The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro (1852)
historyisaweapon.com
historyisaweapon.com
From the Wikipedia article about him:
> Frederick Douglass (born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey; c. February 1818 – February 20, 1895) was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, gaining note for his oratory and incisive antislavery writings.
"Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom. But reading is still the path."
Also, perhaps my favourite part describing the reaction to a speech by Douglass:
"His very appearance and demeanour destroyed the then- prevalent myth of the 'natural servility' of African-Americans. By all accounts his eloquent analysis of the evils of slavery was one of the most brilliant debuts in American oratorical history.
William Lloyd Garrison, the leading abolitionist of the day, sat in the front row. When Douglass finished his speech. Garrison rose, turned to the stunned audience, and challenged them with a shouted question:
'Have we been listening to a thing, a chattel personal, or a man?'
'A man! A man!' the audience roared back as one voice.
'Shall such a man be held a slave in a Christian land?' called out Garrison.
'No! No!' shouted the audience.
And even louder, Garrison asked: 'Shall such a man ever be sent back to bondage from the free soil of Old Massachusetts?' And now the crowd was on its feet, crying out 'No! No! No!'
He never did return to slavery."
I believe this same thing holds true for coding and the modern day African American ( of which I am one ). I earn 6x more than my father ( Fisk University / TSU - BS/Masters ), 3x more than my sister ( Yale / Columbia Educated Architect - BS/Masters ) and an even greater multiple more than the rest of my family - yet I have no college education. I truly wish more African Americans saw that coding is the new literacy and IMO a real path to freedom.
It is a different kind of coding that software engineering, to be sure, and there will be a grey area between data work and actual coding. But based on what I'm starting to see (I work regularly with academics who struggle with this), it is reasonable to call their analytical work a kind of coding - in fact, I'm not sure there's any other way to describe it. I'm starting to see the amount of R, Python, or other languages analysts need to write to truly dig into complex data, to the point where you can really get insight into it. We can debate where the line between coding and mere analysis starts and ends, but what I'm seeing ventures well into the territory where it is most accurate to call it coding.
I do think differently about problems well outside the realm of CS because of my background in CS. You don't strictly need to code to develop this kind of thinking, but coding is a good way to develop it. For me, it has been as fundamental as literary analysis or mathematical proof.
This is very clearly false. I'll sidestep the semantic argument regarding pen/paper vs a keyboard, but the bottom line is that reading and writing are fundamental communication skills that represent the bedrock of civilization and while computers are obviously a revolutionary and world-changing technology the likes of which we've never seen before, the same can be said of physics, chemistry, metallurgy, agriculture etc. These skills just aren't a requirement for being a productive citizen (like reading and writing); they're just not.
> I think people really overlook how fundamentally algorithmic thinking structures your mind
People overlook lots of important insights about psychology, biology, and physics, it doesn't mean those things are fundamental skills comparable to literacy.
> but coding is a good way to develop it
I totally agree that writing code is a guaranteed way to enhance logical and critical thinking skills but the same is true of studying logic directly, or physics, biology etc
That goes well beyond "simply a lucrative trade", though, doesn't it? Even if we disagree about whether it is fundamental in and of itself (akin to algorithmic thinking), or just similar to physics or studying logic directly.
Sure. When I say it is "simply a lucrative trade" I don't mean to characterize programming as sterile or mundane, I only mean to suggest that the programmer's vaunted status as a profession is a function of the current labor market and not a function of some quality specific to the ability to write software. Writing software is a trade-skill subject to market forces, literacy is a critical thinking skill more akin to logic itself.
False dichotomy, these things you distinguish are just two sides of the same coin:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry%E2%80%93Howard_correspon...
If the total number of senior engineers on the market increased 10,000% overnight, the value of programming as a skill would instantly plummet, given the same scenario for rates of literacy, the value of literacy would remain the same or perhaps even increase. This is because literacy is a force multiplier in all aspects of career advancement while software programming simply isn't.
If you glance anywhere outside the IT echo-chamber to examine the value of literacy vs programming the point I'm making becomes very obvious. Nearly every high prestige profession (lawyer, doctor, scientist, architect, author etc) is amplified by literary skills whereas this is obviously untrue for programming.
