I think at this point the general consensus of most Europeans is that the US has more in common with a developing nation than with a developed nation when it comes to equality in the eye of justice, equal access to health care, support for the downtrodden and freedoms...
It is easy to under-estimate the diversity across US States. I don't think many Europeans look at Hungary, Poland, or Bulgaria's justice systems and extend that to an opinion on EU justice in aggregate.
This isn't to excuse the abysmal state of affairs in large swathes of the US. Just to say that the US is rarely sufficiently uniform to summarize as a single entity, especially in topics like justice systems where States have significant sovereign power.
This general consensus is part of why Trump gets support for his recent trade and defense comments and actions. Also, from an economic perspective the US has been successful and has poured that success into different buckets than Europe would prefer but that's fine, let the US be the US and let Europe be Europe.
Numbers for anyone curious
US gdp per capita ~$82.7k
EU gdp per capita ~$41.1k
GDP of Mississippi and Bavaria, Germany are about the same.
You would be simply insane to think that Bavaria wasn't far far wealthier than Mississippi though.
This doesn't show the limits of either the US or European ways of life but rather GDP itself as a figure. It has it's uses but that's it. Lay people are far too dependent on GDP as a meaningful indicator of wealth. Professional economists use a variety of metrics to compare and contrast different areas and systems.
All that GDP per capita and there are still hungry children in West Virginia and single mothers that can't afford to eat healthy food because of their medical debt.
If you or I did the same thing, we'd be in jail shortly for kidnapping and false imprisonment. Here, at best, it just means the local taxpayers pay a settlement.
> This egregious human rights violation is something you'd think you read about in a developing nation, not a developed nation.
Yes, but a note of hope. "The future is unevenly distributed" cuts both ways, the good and the bad. At least we know about some of the atrocities happening here, and good that we haven't been warn down and we still recognize them as such. One tip to deal with a firehose of bad news: rank it based on physical proximity. That way you won't be overwhelmed and lose perspective. "Life is suffering" as the Buddhists say. I believe that if you could empathize with even 1% of the suffering of humans this moment you would be overwhelmed. Egregious failures of the state, like in the OP's piece, must ultimately be solved by those that caused it. Our desire to swoop in and fix other people's problems needs appropriate caution. Consider the lessons of US intervention in the Somali Civil War in the 90's.
> Horrific. This egregious human rights violation is something you'd think you read about in a developing nation, not a developed nation.
bruh you have no idea. seriously. the "justice system" in the US should not be called a justice system, but a slavery and penal system:
> Thirteenth Amendment, 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 States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
the US also has private prisons. do you understand? e.g., there are about 1000 prisoners in california that are also firefighters getting paid $10 a day. do you think they cost $10 a day to california?
EDIT: I was possibly mistaken about this example specifically (see below) but only as of 2022-2023 (the fire fighters program has been around for much longer than 2022-2023). there are many other examples; if you've ever seen prisoners stamping license plates in a movie, the allusion is exactly to this kind of "work":
> Two out of three people incarcerated in state and federal prisons are also workers, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) estimated in a June 2022 report.
> the US also has private prisons. do you understand? e.g., there are about 1000 prisoners in california that are also firefighters getting paid $10 a day.
“E.g.” is is misused here: California prison firefighters are not an example of private prisons (California does not employ private prisons.)
> do you think they cost $10 a day to california?
Well, yeah, they are state prisoners in state prisons, whos do you think is paying the $10/day to the prisoners?
> AB32 included exemptions which allowed private prisons to focus on other profitable "community corrections" programs, such as day reporting centers, counseling facilities, halfway houses, rehabilitation centers, medical offices, and mental health facilities. Currently, these exemptions are worth around $200 million a year. Included are locations that mimic detention facilities and are run by organizations that also run private prisons in California.
> Pasadena, CA - Today, an en banc 11-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that GEO could block California’s AB 32 (People not Profit, Bonta) from going into effect for the duration of the lawsuit, pending further review from District Court. AB 32 is a state law signed in 2019 which banned private prisons and private immigration detention centers in the state.
I do not know if this applies to the Conservation (Fire) Camp Program
The previous poster's point is, I presume, that the upkeep of a prisoner costs a hell of a lot more than $10/day. Specifically, the California Dept of Corrections quotes $133,000/year.
