If it is OK in this instance, then beware the will of the majority in all corners of your life.

Almost as interesting as Post-WW2 Demythologizing Weltanschaaungs.

And WD-40.

And this relates to slavery, because if there ever was a group in our society who are slaves, it’s children – that is they have absolutely no rights. They are owned lock, stock, and barrel by their parents or the state. And Americans don’t want to give up their inalienable right to own their children. Just read their reasons for not signing the UN Charter on the Rights of the Child. And they sure as hell don’t want to sign the provisions that would force them to let a 15 year old child “enemy combatant” be treated like a child. See the case of Omar Khadr – not that the Canadian government is doing anything about his case either. The man has been in Guantanamo since he was 15 years old.

However, let’s get a grip on what slavery really is. Say that I owe a hell of a lot of money on my credit cards. Well, I would work (assuming, of course, in this climate that I have work) and pay them off. I would have gotten myself into the debt hole. Nobody forced me to take out a credit card. It might not have been a good choice, but we all make bad choices and suffer the consequences. It’s not frigging slavery.

So are people suggesting that the government step in and regulate the big banks and the big credit card companies? Maybe they should start by stopping those ridiculous bonus people get for moving “money” around by computers and creating non-existent wealth based on producing absolutely nothing. Would probably be a step in the right direction. On the other hand, how about the government step in and give people jobs – there are plenty of things to be fixed, roads and stuff. Then they can start spending money again. Then they can buy food, pay rent or mortgages, buy stuff that is produced. Then maybe one could think about laissez faire capitalism as a way to run an economy.

I really do have to comment on the Capitalism blog.

And EJ is so right about the child support system, as he describes it. It is not like that in Canada. At least in Ontario, if there is a child support judgment made, and the man fails to pay (most of the time it is the men who fail to pay their child support), the state pays the child support to the mother and goes after the father. The father’s wages can be garnisheed right off the top of his paycheck. It doesn’t always work as well as it could, but at least the money doesn’t go to the province. On the other hand, the taxpayers do foot the bill for the legal costs. From my perspective, its all part of the dues paid to have an equitable society where children have a shot at getting supported.

A worthy constitutional amendment would be to demand that money paid by displaced parents for child support go, 100%, to the kids.

The potential for contempt here is enormous.

Incredible that we haven’t abolished involuntary servitude.

We had it beat, but we let it back in, for a reason, the kids!

http://cdn2.libsyn.com/dancarlinhh/dchha26_BLITZ_Addicted_to_Bondage.mp3?nvb=20100216063828&nva=20100217064828&t=06217540b8f00d2bb800a

That is completely f’d I just read a New Yorker piece about America was so great cause they had gotten rid of debtor prisons.

Cant you just declare Bankruptcy?

That’s absolutely right.

Happens every day, right under your nose.

Great point, I think we also need to look at the debt slavery that so many Americans are being put into as well now. The credit card companies are charging interest rates that only a few years ago would have been considered loan sharking. Add to that, they new this crash was coming and so had congress pass laws that made it harder to declare bankruptcy on said debt. Absolutely criminal. AIG and Goldman Sachs just pulled off the biggest rip off in history with Geithner and paulson giving themselves waivers to steal. And the millions of Americans are now saddled with houses that will likely never regain their value. Sold to them by people who knew they could never pay, and were just exploiting them to make a fast buck. America has just become the biggest ponzi scheme in the world.

All we need is debtor prisons to come back, and the slavery will be complete.

Slavery, or more to the point, violation of the 13th ammendment is alive and well in the US with the public’s full support.

Can a person be locked up, denied counsel, never charged with a crime, never brought before a jury, denied habeas corpus for months on end in today’s court system? It happens every day in this country. In fact, you all endorse this behavior as well.

So if you think you don’t tolerate indentured servitude or slavery, you all are hypocrites. You all say no big deal in this instance. So don’t get so condesending talking about slavery here and conclude it is a thing of our distant past.

EJ

Sure, I have some pleasant left-wing friends – delightful company as long as the subject doesn’t turn to politics or Green issues. We have a mutual agreement to avoid such topics! Not that I am “right-wing” myself, although my philosophies have some commonalities with The Right, and just about nothing in common with The Left. Like Redmond, I value freedom.

And if you had experienced the way this wine attacks ones taste buds (and I mean *attacks*), you would throw out any notion of it being French.

TheCrone says: Native North American peoples came across the land bridge and possibly the Atlantic (see the video: America’s stone age explorers: where did the first Americans come from? for a quick anthropological run down on the minimum of 4 human movements into the Americas). Nomadic tribes sometimes had slaves, however, in general, they were counterproductive to constant movement (one anthropological reason why pigs were banned in semitic nomadic groups – see Marvin Harris, Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches). They preferred to kill the people that they overran. These groups already had a hierarchical system of “governing”. The world was already “domesticated” by the time they arrived in North America (with my apologies to the Midewin believers – not that they would be reading this blog). Slavery (rather than death) seems to have arrived with creation of larger groups of people that required added labour force and land because homo sapiens learned how to cultivate crops leading to surplus goods.

So much of the origins of our civilization is interpretive until we start to get written materials. We have some idea of what happened from about 5,000 years ago with the origins of writing (which began, as far as we can tell, to keep track of commodities, although stories figure prominently from the early days of writing). Prior to that we need to interpret village structures, plant remains, burial remains; all the tools of anthropology in its broadest sense if we want to understand how humans lived. Ultimately, what I was talking about were human groups that tended to hunt and forage and move from place to place when the pickings became slim. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of years ago.

We cannot assume that human beings always had “value” in the sense that they were considered commodities. Human beings, if present company is any indication, resist being owned. It requires force, indoctrination, and serious socialization processes (including religious justifications) for people to accept slavery. The history of slavery is always the history of resistance. Even the Sumerians complained about runaway slaves. For me, that indicates that long before slavery existed, people did not think of themselves and others as commodities to be bought and sold. Somewhere in the past, all indications are that there was a major shift in how humans set up their interrelationships. From my research, this seems to have started when people started to settle down in groups. Why would they settle in groups? Because they had found ways to have stable food supplies. (& might I add, gave men way too much time on their hands [smiley face])

You need to get past left and right, capitalism and socialism.

Humans live in a binary world – freedom or oppression.

I am for any one who gives me more freedom.

I am against anyone who oppresses me.

Greg, the Crone is short on evidence for that statement, but it seems to me the government and its oppressive taxation is responsible for at least some poverty. If we had less government and more laissez-faire capitalism, I suspect we’d have less poverty, not more.

And Dave, perhaps your wine was from France, which would make us wonder if it was a “left wing” bottle. After all, can you name a “pleasant” left winger?