I think you are playing semantics, my argument is simply that coding can be as fundamental to earning a living as literacy and unlike many other occupations there are no gatekeepers that tell you what/when you can code - thus it gives you the freedom to work to improve yourself and your situation in ways that other occupations do not. I have no interest in debating the fundamental building blocks of learning etc... only the tactical dat to day skills that can add value to ones life but I would like to see your GitHub profile. Here is mine - https://github.com/ArionHardison. I also have 0 interest in your supposition, do you have any empirical evidence to back up the assertion that coding in 30 years will be akin to being a lawyer?
Note: To assert that someone would be able to code well enough to hold a job whole also being functionally illiterate is simply moronic.
Meanwhile coding IS a way of communication in itself (as is something like math), but it boils down to being a specification for the behavior of an agent. The versatility that it grants you in the job market, or the algorithmic thinking that it cultivates on the day to day just doesn't seem comparable to the advantages of reading. Text is a literal inscription of the languages used to express the entirety of the human experience verbally. Any programming language just can't compete with the value of being able to read general text (the value added just isn't the same).
Perhaps it is moronic to reduce "literacy" to a binary attribute. Are you deliberately misinterpreting my statements or do you honestly believe I'm here arguing for a definition of literacy that stops at 1st grade language arts? Increased literacy translates into increased ability to communicate effectively and intentionally. Increased literacy translates into faster knowledge acquisition and higher productivity gains.
Many engineers I've worked with have excellent literary skills, but many have poor literary skills and it is very obvious when those poorly developed skills are holding them back; it is especially noticeable among those who have an aversion to books or dense technical literature and supplement their experience almost exclusively with videos and by following tutorials. I'm not knocking videos or tutorials, I use them and I think everyone should, but if you're not also utilizing and improving literary skills you will always be overshadowed by those who are.
Consider the example of the developer who jumps into a new framework on the job and just starts hacking away until they've got a functioning MVP, but in the process also wastes 8 hours trying to demystify the behavior of a complex API by running tutorial code rather than spending an hour doing a comprehensive read through the documentation after which everything makes sense. Consider the missed opportunities for otherwise talented individuals who simply lack the literary skills necessary to participate in ongoing written communication with non-technical management, executives, and business partners. Consider the loss of productivity from poorly written or non-existent documentation. I see this kind of thing all the time.
> I think you are playing semantics, my argument is simply that coding can be as fundamental to earning a living as literacy
I am not "playing semantics", I explicitly disagree with the notion that "coding can be as fundamental to earning a living as literacy", it simply doesn't get any more "fundamental" than being able to read and write and there is nothing "fundamental" about code writing skills that cuts across almost every track of occupational advancement the way that literary skills do. Don't misunderstand, I'm not suggesting that logical thinking skills do not cut across all domains, I'm saying that coding skills do not, they are not at all the same thing.
> there are no gatekeepers that tell you what/when you can code
Such is the case for all artisanal skills, it is only that writing code happens to be in very high demand at this time so it is a smart economic choice given the available options, but that obviously won't last forever and is clearly contingent on a market demand for the skillset. Literacy, on the other hand, is a timeless skill that pays dividends indefinitely in the advancement of one's career regardless of the industry.
> it gives you the freedom to work to improve yourself and your situation in ways that other occupations do not
Not true. Practice makes perfect with code, just like anything else, it's only that nobody is going to pay someone with 1 year of experience a 60k salary to produce hobbyist level paintings and music, thus "the freedom to work to improve yourself" becomes "things I don't have time to do because I'm working".
> I would like to see your GitHub profile
Why? I don't measure my career success by a matrix of green squares displayed on a corporation's website. Seriously, who cares? This is kinda what I'm talking about. Your github profile is just self-aggrandizing noise in the technocratic bubble of the software industry, it's not inherently important.
> I also have 0 interest in your supposition, do you have any empirical evidence to back up the assertion that coding in 30 years will be akin to being a lawyer?
I didn't say it was a proven fact, only that it is something I suspect - but to offer some reasoning for this suspicion
1. Year over year developers are able to produce more and more, with less bugs, at faster rates and cheaper costs. 30 years ago, you couldn't pay an experienced team of 10 to do what a single mid-level dev can accomplish with Rails and AWS today (i.e. doing more with less = less demand for engineers = lower wages)
2. Open source greatly exacerbates this effect and it is compounding as more and more open source software matures and is able to do more. (i.e. tools that get better and easier with 0 cost = lower barrier to entry in the industry = higher supply of engineers = lower wages)
3. An explosion of interest in the field spurred by high salaries, high prestige, popular media, deliberate awareness campaigns, a burgeoning bootcamp industry and an unlimited springwell of high quality resources for free online. (i.e. large influx of new engineers * explosion of free high quality learning resources = big spike in supply of quality engineers = lower wages)
4. Increasing saturation of software markets. We see it pretty much across the spectrum of software from apps and games to office and web; the only area that isn't saturated yet is B2B but that won't last forever either. How many times in how many languages can we remake the same CRUD application before companies start to realize that open-source or off-the-shelf software can be much more cheaply deployed and maintained by an agency as opposed to recruiting and managing an expensive software department? Obviously, software companies can't really do that, but it is becoming increasingly viable for every other industry to do so as the software gets better and better.
