Global Cycling News

On Sunday, July 26, 2020 at 3:57:41 PM UTC-7, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On 7/26/2020 4:42 PM, wrote:
On Sunday, July 26, 2020 at 1:09:57 PM UTC-7, Ralph Barone wrote:
Jeff Liebermann wrote:
On Sun, 26 Jul 2020 08:43:51 -0700 (PDT), wrote:

The country with probably the longest history of slavery making comments
like that? Those that they didn't sell into slavery or enslave in foreign
countries, they shipped of to Australian to die.

White Cargo
The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America
https://nyupress.org/9780814742969/white-cargo/


Snopes gives that meme a grade of “Well, not quite true�.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ir...early-america/

Snopes and Answers are entirely politicized and misleading. Don't believe one single thing they "rule" on.

OK, give us your alternative.

It certainly isn't some ignorant biased lying bull**** from someone like you who will simply take the opposite opinion of mine just like CNN does of Trump such as when Trump says that China is going bad things by invading Hong Kong and CNN then defends the Chinese Communist Party. You are the sort of filth that if you weren't so old, weak and ready to die would be beaten to death.

On Sunday, July 26, 2020 at 6:05:11 PM UTC-7, Ralph Barone wrote:
Jeff Liebermann wrote:
On Sun, 26 Jul 2020 20:09:49 +0000 (UTC), Ralph Barone
wrote:

Jeff Liebermann wrote:
On Sun, 26 Jul 2020 08:43:51 -0700 (PDT), wrote:

The country with probably the longest history of slavery making comments
like that? Those that they didn't sell into slavery or enslave in foreign
countries, they shipped of to Australian to die.

White Cargo
The Forgotten History of Britain?s White Slaves in America
https://nyupress.org/9780814742969/white-cargo/

Snopes gives that meme a grade of “Well, not quite true�.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ir...early-america/

As usual, reality lives between the extremes. The consensus seems to
be that Snopes is generally correct, but I prefer to read (skim) the
available literature and make up my own mind about a topic I know
little. So far, the only thing I've read worth debating is whether
indentured servitude or volunteer slavery is bad, evil, illegal, etc
with plenty of opinions at each extreme.


Right. And there are still a lot of legal ways to be “indentured�. Just
listen to Ernest Tubb’s song Sixteen Tons or talk to somebody working
multiple minimum wage jobs to barely pay for food and rent.

That is the mythological game that anti-free enterprise people take. You don't lock your workers into a situation in which they could not live. They simply move away. No society is so remote that they wouldn't have knowledge of elsewhere and other conditions. This stupid idea used to be popular among intellectual elites in Europe in the late 19th century. Communism was not invented by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels - they only voiced it in publications. Yet when you look it up Communism in a dictionary or even Wikipedia for instance - they give credit to Marx and Engels. Marx and Engels were deletants living in England and Marx in particular spent his family's money as fast as he could saying that an inheritance that should have supported him for years was less than he spent on cigars just while writing Das Capital. This was the man that would even consider the idea that he should give up what he had to others freely? He would spend all of his possessions to give a BALL!

Sort of like the Bull**** that they pass off about the California Mission system being evil and employing slavery practices: Half of all the Indian tribes in North American were on the Pacific Coast. They were hunter/gatherer peoples that were locked into incessant warfare for territory with each other with any non-tribal member taken to be an enemy to be killed upon sight..

The Mission system moved up through California teaching the Indian tribes the art of farming and self restraint. They were so effective at settling the tribes and getting them to live together that when the Mission System was destroyed by the Spanish/American War that the tribes retained the names of the Missions as their tribal names. I remember reading the story of one of the 49er's. They started late and hence all of the grass had been eaten by the previous wagon train animals. So fairly quickly his oxen died. And fairly shortly after that with the end of the meat his wife and children died.. He continued on to the promise of California and eventually made it mostly across the Sierra Nevada. He was dying from thirst in the late summer heat and an Indian came along, gave him water and then led his back to his own encampment. No tribe used to war would have turned his back on anyone to lead him anywhere. The Indian then fed the 49er, allowed him to recover his strength and gave him directions to Sacramento. So it is pretty plain that most of the claims of the barbarity of the Missions System were complete myth invented purely for political purposes.

