The author is French, the story in France, and the slaves are Roman.

No shortage of French slavery in the New World. Just ask anyone from Louisiana or Haiti.

Maybe it’s in the movie adaptation, but the scene of their “freeing” is pretty clear about its point.

Oh sure. You can find all sorts of period critiques of industrial capitalism as slavery with extra steps.

But the notion that people would volunteer to return to bondage really undersells how hard plantation overseers and state police in slave states had to work to keep them there.

Crazy that Amazon would have a cloud computing center there. Wonder who paid for it and what is used for

In fact, they go back to being slaves because then they don’t have to worry anymore.

This last bit is Neo-Confederate propaganda. The “slaves were happy to be slaves” myth is wildly apocryphal.

Far more often, the freedmen leave their plantation economies in pursuit of more lucrative work in more industrial and urban regions. Harlem, New York and Detroit, Michigan are testament to the exodus of American colored people northward following the war. Or they strike out to undeveloped territories and form their own municipalities. Large black communities popped up across the Southwest and West coast, as the post-Civil War frontier was subjected to industrial scale genocide of native peoples.

The consequence of this mass migration is a labor shortage at home. One which can only be resolved by (a) raising wages / living standards until people want to stay or (b) re-enslaving the population through other means. In the case of the US South, these “other means” were the Jim Crow laws, which transformed the private plantation economy into a publicly managed (and privately profitable) state prison economy.

Following the end of Reconstruction under Rutherford B. Hayes, southern state governments imposed a suite of laws forbidding “vagrancy” and constricting the right of colored people to travel unattended. Independent communities of black citizens were raided and demolished (The Wilmington Massacre of 1898, the Tulsa Massacre of 1921 being two notable examples - really all of Red Summer being a major historical turning point for American race relations). Enormous prison compounds were constructed. And the incarceration rate among people of color skyrocketed.

The campaign to re-enslave the colored population was a central position of the “Dixiecrats” straight into the LBJ administration. And capturing these revanchists was pivotal to the Nixon and Reagan campaigns, even as the taste for segregation soured nationally on the American tongue. All of this was covered up and expunged from US History, following the 1980s Reagan Revolution and the reactionary efforts to undo the Civil Rights Movement. So it’s very easy to never know the long dark winter of civil rights in post-Civil War American history.

But “slaves were actually happier to be on the plantation” is textbook Coolidge Era white nationalist revisionism.

It is difficult for me to imagine what “personal liberty” is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment.

Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible.

– Joey S

The only reason it’s not worse than it is is because the United States hasn’t gotten as skillful at making people disappear

ICE camps and El El Salvadorian prisons are full of people who would argue otherwise. Trump’s been happy to go after citizen journalists with green cards and visas - Estefany Rodríguez of the Nashville Noticias being a recent example.

But the US media market is private, decentralized, and profit motivated, which periodically puts it at odds with a partisan government that - itself - changes hands every two to six years.

Nobody seriously thinks the CCP is going to be out of power in the next election cycle. So there’s no second party to court with anti-government rhetoric and no real money to be made as a professional hater unless you’re working with foreign agents.

It’s apples and oranges.

Idk what that does to the suicide rate

So long as there is no criminal prosecution and threat of material jail time against him, Jones is free to keep hiding the fiscal sausage by transferring ownership and shuffling around money between accounts in other people’s names. I’m sure this is an expensive and obnoxious process on Alex’s end. But it’s a small price to pay to shield hundreds of millions of dollars from any kind of court judgement.

Add in that Jones has plenty of friends in the Texas state house and the Austin PD. So he can very easily skirt processors, ignore out-of-state court orders, and glad hand sheriff’s deputies who would otherwise pursue collections against him, simply because he’s got popular clout in his big reactionary backwater.

At some point, the problem isn’t with the courts but the police. Judges and juries don’t do the collections themselves.

Ad hominem

Not that I’m trying to defend this person

:-/

Even Fox News or Russia Today can sometimes dabble in the truth.

But why would you go to them as a primary source?

Okay, but then you’re not talking about reincarnation in the Hindu/Buddhist sense. You’re talking about the kind of Past Lives shit that western spiritualists are into.

everything is just getting worse

The planet is in its sixth major extinction event - one that’s been ongoing for roughly 12,000 years. And yet we’re finally achieving a kind of universal consciousness regarding the impact we’re collectively imposing on the world and the methodologies we can employ to respond to it.

I don’t think I’d call that “getting worse”. No other lifeforms have ever had the opportunity to know they’re going extinct before it happens, much less the faculties to do something about it.

This is a pivotal epoch in Earth’s multi-billion year history. I would not say things are getting worse. I would say things have the potential to move in a direction no planet in the Solar System has had the opportunity to move since it was created. That potential creates a great deal of anxiety and fear, because it is much easier to be ignorant - a dinosaur unaware of the looming comet - than faced with the foreknowledge of catastrophe. But it is that shared anxiety that creates the social pressure for universal change.

Reincarnation into what?

“Hey, if you die in this life, you can come back as a bug that gets eaten by another bug shortly after hatching. And then you can do this for the next 10,000 years until you get lucky enough to come back as something remotely sentient.”

Sounds like that shit sucks, man. You have a real pivotal moment in this life to embrace dharma and appeal to heaven for a higher place in the great pattern. I’ll admit, I’m not much of a mystic, but I don’t think eating a bullet after a night spent guzzling whiskey is what gets you up the ladder.

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/author/tahir-imin/

Absolutely wild that this guy works for the Times of Israel. What must that writers room be like?

Some of the most lucrative wind farms on earth are based in the North Sea, incidentally.

Mormonism is the end result of Protestant theology mingling with Capitalist economics.

The same experiment has produced Jehovah’s Witnesses, Scientology, and dozens of other systems of social exploitation draped in religious clothing. Anywhere people need to believe an end to our industrial age self-flagellation is nigh, but cannot conceive of a society organized outside of theocratic principles, falls back into the same ritual of spiritualized mass marketing.

Well… you have to average in all the kickbacks to friends in US and Israel.

My bet is about $20B

demand an end to attacks on civilians

glances at the US definition of enemy combatant

glances at the US military’s understanding of Iranian politics

glances at the US public’s attitude towards “Muslim”

Yeah, I don’t think anyone in Iran qualifies as “civilian” under these terms.

I mean, I’d have still used a thumb drive at this point. I/O is way better.

without even realizing it

staring intensely at the CD-R drive

“Come on baby, you’ve got at least one more in you!”

Ukraine: “Help! Help! We’re being attacked!”

Middle East US Allies: “We’re busy brutally slaughtering Persian. Nothing we can do.”

Ukraine: “Oh, you’re attacking another country? We can help with that!”

Fucking bleak.