Sam Harris & Neil deGrasse Tyson On Race

[JahFocus CS]

@Aelyas en passant posting some gems and seeming really smart and knowledgeable at points, but still managing to have shytty politics at the end of the day

 

[Broke Wave]

Excellent analysis. I tend to have a very Marxist view of slavery

My breh and @Darth Humanist you should be aware brehs about framing Slavery as simply a natural exercise in the capitalist framework rather than an abhorrent crime with economic context. I understand the rational of Marx and others in relation to slavery but one of his own personal short comings was the inability to separate the real slavery of Chattel slavery which had built the economies of the capitalist powers, and wage slavery which he almost always equivocated, thereby belittling and offsetting the massive difference between the two.

 

[VegasCAC]

My breh and @Darth Humanist you should be aware brehs about framing Slavery as simply a natural exercise in the capitalist framework rather than an abhorrent crime with economic context. I understand the rational of Marx and others in relation to slavery but one of his own personal short comings was the inability to separate the real slavery of Chattel slavery which had built the economies of the capitalist powers, and wage slavery which he almost always equivocated, thereby belittling and offsetting the massive difference between the two.

I agree completely with this.

You always have to nuance theoretical frameworks like Marxism.

There is an enormous moral difference between the free labor system of industrial capitalism and unfree labor of what Beckert calls "war capitalism", or New World slave economies based directly on violence.

 

[VegasCAC]

Was it ???...Unfortunately for you i have receipts....papal bull "dum diversas" courtesy of wikipedia

*We grant you [Kings of Spain and Portugal] by these present documents, with our Apostolic Authority, full and free permission to invade, search out, capture, and subjugate the Saracens and pagans and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ wherever they may be, as well as their kingdoms, duchies, counties, principalities, and other property [...] and to reduce their persons into perpetual servitude*

Now keep in mind this was the mid 1400s so the term "saracen" was synonymous with "Black" ..the term was descriptive of Black North Africans the subcontinent was largely unexplored at this time

*Beginning no later than the early fifth century, Christian writers began to equate Saracens with Arabs. Saracens were associated with Ishmaelites (descendants of Abraham’s older son Ishmael) in some strands of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic genealogical thinking.

By the 12th century, Medieval Europeans had more specific conceptions of Islam, and used the term "Saracen" as an ethnic and religious marker.[1][14] In some Medieval literature, Saracens—that is, Muslims—were described as black-skinned, while Christians were lighter-skinned.*





The Founding fathers obviously borrowed that from the enlightenment but if you pursue it even further the enlightenment thinkers themselves borrowed that from religious texts and thinkers like Thomas aquinas not that youre entirely wrong as far as postcolonial era America but to slave traders of the British East India company and Dutch east india company the religious justification is what they had to rely on to soothe their conscience


Was it really a "new" explanation though...Put chains on the Black man because he is the cursed son of ishmael and put chains on him because he is only 3/5 ths "human" sound awfully alike...its the same reason sans the religious connotations...."less than human"



You keep defaulting to "demand" as an argument yet nobody has opposed that particular assertion...Yes new land needed lots of labor


If were going to be pedantic the most brutal slavery in the world by far was the slavery of the muslim arabs..the male victims were castrated(penis and testicles) brutally and sent into war until they were killed and the women into harems and brothels
But i digress IMO any form is brutal there are only gradations to the violence but never a complete lack of it.




I wouldnt call it capitalism...more like piracy..A state sponsored corporation stealing people to work without pay on stolen land on another continent..the whole system is only workable because of violence

This has been quite entertaining but thus far you still havent disproven Sowells argument which i will restate

Once the founders wrote "all men are created equal" while Black Africans were enslaved they immediately had to come up with a justification why those men arent equal..ergo the 3/5ths rule and so they codified racism and froze it in time until another legislative body had enough will and pressure to change things...Thats why America had a harder time than Brazil who had no such codes so all they had to do was change the social zeitgeist

You're being anachronistic again. "Saracen" was not a description of black, because the concept of "black people" was not fully developed in Europe by the early 1400s. Saracens were described as darker, but that was not their defining characteristic: it was their religion that separated them. If you look in European primary sources, skin color doesn't become a significant indicator of difference until the 17th century, and it certainly did not represent an immutable racial categorization. In fact, there's a significant pre-modern European tradition of admiration for ostensibly black people in Ethiopianism driven by belief in the myth of Prester John (as well as negative connotations, there's a fascinating article I could recommend on the ambivalence of blackness generally in European society before the Age of Discovery).

