Dominance underlies the things that can be done most efficiently with dominance. The moment dominance is no longer the most efficient force, it collapses, because in the vast majority of cases, dominating others takes a lot of time, energy and effort. This is actually how and why slavery (pretty much the most powerful example of dominance) was abolished: it started to make less economic sense than Bargaining (paid employment of freemen) and just Getting Things Done (through better tools and ultimately machines), so even its most ardent supporters became dispirited.
Slavery was abolished and remains abolished through dominance:
first by getting outlawed by the Northern US and Great Britain, who drew strong economic benefit from higher labor prices due to them industrializing earlier for geographic reasons,
secondly by leveraging state dominance during the great depression to demand massive increases in quality and quantity of production, to make it feasible to maintain a non-slave-holding society without having excess labor forces being forced to starve,
thirdly, endless policies that use state violence and reduce the total fertility rate as a side-effect,
Throughout most of history, there has been excess labor, making the value of work fall down close to the cost of subsistence, being only sustainable because landowners see natural fluctuations in their production and therefore desire to keep people around even if it doesn’t make short-term economic sense. This naturally creates serfdom and indentured servitude.
It’s only really prisoners of war (e.g. African-American chattel slaves) who are slaves due to dominance; ordinary slavery is just poor bargaining power.
The current number for slaves in the world in something like 50 million. It’s a significant amount of people. In prostitution, you unfortunately have women that are enslaved with violence and other forms of dominance that are not just about the poor bargaining power of the prostitutes.
I didn’t ask where the number is from, I asked how they came up with that number. Their official definition is “all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace
of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily”, but taking that literally would seem to imply that additional work to pay taxes is slavery and therefore ~everyone is a slave. This is presumably not what they meant, and indeed it’s inconsistent with their actual number, but it’s unclear what they mean instead.
I consider it worthwhile to provide sources so that you can read their methodology yourself. I don’t see a good reason for me to give you my interpretation of their methodology.
Your link doesn’t contain a detailed description of their methodology or intermediate results. I would have to do a lot of digging to make heads or tails of it.
I guess feel free to opt out of this conversation if you want but then ultimately I don’t see you as having contributed any point that is relevant for me to respond to or update with.
The key issue I raised was not about the exact number but about prostitutes not being prisoners of war and still better modeled as slaves due to dominance than slaves due to poor bargaining power.
Your sources are not very clear about that, and it contradicts what I’ve heard elsewhere, but yes I do admit at the boundaries of where society enforces laws, there do exist people who are forced to do things including prostitution via dominance.
I was once talking with someone who in the past was thinking about opening a brothel and who had some insight about how brothels are run in Germany and who said that a lot of coercion is used.
Recently, I read something from a policeman who was complaining about how the standard of proving coercion for prostitutes is too high. Proving that a prostitute who’s over 21 who left was beaten was not enough in court to convince the court that she falls under the criteria of outlawed exploitation of prostitutions.
I don’t really have any end-to-end narrative, but here’s a bunch of opinion-fragments:
There’s lots of good reason to believe that sometimes there’s dominance-based prostitution. However, all the prostitutes I’ve talked with on these subjects have emphasized that there’s a powerful alliance between prudish leftists and religious people who misrepresent what’s really going on in order to marginalize prostitution, so I’m still inclined to hold your claims to especially high standards, and I don’t really know why you (apparently) trust the organizations that prostitutes oppose so much.
Der Speigel does not describe how they sampled the individual stories they ended up with, and it seems very unlikely that they sampled them the same way that the UN number did, so it doesn’t seem like the UN number should be assumed to reflect stories like the ones in Der Speigel.
The article has multiple mentions of women who left prostitution but then later returned. In one of them, it’s for the pay, which seems like a bargaining power issue (unless we go into the mess of counting taxes). In another, it’s more complicated as it was out of hope that a customer would fall in love with her. (Which seems unlikely to happen? Would maybe count as something similar to the vaccine situation, insight into how to achieve one’s goals.)
In the case of e.g. Alina, it sounds like the main form of dominance was dominance by proxy: “She says that she was hardly ever beaten, nor were the other women. “They said that they knew enough people in Romania who knew where our families lived. That was enough,” says Alina.”. This matches my proposal about how the dominance needs to occur at the boundary of where the law can enforce.
This sounds very suspicious to me: “There are many women from EU countries “whose situation suggests they are the victims of human trafficking, but it is difficult to provide proof that would hold up in court,” reads the BKA report. Everything depends on the women’s testimony, the authors write, but there is “little willingness to cooperate with the police and assistance agencies, especially in the case of presumed victims from Romania and Bulgaria.”″
I gave you three sources that are influential to my views. A Spiegel article, a conversation with someone who in the past was planning to run a brothel (and spoke with people who actually run brothels in Germany for that reason) and police sources.
I did not link to some activist NGO run by prudish leftists or religious people or making claims as a reason for me believing what I believe.
In general, it’s hard to know what’s actually going on when it comes to crime. If you spoke in the 1950s about the Italian mafia, you had plenty of people calling you racist against Italians and say that there’s no mafia.
