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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30623 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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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?

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