News: Catholic Church embroiled in massive baby selling conspiricy

if you want to restructure society so that we have specialized communal families, there may be a place for your model, but i think Spain may be out.

try to get this idea. in the specific case of Spain/The Church/child-stealing that started this thread, what happened was wrong on every count. that's a fact. but that does not mean that the consequences are all wrong. i'm not saying that the end justifies the means. i'm not suggesting that it was OK to steal children because some are better off.

i'm responding to the idea that if you asked all 300K kids what they would have preferred, if they knew what their lives might have been like with their real birth mothers, assuming that you could fairly extrapolate, a substantial percentage, maybe more than half (who can tell?), would say they don't regret what happened.

what prompts me to say this is that i prefer thinking that a substantial percentage of the kids are better off than they would have been. is that wrong? to hope that there is some good in this horrible mess?

 

do you know what an anecdote is? 'Cause I didn't use one. But I know what you meant - I just think your "general rule" is based on bad (stupid) reasoning. By comparing a person's outcome to, basically, a sports stat.
What measurement, exactly, are you using to make your statement true? My assumption is that I could pick equal "outcomes" that prove your stats "wrong".

 

single parent (mother) stats

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I called this an anecdote: "... a kid ... raised in a dangerous/unloving/destructive two-parent household... "

 

Kind of like saying that American decedents of slaves are better off because of slavery; I mean living in America vs. living in Africa right?

 

oh, c'mon. if you want to think that it would be better for all the Africans who were rounded up, corralled, cargoed over here would have been better off if they could have remained in Africa, great. clearly, Africa is a much better place to live than the US of A. Africans then and now treat each other much better than the slave owners treated their slaves.

Some African-Americans are not better off because of slavery. they are better off because they don't live in Africa now. that's a real distinction.

 

Certainly the US has derived benefits from slavery being instituted here and Africa has had deficits from its population being stripped away so believing that both places would be the same without slavery would be ridiculous.

 

but that isn't the whole story.

it is easy to say that Africa would be a better place if there had been no mass kidnapping and selling of men and women as slave labor, and i don't doubt the truth of that statement. and i don't doubt that America profited greatly from slave labor. but the issue of quantitative and qualitative "betterness" of an Africa without the slave trade is very hard to parse out.

don't forget that Africans were complicit in the slave trade. don't forget that Africa is subject to famine, which would not be less onerous if there were more Africans than fewer. don't forget that the AIDS epidemic has hit Africa worse than anywhere else, and it's probable that it would not be less of a health disaster if there were more Africans than fewer.

the only thing we can say with great certainty is that it would be a different world had not the slave trade taken place.

better for Africa? in what distinct ways? those are not questions that have clear-cut answers.

 

Well the kings of the tribes that sold the slaves to Arabs and Europeans did get a short benefit (weapons and goods). Africa still has many cases of slavery going on. (Sex slavery of course goes on all over the world still).

I guess is about the glass being half full or half empty.

Would the world be better if slavery never existed, I say yes. Would the world be better if the C.C. did not sell children back in the day, I say yes. Even if there may have been a benefit in the long run.

I guess we can say the same about colonization; would the Americas be better off if colonization never happened? Probably, there would have been many losers and many winners, but I would not have been born if that did not happen, so we can agree that would have been a great loss to this world.

 

my brother spent two whole years in Zambia, which isn't a jungle. he and i have discussed Africa at some length. i don't know whether i know more about Africa than you do, but nothing i said is racist.

people who have come to America from Africa of their own free will, whether they are from an urban or rural area, did so because life for them in Africa offered less promise than life here.

the abuses of Africans by native Africans are well-documented. whether those abuses are worse than what happen here during slavery, i cannot say. ask the Tutsi and the Hutu. ask Africans about Charles Taylor, about Sekou Toure, about Robert Mugabe, about Idi Amin Dada.

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i think the post to which i was responding has disappeared.

such a pity.

 

I'm assuming you have a point here but I have no idea what it is. Maybe it has to do with your response to a deleted post.

 

not at all.

the point you made was that Africa has had resources (human) stripped away through the slave trade, so there are attendant deficits. i wouldn't argue against your conclusion, but it's not a simple matter that Africa is worse off because of the slave trade. that's probably true, but i don't think there is a direct equation.

if there were 15 million slaves and each couple ( 6 millions? ) would have had 80 descendants, that would add about half a billion to Africa's population. i don't know what the real figures would be, but you don't have to be a genius to understand that such numbers would contribute to economic problems on that continent.

every good event/phenomenon has potential, unintended negative consequences if examined closely. the converse (?) is true of every bad event. there may be potential unintended positive consequences.

i would never say that slavery was good, but the unintended consequences would not all be bad, in all likelihood. when those consequences are noted it is not to justify the causes. it's simply to recognize that there is normally a bigger picture.

 

Africa is a fairly underpopulated continent. Even if you don't count the Sahara, it is underpopulated especially compared to Asia and Europe. In general, densely populated countries are richer because dense population correlates with high urban development which brings about prosperity.

All I said is that there were negative consequences to Africa because of slavery. I didn't attempt to quantify them. I was just making an uncontroversial statement. In every event in every life there is a bigger picture. I'm not sure what that statement was supposed to mean in this context.

As for specific benefits, at least to England, capital accumulated by slave traders was a significant part of the investment used to initially begin the Industrial Revolution in England.

 

some people live in a very black and white world, no shades of gray. things are good or bad, little or no in-between. thus, if you say that something we would generally agree upon as bad resulted in a quantifiable good, albeit unintended, you get labeled a monster of some sort because your perceptions are out-of-balance by the person conferring the label. from my perspective, their perceptions are out-of-balance.

having said that, i think we basically agree...

 

I'm labeled a monster because I eat babies.

 

whose?

 

Does it matter?

 

everything matters.

 

You should start posting in the MLS You Be the Don or any of the US Mens fora. They will welcome your input.

 

i'll leave that to you baby eaters.