"The concern with slavery is the innocence of victim. When that’s removed, it’s no longer controversial. At least it shouldn’t be."

No, the concern with slavery is the lack of agency for oneself at the behest of another. A slave has no say in how their body is used and it's a violation of the human rights to be your own person. Whether or not they are guilty of a crime is irrelevant.

Punishment for a crime does not mean permitting abuse. It means rehabilitation or isolation from others. They can still be their own person and aren't forced into labor, but are not allowed to be a part of society again.

Slavery violates bodily autonomy, which is basically the worst ethical failing imaginable, worse than killing.
- I think killing someone is a pretty major violation of that person's bodily autonomy.
- So does jailing someone until they give up and take your bogus plea deal.
Might as well argue a bit.

Putting a person in prison is also a violation of their rights. Are you against prison for criminals?
- My ideal would be a region, probably an island like Pit Cairn, that is remote where the violent can live in a police state built around the idea of rehabilitation through building routines. A prison building is inhumane, especially how it is used in the US, but an open community of folks who are rejected from society as a whole would go along way to solving the punishment problem. Folks need to live as they do in society but removed from temptation - given the coaching they need to succeed when their sentence is served.
  
  For violent and dangerous people who resist rehab, they get to live alone under the watchful eye of drone surveillance, with reaction teams to correct any escape behavior. Being kind takes extra effort, but the results are only available through kindness. Strict authoritarian behavior, like how the US prison system works, will make those individuals resist treatment and rehabilitation.

Same guy earlier upthread

Public transit fares are generally malformed. I personally never pay the LA Metro fare. Why? Because I pay the Metrolink fare, which by their own admission covers same-day Metro transit. But police will actively seek me out as a person who looks like they have money and give me a hard time for not “tapping”, all while folks who very clearly have no money waltz on into the metro, stopping only to smoke crack on the elevator up. There’s a general problem in this country of what to do with law breakers who do not have money. It seems like the answer is to make them work and garnish their wages, but for whatever reason we are against that.

Yea the police are always giving such a hard time to people who don't look poor. It's so unfair that someone who can and does apparently pay for public transit has to prove they did.

"poor people have had it too good for too long and slavery is the only answer. I consider myself a pragmatic centrist"
jesus fuck, this is racist in so many different ways simultaneously that I’m trying to imagine what living like this person must feel like, living this existence where they assume all the “poor-looking” (yeah) people sharing public transit with them must be smoking crack and stealing fare and therefore deserve slavery

like fuck, that kind of existence is just a pit of despair you can’t leave, isn’t it?

e: and literally the only thing that happened to them is they had to pull up a receipt on their phone or whatever! and meanwhile people who look poor (to them) had the audacity to exist near them! fucking ordinary shit is what made them like this! minor inconveniences produced this Level of racial hatred! what in the fuck!
- big failed art student energy isn't it?
"I have a legitimate Metrolink fare and should not be hassled when I don't tap. These other people who don't look like me obviously do not have the Metrolink fare and should be hassled when they don't tap."
Scrooge was a fucking pussy and he should have told those ghosts to suck him in hell
- so as I was reading that I was forming a sneer along the lines of “ghosts transcending both time and death to show me the consequences of my worldview is a classical fallacy, checkmate Dickens” but they just fucking go for it there at the end
heh yeah saw that one too. and they have some other remarkable glittering shitgems in their posting history
- I think I've seen that username on something posted on TechTakes before.

Id say "less" controversial.

Is making people in prisons perform the necessary custodial work to maintain it slavery? I dont think it is, but strictly speaking its enforced unwilling labor so by a dictionary definition it kinda is.

Now making them take jobs performing work for companies seeking to make a profit for less than minimum wage... yeah that smells a lot more like slavery.

What is and isn't slavery is absolutely up for debate. You can have an argument over where you draw the line, but I'm pretty sure anyone remotely sane and moral would absolutely say that for-prisoner labour is slavery.

Which is probably why some countries specifically allow slavery for prisoners.

this is obviously an attempt to goad ngate into returning...right?

Least controversial libertarian. (At least they picked slavery and not ... well you know).

This guy is complaining about this while living in LA?

Isn't prison slavery already legal in the USA??

Isn’t prison slavery already legal in the USA??

it is that (the thirteenth amendment carves out an exception specifically for prison labour), and it's literally the operational model for a significant fraction of US prisons aiui

Where do these dopes come from? Do they grow them in a lab?

It's an ailment that's endemic to HN

Not sure that any time someone posts cringe on HN counts as a tech take. Maybe we can bring AI into this?

What about, enslaving prisoners is not controversial if an AI is giving the orders, since it's not a person oppressing another person. I'll take my 500M VC now please.

Before I actually read the linked post I definitely thought this was about the ethics of enslaving sentient AI as seen in The Animatrix or R.U.R.

Please be about naming conventions...?