Everyone hates the Seanchan but me?

[Cut Strand]

 

 

Has anyone seen the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy? Summary of it (spoilers) is a coca-cola bottle falls into the midst of a bushman tribe (it is in Australia right?)...

The movie is South African, and the bushmen shown are the !Kung.

 

 

From memory, the Seanchan exist because Ishmael spoke in Hawkwing's ear. I do not think Ishmael did that because he thought it would make a pleasant form of government to live under.

 

I find your comments about owned people not being able to raise free people implausible. I doubt the Empress is doing her own wet nursing. I think if you were handed a list of everyone who "parented" Tuon in any meaningful sense, you will find few if any people on that list, who were not property when assigned to Tuon's care.

But those da'covale raising Tuon weren't raising her as her parents. They raised her as the child of someone else. All costs associated with raising Tuon were footed by someone else.

 

If I were a slave/da'covale/property and my children were born free, would I be compensated more by my owner? But now my owner is operating at a loss since I can at most provide the same level of work. So unless I was already compensated at a level that would allow me to raise a child, it doesn't work. If the child is almost property, suddenly there is incentive for the owner to invest in the child.

 

My statement wasn't about not being able to raise children, it was about not being able to raise their own free children.

[didymos]

What do you mean you don't have people warring with each other in Seanchan? The only thing we hear from the soldiers is about all the constant rebellions they've been putting down. Also, it really didn't take a hell of a lot for Semirhage to get the entire continent killing each other off. The descriptions of the place don't strike me as a very stable society, but one thinly held together by oppression and fear.

 

Exactly. The Consolidation was 800 years of continuous warfare spanning the whole continent (plus a few islands). There were still rebellions and unrest and areas like Kaensada with endemic tribal warfare right up until Semi wiped out the Imperial family. And that's disregarding all the myriad personal wars between political rivals in which assassination was an accepted and common tool.

[Ihasavowel]

 

 

But those da'covale raising Tuon weren't raising her as her parents. They raised her as the child of someone else. All costs associated with raising Tuon were footed by someone else.

 

If I were a slave/da'covale/property and my children were born free, would I be compensated more by my owner? But now my owner is operating at a loss since I can at most provide the same level of work. So unless I was already compensated at a level that would allow me to raise a child, it doesn't work. If the child is almost property, suddenly there is incentive for the owner to invest in the child.

 

My statement wasn't about not being able to raise children, it was about not being able to raise their own free children.

If it is costs that concern you, then the problem is solved by a state fund for "the raising of property's free children" (possibly raised from an annual tax on the owning of people, or a sales tax when people are sold). No need to make these children property themselves to solve that one. This practice which facilitates the possibility that someone is owned property because their great, great, great, grandparent looked at the wrong person, is morally dubious, and avoidable.

 

Making someone whose long ago ancestor did something wrong, property, to avoid someone who owns their parents having to pay their upkeep, seems a rather disproportionate ill to swallow, simply so that criminals can feel productive, and this making criminals contribute, seems to be the moral justification for the owning of people in your arguments. I would say this cost alone is reason enough to not make criminals property if it is an inevitable ill of doing so (and it does not appear inevitable to me). Why should person X pay the price of their freedom so that some long dead criminal ancestor (whose "crime" might have been glancing at the wrong person) did not have to feel unproductive?

 

The worth of this contribution (of criminals) referred to, is somewhat undermined if you are right that paying for the costs of raising the child/ren of property would put the owner at a loss. Either the labour gained from people as property would cover these costs and still produce a profit margin of some kind, or it is grossly ineffecient. Unless you mean that it would simply be less profitable than not paying for their upkeep or getting to own those children whose upkeep was funded by the owner. In which case, you would be effectively justifying making the children of property, property, on the basis that otherwise the owners of their parents would profit less from owning people than they currently do. In fact the same exact argument would apply to the American slave era. Why pay someone to work the fields when it is more profitable to have people that you own do it? Was slave owning in America actually morally good because it allowed slave owners to profit more than they otherwise would have? This seems (to me) to be your argument for making property out of the children of property, and in my view, it is a morally bankrupt argument.

[AliasKelly]

Damane:

 

The giant hypocrisy of the Seanchan. Even bigger than the fact that the sul'dam can learn to channel. Their method of dealing with channelers does not remove the threat of the OP being abused for personal gain. It merely shifts who has control of that power. I could see the argument if the Seanchan believed (like the Whitecloaks) that no one should have that kind of power and leased people to keep them from using it for the safety of all. But this is not what they do. They continue to use this power. But instead of the channeler deciding how to use the power, it is the Blood. Are they really any less likely to abuse this power for personal gain? Of course not. The Empress and anyone with damane can channel. They just do it through an intermediary. Having power and being dangerous should not be a crime in and of itself. It should be that person's actions. If you leased an "evil" channeler and gave control to a "good" person (so the evil person could not commit their crimes but their useful power would not be lost) I could understand that. Leasing people for potential crimes is ridiculous. A blademaster is also more powerful and dangerous that most people. Should we cut off the hands of all blademasters because they might use their skills to kill innocent people?

 

Thank you so much for voicing what I've been thinking for so long! There is no difference between a damane being "dangerous" or the sul'dam who controls her power being so, or the one who orders the sul'dam, and right on up the line. Anyone who can control the One Power, by any means, is potentially just as dangerous to society as any other.

[Exy]

All this talk about "trusting" the Aes Sedai is silly -- Deain gave Luthair Paendrag that first a'dam to gain his favor and to grant him a powerful weapon -- an eventual monopoly on the use of channeling in conquest. The damane aren't any less dangerous than the Aes Sedai had been -- they're still doing the same things. They're just under the monopoly control of the Seanchan monarchy, which is continuing its pattern of conquest and imposition of fascist rule over the Westlands now that it's finally secured Seanchan (up, of course, until it erupted into massive civil war.)

 

 

If I were a slave/da'covale/property and my children were born free' date=' would I be compensated more by my owner? But now my owner is operating at a loss since I can at most provide the same level of work. So unless I was already compensated at a level that would allow me to raise a child, it doesn't work. If the child is almost property, suddenly there is incentive for the owner to invest in the child.

 

My statement wasn't about not being able to raise children, it was about not being able to raise their own free children.[/quote']

It's amazing that you're actually saying hereditary slavery is excusable because non-hereditary slavery would reduce the profitability of owning slaves. Is that seriously what you think of as a moral argument?