site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30699 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

11
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Can anyone who is not Holocaust denier, with SS-man as nickname, can confirm is this summary above is true and accurate?

  • -31

You are someone. You apparently have internet access. Be the change you want to see and verify if Canadian residential school mass graves have actual bodies found or merely widely reported "Archeologists detected what they believed..." but then no bodies were actually produced.

Look, I already dinged someone else about this.

It is completely reasonable for you to look at @SecureSignals's posts with suspicion. "Don't engage in ad hominems" does not mean "You cannot consider someone's history when evaluating how credible they are." But this is not the way to express your doubts. Address the argument, and if you find it questionable because of who's making it, you can just wait and see what other people say (usually you won't need to ask for a debunking if there is a debunking to be made). What we don't want is people flinging "Well, of course you'd say that, you're a Holocaust denier" and "You're just saying that because you're a liberal" back and forth.

The OP does not shy away from responding to critics and providing sources (see his other threads). His posts are content-heavy and often use primary sources. I don’t think it’s a good idea if we all start saying “I don’t like this person’s views, can someone from my in-group verify these claims”? If you don’t trust OP then you can wait for someone’s attempted debunk or take on that role yourself, no?

The OP does not shy away from responding to critics

Very often with a large amount of obfuscation and playing obtuse to a point where it takes 8 back-and-forths to get a semi-straight answer.

providing sources

Par for the course for a gish-galloper.

  • -10

If @do_something had looked at their posting history they would easily have seen that and the length to which @SecureSignals goes to follow the rules of the forum and to engage in constructive discourse.

But that's not what their comment is driven by. It's pure outgroup + cognitive dissonance. They see someone they don't like posting something they don't agree with and they lash out.

People who act like this and the want to get away from them and the degenerative effect they have on discourse are the reason for the motte to exist.

The lack of the usual antagonistic and sneering remarks in Amadans mod post is disappointing for the first time ever. And his validation of the otherization of @SecureSignals and the implication that there might be something 'suspicious' going on is beyond poor form.

If @do_something had looked at their posting history they would easily have seen that and the length to which @SecureSignals goes to follow the rules of the forum and to engage in constructive discourse.

"Goes to great lengths to engage in constructive discourse" is definitely not the pattern I have experienced when interacting with SS (nor, for that matter, has "follow the rules of the forum", though on that count I'm not sure he's actually worse than the median strongly-opinionated-poster here).

Example of the non-constructive discourse pattern of "throw out a bunch of claims, then when those claims are refuted don't acknowledge that and instead throw out a bunch more expensive-to-refute claims" here.

Example of the non-constructive discourse pattern of "throw out a bunch of claims, then when those claims are refuted don't acknowledge that and instead throw out a bunch more expensive-to-refute claims" here.

Downvote all you want but that is exactly the MO I have encountered with him over and over and over again. SS is not a troll, but he is the functional equivalent of one.

Not sure lawyering your way into violating only the spirit of the rules should be that great an excuse to begin with.

This is actually the second excavation to turn up no actual corpses. I don't think there's any basis for doubt that a lot of children died at the residential schools, partly due to the fact that children dying was a common occurrence back then, and partly due to the fact that they were kept in crowded housing that promoted the spread of infectious disease. Poor nutrition and extra susceptibility to European diseases may or may not have been factors.

However, it's clear now that the false positive rate of these GPR investigations is very high (0 for 48, by my count), and representing these hits as the discovery of definite or probable corpses was grossly irresponsible.

I don't remember to what extent the media actively encouraged this misinterpretation, or at least failed to discourage it in their reporting, but a lot of people were under the impression that these GPR surveys provided proof of hundreds of deaths above and beyond those which had already been documented, and/or cover-ups of actual murders.

My name is a snarky reference to the bizarre fixation of the left on the imaginary crime of crossing state lines during coverage of the Rittenhouse case, and has nothing to do with Nazis.

As someone with fairly extensive geophysics experience, GPR is pretty meh and I've always found it weird that it's treated as though it was anything other than a very noisy form of sensing that can only tell you when the subsurface material changes (and even then, the depth and size of the change is hard to ever be sure about). Geophysics is inherently very unreliable when it comes to trying to identify small changes below the surface and I'm very much not surprised that these graves are false positives. Plenty of the actual papers that back up the use of the GPR for this purpose found as much and similar uses, like detecting utilities or animal burrows or cavities is just as unreliable. The effectiveness of GPR also depends on the materials involved, which can reduce your penetration to mere inches.

Do you geophys professionally?

I like to imagine someone geophysing my back yard 2000 years from now finding indications of high heat and excavating my burn pile pit. While interpreting it as some sort of 'ceremonial', offering location.

I've watched too much 'Time Team'.

I did lot in my grad school research, mostly seismic and resistivity. A little professionally afterwards.

Most won't have the resolution to pick up a small, residential burn pit, depending how deep it is anyway. Electrical methods might pick it up, since they're sometimes decent resolution near the surface.

In foundation engineering, finding trash pits and burn pits during development when doing test borings or excavations in long developed areas is pretty common. God forbid you hit an undocumented landfill. That's a good way to get your project delayed ($$$). Sometimes you'll need to have a cultural study done if they think it could be a historical landmark or archeological site, so your idle thoughts aren't too out of line with reality ha.

