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I think you make a useful point. At a high level of abstraction "real slavery" and "wage slavery" seem very similar but for the people who were / are really affected it's a world of difference. It puts things in perspective.

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There should be a word for this kind of thing: where you argue something moderately is bad by labelling it as a form of something universally acknowledged to be really bad. Terms like "wage slavery", "cultural genocide" or "raping the natural environment" fall into this category, and they all annoy me.

Perhaps this abuse of the language should be called "verbal bestiality".

The intersection of programmers and people-who-feel-sorry-for-themselves consists of a bunch of people who will abstract away from reality until they've convinced themselves that they are somehow a victim.

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