22 ms·

The 1619 Project

130 points by flexie 7y ago

portmanteaufu 7y ago
> The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.
- animosity-kills 7y ago
  Great, so the old grudges never die. We all stay angry forever. We all retain a constant, simmering outrage at the ghosts of the past, and unpack them for each morning's two minute hate. If you're brandishing your weapons, so too am I.
  - sdinsn 7y ago
    "The 1619 Project" doesn't seem to be about being angry. Just education about the impact that slavery had in early America.
  - mcguire 7y ago
    "The past is never dead. It's not even past." William Faulkner. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requiem_for_a_Nun#'The_past' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requiem_for_a_Nun#'The_past')
danso 7y ago
Note that if you're having trouble navigating the scrolly-animated presentation, you can go to the NYT Magazine's landing page to see a more straightforward listing of articles and links: https://www.nytimes.com/section/magazine https://www.nytimes.com/section/magazine
- dreamcompiler 7y ago
  Thanks. I really want to read these but NYT sometimes goes a little nuts with javascript.
- jumbopapa 7y ago
  Thank you. That was awful.
- duxup 7y ago
  NYT tries a lot of things. I like that. But they're bound to fail, this one is a bit much on the scrolling.
  - danso 7y ago
    The NYT arguably popularized the technique when its 2012 "Snow Fall" won a Pulitzer [0]. My impression has been that, thankfully, people have realized that scrolly-heavy stories are more trouble than its worth. But it wouldn't surprise me if it's still seen as a way to signal "This Project is a Big Deal" even at the cost of accessibility. At least nowadays, most of the project's individual articles can find plenty of traction through non-landing-page clicks (e.g. social media), so the risk of poorly-used landing page is less of a concern than it was 5+ years ago. [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/12/new-york-times-snow-fall-feature/320253/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/12/new-y...
    - smacktoward 7y ago
      > it wouldn't surprise me if it's still seen as a way to signal "This Project is a Big Deal" even at the cost of accessibility. It also looks really slick when shown on a big wall-mount monitor in the conference room where the Important People gather. I dunno about the Times, but I've seen plenty of places where that carried a lot more weight than usability or accessibility did. (Sigh.)
chrishenn 7y ago
A similar and very powerful narrative can be found in _The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism_, by Edward E. Baptist. The book is slightly problematic in some of its methods, but overall I would highly recommend it to anyone who was taught the public school version of US history. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14894629-the-half-has-never-been-told https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14894629-the-half-has-ne...
- johnfactorial 7y ago
  Sounds great, what are the problems with its methods?
danso 7y ago
The only article in this project I've read so far is the history about how the sugar industry became economically viable through slavery, leading one Louisiana politician to boast the state's sugar industry was "without parallel in the United States, or indeed in the world in any branch of industry." https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/sugar-slave-trade-slavery.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/suga...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
khawkins 7y ago
This reads not as a respectful remembrance of the history of the brutal practice of slavery, but an attempt to suggest slavery is a consequence of capitalism and is thus also evil. That since they are both fundamentally exploitative, today's capitalism, in many ways, causes just as much human suffering as its child, slavery did. The conclusion, whether its stated or not, is that capitalism needs to go, replaced with socialism. But what every analysis like this fails to recognize is that capitalism doesn't take away the autonomy of the people who have power, they can choose to wield it responsibly or irresponsibly. Changing the system from capitalism to socialism doesn't change the fact that there will be vast disparities in the power, it just changes the system by which people obtain power. I'm not sure that living "free" under Stalin is necessarily preferable to living a slave in the antebellum south. Of course, both are full of stories of suffering and human misery, and I'm sure both can cite instances where things weren't as bad as we imagine them. But I'm extremely frustrated with rhetoric which cites the latter as evidence that we should move closer to a society like the former.
- yalogin 7y ago
  Where did you see that insinuation? Can you point me to the place where you saw the conclusion about socialism? I feel like you are reading way too much into it. Why attribute something the authors didn't intend?
  - pseudosudoer 7y ago
    The article on sugar production is one example that I'd agree upon with OP.
  - seandoe 7y ago
