You are really, really gross.

Agreed. The independence movement would have fizzled if Spain hadn’t made some really stupid moves.

The 90% voting for independence is extremely misleading. The vote was declared illegal by a Catalan court, and so the people against independence did not participate in the (extremely difficult to access) vote.

idk I think they need to move more left to meaningfully distinguish themselves from the republicans economically.

Imagine you wanted cheap fire fighters, and you didn’t want people to complain about it, and you had a population of people completely under your control. What would you do?

Yes, and if the conditions get below a certain acceptable bar, one group can walk away without retribution and the other cannot. That is an important difference.

Also, the consent to volunteer under prison conditions is highly suspect. The power dynamics between the guards and the prisoners makes it very difficult to…

My disagreement is that I DO see this program as particularly egregious. The fact that the labor is particularly dangerous coupled with their lack of rights to organize is a recipe for disaster. The fact that it’s “volunteer” is bullshit. It is impossible to tell when prisoners are volunteering or consenting to…

They do not get hired by fire departments afterwards, so this is no career move.

In the US it’s difficult to tell the difference. Often children are forced into these marriages to hide sexual assault, or because they got pregnant.

Yes the interests of the employer are definitely going to keep them safe. And if the tides of the free market go wrong (I know, impossible!) then these folks have literally no power or say in how to improve their workplace conditions, how to make sure their work is done safely, how many hours they work, whether they…

omg you cannot compare work under the conditions of being an inmate with work done by free people.

Also they have no power or say in their workplace conditions, not ability to alter inefficient or dangerous policies, no recourse if they are being treated horribly. If it’s really going as well as you say, then it’s dumb luck that someone isn’t taking advantage, and it’s only a matter of time.

On the whole, prison labor is definitely a bad thing. This might be the least bad of all the bad things, but it is definitely not an overall good for society.

Yea, no. This is an exploited population, and we don’t get to have warm feelings about them being exploited into working for less and taking greater risks to their safety out of desperation.

1) Prisoners being volunteers is highly suspect, given the huge power inequality between the prisoners and the people asking for…

The alternative being so much worse does not justify an abuse.

Yea, in a system where sex with guards is always rape because the power dynamics make proper consent impossible, we are defending terrible conditions under which inmates risk their lives as acceptable because they consented.

Actually, as a woman in a field that is generally sexually repressed (especially in my undergrad years) I found that I went from about average sexual experience to far above average when I entered my field. I also found that my social group, which increasingly sprouted from this group of people, had the same social…

Uhm no. A movement is a collection of people, who can hold different viewpoints about a topic that is right now definitely up for debate.

Journalists should be held to a higher standard than strangers/laymen when it comes to identifying the subject of their stories.

Actually, this is not a philosophical question but a scientific one. Since we don’t know the answer, it is completely acceptable to construct a social movement built on some combination of the two.