Dominance underlies the things that can be done most efficiently with dominance. The moment dominance is no longer the most efficient force, it collapses, because in the vast majority of cases, dominating others takes a lot of time, energy and effort. This is actually how and why slavery (pretty much the most powerful example of dominance) was abolished: it started to make less economic sense than Bargaining (paid employment of freemen) and just Getting Things Done (through better tools and ultimately machines), so even its most ardent supporters became dispirited.
Slavery was abolished and remains abolished through dominance:
first by getting outlawed by the Northern US and Great Britain, who drew strong economic benefit from higher labor prices due to them industrializing earlier for geographic reasons,
secondly by leveraging state dominance during the great depression to demand massive increases in quality and quantity of production, to make it feasible to maintain a non-slave-holding society without having excess labor forces being forced to starve,
thirdly, endless policies that use state violence and reduce the total fertility rate as a side-effect,
Throughout most of history, there has been excess labor, making the value of work fall down close to the cost of subsistence, being only sustainable because landowners see natural fluctuations in their production and therefore desire to keep people around even if it doesn’t make short-term economic sense. This naturally creates serfdom and indentured servitude.
It’s only really prisoners of war (e.g. African-American chattel slaves) who are slaves due to dominance; ordinary slavery is just poor bargaining power.
The current number for slaves in the world in something like 50 million. It’s a significant amount of people. In prostitution, you unfortunately have women that are enslaved with violence and other forms of dominance that are not just about the poor bargaining power of the prostitutes.
Can you expand on the methodology behind this number?
The number is from the International Labour Organization of the UN.
I didn’t ask where the number is from, I asked how they came up with that number. Their official definition is “all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily”, but taking that literally would seem to imply that additional work to pay taxes is slavery and therefore ~everyone is a slave. This is presumably not what they meant, and indeed it’s inconsistent with their actual number, but it’s unclear what they mean instead.
I consider it worthwhile to provide sources so that you can read their methodology yourself. I don’t see a good reason for me to give you my interpretation of their methodology.
Your link doesn’t contain a detailed description of their methodology or intermediate results. I would have to do a lot of digging to make heads or tails of it.
I guess feel free to opt out of this conversation if you want but then ultimately I don’t see you as having contributed any point that is relevant for me to respond to or update with.
The key issue I raised was not about the exact number but about prostitutes not being prisoners of war and still better modeled as slaves due to dominance than slaves due to poor bargaining power.
Your sources are not very clear about that, and it contradicts what I’ve heard elsewhere, but yes I do admit at the boundaries of where society enforces laws, there do exist people who are forced to do things including prostitution via dominance.
If we take the issue of forced prostitution and the official numbers are estimates and by their nature estimates are not exact.
https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/human-trafficking-persists-despite-legality-of-prostitution-in-germany-a-902533.html would be a journalistic story about prostitution in Germany that describes what happens here with legalized prostitution.
I was once talking with someone who in the past was thinking about opening a brothel and who had some insight about how brothels are run in Germany and who said that a lot of coercion is used.
Recently, I read something from a policeman who was complaining about how the standard of proving coercion for prostitutes is too high. Proving that a prostitute who’s over 21 who left was beaten was not enough in court to convince the court that she falls under the criteria of outlawed exploitation of prostitutions.
I don’t really have any end-to-end narrative, but here’s a bunch of opinion-fragments:
There’s lots of good reason to believe that sometimes there’s dominance-based prostitution. However, all the prostitutes I’ve talked with on these subjects have emphasized that there’s a powerful alliance between prudish leftists and religious people who misrepresent what’s really going on in order to marginalize prostitution, so I’m still inclined to hold your claims to especially high standards, and I don’t really know why you (apparently) trust the organizations that prostitutes oppose so much.
Der Speigel does not describe how they sampled the individual stories they ended up with, and it seems very unlikely that they sampled them the same way that the UN number did, so it doesn’t seem like the UN number should be assumed to reflect stories like the ones in Der Speigel.
The article has multiple mentions of women who left prostitution but then later returned. In one of them, it’s for the pay, which seems like a bargaining power issue (unless we go into the mess of counting taxes). In another, it’s more complicated as it was out of hope that a customer would fall in love with her. (Which seems unlikely to happen? Would maybe count as something similar to the vaccine situation, insight into how to achieve one’s goals.)
In the case of e.g. Alina, it sounds like the main form of dominance was dominance by proxy: “She says that she was hardly ever beaten, nor were the other women. “They said that they knew enough people in Romania who knew where our families lived. That was enough,” says Alina.”. This matches my proposal about how the dominance needs to occur at the boundary of where the law can enforce.
This sounds very suspicious to me: “There are many women from EU countries “whose situation suggests they are the victims of human trafficking, but it is difficult to provide proof that would hold up in court,” reads the BKA report. Everything depends on the women’s testimony, the authors write, but there is “little willingness to cooperate with the police and assistance agencies, especially in the case of presumed victims from Romania and Bulgaria.”″
I gave you three sources that are influential to my views. A Spiegel article, a conversation with someone who in the past was planning to run a brothel (and spoke with people who actually run brothels in Germany for that reason) and police sources.
I did not link to some activist NGO run by prudish leftists or religious people or making claims as a reason for me believing what I believe.
In general, it’s hard to know what’s actually going on when it comes to crime. If you spoke in the 1950s about the Italian mafia, you had plenty of people calling you racist against Italians and say that there’s no mafia.