The African-American slave statement was recently made on one of the open discussion threads of SSC blog in question. I was fairly shocked by it (I didn’t know it was a common topic), first trying to see if it was meant ironically (no, it seemed to be meant seriously), then expecting the regular “rationalists” to tear the arguments apart. But none did, and the statement stood unchallenged—to be fair, the recent open threads had thousands of comments and so it may have gone unnoticed. I was actually going to see if that thread had any replies when I found the blog was deleted, and I honestly wondered if that wasn’t the reason.

The discussions on SSC were often intellectual and rationality-based, but a lot of the super-commenters were right-leaning. Left-leaning commenters were more scarce, and even benefitted from some affirmative-action less-strict moderation to encourage them to sick around. In fact, after the recent BLM protests, a new user showed up to argue and explain the social justice position, and did so respectfully and was well-received.

But I think a lot of the regulars had their blind spots. So many arguments were essentially: since A is true, B and C are the logical conclusions, but often nobody questioned A, let alone tested it—the rationality was often superficial. A popular format on the open threads (thus I’m characterizing the blog readers and commentariat, not the blog author) was impossible hypotheticals leading to un-provable speculation. Questions like what would’ve happened if Germany in WW2 had such-or-such a weapon. The format was even codified in the format of friendly aliens offering some weird bargain (take a pill to sleep 12hrs a day—or never need sleep but always be tired), then asking people what they would do or how that would change things. Fun thought problems, but so disconnected from reality or practical thought—essentially nerd-sniping (to use an admittedly uncharitable term).

Tl;DR: SSC was a mixed bag, but mostly civil and well-intentioned.

Are you sure that's all there was? I've never heard anyone argue that the slaves themselves benefited from slavery. I want to be clear I'm not making this argument myself, only describing a thing I have heard... I have heard someone argue that modern blacks have received a net benefit compared to if their ancestors had been left alone. And the context is about how to calculate reparations. What you described, slaves themselves benefiting directly, doesn't sound familiar at all.

I remembered slightly wrong, it was more complicated than that. A rather right leaning commenter said that if one were to accept that reparations for historical slavery requested by BLM and SJW were valid, then because African-Americans are claimed to be still better off than any other black populations in other countries, the slavers should be celebrated not torn down. The commenter says because this is “morally repugnant” then BLM and SJW are thus wrong. So it’s a case of false equivalence and setting up a straw man Or something (they love their rhetorical flourishes at SSC). So the slavery issue wasn’t actually claimed, but it was set up as a logical conclusion or the opponent’s perceived position, and this was never countered.

Here is the comment on archive.org:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200622224636/https://slatestar...

> Yeah, the American Right has really marginalized Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, et al.

The fact that Trump is what you think passes for an ethno-nationalist these days is all the evidence needed to demonstrate my point.

>“Europeans did Africans a favor by bringing them to America as slaves”

This is a pretty gross thing to say, but it's not ethno-nationalism. Words have meaning for a reason.

>“Capitalist ownership of the means of production is a root of injustice and fundamentally incompatible with democracy”

The most popular politician in our country a couple years ago, and perhaps still today, is the open socialist Bernie Sanders.