PSA: When you reply to an obvious troll, that reply gets eaten right along with the troll’s post when the don’t-push-your-luck dragon comes along.
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But to present “Slavery wasn’t so bad” as part of a reasonable spectrum of opinion. . . a case of being open to opposing views, unlike those evil liberals who are slavishly devoted to the view that slavery was bad. . . is intellectually dishonest, no?
“Open-mindedness” in defense of slavery is a merely a rhetorical ploy, one that conservatives never get tired of using.
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“You’re just cherry-picking!” as some might have said in a different thread.
I’m almost disappointed those intellects are not firing their ammunition in here…
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No citation, but I’ve read roughly the same. That slave labor hid the real costs of production, and blinded and fettered – ironically - the south to this system that would be unprofitable w/o slave labor. Hence their continuation of farm-life without investing in industrialization – there was no possibility of rational competition.
Are you thinking of Forbes?
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Isn’t the tagline just so … informed?
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What is notably missing is “the people responsible for approving this review have been sacked.”
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Yeah, on the one hand, economists could probably learn something from the data; on the other hand, the article is written by and for giggling schoolboys
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Sometimes this kind of crap is too bizarre for me to wrap my head around, and too depressing to want to try very hard.
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As long as we’re discussing slavery, I just read this at slate
The Testimony of a Laborer Forced Into Peonage in Early 20th-Century Alabama
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Hmm, London has quite a racial price differential.
I agree, but if that is the case then capitalism as an amoral instrument needs to be tempered by thoughtful government regulation to ensure ethical outcomes.
And the response of the neocons is that this isn’t necessary, because capitalism is in fact a kind of moral perfection where everyone gets exactly what they deserve.
This discussion about slavery shines such a penetrating light on that fiction that it simply can’t be ignored, and the complete breakdown of rational thought demonstrated by this reviewer is fascinating. And horrifying.
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[quote=“doctorow, post:1, topic:40618”]
because they were treated as property, the slaves must have gotten a better deal[/quote]
I mean, it’s basically enterprise bargaining. MLK was such a whiny troublemaker!
The accompaning text reads
A prostitute’s rates also vary according to her ethnicity and nationality. What attracts a premium in one place can attract a penalty in another. According to our analysis, in four big American cities and London, black women earn less than white ones (see chart 4).
We had too few data from other cities for a reliable breakdown by ethnicity. But Christine Chin of the American University in Washington, DC, has studied high-end transnational prostitutes in several countries. In Kuala Lumpur, she found, black women command very high rates and in Singapore, Vietnamese ones do. In Dubai, European women earn the most. What counts as exotic and therefore desirable varies from place to place, and depends on many factors, such as population flows.
Probably, they are referring to Chin’s “Cosmopolitan Sex Workers: Women and Migration in a Global City”
Y’know, I’ve wondered about that. I remember when Steve Forbes ran for President in '96, and presumably his magazine (or, the political content therein) would reflect his views, yet the pieces I’ve seen from the Forbes website have been all over the figurative map, politically speaking. At one point Google News was calling Forbes my “preferred source” and would serve up a number of headlines for my consideration. But the more I read, the more it seemed like the writer just pulled that out of their ass and, ironically, these seemed to be the business-related articles.
[quote=“Lexicat, post:91, topic:40618”]
Never said they were.[/quote]I thought you did when you said you “would much prefer people simply honestly state their assumptions and values up front.” I possibly misinterpreted. I can see that it’s a very reasonable request in some contexts.
I guess by “approaching objectivity” I mean that we stand somewhere on a line (plane? hypertorus?) between a “god’s-eye view” objectivity and flat-out epistemic chaos (where literally everything is maximally nonsensical); that we seem to be at least a little bit aware of when some ideas are closer to sense than nonsense; and that we can get better at moving our ideas along that line, one way or the other. It’s making use of whatever it is you bump into that could push you to claim that social constructionism is preferable to, say, positivism. I tend toward the postmodern end of things, too, btw (though I haven’t been able to go so far as to accept that reality itself is socially constructed).
