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Ha! Watch THIS and get back to me.*And don't give me any asinine arguments involving adult consent. Just imagine your own mother/wife/daughter/sister "choosing" that sort of career path. Not a pretty life. Clearly those people are mentally ill and/or drug addicts.No, but still better by far than being a medieval peasant.Yeah. It's incredibly horrible.
Is it on anything like the same scale, or even the same horror as black slavery in the US? Don't forget, it's not like anything was stopping their owners from sexually abusing them either.
No one's claiming all the problems are gone or even that we're not inventing new ones, but an awful lot really has gotten better. Life expectancy has risen, both at birth and at adulthood. Even with all the conflicts, deaths due to war are dropping.
Naive optimism isn't warranted. There's a lot of work to do. But cynicism isn't the answer either. Giving up doesn't help anyone.
There are truly poor people in America, no doubt, but there are a lot of "poor" people in America as well, with late model cars and Dish Network devices on their roofs.
It's relative. Poor people way back when had just about nothing, and it is still like that in a lot of places in the world, but Western nations, for the most part, have mitigated quite a bit of the worst parts of being poor. Most economically stagnant people in the West at least have some access to medical care, homes, and some form of transportation, and also have access to free education (which helps the people who have the mental toughness to overcome their disadvantage and break out of poverty), and a host of services to make sure they don't die of starvation.
Now, we do need to up our game when it comes to the mentally unfit and disabled (a good portion of the homeless here), as we are dropping that ball regularly, but, for the most part, in the West, the poor are much better off than at any time in history prior.
Yes, but to use that ancedote to claim that conditions haven't changed significantly from the 1840's would be absurd to the extreme. Slavery is not presently a sanctioned activity in this country that can be applied to anyone because of the color of their skin. Where it does happen, it is an illegal underground occurrence. Or it's virtual slavery such as the cases of certain foreign born housekeepers in cities like New York.binary thinking may be sloppy, but he has a point. What have been discovered to essentially be slavery rings are broken up in my area constantly, a which is a great embarrassment.So how many more years till I can buy people again?-73. The human trafficking market really picked up during the early 1900s and has been seeing some phenomenal growth in the 2000s. The U.S. is one of the top destinations for people being sold.Binary thinking is incredibly sloppy thinking. It is incredibly bad thinking. Its not smart, its not funny, its not insightful, its not original, it doesn't contribute to the conversation and to top if off you're not even correct.
If you absolutely must be annoyingly pedantic, choose to read a different meaning of can than was clearly intended, ignore what was said and nitpick a statement to play gotcha anyway then the illegality of the act has driven the cost of buying and securing people well beyond my price range.
Or in cases of 100% legal *essentially slavery* where young girls who are on their own are preyed upon, "voluntarily" taken to brothels in Nevada, and forced to stay there even during time off, not given the option to decline johns, receiving less than half of the transaction amount, and being forced to use that money to buy her own contraceptives, and pay back high interest loans issued by her employer (pimp/slave-master).
This, of course, doesn't include the compounding issue that in a non-trivial number of cases the employer intentionally addicts her to narcotics which he also sells to her at a rate that indebts her indefinitely. So the employer has a human that he makes money off of selling her body to other people, makes money from selling her narcotics, has open access to her sexually, she isn't allowed to leave, she doesn't have any money if she could leave, and she doesn't have the ability to say no to a John.
With the notable exception of the narcotics, all of this is completely legal. All of it happens everyday, and the frequency with which it happens is increasing everyday.
That is not a case of binary-semantics. That is a case of legal slavery in the United States today. To split a hair and say that *that* isn't slavery is the abuse of semantics.
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Yes, but to use that ancedote to claim that conditions haven't changed significantly from the 1840's would be absurd to the extreme. Slavery is not presently a sanctioned activity in this country that can be applied to anyone because of the color of their skin. Where it does happen, it is an illegal underground occurrence. Or it's virtual slavery such as the cases of certain foreign born housekeepers in cities like New York.Or in cases of 100% legal *essentially slavery* where young girls who are on their own are preyed upon, "voluntarily" taken to brothels in Nevada, and forced to stay there even during time off, not given the option to decline johns, receiving less than half of the transaction amount, and being forced to use that money to buy her own contraceptives, and pay back high interest loans issued by her employer (pimp/slave-master).
