Perhaps the single weirdest slave story I’ve yet seen, from 1300s Byzantium.

The varied kinds of insanity:

1) A woman *marries her own male slave*, with no plans to free him, and neither the author nor anyone in-story shows any surprise or disapproval. Like, who’s supposed to obey who?? (In-story, it’s clearly him obeying her, which the author doesn’t have a problem with. Class trumps sex!)

2) The author shows absolutely zero sympathy for *his own countrymen carried off into slavery by foreigners*.

Trying to research slavery in Tibet, and stymied by how:

1) Nobody has bothered to translate any actual secular legal texts

2) The background debate is always: “Pre-1959 Tibet: harmoniously enlightened Shangri-La, or tragically Mao-deprived reactionary dystopia?” And there’s the additional fascinating wrinkle that in the West—at least in my lifetime—the anti-Tibet narrative has been consistently right-coded:

“See, you annoying hippies— Buddhism can be oppressive too!”

Only actual tankies take the pro-CCP line here.

I'm very confused by the stark double standard in pre-modern Christian attitudes toward the free poor and toward slaves.

This may be the single most depressing illustration of it I've yet seen: Saint Melania the Younger (c. 400 AD) was a fabulously wealthy matron who owned thousands of slaves. She wanted to pursue asceticism, and so planned to sell her property and give the proceeds to the poor.

Per one of the two hagiographies, this included her slaves.

I loathe the slavish passivity, the nauseating fatalism, of the AI accelerationists.

They portray themselves as the confident, masterful, masculine side.

But their agenda boils down to “if rape is inevitable, lie back and enjoy it.” They call themselves techno-optimists—but it’s the same denial of human agency, the same meek surrender to blind idiot gods.

Sometimes it surrenders to the mindless forces of nature, and says that trying to improve the human condition via technology is hubristically playing God.

@Evollaqi @sumdepony One vice that doesn’t seem discussed enough—and is a major problem in our current hyper-polarized environment—is that of *deliberately provoking anger* in others. This endemic rage-bait takes two forms:

1) Deliberately making people angry *at you*, by saying something calculated to provoke

And, far more common

2) Making people angry *at the other side*, by sharing something outrageous they’ve said

@excrptc A depressing discovery about canon law and slavery:

At least in the Latin West, the church consistently forbade freeing church-owned slaves because of the ban on alienating church property. Per Gratian and his high medieval successors, there were only three ways a church-owned slave could be freed:

1) In order to become a priest, monk, or nun (since their labor would still belong to the church, in a sense)

@Evollaqi Today’s Random Depressing Historical Fact:

1) Contra what I’ve always read, wife-beating *was* generally considered legal in England into the mid-19th-c.

Blackstone’s famous opinion here seems to have been a minority one. My source is “Bacon’s Abridgment of the Law”, which was more influential in 18th-c. England (and colonial America) than Blackstone.

Its last edition, from 1832, preserves the old harsh view:

@Peter_Nimitz Things I learned from "Village Life In Late Tsarist Russia", the first-ever systematic ethnography of a Russian peasant community, done in 1902 by Olga Tian-Shanskaya but never published in her lifetime:

(A warning: it's extremely depressing.) 1) The single most surprising thing by far was how anti-natal peasant attitudes were.

Central Russia may have had the highest fertility of anywhere in Europe, to the point where it was facing a Malthusian crisis, but it *wasn't* because peasants wanted a lot of kids.

@Evollaqi @oogabooga3544
A depressing paradox:

On the one hand, it seems that the current trend among classicists is towards arguing that Greco-Roman infanticide was much less common and less gender-biased than previously thought... E.g., this paper points out that supposed evidence for massively-skewed gender ratios in ancient Greek populations is actually dubious, and that there's no clear evidence of sex-selective infanticide being widespread in practice. academia.edu/3166682/Greco_…

@oogabooga3544

TIL that Keralans weren’t alone in this form of cruelty:

The consensus Rabbinic Jewish view ended up being that slave-owners had no obligation to materially provide for their (Gentile) slaves.

https://twitter.com/reallpberia/status/1543157758060507136

I’m getting this from Maimonides’ “Mishneh Torah”.

The actual Talmudic passages show it was a debated, controversial issue. But the wrong side appears to have won.

I’m *shocked* that those devoutly Catholic Poles keep sanctimoniously damning me for that whole Katyn unpleasantness.

Why, by the rulings of their own most distinguished and humane theologians and canon lawyers, the NKVD’s actions were morally in the clear!

😇🙏🔫🤯😵🪦 Specifically, I refer to the great Francisco de Vitoria, that heroic defender of the Indians and proto-liberal theorist of universal human rights.

Even for him, all combatants are guilty and can legitimately be killed even after capture.

@Evollaqi

Extremely dismayed to learn recently that Medieval English serfdom was *much* closer to chattel slavery, in terms of both theoretical understanding and concrete legal effects, than is commonly thought. @Evollaqi This strongly challenges both Anglophilic narratives about how the common law never recognized slavery, and English participation in New World slavery thus represented a dramatic break with national tradition.