Hey, humanity, how's it going
:yea:
Steven Pinker is such a charlatan. He always claims that neoliberal capitalism is making all the lines on all the graphs go up, but he includes China in his data set. When you remove China mysteriously all the lines on all the graphs go flat or down. He also attacks China all the time, despite them carrying his stats
So I'm curious how reliable people think stats about this sort of thing are. Like I looked at the paper and they're pretty vague about their methodology, and I guess I'm naturally skeptical about narratives that guarantee headlines.
Like more than half the people who are considered enslaved are actually just from forced marriages not forced labour - I'm not saying I love that or anything but I think we can agree that that's at least complicated and different cultures have had very different relationships with marriage.
Also the definition of forced labour seems so vague I'm not sure I understand whatisn't forced labour, but then somehow IDF conscription doesn't count.
IDK I don't have some bee in my bonnet about the conclusion or anything I'm pretty agnostic towards it. I just know there is weird energy in certain orgs to push slavery and human trafficking narratives that just end up justifying inter-state violence or turning the screws on sex workers. I'm open to the UN's ILO being reputable, just wondering what other people's thoughts on the matter are.
Idk, I'd say a girl consigned to marriage against her will, deprived of education and autonomy and forced into sex acts is just as vile as chattel slavery. If anything the difference is semantic. The article is pretty open about the methodology being somewhat suspect, but it suggests that the number could be much higher. The users of this site seem to have a very black and white worldview, sometimes, and assume that just because an organization is captured by capital, such as the UN, it is wholly evil. I'm sure there are some very principled people working in the ILO, and probably some decent comrades, who've decided that working for the UN was the best way they could be a force for good in the world. It's wholly believable to me that the fallout from various ongoing conflicts, the destabilization of governments by US/NATO, COVID, and climate catastrophe have put families in the position to make the horrifying position to sell their underage daughters to men who can afford them. I don't doubt that parts of the world have returned to the bronze age. Modern society is built on the flimsiest of foundations, it doesn't take much to bring it crashing down.
it's actually just people who can't get out of their current cell phone contracts
so what happened to Libya in 2011 is now happening to the entire planet
It can't continue forever. The question is, how do we step in and fix things after it all breaks?
Lots of things, I suspect, but the data is comparing data in 2019, the last year before COVID to data from 2021.