I'd have less of a problem with prisoners being paid a pittance for helping out if it weren't for how the spending-side of prison commissaries [0] and phone calls [1] are often unconscionably overpriced.
In a lot of states, inmates are required to reimburse the state for some portion of the cost of their incarceration. Oddly, the commissary issue strikes me as perverse, but the requirement to cover incarceration costs didn’t, at least once I had thought about it some more. While I am cautious to endorse El Salvador, I think their model is the one to beat: Prisoners are either working or in school, but the goods produced by the prisoners are used by the government to offset costs in other departments, rather than being sold on an open market. For example, they have the prisoners sewing uniforms for public officials, repairing fleets of public vehicles, and building desks for schools. This nominally solves the issue of prison labor being exploited (at least so long as the program remains revenue negative or revenue neutral) without burdening the general public with the cost of incarceration.
"third world" is often US shorthand for "the foreign places I don't know much about but the guys who live inside my TV tell me are bad"
If someone's using it to describe poor conditions (especially in their own country) you can just smile and move on safe in the knowledge that their contribution to the conversation isn't really worth spending much time thinking about
People in the States know how fast our country can fall and don’t accept “well, we’ve still got a ways to go” as an excuse for the descent.
The so-called best shouldn’t compare itself to others, it should compare itself to itself from yesterday. And in those regards, we are descending rapidly, especially for those of us LGBTQ+, women and minorities.
Do not forget how fast Saudi Arabia and other countries changed from their liberal views to literal theocracies.
Trans people can't get passports[0]
Literally everything with the word "gay" is being removed from federal ledgers[1, 2]
Initiatives to **penalize** companies that still choose to have DEI hires
greatly impacts anyone that's not a white male. [3]
Anti-Abortion legislation directly attacks women's health, including when there's
a harm to the mother. [4]
Elderly may very well be missing out on their social security payments [5]
Frankly, to imagine that things aren't getting worse for women, bipoc and lgbtq+ people at this point means you've either lived under a rock, in which case, "Welcome! The world is worse now."; you're willfully ignorant of the harm that's being done to so, so, *so* many communities; or, you're acting in bad faith and sealioning[6].
I'm European. We don't have favelas, as far as I've seen. The destitute in my country, and there are plenty, have far higher living standards than in yours.
Take a little drive round Memphis, or New Orleans. The parts you wouldn't normally go.
I'm talking about how bad comparisons of the US are to actual third world countries and your counter arguments is comparison to Europe, a very NOT third world area?
I was a bit angry and wrote a longer post, most of which I thought better of. Apologies if I didn't formally address your concern.
It is my opinion, having travelled a little in Africa and India, that the slums in some of your cities are directly comparable to slums in those places.
I don't have high hopes that this is a productive conversation. Please just know that it's not a uniquely American thing to view conditions on the ground in your country as "third world".
>Nor have you lived in every third world country or experienced every level of American life.
That's what statistics are for. Check how many people from Africa try to move to the US, and then how many people from the US try to move to Africa, to get a fucking perspective.
>So who are you, or they, to say otherwise?
I'm the person with the correct arguments.
> I was mocking your bad post
You don't interact much with people IRL do you? If this is what mocking is to you, repeating what others say. You need to work on your mocking. And on your thought process.
So you haven't been to every third world country and haven't lived in every level of American life, and therefore are clueless to the reality of it. Glad we cleared that up, thanks.
My immediate thought when reading this was that the number of people is much higher today than 50 years ago, but before my kneejerk reaction I decided to check the math. Assuming the results of a quick google can be trusted, we have around 4 billion more people today than 50 years ago, which means that entire percent of the population growth in the past 50 years are people in slavery. That's staggeringly higher than I would have estimated before reading any of this.
Colonization has only ended in express terms. In many parts of the world, including essentially all of the developing nations where slavery has expanded in the past half-century, the dominant economic activity are forms of extraction at the behest either multinationals, OPEC, China, or USA.
If you consider these imperial powers to be ultimately responsible for the mode of production in the countries that they trade with, does it not stand to reason that they have some obligation to assume responsibility for the governance, policy, and policing of these countries?