On 7/27/2020 7:13 AM, news18 wrote:
On Mon, 27 Jul 2020 03:26:21 -0700, Andre Jute wrote:

On Sunday, July 26, 2020 at 10:28:25 PM UTC+1, Jeff Liebermann wrote:

I suggest a simple test for the morality of the situation. If you
lived in Ireland during the 1740 famine, and were offered a free ride
to America in trade for some vaguely non-specific work situation, would
you take it when the only alternatives were starvation or cannibalism?
No need to answer, just think about it.

--
Jeff Liebermann 150 Felker St #D
http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060
http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558

It's not quite that simple, Jeff. For instance you make the assumption
that all these starving families could be reached to make the offer of
indenture equitably to all of them. It just doesn't answer to the
realities. But it is an easy and common error, widely also made by
professionals:

Snipping AJs story and to cut to the point, many Irish people were
seasonal labourers in England for centuries before the years of the
famine.

FWIW, that continued long after the famine. From what I've read, it was
still happening in the 1950s and 1960s, at least. I don't know if it
still happens today.


--
- Frank Krygowski

On 7/27/2020 10:12 AM, wrote:
On Sunday, July 26, 2020 at 3:57:41 PM UTC-7, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On 7/26/2020 4:42 PM, wrote:
On Sunday, July 26, 2020 at 1:09:57 PM UTC-7, Ralph Barone wrote:
Jeff Liebermann wrote:
On Sun, 26 Jul 2020 08:43:51 -0700 (PDT), wrote:

The country with probably the longest history of slavery making comments
like that? Those that they didn't sell into slavery or enslave in foreign
countries, they shipped of to Australian to die.

White Cargo
The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America
https://nyupress.org/9780814742969/white-cargo/


Snopes gives that meme a grade of “Well, not quite true�.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ir...early-america/

Snopes and Answers are entirely politicized and misleading. Don't believe one single thing they "rule" on.

OK, give us your alternative.

It certainly isn't some ignorant biased lying bull**** from someone like you...

As usual, Tom, you avoided the question and sunk into middle school
playground insults.

The question was the veracity of an article on historical events. Many
such articles are tainted by present day political opinions, and most
historical events have complicated causes.

How do you propose we discern reality? Hint: It's extremely unlikely
that it will consistently come from a right wing extremist website.

So Tom, answer the question.

--
- Frank Krygowski

On Sunday, July 26, 2020 at 7:49:21 PM UTC-7, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On 7/27/2020 12:30 PM, John B. Slocomb wrote:
On Mon, 27 Jul 2020 01:05:05 +0000 (UTC), Ralph Barone
wrote:

Jeff Liebermann wrote:
On Sun, 26 Jul 2020 20:09:49 +0000 (UTC), Ralph Barone
wrote:

Jeff Liebermann wrote:
On Sun, 26 Jul 2020 08:43:51 -0700 (PDT), wrote:

The country with probably the longest history of slavery making comments
like that? Those that they didn't sell into slavery or enslave in foreign
countries, they shipped of to Australian to die.

White Cargo
The Forgotten History of Britain?s White Slaves in America
https://nyupress.org/9780814742969/white-cargo/

Snopes gives that meme a grade of ?Well, not quite true?.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ir...early-america/

As usual, reality lives between the extremes. The consensus seems to
be that Snopes is generally correct, but I prefer to read (skim) the
available literature and make up my own mind about a topic I know
little. So far, the only thing I've read worth debating is whether
indentured servitude or volunteer slavery is bad, evil, illegal, etc
with plenty of opinions at each extreme.


Right. And there are still a lot of legal ways to be “indentured�. Just
listen to Ernest Tubb’s song Sixteen Tons or talk to somebody working
multiple minimum wage jobs to barely pay for food and rent.


