41–50 of 194 posts
Off topic but what does “tolerably spare made” mean? Is a euphemism for slightly overweight?
etymonline.com/word/spare
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People who are holding real estate exposure in the US are the primary beneficiaries. Then you add in redlining, and it starts to look systemtic. So the cure should be appropriate to the disease, make home ownership practical, affordable, and (if you are into reparations) subsidized. Or at least as subsidized as being a rich person is in the mortgage origination process (via that stealth socio-economic test that is yo…
Subsidized home ownership? Don't tell Thomas Sowell that idea. How would that work? You make it easier for people to own, then the prices increase. Do you subsidize more? If so, then it's just 2008 again.
This seems like an absolutely indispensable technology for achieving reparations. Most black Americans have ancestors who (slavery) worked a lot of unpaid hours. Having clear metrics on how many slaves there were is a step towards having a well founded number for what the cost of reparations should be. There are some places in the US which have started, but they're just kind of pulling numbers out of a hat and I don'…
It's not clear that reparations are a good idea in practice, or something to be "achieved," or even strived for (they might do more harm in practice to the group they intend to protect, as many well-intentioned and politically extremist ideologies do) not to mention any considerations involving whether it would be possible to sustain, or affordable, etc.
Be careful with your thinking if you care about being even-handed with your empathy. Being empathetic is a fantastic thing, but don't allow cynical people to hijack your empathy.
Off topic but what does “tolerably spare made” mean? Is a euphemism for slightly overweight?
I like to use etymonline.com to find how a word has been used over time, for "spare" I find "sense of "lacking in substance; lean, gaunt; flimsy, thin; poor," is recorded from 1540" etymonline.com/word/spare
Earlier quoted context omitted.
edit: expected downvotes of course; nobody dares to engage on this particular discussion about the vast sums the Europeans must be made to pay for their evil deeds (which they've skirted for hundreds of years now, like cowards) > Next we need to figure out who profited the most from slaves and where that money is today. The most? The Europeans. Where is the money? It's in London and Amsterdam among a few other former…
There were three primary groups of beneficiaries - planters in the America's, slave traders in Europe, and the Kingdoms in Africa who were among the procurers and sellers.
12.5 million Africans don't end up enslaved and heading to the Americas without the European empires making it happen.
The US owes a lot for its part, no question (what I'm saying is not a reduction in the responsibility of the US, I'm properly adding the Europeans to it). The Europeans owe that much more, including for the other 12 million slaves in the rest of the Americas (which, again, nobody ever wants to talk about re reparations, not under any circumstances). Every discussion is always about the US paying reparations. The Europeans were primarily responsible, the US didn't exist yet and banned the import of slaves as one of its first major actions post formation in January 1808. The US has spent two centuries dealing with the consequences of what the European powers did. We have had to deal with the consequences of their slave trade, while they've skirted it almost entirely.
What consequences have the Europeans suffered over the past two centuries, for what they did? Almost nothing. It's long past time for the Europeans to pay, big time.
It will bankrupt parts of Western Europe. That's how big the reparations number very obviously is.
A worthy cause. Too bad they feel the need to run their own platform instead of contributing to wikidata. They're using the same software, and the data falls squarely within Wikidata's scope. Even worse that they feel the need to stamp this with a CC license. Not only does this make it incompatible with the CC0/public domain requirement. I consider it borderline offensive to assert copyright over the basic facts of s…
And under US law, the copyright on a database would apply to the collective work and not to the individual facts, so your frustration and analysis are sort of strange (they can't copyright the facts and whether the collective work would gain copyright is an open question without an obvious answer).
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Yes, having even just a starting point for numbers on this would be very helpful. Part of the issue is people won't even countenance the concept of reparations, so no one gets as far as saying, well if your great grandfather was enslaved for X years under system Y, here's an estimate of the value of their labor that was stolen by that system. What are the limits? Who will be excepted? How will it be enforced? All goo…
> But we can hardly answer them if we refuse to engage with the idea of reparations to begin with. That's because the first order of business is to demonstrate that reparations are even a good idea. Engage with those who don't like the idea, and address the concerns they raise, if you can; then deal with minutae.
After visiting Africa I think will also help people expand their mind set about the world and that Africa is not a bad place and has lot of opportunities.
Africa has a lot of future, plenty of growth. China knows this and has invested a lot into Africa.
Taiwan does something similar with a paid trip to visit Taiwan to learn about the culture and history and create business connection between the people.
It would not cost anything as well, you just reallocate aid money.
To a degree European Africans have been doing this for a long time, plenty of YouTube videos about people moving to Africa to start a business. Fun to watch too. Many of these European Africans have positions of power in the government or private sector.
Thoughts?
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The following is all just an opinion, and obviously this type of subject is a discussion. Doubly so because I'm white. I don't think anyone should pay any more than they benefitted from slavery. The average person has no ancestors who owned slaves, and the only benefits they got were things like cheaper goods and services. Added up over a lifetime, it's probably not a lot. But some people come from ancestors who made…
We should probably also consider charging the Europeans that made vast wealth shipping slaves, and the Africans that profited from capturing and selling their countrymen.
A worthy cause. Too bad they feel the need to run their own platform instead of contributing to wikidata. They're using the same software, and the data falls squarely within Wikidata's scope. Even worse that they feel the need to stamp this with a CC license. Not only does this make it incompatible with the CC0/public domain requirement. I consider it borderline offensive to assert copyright over the basic facts of s…
The data only falls within Wikidata's scope if "every single enslaved person" can be described using reliable sources. That's a very dubious position. And Wikidata has scaling problems already due to their scholarly-article data - but at least that comes with plenty of surrounding info about authors, topics, citations etc. etc. that's uniquely suited to a general-purpose knowledge base. Can one make the same claim about the micro-level archival history of slavery in the antebellum U.S.?