Growing crops isn’t like engineering. If you can grow cotton and tobacco, you can grow food plants. As for when, well, you can always look at when your neighbours do things, if you don’t know (but they did!).
OK, so one-at-a-time, then, but at least it’s point-to-point, so they need never see me. I’m sure I can spend a year or so getting everyone I want tagged with locator nanites or somesuch, and then VOOP! off they go, all in one stream.
I think there’s a limit to how rich you can get replicating gold and so forth, particularly if you want to keep yourself a secret and avoid causing a worldwide philosophical/theological crisis or total crash of all markets. However, there’s no limit to how rich you can get by inventing things a few years ahead of time and patenting them. I’m not sure what the key inventions were between 1890 and 1920 or so, but I’m inventing the fuck out of all of them (assuming I have an almanac of some sort on board my craft). (I can also then discover oil deposits, and so forth.)
It also occurs to me that there’s at least one context in which frying slavers down to the ground does NOT just result in massive starvation, which is whatever war parties are going out into Africa and capturing previously unenslaved people.
So my revised plan of action is (ignoring things like protecting myself, because that’s not the interesting part of this hypothetical):
(1) Go over to Africa, figure out where the slavers are actually going out and capturing previously unenslaved people. Immediately kill everyone involved in that practice. Free everyone who is held captive over there and presumably has a decent chance of making it back to wherever they came from. Raze the ports and all shipping facilities to the ground. I’ll do my best to make it all seem plausibly non-supernatural…
(2) Create a small amount of instant wealth, hook up with existing abolitionists, and start funding a new underground railroad, and lay the basis for organizations to help provide social help and education for freed slaves.
(3) Invent a bunch of useful things, become the wealthiest man in the world
(4) Fund really large scale education and social programs so that stuff will be in place to keep freed slaves from just starving to death
(5) At this point, really ramp up freeing slaves. I think I’ll basically use every possible non-supernatural means here… as many individual escapes into the (now very well funded and equipped) underground railroad as possible. Political pressure. Sabotage. Assassination. Bribes. Outright purchase and manumission if practical. Etc.
Basically, I don’t want the history books 50 years later to say “God/aliens came and freed the slaves”, nor do I want it to say “millions of slaves were freed and then basically ended up as ignorant sharecroppers with no political voice”, I want it to say “one remarkable individual made the largest fortune the world has ever seen as an inventor and then used it to free the slaves and do his best to help them through the transition… and a lot of random events happened to go randomly in his favor as well”.
Unilaterally going out and destroying people and institutions that depend on slavery, all by yourself, seems suspiciously like terrorism and tyranny mixed into one sweet concoction.
I mean, in my view, choosing for people what their life occupation should be and what the reward/punishment system is for that occupation, before the person is even born, seems pretty immoral. But in someone else’s view, choosing to terminate pregnancies just because you couldn’t wait till you were financially stable and have a husband is equivalent to murder. I wouldn’t be very happy if the person who believed that powered himself up with technomagic and started vaporizing women.
The answers to slavery are:
Demonstrating that the potential educational attainment cap for humans is equivalent across race and sex.
Demonstrating that mechanization of the work force and factory production has greater growth potential than cheap labor.
Note that mine is a completely non-violent method, BTW.
Ha Ha Ha. We can’t even get the racists on this board to agree on that now, when all the science and a century+ of experience are on our side. What makes you think it’ll work on people intimately economically and culturally invested in the opposite being true?
As MrDibble points out, we can’t do that even now. How would we do it then?
Furthermore, there’s not some inescapable link between slavery and racial superiority. There have been plenty of societies which practiced slavery and didn’t think “those guys are inferior”, but rather “those guys are slaves because we fought and they lost, tough titties”. I don’t know how far a hypothetical-future-CSA might be from that, but it’s certainly not an impossible position to hold.
The trouble with using your tech to wipe out slavery is that all the slaveowner sympathisers will think forever more that they were strong-armed out of it in a case of might makes right, which doesn’t cure the root problem.
Having said that from a utilitarian point of view, call me John Brown 'cos I’m heading to Harpers Ferry with guns blazing. I actually see a three-pronged offensive. The first step would be boosting abolitionist resource (even if those men are all talk, and what we need is action!). Give the US the tech advantage to take back what it lost from Johnny Reb once the next showdown inevitably comes and give the abolitionists the finances and resources for endless publications.
Stage 2; Slave liberation. Surreptitiously, through agents and aliases, purchase as many slaves as possible. With my resources create a railroad to the US and facilities to educate (and arm) these ex-slaves. Start to terminate the worst plantation owners and slave traders, with extreme prejudice.
Stage 3; The hammer falls. Open attack on the Confederacy with all the asskicking my future tech can bring to bear and encourage the US, the freed slaves and those still in bondage that this is the moment to strike the blow against tyranny and correct history’s mistake. While I’m at it, settle accounts with Europe since things will be pretty FUBAR if the Confederacy got support from over there.
Bugger the slaves. All this do-gooding has achieved as far as I’m concerned is to strand me on this shithole of a world where my bosses cannot rescue me, and the least I owe to myself with my godlike powers is to make myself Emperor of Earth. The petty squabbles of those who are presently top of the heap and those who aren’t do not need to concern me. I’ll be asking both of them “Who’s the Daddy?” before the year’s out, without fear or favour.
Right now, we can’t demonstrate that the bell curves are the exact same shape. But we can easily demonstate that there are genius women, African-Americans, Native Americans, etc.
Frederick Douglass was writing during that era, for example. Pair him with some studies on feral children and how they never develop fully, when not raised with a proper human education during their formative years, and you’ve got a pretty strong argument.
