Hacker News Reader

Comment by Umn44 | Hacker News Reader

"I find it astonishing that people compare modern-day income equality and the position of the poor in our time, in the Western world, to that of historical slavery"

I'm sorry to tell you but you're a moron if you believe there isn't mass suffering when you are poor and low status. The amount of psychological abuse you take and feelings of self worth and being treated as subhuman by society and the business community at large, you are just wrong on so many levels. You depression and mental illness are induced by capitalist society because your status is directly related to cultural expectations about your ability to live up to the ideology of the culture you exist in, if you don't live up to it you will be ruthlessly not associated with. It effects your love life/dating life, etc... as in you won't have much of one because nobody wants to date/marry a poor person.

If you don't think that just as painful as slavery you're a grade A idiot.

View on HN

This breaks the HN guidelines. Please comment civilly and substantively or not at all.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10828285 and marked it off-topic.

One of the common ways to get out of poverty in the past was indentured servitude. People would voluntarily sell themselves into slavery because it was preferable to their current "free" position. You can't eat freedom.

Yes, although indentured servants were not quite the same as slaves (again, there was of course variance depending on time and place).

For instance, did the fugitive slave acts of colonial America cover white fugitive indentured servants? I'd presume no, although some other laws existed to cover them (I'm by no means an expert but some reading makes me think this.)

Racism must have been a significant factor in making the difference of slavery and servitude in the American colonies: actual slaves were of African descent, while indentured servants were European, and apprenticeship contracts covered young American-born people.

When we talk about slavery in Europe today, in realistic terms it is actually more resembling the indentured servitude contracts of America (debt bondage and enforced servitude) but illegal (if authorities find out, they work actively to confiscate any proceeds of such contracts from those who benefit). E.g. sex workers who are deceived to take some form of a debt bondage.

Where I see the word "slavery" used is however often about situations where employment officials assign some training or intern arrangements for people to get job-seekers allowance. It's hyperbolical, even if there might be something wrong with these arrangements.

You should have a read of Gaerber's "Debt - the first 5000 years". It talks a lot about the the origins of slavery in different cultures. It doesn't seem as black and white as you seem to imagine.

> If you don't think that just as painful as slavery you're a grade A idiot.

If you have to resort to name-calling to make your point ... you're wrong. It's that simple.

When you're a slave, no matter how talented your are, no matter how hard you work ... you're still a slave and you will always be a slave, and your children too, will be slaves.

That situation is truly inhuman. Truly. So much so that the bible, the founding document of our civilization, had a built-in reset for precisely this. [1]

When you're free, your circumstances may suck ... but at least you have a chance to improve them, however remote that chance may be.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_(biblical)

>If you have to resort to name-calling to make your point ... you're wrong. It's that simple.

Except when you're wrong, and you can actually look at research that demonstrates the bullshit people gullibly believe about their society is incorrect.

US distribution of wealth

https://imgur.com/a/FShfb

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

If this affects more than a few otherwise nice, pleasant people, perhaps the dating and marriage prospects are not so dismal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com