What's amusing is the document you just cited is emblematic of what I said: enslavement justified by the concept of "just war". In "just war", Christians could not be enslaved, and religion and circumstance was the primary indicator of enslaveability, not race. You're drawing an extended logical connection (Saracens can be enslaved, Saracens were described as darker, therefore black people could be enslaved) that just isn't there when you have a deeper understanding about the chronology of how race was developed and what "just war" is. Very simply, Saracen was not a racial categorization, and the description of their skin color was incidental to their identity and enslaveability compared to their religion. I will say though, for your apparent unfamiliarity with the subject matter you're not stupid (without other information on its face it seems like it may be true): it's just that "Saracen" and "blackness" were not as correlated in the minds of Europeans as you'd like them to be.

As far as the Enlightenment, you are correct in asserting that- along with many secular European ideologies- that it has roots in religious discourse, it's just not very historically accurate to state that the sentiment "all men are created equal" as expressed in the DOI is connected to the conception of Christian brotherhood. That statement, written by Thomas Jefferson, was an expression of INTENTIONALLY secular (or at least the 18th century version of it) ideology that drew from conceptions of individuality and reason, not Christian theology. I will say that it is true that Evangelicalism helped to spur anti-slavery sentiment and conceptions of human equality throughout the 18th century however, so you're not necessarily far off, it's just that the specific phrase was written without religion in mind.

The curse of Ham was a new explanation to counter anti-slavery arguments. This is well documented. The 3/5ths compromise was less a statement of the humanity of black people than it was an unfortunate and pragmatic political compromise, which I'm sure you're aware of.

Yes, new land needed labor, labor for an export staple crop system. Slave labor was used to maintain that economic regime. The whole smiths and stonemasons digression is inane when considering that it all existed within a wider system centered around tobacco, sugar, rice, indigo, cotton, etc.

Oh, slavery was very, very capitalistic. It was self-consciously market-driven, and slaveowners and traders quantified the bodies and labors of slaves in numeric terms centered around the profit margin. The myth of paternalism and the pre-modern nature of slavery has been thoroughly refuted since the 1980s. When you look at how these people were operating, what they were doing, and the way they talked, it's basically fukking impossible to call it anything other than capitalism. However, it was different that modern capitalism in that it involved direct violence and unfree labor. Beckert in Empire of Cotton differentiates this "war capitalism" and "industrial capitalism" and draws their relation in a far more eloquent way than I could.

Sowell's argument completely misses how race was actually created, and it implies that it somehow was developed as an American (referring to the nation, not the region) invention that stemmed from the DOI statement. In reality, race was a European invention that was developing just fine before the revolution and was informed by colonial realities. America did take it and run with it in a variety of ways though, and made plenty of ideological contributions, both as a reactionary part of the pro-slavery argument and later in scientific racism and phrenology. But the codification of racism was occurring before the American state. The concept of race and racial slavery existed before the American state.

 

[rantanamo]

The mistake here is limiting the discussion to the West. If we're going to talk about the actual concept of race and racism, we're avoiding the very root of religion itself and the societal justifications that go as far back as the Hindus and Janes and several eastern dynasties. As the great religions 'traveled' west, these concepts were further morphed to favor those with the means to truly pass the message to the receiving masses in far less color diverse pre-colonial Europe.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Two great intellectuals discussing race

I thought you were being sarcastic at first. There isn't a single subject Harris is "intellectual" in. Philosophers mock his philosophy, theologians mock his theology, historians mock his history, scientists, mock his science, and his ethics are embarrassing.

Sam Harris is not an intellectual titan lol... Hes actually widely considered a joke now a days.

