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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   32902 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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The simple counter-argument would be that 'stolen' land remains 'stolen' no matter how much time passes, wheras 'gifted' land (or rather, 'gifted' citizenship) is fair and legitimate.

Adverse possession is an ancient legal principle because at a certain point title being clear is more important to everyone’s wellbeing compared to determining who is the moral owner.

But if the land is stolen it's not theirs to give.

Aboriginal activists have a mantra that Australia "Always was, always will be" Aboriginal land. That necessarily implies that Vietnamese immigrants have no right to be here - it was the white people that let them in.

That's a good explanation, though I suspect that the identity/oppression framework is still more fundamental than this. Many of the same people who claim that white Americans still deserve to be called colonialists would probably fiercely defend the Americanness of recent non-white illegal immigrants.

A sign that, when they aren't thinking about it, even the left are natural rights libertarians rather than social constructivists about property rights.

Or, like a lot of people, consistency matters much less than vibes and being right™

All land is stolen so it's nobody's to give.

The plain and evident truth is that some people believe in ethno-nationalism for everybody that specifically is not Western.

There was an interesting argument I heard that, because the fall of Constantinople (1453) and the colonisation of the New World (1493, Hispaniola) are near contemporaneous, anyone who thinks that the colonisation/conquest of the Americas is fundamentally illegitimate is basically arguing that 'historical conquest' became 'illegitimate landgrab' sometime in that very specific 40 year window.

Why "anyone"? There are plenty of people who think that both of those conquests were illegitimate.

My ears will be open to this argument when they start doing land acknowledgements in Turkey.

"We stand today on the ancestral homelands of the Ionian Greeks"

IMO the Reconquista (1492) also fits in quite interestingly here.

There are a number of leftists trying to claim the reconquista was islamophobic and keep citing the caliphate of granada as a tolerant multiracial polity that had to be crushed by racist Christians. For leftists muslims must both be eternally present in Europe and free of all sin in order to justify mass importation and displacement of locals powers. Once the muslims are in place they will loyally vote in socialist feminists to bring forth the anticapitalist paradise where childless intellectuals are the final arbiters of justice and resource distribution. Nothing for proles, tokens for pets, everything for themselves.

Gifted by the illegitimate Norman government of Britain?

Gifted by the democratically elected governments of Britain since the early 1950s, presumably.

The only moral action is to use Neanderthal DNA to bring back some Neanderthals and then abandon Europe to them.

Non-Africans have what, 3% Neanderthal? I daresay there's more Neanderthal DNA in those lands than there ever was under the rule of pure Neanderthals.

Yes, terminating competing land claims if there are no survivors, but not terminating land claims if there are survivors, encourages leaving no survivors.

Thus de-extinction - the land claims return even if there were no survivors.

Truly ethics for dead people.

Well, this brings up one interesting counter argument (which I don't particularly agree with). When I argue with people about land acknowledgements, and bring up that I think that they're stupid because every land is stolen land, the only interesting argument I heard in return is that since the native Americans's descents are still around, it's important to give land acknowledgements at events for native Americans as a sign of respect. Basically respect for the living. However, the people the native Americans had long ago slaughtered to get their land are long gone (as are the neanderthals), so there's no reason to acknowledge their previous ownership.

To me this sounds like they're saying we only need to apologize for the past if the descendants of the victims are still around. This quickly gets to a repugnant conclusion, which is that in some ways it's better to have killed off an entire population then leave any descendents, because if there are no descendents, there's no need to apologize.

I think this also sounds similar to another argument, which is that the only reason white people are held so guilty for slave owning is because previous slave owning populations sterilized the slaves, or the slaves otherwise went extinct before the modern era. This makes it sound like the real "sin" of white people which makes them distinct from other slave owning populations, is that they freed the slaves, and gave them enough resources that their descendents lived to the modern age. Once again, no descendents, no guilt. And white people are demonized as "literally the worst", when in fact they were one of the few groups of people noble enough to end slavery.

This makes it sound like the real "sin" of white people which makes them distinct from other slave owning populations, is that they freed the slaves, and gave them enough resources that their descendents lived to the modern age.

Copenhagen ethics strikes again. This also naturally applies to sexism and racism.

noble enough to end slavery

Yeah, now it's the people that solved the problems that are more bound than those for whom they solved the problems for. And while you could argue that it's not really nobility that ended these practices, and more just good business sense (slavery is not economical in the face of industrialization, and the British were the most industrialized leading to them being the most anti-slavery) with a side of taking the comparatively-unindustrialized colonies down a few pegs (which also applied to the southern US), that is not the argument most of the nags use. They do it just to nag as is their nature.

slavery is not economical in the face of industrialization, and the British were the most industrialized leading to them being the most anti-slavery

I’ve seen this explanation before but thinking about it now it no longer makes sense to me.