    "If you want to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation." "Why doesn't the United States have universal health care? The answer begins with policies enacted after the Civil War."
    - acdha 7y ago
      That seems like quite a stretch: neither of those is a global statement, simply an accurate summary of how the culture in one particular country developed. Most countries with universal healthcare are capitalist to a large degree so it seems pretty clear that an explanation for the difference between, say, the U.S. and Canada is going to have a different answer than “capitalism!”.
em3rgent0rdr 7y ago
> "If you wanted to understand the brutality of American capitalism..." Stopped reading there. Not sure American capitalism is some evil brutal thing to oppose in the first place. And we could have capitalism without having slavery.
- Avshalom 7y ago
  we could have, but we didn't.
  - eej71 7y ago
    Capitalism did not create slavery. It inherited it.
    - dsr_ 7y ago
      But surely you agree that as soon as anyone realized that slavery is wrong, their duty is to shut it down immediately? Capitalism did not do that.
      - dsr_ 7y ago
        2 hours later, there are at least three people on HN who don't agree, but aren't brave enough to make a comment so we can see who they are.
        eej71 7y ago
        Your prior comment makes it sound like it was a light switch that people were reluctant to throw. I see the bloody and protracted nature of the Civil War as evidence for just how difficult it was to end - even in the 1860s! I'm grateful the North didn't give up. It's a miracle they kept at it.
    - earthboundkid 7y ago
      I don't think that's a good summary. Yes, there were always enslaved people. But the transatlantic system was something new. Why didn't the colonizers just use European serfs as slaves in America? Because the Europeans already had a norm against serious abuse of serfs. Why didn't they enslave the Native Americans? They tried, but the indigenous all were dying of European diseases. So they brought in a third party, the Africans. Sure, Africans had been enslaving each other, but it wasn't worse than what Europeans did to serfs. When the Europeans enslaved the Africans, suddenly things got a lot worse than it had ever been in the history of slavery. Just incredible cruelty, but even more than that, the new element of skin color based discrimination. That had never really been a thing before, but to justify being this cruel to Africans, you needed a powerful ideology. In some countries, this led to a color system where your proximity to power was roughly equal to your degree of darkness, but in the US, we evolved a "one drop" rule where people were either classified as white or non-white with no half-measures. (This was also bad for mixed European/Native Americans, as well as those of African heritage.) "Capitalism" is a fuzzy term that is hard to pin down, but to the degree that it means something, I think it's fair to say: after the Columbian contact, the European economic system led to transatlantic slavery, transatlantic slavery was something new in the world and led to modern racism (which is distinct from mere xenophobia), and racism has lived long beyond the end of the legal slave system and taken on a life of its own. Capitalism inherited slavery but then refashioned it and birthed new evils.
40acres 7y ago
Slavery is America's original sin, to this day it permeates every aspect of this nation. Americans must continue to campaign to right the wrongs that began in 1619, I'm really grateful for this project and it's motive of reframing the origin of this country.
- dmarusic16 7y ago
  America is a country, not a project of universal human redemption. Countries do horrible things at times, yes. And these things should be studied. But it’s high time we abandon the gauzy religious rhetoric (“original sin”) when we talk about the United States. It’s a hangover from Lincoln’s rhetoric, and in many ways it’s not healthy, as it prevents us from taking concrete steps to fix concrete problems.
  - 40acres 7y ago
    America has always billed itself as more than a nation ("shining city on a hill", etc.), it's up to it's citizens to hold ourselves to account. Without looking at the past there is no way to fix our concrete problems going forward. For instance, look at the Supreme Court case Holder v. Alabama and how it changed the Voting Rights Act, there is a direct line to slavery and the racism that fueled it. At this very moment States are using this ruling to reinstate laws that disenfranchise black voters who suffered after the fall of Reconstruction.
    - dmarusic16 7y ago
      I’m certainly neither arguing for not looking at the past, nor for doing nothing. I’m suggesting that the universalist language of the founding, and then subsequently the brilliant rhetoric of Lincoln trying to knit together a country wrecked by Civil War, is not helpful. Elevating actual monstrosities to a religious plane leads to lots of handwringing about “atonement” and “repentance”, a lot of which ends up easy to dismiss by those less sold on the metaphor. Instead, sober discussion about the realities of race today, and even more importantly how those play out along class—an underdeveloped subject among most Americans—would be welcome.
