They thought they were going to rehab but ended up in chicken plants (2017)

It's unbelievable and if they ever make a movie or HBO-type series of it, it will need to be seriously toned down, lest it ends up being too horrirific.

Christianity is defined by Christians not how others interpret the bible. Different Christians define it differently. There is no one real way to be Christian.

People popularly think he is more forgiving than he is, in new testament (he isn't, for example he explicitly says he "brings the sword", he more than once displays he is at least annoyed with people, and the famous passages about giving the other face and so on are more about civil disobedience than forgiveness)

And people like to portray old testament God as unforgiving (he isn't either. he did forgive people a bunch of times, and was very patient, and some of episodes that understood today as cruel, were necessary for one reason or another, for example when he told Israelites to execute the children of their enemies after a particular battle, the reason for that is the battle happened in the middle of the desert in a place with not enough food for both groups, it was either execution or abandon them to starve on the desert on their own).

I have a lot of time for Jesus's teachings, but no time for institutions using his name as an instrument of control and abuse. Would the man who famously threw the merchants and money-changers out of the temple and went to his death with the intention of attaining forgiveness for all mankind want abusive slave camps built in his name? The mental gymnastics required to make that work would be worthy of Olympic gold. I hope the people behind this awful system really do have a powerful spiritual/religious experience and seek forgiveness for the horrors they've inflicted on their fellow human beings.

"Go and sin no more."

"Jesus said unto them, If ye were blind, ye would have no sin: but now ye say, We see: your sin remaineth."

Also, if you reject the Old Testament then you cannot accept the New:

"Think not that I came to destroy the law or the prophets: I came not to destroy, but to fulfil."

Important distinction.

There is no special innate morality that Christianity imbues in people. If anything it feeds people's narcissism and makes them behave even worse. "I am important b/c god speaks to me, I can do no wrong because I have the word of god and am surrounded by people who say the same."

Christianity is constantly on the wrong side of history. Christians were overwhelmingly pro-slavery, and used the bible to justify their owning of slaves. Women's rights, accepting of homosexual and trans individuals. Heck, look at today: The republicans whose absurd agenda are prolonging the pandemic are overwhelmingly Christian.

Maybe it's time to stop pointing at "bad Christians" and saying "well they are doing it wrong." Maybe YOU are doing Christianity wrong.

Sometimes you just don't know any better, or you're stuck for what ever other reason. I am 100% certain if it was easier to walk away from situations, anyone really would.

Regardless, congratulations on being sober for 22 years.

Friends, family, fear.

—edit: deleted hyperbole—

There are folks who are paid to work in such plants. That he didn't get paid is a scam. But the work? It's just working in a chicken plant. Not 'the most horrific thing', unless you've never worked hard and then sure it might seem like that.

So scam aside, this story was 'guy worked hard for a year'.

The human mind may be the least well understood thing out there...an even better question might be: why do people expect that other people should behave in a highly logical manner, when they themselves don't?

Maybe. After reading the entire article, I think that it's a little more complex. The convict gets the option of jail or chicken farm.

After choosing the chicken farm, the convict still has the option of doing the jail time instead. The reason they work so hard, endure the horrific conditions and do so without pay is because they still feel that it is better than jail.

The problem arises when Judges (who, like you said, may have an incentive to provide slaves) start weighting the jail option heavier in order to promote the chicken farm option; for example, offer 5 years in jail or two years in slavery.

Another problem with biased Judges is that they may start convicting based on the labour requirements, not on the criminal intent, element and other factors.

Anyone here who also read The Talisman (Stephen King, Peter Straub)? Similar thing there.

They're poor, not stupid. Moving to a blue state doesn't magically make you richer and opportunity doesn't mean anything unless there's a chance you can capitalize on it.

Unless you have a skill or trait that somehow gives you a leg up over the local poors you're destined to be just as poor when you get there. And if you do have some path upward you may as well work that path locally with the benefit of your support network.

If you're young, a hard worker and paying into your support network a lot more than you're getting out and don't have a lot of time/effort/money sunk into your support network yet than a bus ticket might be a good idea (and young people often do move long distances). If you're supporting a family then the better bennies might be worth it but if you're supporting a family moving away from your support network without taking several steps backwards in terms of stability is going to be nigh on impossible.

One of the biggest things that keeps people poor is an inability to have a financial buffer for unplanned expenses. And everyone knows that relocating is fraught with high risk of those kinds of expenses. If the destination has a higher cost of living all the risks are magnified.