All these trends are increasing in intensity and amplifying each-other, the golden era of the engineer won't last forever.
2. There is actually no #2. I have work to do, the things I build help people so while you may take this reductionist attitude toward me and my work it really does not matter because as long as I can push code and use that as a mechanism to distribute my ideas at scale to cause measurable change in the lives of others my code matters - I suspect Fredrick Douglas would be proud of that as where you are just all talk.
Also, https://dietmanager.com - my work is FAR from a simple CRUD app but good luck w/ that.
lol, come on man, do you honestly think I care about proving my accomplishments to random internet strangers? I don't even care about proving it to IRL strangers.
> that "self-aggrandizing noise" is social proof and as I suspected you refuse to provide any
I don't feel like I need to prove anything to you; my statements stand on their own. I also hope the irony of asking a black guy to dox himself in order to prove that he's actually real isn't lost on you. If I had said I was white would you feel the need to ask for proof of my accomplishments? A successful black engineer who disagrees with you is not a unicorn.
> There is always someone like you that attacks what I have done and claims the same but can never provide a single piece of evidence to support their claim.
I'm not sure why you're being so defensive. Seriously, please copy and paste ANYTHING I've said that is attacking you or any of your work. I simply disagree with your assertion that coding is as fundamental to career success as literacy, that's it. I wrote a really long reply with a lot of details explaining my specific reasoning and you completely disregard it in favor of some twisted caricature of my reply that you've decided is a personal attack against you and your work. You're not even hearing what I'm saying so I'll stop here. Good luck on your app.
Edit: e.g. as a product manager, product manager, graphic designer etc...
If anything, seeing more and more NBA players (who tend to be extremely savvy businessmen, at the high end) getting into tech as investors--Steph Curry as a founding investor of Slyce, as an example--might bring visibility into that. A few years after the NBA dress code implementation--and there are things to talk about with regards to that, but that's kind of orthogonal--you saw players like Kevin Durant consciously dress "nerdy", with glasses and sweater vests and the like. I thought Wesley Morris wrote a beautiful piece[0] on the topic, and how, reluctantly or not, those NBA players who are themselves aspirational targets are trying to redefine the possibility space for the people watching them. Maybe that'll help.
You are correct, and you should expand my statement past black communities. I apologize for my bias here as I grew up in an all black poor neighborhood so I often associate this with race but the truth is that its much more socioeconomic than it is racial.
I do wonder what can be further done; the social consciousness of the NBA is one of the reasons I feel good about watching it, and I have anecdotally heard it's made some inroads, but that seems like it's bailing out the ocean. Structural problems, structural fixes...
Actually, according to the Wikipedia article, "The exact date of his birth is unknown, and he later chose to celebrate his birthday on February 14. In his first autobiography, Douglass stated: 'I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it.'"
In 150 years people may well be saying the same thing about the major figures in today's anti-abortion movements.
Two classes of human beings, slaves and women, each deprived of human rights, for valid reasons in the eyes of the supporters of the respective practice.
Unless you wish to argue that bodily integrity [1] is not a human right.
Saying otherwise is equivalent to saying that under certain circumstances it's okay to force someone to keep another being alive for 9 months with continuous blood transfusions while exposing themselves to many dangerous, and potentially fatal, side effects.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/3-human-chimeras-...
It can also lead to someone being of 2 blood types - so that they are compatible with both.
The implication, stated roughly is the following: "A person can do what they want to their own body. And their body is defined by the DNA signature. Whereas a fetus has a different DNA structure than the body it is in, and therefore harming it is depriving it of human rights, because it has different DNA."
I proved this implication wrong. If you feel that this implied statement is not indicative of your intent, please post your implication as a statement rather than engage in obfuscated writings.
And corner cases like Dwight Schrute have nothing to do with it.