webwielder2 7y ago
I'd like to see a similar feature on our extermination of the Native Americans.
nilkn 7y ago
Personally I would like to see a broader and less American perspective on slavery. While chattel slavery in the American antebellum South went away, slavery in general certainly didn't, and it also didn't begin in 1619. To illustrate that latter point, in 1619 slavery was a general practice in Africa, and many of the first slaves imported by Europeans were already enslaved in Africa as a byproduct of endemic warfare. Even today many industries' profitability depends on slavery in the undeveloped world -- it's just no longer visible to Americans. Certainly this isn't meant to diminish this piece. American slavery became particularly incendiary because it developed a racial component that long outlasted its abolition and continues to have ripple effects today not just in America but elsewhere due to the wide export of American culture. But I also don't want to be so quick as to equate slavery in general with one particular (and, indeed, relatively small-scale) instance that did end when we have other larger instances still active today -- instances that we even depend on and make use of.
- aflag 7y ago
  Learning from local history is, if nothing else, a good introduction to the subject.
- conroy 7y ago
  "The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. " If you're looking for a broader view on slavery, a project dedicated to American slavery isn't going to offer you that perspective.
  - nilkn 7y ago
    That's my point. I think we're reaching a point in history where we can start looking at slavery at its true scope and scale, both in geography and time, so I'm increasingly less enthused with analysis that doesn't attempt to look beyond the US's involvement during the antebellum period. The US is still involved -- just with a different form of slavery in a different part of the world. It's still driven to this day by largely the same economic incentives discussed here.
gkilmain 7y ago
I wouldn't have cared as much if I were not a parent - shitty to say but its true - the thought of children tugging on their parents while the parent is being shipped off or sold i mean. My gosh.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jimdyer 7y ago
This is a worthy effort but for a better educational experience it should indicate at the beginning that slavery is still completely legal in the US per the 13th amendment to the Constitution: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
kiss-make-up 7y ago
Fuck this fucking slavery bullshit. Fuck The New York Times. Fuck everyone upvoting this thread. Fuck you, Hacker News. This is some highly politicized bullshit, and it's not at all tech related. Fuck all of this racist shit. Fuck this constant white guilt. For what? For who? What does this get us, constantly dragging around Hector's body like an eternal albatross. Do you feel like you're getting anywhere? Does this feel like progress? Is this how we make friends now?
julienreszka 7y ago
They confuse feudalism with capitalism. Slavery is no capitalism, it's feudalism. See this image to understand what I mean https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VbM3qZttnmI/XSIP33QGpUI/AAAAAAAAU-g/EZCC291tUOcp6KAN7CLdmtx9I5PbI_AxQCLcBGAs/s1600/political-ideologies.png https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VbM3qZttnmI/XSIP33QGpUI/AAAAAAAAU...
jgalt212 7y ago
It's become more and more difficult as a centrist to keep reading the NY Times. And the NY Times probably considers itself centrist because it publishes both very left wing views and very right wing views. -10 + 10 / 2 = 0
credit_guy 7y ago
This appears to be a great project, not in small part because, for my taste, great web design. I haven't read the articles yet, but I plan to. That being said, allow me to share a regret that I have about the Civil War. I find it a tragedy that the institution of slavery was terminated in the United States via such a violent solution. This lead to resentments and scars and continuation of race discrimination and racial issues until this day. It's such a tragedy. Compare the slavery in 19'th century America with the situation depicted in the "War and Peace" early 19'th century Russia, where peasants were slaves in all but formal legal status (for example they were called "souls" and they were pretty much the unit of account when describing a prince's wealth). Two hundred years later, that slavery in Russia left no scars, and the same story was repeated in many European countries. In the country I come from slavery was abolished at various points in time (in various provinces and for various social strata) ranging roughly from 1775 to 1850. The last people to be freed from slavery were the gypsies, and one can say that even today there is some racism in my country against gypsies, but nothing like the issues that America sill faces . I don't really have any point to make, it's just an observation.