This, of course, doesn't include the compounding issue that in a non-trivial number of cases the employer intentionally addicts her to narcotics which he also sells to her at a rate that indebts her indefinitely. So the employer has a human that he makes money off of selling her body to other people, makes money from selling her narcotics, has open access to her sexually, she isn't allowed to leave, she doesn't have any money if she could leave, and she doesn't have the ability to say no to a John.
With the notable exception of the narcotics, all of this is completely legal. All of it happens everyday, and the frequency with which it happens is increasing everyday.
That is not a case of binary-semantics. That is a case of legal slavery in the United States today. To split a hair and say that *that* isn't slavery is the abuse of semantics.
Please demonstrate any of the following.
1. Someone on these boards said that modern day slavery was not slavery, or was not bad.
2. Modern day slavery is objectively worse than pre-civil war slavery.
3. You don't care about the points at hand and just want to argue about modern day slavery against men of straw.
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@Kain
BNW asked when he could buy a person again.
He was provided with information about where he could go to buy a person.
He then said that was "sloppy semantics."
I posit that the sloppy language was his quip about "not being able to buy people."
It is particularly important to note that the person whose sloppy language started this derail is the one complaining about sloppy language. (And, incidentally, the person who constantly denounces humanitarian studies such as applied language use.)
So the point is that if you are going to say some asanine pretentious out-of-touch statement like "when will I be able to buy a person again?" Then you deserve ridicule. And you deserve to be made aware of the fact that your statement ALSO diminishes your stated argument on top of making you look like a complete toolbag asshat. (You being BNW, not you Kain)
If its not something I said it doesn't belong in quotes.
You're focusing on material goods and neglecting a key factor here. Among Western societies, the United States is singularly hostile to it's poor, and that includes the working poor
Margaret Thatcher would have fit right in there...
@Kain
BNW asked when he could buy a person again.
He was provided with information about where he could go to buy a person.
He then said that was "sloppy semantics."
I posit that the sloppy language was his quip about "not being able to buy people."
It is particularly important to note that the person whose sloppy language started this derail is the one complaining about sloppy language. (And, incidentally, the person who constantly denounces humanitarian studies such as applied language use.)
So the point is that if you are going to say some asanine pretentious out-of-touch statement like "when will I be able to buy a person again?" Then you deserve ridicule. And you deserve to be made aware of the fact that your statement ALSO diminishes your stated argument on top of making you look like a complete toolbag asshat. (You being BNW, not you Kain)
So if he'd said "legally buy a person", we could have avoided all of this?
Note that your brothel example isn't actually buying someone. Bad as it is, they are not legally property.
For the larger argument, which goes back beyond BNW's quip, do you agree or disagree that the state of slavery in the US represents an improvement since the 1850s?
Point 1) No, I don't recognize a germane difference between "legal" and "allowed to happen by the government in authority."
Point 2) Again, "legality" is a red herring in that conversation. What happens is people get trapped in a circumstance that they are unable to remove themselves from. That circumstance includes not being able to decline sexual partners and not being able to set the conditions of consent. Let me remove the sugar coating; that means they get raped everyday by a rotating cast of faces and are not permitted to leave and do not have means to self-support if they do leave. Whether you think about "owning" them legally by the hour, or owning them "legally" free-and-clear doesn't mitigate the point that Nevada brothels are the clap-infected dick of progress toward sexual equality in this country and a significant hurdle just on the side of basic human rights.
Point 3) Globally today there are an estimated 27 million people in slavery, compared to 25 million globally in 1850. The only difference between "in the US" and "not in the US" is truly a matter of semantics because of supply chain lengthening over the past 165 years. I guarentee that everyone on this thread benefits from slavery today just as much as the cotton-wearing, tobacco-smoking New Yorker did in 1850. Slavery may not be *in* the United States but we sure as f%!% support it.
How many more people live now than in the 1840s?
If its not something I said it doesn't belong in quotes.
Yeah, that's one of those things that if you weren't anti-academic you may have been made aware of at some point. Quotes are often used to denote an idea (ie. Not nessicarily a direct expression) espoused by another party.
They can also be used to denote that words don't actually mean what they do at face value.
Quotes are versatile little guys.
How many more people live now than in the 1840s?
Is that the point you want to make? I'm genuinely curious if that is actually a thing you really want to say or if you just opened your yap and it fell out on accident. I wouldn't think any less of you if you retracted it, seriously, you should think about that statement and try again.
