Torture’s not very effective on people you’ve killed.
Effective? We are not dealing with sensible/logical people here, and it is high time we quit pretending they will do the sensible/logical thing.
But it’s a very effective means of causing suffering, which is the actual core goal. The Right has always considered women the source of all evil and deserving of punishment, and always believed that the point of pregnancy and childbirth was a divinely-ordained method of torturing women. In their ideal world every woman would in a state of constant, agonizing pain and never know an instant of happiness or pleasure.
Plus, they do think that torture is effective on people they’ve killed; that’s the point of Hell, after all.
Okay, serious question for you.
Do you actually believe this is literally true? Or are you using hyperbole to rouse opposition to the right?
Of course it’s true, it’s been true for centuries. Women are the “Daughters of Eve”, the source of all evil in the world and it is the religious duty of all true believers to ensure women suffer for their innate sinfulness. God demands it.
So not just subordinate to men but in a state of constant pain?
Can you cite right wing figures that have expressed this belief?
The Republican state legislators in North Carolina, for starters.
What did they say?
They said it was OK to kill women trying to get an abortion.
Is it hyperbole? A little. But the Republicans have structured their abortion laws over the years in a way to maximize the pain and suffering of women, both those needing abortions and those with many other health issues, while doing nothing to actually prevent the need for abortions. The conclusion that the cruelty is the point is pretty easy to draw.
And that’s not even getting into their expressed views on rape, nor their attacks on women’s rights across the board.
Again, that’s a policy of subordinating women, not a method of inflicting constant pain on women.
Not according to conservative economic historians who have studied the issue in depth, and liberal economic historian critics of the preceding. (Except for your last sentence, which was not explicitly addressed IIRC.) Bigger picture, it doesn’t take much actual punishment to create a reign of terror; doubling or quadrupling that won’t give you a constant stream of torture and death. Economically, torture policies were effective: we know this because agricultural working hours dropped sharply after the civil war as former slaves transitioned to the status of free men (albeit ones under debt peonage). So there’s evidence that large and small forced labor plantations were businesslike.
Humans, especially conservatives, are sensitive to pecking orders. I think that malice is secondary and indeed is spurred by an urge to prop the oppressor’s status. That still leaves plenty of room for it.
I recall reading how some places, it was a standard practice to regularly whip pregnant slaves under the theory that it somehow would create the proper submissive attitude in the baby. You greatly overestimate their rationality.
As for “conservative economic historians”, as conservatives they are by definition monsters themselves and their claims mean nothing. I’m not going to listen to the opinions of Nazis or the equivalent on slavery.
Slavery might have resulted in more hours worked, but that’s not the metric any business should care about. Free labor is what results in more actual productivity.
That’s why I included liberal critics of the same in my claim, though the conservative work helped earn its authors a Nobel Prize. Wiki on Robert Fogel.
Hard agree. I’m saying that slave drivers using forced labor are heavily influenced by economic forces. If it were all fun, games, torture, and mayhem, it would be more bloodbath than fear.
It was; the bloodbath was called the Civil War. The South was less economically productive than the North, but prosperity was less important to them than slavery.
Which is much like we see right now, even if the issues are different. The Right is consistently more interested in hurting people than in their own welfare or self interest.
You are shifting the terrain of the debate, but yeah. Slavery was a viable industry: contrary to what southern apologists once claimed it was not going to die out on its own. A wave of bankruptcies would have occurred after the world price of cotton collapsed, but that just would have resulted in transfers of ownership. Slave societies such as the antebellum south and the ancient world for that matter tend to be weak on technological development. But that’s not going to persuade slaveholders, who are invested in their system in multiple ways.
In fact, there’s every reason to believe that they would have attempted to spread the system in Central America. If the North had given up, it would have developed fine on its own, though it would have faced a long border with a militaristic third world shithole country to its south.
So that gets a pass? Harm is harm. The motive for it is largely irrelevant.
The thing was the slave owners saw themselves as gentlemen farmers (ie people who owned farms but didn’t personally do any physical farming) whose defining characteristic was their land ownership, with slaves just being a secondary asset.
But that wasn’t the reality. The reality was the agriculture in this period (especially cotton) was very destructive to land. Plantation owners found they were producing fewer crops no matter how hard they made the slaves work. So every year plantation owners would sell off slaves to balance the books.
Part of plantation owners’ self-image was that the plantation was a solid social unit, with everybody, owner and slave alike, happy with their place. In an ideal plantation, slaves would be born on the plantation and spend their entire lives there, content with their situation. Only “bad” slaves rejected this and needed to be sold.
But this self-image clashed with the economic reality. Plantation owners needed to sell slaves because they needed the money. So they had to find reasons to identify some slaves as being “bad” in order to justify selling them.
Another aspect of this was the one mentioned; a constant need for new territory. With the soil depletion in existing plantations, the only way to maintain a market for slaves was for there to be new plantations being founded in new territories. So plantation owners in Virginia and the Carolinas sold slaves to plantation owners in Tennessee and Alabama. And when those plantation owners wore out their land and needed money, they sold to new plantation owners in Mississippi and Arkansas. And then the plantation owners in Mississippi and Arkansas sold slaves to plantation owners in Missouri and Texas.
But it wasn’t a working solution. When southern politicians were trying to get slavery established in places like New Mexico and Kansas, it wasn’t just the plantation owners in Texas and Missouri looking to sell slaves there. All those plantation owners in Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee were still around competing for the sales market.
Abolitionists saw this. They knew if they could prevent the spread of slavery into new states, it would collapse in the states where it already existed.
Ironically, it was a black man who figured out how to farm economically while still preserving the productivity of the land.