Portraying it as an accidental outgrowth, as if someone's body grew a second spleen as an adult, is intellectually dishonest.
1. If you don't want an abortion, don't have one.
2. Quit trying to shove your ethical system on other people.
Even if it was not a fetus but an adult with a fully formed conciousness and personality, this would be a hard demand to make, and our laws reflect that.
Abortion is not about killing, it's about not having a being in your body, potentially wrecking it and killing you. In the same vein, you can stop supporting dependent adults, as an individual (doing that as a society is a different matter). You can just stop. It won't kill them in that case, but that is not what this is about.
If pregnancy was nothing for your body, no stress at all, then carrying to term and giving it up for adoption would be a lot more common. This dimension is often overlooked by people, especially men, I feel. Pregnancy can be insanely hard and dangerous.
I will not go into details since that makes for boring reading for everyone else, but that's what I thought about.
Sorry for being so blunt, but then I thought you might want to know.
They don't look human, they don't act human, absolutely none of them can survive as independent creatures (as most humans can).
If anything, they're kinda weird little monsters that invade women's bodies that could potentially become human, but human they are not.
Rather than call them human (which they're not), or a class of people (which they're not), call them fetuses and then the sophistry around controlling women's access to health care wears away a little.
The evangelical absolutism around abortion is historically new. Before 1980, plenty of evangelical Christians had nuanced views on the topic: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/02/18/the-bibl...
Even some evangelical writers see this as mainly about a wedge issues used for political power, not morality: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2018/07/03/the-con-...
So I think it's no coincidence that at the same time extreme anti-abortion views came to prominence on the US right, the US right became steadily more extreme, with centrists disappearing from the Republican side of the aisle in Congress: https://xkcd.com/1127/large/
My expectation is that this, like all positive feedback loops, will eventually break, and Christians will return to historical norms. And I'd further guess that this will be aided technological advances that make extreme antiabortion views untenable. Look, for example at the question that goes something like, "In a clinic fire, would you save a five year old or a tank with 1,000 embryos?". [1] Advances in medicine, AI, copying minds, and animal uplift would provide many more examples, forcing a debate around what really makes something a legally protected person. If an AI, a human mind moved to silicon, and a dog with a 140 IQ all get citizenship, it'll harder to explain why a nonsentient fertilized human egg gets those protections.
[1] https://www.quora.com/In-the-abortion-debate-isnt-the-5-year...
I like your examples for questions, because they are thought-provoking. Let me add two more: Should a baby born a (2/3..) month (or a day!) premature be less protected than a baby born 3 days late? Would you rather save a five year old, or 20 premature born babies? Or, what do you think about abortions done because the embryo is female.
It seems like the most notable milestone in the entire process, so what makes it arbitrary?
It is certainly the most perceivable milestone. But maybe we can define a status change which is more relevant to the question cell group -> human. Maybe "has consciousness".
My point is that this is a discussion which seems important.
This hinges on the definition of consciousness, which we really don't have a good definition for.
Abortion is condemned in the Didache (late 1st century/early 2nd century CE). There were already rigorously set penalties under canon law for abortion in the 1st millennium. It may be that American Evangelical Christians will return to the moderate views about the issue that they held several decades ago, but it is entire possible that the "historical norms" that any Christian community might return to are the ones even further back in time.
BTW the oath also forbids doctors to treat bladder stones (seemingly for anti-competitive reasons?), so all in all it should, as every ancient text, be interpreted in the historical context.
The deferral to (what I assumed to be) surgeons seems to indicate specialization rather than being anti-competitive. That is, there was a split between "doctors" and "chirurgeons" or surgeons.
> At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation's ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.
The Declaration of Independence was an important and powerful document. An oft-overlooked part is that it set the stage for the end of slavery, a world-wide phenomenon that encompasses known human history, around the world.
At the time of writing, it was more important to keep the country together than to end slavery, but just ~40 years after independence America ended the slave trade, and it was the new nation of the United States of America that freed all slaves less than 100 years after it's founding.
The founders of America truly had a great vision, and created the foundation of a radically new kind of country that beget the end of slavery in the developed world.
The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 abolished slavery throughout the British Empire. The thirteenth amendment to the United States constitution abolished slavery in 1865. So a first approximation is that American independence extended slavery on US soil by 32 years.
America ended all forms of slavery, including indentured servitude, under the 13th amendment after the civil war.
We shed a lot of blood as a country to get that result, the sacrifice of those men and women shouldn’t be so quickly cast aside.
