The Remains of the US Airmail Beacon System | Hacker News Reader

The Remains of the US Airmail Beacon System

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32 pointsbriandear14 comments

I was fortunate enough to use the airmail beacon system to navigate a flight between Helena and Missoula, MT several years ago. I did my initial flight training in Missoula and didn’t quite realize how rare the air beacon system really was. One night I did a training flight between the two cities using primarily the beacons and it was like that scene in Lord of the Rings. There is very little light pollution at night out there in the mountains, and the beacons were clearly visible on top of several peaks, like a breadcrumb trail leading me along. It’s still one of my favorite aviation memories.

Sadly, some years ago Montana Aeronautics announced that they won’t be repairing broken beacons anymore. I think there’s only a few remaining, not enough to navigate by.

"In the mid-19th century the Wild West was largely unexplored."

Whenever a citizen of the US says "unexplored" he means "unexplored by Europeans". A native American once made the point to a younger me, if he would "discover" the house of his neighbour the way Europeans "discovered" and explored North America, he would go to jail.

Yes, the article is written from the Colonial perspective. Whenever a citizen of the US says unexplored they mean it from their cultural positionality. Shocking!

The analogy presented is flawed because your friend discovering a house in a society with agreed upon law isn't an iron age civilization discovering a stone age civilization and pushing it aside like every civilization has done when encountering an opposing one since time immemorial. At least now we criticize ourselves and try not to continue the sins of our less civilized forbears.

If you want to condemn every historical people that has taken land from others because they could, you will find none to be virtuous.

> At least now we criticize ourselves and try not to continue the sins of our less civilized forbears.

The residents of the territories would like to have a word with you.

> At least now we criticize ourselves and try not to continue the sins of our less civilized forbears.

Which then begs the question: why are you upset that we're criticizing ourselves?

It occurs to me that nothing about the parent's comment implies condemnation; it's only an observation that our language choices can serve to either obscure or expound historical facts.

I'd argue that exploration is not exploration if it is not documented or widely known. If Columbo discovered America but died in the process and didn't report about it, would he have same significance?

> exploration is not exploration if it is not documented or widely known

I'm sure Native Americans had documented their land and made it widely known within their society at the time.

How would they document it? In North America no tribe had writing until after encounters with Europeans. They only had oral tradition, which is helpful for preserving myth and little else.

The history of ancient roads, ceremonial centers, seasonal migrations, and trading along fixed routes by various indigenous peoples would seem to suggest that they had some way of preserving information about the geography. I'm very skeptical that oral tradition is incapable of conveying the lay of the land, in fact, that seems to have been a major function of some of the oral tradition (which describes where other groups of people are found in geographical terms, for example).

It's incapable of conveying anything if the civilization is lost. Maybe the mound builders had an incredible understanding of the land, maybe they didn't, but we can't say they documented it, at least not in any way that's transferable to the future or discoverable by a foreign culture.

Maybe I'm moving the goal posts and I'm not trying to do that, so I'll leave the immediate topic there.

> Which then begs the question: why are you upset that we're criticizing ourselves?

I'm not, I'm annoyed with yet another half-Woke 'net commentariat pretending that pointing out the American/Colonialist positionality of discourse in an American fluff piece is insight, when it's just half baked rhetorical whining about someone writing from their own lived experience and positionality. The author of the article, in short, is being mocked for using the language of his culture because the prevailing ideology of the moment proclaims American perspectives to be unilaterally oppressive.

The implied argument is that the Colonial positionality is the most oppressive discourse and therefore the least valid, so using language like "discovers" is argued to continue to marginalize Native cultures, but it's a criticism that is only applied to mainstream American positionalities in order to rewrite American history in a way that justifies "decolonization" and as such I find it a shallow and dangerous criticism worth mocking.

Quick, someone tell me what "Land Back" means, but describe it without violence or ethnic removal. And if you don't know why that phrase is relevant to this screed it's time to pay attention to the memes in the graffiti and the chants of protestors in the US and in Canada.

> The analogy presented is flawed because your friend discovering a house in a society with agreed upon law isn't an iron age civilization discovering a stone age civilization and pushing it aside like every civilization has done when encountering an opposing one since time immemorial.

European colonials in the 16th through 20th century were most definitely not similar to Iron Age versus Stone Age contact. The bulk of US actions against the Native Americans in the West occurred around ~1870[1]. "Might makes right" is poor justification for those who ostensibly professed ideals from the teachings of Jesus Christ, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Age of Reason. I think we are right to judge European colonials harshly by their own moral standards.

[1] See the book, "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee"

Fine, but then you have to answer the question "what does that justify?"

Abolition of the Colonial government and establishment of a new more diverse and inclusive BIPOC-led anarcho-socialist collective?

Do we though? I have no idea where you're getting your second sentence from.

Judging by your username as "no tankies" and reading your comment history I can see you have a keen interest in political arguments. In general comments that insert politically divisive issues into unrelated posts tend to be downvoted on HN, as yours was. This isn't just a liberal bias thing, but happens when people bash Trump on posts that were previously not political. If you continue to post on HN I would encourage you to set politics aside, as they are almost always against the guidelines (see the "guidelines" link at the bottom of the page).

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