Here's a map which attempts to estimate when slavery was abolished across various parts of the world:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/zsnr8q/year_of_abo...
The US wasn't much of an outlier.
As a general rule, anyone who tries to use slavery as a skeleton key to understand US politics is most likely an ideologue with an agenda. Sane people don't propose struggle sessions for events which happened 100+ years ago when everyone involved is long dead. You wouldn't point to a gigantic statue of Genghis Khan to explain what's wrong with modern Mongolia.
I don't think this is a slavery thing. Trump just sucks.
The poster you responded to did not mention slavery, they mentioned the confederacy, which held a variety of views, many of which still inform the politics of many Americans today. Acknowledging this reality seems reasonable.
Your replies indicate your disdain for appeals to the history of American slavery in political discussions, yet you were the one who brought it into the conversation, diverting the thread by initially straw-manning the parents view.
This is bad faith hair-splitting. You know perfectly well what tshrimple thinks "Nuremberg trials" were needed for, or why they think confederates were "evil fucks".
They were evil fucks. Slavery was one among many deplorable things conservatives supported and still mostly support to this day. They also opposed women's suffrage. They opposed civil rights and fought to maintain segregation. They fought against gay rights. They fight against trans rights. They literally fight against any minority who might land on an equal playing field. Hey... guess who has been stating lately that women shouldn't be allowed to vote?
They are always the first to cast someone as an "other" and scapegoat for all of their problems. You're the type of person to hear "Haitians are eating their cats and dogs!" or "Mexico is sending us rapists and murders" and say "That guy has a good point!". It's pretty fucking gross and you're a clown at best for defending them.
>They are always the first to cast someone as an "other" and scapegoat for all of their problems.
No kidding amigo.
Are you actually 'both sidesing' slavery?
I'm pushing back on Chermska1's effort to say that "well actually, the confederacy wasn't really about slavery".
Some people believe they have a right to land based on claims from millennia ago.
I suppose you could question their sanity, but the point stands - history has a short memory, and a few generations are nothing.
Especially when the after-effects of slavery, including segregation, disenfranchisement through gerrymandering and for-profit imprisonment, and other forms of continuing violence, are still live issues today.
That map is inaccurate. Unfortunately slavery is still very much a thing in many parts of the world, including forced labour, prostitution and some sweat shop labour.
The PRC and North Korea still use slave labour as do some other countries. The Soviet Union had slavery with the Gulag system during the 20th century, and other places such as East Germany had some within living memory.
As a general rule, someone trying to use a simple single numerical measure as a skeleton key to understand politics across nations is an ideologue with an agenda.
As for the Genghis Khan comparison, I may have made an error. We may just be dealing with severe cognitive limitations here.
If you think slavery is the key to explaining everything about the US, the burden of proof is on you to show that. Just because something gets discussed a lot does not prove that it's important. Donald Trump is himself the child of immigrants who immigrated to the US well after the end of slavery, and maintained a residence in a state (New York) which opposed slavery. The relevance of slavery to his presidency is at best unclear.
Genghis Khan died 800 years ago. The last American to have born into slavery died in the ~1970s~ 1960s.
The 1970s were 50 years ago. "Long dead", in other words. Did you know that Brazil didn't abolish until 1888? They also imported far more than the US: https://www.slavevoyages.org/static/uploads/01.jpg
It's recent enough that people living today knew former slaves. That's not ancient history at all, so I think the comparison is not good. I'm sure Brazil also has to deal with fallout of their practices, but I don't see how it changes how the fallout of US slavery impacts the US.
>It's recent enough that people living today knew a slave.
Slavery ended in 1865. That's 161 years ago. So maybe there are a few modern 80-year-olds who interacted with 80-year-old former slaves when the modern 80-year-olds were infants. Those 80-year-old former slaves would themselves have no memory of slavery since it would've ended before they could form memories. And the modern 80-year-olds would have no memory of the interaction, since they themselves were infants when the interaction happened.
In other words: There aren't very many of these people, and it's unclear if most of them would count.
You know something which happened more recently in the US than slavery? Prohibition. A trendy, self-righteous moral crusade which didn't accomplish what it set out to achieve, and ended up creating a bunch of problems instead.
I think Prohibition is a pretty good template for understanding the form and tendencies of modern left-wing activist movements. But--at least reducing alcoholism was a good cause that we had a shot at doing something about! Short of inventing a time machine, crusading against slavery from centuries ago seems rather pointless. That's not a problem for activists whose primary goal is to be trendy and self-righteous, of course.