He's excellent at giving off the veneer of intelligence, but his blatant atheist agenda and lack of training in anything other than neuroscience forces him to generalize and ignore social and political structures as the impetus of human behavior.

He's not even adequately trained in neuroscience. His B. A. was in philosophy and there's a lot of noise that he got his hand held through his PhD. He quit the program early to write books, came back and used his advocacy group to self-fund the research (obvious conflict on several levels), wasn't even given sole first-author status for his own PhD results, and the fine print on the paper admits that he didn't even do the experiments, his co-authors did. On top of all that, others have analyzed the results and found them to be bs.

Harris got himself one of those "famous guy will get us pub" PhD's, and immediately quit doing any work in science once he had it in hand. He's a clown.

I don't even think hes giving off the veneer anymore.

The man was feeling himself to the point where he stepped to a 90 plus year old Noam Chomsky; the worlds foremost public intellectual, and got his shyt handed to him like a mouthy Sophmore. Whats worse was he posted it publically like some groupie

That's one of the purest signs of ignorance. It's not just how badly he got owned. It's how oblivious he was to it. If you don't have the intellectual resources to tel when you've been embarrassed, you're done. Improvement isn't even possible.

 

[Techniec]

Then a first strike nuclear attack is still obviously not the answer

Like the complete lack of knowledge of the logistics of a nuclear strike are astounding and for him to even come out of his mouth sideways about that is unbelievable. If a country is hell bent on nuking America, nothing can stop them because there are non conventional delivery systems. This guy lives in a binary fantasy world. Please read his exchange with Chomsky and his incredilous logic about the Sudanese medicine factory and how America had moral cover for that monstrosity due to "intentions"

That was the dumbest shyt i ever read

Cacs were biggin up Harris for a minute and when i read that



Dudes a fukkin retard when it comes to politics. You can tell he got into, like 99% of this board, after 9/11

 

[Dafunkdoc_Unlimited]

There's only ONE intellectual in that vid.....and it ain't the White guy.

Chomsky needs to tell him to STFU again.

​

 

[ⒶⓁⒾⒶⓈ]

You're being anachronistic again. "Saracen" was not a description of black, because the concept of "black people" was not fully developed in Europe by the early 1400s. Saracens were described as darker, but that was not their defining characteristic: it was their religion that separated them. If you look in European primary sources, skin color doesn't become a significant indicator of difference until the 17th century, and it certainly did not represent an immutable racial categorization. In fact, there's a significant pre-modern European tradition of admiration for ostensibly black people in Ethiopianism driven by belief in the myth of Prester John (as well as negative connotations, there's a fascinating article I could recommend on the ambivalence of blackness generally in European society before the Age of Discovery).

Youre partly right in that they didnt have a standardized working definition of Race before Carolus Linneaus and Charles Darwin but that does not mean they didnt know about Africa and Africans.
There was an Assortment of terms they used from Moors,Saracens,Aethiopians,Nubians and so on but these were not based on religion in any significant measure as you claim because there are plenty of writings about christian Moors..as far as religion goes at the time of the papal bull they just assumed most Negros were Muslim since all they had interacted with were coastal Africans who by and large were mostly Muslim due to the conversion by Arab muslim settlers and slave traders.To this very day most of the coastal Africans are still
Muslim

What's amusing is the document you just cited is emblematic of what I said: enslavement justified by the concept of "just war". In "just war", Christians could not be enslaved, and religion and circumstance was the primary indicator of enslaveability, not race. You're drawing an extended logical connection (Saracens can be enslaved, Saracens were described as darker, therefore black people could be enslaved) that just isn't there when you have a deeper understanding about the chronology of how race was developed and what "just war" is.

I see your point as far as religion being a pretext for war but the truth is it was probably mostly economic..The Arabs had monopoly on the spice ,Slave and Mineral trade from Africa and India and the Europeans wanted them out of the way.
I say this because the Europeans did in the early days at first purchase most of their slaves at the coastal markets like Zanzibar from muslim traders both Black and Arabs but that was when the demand was relatively small .

