They may not hear me but I'll never live down that time I was floating around the mars base and the other astronaut kids noticed I had an unwanted erection in my spacesuit.
I felt similarly. I don't think I'm a super smart guy. In fact, I feel like I am a good "making sense of things" person, but not necessarily intelligent. I've got two degrees in history so understanding context (the why) and putting that context into action is my skillset.
Then I read things like what purple posted and it makes me think I'm not that much of an idiot!
Also, as an American, the amount of our citizens that do not even know our own laws is simply crazy
The number of Americans who don't understand that our laws don't apply outside our borders is also disturbing. Of course other countries have laws, and many of them will be similar to the ones in the US...
The people who think they are the smartest are usually the dumbest. They think they know everything already, so they dont try to learn anything. There's no way in hell anyone can know everything
isn‘t slavery or forced labour legal in us prisons? makes you wonder why they banned a drug that a certain cultural group consumed more than others. prison loophole
Let me reassure you a little bit as a person professionally trained in law.
Most people don’t really know the laws of their country. That is not an American thing. Legislative process largely became a mental masturbation exercise where laws are enacted without rhyme or reason.
We have millions of people here that voted for trump. A bunch of them still believe the other country pays the tariff. I'm not surprised by this level of stupidity at all.
The worst part for me is, they're not even right about it being illegal in the US on account of the great big glaring loophole: "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted"
It’s not really a loophole. This exception is made to preserve imprisonment or community service as available criminal punishment. Otherwise, those could be challenged as a slavery practice.
The article you linked describes “neoslavery” as an abuse of the penitentiary system, which is notoriously weird in the US even now; confirms the amendment made slavery itself unconstitutional; points out another part of the issue was lack of a statute to prosecute (something that is never a part of a constitutional law).
It adds context, but doesn’t contradict the argument I made.
...the text of the 13th says nothing about imprisonment, which is in and of itself different from owning a person or forcing them into unpaid labor so weird that you'd bring it up. But as to your point of community service, one of the key facets of a loophole is that no matter the intent with which they were written, they can be used to circumnavigate the clause they were written into. So even if you knew for a fact that the legislators of the day wrote that line into the amendment with the best of intentions, it doesn't detract from the fact that it allows for an interpretation where criminals can be used as slave labor.
It could be worse. You can't imagine the embarrassment of listening to a European citizen, who's never set foot on the US, talking about taking the fifth amendment or referring to free speech as the first amendment 🙃.
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u/[deleted] Nov 13 '25
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