Which Frederick Douglass himself presumably made. I’m skeptical inthe extreme that pure logic and science is going to be able to convince a nation which, 30 years in the past carved itself into existence through a long and bloody war dedicated to the principle of slavery and negro inferiority, that they were wrong and they should really just drop the whole thing, mmm-kay? Even really solid and immediate and irrefutable proof wouldn’t do it, and if we had that today we would have a lot fewer theads about that topic on the SDMB.
And yet, history has shown an increasing movement towards enfranchisement as technology, science, and education have improved.
I would view a successful military win for the South as having been a temporary setback. But in the long run, things are going to right themselves. Having me going around murdering people is probably going to hurt more than it’s going to help.
The problem with that argument, to me, is that you just take it to the extreme and it results in never doing ANYTHING at all, in a Star Trek prime directive sense.
“Oh, hey, from my spaceship I see that a crew of murderous pirates is bearing down on a ship full of women and children. Every single one of those pirates is a horrible homicidal monster. But really, the solution to piracy isn’t actually fighting pirates, it’s educating people about the economic benefits of safe international trade. So I’ll just move my finger away from this firing button… if any of those victims survive the raping and kidnapping and enslaving that awaits them I’m sure that in the long run they’ll appreciate what I did…”
I just had to come by (It’s been a while; I’ve been wandering) and drop in a historical contextual footnote.
[Note that I’m certainly not condoning the practice of slavery (or even indentured servitude.)]
I feel it’s important for everyone playing to understand that slavery was not invented by the American Colonists and wasn’t even invented by Europeans. The practice of keeping and ordering-around slaves predates biblical records.* The practice of loading slaves onto ships in Africa and bringing them to the Colonies (later the United States) of America was an exploitation of existing practices. Slaves already existed in Africa, generally as the POWs from inter-tribal territorial warfare.
So returning the ships’ cargos to their source or destroying the ships before they pick up their cargo isn’t going to stop the enslavement of those peoples or the territorial wars that displaced them. And killing ‘everyone involved in that practice’ would really mean killing everyone in Africa – because all of the different tribes were doing it to each other; it was simply an accepted byproduct of their conflicts (no different than in Rome, Egypt, etcetera) – and then you’re swapping slavery for genocide:smack:. The innovative twist on the practice was to take a ship across the sea and say, “Hey, I’ll take those guys off your hands for ya!” and take them to the USA to make a profit.
So maybe this is the seed of a separate thread: How could a time-traveler prevent the invention of the practice of slavery?
–G?
BTW, Evil Captor, everything but the last sentence in Post 29 just fit your moniker so darn well…until Ms. Mith537 trumped you.:eek:
My understanding, and I may be way off here, is that there were only a small number of places that were set up for the large scale and systematic exchange of lots-of-slaves for lots-of-goods, the loading of those slaves into ships for the middle passage, and so forth. It might be an impossible task to eradicate slavery in Africa, but it should be possible to at least temporarily stop the practice of large-scale selling of those slaves to westerners in oceangoing vessels.
I’m also under the impression that the form of slavery practiced in Africa was generally not chattel slavery as practiced in the American south where families were routinely broken up, children of slaves were guaranteed to be slaves, and so forth; although I’m willing to be corrected (and I may be confusing slavery-in-Africa with things like slavery-in-ancient-Rome.)
I object to that characterization. My plan is not suspiciously like terrorism; it IS terrorism.
But it ain’t tyranny. Tyranny is too much work. And I’m not sweet.
As my great-great-great-great-grandfather said just before the Commonwealth hanged up for teaching slaves how to read, fuck that shit. Slave traders are at war with their victims. If stopping them requires a nice neat lead injection, so be it.
That’s not to say that I’d use the technomagic weapons to overthrow the CSA, by the way. THAT gets complicated and probably won’t work with just one person, no matter how powerful, and I agree with the people who want a subtler solution. But people actively involved in capturing people to sell as slaves? Stop 'em by the most efficient means necessary. If that doesn’t involve killing them, fine. If that does involve killing 'em – boo-hoo.
Doesn’t help the people currently being oppressed.
I also object to the suggestion that I am not already corrupt.
Yes, I secretly use the technology to destroy the right (or wrong) parties.
I also use tons of gold to publicly support and even create anti-slavery and public welfare groups, support education for freed slaves, build companies that employ them and others, etc.
After all, just wrecking shit doesn’t build anything in the long run. You also have to create the circumstances for that better future.
Then as now, there are a great many evils in the world, and from the little I know of history the only difference between the lot of the Russian peasant and the American chattel slave is that the former is not actually called a slave, while the latter enjoys warmer winters. And so on for much of the rest of the world. The only stand-out point as far as the CSA and the slaves are concerned is that they, unlike the oppressed in Russia, China and elsewhere - to say nothing of the ignorant savages in many corners of the world leading lives that are nasty, brutish and short - share a common language with me.
So, not being American and hence also not Americocentric, I figure, once my desire to be emperor of the world has worn off, I’ll be looking to improve the lot of all mankind and not just the one section of it where the injustice is made more visible by the colour of people’s skin. That, I figure, probably means I spend the time and resources I have playing Vandervecken. True, I don’t have a Protector’s lifespan nor his intelligence, but the tech I have at my disposal should help to fill the gap. The Brennan-monster put paid to organlegging by helping Earth to invent synthetic livers and kidneys, and if I can’t figure out a way to make slavery and its near kindred everywhere uneconomic by comparison with the alternative, I don’t deserve to go around indulging my fantasies with unstoppable weapons and unbreachable defences.