When the New World opened up and suddenly they needed Millions instead of thousands of slaves THEN they went to war with the muslims because the profits were too good to share.

Very simply, Saracen was not a racial categorization, and the description of their skin color was incidental to their identity and enslaveability compared to their religion. I will say though, for your apparent unfamiliarity with the subject matter you're not stupid (without other information on its face it seems like it may be true): it's just that "Saracen" and "blackness" were not as correlated in the minds of Europeans as you'd like them to be.

True the concept of "Blackness" was probably very fluid but it still was rooted in REGION...not RELIGION...back then people still had tribal mindsets so the Europeans themselves didnt say "Im white" or "German" they said im Barvarian or Norman... so the term Saracen or Moor would be an identifier for African origin

As far as the Enlightenment, you are correct in asserting that- along with many secular European ideologies- that it has roots in religious discourse, it's just not very historically accurate to state that the sentiment "all men are created equal" as expressed in the DOI is connected to the conception of Christian brotherhood. That statement, written by Thomas Jefferson, was an expression of INTENTIONALLY secular (or at least the 18th century version of it) ideology that drew from conceptions of individuality and reason, not Christian theology. I will say that it is true that Evangelicalism helped to spur anti-slavery sentiment and conceptions of human equality throughout the 18th century however, so you're not necessarily far off, it's just that the specific phrase was written without religion in mind.

I Agree.. My assumption is he had watched Europe tear itself apart in religious strife, the Tension between the English Crown and the Papacy and watching all the refugees from that Landing in America he knew if they brought the same catholic vs protestant mentality to America there would soon be religious wars here too ..

The curse of Ham was a new explanation to counter anti-slavery arguments. This is well documented. The 3/5ths compromise was less a statement of the humanity of black people than it was an unfortunate and pragmatic political compromise, which I'm sure you're aware of.

New to whom?...Its a staple of semitic peoples going back as far as the torah and the other texts its inspired..There is evidence the concepts were introduced into Islam during the Arab expansion of the 7th century, due to cross-pollination of Jewish and Christian parables and theology into Islam, and thereafter into medieval Europe

*In 1498, Annius of Viterbo claimed to have translated records of Berossus, an ancient Babylonian priest and scholar; which are today usually considered an elaborate forgery. However, they gained great influence over Renaissance ways of thinking about population and migration, filling a historical gap following the biblical account of the flood.[56] According to this account, Ham studied the evil arts that had been practiced before the flood, and thus became known as "Cam Esenus" (Ham the Licentious), as well as the original Zoroaster and Saturn (Cronus). He became jealous of Noah's additional children born after the deluge, and began to view his father with enmity, and one day, when Noah lay drunk and naked in his tent, Ham saw him and sang a mocking incantation that rendered Noah temporarily sterile, as if castrated. This account contains several other parallels connecting Ham with Greek myths of the castration of Uranus by Cronus, as well as Italian legends of Saturn and/or Camesis ruling over the Golden Age and fighting the Titanomachy. Ham in this version also abandoned his wife who had been aboard the ark and had mothered the African peoples*
Curse of Ham - Wikipedia

Yes, new land needed labor, labor for an export staple crop system. Slave labor was used to maintain that economic regime. The whole smiths and stonemasons digression is inane when considering that it all existed within a wider system centered around tobacco, sugar, rice, indigo, cotton, etc.

Oh, slavery was very, very capitalistic. It was self-consciously market-driven, and slaveowners and traders quantified the bodies and labors of slaves in numeric terms centered around the profit margin. The myth of paternalism and the pre-modern nature of slavery has been thoroughly refuted since the 1980s. When you look at how these people were operating, what they were doing, and the way they talked, it's basically fukking impossible to call it anything other than capitalism. However, it was different that modern capitalism in that it involved direct violence and unfree labor. Beckert in Empire of Cotton differentiates this "war capitalism" and "industrial capitalism" and draws their relation in a far more eloquent way than I could.

Calling what the Britsh East India Company used to do Capitalism is like calling prison rape a pleasant date....