Could you elaborate a little More on the effects of materials? Does it work at all in wet soils which I imagine absorb microwaves very efficiently?

Well, GPR works based on reflecting em waves, so it runs into the same issues that pure electric geophysical methods and purely mechanical geophysical methods run into. Mechanical challenges like scattering or interference from voids, thin nonrepresentarive layers, layer inversions, boulders, etc. Electrical challenges like water content variations, voids, salt/contamination, etc. They are also generally way lower resolution than the layman would expect.

Electrical methods are generally more sensitive to moisture content, and in my experience, are more likely to detect a change in moisture rather than material (material and moisture are generally correlated). And that's kind of the thing with most geophysical methods, they're telling you when a material changes and by moving your sensing equipment you can see how that change is related to space.

There are GPR "suitability maps" for the US that show vaguely where you can expect GPR to be accurate. I haven't seen one for Canada though, but GPR would be usable in areas with similar surface geology.

Broadly correct, but I would quibble with parts of the framing.

It's certainly true that the 'bodies' found at Kamloops have never been anything more than anomalies found on ground penetrating radar, and that media and activists have never really made any attempt to communicate this to their audiences. The vast majority of people would never realise that these bodies are entirely theoretical and could easily just not be there. Chalk another one up to the media being bullshitters.

However, what I would disagree with in SecureSignals post is the implication that this stuff therefore didn't happen, or that the backlash against the Catholic Church is unjustified. I personally see the 'graves' at Kamloops as a catalyst for action, rather than the substance of the grievance itself. It is undeniable that the Canadian government in association with the Catholic Church basically kidnapped tens of thousands of native children and stuffed them into places like Kamloops, where the conditions were pretty awful (though perhaps not so awful by the standards of the time). Many deaths resulted. Official records from Kamloops say 50 children died there; the true total is likely higher. Though I admit I have little sympathy for the Church to begin with, I don't see the arson of a couple dozen churches to be an outsize reaction to the Church's involvement in residential schools. You reap what you sow.

  • -15

One of the problems with excusing misrepresentations that you think are directionally correct is that many of the people doing so don't know how their own views have been shaped by lies or misrepresentations, building a new layer of bullshit on top of the old one. For instance:

It is undeniable that the Canadian government in association with the Catholic Church basically kidnapped tens of thousands of native children and stuffed them into places like Kamloops, where the conditions were pretty awful (though perhaps not so awful by the standards of the time).

This is how it is often described, but sending your children to residential school was optional.

https://fcpp.org/2018/08/22/myth-versus-evidence-your-choice/

Even the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has helped spread erroneous information. At the final National Gathering in Edmonton, one of the Commission’s information displays stated that, after 1920, criminal prosecution threatened First Nations parents who failed to enrol their children in a residential school. This falsehood, one frequently repeated by supposedly reputable journalists, is a reference to a clause in the revised Indian Act that said children had to be enrolled in some kind of school, a clause that was little different from the Ontario government’s 1891 legislation — nearly 30 years earlier — that made school attendance compulsory for that province’s children up to the age of 14, with legal penalties for failure to comply. Other provinces had similar laws.

And the “criminal prosecution”? The penalty specified by the Indian Act for the “crime” of not sending a child to school was “a fine of not more than two dollars and costs, or imprisonment for a period not exceeding ten days or both.” And as with provincial laws regarding school attendance, there would be no penalty if the child was “unable to attend school by reason of sickness or other unavoidable cause... or has been excused in writing by the Indian agent or teacher for temporary absence to assist in husbandry or urgent and necessary household duties.”

Now if you lived in a location without local schools residential schools were the only ones available, and the percentage of natives living in such locations was higher. But conversely getting out of sending your children to school was easier than it is today, and indeed native enrollment was low:

In 1921, when the revised Indian Act solidified the compulsory attendance of Indigenous children in some kind of school, about 11 percent of First Nations people were enrolled in either a residential school or a federal day school. By 1939, that figure had risen to approximately 15 percent of the First Nations population, but the total enrolment of 18,752 still represented only 70 percent of the 26,200 First Nations children aged 7 to 16. Not until the late 1950s were nearly all native children — about 23 percent of the First Nations population — enrolled in either a residential school (in 1959, about 9,000), a federal day school (about 18,000) or a provincial public school (about 8,000).

And absenteeism among those enrolled was high:

For most of the years in which the IRS operated, between 10 and 15 percent of residential students were absent on any given day

Day school attendance was far worse. In the 253 day schools operating in 1921, only 50 percent of native students were showing up, and until the 1950s, these poorly-funded, inadequately-staffed schools consistently had absentee rates in the 20 percent and 30 percent range. In the 1936-37 academic year, to choose just one example, attendance in Indian day schools sank as low as 63 percent. The only residential school in Atlantic Canada, at Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, was established in part because two previously-established day schools had been forced to close due to poor attendance. Some of the reasons for this absenteeism — the movement of families to areas where seasonal work beckoned, the need to help out at home during the Depression, and the opportunity to take labouring jobs left vacant by servicemen — are understandable, and it is worth noting the the TRC Report acknowledges that very few parents were ever charged or convicted for keeping their children out of school. But children who aren’t in school aren’t getting an education.