130 points by flexie 7y ago

> The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.

animosity-kills 7y ago
Great, so the old grudges never die. We all stay angry forever. We all retain a constant, simmering outrage at the ghosts of the past, and unpack them for each morning's two minute hate. If you're brandishing your weapons, so too am I.
- sdinsn 7y ago
  "The 1619 Project" doesn't seem to be about being angry. Just education about the impact that slavery had in early America.
- mcguire 7y ago
  "The past is never dead. It's not even past." William Faulkner. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requiem_for_a_Nun#'The_past' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requiem_for_a_Nun#'The_past')

danso 7y ago

Note that if you're having trouble navigating the scrolly-animated presentation, you can go to the NYT Magazine's landing page to see a more straightforward listing of articles and links: https://www.nytimes.com/section/magazine https://www.nytimes.com/section/magazine

dreamcompiler 7y ago
Thanks. I really want to read these but NYT sometimes goes a little nuts with javascript.
jumbopapa 7y ago
Thank you. That was awful.
duxup 7y ago
NYT tries a lot of things. I like that. But they're bound to fail, this one is a bit much on the scrolling.
- danso 7y ago
  The NYT arguably popularized the technique when its 2012 "Snow Fall" won a Pulitzer [0]. My impression has been that, thankfully, people have realized that scrolly-heavy stories are more trouble than its worth. But it wouldn't surprise me if it's still seen as a way to signal "This Project is a Big Deal" even at the cost of accessibility. At least nowadays, most of the project's individual articles can find plenty of traction through non-landing-page clicks (e.g. social media), so the risk of poorly-used landing page is less of a concern than it was 5+ years ago. [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/12/new-york-times-snow-fall-feature/320253/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/12/new-y...
  - smacktoward 7y ago
    > it wouldn't surprise me if it's still seen as a way to signal "This Project is a Big Deal" even at the cost of accessibility. It also looks really slick when shown on a big wall-mount monitor in the conference room where the Important People gather. I dunno about the Times, but I've seen plenty of places where that carried a lot more weight than usability or accessibility did. (Sigh.)

chrishenn 7y ago

A similar and very powerful narrative can be found in _The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism_, by Edward E. Baptist. The book is slightly problematic in some of its methods, but overall I would highly recommend it to anyone who was taught the public school version of US history. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14894629-the-half-has-never-been-told https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14894629-the-half-has-ne...

johnfactorial 7y ago
Sounds great, what are the problems with its methods?

danso 7y ago

The only article in this project I've read so far is the history about how the sugar industry became economically viable through slavery, leading one Louisiana politician to boast the state's sugar industry was "without parallel in the United States, or indeed in the world in any branch of industry." https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/sugar-slave-trade-slavery.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/suga...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

khawkins 7y ago

This reads not as a respectful remembrance of the history of the brutal practice of slavery, but an attempt to suggest slavery is a consequence of capitalism and is thus also evil. That since they are both fundamentally exploitative, today's capitalism, in many ways, causes just as much human suffering as its child, slavery did. The conclusion, whether its stated or not, is that capitalism needs to go, replaced with socialism. But what every analysis like this fails to recognize is that capitalism doesn't take away the autonomy of the people who have power, they can choose to wield it responsibly or irresponsibly. Changing the system from capitalism to socialism doesn't change the fact that there will be vast disparities in the power, it just changes the system by which people obtain power. I'm not sure that living "free" under Stalin is necessarily preferable to living a slave in the antebellum south. Of course, both are full of stories of suffering and human misery, and I'm sure both can cite instances where things weren't as bad as we imagine them. But I'm extremely frustrated with rhetoric which cites the latter as evidence that we should move closer to a society like the former.

yalogin 7y ago
Where did you see that insinuation? Can you point me to the place where you saw the conclusion about socialism? I feel like you are reading way too much into it. Why attribute something the authors didn't intend?
- pseudosudoer 7y ago
  The article on sugar production is one example that I'd agree upon with OP.
- seandoe 7y ago
  "If you want to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation." "Why doesn't the United States have universal health care? The answer begins with policies enacted after the Civil War."
  - acdha 7y ago
    That seems like quite a stretch: neither of those is a global statement, simply an accurate summary of how the culture in one particular country developed. Most countries with universal healthcare are capitalist to a large degree so it seems pretty clear that an explanation for the difference between, say, the U.S. and Canada is going to have a different answer than “capitalism!”.

em3rgent0rdr 7y ago

> "If you wanted to understand the brutality of American capitalism..." Stopped reading there. Not sure American capitalism is some evil brutal thing to oppose in the first place. And we could have capitalism without having slavery.