Lets recap.
*.They were a crown corporation given exclusive charter by the Queen,They used taxpayer funded soldiers and sailors to colonize and massacre indigenous people and steal their land.
*They Kidnapped Africans took them thousands of miles away and put them to work on the stolen land growing sugarcane ,Tobacco and cotton ,
*They turned india into a giant sweatshop turning the slave labor cotton into cloth and forced Indian famers to stop growing food and start growing huge amounts of opium..the famines that followed killed millions.
*They bought Tea and silk from china but since the chinese were self sufficient there was a huge trade deficit ...to finance this deficit they smuggled in Opium
Opium was illegal in China and Britain so when the Chinese protested the East india company started a war..the Chinese lost and the opium kept flooding in
*They used slave labor in their mines and colonies and if you didnt give them what they wanted for dirt cheap the guns came out real quick.

*And out of all that the average british taxpayer didnt get shyt..in fact they needed bailouts twice...the Ruling elite who owned all the stock got all the dividends, the corporation bosses got big bonuses...A small group of people got really paid and the rest of the world got fukked

The only word for it is PIRACY...sailing around and stealing shyt from people and even stealing actual people

Sowell's argument completely misses how race was actually created, and it implies that it somehow was developed as an American (referring to the nation, not the region) invention that stemmed from the DOI statement. In reality, race was a European invention that was developing just fine before the revolution and was informed by colonial realities. America did take it and run with it in a variety of ways though, and made plenty of ideological contributions, both as a reactionary part of the pro-slavery argument and later in scientific racism and phrenology. But the codification of racism was occurring before the American state. The concept of race and racial slavery existed before the American state.

True but i believe the clip is from an interview and since the Question was limited to the Americas thats the answer he offered.

 

[ⒶⓁⒾⒶⓈ]

@Aelyas en passant posting some gems and seeming really smart and knowledgeable at points, but still managing to have shytty politics at the end of the day

Because of #trumpset ?

 

[JahFocus CS]

Because of #trumpset ?

Because of #capitalismset and #conservativeset

 

[AJaRuleStan]

Sowell's argument completely misses how race was actually created, and it implies that it somehow was developed as an American (referring to the nation, not the region) invention that stemmed from the DOI statement. In reality, race was a European invention that was developing just fine before the revolution and was informed by colonial realities.

Thomas Sowell made no assertion about the casualties behind the idea of race or racism in the interview posted earlier itt. His argument was in response to the notion that racism is the basis of slavery. From that talking point alone, he was prompted into explaining why race got mixed into it(USA) "more" than anywhere else. Due to one of the founding principles of the country which states men are all equal, a particular unique form of racism was birthed in defense of the institution against those who attack it citing said principle. In places like Brazil, which imported more slaves, it was nowhere near as common to see defenders of the institution argue on those racist talking points to the exact same degree as it was in the US.

"Only in the American South did a large apologetic literature develop, seeking to justify slavery, because only there was slavery under such large-scale and sustained attacks on moral grounds as to require a response. While slavery was referred to in antebellum America as a “peculiar institution,” in an international perspective and in the long view of history it was not this institution that was peculiar but the principles of American freedom, with which slavery was in such obvious and irreconcilable conflict.

If all men were created equal, as the Declaration of Independence proclaimed, then the only way to justify slavery was by depicting those enslaved as not fully men. A particularly virulent form of racism thus arose from a particularly desperate need to defend slavery against telling attacks that invoked the fundamental principles of the American republic. Nowhere else in the world was slavery in such dire straits ideologically and nowhere else did racism reach such heights (or depths) in defense of the institution. As a noted study of Brazil observed, “the defenders of slavery on clearly racist grounds were as rare among public supporters of slavery in Brazil as they were common in the United States.”" - Thomas Sowell, Black rednecks and white liberals


Nowhere in that flow of logic can you find Sowell claiming that racism wasn't used outside of America to justify slavery, or that America created the idea of racism. He is specifically talking about uniqueness of the situation found in the states regarding racism in relation to his greater point that racism wasn't necessary nor sufficient for the existence of slavery.