#exceptionalism

Bioshock 2: Why Collectivism is a shitty philosophy to build society on

Which is not to say that women/girls and nonbinary/genderqueer people are privileged in relation to men/boys (women are in relation to boys but on the age axis) but rather that you have internalized that those things are bad not because they are nonconsensual but because they are done by men/boys towards women/girls.

By: Keith Woods

Published: Jul 2, 2023

A look at slavery outside of the West

It has become popular to blame White people for slavery, to the point that many actually believe slavery was invented by or exclusively practiced by Europeans.

But the history of slavery outside the West is far more brutal.

The Arab slave trade emerged in the 7th century, 10 centuries before the Atlantic slave trade

Arabs sold Africans to the Middle East for a variety of jobs such as domestic work or harem guards - castrating male slaves was common, causing over half of males to bleed to death

The Arab slave trade was particularly brutal: it's estimated that 3/4 captured slaves died before they reached the market for sale

Historians estimate that between 10 and 18 million people were enslaved by Arab slave traders, including women and children taken as concubines.

Arabs did not create the slave trade out of nothing, in fact, enslaving conquered tribes was already common practice in Central Africa when they arrived.

The West African Songhai Empire relied heavily on captured slaves in all levels of society, even as soldiers.

Africans themselves also played a large role in facilitating the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

African tribes conducted raids on rival groups to provide slaves for sale. African middlemen facilitated trade between European traders and African suppliers.

The Arabs also had a slave trade in Europe. Estimates are that up to 1.25 million Europeans were enslaved by Barbary pirates, who would raid villages in coastal countries like Italy, France, England and Ireland, bringing them to North Africa for sale.

In some cases entire villages would be captured, such as the Irish coastal village of Baltimore, entirely raided in 1631.

These slaves faced a brutal future, engaging in hard labour or sexual servitude, and spending nights hot and overcrowded prisons called bagnios.

Many slaves captured by Barbary pirates were sold eastwards into the Ottoman Empire. Slavery was central to the Ottoman Empire, most towns had dedicated slavery markets called Yesirs.

Slaves came from Africa, the Caucasus, the Balkans and Eastern & Southern Europe.

Sexual slavery was a big part of Ottoman society. Slavic women were popular slaves, and Köçeks became a popular source of entertainment in the 19th century:

These were young boys, usually from European backgrounds, who were circumcised, cross-dressed and trained as dancers.

Hereditrary slavery is recorded in China dating back to the Xia Dynasty in 2100 BC. Africans purchased on the Silk Road were used as a sign of wealth.

After Chinese law began to treat women as property around 1000AD it was common to sell daughters and sisters into slavery.

The Mongols enslaves tens of thousands of Chinese as punishment for resistance.

In the post-Mongol Ming Dynasty, thousands of slaves were employed to do bureaucratic jobs for the government, and rich families also employed thousands of slaves to perform menial labour.

Slavery was common in American civilizations like the Aztec and Maya

Among the Aztecs, slavery was a punishment for a variety of crimes or even failure to pay taxes. Husbands and wives sold each other in times of economic hardship. Slaves were identified by wooden collars.

Slavery was also common practice in the civilizations of South-East Asia.

The Khmer Empire had a massive slave class that did much of the work building monuments like Angkor Wat. Historians estimate 25-35% of the population of Thailand/Burma were slaves in the 17th century.

Slavery also existed among Native American tribes. Slavery was common practice among Northwest tribes like the Tlingit, for whom one third of their population during the mid-1800s were slaves.

Various tribes practiced debt-slavery and enslaved captives of other tribes.

The only difference between these cases of slavery and that practiced by Europeans is that Europeans abolished slavery on humanitarian grounds, and spread this across the globe.

The intense focus on the White role in slavery is a product of widespread Anti-White animus.

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American exceptionalism comes in two varieties: "we're exceptionally virtuous," and "we're exceptionally evil."

Both rely on lying about or being ignorant of history.

https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/dashboards/schools_dashboard.aspx

Unraveling the Enigma: Understanding the Peculiarities of American Cultural Norms and Behaviors #AmericanCulture #CulturalNorms #Consumerism #Inequality #Exceptionalism #SocialIsolation

In the labyrinthine landscape of American cultural norms and behaviors, there exist enigmatic enclaves that confound and perplex even the most astute observers. From the superficial to the sublime, these peculiarities embody a tapestry of contradictions and idiosyncrasies that defy rational explanation and beg the question: which American cultural norms or behaviors are the hardest to…

None of the images in this post are drawn or painted by a person. They are the result of the latest iteration of neural net called DALL-E 2, developed by OpenAI, one of the main players in artificial intelligence development and mostly known through their text synthesis suite called GPT-3.

The images are created by entering a text description of the result in a prompt and wait 20 seconds for the system to generate its latent space; dozens of distinctly different versions generated by the same instruction. The images are no pastiches, no collages nor in any other way drawn from any existing illustration. It is capable of a completely different outcome by simply changing the desired form from 'charcoal drawing' to 'vapor wave' or 'pixel art'. Without going into the question of whether or not these illustrations are art, or even creative, it is important to recognize that they are real and development is going in an exponential rate.

The rate in which it develops is something I've never seen and examples from last year in both text and images are completely overshadowed by what the system is capable of today. In hardware development it is known as Moore's Law where a chip get's twice as fast and twice as cheap every two year. One of the founders and current CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, talks about this principle in the Ezra Klein podcast following his article called 'Moores Law for Everything'.

GPT-3 is affecting education directly since it can now write texts that are indistinguishable from students'. DALL-E 2 will be followed by DALL-E 3 this year and where it can now generate images in a 1024x1024 pixel canvas it is not hard to image it being able to draw with vectors, in sophisticated 3D rendering and engineering software and is basically limitless when it comes to everything we as humans learned to draw on a computer in the last 25 years.

For years I've imagined the singularity would be something like a crossbreed between Terminator and Boston Dynamics and in a relatively distant future but it might just come in the form of a beautiful poem or a spectacular painting next year.