The punishment for your children being truant was mild, seems easily avoided by giving an excuse like chronic illness, and most importantly hardly ever enforced to begin with. That is not the sort of coercion required to get parents to send their children to a concentration camp. Native children didn't go to residential schools because they were "kidnapped", they went because their parents believed it was better than the alternatives, including the alternative of not going to school at all. That is compatible with them being low-quality schools, it isn't compatible with the insane rhetoric about them that is prevalent today.

Many deaths resulted.

Many deaths resulted from native americans being biologically more vulnerable to diseases like tuberculosis. Is there even any evidence that the death rate of native children at residential schools was higher than the death rate of native children elsewhere? Skimming chapter 16 ("The deadly toll of infectious diseases: 1867–1939") from the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it looks like the closest they come to an overall comparison instead of talking about individual outbreaks is this:

https://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/9.807830/publication.html

In response to the issues Tucker had raised, Indian Commissioner David Laird reviewed the death rates in the industrial schools on the Prairies for the five-year period ending in the summer of 1903. He concluded that the average death rate was 4%. He compared this to the 4.4% child mortality rate for the ten Indian agencies from which students were recruited for 1902. On this basis, he concluded that “consumption and other diseases are just as prevalent and fatal on the Reserves as in the schools.”

Good finds. Reading those articles seems to indicate that the entire narrative is wrong and this story is one part bigotry against Catholics and one part they are lying to use because that’s what they do.

I wouldn't say the entire narrative is wrong -- regardless of the laws on the books, there was definitely considerable coercion involved in 'encouraging' attendance -- this spin is similar in nature to how the authors of COVID restrictions said things like "nobody's forcing anyone to be vaccinated, we are just stopping them from eating out/leaving the country/etc if they don't".

What is quite pernicious (and I believe originates with the current government) is the spin towards blaming the church (churches actually -- many of the schools were run by protestant denominations, and at least some by non-religious entities) for the issues.

Whoever was running a given school was acting as an agent of the Canadian government -- so that fault for individual behaviour like molestation etc lies with the individuals involved, and the systemic issues (coercion, underfunding, 'cultural assimilation) with the sitting governments. Government has been trying to downplay this since forever, but have suddenly succeeded due to the surge in people who somehow didn't learn about this in elementary school (starting in the late 70s) and think they have discovered some new thing. (which happens to be the government narrative, and has only tenuous relations with the truth) Plus the general propensity for hating Catholics in the water these days I guess.

The Catholics were known to sometimes cover up instances of molestation and other misbehaviour by moving the offenders around and not reporting to authorities -- like many aspects of the story this is bad enough in itself! Yet someone there is the need to invent other things which would be even worse if they were true, but weaken the case IMO considering that they are not.

I guess Id say the systemic issues was just being poor. Which isn’t something your guilty of. It’s not like the Canadian government had unlimited resources. And it sounds like the schools outperformed alternative Options.

Eh, it shades towards Copenhagen Ethics I suppose, but "you touch it you own it" is still pretty valid in this situation. Conditions on reserves (govt related!) and in generally remote areas (not so much) were not great in the late 19th/early 20th centuries -- but if you want to take people away from their homes the bar should be pretty high to ensure that the results are much much better than just leaving them alone. Which very clearly seems not to be the case -- there's the odd satisfied 'customer' of the residential school system out there, but it's legitimately unusual. And normally the super-succesful FN people that you see in business/law/politics had their education in regular mixed day-schools, whether due to not living on the reserve at all or being in the sweet spot of 'reserve too small for its own school' and 'not too far away from regular towns' where it made the most sense for them to go to school with everyone else.

I guess I reject Copenhagen ethics. That’s basically saying we should only build gated communities because then we never interact with the lower class and can’t be blamed for it. Comes up a lot with trade. Like Nike getting yelled at for using cheap labor. Yet those people are better off because the factory is there.

So I disagree the bar needs to be very high. Improving the world should just be improving the world. 21st century mostly leftist ideology leads to worse outcomes.

My point is that the evidence is slim that residential schools succeeded at improving the world -- at best they made "about as bad but in different ways" and many of the people who went there will tell you that it made their lives much much worse.

So my interpretation of Copenhagen Ethics is that it vilifies making the world somewhat better on the basis that you should have made it perfect (see Mother Theresa) -- this seems like a different shade in that the world was made somewhat worse (or at best equally bad) -- so the people responsible for this should be, um, responsible?

EDIT: To be clear, I don't say this from a "leftist ideology" POV -- more like a "people should stay the fuck away from other people's kids as a general rule" one -- which is pretty right wing these days I think?

While you may have a point there about "catalyst for action", what you are suggesting sounds like "It doesn't matter if it's all lies, so long as a conversation was started".

So if some Indigenous woman claims that she was raped, forcibly impregnated, had her baby taken away, and it was sacrificed by the local priest on the altar of the church - that doesn't matter if it's not true, it acted as a catalyst for action and that's the important thing! Because the Catholic Church did Bad Things in the past! Along with the Anglicans, who also operated residential schools, since that was the ideology of the day: give native children a Westernised upbringing so they could fit into mainstream society and be lifted out of primitive superstition and squalour.

