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Slavery is an extreme form of discrimination where the out-group is deemed subhuman. And discrimination is something the US has struggled with since the very be

Slavery is an extreme form of discrimination where the out-group is deemed subhuman. And discrimination is something the US has struggled with since the very beginning. It is the very notion that some people deserve to be restricted more and protected less by the law than other people. The notion that the out-group should be dehumanized and therefore it deserves whatever misery it finds itself in. This is a social illness. All that changed in the US are the names and sizes of the in-group and of the out-groups. But the illness is still there in the minds of the people. It's a continuation in the sense that it is a manifestation of the same social illness.

kerkeslager 4y ago
> Slavery is an extreme form of discrimination where the out-group is deemed subhuman. Ugh, no, don't argue in favor of my beliefs this badly. We know what slavery is, and creative redefinitions only make you sound dishonest. Slavery, real slavery, still exists in the US, and we don't have to make up weird definitions to say that. Slavery still exists in the US, legally. The thirteenth amendment says: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." (Emphasis mine). This is a massive loophole, and one which has been taken full advantage of. By criminalizing things which shouldn't be criminalized, and then enforcing those laws unequally, you can effectively enslave a large portion of whatever group you want to. In some cases such as Angola prison, the prisoners/slaves are literally forced to pick cotton for no pay. In other cases, the prisoners/slaves are paid some small amount: this is better for optics, but these same prisons easily recover the money by vending basic necessities at gouged prices: if you pay a seamstress $1/hour and then charge her $10 for a tampon at commissary, that's not pay. Prisoners can't shop elsewhere and can't work elsewhere. And to be clear: the work isn't voluntary. Refusal to work is punished with solitary confinement and sensory deprivation--and that's if they bother to comply with the law instead of just beating prisoners who don't work or paying another prisoner to shank them. With little oversight, there's little stopping prisons from doing this. In addition to lack of oversight allowing abuses of power, it also allows unsafe work conditions. Prisoners/slaves are unable to report unsafe conditions to anyone, and when unsafe conditions occur, there's no incentive to fix them. Prison slavery is used by a variety of industries. JCPenney and KMart use prison slavery to manufacture clothes, IBM uses prison slavery to assemble circuitry, Wendy's and McDonald's use prison slavery to process foods.
- alexvoda 4y ago
  I was not aware of all you wrote. I guess thanks for picking up the ball when I dropped it. As an eastern European, for whom high school had almost nothing to say about American history (other than WWII) and afterwards I originally learned the usually parroted variant only to later correct the knowledge I had, I am baffled again and again every time when learning new things about the putrid fractal that is slavery in the US. I was never even that curious in the first place. I did hear about the prison industrial complex but I had no idea about the "Angola" and how close this gets to slavery called by a different name. Reading about it now. I believed that while for profit prisons were inhuman, prisoners were not used for forced labor. I always kinda assumed that meant that prisons received so much money from the state they even made a profit. That major western brands make use of it feels nauseating. I believed this was stuff we were criticizing China for.

kerkeslager 4y ago

> Slavery is an extreme form of discrimination where the out-group is deemed subhuman. Ugh, no, don't argue in favor of my beliefs this badly. We know what slavery is, and creative redefinitions only make you sound dishonest. Slavery, real slavery, still exists in the US, and we don't have to make up weird definitions to say that. Slavery still exists in the US, legally. The thirteenth amendment says: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." (Emphasis mine). This is a massive loophole, and one which has been taken full advantage of. By criminalizing things which shouldn't be criminalized, and then enforcing those laws unequally, you can effectively enslave a large portion of whatever group you want to. In some cases such as Angola prison, the prisoners/slaves are literally forced to pick cotton for no pay. In other cases, the prisoners/slaves are paid some small amount: this is better for optics, but these same prisons easily recover the money by vending basic necessities at gouged prices: if you pay a seamstress $1/hour and then charge her $10 for a tampon at commissary, that's not pay. Prisoners can't shop elsewhere and can't work elsewhere. And to be clear: the work isn't voluntary. Refusal to work is punished with solitary confinement and sensory deprivation--and that's if they bother to comply with the law instead of just beating prisoners who don't work or paying another prisoner to shank them. With little oversight, there's little stopping prisons from doing this. In addition to lack of oversight allowing abuses of power, it also allows unsafe work conditions. Prisoners/slaves are unable to report unsafe conditions to anyone, and when unsafe conditions occur, there's no incentive to fix them. Prison slavery is used by a variety of industries. JCPenney and KMart use prison slavery to manufacture clothes, IBM uses prison slavery to assemble circuitry, Wendy's and McDonald's use prison slavery to process foods.

alexvoda 4y ago
I was not aware of all you wrote. I guess thanks for picking up the ball when I dropped it. As an eastern European, for whom high school had almost nothing to say about American history (other than WWII) and afterwards I originally learned the usually parroted variant only to later correct the knowledge I had, I am baffled again and again every time when learning new things about the putrid fractal that is slavery in the US. I was never even that curious in the first place. I did hear about the prison industrial complex but I had no idea about the "Angola" and how close this gets to slavery called by a different name. Reading about it now. I believed that while for profit prisons were inhuman, prisoners were not used for forced labor. I always kinda assumed that meant that prisons received so much money from the state they even made a profit. That major western brands make use of it feels nauseating. I believed this was stuff we were criticizing China for.