Our Founders knew the fight against slavery was coming, they discussed it extensively in historical records you can look up, but they had bigger fish to fry first when they founded the country. The fact the United States moved so quickly after the ratification of the Constitution to ban slave importation in 1808 shows they had a strong desire to get the issue solved. The country quickly chipped away at it with all things considered.
2) The Royal Proclamation of 1763, which forbid european american settlers from expanding into native American territory, was a major contribution to resentment towards British rule. Not exactly a very honorable thing.
3) As for slavery. The Convict lease system existed until past the 1900s or so. This was an enormous system. Over 70% of the income of the state of Albama was from convict lease system. This was just black slavery under a new name. Not only that but it was significantly more brutal than the old slavery.
4) My wife's side of the family is from Hawaii so I've been there many times. I know all to well about the extent of involuntary servitude placed upon immigrants there. People were beaten lynched, racist laws preventing e.g. Chinese from doing anything but farm work. The whole island was illegally invaded by the US. Hawaii was recognized as a sovereign nation by all of Europe at the time.
Ok, I am not trying to say the US was the worst ever, one always ends up getting those accusations. I merely asking to stop this incessant American tendency to glorify themselves as so much better than everybody else.
Painting the English as some sort of evil tyrants might make sense in India. But in America people tended to enjoy a lot more freedom and lower taxes than anywhere else. Britain had never promised representation to colonial subjects. The US followed the exact same practice in their own colonies. Did not see the Philippines get any representation in the US. Puerto Rico still doesn't.
Not entirely... the 13th amendment makes an exception for "punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted."
Meaning slavery as a private institution is outlawed in the US, but the government is allowed to keep as many slaves as it wants, provided it convicts them of a crime first.
But... it is telling that the US just couldn't bring itself to let go of slavery entirely.
No, it didn't; the 13th Amendment explicitly excluded penal slavery from it's general abolition of slavery, and overt penal slavery continued long after the 13th Amendment, having been radically expanded in its immediate aftermath (and, arguably, penal slavery continues in the U.S. today.)
> Our Founders knew the fight against slavery was coming
They did, which is why several provisions of the Constitution were put into place to protect the institution and stack the deck for the coming fight.
See also "sharecropping" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping) and tenant farming.
"The fact the United States moved so quickly after the ratification of the Constitution to ban slave importation in 1808 shows they had a strong desire to get the issue solved."
I seem to recall that the bill (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_Prohibiting_Importation_of...) was supported by some in the slave states because it would increase the value of their existing slaves. On the other hand, the Wikipedia article seems to imply that an important aspect of the issue was that Britain was the largest slave trader of the time.
The idea that "they had a strong desire to get the issue solved" seems clearly false; they kicked that can down the road as long as they could.
In reality, most slavery moved to sharecropping and expanding the criminal justice system so that prisons became the new source of cheap black labor. There’s a prison in Mississippi which was converted to a prison after being a plantation became unfashionable and business there has been unchanged since the antebellum.
Then you have to wonder whether the northern states would have sided with the South or with the English.
The federalist influence came later, but the Constitution we live under now did not require such a huge amount of creativity as we like to teach in our American History classes.
Where did you learn this? This is absolutely wrong. Most developed nations had abolished slavery before the US did. A few, like the Ottoman Empire and Brazil was later, but to frame the US as a front-runner is absurd.
Depends on your meaning and what dates. The British did NOT ban slavery "at the start of the 19th century" (meaning 1800s). They banned only the buying of slaves using English vessels and even then it was nominally enforced. In 1833, the English compensated approximately 3000 slavers for "loss of business assets" (yes, that's right, they compensated the slavers, not the slaves) including the ancestors of David Cameron, the Bazalgettes and other wealthy families.
Almost instantly after the passing of the 1833 act, the British used indentured labour to replace slavery. Indentured labour was found to be equivalently cruel. The historical record shows death rates as high or higher than the slavery period for indentured labourers brought from South Asia to the West Indies and South East Asia. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/dec/12/thefor...
This is a very interesting timeline about the abololition of slavery in different places and peoples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave... i think it is also good to see things in the larger context
That seems fair: the slave-owners had undertaken obligations that by the standards, mores & laws of the time were normal, ethical & legal; changing mores & laws nullified those obligations, and hence they were compensated.
You'll find that it's a lot easier to change someone's mind if you say, 'I want you to do something which is right, and I'll pay you to do it!' than if you say, 'I want you to do something which is right, and I'll punish you for doing it!' What's more important in your mind: freeing slaves or punishing slaveholders?
