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TimS comments on What truths are actually taboo? - Less Wrong
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I'm not sure what reasonable position is being gestured towards by Bill's statement. Are you willing to cash it out a little? (Other than the quoted statement and the "Holocaust as reaction to Jews," I agree that Bill's positions are arguable - although I don't agree with many of them).
On a totally separate topic, I think the International Relation Realists have the better of the argument. WWII was inevitable in the same way that the wars of Louis XIV, Napoleon, and WWI were inevitable. It just seems to be a property of multi-power regions that a power with a plausible chance of dominating the region will try to dominate the region by military force - in the absence of outside intervention (like the US military presence in Germany since essentially the beginning of the Cold War to today).
For serious (though hardly undisputed) evidence that slavery wasn't, in certain respects, "not all that bad" see Fogel and Engerman's Time on the Cross. Note also that Fogel and Engerman were allowed to say this and that they both remain highly respected academics, despite Engerman existing in just the sort of field that the Sheeple Can't Handle My Thoughtcrime crowd would predict to be most witchhunty.
In case it wasn't clear, I think people who think "Slavery wasn't so bad" are widely under-weighing the suffering caused by the violent enforcement of the status quo. Slaves tried to escape all the time, and fugitive slave enforcement was incredibly violent - and the violence was state-sanctioned.
I was asking to try to understand how the statement imputed to Bill addressed that issue - because without addressing the violence of fugitive slave enforcement, the statement did not even seem plausible to me.
The central premise of Time on the Cross - that slavery was economically profitable and unlikely "wither away", and this had some positive effect on the treatment of the slaves, seems quite plausible to me. (That said, I believe this is only true after the invention of the cotton gin).
But I find it implausible that this benefit outweighed the negatives of the fugitive slave enforcement in the US.
The first half of the thesis is most assuredly true. It could be that if not for the invention of the cotton gin, slavery would not have been profitable in the cotton-growing regions of the US South, but slavery was extremely profitable and economically dynamic elsewhere, so I wouldn't be inclined to lay too much emphasis on the gin (except as a matter, possibly, of where slavery came to be located, as it did die out "naturally" in the areas where it was unprofitable.) However, it is also true that northern and/or metropolitan political leaders generally believed (however incorrectly) that free labor would generally be more efficient than slave, which to be fair it was in the industrial production processes that the abolishing regions had a comparative advantage in.
I am extremely skeptical of the second part of the thesis, because most everything I've seen indicates that slaves were worse off than black sharecroppers were worse off than southern whites were worse off than northern whites. But I haven't actually read Time on the Cross too closely.
I'd have to do some reading before responding to the second half of your comment, but to the first, that's relatively easy.
During slavery: black people are somebody's valuable property.
After Reconstruction: black people are a hated but cheap source of labor you can do pretty much anything to.
Granting that I haven't done a detailed study of the literature on this, but I think you're taking an exceptionally narrow view of what was bad about slavery in the antebellum US. After reconstruction, for example, black sharecroppers could not have their spouses and children arbitrarily seized and sent elsewhere.
How sure are you of that? Sharecroppers were often kept indebted as a method of control, and the US had debtors' prison just like England did.
As I said, this is not within my area of expertise. However, given that the family-destroying aspect of slavery is much commented upon, and various other evils of Jim Crow are much commented-upon, the fact that I have never encountered complaints about the family-destroying aspect of Jim Crow is sufficient for me to feel moderately confident that the situation was not equivalent on this dimension.
"Jim Crow" is a pretty small part of the story here. "Criminalization of black life" is a better description.
It wasn't designed to be a erudite summation of what slavery was like, but rather a succinct illustration of how slavery was not at that time an obviously worse outcome than the consequences of abolition. It's obvious to me at least that the abolition of slavery has proved a Good Thing, but it would not have been obvious in 1890.
Interesting argument, although I think it overestimates the protection offered by slavery and underestimates the downsides. Maybe change it from "either true or arguable" to simply "arguable"? You're losing status by implicitly endorsing these positions.