I’m also not entirely sure what “trying to be objective” is. But I think merely being self-aware enough to “try to try” would satisfy me. At least there’s a “good faith” thing going on there. Plenty of writers out there are definitely not doing even that much. I think a lot of people who ask for at least one “objective” journal are hoping for a publication they can trust to maintain that sort of humility.
It was horribly biased. Sure, biased in a way I’m sympathetic to, but biased none the same. Zinn was the king of the progressive liberals, and you can tell it.
Then regulate the bad parts out, government exists for reasons such as this. Just because we misapply government or somehow got deluded into thinking “regulation” is a bad word doesn’t make it less so.
Humans are also vile, thriving, murderous assholes on some level, and thus we created a series of laws and other institutions to help minimize or suppress these tendencies. So be it with capitalism.
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“Good faith” goes a long, long way. In fact while I got beef with “objectivity” (Oh, it is ON!), I think that honesty is tremendously valuable.
I am definitely not of the ‘all reality is socially constructed’ camp (though certainly most human reality is socially produced). I will have to ruminate on the geometric metaphor you invoke… see what I want or do not want with it. I tend to see ethics and epistemology as organized in complex hierarchies (in the formal senses, not necessarily or exclusively in terms of power/dominance). Therefore, we aerobes have a particular way of valuing an oxygenated atmosphere and ecology in a way that anaerobes cannot share. Similarly, those of us who are transgender, or from poor-as-dirt backgrounds or who get around by sailing from one island in the archipelago to the next in our day-to-day are situated in ways that shape our values, world-views, power, access, etc… including in the ways we do our science and that shaping is not undesirable.
For example, when transgender scientists start mixing their transgender perspectives with their science (e.g. ecologist Joan Roughgarden, economist Dierdre McClosky) valuable insights emerge that are either unavailable or tremendously unlikely to emerge for scientific viewpoints deeply situated in cisgender perspectives. (Standpoint theory and Donna Harraway’s situated perspective are informative here.) Hearken back to Lysenkoism under Stalinist USSR and the mockery that scientists in capitalist social democracies made of scientists operating under the influence of USSR-style communism… but the scientists in capitalist social democracies seldom think about the ways that their science is (profoundly) influenced by capitalism and by statism, and even more rarely enact science to counter those influences.
Anywho. We are far afield here: Boo! Bad The Economist! No overthrowing racism for a more just society award for you.
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Which is still leagues off from being a real slave. My job sucks, and I’m not being paid enough, but Im far far better off than slave.
There is the one (rather fantastic) option that could happily make sense of this.
It could simply be that someone at The Economist is not only a capitalist, but also quite subversive in their sense of humor. The whole review could have just been a way to welcome the wonderful Ms. Streisand’s force onto a book that might otherwise have gone unnoticed.
The book’s release date is September 9th. It isn’t out until this Tuesday.
Currently, The Half Has Never Been Told has these rankings on Amazon (they get updated hourly):
• #258 in Books (as of July, Amazon listed 32.8 million books for sale)
• #1 in Books > History > Americas > United States > Civil War > Abolition
• #2 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Specific Demographics > African-American Studies
• #2 in Books > History > Historical Study & Educational Resources
Currently on Goodreads, two people have rated it one star, one person 4 stars, one person 5 stars (the only person to actually write a review of the book was one of the one star reviewers who explained where she received her advance copy from) and 443 people have marked it as to-read.
Then there’s the Kirkus Review posted online: June 17th, 2014. It’s a basically positive review, and it made no news whatsoever. There’s not even a single comment at the site - unless they’ve been removed - for three months there hasn’t been one.
It describes the book as “occasionally tedious” and calls it an “exhaustive tome”, but then says, “this is a complicated story involving staggering scholarship that adds greatly to our understanding of the history of the United States.”
Since by now on BoingBoing someone would typically have mentioned the Streisand Effect - but no one has - I’m stepping up and mentioning it as well as the other bits. Obviously there’s no way to know if this was all just a way to sell more “tomes” - but it sure makes an entertaining version of the story!
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