It's stuff like this that reveals why some organizations like the NAACP are successful and others are not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_Trade_Act_1807
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_Africa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_Abolition_Act_1833
It even pressed other countries to abolish it (not only for pure reasons, also for commercial ones, but they'd still make Machiavelli proud).
"As long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom - for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself."
;-)
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/jul/05/declaration-indep...
This is just bad history. What on Earth possessed you to write this? One could refute it but it's so made up it's practically fan fiction of the history of the world.
Slave-plantations are unsustainable. A workforce must be free before it can be trained to farm in such a way that does not rapidly deplete the land; this is one fact which contributed to the idea of white supremacy, as free workers were white, and free workers were taught more skills. With the rapid expansion of U.S. territory this would not become a problem in any single man's lifetime. I believe that those slave owning people who backed secession may have seen slavery driving the U.S. expansion, rather than the other way around, but that's just an opinion.
Anyway, coming back to emancipation, the Lincoln administration had a much clearer view of the relationship between capitalism and slavery since they were outside of the southern thought bubble. Plus anyone could see the potential in having former-slave armies: radicalized fighters with unlimited morale. "Freeing the slaves" is always a good idea when one is at war with slave owners.
Lincoln is one of the greatest presidents my country has ever had but in my view, the Civil War had almost nothing to do with asserting the equality of all people. When viewing it on paper it seems to me to have been about solidifying the authority of the federal government, as well as industrializing the U.S. economy to replace and eventually compete with foreign manufacturing.
Also, the U.S. is not a new kind of country. There were already several confederations of independent nations, living in the area when the Europeans arrived and began colonizing. I will concede that having a central government which can create and apply policy to all members of the confederation was "new" it was not "radically new" as it was only a remix of other, well-established models of government.
> What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.
Douglas was woke af.
It looks like there's a maritime museum dedicated to him and Isaac Myers right near where Douglas lived in Baltimore. I'm a bit ashamed to admit I had no idea this existed, and I lived there for 5 years. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Frederick+Douglass-Isaac+M...
The Chinese and Russians e.g. seem a bit more honest about the machinations.
America houses more prisoners than any country in the world (around 2.4 Million). More than both China and Brazil combined, the next two highest (Brazil has recently beat out Russia for third highest prison population). To give some comparison, the combined population of China and Brazil is 1.6 Billion, compared to America's 326 Million.
About one in three Americans has a criminal record. http://www.sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/...
Don't get me wrong. There are LOTS of things I love about the US. The country fascinates me immensely. There are many things Americans can be proud of. I just wish there was more acceptance towards the idea that the US is in fact quite flawed and not miles ahead of everybody else in freedom as they like to portray it.
It almost feels a bit insulting when you interact with Americans and they just assume you live in a dictatorship, because hey only Americans have freedom. That mindset can't be by an accident. It must be from the constant harping on in school and in public about how amazing and free the US is.
The simplest way to look at it is this. Some minorities in this country have been forced to be poor due to a combination of social and state-sanctioned actions accumulated for a century or two. People in poverty often end up associated with crime and drug use. As a massive amount of cheap, highly addictive illegal drugs pours into poor areas, crime and drug use climbs.
The political system decides that the solution is to punish people more, the thinking apparently being that punishing them harsher will somehow alleviate the source of the crime and drugs: poverty. So the minorities targeted by racist policies, mainly poor black people, get locked up 6x more than anyone else. When they get out of jail, they have even fewer opportunities to make a living. The end result is a cycle of poverty, crime, prison, poverty, crime, prison.
To address this, you basically have to state that 1) America is deeply affected by systemic racism, 2) Politicians sentenced poor people to languish in prison rather than help them rise out of poverty, 3) Our citizens don't care much about each other.
It's very easy to ignore a big problem like our insane prison problem when the people affected don't live in your community or they're locked up in prison. The poor black communities who are affected have become completely normalized to it; every black person I know has a member of their family who has been to or is in prison.
Even though keeping people in prison costs us tens of billions of dollars, and continues a revolving door of poor people, new prisoners, crime, illegal drugs, and racism, we refuse to address the problem. We will continue to do so as long as we refuse to look hard at our own complicity.
And also he seems to give a free pass to Russia and China, and in terms of human rights... I would say the US is streets ahead.
