This is not a purely theoretical question. I spend half the year traveling the world in ways that let me talk a lot with local people, and I am astounded by the number of young men in developing countries who venerate Andrew Tate and are frantic about physical access to women. As a somewhat older man, I can’t share their desperation and I wish I could communicate to them “Just wank it and then get back to doing something productive with your time”, yet I fear being accused of being a “low-T man”, which in that social-media world is an object of contempt.

(I personally just leave the tape there all the time, because if I need to videoconference, I’d rather connect my mirrorless camera with a much better lens and sexy bokeh.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_high_school

When I got my first iPod in 2006, I immediately put Rockbox on it, where the iPod indeed mounted like a hard drive and files (including all my .oggs, remember those?) could be dropped right onto the device. Never used Apple’s own UI even once.

I still miss the iPod. It let you really immerse yourself in the music without all the distractions inherent in a smartphone. I occasionally considered getting a used one and installing larger storage and a new battery, but by now I think that ship has sailed.

I think that you are being disingenuous here. The African tribes that sold slaves were not necessarily the slave’s own tribe, but rather a different tribe that proved victorious in war or raiding. The slave’s own tribe, as I mentioned, would hardly have been unable to ransom its own people from the US due to lack of literacy, lack of communications, and lack of financial means. Meanwhile, postal connections between North Africa and Europe were reliable enough by the 17th and 18th centuries that slaves could message home for ransom, and this was frequently allowed as it proved highly lucrative for Barbary slaveholders.

> white slaves in a non-white country

This is a completely ahistorical way of describing the matter. In terms of race linked to skin colour, Barbary slaveholders very much considered themselves white in opposition to the black African populations to the south whom they exploited. (This survives in modern Mauritanian slaveholding.)

Moreover, Muslim slaveholding here and in the broader region was bound up with with issues of religion, not race as the modern USA understands it. In as little as a single generation post-manumission, those descendants of raided European slaves were no longer necessarily regarded as an outcaste, provided they were observant Muslims, which is why so much of the power in the Ottoman Empire famously ended up in the hands of men of Eastern European descent. At least in terms of knowing your progeny would be better off, they had privilege that African chattel slaves in the USA could only dream of.

Let's be honest: most of us here know there is more 'there' on the myriad university-press books available free on Anna's Archive, than on HN. The reason we still hang out here is desire for socializing, laziness, or pathological doomscrolling; information density doesn't really factor into our choices.

Which shouldn’t be surprising, because by 325 CE (and really, by 100 CE) Christianity had been around long enough for groups to take it in all kinds of directions, just like some Asian or African peoples have created new religions that are ostensibly Christian but preserve little of the Christianity originally introduced by colonial powers. In my own academic field, I deal a lot with third-century Manichaeism, where it is obvious how popular preachers could repurpose existing monotheistic religions into something that bore little resemblance to them.

> This NPR interview with a former Evangelical…

You really ought to state plainly in your post that this is Bart Ehrman. While he is a prominent scholar, even researchers of early Christianity who are not themselves Christians take issue with some of his claims.