The Americans are not (to my knowledge) pointing a gun at Bangladeshi sweatshop owners and telling them “You must produce a quota by whatever means necessary.” The Americans might be benefitting from this arrangement, but if they refused to buy these products, it’s not like slave labor would disappear; it would just be redeployed into other sectors. The countries where this slavery occurs have to bear some level of responsibility for the things they permit to happen within their own borders, otherwise they were never sovereign countries to begin with, and they ought to be colonized by those powerful enough to enforce the rule of law.
Slavery has existed for all of human history, and is sadly the natural state of things. It was stamped out by the British empire, a colonising power, because of the relentless campaigning of Christian moralists.
Imprisonment is indeed a newer development. In the past they chopped off your hand and let fate deal with you, or they just executed you. Nobody was going to feed some peasant who couldn't even work. Imprisonment was for aristocrats and their children, not for criminals.
>Imprisonment was not a sentence under Roman statutory law,[2] though detention is mentioned in the Twelve Tables and throughout the Digest.[3] "Detention", however, includes debt bondage in the early Republic;[4] the wearing of chains (vincula publica), mainly for slaves; and during the Imperial era a sentence of hard labor at the mills, mines or quarries.[5] Slaves or lower-status citizens sentenced to hard labor were held in prison camps.[6]
>Incarceration (publica custodia) in facilities such as the Tullianum was intended to be a temporary measure prior to trial or execution; abuses of this principle occurred but were officially censured.[7] Located near the law courts, the Tullianum was used as a jail or holding cell for short periods before executions and as a site for executions.
So yes, as I said, imprisonment is a newer development. Holding people temporarily is jailing. Imprisonment, in the "sentenced to prison for a period of time or indefinitely" is a modern idea. It was considered barbaric by some cultures historically, but it also was just not viable. There was a small surplus of food, which was for the aristocracy to siphon off the top (ostensibly to fund the defence of the realm), not for feeding common criminals.
Please - and I ask this with calmness and a sincere urging:
Stop trying to make incarceration seem like a long-running historical phenomenon. It is profit-driven propaganda, the promulgation of which began promptly in 1865.
Incarceration, in the Western legal tradition, is very new in relative terms, and its growth has been overwhelmingly the result of the experience of the USA transforming slavery into something marginally more politically acceptable.
You probably already know this, given your knowledge of the history, but some plantations, such as Angola, never even bothered closing down; they just transformed into penitentiaries and continued business as usual. The 13th amendment to the constitution, against the better judgment of many objectors, is specifically worded to facilitate this transformation.
Incarceration is not a legal tradition. It is a way to shoehorn slavery economics into one.
The UK’s Bloody Codes and transportation, the French Bastille, etc. all long predate 1865.
American post-Civil War incarceration is absolutely squicky in its often clear continuation of the slavery system it replaced, but prisons and incarceration aren’t new.
This is true of some forms of chattel slavery, but not of slavery in general. Most forms of slavery throughout history allow slaves some degree of personal property. This was often legally considered to be the property of the slave’s owner, but it was effectively controlled by the slave himself.
There isn’t anything inherent to industrialization which favors the use of free labor. One common argument is that mechanization required the use of more highly skilled laborers, which afforded greater leverage to laborers. This argument falls flat because we can see examples of even relatively sophisticated labor being performed by slaves. Consider the articles posted here recently about slavery in call centers in Myanmar and Thailand, where kidnapped victims are forced to perform scams. There are also the more widely known examples of sweatshops in Bangladesh.
Another argument that is often made is that factories have high amortization costs that require the factory to produce (and more importantly, sell) a high enough number of units in order to cover these costs. What I have not seen here is a compelling case as to why the propertied class of a slave-holding society would care about building factories for consumer goods if the unit economics were not already favorable.
It is amazing the mad things people will believe in order to maintain the belief that the British Empire never did anything good for a good reason.
You can go back and read the newspaper articles, speeches in parliament, pamphlets, etc. The historical record is unambiguous. Slavery was abhorrent. That was it.
Horrific. This egregious human rights violation is something you'd think you read about in a developing nation, not a developed nation.