Are the laws in America unjust? Do they make criminal behaviour which in other nations would be legal? Are the police & justice system in America more effective, in finding & punishing criminals? Or are Americans more criminal than residents of other nations?
Only the first of those points to a problem of the American system; the second, if true, is a good thing; the last points to a problem of Americans.
You are correct about invading and locking up, but you leave out the fact that all of Western Europe would have fallen under Stalin if not for the US heavily investing in it.
If tomorrow all the things were gone I'd worked for all my life
And I had to start again with just my children and my wife
I'd thank my lucky stars to living here today
'Cause the flag still stands for freedom and they can't take that away
Comic version of an extract from his autobiography: https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/an-original-aom-comi...
His speech on self-made men: https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/manvotional-self-mad...
However, after reading his story, one cannot help but be angered by the many who push the popular, patronizing, and cryptically racist mantra that black americans don't have the power within themselves to overcome the legacy of slavery.
Nobody is saying "it is impossible for a black person to make it in America, because of racism." But racism does stack the deck against them.
The question is: how should one react to learning that life is unfair and full of adversity against them?
Perhaps the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass could serve as a good example?
I wonder if Douglass had just remained hopeless, blamed others, and waited on the government to fix his problems, instead of learning to read, educating himself, and becoming resolutely determined to gain freedom, would we even be talking about him right now?
Surely Douglass was delt far worse cards than most american's complaining about the deck today.
The answer: Get incredibly lucky; Douglass learned to read with help from his master's wife when such was significantly frowned on and (IIRC) illegal. Respond to disagreeable situations violently ("After Douglass won a physical confrontation, Covey [a poor farmer who had a reputation as a "slave-breaker"] never tried to beat him again"). Commit crimes; Douglass attempted to escape repeatedly.
After that, all you have to do is become one of the most successful writers of your age. This step is trivial.
>The answer: Get incredibly lucky;
Does a human have no agency in which to improve their odds?
>Douglass learned to read with help from his master's wife when such was significantly frowned on and (IIRC) illegal.
Indeed today educating oneself is frowned upon by many in the black community, those who do are often referred to as "white" or "uncle toms". Does that mean one should refrain from it?
>Respond to disagreeable situations violently ("After Douglass won a physical confrontation, Covey [a poor farmer who had a reputation as a "slave-breaker"] never tried to beat him again"). Commit crimes; Douglass attempted to escape repeatedly.
"Disagreeable" is incredibly euphemistic and dishonest characterization of slave-breaking camps. Should human beings not rebel when being tortured and enslaved?
"One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all." -MLK
> I wonder if Douglass had... blamed others... instead of learning to read, educating himself, and becoming resolutely determined to gain freedom, [we would not] even be talking about him right now
has as its counter-example the very discussion in which you're taking part...
Douglass is a perfect example of two facts that cut agains the thesis of your comments in this thread. His work demonstrates that 1) critique is necessary; and 2) placing blame where it is due is NOT, as your question insinuates, mutually exclusive with action or self-improvement.
PS: I am curious why asking about continuing slavery in other parts of the world importing Black slaves is so heavily downvoted. Aren’t people equal regardless of where in the world they are? Why discourage concern and knowledge about slavery of people of African descent??
This is like when the Paris attacks happened and the world was lit up in French colors while on the same day the same group (ISIS) killed just as many people at a stadium Beirut, Lebanon and no one seemed to even mention them. We need to move past our navel gazing.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/11/16/world/middleeast/beiru...
EDIT: again, heavily downvoted for merely inquiring why slavery in the middle east persisted
It seems it’s only acceptable to discuss the moral failings of the US, or attacks on Westerners, while peoples and nations in the middle east are “below” criticism or comment eh? “We” are too englightened and talking about “them” is diverting the conversation from what really matters?
You’re absolutely allowed to criticize other countries (Mauritania is pretty far from the Middle East BTW), but when you suddenly bring them up in a conversation that’s specifically about the US and a prominent figure in the American abolitionist movement, it looks like you’re trying to deflect. I gave you the benefit of the doubt, but it looks like the downvoters got it right.
Mauritania is considered to be a constituent part of the "Maghreb" region, which, while it isn't the Middle East, it is certainly a part of the "Arab World".
Furthermore, Mauritania has a crescent and star on their flag, and their state religion is Islam.
When Paris was attacked, and Beirut on same day, only France was being remembered. Somehow we haven't yet learned to care about people being hurt in other places in the world if we're not living there, if it's not part of "us". We need to start thinking of people as equal regardless of where they live.
