The US condemns the use of forced labor to produce cotton.
Now they relaxed the requirement to 2 and applied it to everyone. Of course it's now immediately a genocide. The previous one, despite harsher limits and usage of the same methods, is evidently not.
Maybe the article is mistaken? It seems like quite a bit more than just applying a one-child policy.
There are 10 million Uyghurs in China. Abortion on hundreds of thousands is quite literally the abortion of the whole population. And hundreds of thousands will be able to attest to this. I have no doubt that China violated a bunch of human rights to enforce the 2 child policy, but calling it a genocide of the Uighur, and then exaggerating or filling in the data by imagination is rich given that it was harsher before and nobody voiced a peep just because it didn't apply to minorities.
I don't like what China is doing, it's probably entirely justified to sanction Xinjiang and the camps. Nobody should have their freedom restricted just because they were born different and believe in different things. But at the same time propaganda outlets manufacturing consent is also disgusting.
What I'm trying to say, is that truth matters. We can't just level unfounded claims because it's convenient, that's how you devolve into a nationalist flame war, with the military industrial complex giggling in the background.
Slavery didn't end in 1865. It's still with us - just a bit out of sight, out of mind.
No, it wasn't.
Chattel slavery was converted almost overnight into penal slavery, with largely pretextual criminalization of the exact same group previously subject to chattel slavery, a long time ago in the United States.
We can go buy slaves today in the US. /s
Yes, criminalization of legal acts to recapture the free labor is abhorrent. However, passing the 13th amendment and then fighting a civil war to enforce it at least creates an incredibly strong legal footing for defending people from forced labor.
Criminals paying back their debt to society is a different conversation in terms of the length and harshness of the penality.
No, slaves you can buy as an individual is what you have with chattel slavery.
Slaves whose labor you can rent, or the product of whose labor you can buy, from the state who holds them as convicts (or that the state uses directly for it's own purposes under the same conditions) is what you have with penal slavery.
> However, passing the 13th amendment and then fighting a civil war to enforce it
That...didn't happen. In fact, the Republicans, despite being an ideologically abolitionist party, didn't pursue abolition as a policy, merely limiting (not even stopping) the geographic expansion of slavery, specifically to avoid splitting the union and provoking a civil war.
Great. We're all still talking about the same thing still.
And here I thought everyone was referring to an American practice analogous to the Chinese state forced labor of those who have been deemed harmful to society; while chattel slavery is, I suppose, loosely analogous there, I'd say penal slavery is actually a closer analogy.
It is ironic and amusing.
</point>
> prisoners have been digging graves on Hart Island for years
This isn’t really COVID related. Additionally, they are digging graves not necessarily burying bodies.
> is offering prisoners at Rikers Island jail $6 per hour... and personal protective equipment
So they get paid and have personal protective equipment.
ETA I am now reading article after article about this issue, and the fact that this particular industry seems to have cleaned up its act in 2012 doesn't make me feel better about any of it.
To your first point: I have a problem with the unsourced claim that there have been 1000 instances in the past 10 years, which I could not find a source to confirm. To your second about which term I would prefer, I don't set myself up as an authority. But if the op meant 1000 people, he should have said 1000 people. I think it would be clearer than "instance." When I first read that, I wasn't sure if it means "a person" or "a case when a tomato farmer got busted." If the latter, then it would have been way more than 1000 people affected.