Officer! This post! Right here! She is trying to take my assigned at birth pronoun!

correction: succeding >:3c

you understand the post

everyone here gets it. this is what it's about. I'd block someone for sneezing. and if someone blocked me for using the word "penultimate" wrong well how could I fault them. commendable pettiness all round

#moral of the story is NOT to do/say nothing in order to piss no one off#the moral is that people have a billion pet peeves and it doesn't mean they don't like you. it just means they're curating their experience#as I become bigger and bigger on this site I find myself blocked by more people just because more people are seeing my blog#and for the longest time I was worried I was a shitty person if so many people had me blocked. but nahh#it's normal to disagree with other people and it's normal to curate your online experience

Finally a post about the U.S. that's even nice applicable if you live outside of it

“i'll be there shortly” yeah. we know.

Y’all know that I’m into ancient Roman history and I do a lot of research on it but even though I should be used to it by now sometimes I read an anecdote about how an individual slave was treated and I’m hit with the realization that like a third of the population was living like that and I just need to put my head in my hands for a second

Emperor Hadrian randomly stabbed a slave in the eye in a fit of rage and he was supposedly unusually sympathetic to slaves.

There’s other instances of people randomly punching slaves that they didn’t even know because they got in their way or something. This was just normal behavior.

And slaves didn’t rebel en masse because if even one slave committed an act of violent rebellion it was common practice to kill every slave and former slave in the household.

People only took notice for posterity when these mass executions got into the hundreds of people. One of the few recorded for the history books is of over 400 people being killed because one guy stabbed his enslaver.

Like how many people throughout history were beaten to death because some rich asshole was angry and there was no legal or social consequences for doing so? We don’t know.

When you study ancient history you’re reminded that slavery has never once been kind or justified. It just takes on different forms of evil in every time and place that it infects.

Chattel slavery is an incredibly cruel and dehumanizing system.

So is every other kind of slavery.

This doesn’t diminish the awfulness of what people were forced to endure under chattel slavery.

I just think it’s useful to remember that cruelty is complicated and diverse and just because a cruel system is different doesn’t make it right by any means.

Roman slavery operated differently from slavery in the antebellum American south which operated differently from slavery in the Ottoman Empire which operated differently from modern prisoner chain gangs.

All of these are still slavery. They’re all cruel and unacceptable. Their diversity does not matter. Their willing participants have still committed the crime of taking away the self ownership and personhood of another human being.

My dad is a high school physics teacher, and every year he does an incredibly valuable and deeply uncomfortable exercise with his students to drive home why “the Industrial Revolution” was called that:

In the unit about physical work, he points out that work is, at its core, a measurement of labor, and that labor which isn’t done by a paid laborer had another name before the rise of automation: slavery. He has his students quantify the amount of physical work that you might expect out of a human slave, and then sets them to work calculating what that means for their own standard of living. If you wanted to live like you currently do in the ancient world, how many slaves would you need? Calculate your washing machine in slaves. Calculate your dishwasher in slaves. Calculate your refrigerator and your TV and your HVAC in slaves.

And then he asks them to think about those calculations every time they read about any form of wealth at any point in history prior to the Industrial Revolution, and to ask themselves how many slaves went into creating and supporting that wealth. Sometimes it’s chattel slavery, and sometimes it’s serfs, and sometimes it’s forced marriages, or debt bondage, or penal labor… but scratch the surface of wealth and civilization and leisure time throughout history, and you inevitably find slavery hiding underneath. Sometimes (often) you still find slavery hiding underneath, even in the modern day – but until automation, it’s a virtual guarantee about any culture with a high standard of living at all.

Also: the racialized people of a marginalized group have it worse worse than the white people of said group