Seriously now, isn't it possible in the U.S. today to get along on
minimum salary? I don't mean to have the 40" TV in the toilet and all,
but to get along? Maybe only one bicycle (I know how scary that is)
and a second hand car, pay the rent and eat?

I know that some states have an extremely low minimum but California,
for example, it is $13.00/hour - $104/8 hour day, $520/5 day week.
Cheers,
John B.

At the start of our marriage, I felt fairly poor. Our bank account was
scarily low. I didn't see how we would ever afford a house.

I read a book called _Champagne Living on a Beer Budget_ or something
like that. It seemed intended for people living in a big city apartment,
which was not us; but it had tons of tips, like "Why do you think your
four kitchen chairs have to match? Buy whatever's at Goodwill and paint
them. Why do you think your toaster needs to be chrome? Paint a rusty
one. Why do you need two cars, or even one? Ride your bike!" And "Good
old stuff is GOOD!"

We kind of followed that advice for a while. (Except we did buy the
tandem.) In a few years, we had our down payment for a house. A few
years later, we were paying cash to buy cars. We didn't have fancy
furniture, the world's best stereo, the fanciest bikes. But we didn't
have debt, except for the house - and we paid that off early.

I now know a young couple in our neighborhood who spend thousands of
dollars at the drop of a hat, while complaining about not having money.
Heck, their boat probably cost as much as our finest car.

My first job out of my $137/mth Air Force pay was in high energy nuclear research at a decent wage. From there I moved on to Project Genie. And every proceeding job moved easily up the ladder. I had no need to worry about a job or an income. If there was a lull in tech activity I had no compunctions about hiring as a technician. I did commercial aircraft recovery during the Vietnam airlift. In one lull I took a I formed a partnership with another man installing telephone systems in San Francisco commercial high rises. In another I took a job as an electronics technician with BART. When I was hired as an Engineer on one job I was making technician wages but with a stock option. When my mother came down with Cancer I cashed that option in because radiation and chemo were still considered "R & D" and health insurance wouldn't cover that. The amount I received from that was about a million dollars after taxes so that paid for her complete treatment and she used the remainder and her sale of her fourplex in Oakland to buy the house I presently live in. That is why when she died she bequeathed it to me instead of my older brother. I also paid entirely for her medical care in her final days though she had an insurance policy and had made complete arrangements for the disposition of her remains.

Ralph Barone writes:

Jeff Liebermann wrote:
On Mon, 27 Jul 2020 01:05:05 +0000 (UTC), Ralph Barone
wrote:

Right. And there are still a lot of legal ways to be
“indentured”. Just
listen to Ernest TubbÂ’s song Sixteen Tons or talk to somebody working
multiple minimum wage jobs to barely pay for food and rent.

Part time or full time? For about a year, I worked at two jobs while
attending college, both part time. Neither would give me enough hours
to work at only one job, while going to skool, and simultaneously
carrying enough class units to maintain my student deferment. These
days, banks hire two part time employees to do one job so that they
don't have to pay benefits.

As for minimum wage, it's probably too minimum. The current buzzword
is "living wage":
"Minimum wage workers cannot afford rent in any U.S. state"
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/14/minimum-wage-workers-cannot-afford-rent-in-any-us-state.html
(July 15, 2020).

As I mentioned up-thread:
At some point, we will need to draw the line between
slavery for mutual economic or social benefits, and
the general loss of civil right such as being treated
as property.

Agreed. And it’s fuzzy at the best of times.

Different people, groups, countries, courts, etc draw this line at
different points. It also changes with time, events, economies, and
political systems. I could easily argue that all communist countries
practice universal slavery. I could also argue that capitalism does
the same thing by paying workers less than they are worth in order for
the employer to make a profit. Same with the US banking system, which
quietly hints that it's primary purpose is to keep its customers in
debt, so that the customers can establish a favorable credit score in
order to live beyond their means.

