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Slavery Was Never Abolished – It Affects Millions, and You May Be Funding It

posted by mrpg on Friday October 19 2018, @02:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the or-suffering-it dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

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]

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 19 2018, @09:30PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 19 2018, @09:30PM (#751162)

    I mean, I sympathize with you here, you're annoyed a pedant who is purposefully missing the intended meaning of words to focus on some irrelevant technicalities.

    Except the bulk of the original comment was founded on the author's interpretation of the meaning of the word "abolished". It's hardly irrelevant.

    This is a case of "when you look up abolish in the dictionary there's a picture of slavery" level wrongness you're going for here.

    First, you're quoting Wiktionary.
    Secondly, the usage examples in dictionaries are just that; examples of usage. They should not be seen as a source of universal truth, even when it's not a dictionary that can be edited by anyone.

  • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Saturday October 20 2018, @12:59AM

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Saturday October 20 2018, @12:59AM (#751230) Journal

    Oh come on this isn't a prescriptivist/descriptivist or source quality(though websters also uses slavery as an example) thing.

    "This is a sound way to use this word" is pretty well established by any dictionary. Regardless of whether you believe in a rigid theory of language or not. I really hope we don't continue this conversation, because this is about to hit a level of pedantry unseen by nerdkind.