3 Topics Over Dinner

Some people really, really want to believe that American slavery was somehow "unique" and the worst thing that happened to anybody anywhere. This is a view sustainable only with a profound ignorance of the facts.

Prior to 400 years ago, slavery existed everywhere. The practice probably pre-dates the use of metal as currency, and most intellectuals considered it an unfortunate but inevitable part of the human condition. The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, widely revered as a great and noble Stoic philospher, was in a position to eradicate slavery, but he didn't. Jesus Christ would have seen slavery all around him in the Roman Empire, but he never told slave owners to free their slaves, and neither did the Apostle Paul, who authored much of the New Testament (he told slaves to work hard, so their owners wouldn't discourage their other slaves from becoming Christians, and he told masters to be good to their slaves, but nothing so far as freeing them.

The Native Americans enslaved one another before the whites showed up.

Male slaves were regularly castrated in The Ottoman Empire and China, and in both those places, slavery continued after it had been abolished in the US. The Ottoman Empire enslaved both Africans and Europeans (but not Muslims). Castration was not the typical practice in the US

Before South Sudanese independence, Muslim Arabs from northern Sudan would enslave Christians from southern Sudan in the late 20th century.

One of the reasons for the War of 1812 was that when Royal Navy ships were short-staffed, they would board American ships and abduct Americans to enslave as sailors for the Royal Navy. One of the demands in the American declaration of war was that Britain would stop that. America lost the war and agreed to peace without any of our grievances being addressed.

When Europeans went to tropical Africa, they quickly found that any of them who went exploring into the jungle never came back -- unlike Africans, they had no genetic resistance to tropical diseases. So they were unable to go inland to abduct slaves. Instead, they built forts on the coast and bought slaves from African tribes. The going rate was a barrel of rum per slave.

Experiments show that artifical intelligence bots on social media are several times more persuasive than highly intelligent humans. What's more, the AI bots are persuasive not because they are providing logically sound arguments and accurate facts -- they lie and deliberately use known logical fallacies.

For years, I've been going into conservative spaces on social media and trying to persuade them to cooperate with climate action. But to the best of my ability, I've always been honest about facts and the arguments that I've been making have been ones that I think are valid. But I would be no match for these deceitful AI bots.

A lot of people have been alarmed by the bad rap that Israel has been getting over the war against Hamas. An AI bot has been created, Operation Iron Dome, to argue on social media on Israel's behalf.

According to this article, many respected intellectuals are increasingly turning to religion.