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Comment by pc86 | Hacker News Reader

> I too would need a half bottle of port to write about freedom and liberty while my slaves built me a countryside mansion.

You almost certainly would not have, had you been born in the same period of time.

Let's not pretend that people in the past were monsters simply because they lived during the period of time they lived. Maybe they were all racist monsters by today's standards, but had they been born today they'd be completely different. We are not inherently better than them because we happen to have the dominant opinions of our time and they had the dominant opinions of theirs.

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They were monsters in the same way we have monsters now. Oligarchs, billionaires, oil executives, and dictators. The American monsters were just a different flavor than the European ones. If they had been born today, they would be called Musk, Bezos or Ellison.

People KNEW slavery was wrong, but those in power did not want to admit it. The same way that we KNOW it's wrong to horde massive wealth while children go hungry and people do not have access to basic medical care.

Real monsters today? Child services people who turn a blind eye to abuse and let kids die because it's too much work to deal with it. Your neighbors who assault and beat their kids. And of course the hundreds of millions who oppress others on a daily basis.

Those people are your neighbors...unlike the billionaires that people harp on about. Monsters are all around you. Just look to your left and right.

Maybe if those neighbors were rich they could hire a nanny and have more leisure time and neglect their kids in the same way that a billionaire with three partners and ten kids must certainly neglect theirs.

> Child services people who turn a blind eye to abuse and let kids die because it's too much work to deal with it.

Because child services is critically underfunded and poverty is rampaging through our country. The richest one on earth.

> Your neighbors who assault and beat their kids.

Yes, more monsters, but not on the scale of someone who enslaves children and adults en-masse in foreign countries in order to suppress wages in their own country.

> Those people are your neighbors...unlike the billionaires that people harp on about.

Not unlike each other at all. They are the same narcissists and psychopaths, just with less power.

You have to get a sense of scale. Your neighbor slapping around his kid is obviously less important than the death of a child, and the death of a child is obviously less important than the deaths of 1000 children. We killed a million children in Iraq before the post 9/11 invasion.

You know there were people back then that were very much anti-slavery?

A list that includes John and Samuel Adams and Alexander Hamilton, who eventually cajoled all of the other Founding Fathers into condemning slavery and (except for Madison and Jefferson) freeing all of their slaves.

Of course there were, especially regarding the chattel slavery we had in the US that was very much different than slavery in other parts of the world, and historically. They were also very much in the minority, and most people were at least indifferent to it.

My point is that it's easy to take our 2023 ethics and apply them to people in the 1700s but all that does is prove you don't have a proper context or frame of reference for history. It lets you conveniently ignore things in the most intellectually lazy way. I mean, look at my comment's parent and GP. In reverse order, a perfectly rational and reasonable point about how the framers drank a lot while writing a document that would found a new country (and perhaps the difference between how it affect those people vs. his family). And the knee-jerk, lazy, boring response of "yeah but SLAVES."

> And the knee-jerk, lazy, boring response

Do you think that this response is innovative and thoughtful? Somebody literally said that the framers of the US constitution were collectively some of the "most functional human beings in history" and they were reminded that those people were vile and violent. If you're a black American, you have a reasonable chance of being one of their descendants because they would buy human beings to rape.

They also accomplished many things, and some of them wrote very interesting things. Jefferson was often very insightful, but he also raped slaves. Lots of drunks have written interesting things.

An interesting case is the state of Georgia, which was a free state check out:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery_in_Georgia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Whitefield

Of course people knew slavery was wrong, but profits. We may not have slavery today, but the same kind of people are around, for example against minimum wage increases or for non-compete agreements.

The slaves knew slavery was wrong. Why are you only interested in the slaver's viewpoint?

Because the comment was about the people who owned slaves (the juxtaposition of drinking a lot with founding a country at the same time, and perhaps their lives/"productivity" compared to the GP's families). Replying to that perfectly reasonable comment with "yeah but SLAVES" is lazy and boring.

> productivity

> yeah but SLAVES

It's astounding to me that so many people completely missed the point that these two things are related.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that GP's family probably didn't have an army of black people doing all their chores and generating a healthy income stream to live off, for free, so that they could engage full-time in civics.

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