The Benefits of Slavery.

[Kriswest]

@Knox

@Kriswest

Knox, I would disagree about being slaves, indentured servants is what the masses are. It is a step above slavery but, an important step.

I know. That was an idea I had when I was a teenager. It’s a lot of semantics and definition and not much meat.

Still, there’s a lot of cultural rhetoric associated with the term “slavery,” and I think defining it the way I did can remove that and put it in a more rational perspective.

Slavery is often treated as the most evil and vile thing one human can do to another. Quite frankly, I don’t see it that way. A significant step is a good way to put it. It was a significant collective step we made in the evolution of our labour market.

Abusive slavery is a vile thing, Unfortunately it is dominant. When slves were freed many decided to stay with their former masters as employees. Room, board and a small salary were given to them. Many took the 10 acres and a mule offer still others went to Nigeria. The ones that took 10 acres, they varied in their success. Some promptly lost it all, others eventually lost it, others turned it into a decent living and become comfortable. Why would they fail? Just because you know how to plant and grow things does not mean you understand the variable of farming and finances. Those that stayed with their former masters varied in their success too.

The main problem is giving freedom as opposed to not earning it. Dependence is still there for the former slave if it is given not earned. The welfare system is a prime example of what happens to creating a people dependent upon master’s gentle generousity. The welfared irregardless of skin color are the most enslaved humans in this country. They have become truly dependent upon their master, if cut off they will for the most part perish. The lack of will, the lack of pride and independence is hard to overcome. If cut off some will become career criminals and so become dependent upon the state once more in the prison system. Between welfare and prison we have an entire country indentured and enslaved mentally to the masters. Any form of choosing which job career or place to live has been removed by their dependence upon the system. They did it themselves. You may be enslaved to your employer, physically but, mentally you have choices and freedoms they do not have and many do not want to have.

It does become easy to have someone else make your decisions for you. The master is now saddled with dependents that in this day and age cannot be cut off. It would be considered immoral. So the system master takes care of these slaves and recieves nothing in return. , we get to pay for this morality. we are indentured to pay for their keep, we work , they don’t. yet they truly are the ones enslaved. I prefer what I am, to ever having that mentality.

[Anvil]

Cyrene:

All the stuff you say is great anvil, except is wrong. All signs point towards true slavery on top of sexual slavery for these women.

Come Cyrene, let’s go raiding.

But first, who are we…? Well, we’re two brave late-teen to early twenties warriors of a semi-nomadic tribe, from a small and fairly temporary village. our population is roughly fifty, but since our tribe traditionally favours male children, and sometime infanticide is practiced in the advent of a girl, the male female ratio is skewed - let’s say at the moment in our village their are only 15 fertile women, all of whom are taken, as there is also some polygamy practiced by the older and dominant males.

We are somewhat frustrated. So frustrated in fact, we are willing to risk almost everything to find a woman, barring stealing one from one of the dominant males in the village - which would be suicide, either by being killed in revenge, or becoming outcast from the tribe.

In the dead of night, without the elders’ permission, (for we have been refused before because the elders are afraid of unecessary conflict with other tribes) we steal away from the circle of huts.

We have heard of a small hut on the bank of the river where a family not of our tribe catches and cures fish in the season when they run. We go there. We hear noises in the hut, talking, low singing, the squabble of infants. Almost mad with fear, we burst in. You stab an old man sitting by the door through the chest and I leap over the small fire to club the man just awaking over the head. An older woman, her breasts hanging like soft sacks screams and clutches two teenage girls towards her leaving the babe crawling on the dirt floor. After I’ve finished killing the man on the matting I turn and accidently kick the baby into the fire. The old woman darts out to retrieve it and you reflexively skewer her through the back.

This leaves the two girls. Elated and sickened by what we have done, we fall on them and rape them repeatedly. Then we beat them until they are quiet and passive, and take them back to our village.

Now. At any point were we thinking about using them for the heavy, repetitive, systematic labour characteristic of slavery…? We have no fields to tend - no crops to bring in, their lives in our village will be almost exactly the same as the lives they would have led in their own - the only differnec being they will be wives of our tribe, rather than their own.

as to calling hunter-gatherer/tribal warfare 20x more deadly, yeah, its a specific number, because thats what you get when you calculate the average death-rate in hunter-gatherer groups due to violence compared to our own.

I misunderstood, I thought you meant that their methods of killing were 20 times more efficient, I see now you mean solely the likelyhood of meeting a violent end is 20 times greater. Fair enough.

[MagsJ (Surya Loka.. triumvirate)]

@Cyrene

Uh, why?

the only reason its ‘for survival’ is because so many tribes are so violent/religious scared/insane. And lots of hunter-gatherer’s/tribes take slaves when its not for survival, say when its for slavery’s sake.

Don’t see how forcing some dead man’s children to cook/carry wood for you when you could potentially get other people to do it as ‘for survival’. Though in lots of cases, as i argued above, its probably almost a ‘necessity’ i mean, if some tribe takes all your women, its essentially, take other women or die out.

My ancestor’s tribe were the ones taking all the women and killing off all their men to near extinction! but why, I don’t know

…alll the fun of the fair!

[Cyrene]

I misunderstood, I thought you meant that their methods of killing were 20 times more efficient, I see now you mean solely the likelyhood of meeting a violent end is 20 times greater. Fair enough.

its kinda both. 60% of people’s populations were wiped out. that doesn’t happen today. (well minus some extreme examples) the others enslaved.

don’t get me wrong, i’m sure i’d act exactly like you described if i was born to a hunter-gatherer society. but that meant enslaving women, in the true slave and sexual sense, after potentially stabbing to death some old man like in your example.

[MagsJ (Surya Loka.. triumvirate)]

These high-tech times make for high-tech deaths, en masse.

[Anvil]

but that meant enslaving women, in the true slave and sexual sense

You still see no difference…?

Okay, let’s go slaving, this time, not for wives, but for money.

Scenario 1: Capturing slaves for sale.

We are given a set of (external) criteria by the speculative buyer that equates to “good slave material” and use that, rather than our own criteria, for choosing victims. Unlike sexual slaving, in which we use our own (internal) aesthetic, or at least gene-driven criteria.

Rather than a two man, sexually frustrated raiding party, this time it is the whole tribe, experienced and well armed. After killing as few of the victims as possible in order to achieve passification. We have a choice. Either we kill all the people who don’t fulfill our criteria then and there, or simply chain them all together and march them off to the holding pens and sort them out there.

I’d say killing them there is asking for trouble. Better to use the old and frail to keep the more hale and hearty will-be-slaves occupied during the march. It’s hard to form a good rebellion with your handicapped mother-in-law constantly nagging in your ear.

So, get them all to the pens, leaving the march to weed out the worst, kill any real no-hopers in some horrific fashion under the excuse of some made up infraction of the ‘rules’ to serve as examples to the other of what happens to naughty slaves. And, I suppose yes, have sex with the pretty girls while the deal is being sealed, unless the criteria specifies ‘untouched’.

Count your money and go home to your wives.

Scenario 2: Capturing slaves for your own use.

To have something for the slaves to do, to justify the bread and water required to keep them alive, you’d need a large populated society, with agriculture and job specialization, which probably means there are enough females knocking about to prevent major sexual frustration, and let’s face it, prostitution is a specialized career niche, likely to have been filled in an advanced and stratified population.

Off we go, loaded up to the gills with advanced weapons technology, and capture absolutely everybody. Herd them off to the pens, and let others sort them out, cos sorting out is not our job, we just bring 'em in alive goddamnit. Go home to wife, or grab our pay and head off to the local whorehouse, where the women are less likely to cry, less likely to bite (unless you pay them extra) and more likely to be… experienced.

Actually. Cyrene. Forget it, you’re right, with sexual slaving and ‘normal’ slaving, perhaps the methods of procurement are different - but the end result is largely the same. For want of a better word ‘full’ slavery, only the task given to the slave is different.

Well. Damn.