I'm not american, nor do I know much about the states, but at a guess I'd say it comes down to 3 things:

1. Cost of living (I could be wrong, but I imagine these states are cheaper to live in, and moving is often a massive expense in itself)

2. Lack of applicable skills (if you grew up in an area which produces mainly farmers for example, and you move to an area which produces mainly programmers, you're going to have a tough time finding work)

3. Culture (For you these may be "shitty redneck states", but I wouldnt find it suprising at all if the people that live there consider the bigger liberal states the shitty ones. Again US culture isn't a strong point for me so this is just a guess).

I know of two reasons.

1. The "blue states" have, quite deliberately, stopped building housing. This closes a traditional way out of rural poverty, and I think/speculate it's a major driver behind the opioid crisis.

2. The book "Dignity" by Chris Arnade documents the life of dirt poor America. I strongly recommend it. It talks a lot about how many people belong somewhere, and won't move because of that.

https://www.amazon.com/Dignity-Seeking-Respect-Back-America/...

You ever try helping an opioid addict? They immediately try running off to buy drugs in any way they can. They are consumed with chasing the next high and will lie and steal left and right to get it. Family, friends, it doesn't matter. You can put them up, feed them, give them a job, build them a house on your property, involve them in their nieces and nephews lives, and they still sneak off and go on a bender and hide drugs in your house. The fiascos have no bounds.

People with normal lives seeing the conditions of a rehab program? They are merely appalled by reality. Find something else to get outraged by.

Being poor near family and friends is about 100x better than being poor away from them. That network can provide tens of thousands of dollars (if you had to pay strangers for it) per year in services and assistance.

But being poor in the US seems so much more horrible. Having the wrong skin color, or being involved with the wrong herb, the State may treat you so much worse.

As far as actions to take, what immediately comes to my mind are ideas that involve becoming a federal felon for violation of the computer fraud and abuse act.

Does anyone have any concrete ideas on what to do as a technical, moderately affluent person when you come across such insidious bullshit?

We don't dox.

How is this not just outright fraud? The state may turn a blind eye towards horrific abuses of prisoners, but they're not going to be so sanguine about theft of their money. Even worse this creates an incentive to make the workplace dangerous, since each injury is more cash in the administrator's pockets.

The complete lack of personal accountability was not always a thing. Tales abound in colonial America about officials getting tarred and feathered for acting in nakedly corrupt ways. But the global village means you dont even care what happens to your neighbor anymore as they are too far and distant from you despite geographic proximity.

https://www.ted.com/talks/johann_hari_everything_you_think_y...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park

The instinct for "shock treatment" and to hope they hit "rock bottom" is completely misguided. While there is probably no one-size-fits-all treatment for addiction, in most cases they need resocialization, routine, exercise structured around activities that reward without the drug. In the case of serious addicts prone to relapsing or who can't get through withdrawal successfully, a slow medically supervised taper off is probably ideal.

Basically, you want to minimize the stress on the addict, avoid withdrawal, make the transition off the drug a gradual one, and stabilize them socially and economically so they have deeper ties so they build up coping strategies besides resorting to drugs. Unfortunately this is the very opposite of what we usually do. Criminal intervention often destroys social relations, results in repeated cyclical withdrawals (often with risk of overdose each time), results in job losses and housing losses, and generally just adds a great deal of chaos that makes getting stable harder.

This sounds exactly like a rehab program to me.

Afghanistan Brunei Darussalam China Marshall Islands Palau Tonga Tuvalu

See https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:11310:0::N...

It takes a LOT of garbage haulers, floor sweepers, line cooks, dishwashers, and the like to keep our society humming along.

It's ostensibly voluntary, so not the same thing as in TFA, but close.

There is also a huge amount of slave labor used in the US's world-leading prison population. Slavery was never really abolished in the US, just limited to prisoners. Correspondingly, the number of black people in prison skyrocketed.

> not allowed to leave the compound

Wouldn't you have been at least 18 at this point? Unless I'm missing something you were absolutely allowed to leave the compound, but I presume then your parents would no longer pay for your housing.

This is unfortunately par for the course across these sorts of nonprofits, religious or not, rehab or not. The profits that help special needs kids and the elderly are unfortunately no different. All the money goes to those at the top. Generally speaking, the less directly the state is funneling "customers" to them the less slimy a given organization is.

>Honestly, spending almost a year isolated gave me enough time to think about what I wanted in life and motivate me to do something with my future.

And then what happened?

It often surprises me in cases like these. They do horrible things to lots of people and guns are easy to come by, why aren't more victims of programs like these go vigilante since the three pillars of democracy obviously don't care?

