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Comment by 0xDEAFBEAD | Hacker News Reader

Here's a map which attempts to estimate when slavery was abolished across various parts of the world:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/zsnr8q/year_of_abo...

The US wasn't much of an outlier.

As a general rule, anyone who tries to use slavery as a skeleton key to understand US politics is most likely an ideologue with an agenda. Sane people don't propose struggle sessions for events which happened 100+ years ago when everyone involved is long dead. You wouldn't point to a gigantic statue of Genghis Khan to explain what's wrong with modern Mongolia.

I don't think this is a slavery thing. Trump just sucks.

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The poster you responded to did not mention slavery, they mentioned the confederacy, which held a variety of views, many of which still inform the politics of many Americans today. Acknowledging this reality seems reasonable.

Your replies indicate your disdain for appeals to the history of American slavery in political discussions, yet you were the one who brought it into the conversation, diverting the thread by initially straw-manning the parents view.

This is bad faith hair-splitting. You know perfectly well what tshrimple thinks "Nuremberg trials" were needed for, or why they think confederates were "evil fucks".

They were evil fucks. Slavery was one among many deplorable things conservatives supported and still mostly support to this day. They also opposed women's suffrage. They opposed civil rights and fought to maintain segregation. They fought against gay rights. They fight against trans rights. They literally fight against any minority who might land on an equal playing field. Hey... guess who has been stating lately that women shouldn't be allowed to vote?

They are always the first to cast someone as an "other" and scapegoat for all of their problems. You're the type of person to hear "Haitians are eating their cats and dogs!" or "Mexico is sending us rapists and murders" and say "That guy has a good point!". It's pretty fucking gross and you're a clown at best for defending them.

>They are always the first to cast someone as an "other" and scapegoat for all of their problems.

No kidding amigo.

That is revisionist history. Republicans are very proud of their opposition to slavery, and the Democrats were the ones opposing civil rights.

There have been some changes in alignment over the years, but every Republican I've every talked to remains proud of their historic roles above.

They did not say "Republicans". They said "conservatives".

1800s Republicans were a big business, religious, nationalist party. The Union side in the Civil War was motivated by religion (cc "Battle Hymn of the Republic") and nationalism. Rich men paid to have poor men serve in their stead.

There has been a lot more than "some changes in alignment over the years"—the parties of 160+ years ago are essentially unrecognizable today. Given the nature of how the modern Republican party established its base over the course of the 20th century, this idea of taking pride in a legacy of ending slavery is basically comical, a fiction that falls apart with even a basic knowledge of the history of American political ideology and party alignment.

I don't think it is much more comical than modern Democrats trying to take credit for the civil rights movement. The Democratic alignment has changed from "judge by content of character, not color of skin" to thinking that practice is highly problematic.

Are you actually 'both sidesing' slavery?

I'm pushing back on Chermska1's effort to say that "well actually, the confederacy wasn't really about slavery".

They didn't say the Confederacy wasn't really about slavery, they said it was much more than that. And it's those more abstract ideologies which have persisted through American politics, as traced in the history podcast episode I posted in a sibling.

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

Some people believe they have a right to land based on claims from millennia ago.

I suppose you could question their sanity, but the point stands - history has a short memory, and a few generations are nothing.

Especially when the after-effects of slavery, including segregation, disenfranchisement through gerrymandering and for-profit imprisonment, and other forms of continuing violence, are still live issues today.

That map is inaccurate. Unfortunately slavery is still very much a thing in many parts of the world, including forced labour, prostitution and some sweat shop labour.

The PRC and North Korea still use slave labour as do some other countries. The Soviet Union had slavery with the Gulag system during the 20th century, and other places such as East Germany had some within living memory.

As a general rule, someone trying to use a simple single numerical measure as a skeleton key to understand politics across nations is an ideologue with an agenda.

As for the Genghis Khan comparison, I may have made an error. We may just be dealing with severe cognitive limitations here.

If you think slavery is the key to explaining everything about the US, the burden of proof is on you to show that. Just because something gets discussed a lot does not prove that it's important. Donald Trump is himself the child of immigrants who immigrated to the US well after the end of slavery, and maintained a residence in a state (New York) which opposed slavery. The relevance of slavery to his presidency is at best unclear.

No one even mentioned the Trump administration. The major connection is through the Supreme Court.