Wasn’t it mostly just the island of Britain itself which lead the word in industrialisation while they still controlled lots of poorly developed colonies? Why would Britain, where slavery had already been dead for hundreds of years, developing industrially change the profitability of using slaves in areas of the empire with little to no industry?

Slavery never caught on in the British isles because they had population in excess; the same time that the US was still using slave labor had the British loosing children in mining accidents.

And despite eliminating the slave trade in the early 1800s, they didn't manumit slaves in the Caribbean holdings till around the 1840s.

If you want to be very, very cynical, the British anti-slave movement was a mix of virtue signaling and economic tactics to try and neuter an up and coming economic super-power.

Please excuse the lack of sources. It's early morning for me and I'm being lazy.

Slavery never caught on in the British isles because they had population in excess;

I learned something new looking this up, that Scotland still had slaves in the coal mines until 1799, but my understanding is that England (and by extension Ireland and Wales) didn’t use slaves domestically simply because it hadn’t been accepted under common law since the 12th century.

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I don't know anything about the economics of slavery, so I'm just trying to understand. But why does having population in excess make slavery less enticing? I understand you can get lots of cheap labor if you have excess population. But at the same time, slavery is free labor, and wouldn't having excess population mean you have more people to enslave?

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Yes but did native britons (not those of Saxon or Norman or Dane decent) vote for that?

Hah yes. The simple counter-counter argument would be, do the people who stole the land originally (as the natives of America did) really have much of a leg to stand on when they tell us we shouldn't have stolen it from them?

Many of the native Americans who died or were displaced as a result of the European conquest had never personally conquered anything, they simply happened to be descended from people who had conquered the land earlier. Should an entire ethnic group be held responsible for the actions of some of its members, many of whom are not even members of the present generation?

Should an entire ethnic group be held responsible for the actions of some of its members, many of whom are not even members of the present generation?

This isn't about "holding responsible". It merely means they* should get no claim on what was never rightfully theirs in the first place.

Aside from, as others have pointed out, this being a response to just the same argument in the other direction.

*"they" meaning "the ethnic group". This is assuming an ethnic group may have land claims, but if not, there naturally isn't a claim either.

I definitely think they shouldn't be. But unfortunately, some people think it is OK to hand down guilt through the generations like you describe, which is why we have the land acknowledgements to begin with.

Should an entire ethnic group be held responsible for the actions of some of its members, many of whom are not even members of the present generation?

I would guess that most people here would say "of course not." Concepts like race guilt and blood guilt are noxious. (I'd actually be interested in hearing from someone who believes in them earnestly).

It's almost always brought up, though, in response to claims that white people bear collective race guilt for their ancestors winning against indigenous people. And that's kind of a pretty weird standard: why should race guilt only start applying once the crimes that impart us with race guilt have stopped?

Honestly, it's sort of dehumanizing to historical Native Americans. It reduces them to little fairy children dancing in the forest, totally innocent of all sin until the evil Whites came and ruined their utopia. They become dumb creatures lacking all agency, only existing to function as symbols in internecine white conflict.

Noted liberal professor proves your point. And then, probably, masturbates

In some ways it's even more complicated than that: I learned relatively recently that the Black Hills famous for the Little Bighorn and Wounded Knee incidents weren't traditionally Lakota land, and had, at the time, been recently taken by the Lakota from the Cheyenne in 1776.

History is full of incidents like this.

People naively assume the Incan and Aztec empires were thousands of years old. In fact, they were both only about 100 years old at the time of the conquistadors.

Innumerable conquests and genocides must have happened in the New World before Columbus showed up. We don't know about them simply because they were never written down.

I see you also listen to The Rest is History! Brilliant podcast.

Before Columbus the Americas had a low disease burden meaning the check on population had to be war and starvation. I'm guessing they fought before they let their kids die of starvation so there was probably constant war over food.

I'd say absolutely not. But you must know that that argument applies to us as decendents of European settlers, too. @shakenvac was bringing up an argument that the amount of time and generations that pass do not matter.

Personally I disagree with the notion of race guilt and I also disagree that stolen land remains stolen no matter how much time passes. I see no morality in judging the innocent descendants of conquerors for what their ancestors did. It's another matter, I suppose, if the descendants revel in the actions of their ancestors and plan to continue acting in a similar fashion themselves. But that does not apply to most modern Europeans.

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