Jeremiah

By employing their considerable language and interpersonal skills, they cleverly negotiated several escapes that took them from the Caribbean to Virginia and then England, but always ended in their being enslaved again.

Finally, in England, they sued for and remarkably won their freedoms.

Eventually they found their way back to Old Calabar and, evidence suggests, resumed their business of slave trading.

End quote.

Scott writes, Does little Ephraim Robin John have the right to hate the hand that holds the whip?

If he doesn't, where's the boundary between literally being him versus being the sort of person who would have been him if raised in his exact socioeconomic conditions?

Probably lots of people.

Habu71 writes, quote,

Scott writes, Yeah, this gets into tough questions around blame and the three different things I asked people to disambiguate at the beginning of this post.

It also runs into the same question that Darwin asked above.

Suppose that in 1970, every generation living at the time thought nuclear was bad.

And today, every generation living now thinks nuclear is good.

On some level, this isn't the fault of any particular generation.

It seems like the information environment in 1970s just wasn't conducive to figuring this out.

Although, of course, you can question who created that information environment.

Unless you're a very special person, if you lived in 1970, then you would have been anti-nuclear too.

So can we blame the real 1970ites for their anti-nuclear opinions?

I guess in the same sense that we can blame slave owners.

But that's not an answer.

Richard Hanania writes, quote, There's a lot to quibble with in this piece, but on this part I'll repost here what I recently told Scott via email.