I'm pointing out we can cut people from the past a little slack for acting in a manner that was acceptable in their day, and not judge them all by the morality we've achieved. That, for example, people who married 14-year-old girls and would be considered child rapists by our standards, shouldn't be thought of as scummy as child rapists of today. Neither are the others who willingly allowed their children to be married off in that way, beat their kids, etc.

I'm going to the Cards game now, so we can continue this interesting discussion later, tyvm.

Your entire argument relies on if racist attitudes were okay in the past. Of course it wasn't okay. People died in mass because of it.

You also miss the point that white slaveowners weren't just ignorant folks, they knowingly rejected the notion of racial equality and the immoral nature of slavery.

No it doesn't. You just want to make obvious moral statements that have already been agreed upon ITT and are mischaracterizing Foldn's argument to do so. It is like you have whiffed past half the discussion.

The fact that he realized in theory that slavery was wrong yet still didn't free his own even after death makes him in some ways even worse.

So you think we should use more resources in the production of food, because fat people?

Do we know or have a hint why yet? Just calling him worse than scummy is not very informative.

If it turns out people like him were tragically hypocritical to the point of irreconcilable paradox with our modern understanding, is it just impractical to try to understand why any further?

Wat.

I'm saying cheap food isn't the greatest thing ever to happen for various reasons.

Do you think this planet is better or worse off when humans routinely expand in an industrial way? (not that I am a hippie or anything. but to handwave away the consequences of stuff is silly.)

Because his self interest trumped his principles. Just like most people. And most people are scummy, then and now. Including me.

I don't think the planet cares much one way or the other. Avatar was fiction, bro.

If you're talking about intentionally limiting human population so those allowed to live can have a higher quality of life, well that's a valid line to take in some respects. For example, choosing not to have children seems acceptable, but it gets a bit morally iffy when you're condemning millions to malnutrition because we need their forests to clean up our pollution.

On a less global scale, I'm all sorts of uncomfortable telling the working poor that they need to pay more for food because fat people ruined it for everybody and now we need to disincentivize eating.

Never seen Avatar, bro.

And you are glossing over the fact that in the twentieth century even with cheap food there was starvation in areas around the globe despite nations having surplus food.

How the hell have you not seen Avatar?

I'm curious because my background in Economics as to what ethics/principles you hold that conflict with self interests.

To be honest, I can't recall a movie I have seen in the theaters in the past ten years. And Enter the Void is possibly the last movie I have seen in the same year as it came out. Hell, I just watched the Infernal Affairs series last week, ten years later.

You could have just watched Scorcese's remake and skipped the subtitles.

Don't think that's ever gonna be an option for Enter the Void, tho.

Well, the latter only wish they could do something as heinous as what the former actually did. So, that might be a reason to think slaveholders were scummy.

The issue here is that in the slave holders' day owning slaves was acceptable according to slave holders. It was very UNacceptable to the people that they enslaved.

That slave holders had so much power that they were able to control society in a way that perpetuated slavery as an institution, only means that they had enough power to maintain a power dynamic that was unacceptable to people with less power.

Ask any exploiter in history if they were an exploiter, and they'll puke out a pile of verbal justification. You can rely on their answer, or you could inquire about how the exploited felt about the situation.

Slave owners weren't some poor group of people that just accidentally wound up in the unfortunate position of owning other people. No need to cut them any slack.

Price to end world hunger: $30 billion a year.

To put this into perspective, that's about 5% of the American annual defense budget.

I don't mind subtitles and find Asian movies more delightful than their American remakes....

Last movie I saw in the theaters was Sin City(2005).

I consider enabling us to increase the population of the world to be a huge negative.

Yeah I get that, but you're waltzing into a moral mine field. There are no clear absolute rights or wrongs, just trade offs. An ecologically balanced species staying within the carrying capacity of its environment requires a lot of misery and death for some. I'm guessing you're not going to volunteer to be on the misery and death side of that equation.

There will be more human misery because of things being out of balance, it will just be put off.

Is this cheap food getting to hungry people anyway or to fat people? Does the US export meat? (well, we do our bit to drive bluefin tuna extinct and export them to Japan)

In modern times food supply hasn't been a factor in limiting population. Famines have come and gone and populations in those areas have continued to grow.

Wealth, education, health (child mortality increases the number of children people have) all decrease or slow the increase of population. The trick is, the undeveloped areas need to bypass the nasty environmental impact of 18th and 19th century style industry or at least get through it quickly.

I am looking forward to spank's campaign against those who speak ill of Hitler. Hitler is dead, after all.

RE slaveholders

There are like 27 million slaves in the world today. If you eat chocolate that isn't labeled free trade and maybe even if it is, you're fostering slavery. Coffee, sugar, cheap clothing, cotton, steel, oriental rugs, diamonds or silk will also often involve slavery.

Also, the talk about animals. The conditions in factory farms for the animals as well as the environment impacts are just inexcusable.

It's really easy for people to cause a lot of harm if it's the norm.