How many more people live now than in the 1840s?Is that the point you want to make? I'm genuinely curious if that is actually a thing you really want to say or if you just opened your yap and it fell out on accident. I wouldn't think any less of you if you retracted it, seriously, you should think about that statement and try again.
So is that you don't know?
So is that you don't know?How many more people live now than in the 1840s?Is that the point you want to make? I'm genuinely curious if that is actually a thing you really want to say or if you just opened your yap and it fell out on accident. I wouldn't think any less of you if you retracted it, seriously, you should think about that statement and try again.
Ok, so you are just a terrible excuse of polypeptides assembled into a shell loosly resembling a human being.
Just so we can all be perfectly clear, the conversation just moved from "there are less slaves today so things are better," to "there are less slaves per capita today so things are better."
All I can say is wow.
Point 3) Globally today there are an estimated 27 million people in slavery, compared to 25 million globally in 1850. The only difference between "in the US" and "not in the US" is truly a matter of semantics because of supply chain lengthening over the past 165 years. I guarentee that everyone on this thread benefits from slavery today just as much as the cotton-wearing, tobacco-smoking New Yorker did in 1850. Slavery may not be *in* the United States but we sure as f+*& support it.The other difference is the world population. Which is something like 6 times what it was in 1850. While there are more people enslaved (by whatever definition you want to use), it's a much smaller percentage. I dunno if that makes it better.
Or if we really should just go back to feudalism and outright slavery again because it makes no difference.
See my above post.
Jesus f$#*ing Christ. I'm leaving off-topic for a few days.
How many more people live now than in the 1840s?Is that the point you want to make? I'm genuinely curious if that is actually a thing you really want to say or if you just opened your yap and it fell out on accident. I wouldn't think any less of you if you retracted it, seriously, you should think about that statement and try again.Why? I think enslaving a much smaller percentage of people is better than enslaving a larger percentage.
Just like nearly everything else should be looked at per capita rather than in absolute numbers. You wouldn't compare murder rates or crime rates in absolute numbers, why slavery?
None of which is to say it's fine, we're talking relative degrees here.
Perfectly fine observation from your ivory tower.
So is that you don't know?How many more people live now than in the 1840s?Is that the point you want to make? I'm genuinely curious if that is actually a thing you really want to say or if you just opened your yap and it fell out on accident. I wouldn't think any less of you if you retracted it, seriously, you should think about that statement and try again.Ok, so you are just a terrible excuse of polypeptides assembled into a shell loosly resembling a human being.
Just so we can all be perfectly clear, the conversation just moved from "there are less slaves today so things are better," to "there are less slaves per capita today so things are better."
All I can say is wow.
You seem to be trying to convince us that slavery is bad. Do you realize no one is arguing that with you?
How many more people live now than in the 1840s?Is that the point you want to make? I'm genuinely curious if that is actually a thing you really want to say or if you just opened your yap and it fell out on accident. I wouldn't think any less of you if you retracted it, seriously, you should think about that statement and try again.Why? I think enslaving a much smaller percentage of people is better than enslaving a larger percentage.
Just like nearly everything else should be looked at per capita rather than in absolute numbers. You wouldn't compare murder rates or crime rates in absolute numbers, why slavery?
None of which is to say it's fine, we're talking relative degrees here.
Not to mention he seems to be comparing slaves to both slaves and people who live in slavelike conditions. It's not like the second group magically appeared after slavery was abolished. You had slaves of circumstance who were not legally slaves 150-200 years ago too.
Perfectly fine observation from your ivory tower.How many more people live now than in the 1840s?Is that the point you want to make? I'm genuinely curious if that is actually a thing you really want to say or if you just opened your yap and it fell out on accident. I wouldn't think any less of you if you retracted it, seriously, you should think about that statement and try again.Why? I think enslaving a much smaller percentage of people is better than enslaving a larger percentage.
Just like nearly everything else should be looked at per capita rather than in absolute numbers. You wouldn't compare murder rates or crime rates in absolute numbers, why slavery?
None of which is to say it's fine, we're talking relative degrees here.
hm.
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More people today have a college education than ever before, therefore things are good.
More people today lack a college education than ever before, therefore things are bad.
School sucks!
School sucks!
School doesn't suck. Goblins suck at school.
No, school sucks. And so do filthy pinkskins.