The burden is on you to have studied the subject in even the slightest detail before you mouth off with your ridiculous hot takes. There are plenty of discussions of this available.

Do you need me to spoonfeed you about where you can find them? Or do you not actually have the intellectual capacity to be able to use a search engine, or a chatbot?

Genghis Khan died 800 years ago. The last American to have born into slavery died in the ~1970s~ 1960s.

The 1970s were 50 years ago. "Long dead", in other words. Did you know that Brazil didn't abolish until 1888? They also imported far more than the US: https://www.slavevoyages.org/static/uploads/01.jpg

It's recent enough that people living today knew former slaves. That's not ancient history at all, so I think the comparison is not good. I'm sure Brazil also has to deal with fallout of their practices, but I don't see how it changes how the fallout of US slavery impacts the US.

>It's recent enough that people living today knew a slave.

Slavery ended in 1865. That's 161 years ago. So maybe there are a few modern 80-year-olds who interacted with 80-year-old former slaves when the modern 80-year-olds were infants. Those 80-year-old former slaves would themselves have no memory of slavery since it would've ended before they could form memories. And the modern 80-year-olds would have no memory of the interaction, since they themselves were infants when the interaction happened.

In other words: There aren't very many of these people, and it's unclear if most of them would count.

You know something which happened more recently in the US than slavery? Prohibition. A trendy, self-righteous moral crusade which didn't accomplish what it set out to achieve, and ended up creating a bunch of problems instead.

I think Prohibition is a pretty good template for understanding the form and tendencies of modern left-wing activist movements. But--at least reducing alcoholism was a good cause that we had a shot at doing something about! Short of inventing a time machine, crusading against slavery from centuries ago seems rather pointless. That's not a problem for activists whose primary goal is to be trendy and self-righteous, of course.

That's not the point, it's that people who were slaves died in a time when color TVs existed. This woman died in 1964! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_J._Cooper

That's not long enough ago to call it ancient history.

Someone who died in 1964 was technically a slave, but not yet old enough to function as a slave. Real slaves were mostly dead by 1940, the few who remained are outliers

Babies being born into slavery served the slave system just as much as grown men slaving in a field. Slave was a legal status in a system, not a job title. A baby born into slavery is a real slave, not a fake slave.

  Either George, who enslaved her mother, or his brother, Dr. Fabius Haywood, who enslaved her older brothers, Rufus and Andrew,[3] was probably Anna's father

So Anna came into existence because her mother was raped by a man who legally owned her as property. And that was recent enough that Anna lived to witness Gilligan’s Island.

Moreover, she was still a slave until she was six and served her masters as a domestic house servant. When you were six you were probably being educated to read and write and do math.

You guys are so quick with your “well ackshually” that you’re missing the point which is very simple and has been restated by other posters.

I think you need to check the math on that. Knew a former slave maybe?

Yes right indeed, edited.

I don't know any former slaves.

I don't know anyone that has spoken to a former slave.

And most people of color in the US's ancestors were not slaves in the US south. They came as immigrants from other countries.

The issue is not slavery. It might be racism. But it is not "I can't have slaves anymore"

It really doesn't matter what you personally know, that's not the point.

A full 76 of current serving US Senators were born before the passing of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which officially ended segregation and the Jim Crow era).

That certainly means it's recent to me. My own parents (both still alive) grew up while "separate but equal" was still law of the land.

So, yes, it's definitely racism. Or shall we say, the lasting imprint of slavery and the Confederate ideology more generally. Reconstruction failed and therefore allowed the Confederate ideology to persist for 100 years of Jim Crow and right on into today.

What’s your angle here, exactly? I don’t get it.

That the issue of slavery has weak explanatory power for what is happening today.

I didn’t ask you. But since you chose to get involved: do you believe there is no lasting impact or consequences resulting from slavery in the USA?

Pretty much everything that has happened in the past has consequences today. It's the butterfly effect.

Slavery has existed as far back as history. The idea that people are created equal, and are equal under the law, is very, very new, and that idea has resulted in a great many positive things happening.

You should check out this podcast episode with two historians, tracing the influence of the Confederacy ideology all the way to the current Supreme Court:

https://youtu.be/1i2VuPACBbU?si=8jv8XrRTLHJ9hHTu

I'm anti-Trump. If you tell people "Trump is a corrupt asshole", that has a chance at convincing supporters to abandon him. If you tell people "the US needs a cultural revolution due to events from past centuries", that's what got him elected in the first place.

