Hacker News Reader

Comment by okasaki | Hacker News Reader

I guess now that SA has signaled a slight shift away from the US empire, we're going to be seeing a lot more articles about how evil they are.

View on HN

Reporting on this long predates the shift. For example, 2015: https://www.thedailybeast.com/inside-the-world-of-gulf-state...

(Or the 1960s, if you wanna go back further. https://www.nytimes.com/1967/03/28/archives/saudi-arabian-sl...)

Yes, although I think it'll be, not because the media apparatus is going to be less lenient, but because they no longer feel the need to restrain their evil.

In this case we also presumably have these companies that replace 'master' with 'main' etc. in technical literature and comments, but which are cooperating with things which may well be actual slavery.

Exactly.

This is something that leaders from Africa and Latin America have talked about a lot.

Western democracies love using the appearance of moral superiority as a diplomatic tool while turning a blind eye to their own corruption and failings (ie. United Fruit, JP Morgan Chase, Boeing, gun violence, police brutality)

1. It’s cheaper to whitewash (ie. affirmative action) than effect change (ie. reparations for Haiti, descendants of slaves in US)

2. It perpetuates the good guys vs bad guys myth /propaganda at home that makes it easier to wage war and disenfranchise “third-world” countries.

I don't think this should be the focus.

Slavery is abolished in the west and currently existing slavery should be a primary focus-- whether it's a western company participating in a possible slave market, or Saudi participating in it-- such entities and individuals must obviously be destroyed, and immediately.

How we deal with morality and history is a separate question and of less interest.

Slavery is definitely not abolished in the West. It is rife in the UK and Europe.

It is certainly abolished.

There are of course Roma beggar-gangs who have travelled to Sweden and who practise some kind of forced labour system on their members, but this is not something officially permitted and to the degree that this is a phenomenon it is only possible because of the foreignness of these gangs the the difficulty of Swedish policemen to genuinely understand what is going on.

When we have access to experts we try to break these things up and to prosecute.

Furthermore, we are not in any way reliant on these groups, since they are, as I have mentioned, beggar-gangs. They do not offer any service, but beg for money outside supermarkets and on trains.

Slavery is abolished on paper, but there are more than enough well-known instances where we still have slavery or slavery-like conditions... Italy is estimated to have 50k people in agriculture, mostly in tomato picking, and a further 95k in prostitution and domestic labor [1] as a result of a lot of undocumented immigrants being exploited, Spain's agriculture modern slavery is smaller but still existent [2] and known for at least a decade [3], even Germany has massive issues [4] with estimates going up to 167k people [5].

We may not have overt slavery any more in the Western world, but covert slavery and human trafficking? Absolutely.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/20/tomatoes-italy...

[2] https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/26136/strawberry-picker...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2011/feb/07/spain-salad...

[4] https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/moderne-lohnsklaven-in-...

[5] https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/schneller-schlau/mode...

For the purposes of discussions like this, abolish should be defined as: to repeal the statutes creating the institution of slavery.

It is a stepping stone toward greater legal rights, and not an all-or-nothing goal.

Slavery is most certainly present in the West. The US penal system uses slavery.

Here’s a source with more information about the US penal system using slavery.

- https://www.vera.org/news/slavery-is-still-legal-for-two-mil...

Additionally, it’s also estimated that the US has at least a half million people in domestic servitude as stated in the article. This does not include sex trafficking which is a separate issue.

Genuinely curious, who would pay reparations to Haiti? France? How much would need to be paid and how would it be administered to make a dent in Haiti?

At least, the sums extracted from Haiti and corrected into 2022 money should be part of the conversation. It’s much less murky than reparations in the US. Slave owners in Haiti were both black and white, and foreign policy toward Haiti was directly punitive to demonstrate an economic cost for other potential slave uprisings.

The date after which I perceived a change in the coverage of Saudi Arabia in the US was September 11th, 2001, but I don't know whether the coverage changed or my awareness of it did. Similarly, that you perceive a change in coverage may reflect not an actual change but only a change in yourself: you expect bias in coverage based on national interest and you perceive national interests to have changed, so you interpret individual articles like this to reflect a change in coverage generally.

I would say it is possible, likely, that people have false impressions of the general conditions in other nations based on news organizations' choosing to cover stories that are not generally representative of conditions in the nation. This will be true for all nations, regardless of whether anyone in the organizations are choosing, consciously or unconsciously, to cover stories confirming or creating biases. I think a greater problem is our own biases and attention selecting the news coverage we attend to. I think it is not the case that bias in coverage is centrally coordinated as you imply.

This is all aside from whether a particular article is true. This is something actionable. Choosing to believe or ignore individual articles based on your prior belief in bias leaves you in a hall of mirrors.

