Apparently, Elon Musk's Girlfriend is a Communist

I like that. That sounds right. Well put.

What was the thread about again?

That's the big issue that caused the split of the Northern Baptists (and their rich history of Orthodox Protestant Theology) and the Southern Baptists (and their missional outreach) at the Triannual Convention in 1845. We Southern Baptists have publicly repented of and repudiated that particularly heinous sin as a collective body. But, there's still work to do within and without.

Timing has more to do with the success of social pressure to end slavery than just social pressure itself. If slavery had lasted through 2021, there would be a lot of disinformation ..., well, exactly what's happening today - slaves are treated fairly, they're happy, ...

The same people who support trump would be the same people saying "they're fine; damned liberals are trying to destroy the ecoomy".

I'm not going to lie, the above thesis is very much something I've heard before and always sounds just a little like revisionism in places.

Maybe even propaganda?

American history as self taught and transmitted through the media paints a conveniently heroic picture of capitalism as a force for good even where it was at best coincidental. It also tends to fudge major world events to suit a narrative of having been driven by purely domestic events whilst overlooking external factors.

I'll not deny the importance of the written word but I will point out it was hardly a new phenomenon. Books had been commonplace for a considerable time prior to the Civil War, it's what is written in them that matters.

I don't think there's any coincidence that abolitionist movements began within such a narrow time frame on both sides of the Atlantic and in both instances found momentum away from the traditional slavery strongholds. Absolutely communication and education were key to that but those were not directly linked to the rise of capitalism.

One could argue industrialisation (which is a close cousin) played a part but crucially it's interesting that the more violent shift was one which took place in a nation primarily consuming slavery rather than providing it.

The British Government still held a monopoly via the charters which allowed traders to ship slaves across the Atlantic, but by and large the public here had at least a passable case for having been insulated from the realities entailed.

Likewise the Northern States were far less hardened to the brutality of slavery than the Southern counterparts.

Absolutely education and the written word were key to bursting those bubbles but they cannot really explain the timing.

If the written word is all that mattered why did such movements come about globally with such synchronicity when on at least one side of the Atlantic the press was a long established concern?

No, there was at least as much propaganda flying around in 1860. The plantation owners owned the Southern newspapers, at the time the only mass media. They controlled access to education. They invoked religion in defense of their cause.

You can't possibly compare propaganda from the 1860s to the kind of propaganda that exists today.

For mass media to pervade every aspect of your life, you it has to be central to your life. In 1860s, media was written. You can't read while plowing the field or churning butter or any of the other manual labor things that needed to happen every day. Today, just turn on your ipod, plug in your ear buds, and you have propaganda streaming into your brain 24/7.

It's so not the same thing.

I guess we are going to have to agree to disagree then. I don't place all of the reason at capitalism's doorstep, but it was critical to the growth of literacy under industrialization. And I'm not familiar with any other economic system at the time that allowed for the creation of industrialization other than capitalism.

So while books existed, it was the number of people reading those books that changed. And I think you can track that as well to the rising populism of the day that eventually led to democratic revolutions. Abolitionist movements were trailing indicators of this concept, based on many of the same precepts.

There's an article on JSTOR concerning literacy in England, Scotland and Wales. It cites 'signature literacy', the basic literacy necessary to sign one's own name, at below 50% in England until the early 18th century. Prior to that, it's doubtful that there would be enough critical mass, as people simply weren't reading the books.

In the US, historians put a lot of credit to the Second Great Awakening, which led to widespread support of reform policies, including abolition, temperance, and women's rights. It's interesting to note that this is a uniquely protestant movement, and one of the principle tenets was an individual relationship with God outside the minister and the interpretation of the bible for one's self. Needless to say, that's difficult with an illiterate populace.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not in the 'capitalism is good' category, and the world is teetering under it's excesses and mistakes. And certainly it was also the engine that thrived on unpaid labor of slavery, so is just as responsble for it's spread as it is for several of the factors that in turn killed it.

But yeah, I do think a combination of increasing economic prosperity (at least for whites), increase in a sense of liberty, religious self-interpretation, and the general increase in literacy that afforded mass communication of these ideals to make them into political movements were directly influenced by capitalism.

Your examples of 'slaves are treated fairly, they're happy' is directly out of a Southern newspaper or political speech in the 19th century. The difference between a Fox News viewer and a poor Southern farmer is signicant. The Fox news person is literate, and he has access to endless other media options. ALL of the media was controlled in the South, all of the newspapers were dominated by wealthy slave interests, there was no other source of information, and if you tried to put up fliers against slavery you would be arrested and beaten.

So if anything, their situation was worse.

I'm not denying that aspects of capitalism were crucial, in fact I acknowledged that in my previous post.

However I'm suggesting that it was a double edged sword whereby whilst some of it's fruits did, in fact, play a positive role you cannot escape the fact that slavery prospered within a capitalist framework where the profits to be made were astronomical and underlie many a fortune to this day.

Fair enough, I certainly agree with all of that.

And now in the US we have the industrial prison complex that was the culmination of the drug war, and the same type of profits are made while also stripping minorities of their voting rights. It's not quite as bad, but it's in the same damn area code.

Why do you suppose there is such thing as "the industrial prison complex"? Is it a communist/socialist construct?

Usually concrete I believe...

In Soviet Russia, industrial prison complex gets lost in you!

Quick reminder. "Its" - Possessive of "it." "It's" - contraction of "it is." This seems to confuse some of you.

Nope.

https://grammar.yourdictionary.com/punctuation/apostrophe-rules.html

Which puts a worrying new angle on GOP efforts to undermine it.

Nope.

https://www.grammarly.com/blog/its-vs-its/

Your link doesn't address "its" or "it's" at all.

Yes it does, look under possessives

Also

https://www.thepunctuationguide.com/apostrophe.html

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/informatics/punctuation/apostrophe/possessives

Sigh. Here in the US, mixed. Yes, state run prisons rent out prisoners. There are also for profit prisons, but they are much smaller subset.

But of course, we aren't the only ones who have ever done it - it's infamous in the Gulag archipelago in Russia and the current forced labor in the Xinjiang province among the Uighurs of China. The fascists certainly did it too. Sweden put their communist proponents in forced labor camps in WWII, Turkey had its labor battalions of prisoners, Vietnam its reeducation camps... Cuba, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Romania... This is hardly something unique to the United States, or even capitalism in general

Lanzman is technically correct, which is the best kind of correct.

https://www.dictionary.com/e/its-vs-its/

For some reason common usage has become its is possessive and it's is the contraction of it is. Because English is three racoons in a trench coat trying to get in to a matinee movie with the senior discount.

Still doesn't address "it's" or "its".

Yes it does, as do the further two links.

https://grammar.yourdictionary.com/punctuation/apostrophe-rules.html

Never said it was. I just asked - as you brought it up as an example of modern day slavery and how slavery makes a profit for the slave owners.

Don't get upset with me if you just destroyed your own argument.

Are we specifically discussing the word it or possessives in general?

The post to which you responded:

Fair enough, I was taking it to be a broader statement about possessives.

My bad.

I really feel like I need to bring in the geek teenager who is such a grammar nazi he corrects the dog, the neighbor, the POTUS (not to his face), and ... basically, anyone who was taught to speak English in Britain. :wink: