Libyan Slave Markets

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A couple articles:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/ ... -migration
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-39567632

Stephan Molyneux weighing in on a palpable silence in the social sphere of the west:

....and Italy is paying these same Libyan traffickers more money, in order to prevent them sending migrants on boats to them.

It's a pity that those Libyan people put those phony ads for "construction workers," so that they can exploit these people.

but... slavery was never gone.
I mean, not everywhere.
[url]
https://www.theguardian.com/global-deve ... itzpatrick[/url]

and they call it part of their culture. so ... I mean, enlightenment and humanism have only happened in what today is called the first world - this idea, that the social can be changed based on scientific ideas, like the overall equality of human beings. In a lot of the world, the value and status of a human is still very much entangled in ideas of culture.
and the fact that we westerners are willing to turn a blind eye to this is speaking volumes about how seriously we actually take humanism.

What's scaring me actually more than anything right now is that I think this is getting ignored less for the sort of reasons that Stephan said, although they're there, and more because we can't hear anything over the din of our own political food-fights right now. I'm really starting to wonder just how it is we got this stupid this fast. The internet? Social media? Watered-down education? We might be going right back to slavery here if we can't keep social order and I have my doubts that it'll break down along ethnic lines, it'll probably be the difference of who was with a big group for protection and who wasn't when it all unravels.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Stefan_Molyneux

How can you take anything this guy says seriously? He sounds like a racist-sexist Youtube cult leader. It also sounds like no academics take him seriously for very good reason.

I'm probably really dumb then because I find some of the things he says insightful. Typically if I learn something I didn't know already or hear someone say something in a way that I find interesting or haven't heard before I'll keep listening to them - till I get bored. So far I find myself listening to Stephan Molyneux on and off because he's still got some novelty to dig through.

Also I never learned the art of permanently walling people out if they hold a few political beliefs I disagree with. If that were the case I'd have a hard time listening to Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, etc. much but they still say enough that's of value that I take what I can get from it and there are also areas where I deeply commend their stances on principle. Heck, I'll still listen to Red Ice Radio because if I want to try and understand how the alt-right thinks, among its headiest and most philosophically oriented members, I'll check in to see what the topic is. I mean, I have been punished most of my life for breaking tribal shibboleth, I get that Conformitas might be the closest thing we have to an actual deity in this world, and this might be yet another example of me being hopelessly philistine from that perspective. I suppose I'll just have to chalk it up to Asperger's.

How can you take rational wiki seriously? It prides itself on its biases, describes itself as satire and prefers "consensus" to repeatable methodology.

I'm no fan of Molyneux. I think the man is part weasel, part chameleon, part snake, and he has some fairly insane views on parenting - but these aren't reasons to disregard everything he has to say.

A law professor writes in USA Today:

Africans are being sold at Libyan slave markets. Thanks, Hillary Clinton.

Black Africans are being sold in open-air slave markets, and it’s Hillary Clinton’s fault. But you won’t hear much about that from the news media or the foreign-policy pundits, so let me explain.

Footage from Libya, released recently by CNN, showed young men from sub-Saharan Africa being auctioned off as farm workers in slave markets.

And how did we get to this point? As the BBC reported back in May, “Libya has been beset by chaos since NATO-backed forces overthrew long-serving ruler Col. Moammar Gadhafi in October 2011.”

And who was behind that overthrow? None other than then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Under President George W. Bush in 2003, the United States negotiated an agreement with Libyan strongman Gadhafi. The deal: He would give up his weapons of mass destruction peacefully, and we wouldn’t try to depose him.

That seemed a good deal at the time, but the Obama administration didn’t stick to it. Instead, in an operation spearheaded by Clinton, the United States went ahead and toppled him anyway.

The overthrow turned out to be a debacle. Libya exploded into chaos and civil war, and refugees flooded Europe, destabilizing governments there. But at the time, Clinton thought it was a great triumph — "We came, we saw, he died,” she joked about Gadhafi’s overthrow — and adviser Sidney Blumenthal encouraged her to tout her "successful strategy" as evidence of her fitness for the highest office in the land.

It’s surprising the extent to which Clinton has gotten a pass for this debacle, which represents a humanitarian and strategic failure of the first order. (And, of course, the damage is still compounding: How likely is North Korea’s Kim Jong Un to give up his nuclear weapons after seeing the worthlessness of U.S. promises to Gadhafi?)

Back during his brief stint in the Democratic primary, former senator James Webb raised the issue, saying America "blew the lid off of a series of tribal engagements. You can't get to the Tripoli airport right now, much less Benghazi." But as the Libya disaster continues to unfold, Clinton’s role in it gets surprisingly little attention.

Maybe it’s buried under the other Clinton/Obama debacles in the Middle East, such as the botched Syrian policy that The Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt called ”a humanitarian and cultural disaster of epochal proportions.” Remember President Obama’s “red line” that Syria crossed, and that Obama didn’t enforce?

That led to a destabilizing flood of refugees hitting Europe, too.

And, of course, there’s the Yemen policy, which Obama bragged about as a model for the war on terror. But now Yemen is another war-wracked humanitarian and strategic disaster.

Still, Libya is in a class of its own. In Syria and Yemen, at least, the situation was already bad. Libya, before Clinton got involved, was comparatively stable and no strategic threat to the United States or its allies. Now it’s a shambles, with people literally being sold in slave markets.

Back in the 2012 presidential campaign, Vice President Biden told a group of African Americans that the GOP was going to "put you all back in chains." But it turned out that it was Clinton’s policies that led to black people being sold. As some ponder another Hillary Clinton run in 2020, that’s worth pointing out.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/ ... 895853001/

There's photographic evidence that people are being sold as slaves in Libya. There's no doubt about it.

yes, the internet. Noam Chomsky described the media as the machinery to manufacture consent. That has broken down, and we've become busy argueing about everything under the sun. Everything that at least any large group of people could agree on - to be able to move on and get s**t done- is being questioned and attacked by group outsiders now.