Anyway, when I saw that Facebook only let you put up the French flag I made https://customizeyourpic.com
And you can hear what I really think in the video there.
I am talking about slavery of Black people that continued to happen and, by the way, is happening today.
And instead of discussing the actual issue, it’s considered hijacking?
I have seen Hacker News comments of all types on an article, some heavily upvoted, that are on a tangential topic. Very often they were even political or opinions on other tech platforms or the landscape of tech in the FIELD of the article.
It happens so often on HN that I am truly bewildered as to how this is not just special pleading / double standard invoked specifically because what I am doing is currently politically incorrect: talking about issue X happening more recently and in the rest of the world, which takes away from talking about the history of the country where most HNers live.
Just step away for a second and think about it. Is it really a healthy response when I say Black people have continued to be enslaved long after the Emancipation proclamation in the USA, that for millions of Negroes in other parts of the world this continued, to say it is “hijacking to talk about my pet issues”?
"Activists are arrested for fighting the practice."
Everyone is always quick these days (at least, here in the US) to decry "Social Justice Warriors" as if they are a bad thing ... but for many across the world and across history, they were the saving grace; someone who dared ask, "why are we doing this?"
More accurately, as if they are not obviously noble, since you conflated everyone to have been called SJW with someone brave and insightful. But yeah I do think those things are intrinsically wrong.
Not saying your post is that. But I am saying that if somebody of that mind wanted to derail some things, they'd write your post.
EDIT: Ah. Saw your comments elsewhere in the thread. Sorry for giving you the benefit of the doubt.
Because it sounds very much like whataboutism. In an article about the US and slavery, you're talking about how other cultures may have been worse--ones completely unrelated to the current discussion.
Like when women in the world are trafficked into sex slavery, married off as children, honor killings, caste rapes etc. and a charge of “whataboutism” is used to refocus on how a default avatar in social networks is unfairly male instead of female.
It has been over a century since slavery was abolished in the USA yet it persisted and persists around the world now. I think it SHOULD be talked about, and analyzed and solved, whether or not it is whataboutism, just like we should talk about malaria or anything else. Just because it isn’t happening here doesn’t mean it’s not a BIGGER and more pressing problem.
So just cause someone coined a stupid word doesn’t mean you get to dismiss issues affecting millions of people or excuse a double standard. Go beyond virtue signaling and care about actual utilitarian statistics and solutions.
I would argue the supremacists are those who focus exclusively on their own ethnic group and navel gaze at their own coutry at the expense of people worldwide.
But the fallout of the bad shit from the past matters too and trying to diminish that here suggests that your motives are not as pure as your representation of them suggests. Which may not be your intention...buuuut...I'd bet that way, Monsieur "Virtue Signal", Señor "They're The Real Supremacists", Mister "Let's Talk About Anybody But Me".
Willing to be wrong, though. Put up.
I am happy to talk about things if the intention is genuine. The people who care about historical wrong X seem to put up pedantic walls as soon as they are asked to care about X much closer and much more pressing to us. “Make another topic on HN and get it upvoted and maybe I will talk about slavery of Black people that has been happening in regions where it’s not as cool to critique at the moment.” Doesn’t seem to fit on a site where comments to “I invented a decentralized permissionless movie streaming platform” is “your site is green bleh” or some other thing. But talking about Black people being enslaved today is “diverting attention” from an article about Black people being enslaved by the country of which I am a citizen. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/series/modern...
It is a form of soft bigotry to me, if analyzed without the filter. A light form of collective insanity. And it doesn’t have to do with slavery in particular but pick any X issue.
And sometimes they're just responding to a topical article like a link to Frederick Douglass' speech on the 4th of July
I am just trying to get you to see that if this was any other topic on HN, like eg a speech by Linus Torvalds about Git, a wide array of comments would be perfectly fine eg someone asking whether distributed VCS has really taken off, or (like I did) whether people still use centralized version control in some companies.
Here we are talking about the lives of human beings. But apparently Black lives matter ONLY in the USA, women’s lives matter only in the USA, because mentioning current honor killings of women in some countries is racist. That is a perverse reaction and no, saying it’s “off topic” just makes it worse. You either don’t actually care about women's rights or ending slavery, or there is some overriding principle I am still not aware of that makes the same exact issue outside the USA so off topic as to be essentially unwelcome as a comment!
the use of this meme seems seems rather correlated with a particular group of people.