That's not the point, it's that people who were slaves died in a time when color TVs existed. This woman died in 1964! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_J._Cooper
That's not long enough ago to call it ancient history.
You know something that happened more recently than prohibition in the US? Civil rights legislation.
It’s impossible to take you the slightest bit seriously. Ignorance and stupidity are ultimately inseparable.
I think you need to check the math on that. Knew a former slave maybe?
Yes right indeed, edited.
What’s your angle here, exactly? I don’t get it.
That the issue of slavery has weak explanatory power for what is happening today.
I didn’t ask you. But since you chose to get involved: do you believe there is no lasting impact or consequences resulting from slavery in the USA?
Pretty much everything that has happened in the past has consequences today. It's the butterfly effect.
Slavery has existed as far back as history. The idea that people are created equal, and are equal under the law, is very, very new, and that idea has resulted in a great many positive things happening.
I'm anti-Trump. If you tell people "Trump is a corrupt asshole", that has a chance at convincing supporters to abandon him. If you tell people "the US needs a cultural revolution due to events from past centuries", that's what got him elected in the first place.
A good general wouldn't voluntarily shift the battleground to a region where their troops are weak. Political persuasion is no different. The Democratic Party keeps losing because they cling to unpopular positions on cultural issues. If Trump is as bad as you say, prove it to me by showing willingness to strategically cede ground on a few issues in order to win more voters.
I’m generally aligned with your point, but I also don’t think the official position of the Democratic Party is that we need a cultural revolution, nor do I observe most Democrats feel that way.
What I do see is media and politicians on the Right characterizing extreme positions held by a minority of folks on the far Left as though they are adopted by the entire Left, and that weak uncritical minds on the Right believe that nonsense. Rush Limbaugh pioneered this technique to profit himself, and Trump gave him a fucking Presidential Medal of Freedom in his first term.
I think you're somewhat underestimating how effectively the far-left minority has scared others into silence. Anyways, I do what I can to push back against them when they say things which seem wacky to me, as in this instance.
Maybe I should work harder to make my actual views clear. I added a few sentences to the end of my original comment in this thread: "I don't think this is a slavery thing. Trump just sucks." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49572347
> because they cling to unpopular positions on cultural issues.
The Republican propaganda machine will always be ready to make any cultural issue the dems hold 'unpopular'. They turn anything and everything into a culture war, and if nothing exists, they are more than happy to manufacture it.
Observe how they turned their own vaccine into a cultural issue.
And does Brazil have their own 13th amendment that allows them to use prison labor as their modern slave workforce?
"Around the world, at least eleven million people are imprisoned, either pre-trial or following conviction. Most sentenced prisoners will work while in custody...
...
Most countries’ legal systems, however, carve out an exception for prisoner-workers, permitting the state to require them to work—sometimes for no pay, but typically for very low rates of pay.
There are, even so, multiple potential benefits to prison work. For example, ICPR’s recent research indicated that prisoners who could not work (when prison regimes around the world were restricted during the COVID-19 pandemic) reported many negative consequences, including to their mental and physical wellbeing. At the minimum, work may mitigate some harmful impacts of imprisonment. At best, it may increase prisoners’ prospects of successful reintegration into society, potentially also benefitting society by reducing recidivism."
https://www.prisonstudies.org/sites/default/files/publicatio...
(emphasis mine)
Here's a photo from a Brazilian prison from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labour#/media/File:Inmat...
The question isn’t whether prisoners work in other countries which I’m confident you know and dodged.
The question is whether the prisons in Brazil are private, and are allowed to sell prison labor FOR A PROFIT, incentivizing both greater incarceration rates, and disincentivizing release.
The answer is no, I’m not aware of ANY other country that allows a private organization to profit off the labor if people imprisoned by the state. At least not any country we would consider 1st world.
It’s absolutely absurd to suggest the current situation is beneficial to anyone but the ruling class and anyone claiming otherwise has never been to prison, never had a relative or friend who has been to prison, or is literally a psychopath who lacks basic human empathy.
You're moving the goalposts.
Your comment stated: "And does Brazil have their own 13th amendment that allows them to use prison labor as their modern slave workforce?"
The article I linked states: "Most countries’ legal systems, however, carve out an exception for prisoner-workers, permitting the state to require them to work..."
So my quote directly answers your original concern.
