Hot take: slavery
You get to say slavery taught people valuable skills *if* you're, say, Roman, 'cause the Romans knew how to exploit people *efficiently* and it was part of how.
You definitely *don't* if you're a Confederacy apologist, because their form of slavery excelled at cruelty, malice, and general fuckheadry while simultaneously being pure goddamn shit at the actual exploitation part.
(Smells like Dark Kantianism, but is probably just our special kind of literally incredibly stupid.)
Hot take: slavery
Incidentally, yes, obviously it is also an ethical abomination. But you know that, I know that, and everyone reading this knows that, so there's no point in repeating it.
(If you don't know that, please stop reading immediately, unsubscribe, go home, and rethink your everything.)
Hot take: slavery
If you're going to throw all ethics aside and try to recreate the glory of some historical culture complete with the nasty bits, at least pick one that *succeeded*.
We may still have to fight the neo-Mongols or the Tamerlane Recreationists, but at least it won't be so embarrassing that our nemeses are a pale imitation of what was a shitpile to begin with.
Hot take: slavery
I'm still going to take a moment to observe that something that pisses me off is that a certain type of people always stan the cultures that were complete and utter losers at what they tried to do. Confederate apologists, neo-Nazis, tankies, you name it, these fuckers just love cultures that were complete and utter failures from failtown riding the failroad to fail city.