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

That's not predestination, but it comes down to the same kind of thing.

In general, I think all forms of justice in the west are based on free will being true. If some form of determinism is true, then "punishment" doesn't make sense.

I've met quite a few people who's attitude is that "bad" people are irredeemable. Not all of these people were from the USA; but it seems to be an attitude that is particularly prevalent in the USA. This is a bit odd, because most USAians aren't Calvinists. It's as if there's a thread of Calvinism running through evangelicalism - but most evangelical traditions don't inherit from Calvinism, or so I thought.

The intriguing thing for me about the philosophy was that, yea, you're predestined so you in theory could do whatever you want, but if you're not doing good works, you're probably not one of the elect.

Where did you read that Calvinists believe that the elect were also bestowed wealth? Was this a widespread belief? I'm genuinely interested, this is new to me.

The way America was settled historically was way more complicated. Simplification that boils it down to the "core group of the first settlers" with far reaching consequences up to now is bound to be wrong.

What's changed is that you're not allowed to ship black people from Africa now, but when you look at articles like the one that was posted, and mass incarceration and prison labour, and basically living as if your employer did you a favour by hiring you...the pattern remains constant even as the implementation changes.

And there are still those puritanical underpinnings about 'bad' people deserving the bad treatment they get from 'good' people.

Many countries in the world have moved on from that system. Obviously not all of them, but it's still rather shocking that a first world country still actively encourages a system where you can lose all of your agency as a person.

You get it everywhere to some extent, but… maybe it’s more of a thing in the US? At the extreme, some US Protestant sects like to blame the likes of natural disasters on the presence of what they think of as sin (often gay people); while this idea is obviously not a majority view, it doesn’t really show up _at all_ in European Christianity or most other religions.

It's American Conservatism. American conservatives fundamentally buy into the just-world hypothesis [0]. They believe that the world is so strongly a meritocracy (itself a dubious assertion) that it affects basically all aspects of life. It's why conservatives often champion "personal responsibility," while simultaneously excusing their own irresponsibility. They believe that when bad things happen to others, it's because they deserve it so they should be responsible for what they did. When bad things happen to them, it's just bad luck. That leads to cliches like "the only moral abortion is my abortion" and other such hypocritical nonsense.

I'm sure you can trace this idea back to one of the series of evangelical or fundamentalist movements in the United States, but personally I believe that it's almost always tied to the simple fact that many people manage to reach middle-age without having failed or suffered due to circumstances beyond their control while absorbing pro-American propaganda all their lives. It leads you to a mistaken understanding about how much power and control you have over your own life and about what the real causes of success are.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis

Calvinism teaches that, although salvation is freely available to everyone, human nature is such that no one would choose salvation on their own. Therefore, God chooses to intervene to cause some people to accept salvation.

The Prosperity Gospel teaches that God rewards faith and/or good deeds with worldly blessings like wealth and good health.

I actually think that some of the problems that America faces are due to an overreaction by Calvinists (and other conservative Christians) to the Prosperity Gospel. That is, in their eagerness to avoid the Prosperity Gospel they overcorrect and deemphasize the parts of the Bible that teach that God cares about the poor and meeting people's physical needs.

Commentary from John Calvin on Luke 13:4 where Jesus comments on whether the 18 people killed by a falling tower were bad people because they suffered this fate:

"This passage is highly useful, were it for no other reason than that this disease is almost natural to us, to be too rigorous and severe in judging of others, and too much disposed to flatter our own faults. The consequence is, that we not only censure with excessive severity the offenses of our brethren; but whenever they meet with any calamity, we condemn them as wicked and reprobate persons. On the other hand, every man that is not sorely pressed by the hand of God slumbers at ease in the midst of his sins, as if God were favorable and reconciled to him. This involves a double fault; for when God chastises any one before our eyes, he warns us of his judgments, that each of us may examine himself, and consider what he deserves. If he spares us for a time, we are so far from having a right to take such kindness and forbearance as an opportunity for slumber, that we ought to regard it as an invitation to repentance."

Slavery/indentured servitude/prison labor predates capitalism by forever, that really has nothing to do with it. Similar (but much worse) labor camps existed in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Center_for_Investigative_R...

???

How is stating facts about labour abuse in china or qatar a propaganda?

Just because it happens in your country too doesn't change the facts or make both acceptable.

2. The USA is a federal state, not top-down ruled, unlike China.

3. He Without Sin, Cast the First Stone is a call for compassion, not to stick your head in the sand.