As for "Sixteen Tons", Wikipedia says it was written in 1946 by Merle
Travis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteen_Tons
https://genius.com/Tennessee-ernie-ford-sixteen-tons-lyrics

Damn. Now what song did Ernest Tubb sing? Maybe “Walking the Floor Over
You�. Unfortunately, no relevance to cycling or white slavery in that
tune...

I missed that surname when first I read that song reference. Tennesee
Ernie Ford was famous for singing "Sixteen Tons", although he did not
write it. Not sure how Ernest Tubb covered economic injustice; I have
read the theory that a lot of the old blues lyrics complaining about
one's woman were popular because complaining about one's employer was
not a safe thing to do.

On Monday, July 27, 2020 at 3:26:24 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Sunday, July 26, 2020 at 10:28:25 PM UTC+1, Jeff Liebermann wrote:

I suggest a simple test for the morality of the situation. If you
lived in Ireland during the 1740 famine, and were offered a free ride
to America in trade for some vaguely non-specific work situation,
would you take it when the only alternatives were starvation or
cannibalism? No need to answer, just think about it.

--
Jeff Liebermann
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558

It's not quite that simple, Jeff. For instance you make the assumption that all these starving families could be reached to make the offer of indenture equitably to all of them. It just doesn't answer to the realities. But it is an easy and common error, widely also made by professionals:

Years ago there was a conference of economic historians here and I was tasked with part of their hosting because I knew so many of them. I took them down into the Gap of Dunloe, south of Killarney, took them halfway up a hillside so that on the opposite hillside they could see some squares of land marked out by fallen stones. Then I took them across the valley and into the stones. "Pace out the squares, if you please. No, not you, not the agricultural economists. You already know what I'm going to say." Behind me a lady who was a leading light of co-op history said, "Oh, ****." She knew all right. Each square, thirty by thirty paces, had to support an entire family.. One of my favourite teachers was by then an Israeli pol, a deputy minister. "An average family with thirteen surviving children?" he said to me. "It's an impossibility." He wrote to me to offer me a consulting job a few years later and added in his own hand a postscript at the bottom of the official letter: "A single Gap of Dunloe example will shock the complacent out of their torpor." The problem is that Killarney itself was a couple of hundred miles of atrocious roads from Dublin, and probably a difficult two-day ride from Cork, which has a sheltered harbour, plus another day of hard travel to reach the Gap (which today is a few minutes in a comfortable car on a blacktop road away, a tourist attraction,). The Gap itself, which I've walked through in May, sometimes in mud up to my hips, is impassable in a bad winter. Most of the victims of the famine were that hard to reach, and starving people, who even in good years were outside the cash economy, didn't have money for newspapers, even though the Irish peasants were likely more literate than those in other nations. I think it is fair to conclude that most of those who indentured signed the papers in the bigger coastal towns, all of which have harbours which at that time would have taken the size of ship that crossed the Atlantic. There's a graveyard of famine victims we often stop at on our rides. We'd ride up beside the River Bandon from its estuary (the watersports marina on the estuary being the halfway point of our ride) a few miles to a hulk of a North Sea or Baltic trader about 75ft long, and there turn inland. We know, from the placement of mills and distilleries and tales of how the monstrous church bells of a village well inland were rafted upriver, that the river once was routinely navigated by substantial ships. Yet this famine graveyard is only a couple of hundred yards up the road after we turn away from the river. In fact, we're riding across a bow of the river, and will return to it at the starting point of our circular ride; there is nowhere in ireland where you can get further than a day on foot from a navigable river.

So here's another mystery for you: Consider that Ireland is an island, that there are fishing harbours without number every few miles around the coast, -- then ask why didn't they substitute fish in their diet for the now-absent potatoes?

I don't want you to think I don't take your point -- that a starving peasant doesn't have the energy to consider the moral distinction between actual slavery and indented servitude. The case I'm making is different: that in most cases he wasn't offered the opportunity or even the knowledge that just up the road the opportunity existed.

