Glenn Beck: Slavery "started with seemingly innocent ideas" then "The government....

[Dorian Gray]

Glenn Beck: Slavery "started with seemingly innocent ideas" then "The government....

began to regulate things"

Bat. [Guano]. Insane.

http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201010010026

First minute: "Did health care go up, or did it go down" ... well check it in any year prior to now! It went up in those years also. That was just getting warmed up. The idiocy begins at 2:15.

At 2:39, he literally says the quoted part of the thread title, that slavery "started with seemingly innocent ideas"... and then he proceeds to blame slavery on government regulation! He actually suggests that it took a long time to start slavery - that America didn't start out with slavery, but slowly regulated slavery into existence! Jesus Christ, are you kidding me?

First sentence of the Wikipedia article "Slavery in the United States":

Slavery in the United States was a form of unfree labor which existed as a legal institution in North America for more than a century before the founding of the United States in 1776, and continued in the South until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1865.

So not only did slavery start in this land a full 100 years before The United States of America ever existed, but the government actually slowly regulated it OUT of existence!

And there you have Glenn Beck in a nutshell - revising history and flat out lying in order to make a bad analogy comparing health care reform to slavery. Dare I say, you also have Fox News employees and philosophy in a nutshell as well.

If health care reform acts like slavery regulation ACTUALLY happened, then people will slowly be able to GET health care until eventually, everyone has it. Just like people were slowly able to GET freedom until eventually, everyone had it.

 

[Puppycow]

Glenn Beck is so wrong on so many levels it's hard to know where to start.

Listening from the beginning I at first thought that this was a case of Glenn Beck redefining the word "slavery" to mean not chattel slavery but government regulation (which he does, and which is bad enough), but apparently he actually thinks this is how chattel slavery began. What a lunatic. Total ignorance of history.

 

[leftysergeant]

What a freaking idiot. This boy has no clue what he is talking about. Slavery was not started by courts and legislatures.

The Portugese brought a bunch of slaves out of Angola and the Dutch figured out that it looked like a money-maker and then the French and Spanish and British figured out how to get cheap labor on their plantations.

By the time there was a USA, it was just accepted that black people could be property.

That moron is one of the forces dumbing-down our education system.

 

[Thunder]

Glenn Beck: teaching America how to be brain-dead, one day at a time.

 

[Ziggurat]

Wait... you all aren't under the impression that there was no government in America prior to 1776, are you?

 

[leftysergeant]

Wait... you all aren't under the impression that there was no government in America prior to 1776, are you?

Sure there was. And it varied from time to time and place to place. Some times and places it was a ghastly anarcho-capitalist miasma. That's why slavery was able to take root.

 

[Upchurch]

Wait... you all aren't under the impression that there was no government in America prior to 1776, are you?

Wait... you aren't under the impression that the form of government in America prior to 1776 is the primary flaw in Beck's claim, are you?

 

[Beerina]

It's hard to have slavery in an otherwise free society without government recognizing slavery.

 

[Upchurch]

It's harder to say that slavery started as an innocent idea and the government screwed it up with regulation.

 

[daredelvis]

It's hard to have slavery in an otherwise free society without government recognizing slavery.

By that logic, there must be no slavery in that Libertarian paradise Somalia!!

Daredelvis

 

[Captain.Sassy]

It's hard to have slavery in an otherwise free society without government recognizing slavery.

No it isn't. Market forces push scores of women into illegal sexual slavery every day.



As for Glenn Beck

holy ****. Like ... just ****. A lot of people listen to this guy.

The US is screwed!

 

[leftysergeant]

It's hard to have slavery in an otherwise free society without government recognizing slavery.

As long as it is an anarcho-capitalist society, it is entirely concieveable.

 

[Upchurch]

Just think of how much human sex trafficking we could get rid of if the government would just stop regulating it.

 

[Puppycow]

Wait... you all aren't under the impression that there was no government in America prior to 1776, are you?

Nope. Is there a point there somewhere?

 

[Fiona]

"slavery started with seemingly innocent ideas" ?

Wow

 

[NWO Sentryman]

If the word "fail" were inscribed on every single cell of my body, it would not even begin to approach one billionth of my feelings towards Glenn Beck. Fail. Fail.

 

[Ziggurat]

Nope. Is there a point there somewhere?

Yeah: that Dorian's claims regarding Beck being wrong because of the timeline are nonsense, There might be other problems with the argument, but that isn't one of them.

 

[Upchurch]

Yeah: that Dorian's claims regarding Beck being wrong because of the timeline are nonsense, There might be other problems with the argument, but that isn't one of them.

Mmmm.... cherry-picking.

You might be right if that were the only argument in the OP, but it isn't.

 

[Loss Leader]

Slavery was not started by courts and legislatures.

The Portugese brought a bunch of slaves out of Angola and the Dutch figured out that it looked like a money-maker and then the French and Spanish and British figured out how to get cheap labor on their plantations.

Slavery has been a fact of human existence for as long as there has been a class of citizen wealthy enough to afford the significant cost of controlling people - at least 5,000 years.

The largest difference between ancient and modern slavery (1500-1865) was the concept of only enslaving one particular race instead of whomever happened to be standing around looking particularly enslavable.

Slavery today has gone back to being race-blind which ... is good ... I guess.

 

[Thunder]

there is nothing "innocent" about stealing human beings, ripping them away from their families, and forcing them to work under brutal conditions, for the rest of their lives.

slavery always was immoral. human beings are not property.