"In three days I will check whether the female scientist the IS wanted to be released is still in prison, and if she is I will check Ariana's Wikipedia page to see if she's in a relationship" (25 Sep 2026 at 21:07)
When I did this search, the first result was about a male scientist, with Chinese ethnicity but residing in the US, who has been imprisoned in China for almost two years. Even though I'm supposed to be not checking the news, since last year probably, I eventually came to this article:
Meatpacking groups say ICE arrests could lead to higher prices and revenue loss
(I had to open it with Javascript off to prevent the single web page from using all my computer's memory)
Ariana's political question last year touched on the topic of immigration enforcement raids.
It's poor people pushing the button that allows them to be happy.
I tend to be on the side of enforcing laws. Even though I am not Japanese, I still have a Japanese mindset about some things. In the drama series Ikebukuro West Gate Park: episode 4, a foreigner (personal detail: my youngest sister's name is Alejandra, which got shortened to Ali, which is the same name as this character) is befriended by a main character, but the foreigner still gets deported at the end of the episode for breaking immigration laws. This happens at a party. The immigration officer carrying out the action moves slowly, but the foreigner does not run and complies with the law.
Squid Game: there is a similar character, also named Ali.
In 2015, there were articles about the poor labor conditions of the workers on Thai fishing boats. I searched my bookmarks for 'shrimp', and there are only two results, but the second one has a lot of related articles. It might be a mistake to link any of this, as too much information.
Folder 'Inequality, 02 Jan 2016' (last article is the one related to shrimp, none of these were bookmarked with a title):
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/30/google-got-it-wrong-the-open-office-trend-is-destroying-the-workplace/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/31/the-surprising-thing-ancient-mummies-tell-us-about-what-to-eat/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/what-its-like-to-house-hunt-in-silicon-valley-the-nations-priciest-market/2015/12/31/920c5b02-9dcf-11e5-bce4-708fe33e3288_story.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/14/the-rich-kids-of-instagram-are-a-product-of-extreme-inequality-and-theyre-not-afraid-to-show-it/
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rich-see-different-internet-than-the-poor/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/16/these-powerful-photos-of-people-living-with-debt-will-make-you-feel-not-alone/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/15/the-shocking-truth-about-shrimp-today/
Folder 'slaves, 23 Sep 2018':
Desperate Rohingya Flee Myanmar on Trail of Suffering: ‘It Is All Gone’ - The New York Times
Thai Fishing Industry Trafficking, Enslaving Rohingya | Burma Task Force
Seafood Slaves | slavery | Al Jazeera
AP Explore: Seafood from slaves | Associated Press
US lets in Thai fish caught by slaves despite law | Associated Press
Myanmar fisherman goes home after 22 years as a slave | Associated Press
AP tracks slave boats to Papua New Guinea | Associated Press
AP Investigation: Slaves may have caught the fish you bought | Associated Press
Second-to-last has a URL that indicates it is from 20 Jul 2015.
Also, bonus article, the bookmark that follows this folder:
Erawan Shrine bombing was on 17 Aug 2015, about a month after the first articles describing the workers on the Thai fishing boats as "slaves" were written. From the Wikipedia article:
The Thai government has at times suggested the bombers acted to avenge a crackdown on their human trafficking network
Should poor people be encouraged to break laws by illegally traveling to other countries to find work? This is a different question than whether they should be punished by the country they travel to for breaking immigration law.
The US isn't special in being a country that people want to illegally reside in to work. It's a problem caused by global economic inequality. So: does Ariana think that Thailand should continue to allow fishing boats to employ illegal immigrants, just as meatpacking plants in the US do? Or should people only be allowed to work if they have official permission to be in a country, such that employers cannot threaten to turn them in to the authorities if they don't accept poor working conditions?
Short version of this post:
<quote>
<link to article>
Squid Game.
Thai fishing boats, shrine bombing.
First search result for thai fishing ship: Revealed: how the Thai fishing industry trafficks, imprisons and enslaves | Thailand | The Guardian (20 Jul 2015, same article linked above)
First search result for thai fishing ships: 'Such brutality': tricked into slavery in the Thai fishing industry | Movies | The Guardian (21 Sep 2019)
First search result for thai fishing boats: Forced to fish: Slavery on Thailand's trawlers - BBC News (23 Jan 2014)
So the topic of the article that I saw in Jul 2015 and posted about on Chirp Club was not new. It was just a new round of articles, that alerted me to a topic I had not known about.
The logic is that it was relevant to the question of whether people are, by nature, good or evil. Are the people who facilitate illegal entry into Thailand by taking people through jungles, which is by definition human trafficking, helping those people or harming them? Are they good or bad? Would taking away the button that lets poor people be happy — with a 1% chance of dying — be good or bad?
If you were the ruler of Thailand, what would you do?
___
Update 26 Sep 2026, 04:54
You are a participant in a YouTube video by a certain creator. Each time you push a button, $200 is split between you and a Soulless Mega-Corporation, but you get $1 less than the last button push: $100, $99, $98, etc. Do you keep pushing all the way down to $1? Each button press takes 0.2 sec.
No comments:
Post a Comment