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Comment by cen4 | Hacker News Reader

Slavery was good for society.

Colonies were good for society.

Kings and Feudal Lords were good for society.

It's not a static world. Things change.

Those who benefit at the expense of others, get trapped into making up elaborate stories to justify their choices. Unfortunately making up stories, doesn't reduce the number of people who are paying some price or the other. Once that pool grows large enough, we see change. So Slavery got abolished, Colonies got abolished, and most Kings and Queens have been reduced to Tourist Attraction. Its up to the Tech Monopolists, for the sake of their own survival, to pay attention to the growing rumblings.

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In some ways I think you can make the argument that we never really moved away from slavery as such. Not really. I’m typing this on an iPhone which is full of components that were mined/created/packaged/shipped by a lot of people who live under semi-terrible to horrible conditions. Some of the materials / components may have been build / gathered by actual slaves through third party contractors who lie to Apple. Apple which probably doesn’t look to closely into this.

I call out Apple here, but Apple is probably one of the better companies out of all the hardware that I own. I’ve even tried to buy my hardware sort of ethically but it’s basically impossible to do so. Which isn’t the only products which are hard to source. Now, I buy clothes which are actually made from the materials up to the final product within the EU, but that’s because I’m working in a well paid job which has a semi tight dress code. A lot of the clothes my children wear is recycled and was originally bought from H&M. A company which at the time some of this was bought were in a big scandal about some of their third party suppliers using child labour.

We have build this nice logistics setup where it’s easy to hide the bad conditions to actual slavery. Unless you care about it specifically you probably don’t even know which of your products were produced in a terrible way.

Slavery is not just forced labor, it's officially accepted arbitrary power of some people over lives of other people, treating people like cattle. It sadly does still exist, but in really small pockets, and is universally deemed unacceptable.

Terrible conditions are much more widespread. But, unlike slavery, this is not forced labor, and it's paid. If handled correctly, giving these people jobs lifts them from poverty. China is probably the biggest example.

But the problem of cultures living in abject poverty is usually not just in the lack of resources, but in predatory and embezzling power structures. Humankind produces more than enough food to feed everyone well; all occurrences of famine are either natural catastrophes or, often on top of theses, of supplies being appropriated and held by local overlords in order to maintain their privileged position, plebs be damned.

Not buying from oppressive regimes does not help the oppressed; buying from oppressive regimes does not help them either. But at least boycotting oppressors gives them less resources to use for strengthening their chokehold.

Slavery was undeniably "good for society", it made certain societies highly successful. See Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, Old Dixie. The problem was that the success was very unevenly distributed, and, worse, large swathes of the society lived in a way we currently see as unacceptably bad.

This mostly shows that "society as a whole" is an extremely coarse scale, and should be used with a lot of caution, if at all.

Not only that, ancient Rome/Greece existed in a period where every agricultural society had some level of slavery, it was basically universal - although some places far more than others. For instance, Rome was ~10% slaves, Athens was ~20% slaves, and Sparta was ~95% slaves. Sparta was the worst.[1]

[1] https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...

  Tell me, Gordon, when does it all end, huh? How many yachts can you water-ski behind?

Not sure why the downvotes/greying, but you're absolutely right.

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