Happened to white children as well, there's a long-running similar dispute about mother and baby homes in my country with similar claims of unmarked mass graves. And the movement to send orphan (though often they weren't) British children to new homes in Australia and Canada where they'd become (in time) farmers and settlers but in practice were treated as cheap, disposable labour by the people supposed to be fostering them.

So it's not confined to the Indigenous peoples of the former British Empire/Commonwealth, by any means.

There are certainly grounds to argue about the ideas underpinning that view, and about how indigenous people have been treated badly. But "hey if it's all lies it's okay so long as it's the Indigenous who are telling the lies" is not helping anyone.

Though I admit I have little sympathy for the Church to begin with, I don't see the arson of a couple dozen churches to be an outsize reaction to the Church's involvement in residential schools. You reap what you sow.

And what of the crimes of the Indigenous peoples when they were the ones ruling the lands? I don't think it was all peaceful running around singing with the animals and the trees. Maybe they reaped what they sowed with karma for wars, murders, and massacres? Or is that a case of "one law for me, another for you"?

give native children a Westernised upbringing so they could fit into mainstream society and be lifted out of primitive superstition and squalour.

Honestly I'd love to get an unbiased, clinical review of what exactly the median life outcomes were of receiving a Westernized upbringing through 'the stolen generation' and/or other equivalents versus remaining in remote communities. I've yet to be convinced that the former strategy didn't actually do more good than harm, though it'd be absolute anathema to actually try publish that.

I think you're being uncharitable by calling this a 'lie'. Evidence for 200 child graves in Kamloops has been found. It's not great evidence, It could easily be incorrect, it is being treated as proof when it absolutely isn't. But it is evidence, it hasn't been invented, and the underlying atrocity to which this evidence refers is (to a greater or lesser extent) certainly true.

And let's make your analogy more representative of what has happened. If someone found a cave full of suspicious looking bone shards and says "hey we just found evidence of 200 babies that were killed in ritualistic sacrifice" and the Catholic Church says "nuh-uh, Thiose shards are probably from a goat or something, we only raped, impregnated, and sacrificed the babies of 50 indigenous women at that site. And besides everyone was doing it back then, it was really trendy." Well in that scenario I'm less bothered about the veracity of the find and more about the underlying atrocity. And if a group of indigenous people want to take mortal offense at what happened I think that's pretty fair. And if they burn down a church or two, well I don't advocate for that (I genuinely, honestly do not think it is a good thing that churches were destroyed over this), but it's hard for me to feel any indignation on behalf of the Church.

By way of example, let's say Andy viciously insults David's wife in an argument and David breaks his nose in response. I don't think that’s a good or right thing to do - you shouldn't be going around breaking people's noses because they upset you. David should probably be arrested. But at the same time it's a completely understandable and predictable response, and I have zero sympathy for Andy. Now replace Andy with the Catholic Church and David with Indigenous people.

  • -21

Evidence for 200 child graves in Kamloops has been found. It's not great evidence, It could easily be incorrect, it is being treated as proof when it absolutely isn't.

I mean this leaves out the important context that the evidence has been debunked by further investigation. And that this is mostly not actual indigenous being upset about it, either.

Evidence for 200 child graves in Kamloops has been found.

That's the precise thing we're arguing over; some are saying that it's not evidence, it's blips on ground-penetrating radar which could be any kind of anomaly, and because the tribespeople won't let the ground be excavated, we have no idea if there are 200 child graves or 60 child graves or 50 gopher holes.

But at the same time it's a completely understandable and predictable response, and I have zero sympathy for Andy. Now replace Andy with the Catholic Church and David with Indigenous people.

Which is not what you originally said about it not mattering if it was true or not. Suppose Dave breaks Andy's nose because Tom said "Hey, Andy insulted your wife" but Tom is lying because he wants to get Andy in trouble. Is that okay, then? Is Andy still the bad guy?

I want the truth to come out. If there are 200 graves there, I want that to be known. But someone claiming "There are 200 graves but no you can't check, just believe us" isn't good enough when it comes to a claim like this.

Because there have been similar claims of wrong-doing which turned out to be false and which got the credulous into trouble over jumping the gun:

Sir Cliff took the BBC to court after the broadcaster filmed a police raid on his home in Berkshire in 2014. The footage, which included aerial shots taken from a helicopter, was shown on news bulletins throughout the day.

Officers were investigating an allegation made by a man who claimed he was sexually assaulted by Sir Cliff in 1985. But the singer was never arrested or charged and the case was dropped two years later.

Should I believe the bare word of anyone who claims on here "Psst, shakenvac is a known embezzler and swindler, take it from me, would I lie to you?" and then ostracise you? Wouldn't you like the chance to exonerate your name? Would you find it acceptable if I said "Well my aunt lost a fortune to a swindler, I hate swindlers, so even if it was untrue I think I was still right to splash your name all over social media as a swindler and warn people about you"?

some are saying that it's not evidence, it's blips on ground-penetrating radar which could be any kind of anomaly

Some are wrong. Evidence is "a sign or indication of something". Grave-sized GPR returns 6ft under the ground is evidence of graves. Is it strong evidence? not really. You want more certainty? I don't blame you. But fundamentally, the truth of those 200 graves makes little difference, because...

