US prison labor is cruel and pointless legalized slavery.

Dyjuan Tatro

The Guardian

Originally posted 22 Sept 23

Here is an excerpt:

It costs New York around $70,000 a year in taxpayer money to imprison someone. It costs the BPI about $10,000 a year to educate an incarcerated student. New York’s recidivism rate is 40%, while graduates of the BPI and similar programs recidivate at only 4%, a tenfold decrease. Yet, despite its clear positive record, only 300 of New York’s 30,000 incarcerated people are enrolled at the BPI in any given semester. I was one of a lucky few.

Prisons are designed to warehouse, traumatize and exploit people, then send them back home in worse shape than when they entered the system. Despite having worked every day, the vast majority of people are released with no job experience, no references and no hope. Some would take this to mean that the system is failing. And it is with regard to public safety, rehabilitation and justice, but it’s horrifyingly successful at two things: guaranteeing jobs for some and perpetuating slavery for others.

Over the years, I learned that prison officials were not interested in giving us fruitful educational and job opportunities that allowed us to go home and stay home. The reality is much more sinister. Prisons are a job program for officers that requires us to keep coming back.

The article is here.

Here is my summary:

The article is a personal account of the author's experience working in prison. Tatro argues that prison labor is a form of legalized slavery, and that it is cruel and pointless. He writes that his work in prison was meaningless and dehumanizing, and that it did not teach him any skills or prepare him for life outside of prison. He also argues that prison labor undermines the living standards of workers outside of prison, as businesses that use prison labor are able to pay their workers less.

Tatro's article is a powerful indictment of the US prison system, and it raises important questions about the role of labor in the rehabilitation of prisoners.

In the corner of an Australian lab, a brain in a dish is playing a video game - and it’s getting better

Liam Mannix

Sydney Morning Herald

Originally posted 13 NOV 22

Here is an excerpt:

Artificial intelligence controls an ever-increasing slice of our lives. Smart voice assistants hang on our every word. Our phones leverage machine learning to recognise our face. Our social media lives are controlled by algorithms that surface content to keep us hooked.

These advances are powered by a new generation of AIs built to resemble human brains. But none of these AIs are really intelligent, not in the human sense of the word. They can see the superficial pattern without understanding the underlying concept. Siri can read you the weather but she does not really understand that it’s raining. AIs are good at learning by rote, but struggle to extrapolate: even teenage humans need only a few sessions behind the wheel before the can drive, while Google’s self-driving car still isn’t ready after 32 billion kilometres of practice.

A true ‘general artificial intelligence’ remains out of reach - and, some scientists think, impossible.

Is this evidence human brains can do something special computers never will be able to? If so, the DishBrain opens a new path forward. “The only proof we have of a general intelligence system is done with biological neurons,” says Kagan. “Why would we try to mimic what we could harness?”

He imagines a future part-silicon-part-neuron supercomputer, able to combine the raw processing power of silicon with the built-in learning ability of the human brain.

Others are more sceptical. Human intelligence isn’t special, they argue. Thoughts are just electro-chemical reactions spreading across the brain. Ultimately, everything is physics - we just need to work out the maths.

“If I’m building a jet plane, I don’t need to mimic a bird. It’s really about getting to the mathematical foundations of what’s going on,” says Professor Simon Lucey, director of the Australian Institute for Machine Learning.

Why start the DishBrains on Pong? I ask. Because it’s a game with simple rules that make it ideal for training AI. And, grins Kagan, it was one of the first video game ever coded. A nod to the team’s geek passions - which run through the entire project.

“There’s a whole bunch of sci-fi history behind it. The Matrix is an inspiration,” says Chong. “Not that we’re trying to create a Matrix,” he adds quickly. “What are we but just a goooey soup of neurons in our heads, right?”

Maybe. But the Matrix wasn’t meant as inspiration: it’s a cautionary tale. The humans wired into it existed in a simulated reality while machines stole their bioelectricity. They were slaves.

Is it ethical to build a thinking computer and then restrict its reality to a task to be completed? Even if it is a fun task like Pong?

“The real life correlate of that is people have already created slaves that adore them: they are called dogs,” says Oxford University’s Julian Savulescu.

Thousands of years of selective breeding has turned a wild wolf into an animal that enjoys rounding up sheep, that loves its human master unconditionally.

The info is here.

