this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023
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This was culture. Just because we have managed to slightly altar a few cultural norms over a hundred plus years hardly makes us better people.
In fact...
Majority of these people lived without electricity, phone, or private vehicle.
Huge percentage of these people still did not have indoor plumbing.
Many had never had a hot shower.
Hygiene norms for the majority were a once a week bath of that.
Impoverished children were born to parents that sent them to work as early as four years old.
They were beaten with heavy blunt objects if they objected to anything.
Many watched their mother's murdered by drunken fathers who received zero consequences for the murder and would not receive consequences for the suspicious death of a child either.
These children went to work the next day.
I'm no expert on this but I look at the faces of the children in the forced child labor pics and I can see that they are dead inside.
My heart goes out to the people who built this country. Millions were once enlaved. Millions more lived in a harsh universe where death of loved ones was common place and ailments we now think nothing of were deadly.
These were hardy people doing the best they could in a world that would astonish us if we were teleported through time on a one way ticket. That their sense of humor trended dark makes sense to me. I'm glad that found anything funny at all.
Eh, it's true that this isn't a real pig. It still brings up the very real horrors and suffering that humans have put pigs through (and still put them through to this day).
So, it still hits different, based upon our history, in a way that a "dying dinosaur" wouldn't. It's similar to how a racist joke against African-Americans hits different to a racist joke against Italian-Americans. The context is important.
Is a dying pig balloon really that much worse than killing virtual pigs for their meat by repeatedly hitting them with a sword in Minecraft?
Slavers we’re also part of that culture. And they were popular.
This ad was produced decades after the abolition of slavery. Yes, things were even worse during slavery. And slavers were not average people; they were scum then and now.
I think what they're saying is: "just because that's the way it was, we should not treat it as if it was acceptable."
I fully agree. Just because we can explain why normal people were more pessemistic and dead inside does not magically make recent history anthropology. They were people with emotions, and produced children and continued the trauma, and those children are still largely alive today.
Their misery is directly connected to the present's history, and taking pity on them does less than nothing for solving the problems that produced them or the problems they persisted. It literally disarms your critical mind in favor of what could be misconstrued as sympathetic dismissal of the underlying concerns.
I’m more at risk for being construed as saying: patting ourselves on the back for being offended by a pig toy is ridiculously self serving.
I’m not even sure what your point is anymore. But you’re annoying to talk with.
Perhaps I didn’t understand your point about slavers? What did you mean?