Suppose Dave breaks Andy's nose because Tom said "Hey, Andy insulted your wife" but Tom is lying because he wants to get Andy in trouble.

It doesnt really matter if Andy insulted Dave's wife on the 13th October 2022 when we know he has done so every other day for the last 3 years. We know what we need to about Andy's big mouth.

It doesn't really matter if Sir Cliff sexually assaulted man X if it's already proven that he assaulted 24 other men*. We know what we need to about Sir Cliff's perversions.

It doesnt really matter if you accuse me of being a swindler with little basis if I am known and proven to have swindled 50 people. We know what we need to about my swindling tendancies.

And it doesnt really matter whether it was 50 or 200 children died in Kamloops if it is already known that thousands of children were kidnapped, abused, had their identity erased, and ultimately died of neglect by the Church. We know what we need to about the crimes of the Church.

*I know this isn't true, I'm making a point.

  • -11

Grave-sized GPR returns 6ft under the ground is evidence of graves. Is it strong evidence? not really. You want more certainty? I don't blame you. But fundamentally, the truth of those 200 graves makes little difference, because...

Oh holy crap. Ever heard of a thing called "middens"? By your logic, that means that indications of middens are really graves, and it's okay to burn down the buildings of the people who dug those middens because fuck evidence and proof and truth.

At this point, I don't even know how to argue this with you. You seem to be standing firm that you don't care if it's all lies, because it's all in the cause of bashing the Catholic Church. Well, goodnight, goodbye, and good luck to you, and I hope to God you never get into a court case where your fate will be decided on "I don't care what the evidence says, this guy looks sketchy so I say he's guilty and he should go to jail for ten years".

If you want to argue it's all lies, then do so. You are arguing that the 200 graves are lies. Those 200 graves are not "all". they are ~1% of the enormity of the Residential Schools System, for which the church bears serious responsibility, and you have at no point indicated that you dispute the other 99%.

Either Dispute the evils of the Residential Schools, or admit that the Church fucked up.

  • -21

Either Dispute the evils of the Residential Schools, or admit that the Church fucked up.

So it's not about dead bodies, you're engaging in good old-fashioned The Church Is Bad.

Are you protesting the Residential School System in Australia as well? Or the US native reservations? Because the Catholic Church wasn't involved with those.

My own view on this is that the other churches are let off the hook because they've fallen in line with the Zeitgeist and do what they're told around sexual matters, from divorce to LGBT rights. The Catholic Church is the remaining large Western church which officially teaches "no" on the social liberalism, so it's the number one target for white progressives who don't care about the little Indians but do care about "how dare they say that fornication is a sin?"

I got this in the volunteer-mod queue, and I rated it Neutral. I think your post is bad, but it's bad in a "downvote" sense rather than a "ban" sense i.e. I think you're advocating something that's bad and destructive to society, but I don't think the way in which you're advocating it is especially destructive to this community.

The thing you appear to be advocating is some kind of epistemic hell in which lies are okay if they have the correct political results, and truth-telling is bad if it undermines those results. I think that this burns the commons; it cannot be universalised because common knowledge that the media are lying political liars would zero out the ability of the media to affect politics while also removing the capability to inform the populace of important true things.

Go figure that despite the apparent mountains of evidence of the Church's sadism and neglect, with confirmed body piles and graves attesting to it, the one story that became international news, drew commentary from the highest levels of Canadian politics, and prompted the very public lowering of national flags in solemn condemnation, might just be a load of bullshit.

Funny that. Is there nothing of interest to mine from this phenomenon? Are you comfortable with that kind of behavioral algorithm being rared to let rip when it comes to a target you have more sympathy for?

This is my same problem with the discourse over policing of minorities in the US. With all the potential cases that could be used as a solid starting point for discussion, why do most of the examples end up looking false, more complicated than their initial appearances indicate, or are fucky in some other way? Meanwhile, videos of black officers joyously beating a kid to death runs the news for about a week and I doubt anybody remembers his name since.

The truth always matters.

And it doesnt really matter whether it was 50 or 200 children died in Kamloops if it is already known that thousands of children were kidnapped, abused, had their identity erased, and ultimately died of neglect by the Church. We know what we need to about the crimes of the Church.

It matters a lot if 50 or 200 children died in Kamloops of natural causes, and not in greater numbers than would have happened elsewhere, or if they died because they were starved, abused, or murdered. The first would be a tragedy and you can certainly condemn the church for taking them from their homes in the first place, but claiming that the people who ran the schools were literally mass-murdering children is a crime of much greater enormity. "The Church did bad and misguided things in the past in less enlightened times" is not the same as "The Church conspired to commit genocide out of sheer evilness." You don't get to claim the latter (and use it to justify retribution) and then say it doesn't really matter which is true.

The truth always matters.

I never said it didn't. I said it makes little difference. If you'll forgive the invoking of Godwin's law, we could have a spirited debate over whether it was 2000 or 4000 jews were shot in some nameless polish town in 1940. While the truth of that question would matter in some sense, the conclusion wouldn't change the nature of the Holocaust, nor the guilt of the Nazis. Same principle.

but claiming that the people who ran the schools were literally mass-murdering children is a crime of much greater enormity.

