It's easy to sign up someone else hundreds of years ago to have gone through that. Much harder to willingly sign yourself up for a lifetime of the American slave experience.

There is no 'the' American slave experience. There was a lot of variety. 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' was written for the purpose of convincing people that slavery is so evil we should go to war to end it, but most of the slaves in the book had a pretty nice life at first. (But the eventual downside of being owned mean you have no control over when/if it all goes bad).

American slavery was one of the cruelest forms of slavery in recorded history.

> A quote from a letter by Isabella Gibbons, who had been enslaved by professors at the University of Virginia, is now engraved on the university's Memorial to Enslaved Laborers:

>> Can we forget the crack of the whip, the cowhide, whipping-post, the auction-block, the spaniels, the iron collar, the negro-trader tearing the young child from its mother’s breast as a whelp from the lioness? Have we forgotten that by those horrible cruelties, hundreds of our race have been killed? No, we have not, nor ever will.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treatment_of_slaves_in_the_U...

This is willfully clueless. I'm embarassed to have read this opinion here

“one of” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

American slavery didn’t hold a candle to the cruelty of Arab slavery. Imagine all the horrors of American slavery and they cut your balls off. Slavery and genocide mixed together, with the evil benefit of no free descendants to contend with.

Castration was a common punishment in American slavery, and “didn’t hold a candle to” is a really egregious whitewash. Questions like whether it’s better or worse than having a child sold off are potentially valid philosophical debates but the only valid conclusion is that both were heinous systems deserving only condemnation.

Mediterranean oar slaves sound like they had it worse: force to row every day in the sun until your skin burned, got infected, then you died from said infection. Afterwards your corpse was tossed overboard. You were replaced with another slave held in the hold and the process repeats.

American slaves were generally purchased (with a mortgage) so they were not infinitely replenished.

"eventual downside"

> It's easy to sign up someone else hundreds of years ago to have gone through that

it's a pretty universal human desire to give a better life to your children and your children's children, so he might not be very far off.

a) That actually isn't a refutation or a response of the parent argument. It's just some random point.

b) The topic wasn't indicated to be about the American slave experience, it could have been about slavery in general, or about slavery in the Incan empire etc etc, so you could be making an argument against a point isn't even relevant.

This is why debate is important. Its trivially easy to see through bad arguments.

On the topic of bad arguments, is (b) supposed to suggest that any form of slavery was good to the slaves and not an unreasonable cruelty as US slavery was? Not sure how Mike Tyson is any more valid by describing a different instance of slavery. Not all slavery is equally bad per se, but I'd say it's all bad enough.

No. I said what I said. Slavery being good is not refuted by bringing up a single instance of slavery.

The point is that if your response to "Slavery good" is that "US Slavery was really really bad" and spend a ton of time on this argument, the opposing team could easily stand up respond with "We concede US slavery was bad, here are the reasons why that doesn't really matter and why it doesn't even refute our generic arguments that slavery is good across the board except for this one time"

So you've wasted a ton of time arguing something that can easily be made irrelevant with very little effort.

You can't go up there and say Slavery is bad because I think Slavery is bad and expect to win.

Except I'm not saying "only consider one instance of slavery that is bad". By all means, consider them all. Then there's the question of whether slavery can inherently be remotely good. Also, I said "instance of slavery" but that downplays the scale and impact of the systems that enabled slavery. Of course I'm not pointing at an example of slaves being mistreated as my only reasoning.

But then the other side is not arguing slavery is good, but slavery is good except for this exception, which could likely be continued at infinitum. At some point we end up at the true scotsman fallacy, where no existing slavery was ever "real" slavery. .

If we take a scientific view, one example acn falsify and statement, so shouldn't

You're responding to someone who has taken a pretty strong position and backed it up with reason and anecdote. Don't answer it by telling the person who made the argument that they should feel guilty for making the argument. That's why everybody is stupid now.

Just tell them why they're wrong, point by point. Point out implicit premises that don't hold up. Do anything else other than try to convince the other person to stop speaking. People don't shut up because you tell them to, you have to make them shut up. That is a slippery slope.

> backed it up with reason and anecdote.

And here we can see the easily swayed debate judge in action.

A made up Mike Tyson quote, really? At least Kayne actually said the thing about being a slave was a choice, somehow.

Overly rosy description and/or low bar. As for Mike Tyson, it's convenient to appeal to history as how things must be, rather than just one path of how things were. To be fair, asking people to come up with reasonable arguments for slavery (aside from the people benefitting from slavery) is a tad difficult.

Can you source that Mike Tyson quote? I've heard it attributed to several black boxers, which makes me think it's made up.

It was Muhammad Ali, after the Rumble in the Jungle against George Foreman in Zaire in 1974.

On his return he was asked what he thought of Africa and said “Thank God my granddaddy got on that boat!”