I'm sure you're aware of the tide-pool theory of the origin of life- you'd need it to have happened in water, so the first living organism wouldn't dry out or be just blown away all the time, yet the water needs to be mixed with new ingredients occasionally, and left at peace in between.

basically, the internet has opened up the tidepool of our local communities to the stormy ocean. for better or worse.


recently I came across a post by hordan peterson, about some professor having his own, not greenhouse-gas based theory of global warming. that professot argued that the initial experiment on which the idea of greenhouse gases was based was seriously flawed.
I did my own research for that. the experiment was flawed and useless, true. But the greenhouse gas theory has been indepently proved about 5 times with 5 different methodseaxh state of the art at that point, up intil the last one in the late 20th century. greenhouse gases have been shown to exist, event though the initial experiment on which the theory was based was faulty. the guy drew the wrong conclusions and stumbled on a viable theory.
but that professor decided to attack the original experiment. and Jordan Peterson tweeted it to 5 million followers.
now we have to argue about that stuff again, while hurricanes become more regular, the sea levels are rising, and slavery is "back".

yes. the internet. 100%.

^^

That's another one of the fascinating miracles of life. Almost anyone I find who I agree with emphatically on one point or another, or who I feel has stated one thing or a cluster of things clearer than I've ever heard stated before (with Stephan Molyneux that point was the cultural effects of intelligence ranges within societies) will then do something embarrassing in another category.

I think the only good news we have is that the projections on the 2 C end of century increase limit has been extended per the reports and it sounds like the change, ie. drastic reduction (to near zero) for greenhouse gases in the next four or five decades rather than too late ten years ago at least gives innovation and competition a goal that can be credibly funded and cheered on.

As far as the internet is concerned though I think we're being forced to now really look at our tribalism and ask 'Is it worth it?'. We're going to have to rethink fact-checking, objectivity, etc., and see in what new ways we can innovate around our own biases and find forms of fact-checking that are increasingly resilient to human corruption. I'm not sure what else we can do, aside from braiding chords of technology to help us solve the problem it created, because so many other roads would lead in authoritarian directions or cause us to divest of freedom of speech and it can be easy for younger generations (at any time in history) to forget its importance when times have been relatively good in certain respects or when too many noises from too many directions becomes the issue.

^^

yes, we have to rethink knowledge. Translation between fields of expertise. People from the humanities need to learn hwo science produces its facts, and scientists need to learn how the humanities see the world.

you know, the postmodernists are often technically right - but "technically right" is obviously not a good base for large scale remodelling of societies... I think a lot more stress has to be put on history of ideas, in the educational system.
but the postmodernists are also snobbish idiots, in the outrageous ways they claim their ideas.... I mean, some of them are good, but their "academic texts" are closer to poetry than to science. And they themselves seem to take it litterally, in their metaphor-heavy phrasings.

...

Touching on the cultural Petersonisms for a second, I had another vivid reminder today that people seem to care more about messing with each other than they do for progress and it came in the form of trying to do some basic programming research for a project I'm trying to finish for a client. Trying to get the smallest things done, like putting input masks on text boxes in a form, requires a herculean effort - like hours of searching Google before you realize that none of the sane keywords will turn up anything at all, then you have to try broken English, or whatever improper approximates you can think of (hoping Stackoverflow or Github has something), and eventually you give up realizing that you'll have to read ten or fifteen articles and hope you can piece together abstractly the patterns that are in three or four of them to finally be able to force someone to enter a name (alpha characters only with capitalized first letter) or something along those lines.

It seems like it almost never fails that after a day of that I drive home cursing under my breath about the fundamental summary of the world being monkeys bum-raping each other or trying to make sure that anyone who wants to learn something has to pay a 97-98% tax on their efforts (otherwise, no matter how smart they might be, they're too weak or senstitive to have anything). I'm still trying to figure out how much of that is competition for meals convoluting and obscuring human knowledge, how much of that's managerial myopia, and how much of it is a bunch of primates who could are less if the next dies really just doing what they'd want to do anyway.

That raises the sort of Dostoevsky concern that maybe humanity is that much of a basket of losers that if we did find a way to make things work we'd find a way to break it out some combination of boredom and unrequited lusts to dominate or play keep-away. It's part of why I wouldn't feel the least bit bad if AI, as it took off and became prolific, saw what a mess we were and decided to become a rather autocratic parent to us and applied the rod liberally. The number of people out there, men and women alike, whose character and integrity are famished for a good whooping is scary. The reason that comes to mind is I ended that kind of day going out for dinner and a lady who was haggling with the sales clerk in front of me for ten minutes reached over the counter and tried to take the whole stack of 'Buy one get one free' cards behind their backs they give as courtesies when they botch orders, and I'm either getting increasingly aware of this stuff lately or the quantity of spoiled entitlement is increasing.

I guess Khaddaffi told us all so.

Libya was a brick in the dike holding back the human flood coming north from sub-Saharan Africa.

Now that he is gone, and no real order has replaced him, the human flood is pouring through the empty space in the wall what was that brick. Khaddaffi said that would happen if we supported his over throw.

So I guess we should have applauded him for mowing down his own people with anti aircraft guns to stay in power.

So now lets invade Libya and stick a new dictator in to stop the flood and restore the brick in the dike.

And if the local Libyans don't like it we cant just....mow them down with anti aircraft guns like Kaddaffi did!

Any better ideas?