I don’t know why people bother with lemmy.ml at all - just add it to your user instance block list and move on.
PTB lemmy.ml communities have a lot of powertripping, sometimes by mods of the communties, sometimes the instance admins themselves. They do not like nuance or disagreement with their narrative of any kind.
PTB
Its a .ml community. They do not like nuances.
They love to powertrip, and the 2 month ban is just ridiculous for a simple disagreement. I don’t see anything in the comment that is in any way bigoted or uncivil.
I personally have blocked all news and politics communities from .ml
Btw, even if they are not technically “slaves”, they are de facto slaves, because they only done so under coercion.
What’s rule 1 and 2 there?
Fwiw, they are slaves, the Constitution refers to them as such, and they can’t truly consent to the labor when the alternative is to rot in prison conditions so deplorable they’ve been decried as inhumane by the UN and other international organizations.
That said, I do think that you were polite and civil in your post.
- No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
- Be respectful, especially when disagreeing. Everyone should feel welcome here.
Everyone should feel welcome here.
Pffft right. Vatnik please.
Prisoners can be forced to work in the US, to my knowledge.
Penal labor is permitted under the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits slavery except as a punishment for a crime where the individual has been convicted.[1] The courts have held that detainees awaiting trial cannot be forced to work.[14] However, convicted criminals who are medically able to work are typically required to do so in roles such as food service, warehouse work, plumbing, painting, or as inmate orderlies.[15]According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, inmates earn between 12-40 cents per hour for these jobs, which is below the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.[15] There have been proposals of ideas to help incarcerated workers obtain better wages and improved working conditions through unionizing prison labor.
The user is clearly wrong, but they’re wrong in a way that’s incredible common among Americans. It’s not their fault, exactly, they’ve been taught to think that slavery is okay from birth. That all said, I don’t think their post actually violates the rules and they’re clearly open to discussion on the issue.
you had me until “they’ve been taught to think it’s okay from birth.”
what a weird, broad generalization.
My guy, it simply isn’t slavery. These inmates are entirely free to just not do this type of work.
Yes, there is actual slavery in US prisons. There is mandatory labor. It’s fucked up.
That said, unless I’ve missed something critical, this is not one of those situations. They had to choose to apply to the firefighting position.
They’re punished if they refuse. It’s not a true volunteer system.
But in this case they are volunteers. They specifically applied to the firefighting program.
There’s certainly cause for discussion about the ethics, etc. but calling it slavery or involuntary servitude is hyperbole.
The 100+ page report at https://www.aclu.org/publications/captive-labor-exploitation-incarcerated-workers makes note of this:
More than three quarters of incarcerated people surveyed (76%) report facing punishment—such as solitary confinement, denial of sentence reductions, or loss of family visitation—if they decline to work.
Calling them volunteers is the hyperbole.
Anyway, give the report a read, yeah.
I think you’re conflating the general issue of inmate labor with the particular issue of inmate firefighters.
I think you’re ignoring data that doesn’t agree with your point. Inmate firefighters are inmate labor, my dude.
Inmate firefighters are indeed inmate labor, but the issue is whether inmate firefighters are slaves. I don’t think that they are, and I also think that lumping them together with other forms of inmate labor (particularly those that benefit private interests) is misleading and hyperbolic when discussing that point.
So they get physically, mentally, and socially punished if they don’t work. Yeah, there’s a word for that: slave.
I agree that ML is being disingenuous when they claim they’re being forced to fight fires but it is true that prisoners are forced to work which is slavery, imo. I’m glad they’re not forced into dangerous work, at a minimum.
There is a spectrum of conditions which may be considered as slavery. Have you ever heard the phrase “economic coercion”? Are you aware that sometimes there are punishments or negative consequences for not “volunteering” to do something? Prison systems and other punitive systems are very well-known for trying to create an appearance of consent when there is actually none.
Suppose, for example, that you lived in the Great Depression in the US, and your only choices are either to starve to death, or to “voluntarily” take on a job with utterly horrible conditions that will lead to a premature death some years down the road. You can just starve, of course, but we wouldn’t say it’s truly voluntary to take the job. There are pressures within the system that you live in that are outside of your control.
However, I will grant you that the term “slavery” is indeed very charged, and should be reserved for specific contexts, and the purity of its meaning needs to be maintained…and that this issue is complex and somewhat ambiguous. How should we define the term exactly? Who should get to define the term? How bad exactly should things be, before we call them “slavery”?
Someone, say, working on a plantation gathering cotton for a legal slave owner in the 1850s US, is very clearly someone we should consider as subject to slavery. How about a 2020s US prisoner who is forced to “volunteer” as a firefighter or else, say, be at much higher risk of being physically assaulted by a guard? What are the conditions of the prisoner’s life like otherwise? It’s less clear, but I think there may be a case for calling this slavery.
Another question is, what is it to you? I think, for example, that people who have ancestors who were slaves, are more suited to define “slavery” than people who do not have any ancestors who were known slaves. If you don’t have any personal stake in this, then it’s all that much more important for you to re-evaluate why you felt the need to comment on this, and why you’re so attached to your opinion.
So, I personally would not fully agree with either you or the mod. I am not sure what is best in this situation, but I think it’s good if we don’t jump to conclusions overly quickly without properly considering how complicated this is.
