Game of Thrones is coming to an end. Thank god.
HBO has decided to replace it with a new show called Confederate.
HBO has given a straight-to-series order to Confederate from Emmy-winning GoT creators, writers, and producers David Benioff and Dan Weiss.
The show “chronicles the events leading to the Third American Civil War. The series takes place in an alternate timeline, where the southern states have successfully seceded from the Union, giving rise to a nation in which slavery remains legal and has evolved into a modern institution. The story follows a broad swath of characters on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Demilitarized Zone – freedom fighters, slave hunters, politicians, abolitionists, journalists, the executives of a slave-holding conglomerate and the families of people in their thrall.”
On behalf of Southerners and those with a modicum of understanding about economics, FUCK YOU.
Let’s be honest. This show is about beating up on the South for being a bunch of racists.
Let’s forget the moral argument against slavery for a minute. Let’s forget that just about every Western nation abolished slavers in the mid to late 1800’s.
Let’s focus entirely on the practical issue of slavery here.
For their show to make sense, they have to throw out EVERY economic textbook and craft a shittier premise than Bernie Sanders’ understanding of single payer healthcare.
Slavery exists today only in third world shit-holes. Why? Because it is economically unfeasible in a technologically advanced world.
This is a modern John Deere cotton picking machine.
Ask yourself this question: how many slaves would you have to have and how hard would you have to whip them to get them to pick cotton by hand that fast.
The answer is: it’s not humanly possible. The return on investment of slaves would be orders of magnitude less than any modern industrialized agricultural equipment. The US is the 3rd largest food producer in the world, with less than 2% of the population actually engaged in farming. In 1860, 53% of the population was engaged in agriculture. That decrease is entirely driven by technology, not beating slaves into doing more labor.
Today, we are seeing robots replace migrant farm workers. They are faster, don’t damage the produce, and they don’t shit in the lettuce fields and cause e. coli outbreaks.
But J. Kb. What about manufacturing, heavy industry, mining?
Well, I work in manufacturing. Robots have taken over for the same reasons.
Even when you have to have stuff hand assembled, slaves are a poor choice. One of the biggest issues we have is low skilled workers. We need skilled people to run the equipment, know what they are doing, and build quality products.
It used to be against the law to teach a slave to read and write. So tell me how you get an educated workforce that knows how to read machine drawings and import CAD files into a CNC and can’t read or write?
You can’t.
The industrial revolution ended the economic viability of slavery in large scale production.
But the writers of this show wont think about that.
This is Trump’s America, and they just want to beat up on the South. They will be as cruel to us as they are to the illegal immigrants they hire as nannies, housekeepers, and gardeners.
There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth over this series by the SJW’s because it’s not written/produced by blacks, automatically assuming it’s going to be ‘pro-racist/fascist/nazi’ or some such nonsense.
An eerie silence was heard when I mentioned the fact that Harry Turtledove wrote a standalone book and an entire series based upon this premise and Steve Jackson Games had an alt. timeline game setting using the same concept.
The South made a deliberate decision to not industrialize (and to keep any Yankee industrialists out) because it would have meant a choice between importing bunches of Scots and Irish immigrants to work the mills, or teaching slaves enough so they cold work the.mills. the second flat out wasn’t gonna happen, and the first was almost as unpopular with the plantocracy. So, when you read how proud Tredegar Iron Works were that they were producing a whole new Napoleon field cannon per day (whIle there were foundries in the North finishing more.than that per shift), or read about how the South couldn’t replace their rolling stock or worn out tracks …. Remember, it was the result of a deliberate policy.
The purpose of the new HBO show isn’t really to badmouth white southerners; it’s to remind blacks about how eevil white folks are so they won’t be tempted to stay home next election day.
Ps… my money says they won’t even be able to construct a plausible alternate history to explain the South’s ascendancy. These people are not smart.
I’m one of those people who read the Song of Ice and Fire books before the show came out, and I loved the books, so I’ve begrudgingly subscribed to HBO so I can watch Game of Thrones. However, after every season is over, I immediately cancel my subscription, lest those liberal assholes running that network get any more of my money. The rest of their programming is terrible.
