analoguised the best master/slave relationships to family adoption, mixed in with Japanese social stability. But unless you're actively marrying those races together, the "adoption" model means you've adopted a pet. What legacy to the posterity is that? Do you want to breed black people into better pets, is that it? (Of course we're increasingly developing robots to fill also that need - niche, rather.)

We can appreciate that Aristotle, John Calhoun, George Fitzhugh and - in 2013 - Karl Boetel made the case. I am certainly not recommending #cancel! against this blogger itself. But the Peculiar Institution was Considered Harmful, for good reason. Whether the necessary emancipation was properly handled is another question.