Ronnie DeSantis Needs to Be Less Clumsy About Making His Point.

I'm not sure how I escaped this.  My birthday is in March, and during the three years I spent in junior high school, there must have been at least one day I was in school, and in PE, on my birthday.

One of the coaches made it his business to find out who had a birthday on a PE day.  He would snag that student coming out of the shower, and he would paddle the student, naked and wet, to the beat of "Happy Birthday."  The paddle was covered in formica, and it had holes in it, so it had maximum effect.  Maximum effect included that the student had very red buttocks after this paddling.  At the end, the coach smiled at the student, shook his hand, and asked him what do you say when someone gives you something: "Thank you."

Ronnie DeSantis' newest suggestion was that slavery was actually a benefit to slaves, because it taught them skills they could "parlay" into trades (if and when they ever got freed from slavery).  Clearly, at first blush, this comes across as, oh, I don't know, heartless, cruel, and completely lacking in human feeling and decency.  But I think we have to consider the possibility that DeSantis was more inept than necessarily strictly wrong, per se.  So, here's how I think Ronnie can do a better job of making his point.

We can enslave the DeSantis family, and everyone they know.  They can pick oranges or strawberries or something.  We can do this for 400 years' worth of generations.  We can control their lives completely, flog them when they do something that doesn't completely satisfy us, and arbitrarily break apart their nuclear families, selling off a younger and stronger male, or the young'uns when they're capable enough to do something useful, or a female, if anyone thinks she'd either make a good brood "mare," or at least be appealing enough to rape.  (If she gets raped enough, she'll learn how to please a man.  That could be a good skill to know.)

And then, at the end of 400 years, we'll let all of these slaves go, although we'll continue to make their lives difficult in as many ways as we can.  Maybe we can brand them, so we'll know which ones are DeSantises, etc.

And if we find out that during 400 years of generations, any of these DeSantises, etc, have learned any kind of skill that will be of any value to anyone, or to them, we'll reassure ourselves that we not only did the right thing by enslaving the DeSantises, but that we actually did them a favor.

For which they should naturally thank us.  Ronnie just hasn't learned about teaching people gratitude.  We should probably teach him, and his wife, and their children, and everyone they know, for many generations.  I'm sure Ronnie, his extended clan, and their heirs, will be deeply grateful.