A good general wouldn't voluntarily shift the battleground to a region where their troops are weak. Political persuasion is no different. The Democratic Party keeps losing because they cling to unpopular positions on cultural issues. If Trump is as bad as you say, prove it to me by showing willingness to strategically cede ground on a few issues in order to win more voters.

I’m generally aligned with your point, but I also don’t think the official position of the Democratic Party is that we need a cultural revolution, nor do I observe most Democrats feel that way.

What I do see is media and politicians on the Right characterizing extreme positions held by a minority of folks on the far Left as though they are adopted by the entire Left, and that weak uncritical minds on the Right believe that nonsense. Rush Limbaugh pioneered this technique to profit himself, and Trump gave him a fucking Presidential Medal of Freedom in his first term.

I think you're somewhat underestimating how effectively the far-left minority has scared others into silence. Anyways, I do what I can to push back against them when they say things which seem wacky to me, as in this instance.

Maybe I should work harder to make my actual views clear. I added a few sentences to the end of my original comment in this thread: "I don't think this is a slavery thing. Trump just sucks." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49572347

> I think you're somewhat underestimating how effectively the far-left minority has scared others into silence

Besides all the YouTube videos, X posts, the addition of two new right-wing TV networks (OANN and NEWSMAX), “Truth” Social, WSJ, NY Post, etc.? Silence is a myth perpetuated by the right (“people are trying to suppress the truth and your 1A rights!”) to build a following when in fact opposition voices are plentiful.

I don't think people on the right are scared. I think too many center-left Democrats are scared.

Of what?

Censure and career threats by leftists.

Scared others into silence with what magical powers? Zero control of both chambers, zero control of the executive, military, cable news, Supreme Court, law enforcement etc. With what is this mighty far left minority scaring people? Protest sit-ins on campuses? That's what makes you quake?

> because they cling to unpopular positions on cultural issues.

The Republican propaganda machine will always be ready to make any cultural issue the dems hold 'unpopular'. They turn anything and everything into a culture war, and if nothing exists, they are more than happy to manufacture it.

Observe how they turned their own vaccine into a cultural issue.

Many people, including me, not all of us Republicans, have observed that the Dems were much saner before 2010 or so.

What happened around 2010 that might have precipitated whatever changes you’re thinking of?

Tumblr? Cultural shifts from social media started to gather momentum roughly around that time.

There was a lot for people to be angry about, particularly the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan that the Bush administration got us into as a knee-jerk reaction to 9/11, combined with the 2008 financial crisis and Wall Street public bailout that culminated in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street

None of those events were the focus of the cultural shifts I'm referring to.

Maybe you should be more explicit about what you think really happened.

This whole thread started with:

>We're still fighting the remnants of the confederacy. Germany and Japan in particular purged most of those elements from their society. Here we built statues to the evil fucks

That is a historical fact which has important explanatory power. It may not directly be the best basis for public Democratic platform, which most people probably agree with. The core manifestation is in our institutions, and that's what we need to fix. I agree with you that framing it through the lens of corruption is the best overt political strategy.

Is this theory falsifiable? What would it look like if this problem was "fixed"? Many confederate statues were taken down--did anything change as a result? The entire thing seems like a delusional crusade against windmills. Focus on the present, not the past.

I get the sense that many in this thread simply have an un-quenched lust for re-education camps. Probably under Stalin they'd be mumbling about dastardly capitalist spies and saboteurs.

> Many confederate statues were taken down--did anything change as a result? The entire thing seems like a delusional crusade against windmills. Focus on the present, not the past.

This sounds like a thinly-veiled argument to keep them up. But why should we keep them up? In what universe does it make sense to honor the losers of a failed coup attempt against our nation by embodying them in statutes?

The reason many continue to pursue this is because of the surprising number of people who want to maintain them. It's not a "crusade against windmills," it's a crusade against people who want to honor the enemies of our nation. It's as understandable as being upset that a group of people would want to maintain an Osama bin Laden statue in the middle of Manhattan.

Taking statues down may not change much in and of itself, but it's a small piece of the bigger puzzle.

> I get the sense that many in this thread simply have an un-quenched lust for re-education camps.

Well that escalated quickly.

And does Brazil have their own 13th amendment that allows them to use prison labor as their modern slave workforce?

