I really feel your usage of "enslaved" and "tortured" are not very inclusive. There are people whose ancestors experienced such things, and words like that might be triggering and make them uncomfortable.
Maybe you could use friendlier words like "not free" or "hurt"?
You removed the words "of the genuine horrors that exist even today". Those make it clear that I think the use of "slavery" is wrong here not because it slanders Jeff Bezos or American enterprise or whatever, but because it conflates (a) a bad job--accepted on the open market, by people in a country with a safety net that while imperfect almost never lets people starve to death--with (b) taking people with force or deception, making them work, and keeping them even if they want to leave, under threat of physical violence.
Do you think we should use the same word for both of these concepts? Is there a word that you use to mean (b) that doesn't include (a)? How do you think that guy on the Thai fishing boat would feel, if he saw the Amazon warehouse and was told it was "slavery"?
The terms are already desensitizes and as someone wrote earlier, no person alive was ever a slave, so the sensibility is not justified. When we use these terms we don't think of a black slave in USA 200 years ago, these are terms that are totally repurposed.
People are rescued from slavery all the time. Bring mindful of casually using a term which they know to describe their years to decades of abuse and torture doesn't seem like a particularly difficult ask.
I think you'd have better luck by explaining your ideas further, rather than simply trying to associate ideas with emotionally charged words like 'slavery' or 'sex trafficking' by writing them next to things you dislike.
There can be different kinds of slavery. Let's not get bogged down by details shall we?
If a situation fits for 80% and there is no other single word that better describes it, i see you would just do nothing and leave a clearly wrong situation in confusion and undefined. People need a word and a clarity of meaning to rally behind it. Slavery fits really well, even if some things don't fit the historical original definition of it. If you can come up with a better fitting word, be my guest, otherwise please don't stand in the way while people are trying to raise awareness for the tragic lack of freedom that so many of us experience.
Are you seriously arguing that slavery is not abuse? Or not always? Because I have no idea how to read your opening paragraph here except that way, and you seem not to understand the core difference between it and those other terms.
Naming matters, and if you wouldn't use a racial epiphet, a term for sexual assaults or slang for genitalia to name something, then you at least have enough of an idea that it's worth not using a term which defines an active and devastating practice, as well as a historical reality that's 3 human lifetimes old and defines an entire community of people, as just another term that's totally okay.
Thank you! A commenter who actually knows a bit of what they are saying! I will take a look at it.
From my knowledge of other such situations, enslaved people have many fewer rights, customary and legal, but not none. Humans will still be sickened by seeing other humans do bad things; there are limits. Also, they want the enslaved people to be pacified and cooperative, not murderous and angry.
> The enslavement of an entire race of people goes quite a ways beyond "unpleasant."
Absolutely. But what we're talking about isn't racial. The last time I worked on a master/slave setup (I forget whether we used those terms), the "master" and "slave" were of the same race. In fact, the slave could become the master, and the master could become the slave.
You may tell me that we're talking about the words, and I suppose that's true. But the words are also used for same-race slavery, so the words are not inherently about a racially-charged situation either.
The problem with ”slave” (as an example) for me is, how do we know this is actually a problem for enslaved people? How do we know this isn’t just a ”white man burden” thing? Yes, it makes sense, but just because something makes sense doesn’t mean it’s inherently good or applicable. Lots of things make sense from a theoretical, conceptual perspective, but are not feasible in practice.
It seems to me that enslaved people have much bigger problems than to worry about this, and if they don’t anymore, then the wording doesn’t matter. They are either ”former slaves”, which emphasizes the severity of the situation they were put through, or they are still slaves, which again——emphasis. I could argue that the new wording diminishes the seriousness of the predicament (but I won’t as I don’t believe that, given the horrors of slavery, the word matters at all here).
Your right, it's insensitive to every people group that's been enslaved for any period of time. Yet somehow that doesn't encompass all people groups in the same way that kill does. Maybe we should be considerate of all peoples/individuals who have experienced slavery directly or in their ancestry.
My Swiftian Proposal: lets just remain all uses of the word "slave" to "forcedChildLaborer". It's more accurate anyway, since in software a "slave" is usually "born" into the role and often times doesn't live very long. We are striving for accuracy after all, right?
And for my two cents that will inflame this even more: We should considering deprecating the use of "kill" to signify terminate. I haven't used it in my 15+ years of writing software professionally and no one has impugned my code quality for not using "kill" enough.
It was proper to call you ancestors slaves and their owners master.
In the same way it's proper to use same concept as a metaphor to describe other relationships where one thing is owned by other. There is nothing wrong or offensive in the concept of slavery. Even when the context is enslaving humans.
Slavery is immoral, but the concept of slavery is not.
Slavery is with us today in too many parts of the world. American chattel slavery was ~3 human lifetimes ago (for long enough lived humans).
I am completely okay with removing words which imply domination and subjugation without moral judgement from day to day vocabularly.
Slavery is a horrific, barbaric practice, and if the word only ever comes up in one context with all the moral and emotional weight that should carry, then that's an improvement.
This is a very American-centric view of slavery. Most cultures have participated in slavery at some point in history without the extraneous parts. Even if you treat your slave as family, the slavery is still immoral.
Similarly, your views on free speech are very narrow-minded. Many people have been murdered by oppressive governments for speaking out against injustice. Were they "idiots spout[ing] whatever crappy opinion happens to wander across what passes for their mind"?
If you are discouraged from saying something for _any_ reason, this is slavery of the mind. As for collective cultures, I don't think I know enough to effectively comment. I will note that many cultures that were okay at one time are now viewed with disgust as primitive, including your depiction of slavery in the Americas.
The problem is that the word can have derogatory implications, not that it represents a bad thing to do with humans. If slavery didn't have the sort of implications it does in the US, it might be no worse than 'kill' or 'destroy'. You shouldn't do those to humans either, but seeing the word doesn't leave an unpleasant residue.
Maybe you could use friendlier words like "not free" or "hurt"?
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