Avshalom 7y ago
we could have, but we didn't.
- eej71 7y ago
  Capitalism did not create slavery. It inherited it.
  - dsr_ 7y ago
    But surely you agree that as soon as anyone realized that slavery is wrong, their duty is to shut it down immediately? Capitalism did not do that.
    - dsr_ 7y ago
      2 hours later, there are at least three people on HN who don't agree, but aren't brave enough to make a comment so we can see who they are.
      - eej71 7y ago
        Your prior comment makes it sound like it was a light switch that people were reluctant to throw. I see the bloody and protracted nature of the Civil War as evidence for just how difficult it was to end - even in the 1860s! I'm grateful the North didn't give up. It's a miracle they kept at it.
  - earthboundkid 7y ago
    I don't think that's a good summary. Yes, there were always enslaved people. But the transatlantic system was something new. Why didn't the colonizers just use European serfs as slaves in America? Because the Europeans already had a norm against serious abuse of serfs. Why didn't they enslave the Native Americans? They tried, but the indigenous all were dying of European diseases. So they brought in a third party, the Africans. Sure, Africans had been enslaving each other, but it wasn't worse than what Europeans did to serfs. When the Europeans enslaved the Africans, suddenly things got a lot worse than it had ever been in the history of slavery. Just incredible cruelty, but even more than that, the new element of skin color based discrimination. That had never really been a thing before, but to justify being this cruel to Africans, you needed a powerful ideology. In some countries, this led to a color system where your proximity to power was roughly equal to your degree of darkness, but in the US, we evolved a "one drop" rule where people were either classified as white or non-white with no half-measures. (This was also bad for mixed European/Native Americans, as well as those of African heritage.) "Capitalism" is a fuzzy term that is hard to pin down, but to the degree that it means something, I think it's fair to say: after the Columbian contact, the European economic system led to transatlantic slavery, transatlantic slavery was something new in the world and led to modern racism (which is distinct from mere xenophobia), and racism has lived long beyond the end of the legal slave system and taken on a life of its own. Capitalism inherited slavery but then refashioned it and birthed new evils.

40acres 7y ago

Slavery is America's original sin, to this day it permeates every aspect of this nation. Americans must continue to campaign to right the wrongs that began in 1619, I'm really grateful for this project and it's motive of reframing the origin of this country.

dmarusic16 7y ago
America is a country, not a project of universal human redemption. Countries do horrible things at times, yes. And these things should be studied. But it’s high time we abandon the gauzy religious rhetoric (“original sin”) when we talk about the United States. It’s a hangover from Lincoln’s rhetoric, and in many ways it’s not healthy, as it prevents us from taking concrete steps to fix concrete problems.
- 40acres 7y ago
  America has always billed itself as more than a nation ("shining city on a hill", etc.), it's up to it's citizens to hold ourselves to account. Without looking at the past there is no way to fix our concrete problems going forward. For instance, look at the Supreme Court case Holder v. Alabama and how it changed the Voting Rights Act, there is a direct line to slavery and the racism that fueled it. At this very moment States are using this ruling to reinstate laws that disenfranchise black voters who suffered after the fall of Reconstruction.
  - dmarusic16 7y ago
    I’m certainly neither arguing for not looking at the past, nor for doing nothing. I’m suggesting that the universalist language of the founding, and then subsequently the brilliant rhetoric of Lincoln trying to knit together a country wrecked by Civil War, is not helpful. Elevating actual monstrosities to a religious plane leads to lots of handwringing about “atonement” and “repentance”, a lot of which ends up easy to dismiss by those less sold on the metaphor. Instead, sober discussion about the realities of race today, and even more importantly how those play out along class—an underdeveloped subject among most Americans—would be welcome.