"Around the world, at least eleven million people are imprisoned, either pre-trial or following conviction. Most sentenced prisoners will work while in custody...

...

Most countries’ legal systems, however, carve out an exception for prisoner-workers, permitting the state to require them to work—sometimes for no pay, but typically for very low rates of pay.

There are, even so, multiple potential benefits to prison work. For example, ICPR’s recent research indicated that prisoners who could not work (when prison regimes around the world were restricted during the COVID-19 pandemic) reported many negative consequences, including to their mental and physical wellbeing. At the minimum, work may mitigate some harmful impacts of imprisonment. At best, it may increase prisoners’ prospects of successful reintegration into society, potentially also benefitting society by reducing recidivism."

https://www.prisonstudies.org/sites/default/files/publicatio...

(emphasis mine)

Here's a photo from a Brazilian prison from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labour#/media/File:Inmat...

The question isn’t whether prisoners work in other countries which I’m confident you know and dodged.

The question is whether the prisons in Brazil are private, and are allowed to sell prison labor FOR A PROFIT, incentivizing both greater incarceration rates, and disincentivizing release.

The answer is no, I’m not aware of ANY other country that allows a private organization to profit off the labor if people imprisoned by the state. At least not any country we would consider 1st world.

It’s absolutely absurd to suggest the current situation is beneficial to anyone but the ruling class and anyone claiming otherwise has never been to prison, never had a relative or friend who has been to prison, or is literally a psychopath who lacks basic human empathy.

You're moving the goalposts.

Your comment stated: "And does Brazil have their own 13th amendment that allows them to use prison labor as their modern slave workforce?"

The article I linked states: "Most countries’ legal systems, however, carve out an exception for prisoner-workers, permitting the state to require them to work..."

So my quote directly answers your original concern.

Your new concern is about private prisons. Here's a new quote from the article which addresses your new concern:

"Involvement by non-public entities in prison work can take many forms. In most countries including all three of Brazil, the United Kingdom, and the United States, for-profit companies operate entire prisons (or provide services within prisons) under government contract. Similarly, the operators of both public and private prisons in all three countries contract with buyers, equipping prison workshops and using prisoner labour to produce goods and services which go on to be sold beyond the prison."

(p. 15, emphasis mine)

So no, the US system doesn't seem to be especially unusual, according to this article.

You're welcome to decry this practice as inhumane, btw. I just don't think it is some sort of skeleton key which will help us understand every aspect of US politics.

>You're moving the goalposts

Rich from someone that brought up slavery from nowhere.

Oh please, are we pretending that the confederacy wasn't working to preserve slavery? Is this some sort of lost cause advocacy on your part?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZVVIACrX38

I didn't even make any argument nor do I disagree with you, just found it weird that you brought it up from nowhere.

Am I taking crazypills? You think talking about slavery in the context of the CSA is "bringing it up from nowhere"???

De facto there’s hardly rule of law there so if you piss off the wrong people yes.

It's called penal labor, and it was and remains widespread around the world. (And, yes, Brazilian law requires mandatory labor for all prisoners.) It wasn't until the middle to late 20th century that countries began to reform penal labor. But it's complicated. Without penal labor you can't force prisoners to, e.g., do laundry or mop floors. Even mandatory community service is a form of penal labor, and you can still find that in some Western European countries.

The norm now is to require a wage for mandatory labor, but of course often it's just a pittance. (Only 6 US states have uncompensated labor.) But even when you require minimum wage, many criminals owe restitution, so it could be and is taken away again.

Many US states have penal labor systems just like in Europe, that is nominally opt out, mandatory wages, etc, but at the end of the day it's always open to accusations of coercion and claims of "slavery".

The rhetoric around the 13th Amendment is exactly why we're in the situation we are now politically. Everything is equivocated to maximize rhetorical impact. Every unethical thing a politician does is "corruption", so when you get open and egregious corruption as with Trump, people can't discriminate and assume it's all the same.

Was penal labor abused to roll back the clock on abolition? Yes. Is penal labor abused today? Yes. But calling it slavery, drawing parallels to chattel slavery, is just irresponsible.

> Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

> Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

The 13th amendment specifically mentions penal labor as an exempt form of slavery.

Take your criticism to the authors of the 13th amendment, not the people who bothered to read it.

