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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

Please stop posting flamewar comments to HN. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for, and you've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33253658 - swipes like that are totally not ok).

If you'd please review the site guidelines and start following them, we'd appreciate it. Note this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

People in other parts of the US joke about how the deep south is backwards and give facts like the lack of quality education as examples, but fail to realize this is intentional. The working class in the deep south may be "backwards", but it's not by choice or culture. The people in power in those states intentionally create conditions that result in a permanent underclass who have no opportunity besides selling their manual labor and well-being for whatever pittance the capitalists deem. Slavery was outlawed but exploitation wasn't.

Slavery was never outlawed in the United States of America. Its government can still fully legally actually enslave prisoners.

Is there an example of a government that has outlawed slavery without some sort of exception for prisons, etc?

Slavery is even legal in the EU according to European Convention on Human Rights Article 4 Paragraph 3.

I love subparagraph (d) which is a wonderful catch-all in case a legal pressure relief valve is needed in the future to justify god knows what.

  Article 4 – Prohibition of slavery and forced labour

  1 No one shall be held in slavery or servitude.

  2 No one shall be required to perform forced or compulsory labour.

  3 For the purpose of this article the term "forced or compulsory labour" shall not include:

    a any work required to be done in the ordinary course of detention imposed according to the provisions of Article 5 of this Convention or during conditional release from such detention;

    b any service of a military character or, in case of conscientious objectors in countries where they are recognised, service exacted instead of compulsory military service;

    c any service exacted in case of an emergency or calamity threatening the life or wellbeing of the community;

    d any work or service which forms part of normal civic obligations.

I wonder if D has already done heavy lifting for children.

Incidentally, I was just two days ago in Montgomery, Alabama at the Equal Justice Initiative's museum documenting and memorializing the plight of enslaved people in the Americas. While not uniquely exploitative amongst all US states during the 2 century era of the legal slave trade, the post century of near complete lack of enforcement against the illegal slave trade, and the post half-century of transforming the slave trade into the prisoner-slave trade, this is true. Alabama--along with the other deep-South states--has been really bad about forced labor. I'd say it's more like 400 years of custom, with the first 150 years pre-dating the founding of the US, and the last 50 just being ignored because it's "only prisoners", with no introspection on just how those people became prisoners, or why what they did (or didn't even do) was considered a crime.

And modernized slavery in Florida (2002 article):

https://www.tampabay.com/archive/2002/07/03/slavery-alive-in...

You should try visiting reality occasionally. It's not so bad, you just have to leave your delusions behind at the border.

Please don't break the site guidelines yourself, regardless of how bad another comment was or you feel it was. It only makes things worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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