This is a community in the spirit of "Am I The Asshole" where people can post their own bans from lemmy or reddit or whatever and get some feedback from others whether the ban was justified or not.
Sometimes one just wants to be able to challenge the arguments some mod made and this could be the place for that.
Expect to receive feedback about your posts, they might even be negative.
Make sure you follow this instance's code of conduct. In other words we won't allow bellyaching about being sanctioned for hate speech or bigotry.
Some acronyms you might see.
Relevant comms
What's rule 1 and 2 there?
Fwiw, they are slaves, the Constitution refers to them as such, and they can't truly consent to the labor when the alternative is to rot in prison conditions so deplorable they've been decried as inhumane by the UN and other international organizations.
That said, I do think that you were polite and civil in your post.
Everyone should feel welcome here.
Pffft right. Vatnik please.
I don't know why people bother with lemmy.ml at all - just add it to your user instance block list and move on.
PTB
Its a .ml community. They do not like nuances.
They love to powertrip, and the 2 month ban is just ridiculous for a simple disagreement. I don't see anything in the comment that is in any way bigoted or uncivil.
I personally have blocked all news and politics communities from .ml
Btw, even if they are not technically "slaves", they are de facto slaves, because they only done so under coercion.
Prisoners can be forced to work in the US, to my knowledge.
Penal labor is permitted under the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits slavery except as a punishment for a crime where the individual has been convicted.[1] The courts have held that detainees awaiting trial cannot be forced to work.[14] However, convicted criminals who are medically able to work are typically required to do so in roles such as food service, warehouse work, plumbing, painting, or as inmate orderlies.[15]According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, inmates earn between 12-40 cents per hour for these jobs, which is below the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.[15] There have been proposals of ideas to help incarcerated workers obtain better wages and improved working conditions through unionizing prison labor.
The user is clearly wrong, but they're wrong in a way that's incredible common among Americans. It's not their fault, exactly, they've been taught to think that slavery is okay from birth. That all said, I don't think their post actually violates the rules and they're clearly open to discussion on the issue.
you had me until "they've been taught to think it's okay from birth."
what a weird, broad generalization.
PTB lemmy.ml communities have a lot of powertripping, sometimes by mods of the communties, sometimes the instance admins themselves. They do not like nuance or disagreement with their narrative of any kind.
There is a spectrum of conditions which may be considered as slavery. Have you ever heard the phrase "economic coercion"? Are you aware that sometimes there are punishments or negative consequences for not "volunteering" to do something? Prison systems and other punitive systems are very well-known for trying to create an appearance of consent when there is actually none.
Suppose, for example, that you lived in the Great Depression in the US, and your only choices are either to starve to death, or to "voluntarily" take on a job with utterly horrible conditions that will lead to a premature death some years down the road. You can just starve, of course, but we wouldn't say it's truly voluntary to take the job. There are pressures within the system that you live in that are outside of your control.
However, I will grant you that the term "slavery" is indeed very charged, and should be reserved for specific contexts, and the purity of its meaning needs to be maintained....and that this issue is complex and somewhat ambiguous. How should we define the term exactly? Who should get to define the term? How bad exactly should things be, before we call them "slavery"?
Someone, say, working on a plantation gathering cotton for a legal slave owner in the 1850s US, is very clearly someone we should consider as subject to slavery. How about a 2020s US prisoner who is forced to "volunteer" as a firefighter or else, say, be at much higher risk of being physically assaulted by a guard? What are the conditions of the prisoner's life like otherwise? It's less clear, but I think there may be a case for calling this slavery.
Another question is, what is it to you? I think, for example, that people who have ancestors who were slaves, are more suited to define "slavery" than people who do not have any ancestors who were known slaves. If you don't have any personal stake in this, then it's all that much more important for you to re-evaluate why you felt the need to comment on this, and why you're so attached to your opinion.
So, I personally would not fully agree with either you or the mod. I am not sure what is best in this situation, but I think it's good if we don't jump to conclusions overly quickly without properly considering how complicated this is.