Thoughts Upon Slavery (1774)
16 comments
·April 27, 2025endoblast
>In what manner are they procured?
This really is the key: the manner reveals the motivation and morality is about motivations, which makes it understandable why slavery existed in the ancient world.
Suppose your country is invaded by a belligerent neighbour one summer and you manage to fend off the attack and capture most of the enemy soldiers.
What do you do with them afterwards:
(1) let them go, (2) kill them, (3) cut off their right thumbs and release them, (4) make them your slaves?
The obvious problem with (1) is that if you let them go they may return next year and succeed in the job of murdering you and destroying your nation or tribe. (2) and (3) are fairly cruel and barbaric.
Which leaves (4).
travisgriggs
The world needs more people like John Wesley.
Sad the heros we choose instead.
ivape
There are plenty of people that have thought like this on all kinds of issues from the past and now currently as well. I suspect someone like Wesley and the Abolitionists were called unrealistic and unpragmatic in their time period, just as people who speak out about certain things today are called delusional and idealistic. Pacified and moral opinions are very much available, you just have to be willing to be part of a minority that regularly gets derided as naive.
stogot
There are more slaves today than any point in history. Sad but true fact we don’t think of in modern times.
I recommend donating to the ImJ who help find and free slaves, prosecute abusers, and educate and help the victims thrive in their freedom
Braxton1980
Who doesn't think of it?
jvanderbot
Modern slavery was not on my radar until reading this thread. You really have to live in a self righteous echo chamber to assume that all the people you want to join your cause should already know about it.
muser8
This has to be the most inaccessible page I've seen in nearly 25 (30?) years.
pclmulqdq
What is inaccessible about a bunch of text on a page? It's readable in any kind of viewer you want, and a screen reader or a braille display can parse it. Does "accessibility" now mean that you have to have a navbar at the top of the screen for some reason?
crazygringo
The fact that almost every single link on the page goes to a 404, times out, or says Forbidden, might have something to do with it.
Or the gigantic, seemingly meaningless URL.
I don't know what this page is, but it doesn't seem to exist in any kind of context of a larger website. How did anybody even find this in the first place?
myhf
Cool URLs don't change [1], and that page has had the same URL for 251 years
lelandfe
"Accessible," like so many words, means different things to different people.
You're saying this page seems inaccessible: how did anyone find this page? How is a person meant to access this stranded corner of the web?
They're saying this page has good accessibility: those with impaired vision, who use text to speech tools and the like, would not face difficulty with this simple HTML.
jp57
It looks fine in Safari reader mode. Pretty sure most other browsers have something similar.
saghm
The styling honestly is reminiscent of 90s webpages, so I wouldn't find it shocking if it is a couple decades old and just hasn't been updated.
saghm
Looking closer at the URL, I realize now it has "2002_09_10" in the path. Presumably it was created then and hasn't been fully rewritten since, so while not quite 25 years old, it seems that might be the reason it doesn't have any recent accessibility features.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Libya
Here, all the slavery one can defeat. Tolerated by a culture with 2 billion heads. And it is utterly ignored for whatever hipocritical reasons. Same in China, were the lower classes from the village will be treated like owned air by the rich cityzens. All beneath a thin layer of western mimicry.Yet, im supposed to ignore the living, for what was back then a battle for the living and is today a civil war flag, for the western cultural block, the only block that marched with sic sempre tyrannis on the barbary cost and fought to better itself. The wingnuttery has to end, reality has to be embraced and the atrocities in it fought. Wherever they are.