Andre Jute
People don't always do what is logical

Yes, but this wasn't the case in America. Why do you think that there were so many land rushes and gold rushes in the USA? Even people in the dankest hollows of New York City could have told you that there was land in Kansas for the taking.

On 7/27/2020 9:30 AM, John B. Slocomb wrote:

snip?

Seriously now, isn't it possible in the U.S. today to get along on
minimum salary? I don't mean to have the 40" TV in the toilet and all,
but to get along? Maybe only one bicycle (I know how scary that is)
and a second hand car, pay the rent and eat?

Yes and no. A single person could survive on a minimum wage job, renting
a room from someone, using food stamps and a food bank for food, and not
owning a car. But they could not rent a market-rate apartment with a
minimum wage job. To rent their own apartment they would have to get s
Section 8 voucher or get into a subsidized Below Market Rate (BMR)
apartment (for which there is a big waiting list).

On 7/27/2020 3:37 PM, John B. Slocomb wrote:

snip

When I lived in Riverside Calif. I had to get a credit card as most
fuel stations were "Exact change or credit card only". So I got one.
On Payday I'd take my check into the bank, deposit it and go right
across the office to the credit card guys and pay my last month's
charges.

Wow, you could actually pay your credit card bill in a bank back then?

56.1% of Americans pay their credit card bill in full every month (this
was in 2018, pre-Covid). So more than "a few" people understand that
paying 9-24% interest is probably not in their best interest (no pun
intended).

These days, there are big financial advantages to paying with a credit
card versus cash, check, or debit card, as long as you pay your bill n
full each month.

On 7/27/2020 10:04 AM, Radey Shouman wrote:
Ralph Barone writes:

Jeff Liebermann wrote:
On Mon, 27 Jul 2020 01:05:05 +0000 (UTC), Ralph Barone
wrote:

Right. And there are still a lot of legal ways to be
“indentured”. Just
listen to Ernest TubbÂ’s song Sixteen Tons or talk to somebody working
multiple minimum wage jobs to barely pay for food and rent.

Part time or full time? For about a year, I worked at two jobs while
attending college, both part time. Neither would give me enough hours
to work at only one job, while going to skool, and simultaneously
carrying enough class units to maintain my student deferment. These
days, banks hire two part time employees to do one job so that they
don't have to pay benefits.

As for minimum wage, it's probably too minimum. The current buzzword
is "living wage":
"Minimum wage workers cannot afford rent in any U.S. state"
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/14/minimum-wage-workers-cannot-afford-rent-in-any-us-state.html
(July 15, 2020).

As I mentioned up-thread:
At some point, we will need to draw the line between
slavery for mutual economic or social benefits, and
the general loss of civil right such as being treated
as property.

Agreed. And it’s fuzzy at the best of times.

Different people, groups, countries, courts, etc draw this line at
different points. It also changes with time, events, economies, and
political systems. I could easily argue that all communist countries
practice universal slavery. I could also argue that capitalism does
the same thing by paying workers less than they are worth in order for
the employer to make a profit. Same with the US banking system, which
quietly hints that it's primary purpose is to keep its customers in
debt, so that the customers can establish a favorable credit score in
order to live beyond their means.

As for "Sixteen Tons", Wikipedia says it was written in 1946 by Merle
Travis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteen_Tons
https://genius.com/Tennessee-ernie-ford-sixteen-tons-lyrics

Damn. Now what song did Ernest Tubb sing? Maybe “Walking the Floor Over
You�. Unfortunately, no relevance to cycling or white slavery in that
tune...

I missed that surname when first I read that song reference. Tennesee
Ernie Ford was famous for singing "Sixteen Tons", although he did not
write it. Not sure how Ernest Tubb covered economic injustice; I have
read the theory that a lot of the old blues lyrics complaining about
one's woman were popular because complaining about one's employer was
not a safe thing to do.


As a listener of the genre, blues lyrics bitch about
everything and anything:

http://www.songlyrics.com/mississipp...es-tax-lyrics/

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971