I did the same thing before I cut the cable.
Let’s not forget the Northern activities post-war.
Rather than buying and owning people and keeping them as livestock, the Northern Industrialists just hired people, paid them shit, and let the workers worry about how they were going to feed, clothe and house themselves.
You had slaves you needed to keep them healthy, and if a slave fell ill you’d need to decide if it was cheaper to make them well or buy a new one.
If you were a Northern Robber Barron you only hired healthy workers. If they got sick or hurt, fuck ’em! Send them packing and hire somebody new!
Even if the South won, slavery wouldn’t have lasted.
That was my point entirely. The South would have abandoned slavery right about the time the mechanical harvester was invented, so about 1880. It just didn’t make economic sense once the industrial revolution was in full swing. Feeding and controlling slaves would be far more expensive and less productive than one tractor.
With a continuation of slavery, the mechanical harvester wouldn’t have penetrated into the South. To paraphrase Drake and Sterling, if you’ve got enough disposable labor you don’t need labor-saving devices.
The big thing would have been that the Southern cotton crop would have collapsed by 1880 anyway, under the pressure of cheap Indian and Egyptian grown cotton and European popular disgust with slavery.
That leads into some common ‘what if’ questions. CSA allies England and France would have definitely put political/economic pressure on them to abolish slavery. The other is that the cheap Indian and Egyptian cotton were partially created due to the shortages from the blockade during the Civil War. If this hadn’t occurred, there would likely have been less emphasis on finding alternative sources.
By the 1880’s the South, had secession been successful and slavery remained, would have had to make a choice:
1) Keep slavery and an non-technological cheap labor force, in which they would have evolved into a nation like India.
2) Abolish slavery and enter the industrial revolution.
The two largest potential trading partners would have been the North and Canada, and neither would have bought slave made goods. The fight to keep slavery was a short sighted desire and would have either become obsolete or destroyed the Southern economy by the beginning of the 20th century.
You miss the one area where slavery does things the industrial revolution can’t touch. Sexual slavery. The Isis scumbags have kidnapped hundreds of women; christian, yadzidi and others, and sold them into sexual slavery. Slaughter the girls considered too old and undesirable and sell the rest, so like so much cattle.
Slavery as it exists in the 21st century is exclusively in Muslim countries, AFAIK.
Like I said, third world shit-holes.
http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2004-03-24/news/0403230561_1_haitian-women-haitian-community-slavery
Slavery is not a muslim problem, it’s more a third world problem and has even reared it’s ugly head here. If I recall this couple was tried in federal court and convicted. And sex trafficking is just slavery in disguise.
In just about any scenario you can imagine, the viability of an independent Confederacy requires England and France to guarantee the Confederacy’s sovereignty. By the time of Gettysburg, with the Emancipation Proclamation in place, neither England nor France would actively intervene for the South. Lee and his staff were told as much by a British observer over a campfire prior to Gettysburg. After Gettysburg and Vicksburg, the war was effectively lost for the South, the bloodshed, however, continued for nearly two more years.
There was too much popular sentiment in england to side with Richmond easily (not helped by English interests in the aforementioned Indian and Egyptian cotton , and by the fact that the CSA ambassador to the court of Saint James made himself unpopular quickly) but France might have mixed in. It wasn’t the dumbest thing Napoleon III had ever done, and a lot of his advisors wanted to send help to the South up through Mexico, where French bayonets were propping up Emperor Maximillian’s throne. After the war, they did in fact send Phil Sheridan and an awful lot of veteran troops to the Mexican border and Nappy 3 was politely Informed that if any of those troopships bound for Mexico strayed too far north he wasn’t gonna get them back.
Then again, there was the whole Fenian thing…
Correction: not Sheridan, but Sherman with 50,000 veterans. Just looked it up.
This is just a continuation of the Obama policy of inciting racial division.
Any historians out there who know when America abolished slavery compared to when every other country had? I was under the impression that we were one of the first countries to do so.