Not something that I ever claimed.

"The Church conspired to commit genocide out of sheer evilness."

Also not something that I ever claimed.

Even if we accept, for the sake of argument, that the death rates in the Residential Schools were no worse than in tribal communities, and the abuse meted out in these Schools was hugely overstated, and that the Church only had the best interests of these poor ignorant savages in their hearts, and every single death was dutifully recorded with a heavy heart and a good Christian burial... Even if we accept all that, the Church was still instrumental in stealing these children away from their parents and expunging their culture and destroying their identities and burying them hundreds of miles from their homes when they died. That alone makes me have zero sympathy for the Church having a handful of cases of arson on their hands.

I'm not saying the arson justified per se, grievance resolution by arson is no way to run a society. I'm just saying I get it. If Scientologists had spirited away my great uncle when he was 6 and buried him in one of their godforsaken compounds I'd probably want to burn down a few buildings too.

  • -21

Are you as sympathetic to burning down random buildings owned by indigenous Canadians? After all, their ancestors certainly genocided conquered tribes a bunch of times throughout their history and prehistory.

The sins (genocide) you describe are the sins of every settler society, everywhere (Canada, USA, Australia). In the Canadian instance the government directed the Churches to run these institutions, similar to how Churches were directed to run orphanages and hospitals. The government lacked the efficacy to administer social programs and delegated it to charitable institutions that they could skimp on funding. I feel you are focusing on the churches when if the government had tasked these schools with any other group in these settler societies at this time I find it difficult to believe the exact same crimes would have not occurred. The counterfactual I have mind being some Montreal Atheistic 1920s society given the same task and resources would also have the same native assimilation mindset (it infects the society at large) and their school would have had the same lack of funding, leading to the exact same problems, but the curriculum would have no Theology and more Philosophy.

The Churches set up these schools because the government told to. I think you are accepting the sleight of hand that the Churches are somehow uniquely to blame when the ENTIRE society was broadly convinced of the Imperialistic mindset that created the milieu for these crimes. The Churches were the apparatus to accomplish the aims of the larger settler society, Residential schools were Canadian government policy. The Canadian settler descended people wanted this at that time.

So the while Churches are definitely not innocent, the emphasis on their role and crimes should not diminish the guilt of the government and wider settler society that willed this to happen.

If the Church arson cases don't deserve sympathy, are all Canadian government buildings also fair targets for such treatment? If individuals not connected directly to the crimes are able to be antagonized are members of broad social groups (ie White Canadians) also able to be antagonized?

“I'm not saying the arson justified per se, grievance resolution by arson is no way to run a society. I'm just saying I get it. If Scientologists had spirited away my great uncle when he was 6 and buried him in one of their godforsaken compounds I'd probably want to burn down a few buildings too.”

I’d say this is argument that is safe to just drop. The problem is the people with their Church’s being burned down aren’t the people who ran the residential schools. Uninvolved people are being hurt. And in general only bad things come from holding people guilty of their ancestors or weakly related people.

And the thing is many people don’t give the same understanding. Trudeau talks about these residence school but when was he compassionate to truckers who had an actual grievance directly from him. Or the right justifies 1/6 because well the FBI did interfere in the election and they were harmed. And I’ll take that justification often. I’m not even sure if the people who did the arson are people who had a connection to harm or more of an antifa group.

There is probably some long posts someone could do on Mexico and similar issues. Where I think even many on the left would need to admit Christian culture was better than Mayan culture. And where the natives and the westerners did a fairly good job of creating one people.

I never said it didn't. I said it makes little difference. If you'll forgive the invoking of Godwin's law, we could have a spirited debate over whether it was 2000 or 4000 jews were shot in some nameless polish town in 1940. While the truth of that question would matter in some sense, the conclusion wouldn't change the nature of the Holocaust, nor the guilt of the Nazis. Same principle.

Well, no, it's not, because in this case we really are disputing the truth of what actually happened, not just quibbling over numbers.

Even if we accept all that, the Church was still instrumental in stealing these children away from their parents and expunging their culture and destroying their identities and burying them hundreds of miles from their homes when they died

Sure, most people agree that the residential schools were a bad idea.

Since you're so fond of analogies, here's another one: we all (sigma a few contrarians) agree slavery was a bad thing. Your argument is equivalent to saying "Hey, how about that time the U.S. Army rounded up black people in every town in the South and gunned them all down and buried them in mass graves by the side of the road?" And in response to "Really, do you have any evidence this actually happened?" you are going straight to "Well, it doesn't matter so long as we know that at least once the U.S. Army probably killed some black people, and anyway, what are you, a slavery apologist?"

I'm not saying the arson justified per se, grievance resolution by arson is no way to run a society. I'm just saying I get it. If Scientologists had spirited away my great uncle when he was 6 and buried him in one of their godforsaken compounds I'd probably want to burn down a few buildings too.

And hopefully you'd go to prison for a very long time if you acted on that desire.

More comments

Can you clearly state what you think the Church did bad? Kid dying of disease and being buried doesn’t strike me as bad. The mass grave thing seems to be a desire to associate this with far worse things. Are you accusing the church of executions? Otherwise why does this matter.