Lolita understood that some sex is transactional. So did I

Tamara MacLeod
aeon.co
Originally published September 11, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

However, I think that it is the middle-class consciousness of liberal feminism that excluded sex work from its platform. After all, wealthier women didn’t need to do sex work as such; they operated within the state-sanctioned transactional boundaries of marriage. The dissatisfaction of the 20th-century housewife was codified as a struggle for liberty and independence as an addition to subsidised material existence, making a feminist discourse on work less about what one has to do, and more about what one wants to do. A distinction within women’s work emerged: if you don’t enjoy having sex with your husband, it’s just a problem with the marriage. If you don’t enjoy sex with a client, it’s because you can’t consent to your own exploitation. It is a binary view of sex and consent, work and not-work, when the reality is somewhat murkier. It is a stubborn blindness to the complexity of human relations, and maybe of human psychology itself, descending from the viscera-obsessed, radical absolutisms of Andrea Dworkin.

The housewife who married for money and then fakes orgasms, the single mother who has sex with a man she doesn’t really like because he’s offering her some respite: where are the delineations between consent and exploitation, sex and duty? The first time I traded sex for material gain, I had some choices, but they were limited. I chose to be exploited by the man with the resources I needed, choosing his house over homelessness. Lolita was a child, and she was exploited, but she was also conscious of the function of her body in a patriarchal economy. Philosophically speaking, most of us do indeed consent to our own exploitation.

The info is here.

Are human rights anything more than legal conventions?

John Tasioulas
aeon.co
Originally published April 11, 2017

We live in an age of human rights. The language of human rights has become ubiquitous, a lingua franca used for expressing the most basic demands of justice. Some are old demands, such as the prohibition of torture and slavery. Others are newer, such as claims to internet access or same-sex marriage. But what are human rights, and where do they come from? This question is made urgent by a disquieting thought. Perhaps people with clashing values and convictions can so easily appeal to ‘human rights’ only because, ultimately, they don’t agree on what they are talking about? Maybe the apparently widespread consensus on the significance of human rights depends on the emptiness of that very notion? If this is true, then talk of human rights is rhetorical window-dressing, masking deeper ethical and political divisions.

Philosophers have debated the nature of human rights since at least the 12th century, often under the name of ‘natural rights’. These natural rights were supposed to be possessed by everyone and discoverable with the aid of our ordinary powers of reason (our ‘natural reason’), as opposed to rights established by law or disclosed through divine revelation. Wherever there are philosophers, however, there is disagreement. Belief in human rights left open how we go about making the case for them – are they, for example, protections of human needs generally or only of freedom of choice? There were also disagreements about the correct list of human rights – should it include socio-economic rights, like the rights to health or work, in addition to civil and political rights, such as the rights to a fair trial and political participation?

The article is here.

Lawsuit: Your Candy Bar Was Made By Child Slaves

By Abby Haglage
The Daily Beast
Originally published September 30, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

In the 15 years since the documentary sparked outrage, there are more child laborers in the cocoa industry than ever before. The companies have not only failed to stop the “worst forms of child labor”; they’ve seemingly made it worse. A report released on July 30, 2015, from the Payson Center for International Development of Tulane University and sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor found a 51 percent increase in the number of children working in the cocoa industry in 2013-14, compared to the last report in 2008-09. The number, they found, now totals 1.4 million. Those living in slave-like conditions increased 10 percent from the 2008-09 results, now totaling 1.1 million. The study concludes that while “some progress has been made,” the goal of reducing the number of children in the industry had “not come within reach.”

The California plaintiffs’ false-advertising claims against Nestle, Hershey, and Mars are the latest effort to pressure the chocolate industry to fix a problem it has known about for more than a decade. “Children that are sometimes not even 10 years old carry huge sacks that are so big that they cause them serious physical harm,” the complaint alleges.

The entire article is here.

Cambodian Activist’s Fall Exposes Broad Deception

By Thomas Fuller
The New York Times
Originally published June 14, 2014

The fall from grace of one of Cambodia’s most prominent social activists and the unraveling of her sad tale of being an orphan sold into sex slavery has highlighted what aid workers here say is widespread embellishment and in some cases outright deception in fund-raising, especially among the country’s orphanages.

Somaly Mam, who rose from rural poverty in Cambodia to become a jet-setting and glamorous symbol of the fight against the exploitation of women and children, stepped down last month from the United States-based charitable organization that carries her name after details of her widely publicized story were thrown into question.

The entire article is here.

