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When we think of slavery, many of us think of historical or so-called "traditional forms" of slavery – and of the 12m people ripped from their West African homes and shipped across the Atlantic for a lifetime in the plantations of the Americas.
But slavery is not just something that happened in the past –- the modern day estimate for the number of men, women and children forced into labour worldwide exceeds 40m. Today's global slave trade is so lucrative that it nets traffickers more than US$150 billion each year.
The article asserts that much of today's slavery is being driven by the demand for electronic goods.
[Edit: fixed ILO links]
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Slavery Was Never Abolished – It Affects Millions, and You May Be Funding It
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Remember Darwin; building a better mousetrap merely results in smarter mice.
(Score: 4, Informative) by ikanreed on Friday October 19 2018, @05:43PM (3 children)
That's very close to but not quite true.
Chattel slavery as practiced in the United States(and some of the other colonial Americas, Brazil and Cuba e..g) was perhaps uniquely barbaric. It was pretty historically unprecedented to ban teaching literacy to slaves in the historical Ottoman, Asian or medival and ancient European varieties of institutionalized slavery. It was also extremely uncommon to have "slave patrols" to gather and return slaves who escaped. It was frequently the case that protections against excessive physical abuse or murder of slaves were encoded in the law. There was about an 80/20 split on freeing children of slaves versus keeping them, but surprise, we ended up on the side that was vile and shitty. Some small percentage of slaves even had mandatory leave and minimal pay, but it'd be dishonest of me to pretend that was the norm.
Things that were common in every variety of slavery, though: raping slaves, hard manual labor, being forced into the local religion(though, as others noted, this freed you in Islamic slavery), dispassionate lack of care for basic needs.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by VLM on Friday October 19 2018, @08:12PM (2 children)
The irony is despite immense staggering levels of social pressure from non-black sources, around 40% of blacks refuse to participate in education and won't graduate high school. Insert anecdote about leading horses to water vs drinking, such that seen from contemporary perspective this is more of a "stop wasting money" argument. Its tragic to whip and beat a white child to stop them from learning to read, but also consider that in the current year the truancy police can't whip and beat black kids enough to get them to attend school long enough to get a "participation trophy" diploma, you kinda have to use a multicultural perspective when analyzing this stuff. To this day, "book store owner" is not a realistic career path in historically black neighborhoods, with minor exception for leftist gentrification regions.
Also everyone knows the straw dog thats always proposed that there were never any rules in slavery, although a few moments with google show that as you'd expect of a literate euro culture there were in fact tons of laws about slavery; slaves were relatively expensive and valuable property and property attracts laws like flies. Admittedly like all laws ever passed in every culture on the planet, the exact level of enforcement was unclear. And like many laws taken out of historical context, those ancient laws would not be acceptable in the current year; although that's hardly unique to slave law and as such "proves" very little about slavery.
Another slavery apology straw dogging topic not discussed enough is clearly today any african living in white countries has a staggeringly higher quality of life than those africans still living in Africa, but this was also the situation in the pre-civil war era despite how awful slavery was compared to being white. Yes the quality of life was awful in the south USA, but the quality of life in Africa was even unimaginably worse. The Africans and Jews running the slave business back in Africa were much more ruthless than the average regulated plantation owner, despite how horrible plantation life was.
The reality of slavery is it was more of a failed immigration policy than anything else.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 20 2018, @04:47AM
Apparently your stupid levels are also too high, I hear they are getting close to brain transplants so maybe you'll get lucky. Failed immigration policy, lolol wtaf?
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday October 21 2018, @12:12AM
So what are you saying, VLM? Because this post reads like a gussied-up, lipstick-on-a-pig way of saying "Black people were better off as slaves and should be made slaves again." Only you'd pronounce "black people" with two Gs in it. Who the fuck do you think you're fooling?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...