Your new concern is about private prisons. Here's a new quote from the article which addresses your new concern:
"Involvement by non-public entities in prison work can take many forms. In most countries including all three of Brazil, the United Kingdom, and the United States, for-profit companies operate entire prisons (or provide services within prisons) under government contract. Similarly, the operators of both public and private prisons in all three countries contract with buyers, equipping prison workshops and using prisoner labour to produce goods and services which go on to be sold beyond the prison."
(p. 15, emphasis mine)
So no, the US system doesn't seem to be especially unusual, according to this article.
You're welcome to decry this practice as inhumane, btw. I just don't think it is some sort of skeleton key which will help us understand every aspect of US politics.
>You're moving the goalposts
Rich from someone that brought up slavery from nowhere.
Oh please, are we pretending that the confederacy wasn't working to preserve slavery? Is this some sort of lost cause advocacy on your part?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZVVIACrX38
I didn't even make any argument nor do I disagree with you, just found it weird that you brought it up from nowhere.
Am I taking crazypills? You think talking about slavery in the context of the CSA is "bringing it up from nowhere"???
De facto there’s hardly rule of law there so if you piss off the wrong people yes.
It's called penal labor, and it was and remains widespread around the world. (And, yes, Brazilian law requires mandatory labor for all prisoners.) It wasn't until the middle to late 20th century that countries began to reform penal labor. But it's complicated. Without penal labor you can't force prisoners to, e.g., do laundry or mop floors. Even mandatory community service is a form of penal labor, and you can still find that in some Western European countries.
The norm now is to require a wage for mandatory labor, but of course often it's just a pittance. (Only 6 US states have uncompensated labor.) But even when you require minimum wage, many criminals owe restitution, so it could be and is taken away again.
Many US states have penal labor systems just like in Europe, that is nominally opt out, mandatory wages, etc, but at the end of the day it's always open to accusations of coercion and claims of "slavery".
The rhetoric around the 13th Amendment is exactly why we're in the situation we are now politically. Everything is equivocated to maximize rhetorical impact. Every unethical thing a politician does is "corruption", so when you get open and egregious corruption as with Trump, people can't discriminate and assume it's all the same.
Was penal labor abused to roll back the clock on abolition? Yes. Is penal labor abused today? Yes. But calling it slavery, drawing parallels to chattel slavery, is just irresponsible.
Someone replied to my comment. I composed a reply, then they deleted their comment. Since I already put in the effort to write my reply, I will paste it here.
* * *
Trump outperformed with black people relative to Romney and has appointed black people to his cabinet.
>problems going on to the present day
Often more noise than substance, e.g. the odds of a black man being unarmed and killed by cops in the US are something like one in a million annually.
>The white vote in the US was a solid majority for Democrats before the Civil Rights Act and is now a solid Republican majority.
Ethnic bloc voting is not at all unusual by international standards. I might as well interpret black loyalty to the Democrats as racism against white people.
>Those who "deserve it" are usually not white.
Trump has had many many "beefs" with white people such as Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Mike Pence, James Comey, Mark Milley, Anthony Fauci, Megyn Kelly, Joe Scarborough, Rosie O'Donnell, etc.
What frustrates me is when activists take an issue which should be a winner ("Trump is corrupt, let's do something about government corruption, all Americans can unite around this") and immediately pivot to handwavey, divisive race-baiting and talking about how utterly depraved conservatives supposedly are. Sometimes it seems like you guys are determined to lose.
Sounds like you’re completely ignorant to US history post civil war. You seem to know nothing about the daughters of the confederacy. Know nothing about segregation and Jim Crow. You have no idea that conservatives fight to this day to maintain monuments to literal traitors to the country. Or that they still routinely fly the flag of traitors to the country. Or more likely you do know about all of that and agree with it and just want to white wash conservative history in the US.
I know that stuff happened, but I don't think it's some sort of universal explanation for everything which happens in US politics.
I'm sorry you're too dense to see why "The Party of Lincoln" is defending the confederate flags and confederate monuments. They must just really believe in states rights except where it actually helps people. Sort of like the confederates who pretended to be about states rights while demanding other states return their "escaped property". And it doesn't explain everything in US politics. I never claimed your strawman. It explains US conservative's degeneracy. Their complete lack of shame or civility. They never had any.
>"The Party of Lincoln" is defending the confederate flags and confederate monuments
I think the obvious answer here, insofar as that's true, is that historical continuity is simply not as strong as you are assuming. I mean you've basically admitted it yourself. In 1860 would you vote for the Democrats or the Republicans?
You don't seem to believe that something like generational wealth makes much of a difference?
It makes a difference at a demographics level but I don't think that's what we're discussing here.