'Shameful' failure to tackle slavery and human trafficking in the UK

Inquiry outlines 80 recommendations, including appointing an independent commissioner and new legislation to protect victims

By Toby Helm and Mark Townsend
The Guardian/The Observer
Originally published on March 9, 2013

Ministers, the police and social workers have been accused of a "shocking" failure to prevent the spread of modern slavery in the UK, leading to sexual exploitation, forced labour and the domestic servitude of adults and children from across the world.

Describing government ministers as "clueless" in their response to tackling human trafficking, both into and within the UK, the most exhaustive inquiry yet conducted into the phenomenon concludes that the approach to eradicating modern slavery is fundamentally wrong-headed. Instead of helping vulnerable victims who are trapped into forms of slavery after being trafficked from overseas, the legal system prosecutes many for immigration offences.

The major study by the Centre for Social Justice, which will be published on Monday, says that political indifference and ignorance alongside a leadership vacuum in Whitehall has meant that the country that led the way in abolishing slavery in the 19th century is now a "shameful shadow" of its former self as the practice makes a comeback in a contemporary guise.

The entire story is here.

Anti-human-trafficking efforts gain momentum

New policies and new laws on human trafficking are spreading across several states

By Yamiche Alcindor
USA TODAY
Originally posted on February 16, 2013


A growing wave of efforts to stop human trafficking has spread across the country as lawmakers and others look to combat the problem through law, policy, and grass-roots activism.

While approaches vary, advocates say more must be done to stop the crime, dubbed "modern day slavery" and defined by the U.S. State Department as the recruitment, transportation or harboring of people by means of deception or coercion. Victims, often mentally and physically abused, can be forced into prostitution, unfair working conditions, or other exploitative situations.

"Consciousness and outrage have reached a different level because of the perverseness but also the impact of human trafficking," said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. "People understand that everyone has a responsibility to fight human trafficking and every individual can have an impact."

The entire story is here.

President Obama Unveils Landmark Actions To Fight Human Trafficking

The president said it was time to call human trafficking by its real name: "modern slavery."

By ELIZABETH FLOCK
US News and World Report
Originally published September 26, 2012


President Barack Obama unveiled major actions to fight human trafficking at home and abroad in a speech at the Clinton Global Initiative's annual meeting Tuesday, a problem the U.S. has long sought to control.

Just hours after his Republican challenger Mitt Romney spoke to the same audience, arguing broadly that free trade and aid were the key to a better world, Obama chose to focus his speech on the single issue of trafficking, and what the U.S. can do to stop it. Obama told the assembled audience it was time to turn the focus on fighting trafficking within American borders.

"The ugly truth is that this goes on right here," he said. "It's the migrant worker unable to pay off the debt to his trafficker... The teenage girl—beaten, forced to walk the streets. This should not be happening in America."

The president also said it was time to call human trafficking by its real name: "modern slavery." Obama's speech came just days after the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, the executive order issued by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863 that freed millions of slaves across the United States.

The entire story is here.

Actress urges action against human trafficking

By Andres Gonzalez
The Associated Press
Originally published July 17, 2012

Jada Pinkett Smith

Actress and activist Jada Pinkett Smith urged Congress on Tuesday to step up the fight against human trafficking in the U.S. and abroad.

The actress testified during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing that she plans to launch a campaign to raise awareness and spur action against human trafficking and slavery. She said the "old monster" of slavery "is still with us," almost 150 years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation that freed slaves in the U.S.

"Fighting slavery doesn't cost a lot of money. The costs of allowing it to exist in our nation and abroad are much higher," the actress said. "It robs us of the thing we value most, our freedom."

The entire story is here.

Human trafficking: Modern day slavery

Women's Psych-E Newsletter
March 2012

On February 1, 2012, the APA Women’s Programs Office, the Graduate and Postgraduate Education and Training Office and the Neighborhood Opportunities for Volunteer Activities (NOVA) Committee hosted a brown bag lunch for APA staff in recognition of January as National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month featuring Tina Frundt, Founder and Executive Director of Courtney’s House.

Frundt, also a survivor of domestic sex trafficking, discussed the importance of providing programs and services for domestic victims. “Trafficking of American children is often not heard about. The focus is often on foreign trafficking, she says. Due to a lack of funding for programs for trafficking victims, minors are all too often arrested, charged with child prostitution and placed in juvenile detention centers which are unsafe.” She is currently working to get legislation that will prevent children from being arrested and charged with child prostitution and to will allow them to receive services. Dr. Marsha Liss, PhD, member of the newly formed APA Task Force on Trafficking of Women and Girls, also in attendance, emphasized the importance of services and supports that prevent survivors from being sent into situations where they're at risk.

The entire article can be found here.