Ummm, is there any kind of citation for the proposition that much of the southern coast of Europe was depopulated by Arabs killing all the men and carting away the "white teenage girls" as sex slaves?

Ah yes, not neonazis or white nationalists but people supporting statues of *checks notes* white supremacists who were so white supremacisty they waged war to keep their right to enslave black people.

Gotcha.

In less than 36 hours, we moved from TS professing his open-mindedness and expressing hope and enthusiasm for a reasonable exchange of ideas to you having to explain to TS that it was racist for a white person to own a black person in the United States in 1840, even if that white person was mostly interested in making money off the free labor of that black person.

You're supposed to click the post report button and write that, but yes I think you make a good point.

Seriously.

And even if there were no link between confederate statutes and racism, any decent person who inadvertently wandered into a protest organized by neo-nazis and white supremacists would head for the hills once he or she realized what was going on.

Let's get this straight.

A list of items was offered claiming that Trump was racist. The list was pretty weak in my view.

Then someone (not me) opened the discussion asking if slavery was unequivocally racist. I explained that clearly it wasn't, given that white owners owned white slaves in the millions throughout history and black owners owned black slaves in the millions through Africa. So the act of slavery itself is not sufficient to establish racism. This is just basic logic guys, trying to narrow down a term based on a claim that ______ is racist.

So I ask ok - what are the criteria? Give historical examples of how what you offered is not sufficient. And you all lose your minds.

This lack of philosophical perspective as to what are basic and reasonable questions is terrible, truly terrible.

Racist: The claim that all of <race> are inferior
Racist: The claim that all of <race> share in guilt for that race's historical shortcomings
Racist: Believing that people are less as humans because they're <race> and therefore it ok to enslave them in perpetuity.

Not racist: Slavery itself, including enslaving of whites by blacks for purely economic reasons, any more than enslaving of whites by whites was racist
Not racist: Opining negatively about the Central Park 5, brutal thugs and bashers of women wrongly convicted of the rape and head trauma of a woman that happened in the same park by the same group of thugs participating in the bashing
Not racist: Claiming Obama or Ted Cruz were born outside of the USA.

This stuff isn't hard and it's not even controversial as far as I'm concerned. Everybody needs to take a breath in my view.

Prior mentions of slavery in this thread are clearly about the trans-atlantic African slave trade, not like the abstract concept of slavery. And clearly there is more context to birtherism than the mere claim that someone was born outside of the USA, and the same is true of Trump's reactions to the central park 5.

I have trouble believing that you don't understand this, which is why I have trouble believing you are really intending to contribute to a productive conversation on this. There's also the part where you omitted the definition of racism that's been endorsed by basically every other participant in the conversation.

The most ridiculous part is that even if you try to strongarm and commandeer the semantics and succeed (which you can't; though there is an interesting conversation about how people in, uh, certain parts of USA#1 had more personal racial animus in, say, 1870 than they did in 1840) you're left with saying, yeah bro, slavery is Actually Good.

Let me just quote myself from a few years ago:

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/s...postcount=6775


If TS is saying, no, wait, it's Actually Good to also enslave some Stabby Irishmen for good measure (I mean, in this economy, you can't afford NOT to!) then OK, I guess. I can 2nd WN's motion to move on.

Yeah, this didn't happen. I'm the one who made the comment and I certainly wasn't opening a discussion about whether slavery was racist in every conceivable manifestation of the practice. What I said in fact was:

Given that we had been discussing Trump, and given that I expressly mentioned the period just before the Civil War in my post, there is no way that you misunderstood whether my comment was about white people owning black people in the United States.

And as well-named explained, your post was awful as applied to slavery in the United States.

Let’s just move on, although in fairness since this is a Trump thread, it being somewhat chaotic seems fitting.

While I cannot vouch for TS's claim that men were beheaded and women were kept as sex slaves it is true that the Barbary Pirates raided the coasts of Southern Europe to such a degree that much of the country side was depopulated.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british...laves_01.shtml

The conflicts of this time period between the Papacy, Venice, Spain, The Knights of St John vs the Ottomans and the Barbary States is some pretty fascinating history that doesn't really get covered in schools in the US.

Why should we give TS a pass by "moving on"? I'm curious to see exactly how far down the rabbit hole he will go.

The birtherism = must be racist thing to me is just something that blows my mind. It is perfectly reasonable to question the birth status of someone who grew up in international schools to an international traveling father and a US born traveling mother, and whose own (confused) grandmother claimed was born in Kenya. If Obama was white and had grown up in Africa in a very itinerant the same questions would be raised. Ted Cruz copped a lot of flack and his life was far more settled than Obama's.

I don't understand the whole notion of rooting out every possible instance of racism and overclaiming just in case. It seems insane to me.
What is the one that's typically used? It is hard to keep up. Because much behavior currently claimed as racist would not be seen as such 15 years ago by people who are considered not racist.
Sure. Is there room for a new thread on this? Or is this a topic we should just avoid for now?

There is considerable debate about the magnitude.

In any case, I doubt that bobman was questioning whether the Barbary slave trade was a pure fiction invented by TS.

If you want to have a more philosophical discussion about definitions of racism I am willing to indulge you in my playground (since it's more relevant there, I think), if you are willing to treat it as a conceptual problem in social science (to measure racism, you have to define it) and can discuss it without your usual flair for provocation.

In with slanker notice.

Right. Fifteen years ago, no one would have thought that a white person in the United States owning a black person for financial gain was racist. Your views on this topic would have been super mainstream in 2004.

It also comes in handy when you want to minimize African-American slavery in the US. It's a favorite topic of the Breitbart crowd. Utterly unshocking that TS found a way to interject it.

So for conservatives money is more important than morality?

TS still hasn't commented on whether Trump's statement about the judge in the Trump University case was racist, but I'm betting that he disagrees with well-known beacon of racial justice, Paul Ryan, on this point.

Yeah that seems to be the case unfortunately.

Let us count the ways, despite their weekly pep talks from the pulpit.

Yeah, I'm definitely curious about the lurid description of the exclusively sexual nature of Barbary enslavement rather than its existence.

I just explained this to you in post #172.

If you're thinking, hey wait, that's just an image with no explanatory text then I'd respond, well, yeah.

So, to spell it out: "race" wasn't always seen as a monolithic white/black/etc race but still had enough of the same characteristics to fit a working definition of "racism". Hence the Stabby Irishman.

You even preemptively allude to this yourself,

but because you're so unbelievably racist (it's surreal, almost like you're an AI who learned science by reading Stormfront) you didn't connect the final dots.

You can't grasp that the Vikings and the Brits viewed each other as separate races because to you they're all Good White People, similarly to the Africans being all bad. You can't grasp that of course "racism" could be an apt descriptor of this historical behavior due to the concept of "race" being mostly artificial nonsense to begin with. You actually believe there's a monolithic White Race in opposition to assorted other monolithic races and you just told on yourself in a big way. It's almost too comical and sophomoric to even be disgusting.


p.s. And this is still all aside from No You See Slavery Is Actually Good Because Econ101

my main man 6ix. You registered at the new location, exiledpolitics?