[rayiner]

> Your words amount to saying that freedom is only allowed when it's meaningless because nobody is actually exercising it in any way that matters

It’s interesting that you think freedom is only “meaningful” if people actually engage in the anti-social conduct which they’re free to do. I would say the point of freedom is to eliminate the apparatus of control because you can trust nearly all people to do the right thing without it. That’s the highest form of society.

That slavery existed is not some trump card that negates everything else. It’s also a particularly uneducated comment to level at John Adams of all people. The idea that slavery is intolerable, which you easily hold in your head in 2025 without having worked for it—was bequeathed to you by John Adams and his ilk. In 1789, you would have looked the other way at slavery, just like you look the other way at everything you tolerate today. You probably would’ve even called John Adams a religious nut for believing everyone was created equal in the eyes of god, and demanded scientific proof of that.

[jacquesm]

> The idea that slavery is intolerable, which you easily hold in your head in 2025 without having worked for it—was bequeathed to you by John Adams and his ilk.

That's a rather US centric point of view. Slavery was considered intolerable in many places, the US was different in that it actually allowed it for as long as it did. Of course there are many guises for slavery that are practiced in other places but on a moral level lots of people realize it is wrong and John Adams had absolutely nothing to do with that.

[rayiner]

Yes, I was talking about the U.S. Though I don’t know anywhere that opposed slavery with the moral fervor of Anglos. Who went to war and killed their own people to free slaves from a different ethnic or religious group?

[jacquesm]

Slavery was common in large parts of the world that all dropped it well ahead of the United States, and in most cases without a civil war (though there were some):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave...

You could spend a good chunk of a lifetime studying this subject and still not have the complete picture. The main difference is not the 'opposition to slavery with the moral fervor of the Anglos' as much as the resistance to getting rid of slavery.

That is what sets the US apart, the stark division between the pro and the con side and the fact that the South figured out that this was the thing that they could not give up. And their roots were just the same as the side that opposed them, they just had an economic interest.