When exactly has Western media been soft on Saudi Arabia? They have always been portrayed as a backwards country that oppresses women, kills LGBT people, and since 2014 Saudi Arabia has also been heavily criticized for their war in Yemen. There were also BBC/Channel4 documentaries from more than a decade ago about how Saudi Arabia was indirectly funding the radicalization of Muslims in Europe.

Yes. But the Western Media has been soft on those in the West who do business with SA, have political relationships with SA, etc.

For example, even POTUS Trump* got a free pass. His first overseas visit was to SA. Imagine that, of all our allies, he goes to SA first. And yet, not a peep of outrage, even from The Left leaning media. Why would that be?

* This is not an attack of DJT. It simply a perfect example of how (intentionally) blind the media is to those who accept and enable SA.

There was quite a bit of discussion about this when it happened. Not sure what news media you were listening to, but there was quite a bit of push back for this decision when it happened from main stream commentators.

Discussion? Yes, in the usual token sense. But not much more. And if amything it was directed solely at Trump, not the USA's long standing (hypocritial) relationship with SA. That's simply not something the USA MM does.

Regardless, it's one example. The point is, the Western Media is relatively blind to anyone or anything that involves itself with SA. RT probably does a better job.

Were you expecting the media to do more than report?

Not any more or less than they usually do. I was expecting, if nothing else, consistency in how they use their tactics. But not doing so is just as telling.

Conclusion: We have a conpletely failed Fourth Estate; which means "the democracy" (they're so fond of fearing for) is no democracy - by the text book defintion - at all. The irony is absurd.

I think specific examples would help this back on track. We have a grandparent comment and others in the thread supporting negative media narratives about KSA culture. We have a parent comment about the coverage of US business involvement with KSA and a few commenters supported that with their recollections of the media narrative around conducting business with KSA, not even getting into cultural or military problems.

It’s interesting if your media diet has changed favorably for either KSA culture, military, or business connections. Maybe the career arc of Rex Tillerson, or the investiture arc of Jared Kushner have been sculpted by some outlets and not others.

Coverage of Mr Trump’s financial arrangements with KSA were prominent in coverage of that visit, and what the change could mean. For example, while campaigning he said that KSA was responsible for 9/11 and that it wouldn’t exist without American intervention. The story of his visit as POTUS notably covered this change. Mainstream media covered his son-in-law arranging Saudi funding. Covering change is more important than fanning outrage.

You missed the point. That is, they are not the only ones. In fact, the whole country (read: US fed gov, and perhaps plenty of states) are in bed - comfortably - with SA.

But as long as they have oil, and we need to kneel before them, our media plays along.

Note: This is not a critique of SA. They're a sovereign nation. I'm not fit to judge (and it's off topic). This is a critique of Western media and it's willingness to look away.

The absurdly uncritical coverage of Biden making up with MBS comes to mind.

There was a brief moment when MBS was seens as the reformer. Then a few minutes later it turns out he gave the order to chop up Jamal the journalist. :|

In the US, media is totally critical of Shiite-majority nations while avoiding any serious critical view of Sunni-majority nations. If that's too opaque, then another way to put it is that the US stigmatizes, sanctions and engages in military interventions in countries that the Saudi government is hostile towards: Iran, Iraq, Yemen and Syria; who are Shiite-majority and Shiite-ruled. The Saudis are themselves Sunni and they treat Shiites as "barely Muslim". Saudi interventions in Oman or Yemen are ignored while Iranian interventions get reported to American audiences.

What is happening in the Middle East is a modern version of the Thirty Year's War. This time, instead of Catholic vs Protestant, it is Sunni vs Shiite.

Disclaimer: I've lived in both Iran and Saudi Arabia - dad was in the oil business.

Honestly thinking back I don't think I have ever read where an article saying anything positive about SA society and culture. This is thinking back decades. So I think the SA is evil ship launched a long time ago

  > I guess now that SA has signaled a slight shift away from the US empire, we're going to be seeing a lot more articles about how evil they are.

Telling that the gist of the article isn't "These people are suffering from slavery" but rather "These people are selling slaves" - the focus is on the Saudis, not on the slaves. Unfortunately, slavery is rampant the world over even today. My own grandfather was a slave.

But this is not a piece intended to help the slaves. This piece is intended to slander the Saudis.

What would a piece "intended to help the slaves" look like to you, and what's slanderous in this one?

A piece intended to help the slaves would focus on who they are, where they came from, his they became slaves, how to help release them from bondage, and most importantly how to prevent further cases. In other words, actionable information.

This piece is slanderous because it does not focus on slave owners in general, but rather on a specific slave owner. This piece does not convey the message "owning slaves is wrong for all people" but rather "Saudis are bad, because they own slaves". There is no focus on other groups of people who own slaves, only the Saudis.

That’s not how slander works.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com