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Comment by OfSanguineFire | Hacker News Reader

Slavery is still de facto legal in Mauritania (ostensibly outlawed back in the 1980s but still omnipresent), and foreigners go there all the time. Overlanding from Europe to West Africa is popular. States where slavery is legal, or remains de facto legal as in Mauritania, generally have had a system for who becomes a slave, and it isn’t a posh foreign visitor. It is prior slaves’ progeny, prisoners of war, or purchase on the market from sellers selling the former two groups.

In fact, it isn’t just posh foreigners. Many Senegalese people go to work in Nouakchott for a few years, save up money, and then return home. They aren’t worried about being enslaved because, again, the slavery system isn’t about them.

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This thread is about python. What you have here has no connection to what anyone has said.

The OP wrote “I wonder how the signers of this letter would feel if the Python conference was to be organized in a country where slavery was still legal.” I mentioned a country that is known for modern-day slavery yet draws foreigners, with the implication that it might not be as shocking for tech organizers as the OP thinks. For example, the country has recently been prominent in the OpenStreetMap community[0], but I have never seen the discussion go off into concern about slavery, and I wouldn’t expect a large outcry if one of the big international OSM conferences like SotM was organized there.

[0] https://www.trufi-association.org/projects/public-transport-...

I mentioned a country that is known for modern-day slavery

You went off on a wild tangent about slavery when they were making a point about python conference organizers.

Just because someone says the word 'slavery' while emphasizing their point doesn't mean it makes sense to unload some unrelated slavery facts.

This is like someone reading a wikipedia article and clicking on a single word, then going to the wikipedia page that has no relation to the original article. (Please don't respond with a history of wikipedia, that isn't the point here)

HN comment threads go off into tangents all the time. Any link that draws into the hundreds of comments is going to have many tangents, and this one was no exception before I even came to it. Your account was created in 2014, it puzzles me that this isn't something you're well used to already.

This is not normal. When someone makes a point about conferences in places with terrible human rights and you miss the point completely to talk about something unrelated, it is not normal conversation.

This is the sort of delicate topic that tends to exceed the boundaries of normal hypocrisy, with tangents that are irrational and self-delusional (like the abundance of slightly blunted, sometimes subconscious hate speech), rhetorically illogical and distracting (slavery, precedents of other conferences in other places, etc.), drastically missing the point (e.g. the distinctions between Tanzanian laws and what happens to foreign tourists in Zanzibar).

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