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It's easy to sign up someone else hundreds of years ago to have gone through that. Much harder to willingly sign yourself up for a lifetime of the American slav

It's easy to sign up someone else hundreds of years ago to have gone through that. Much harder to willingly sign yourself up for a lifetime of the American slave experience.

tekla 3y ago
a) That actually isn't a refutation or a response of the parent argument. It's just some random point. b) The topic wasn't indicated to be about the American slave experience, it could have been about slavery in general, or about slavery in the Incan empire etc etc, so you could be making an argument against a point isn't even relevant. This is why debate is important. Its trivially easy to see through bad arguments.
- vacuity 3y ago
  On the topic of bad arguments, is (b) supposed to suggest that any form of slavery was good to the slaves and not an unreasonable cruelty as US slavery was? Not sure how Mike Tyson is any more valid by describing a different instance of slavery. Not all slavery is equally bad per se, but I'd say it's all bad enough.
  - tekla 3y ago
    No. I said what I said. Slavery being good is not refuted by bringing up a single instance of slavery. The point is that if your response to "Slavery good" is that "US Slavery was really really bad" and spend a ton of time on this argument, the opposing team could easily stand up respond with "We concede US slavery was bad, here are the reasons why that doesn't really matter and why it doesn't even refute our generic arguments that slavery is good across the board except for this one time" So you've wasted a ton of time arguing something that can easily be made irrelevant with very little effort. You can't go up there and say Slavery is bad because I think Slavery is bad and expect to win.
    - vacuity 3y ago
      Except I'm not saying "only consider one instance of slavery that is bad". By all means, consider them all. Then there's the question of whether slavery can inherently be remotely good. Also, I said "instance of slavery" but that downplays the scale and impact of the systems that enabled slavery. Of course I'm not pointing at an example of slaves being mistreated as my only reasoning.
    - cycomanic 3y ago
      But then the other side is not arguing slavery is good, but slavery is good except for this exception, which could likely be continued at infinitum. At some point we end up at the true scotsman fallacy, where no existing slavery was ever "real" slavery. . If we take a scientific view, one example acn falsify and statement, so shouldn't
bluGill 3y ago
There is no 'the' American slave experience. There was a lot of variety. 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' was written for the purpose of convincing people that slavery is so evil we should go to war to end it, but most of the slaves in the book had a pretty nice life at first. (But the eventual downside of being owned mean you have no control over when/if it all goes bad).
- istjohn 3y ago
  American slavery was one of the cruelest forms of slavery in recorded history. > A quote from a letter by Isabella Gibbons, who had been enslaved by professors at the University of Virginia, is now engraved on the university's Memorial to Enslaved Laborers: >> Can we forget the crack of the whip, the cowhide, whipping-post, the auction-block, the spaniels, the iron collar, the negro-trader tearing the young child from its mother’s breast as a whelp from the lioness? Have we forgotten that by those horrible cruelties, hundreds of our race have been killed? No, we have not, nor ever will. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treatment_of_slaves_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treatment_of_slaves_in_the_U...
  - polski-g 3y ago
    Mediterranean oar slaves sound like they had it worse: force to row every day in the sun until your skin burned, got infected, then you died from said infection. Afterwards your corpse was tossed overboard. You were replaced with another slave held in the hold and the process repeats. American slaves were generally purchased (with a mortgage) so they were not infinitely replenished.
  - newZWhoDis 3y ago
    “one of” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. American slavery didn’t hold a candle to the cruelty of Arab slavery. Imagine all the horrors of American slavery and they cut your balls off. Slavery and genocide mixed together, with the evil benefit of no free descendants to contend with.
    - acdha 3y ago
fsckboy 3y ago
> It's easy to sign up someone else hundreds of years ago to have gone through that it's a pretty universal human desire to give a better life to your children and your children's children, so he might not be very far off.
pessimizer 3y ago
You're responding to someone who has taken a pretty strong position and backed it up with reason and anecdote. Don't answer it by telling the person who made the argument that they should feel guilty for making the argument. That's why everybody is stupid now. Just tell them why they're wrong, point by point. Point out implicit premises that don't hold up. Do anything else other than try to convince the other person to stop speaking. People don't shut up because you tell them to, you have to make them shut up. That is a slippery slope.
- magicalist 3y ago
  > backed it up with reason and anecdote. And here we can see the easily swayed debate judge in action. A made up Mike Tyson quote, really? At least Kayne actually said the thing about being a slave was a choice, somehow.