Setting aside textual analysis and how commas are used in the constitution, the point is that people claim not just that slavery is allowed, but that mandatory penal labor is slavery, and implicitly the same slavery that was ostensibly abolished.

So do you agree or not agree that mandatory penal slavery is an extension of 19th century and earlier American slavery. Because that's what the movement and rhetoric are saying. And removing the Exception Clause won't change the rhetoric, because the entire point is to argue "things haven't changed".

It's the same rhetoric that equivocates "wage slavery". All those things can, of course, fall under a literal definition of slavery. Just like all forms of misbehavior by politicians can be called corruption. We can say, well, Trump isn't doing anything every other politician hasn't done. Which can be literally true. But I choose not to play semantic games like that, because those semantic games are at least as likely to be used to excuse abuses as they are to prevent them. If you want reform, pursue reform. Note that many states have removed their state constitutional Exceptions Clauses which by itself resulted in zero changes to the status quo, because when you play semantic games there's always room to redefine things on-the-fly, or to find another semantic loophole. Every court knew what the Exceptions Clause actual, contextual meaning was, and can just as well redefine slavery or non-slavery to exclude or include penal labor. Semantic games don't change the real world, except insofar as they promote cynicism, confusion, and disengagement from substantive issues.

> So do you agree or not agree that mandatory penal slavery is an extension of 19th century and earlier American slavery.

I agree that mandatory penal slavery (as practiced in US prisons in the 21st century) is an extension of 19th century and earlier American slavery.

I don't think you can say "long dead" until no one who met them is still alive. We have 6 serving Senators over the age of 80, meaning they were born in the 40s or earlier. We have a total of 76 serving Senators who were born before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed...

You seem to be missing important parts of US history, not least of all the century of Jim Crow. I mean, come on, my Boomer parents were already alive to see the Civil Rights Act passed.

For a trace of the thread directly from the civil war to the current Supreme Court, check out this podcast episode:

https://youtu.be/1i2VuPACBbU?si=8jv8XrRTLHJ9hHTu

You don't seem to believe that something like generational wealth makes much of a difference?

It makes a difference at a demographics level but I don't think that's what we're discussing here.

Sounds like you’re completely ignorant to US history post civil war. You seem to know nothing about the daughters of the confederacy. Know nothing about segregation and Jim Crow. You have no idea that conservatives fight to this day to maintain monuments to literal traitors to the country. Or that they still routinely fly the flag of traitors to the country. Or more likely you do know about all of that and agree with it and just want to white wash conservative history in the US.

I know that stuff happened, but I don't think it's some sort of universal explanation for everything which happens in US politics.

I'm sorry you're too dense to see why "The Party of Lincoln" is defending the confederate flags and confederate monuments. They must just really believe in states rights except where it actually helps people. Sort of like the confederates who pretended to be about states rights while demanding other states return their "escaped property". And it doesn't explain everything in US politics. I never claimed your strawman. It explains US conservative's degeneracy. Their complete lack of shame or civility. They never had any.

>"The Party of Lincoln" is defending the confederate flags and confederate monuments

I think the obvious answer here, insofar as that's true, is that historical continuity is simply not as strong as you are assuming. I mean you've basically admitted it yourself. In 1860 would you vote for the Democrats or the Republicans?

Someone replied to my comment. I composed a reply, then they deleted their comment. Since I already put in the effort to write my reply, I will paste it here.

* * *

Trump outperformed with black people relative to Romney and has appointed black people to his cabinet.

>problems going on to the present day

Often more noise than substance, e.g. the odds of a black man being unarmed and killed by cops in the US are something like one in a million annually.

>The white vote in the US was a solid majority for Democrats before the Civil Rights Act and is now a solid Republican majority.

Ethnic bloc voting is not at all unusual by international standards. I might as well interpret black loyalty to the Democrats as racism against white people.

>Those who "deserve it" are usually not white.

Trump has had many many "beefs" with white people such as Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Mike Pence, James Comey, Mark Milley, Anthony Fauci, Megyn Kelly, Joe Scarborough, Rosie O'Donnell, etc.

What frustrates me is when activists take an issue which should be a winner ("Trump is corrupt, let's do something about government corruption, all Americans can unite around this") and immediately pivot to handwavey, divisive race-baiting and talking about how utterly depraved conservatives supposedly are. Sometimes it seems like you guys are determined to lose.

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