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RococoBasilica  Actually a Quality Retribution  2yr ago (astralcodexten.substack.com)   1992 thread views

Astral Codex Ten: A Columbian Exchange

astralcodexten.substack.com

Scott wades into the Culture War again with a delightfully dorky dialogue about Columbus Day. Contains lots of references to the other other Scott.

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just because they were there first

One of the main problems is that no one currently anywhere was "there first"

The proto-groups of what we call the "Native Americans" or "indigenous people" were violent genocidal colonizers who just happened to win prior to contact with recorded history. The ghosts of the Anasazi and all that.

Everyone everywhere is the descendent of violent colonizers, because that's who gets to have territory. The proto-jews got colonized by the egyptians, philistines, assyrians, babylonians, greeks, romans, persians, arabs, persians again, egyptians again, the crusaders, the kurds, egyptians again again, the turks, and the british, and now stand accused of colonizing their own long-ago historical home. Who owns the Levant?

That area got worked over a bit more than most, but this pattern holds true everywhere. The spanish control Spain, but that wasn't true six hundred years ago. Even who we call "spanish" are mostly itinerant "barbarian" tribes who stole big chunks of land off the declining Roman empire, who in turn stole it from previous owners, who almost certainly weren't the "original" inhabitants. Shall we have land acknowledgements in France to memorialize the dispossession of the Gauls by Caesar?

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