[devalier]

I am familiar with the Nehemiah Adams reference.

Keep in mind that Moldbug's blog is trying to provide a corrective to our default view, and so Adam's account is his favorite, shock therapy, corrective book in a world where we are already marinated in the view that southern slavery was an unmitigated horror. In world where slave-holder ideology ran supreme, perhaps his favorite book might be something else.

The key question is: do we have a more accurate view of slavery if we include Nehemiah Adams and Genovese and the Roving Editor in addition to the standard progressive accounts? Or do we have a more accurate view if we only read the standard progressive accounts? Is Nehemiah so credulous, so inaccurate, that we get negative information value from reading him? Do we trust his account at all? Or was he duped like Beatrice Webb visiting the Soviet Union?

My own sense is that reading Adams in addition to progressive sources gives us a more accurate view of slavery in its totality. I don't get the sense that he his Beatrice Webb, he wasn't being given a tour by official handlers. But I'm willing to be convinced otherwise. I honestly do want to have an accurate picture of history, whatever that may be.

[tptacek]

I recoil from the idea that the view of southern slavery as unmitigated horror needs correction. Meanwhile, I don't have to defend every sentence in Nehemiah Adams, because the context in which Yarvin chose to cite him (approvingly, as one of his favorites) is as a rebuttal to the idea that slavery was harmful to blacks. If someone's being unfair to Adams in this situation, it's Yarvin.

[cwyers]

I think, if anything, we tend to underestimate how southern slavery has continued to contribute to horrors that still continue well over a century after its abolition:

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case...