this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
178 points (76.6% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35820 readers
1055 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

This relates to the BBC article [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66596790] which states "the UK should pay $24tn (£18.8tn) for its slavery involvement in 14 countries".

The UK abolished slavery in 1833. That's 190 years ago. So nobody alive today has a slave, and nobody alive today was a slave.

Dividing £18tn by the number of UK taxpayers (31.6m) gives £569 each. Why do I, who have never owned a slave, have to give £569 to someone who similarly is not a slave?

When I've paid my £569 is that the end of the matter forever or will it just open the floodgates of other similar claims?

Isn't this just a country that isn't doing too well, looking at the UK doing reasonably well (cost of living crisis excluded of course), and saying "oh there's this historical thing that affects nobody alive today but you still have to give us trillions of Sterling"?

Shouldn't payment of reparations be limited to those who still benefit from the slave trade today, and paid to those who still suffer from it?

(Please don't flame me. This is NSQ. I genuinely don't know why this is something I should have to pay. I agree slavery is terrible and condemn it in all its forms, and we were right to abolish it.)

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Okay, and how about the millions of other people whose ancestors never did or had any of that? Of the families that benefitted, some of them are still rich and powerful, those are the ones that should be looked at, not some Joe Blow whose lineage has always been lower/middle-class, working for a living like everyone else.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I do genealogy and so I know that my g-g-g-grandfather had to give up farm labouring during the first decades of the British Empire and move to the Bermondsey slums, where he worked as a tanner. If you know anything about historical tanning, you know that this sucked. He was screwed over by the infiux of cheap food from the Empire and our family is part of the underclass to this day.

The thing is, we still live in a rich country because of that. My parents and grandparents and their parents did. We've still had access to education and free healthcare and all that shit. We still had access to all that cheap shit that we robbed the rest of the world for.

So yeah, we owe those people's descendents like it or not. Plus, considering that yes, we were repaying the descendants of slaveowners until just a few years ago, and paying off our Marshall Plan debts etc until very recently, I'm not too fussed if the government of my country pays its debts.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

not some Joe Blow whose lineage has always been lower/middle-class, working for a living like everyone else.

The corresponding Joe Blow from the group that got screwed over is going to be comparatively much worse off. Right? Or you can look at it from the other angle: if normal Joe Blow had ancestors who benefited from seriously screwing over people but made bad decisions, squandered their wealth and advantages so Joe Blow is just a Joe Blow then how much worse off would Joe Blow be? Possibly quite a bit.

But anyway, looking at it from the perspective of ancestors, who screwed over who, who's responsible for what is overcomplicating things. Are there people who are suffering from unfair disadvantages, are their people who are enjoying unfair advantages at the expense of others? If you're a decent person, that status quo shouldn't be acceptable: it's something that needs to be fixed. Maybe through reparations, maybe through affirmative action, maybe through some other approach. We should determine what the most effective use of resources is and do it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I mean, if you agree that descendants of people who benefitted from enslaving others owe the descendants of those enslaved people compensation of some sort, then I think we agree. The remaining questions are how to identify members of each group and how to accomplish the transfers. That's law and policy. Not simple, but achievable.