webwielder2 7y ago

I'd like to see a similar feature on our extermination of the Native Americans.

nilkn 7y ago

Personally I would like to see a broader and less American perspective on slavery. While chattel slavery in the American antebellum South went away, slavery in general certainly didn't, and it also didn't begin in 1619. To illustrate that latter point, in 1619 slavery was a general practice in Africa, and many of the first slaves imported by Europeans were already enslaved in Africa as a byproduct of endemic warfare. Even today many industries' profitability depends on slavery in the undeveloped world -- it's just no longer visible to Americans. Certainly this isn't meant to diminish this piece. American slavery became particularly incendiary because it developed a racial component that long outlasted its abolition and continues to have ripple effects today not just in America but elsewhere due to the wide export of American culture. But I also don't want to be so quick as to equate slavery in general with one particular (and, indeed, relatively small-scale) instance that did end when we have other larger instances still active today -- instances that we even depend on and make use of.

aflag 7y ago
Learning from local history is, if nothing else, a good introduction to the subject.
conroy 7y ago
"The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. " If you're looking for a broader view on slavery, a project dedicated to American slavery isn't going to offer you that perspective.
- nilkn 7y ago
  That's my point. I think we're reaching a point in history where we can start looking at slavery at its true scope and scale, both in geography and time, so I'm increasingly less enthused with analysis that doesn't attempt to look beyond the US's involvement during the antebellum period. The US is still involved -- just with a different form of slavery in a different part of the world. It's still driven to this day by largely the same economic incentives discussed here.

gkilmain 7y ago

I wouldn't have cared as much if I were not a parent - shitty to say but its true - the thought of children tugging on their parents while the parent is being shipped off or sold i mean. My gosh.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jimdyer 7y ago

This is a worthy effort but for a better educational experience it should indicate at the beginning that slavery is still completely legal in the US per the 13th amendment to the Constitution: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

kiss-make-up 7y ago

Fuck this fucking slavery bullshit. Fuck The New York Times. Fuck everyone upvoting this thread. Fuck you, Hacker News. This is some highly politicized bullshit, and it's not at all tech related. Fuck all of this racist shit. Fuck this constant white guilt. For what? For who? What does this get us, constantly dragging around Hector's body like an eternal albatross. Do you feel like you're getting anywhere? Does this feel like progress? Is this how we make friends now?

julienreszka 7y ago

They confuse feudalism with capitalism. Slavery is no capitalism, it's feudalism. See this image to understand what I mean https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VbM3qZttnmI/XSIP33QGpUI/AAAAAAAAU-g/EZCC291tUOcp6KAN7CLdmtx9I5PbI_AxQCLcBGAs/s1600/political-ideologies.png https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VbM3qZttnmI/XSIP33QGpUI/AAAAAAAAU...

jgalt212 7y ago

It's become more and more difficult as a centrist to keep reading the NY Times. And the NY Times probably considers itself centrist because it publishes both very left wing views and very right wing views. -10 + 10 / 2 = 0

credit_guy 7y ago

This appears to be a great project, not in small part because, for my taste, great web design. I haven't read the articles yet, but I plan to. That being said, allow me to share a regret that I have about the Civil War. I find it a tragedy that the institution of slavery was terminated in the United States via such a violent solution. This lead to resentments and scars and continuation of race discrimination and racial issues until this day. It's such a tragedy. Compare the slavery in 19'th century America with the situation depicted in the "War and Peace" early 19'th century Russia, where peasants were slaves in all but formal legal status (for example they were called "souls" and they were pretty much the unit of account when describing a prince's wealth). Two hundred years later, that slavery in Russia left no scars, and the same story was repeated in many European countries. In the country I come from slavery was abolished at various points in time (in various provinces and for various social strata) ranging roughly from 1775 to 1850. The last people to be freed from slavery were the gypsies, and one can say that even today there is some racism in my country against gypsies, but nothing like the issues that America sill faces . I don't really have any point to make, it's just an observation.