"Incest --- a game the whole family can play" (attributed to Cicero)

And if that isn't a reflection on a broken society, I don't know what is.

Exactly. In medieval spain the moors in Al Andalus actually prefered blond germanic slaves. So much that the word slave in spanish (and likely in english) "esclavo" comes from "eslavo" (as in an slavic person)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't most slave-owning cultures pretty undiscriminating about who they enslave? The ancient Romans took slaves of all races from all over the known world, same for the Vikings and Mongols, and most peoples that engaged in conquest and slavery.

This is talked about a lot, especially by people that want to downplay a specific slave trade and more importantly its legacy in current society. (Obviously it is an irrelevant point).

the fact that slavery was consider a part of life have been forgotten, at one or other point in history anybody could become a slave if they were unlucky enough...didn't have anything to do with ethnicity...yet the way people have treated slaves are been very different. many places had actuall rules to what an owner could do to a slave, and only a few times have slaves been completely without rights ie Rome or the continental slave trade...

It's constantly talked about by the type of people who think @#* lives matter is an acceptable response to BlackLivesMatter. It doesn't arise.

Absolutely, slavery has been around since the dawn of time and there have been racial elements before but it doesn't change that the situation in the US was unique and the side effects are still being felt today.

“Never talked about” my ass. The second anyone talks about American slaves, some racist will pop in with “white people were slaves too!!!”

Roomie and I were discussing this recently, that enslaving others has always been part of human society. USA for-profit prisons are slave factories. USA is currently debating Critical Race Theory and how to make reparations for our long-term enslavement of African descendants.

China has an expression, Fang Nu, or "house slave" for people whose total earnings go mostly for mortgage. I wonder if other nations were as frank about this debacle as the Chinese, how many billions of slaves would we count worldwide...

Thank you, this needs to be understood in order to break cycles of oppression.

this is all semantics. economic and educational slavery are very real in every country. the rich can limit how much health, education and wages people can attain. keeping a people helpless even though they are 'free' is still 'slavery'.

It's talked about just not taught in usa schools

Slavery exists/existed in almost all parts of the world. A lot of it was based on who was the victor and who was the loser; losers became slaves. However, when some white skinned people (I too am northern European descent) decided that they were superior to dark skinned people, history began to show the enslavement of a race based on skin color and legitimized via incompetent understanding of biblical history. Of course, if those (primarily) Africans had been better equipped to put up a fight about it, maybe history would have been changed significantly. All of this is fueled by the human need to have someone to control and look down on....

Yes, but you don't need to talk about races here. Slavery has been practiced everytime and everywhere, indeed, and long before the mere concept of "race" was even elaborated (let alone the fact that there is no such things as human races actually). Slave owners had preferences about physical features - they wanted their slaves strong or beautiful according to the taste of the moment ; they treated their slaves as animals because that was their status in the local laws ; but they didn't need any pseudo-scientific background about being biologically "superior" or whatever to do all of this. In other words, skin color didn't really matter, and any misfortune could lead you from master to slave regardless of what you looked like. I insist on this because it is eye-opening for the present time : you don't even need to be racist to be a slave-owner...

The big difference is that the enslaved that were brought to America by the Europeans who imposed hereditary slavery. In other cultures and societies a slave could work off their servitude. In American slavery an enslaved person's children were also enslaved. A person's children could be bought and sold like chattel. It was a never ending cycle util the Civil War. If Andrew Johnson hadn't voided it all, America would be a very different place.

Is that statue real? Where is it?

Yes, but some are more recent than others :O

Ethnies, not races...

this needs to be way higher on the list

Every ethnicity. We're all the same race.

Yep, only difference being they didn't have social media to tell you what you had to think.

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If taught in elementary schools like it used to be in the 70s the entire grievance industry would collapse.

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On bored panda it's exaggerated, incorrectly stated and still claimed to be not talked about.

There were no human casualties. The "army" just retreated eventually.

Oh, the bitterest of all ironies.

"Long sausage full of teeth" is a good body plan.

One is titled : "How to cover a book in human skin and get away with it"

Gee, you mean nations commit horrible atrocities even on their own citizens? Gasp, shock, faint ----- and, yes, that was sarcasm.

Controlling women's wombs for thousands of years and still nothing has changed

here's a list: As of 2018, the countries with the most slaves were: India (18.4 million), China (3.86 million), Pakistan (3.19 million), North Korea (2.64 million), Nigeria (1.39 million), Indonesia (1.22 million), Democratic Republic of the Congo (1 million), Russia (794,000) and the Philippines (784,000).

The fact that some critical decisions that will affect the whole humanity are on the hands of a few people, is scary

Forced Vampirism

That’s insane. I remember watching Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon.

TIL how to spell Bazalgette. Always sounded like it should be Basiljet to me. First modern sewer system was in London, before that the River Thames was the sewer!

They also had a violent empire that had slavery and conquered, raped and pillaged their neighbours. Which is completely normal for the time. But everybody talks about the europeans as if we were the only ones to commit atrocities

Ireland hasn't recovered from the potatoes famine. There were 8 million in Ireland in 1841, now there are about 6.

I will never stip being shocked at the idiocy of doctors. Anybody with half a neuron knows that they feel pain. Since they show it. There was no reason to think otherwise except laziness

oh yeah i've heard of this, there were a lot of people that died there...

And the babies slept very quietly after their baths! But seriously, water was often contaminated in the ancient world, and alcohol killed bacteria so it might actually have been a good idea. Did you know that Roman army was able to conquer much of the known world because they carried huge vats of low-quality wine and mixed it with whatever drinking water they found? It killed enough pathenogenic microbia that the armies didn't get sick en masse in dubious areas.

In the Tuskegee Study, the U.S. government injected African Americans with syphilis so that they could find how it spreads and works its way through the body. And they just left them infected rather than giving them penicillin afterwards.

Clearly they used a Dutch oven.

And it took even longer from that point to now to work out that we still have dinosaurs in the form of birds and reptiles.

One way that chronobiologists and sleep researchers have used to identify and study circadian rhythms is to spend extended periods isolated from natural light, temperature fluctuations, or other stimuli that could signal the time of day. Today, some laboratories have special facilities to achieve this isolation, but early researchers used caves. Nathaniel Kleitman conducted the first cave experiment in 1938 when he and a graduate student spent 32 days isolated from the outside world in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky. The researchers imposed a 28-hour cycle on themselves consisting of ten hours of work, nine of leisure, and another nine hours of sleep. Bedtime shifted four hours later each day during the Mammoth Cave study. Despite the alternative schedule and the absence of external cues, Kleitman found that body temperature continued to fluctuate in an approximately 24-hour cycle, suggesting the existence of an endogenous clock.

We have done so much evil in such little time