Complicit in the abduction of children by the Canadian Government, subjected them to emotional and physical abuse, often looked after them pretty poorly, and as a result many children died of preventable diseases. and of course, the whole point of the exercise was to expunge their culture from them. Which is, uh, bad.

I mean, is it really that difficult to see where the natives are coming from?

I think if I kidnapped your child, took him half a world away to learn Swahili and African culture and have that dumb Christianity beaten out of him, and then sent you a letter saying 'Sorry, young Mswati (that was his new name) died of malaria.' I think you'd probably feel a tad aggrieved.

  • -13

We do this every single day in America. What do you think schools in America do? Expunge bad culture teach good culture. The deaths honestly just sound like poor people deaths.

I’m fairly certain the people upset about this incident are the same people shoving pride and blm flags down people’s throats. The problem here just seems to be Christians = bad.

I have no issue with teaching poor people higher culture. Perhaps, I’m not being fair here but I don’t see anything obviously wrong with taking an outgroup and trying to incorporate them into your civilization.

Whether the conditions were particularly bad I don’t know. Would take a lot of study to differentiate.

Expunge bad culture teach good culture.

We used to that. Do you have children in school? We're homeschooling, now.

The view now is that previous attempts to inculcate native peoples with the mindset and skills necessary for survival in western civilization is genocide.

I don't know what definition of genocide was available to them at the time.

I suspect the alternative was a more immediate form of genocide.

The deaths honestly just sound like poor people deaths.

They weren't Poor People deaths though were they? They were Ward of the Church deaths. When you steal children away from their parents you get to take responsibility for what happens to them.

I have no issue with teaching poor people higher culture.

it was hardly """just""" that. If they had managed to do so without kidnapping, abuse, beatings, and deaths by neglect they'd have far less of a case to answer today, eh?

Whether the conditions were particularly bad I don’t know

Bad compared to conditions back at the tribe? Probably unknowable. They were certainly worse than they could have been. And like I said, when you steal children away from their parents you get to take responsibility for what happens to them. If you find that too burdensome feel free to not do it. Or engage in apologism for those that did.

I disagree. I don’t think you would be responsible for every death. You would have resources and technology level of the time and place. I would agree they are responsible for deaths from beatings (murder is a crime) or from neglect (if they withheld food). I’m not entirely sure of the exact time period for this but if they died of 19th century diseases or I believe it included the time period of the Spanish flu (which did kill younger people) then they were not responsible.

There is a bit of cultural relativism going on here. I don’t believe that is true and we have forgotten this. I think it’s a good thing to provide these children with a better education. Something feels wrong to me with NOT trying to educate these kids because of who their parents were.

Certainly if this happened today you would have a standard of basically zero deaths. But that is because we solved a lot of disease.

Whether the conditions were particularly bad I don’t know

Bad compared to conditions back at the tribe? Probably unknowable.

Well, there you have it. You don't even know if these schools had worse or better conditions for the children than they would have had at home, yet you're willing to blame the church for the deaths.

They were certainly worse than they could have been.

Perfection is never an option nor a reasonable standard.

And like I said, when you steal children away from their parents you get to take responsibility for what happens to them.

OK, suppose the state finds a cult who rape their children and sacrifice half of them to dark gods on their 16th birthday. The state takes all the children away to a group home, where a few of them die of ordinary accidents. Do you blame the state? It's the same principle.

More comments

It's not just the media; various First Nations tribes ALSO trumpet the GPR results as being proof of large numbers of bodies being anonymously buried.

However, what I would disagree with in SecureSignals post is the implication that this stuff therefore didn't happen

What stuff didn't happen? There were residential schools. The conditions there were often bad. They were an attempt to "civilize" the Indians. What didn't happen is large numbers of kids being killed or dying and then being surreptitiously buried to cover it up, and that's what's implied or sometimes claimed outright.

Official records from Kamloops say 50 children died there; the true total is likely higher.

On what evidence do you claim the true total is higher?

I don't see the arson of a couple dozen churches to be an outsize reaction to the Church's involvement in residential schools.

This is not a standard applied to any other crime. If I had relatives at the Zwaanendael Colony do I get to burn down Nantichoke tribal headquarters?

I just want to point out you are advocating for violence against innocent people from a story that ended up being false.

Property damage does lead to real death. People depend on property to support their life. In the case of a church people depend on their community church for socialization etc. Even if there are no direct deaths there could be a 78 year old whose community connection are based around that church. Who well life falls apart without it.

I guess it’s good we have a few people from the left popping up. But advocating for violence to innocent people seems radical to me. I could just as easily write something like the summer riots were violent so there’s nothing wrong with fire bombing a lot of Democrat office space. You reap what you sow. Atleast in this case you would have people involved with causing riots and not people with some historic connection.

That being said I don’t even understand what people think is wrong here other than Catholic hate. Your telling me you think it’s wrong that the church with the government educated poor kids?

Were those conditions more awful than the usual condition of native children in their own communities? Was their average death rate lower?

The poor conditions in their home communities were also the fault of the Canadian government, so relative rates aren't a very convincing argument.

