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Comment by hereme888 | Hacker News Reader

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I know you're just trolling but given how much the current administration has done to shut down foreign aid programs that helped investigate and stop trafficking, the American Right doesn't seem to give a shit about "real slavery" either.

Why would people from place X be more interested in abuses happening in place X than in a country literally half a planet away that they have no control over? Truly a mystery, probably they are just DEI crazies (whatever that means).

Real slavery, like what's permitted via the Thirteenth Amendment and propagated by over-policing black communities? Pretty sure the "American Left" is keenly aware of this, even if terminally-online armchair policy analysts engaging in whataboutisms aren't.

This is kinda the whole crux of prison and police reform in the US; you may want to read "The New Jim Crow". Decent primer.

comparing this to what happens in USA is why people don't take BLM and DEI seriously

Oh, you don't have to out yourself like that; not here in public! Many people care about black lives and DEI. In fact, I'm willing to bet you probably agree with the most palatable form of DEI - jobs programs and hiring incentives for veterans.

In any case, here's a quote FTA:

>Rather than explicit imprisonment, the compound relied on a system of indentured servitude and debt to control its workers.

Not that different from the USA: https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-inve...

Race to the bottom, eh? Why talk about what the situation is in our country and try to improve it when other people in other countries have it much worse?

I guess if you're taking the Epstein thing as extra-territorial we could pretend this comment makes any sense.

You could, of course, demand/wish/hope that right-wing politicians did anything about slavery in foreign nations. But somehow “trying to do anything good” is on left-wing politicians, while right-wing politicians, without repercussions, can thwart all anti-slavery efforts made by the US over several decades.

Like ending 69 global initiatives to end child labor, forced labor and trafficking: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/27/trump-cuts-c...

US politics in a nutshell. In order to feel you’ve contributed to a conversation, you can just yell DEI and be done with it.

Spot on. Between the end of the Cold War and the 1994 Congressional election, the right wing decided to flip the enemy from external communists to internal partisans. You’d hear some “party of Reagan” platitudes, but it was really the party of Cohn and Stone, names more influential today than Reagan. Those are people who recoil at doing good in the world.

You understand it was Republicans who ended slavery, while Democrats fought a war to prolong it as long as they could?

Yes. And that’s as relevant to this discussion as the history of slavery among the Homo Erectus.

What matters is what’s being done today.

So what are those benevolent republicans doing about slavery, foreign and domestic, today, tomorrow or at any point in the next decade?

Such an understanding must of course consider the Whig party. You understand that, right?

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