It's easy to sign up someone else hundreds of years ago to have gone through that. Much harder to willingly sign yourself up for a lifetime of the American slave experience.

tekla 3y ago

a) That actually isn't a refutation or a response of the parent argument. It's just some random point. b) The topic wasn't indicated to be about the American slave experience, it could have been about slavery in general, or about slavery in the Incan empire etc etc, so you could be making an argument against a point isn't even relevant. This is why debate is important. Its trivially easy to see through bad arguments.

vacuity 3y ago
On the topic of bad arguments, is (b) supposed to suggest that any form of slavery was good to the slaves and not an unreasonable cruelty as US slavery was? Not sure how Mike Tyson is any more valid by describing a different instance of slavery. Not all slavery is equally bad per se, but I'd say it's all bad enough.
- tekla 3y ago
  No. I said what I said. Slavery being good is not refuted by bringing up a single instance of slavery. The point is that if your response to "Slavery good" is that "US Slavery was really really bad" and spend a ton of time on this argument, the opposing team could easily stand up respond with "We concede US slavery was bad, here are the reasons why that doesn't really matter and why it doesn't even refute our generic arguments that slavery is good across the board except for this one time" So you've wasted a ton of time arguing something that can easily be made irrelevant with very little effort. You can't go up there and say Slavery is bad because I think Slavery is bad and expect to win.
  - vacuity 3y ago
    Except I'm not saying "only consider one instance of slavery that is bad". By all means, consider them all. Then there's the question of whether slavery can inherently be remotely good. Also, I said "instance of slavery" but that downplays the scale and impact of the systems that enabled slavery. Of course I'm not pointing at an example of slaves being mistreated as my only reasoning.
  - cycomanic 3y ago
    But then the other side is not arguing slavery is good, but slavery is good except for this exception, which could likely be continued at infinitum. At some point we end up at the true scotsman fallacy, where no existing slavery was ever "real" slavery. . If we take a scientific view, one example acn falsify and statement, so shouldn't

bluGill 3y ago

There is no 'the' American slave experience. There was a lot of variety. 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' was written for the purpose of convincing people that slavery is so evil we should go to war to end it, but most of the slaves in the book had a pretty nice life at first. (But the eventual downside of being owned mean you have no control over when/if it all goes bad).

istjohn 3y ago
American slavery was one of the cruelest forms of slavery in recorded history. > A quote from a letter by Isabella Gibbons, who had been enslaved by professors at the University of Virginia, is now engraved on the university's Memorial to Enslaved Laborers: >> Can we forget the crack of the whip, the cowhide, whipping-post, the auction-block, the spaniels, the iron collar, the negro-trader tearing the young child from its mother’s breast as a whelp from the lioness? Have we forgotten that by those horrible cruelties, hundreds of our race have been killed? No, we have not, nor ever will. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treatment_of_slaves_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treatment_of_slaves_in_the_U...
- polski-g 3y ago
  Mediterranean oar slaves sound like they had it worse: force to row every day in the sun until your skin burned, got infected, then you died from said infection. Afterwards your corpse was tossed overboard. You were replaced with another slave held in the hold and the process repeats. American slaves were generally purchased (with a mortgage) so they were not infinitely replenished.
- newZWhoDis 3y ago
  “one of” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. American slavery didn’t hold a candle to the cruelty of Arab slavery. Imagine all the horrors of American slavery and they cut your balls off. Slavery and genocide mixed together, with the evil benefit of no free descendants to contend with.
  - acdha 3y ago

fsckboy 3y ago

> It's easy to sign up someone else hundreds of years ago to have gone through that it's a pretty universal human desire to give a better life to your children and your children's children, so he might not be very far off.

pessimizer 3y ago

You're responding to someone who has taken a pretty strong position and backed it up with reason and anecdote. Don't answer it by telling the person who made the argument that they should feel guilty for making the argument. That's why everybody is stupid now. Just tell them why they're wrong, point by point. Point out implicit premises that don't hold up. Do anything else other than try to convince the other person to stop speaking. People don't shut up because you tell them to, you have to make them shut up. That is a slippery slope.

magicalist 3y ago
> backed it up with reason and anecdote. And here we can see the easily swayed debate judge in action. A made up Mike Tyson quote, really? At least Kayne actually said the thing about being a slave was a choice, somehow.