EDIT: Nevermind, I've fallen for the narrative. Death rates at residential schools reached acceptable mortality rates by 1949 (Source Canada’s Residential Schools: Missing Children and Unmarked Burials (PDF), p17, from this website).

(As a sidenote, my thought process was "Why the downvotes? Motteposters are usually smarter than that. I'll show them with FACTS and LOGIC." lol.)

I don't find that plausible at all.

You don't think that the conditions on reserves are the responsibility of the Federal government, or you don't think that they were bad, or what?

How familiar are you with Canadian history?

I find implausible and frankly preposterous the notion that the authority of the federal government and the Church in Canada over local aborigines resulted in an increase of average child mortality among that population. The idea that the average aborigine child had a higher chance of surviving into adulthood before the evil colonizers showed up is simply ludicrous.

What are you talking about? Do you think that they were hopping in a time machine to get to their "home" in the 1860s when they were attending school in the 1960s?

Of course the conditions improved in a hundred years. You've correctly identified that it's simply ludicrous to deny that, but I'm not sure why you felt it was relevant.

In fact, let's imagine an alternate history: Colonization, settlement, and the Treaties happen like normal, but then the native population gets locked in and experiences zero changes in welfare/wealth/happiness/etc. from the pre-contact baseline. Would you think "Wow, the Federal Government is doing a great job. We haven't worsened their nasty, brutish, and short lives at all!"?

Maintaining the status quo doesn't meet my standards, and neither do the (frankly huge) improvements we have done in reality. This goes double when you cast your eye back a few decades.

According to these accusations (to the extent they can even be called that), in which timeframe were these mass murders of Native children committed?

More comments

Honestly this is what perplexes me the most about indigenous culture war. I feel like one side reads the horrors of colonialism, but then doesn't engage with the horrors of general pre-modern human life.

Why would I engage with the horrors of pre-modern life? Residential schools were only shutting down around the 1960s, so it's appropriate to judge them based on contemporary standards.

More comments

I assume that is due to ignorance, as there is no Disney movie with the horrors of pre-colonization life, it must have been rainbows and flowers and all that noble savage jazz.

Is that necessarily relevant? For example, if a child was taken from their parents by CPS for their safety and went into foster care with a much more functional family, which offered him a better life than his alternatives with his previous family or in a orphanage or whatever, would that child still not have legitimate grievance if they were mistreated in a lesser way by the foster family?

It’s worth noting that this usually isn’t what happens- conditions in foster care are generally horrific.

Is that still true? I know several foster families, and they seem about equal with other middle class families, aside from greater compatibility challenges.

If they could properly vet, it’s probably no worse. But there are enough families slippping through the cracks that you end up with a lot of dysfunctional people as foster parents.

Who judges the mistreatment? The child is likely a poor judge.

The intervention in your hypothetical results in material improvement and better life. Grievance over something you can't change and resulted in better outcomes than non-intervention seems poorly considered. It may make the people who intervened wish they left you with your shitty birth family. Is that a better outcome, if it dissuades future positive interventions?

That depends on your definition of 'legitimate'. (Yeah, I actually just said that.) If 'legitimate grievance' in this context means 'grievances, when proven, used as justification to enact organizational reform of CPS so that no child abuse is committed under their watch in the future', then I think the answer is very obviously yes. Having said that, this is not at all what's happening in this particular case. Let's just be clear about this. This is simply pure culture war, nothing else.

Can you not open links? Yes, the summary is accurate. Whatever you think of his agenda and sources, I have never seen SecureSignals post anything he didn't believe was accurate before. Generally if you suspect someone is wrong or lying the onus is on you to debunk them.

I think part of rationality is assessing the reliability of your sources. If you don't have expert knowledge, then you need to defer to other people, and I don't blame do_something for being mistrustful of believing someone who spends most of his time on this site denying the most well documented mass killing in history.

Perhaps, but a larger part of rationality has always been equipping yourself with the tools to assess reliability on your own. But do_something didn't 'defer to other people' they straight up ignored the post and loudly asked for someone else to read it for them. It is an ad hominem argument in its purest form - no attempt at an argument is made, only an appeal to the op's status as a witch, to discredit them without having to bother with discrediting their arguments.

In my opinion, as a fan of the motte and someone who doesn't want it to turn into the rest of the internet, that post is the equivalent of squatting in the middle of the commons and taking a big greasy shit. I don't care how you justify it, I think it makes all our lives worse.

Side note - never forget that in the eyes of the perpetually offended, you are already tainted. You have been since long before SecureSignals ramped up his obsession. No amount of loudly declaring your disagreement with him will save you, nothing can save any of us now.

Oh don't worry, I'm not posturing against the resident Holocaust denier for my own sake. I just think he degrades the quality of the conversation here by bringing every other conversation back to his own pet pseudohistoric topic.

I realise that a place like this is vulnerable to witches and is to some extent a necessary compromise we have to make, but damn is it annoying.

The National Post is one of Canada's two major national newspapers (along with the Globe and Mail). This doesn't count as "expert knowledge" in my mind, and would go a long way towards determining its reliability (whatever answer you end up with).

If you want some background to this story I follow a substack that seems reputable (woke watch Canada). As far as I can tell it's actually a pretty interesting case of the facts not being covered by the msm.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats