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> I mean, they would cut your balls off (castration) just to qualify you for unpaid labor in the old world.

And they would kill slaves right here in the new world. Neither of those things is representative of farming as labor — it represents specific moral bankruptcies in those societies. There are plenty of small to medium sized farms where I live, and neither of those principles has applied to them for nearly 400 years, at least.

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Right, somewhere between the Crusades/Inquisitions (plural, cross-regional) and the Atlantic Slave Trade was the moral peak of humanity - is that the take?

Even on a quaint farm in the south of France the punishment for a servant disobeying their master was a lot worse than getting laid off with severance - one might say severance had a different meaning.

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> Right, somewhere between the Crusades/Inquisitions (plural, cross-regional) and the Atlantic Slave Trade was the moral peak of humanity - is that the take?

… what?

No. I’m saying that none of these societal tyrannies has anything to do with being a self-operated farm owner now.

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Oh I thought you said for 400+ years (small) farming has been as ethical as it is now.

I understand that you're saying:

> [slavery] is not representative of farming as labor

But I disagree, since it clearly has been. Military, prison, servitude, employment, even the tyranny of "the man of the house" - all these hierarchical authoritarian social structures (whether or not they were ever noble or righteous, or useful) have improved ethically over time in the lives of those subjected to the violence of these systems - the conditions used to be a lot worse, across the board.

Labor is not solved in terms of ethics, but it's a lot better now.

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There are a few million people in jail and supervision in the USA, offloading the crudity and performing the work of incentivizing conformity, at slave wages as we speak.
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What was imprisonment like in 1920? 1320?

What year were the Mayans rolling heads down staircases?

I’ll take now

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“Things can’t be bad now cause they were bad before”
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"Things can't be good now cause they were good before"
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That doesn't work.
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