Why would a criminal organization that trafficked you into a place where you have no legal recourse ever stop exploiting you?

They are Ethnic Chinese who were operating scam centers in collaboration with junta at northern area Laukkai.

There are more at shwe Koko area.

The catch-22 is that these people are nearly always immigrants, and the criminals have taken their documentation, so the best case scenario is they get rescued and then deported, possibly via a spell in immigration detention. The worst case scenario is the cops turn up, laugh, collect the day's bribe money and then the person who called the cops gets beaten.

(this is an important dynamic in sex trafficking as well)

Why would people from place X be more interested in abuses happening in place X than in a country literally half a planet away that they have no control over? Truly a mystery, probably they are just DEI crazies (whatever that means).

Real slavery, like what's permitted via the Thirteenth Amendment and propagated by over-policing black communities? Pretty sure the "American Left" is keenly aware of this, even if terminally-online armchair policy analysts engaging in whataboutisms aren't.

This is kinda the whole crux of prison and police reform in the US; you may want to read "The New Jim Crow". Decent primer.

You could, of course, demand/wish/hope that right-wing politicians did anything about slavery in foreign nations. But somehow “trying to do anything good” is on left-wing politicians, while right-wing politicians, without repercussions, can thwart all anti-slavery efforts made by the US over several decades.

Like ending 69 global initiatives to end child labor, forced labor and trafficking: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/27/trump-cuts-c...

US politics in a nutshell. In order to feel you’ve contributed to a conversation, you can just yell DEI and be done with it.

In the chart, it says 大海 (dàhǎi, lit. big sea) above "SEA", which means 'ocean'.

It was reported in the very first paragraph of the article and in countless other articles the past few years: these people are kidnapped and kept as slaves. Nobody decided "yep, I want to get kidnapped during my relaxing trip to Thailand and be transported to the Laos/Myanmar border to be beaten half to death and take on call center work with the risk of being murdered should I refuse."

Because that is what is happening. People who get kidnapped and refuse to work are being murdered. This isn't call center work. Some people may be doing this voluntarily around the world, but this article is specifically about people who are being held as literal slaves with zero chance of walking out alive on their own free will. And it's worsened by the fact the governments of Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar (or what's left of their government), and Thailand are all complicit in this. It brings in big bucks, and there are reports of police even bringing people back to the compounds if they somehow escape.

Just because you talked to one (or many) who chose the job freely, doesn't mean the ones in SE Asia are the same...

The captive ones do the scamming via text anyway, and they'd get beaten or worse if they don't do as wanted. "Just send some coded message", your incompassionate mind might say.. sadly not everyone is as wise as you, and it's hard to be so when they can cut your head and throw you into a river in a lawless part of the world.

Well, let's just hope that if you get kidnapped, enslaved and forced into labour, someone will be kinder to you then you were to them.

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This probably has more to do with a power vacuum in which lawlessness arises instead of the ideology that is at power.

But in this case this is not about politics, it's about local power and local control, and Laos government have very little of either of it. Laos communism and Vietnam communism are very similar, but you don't here the same about Vietnam, because Vietnam is easier to control due to geographical terrain and investment by USSR and china after the vietnam war. Laos still have areas with unexploded personal mines and ammunition (the "joke" there is that US pilots couldn't aim for shit, the reality is that vietcongs used Laos jungle path to encircle US soldiers, and so the US made those path unusable). Laos have way less roads, rougher terrain, and mines. You have basically local feudalism. Imagine colombia, but ten time worse.

As opposed to capitalism, which as we all know works flawlessly. The free hand of the market keeps everything running smoothly. There’s always competition for the benefit of the customer, never collusion. There aren’t just a few bit players controlling everything, everyone has equal opportunity. And of course who can forget trickle down economics, where giving more money to the richest people made every one of us richer.

Capitalism’s most outstanding feature is that no matter how hard it tears one’s asshole, it keeps people begging for more with the false promise that they too one day will have their turn as the selfish oppressors doing the pounding, and that’s a good thing for everyone actually, for some reason.

Is there any ideology applied societally at the scale of those two which hasn’t failed to deliver?

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this really has little to do with communism. after all the vietnam war etc concluded, that area kind of got left to itself by the powers that be.

It's a small country that was given a political system to be a client-state of a hegemonic regional power, and then the hegemon abandoned them, they don't have valuable resources like crude oil or gold, and they end up with underdeveloped state institutions. they aren't really failed states, but more so "unfinished" states

similar examples include belize, papua new guinea (abandoned by australia), East Timor, vanuatu, djibouti, maldives etc. some marxist, some british, portuguese, french, etc

in many of these countries you really can do what you want. belize is not much more than a forestry plantation with 19th century english corporate law and a few bars in the capital ("Belize City").

Laos is a pretty odd state. I looked up their official news site once expecting to find North Korea style propaganda, but it was instead surprisingly straightforward about a lot of day to day problems. I also had some contact many years ago with their one Linux/Free Software enthusiast. My impression is that it's a fairly weak state, and the main reason the communists are technically still in charge is that nobody really wants the job of ruling Laos particularly much.

Is there anything that capitalism did that is different from what it preaches?

Why though? The essence of communism is banditism