Squatters issue death threats to archaeologist who discovered Caral | Hacker News Reader

Squatters issue death threats to archaeologist who discovered Caral

theguardian.com

What a crazy story! I suspected this was, under the surface, the tale of a douchey foreign archaeologist pissing off the locals, but no. Ruth Shady Solis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Shady) is Peruvian, and teaches at the National University of San Marcos in Lima.

The "family of squatters" who bring in a backhoe kind of sounds like Ammon Bundy's clan.

I think comparing the squatters to Ammon Bundys family and supporters is completely ignorant. I'm not hoping to insult you but I do wish you would go and do a bit more research, my friend. I cannot agree with Ammon on several things but this is a grossly misguided comparison.

You're right. The Bundys are lawless domestic terrorists. These people don't sound like terrorists.

It's shocking to me that you say this. What was their action that you claim to be an act of terrorism?

The armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is a pretty clear-cut example.

That isn't an example of domestic terrorism, though.

You might want to open up a dictionary and look up the definition of “terrorism” again.

Just doing something illegal with guns doesn’t quite qualify.

It's an incredibly similar case...

"Terrorist" has taken on a LOT of different meanings. What do you see as terroristic in Bundy's actions that is missing from the actions of these squatters?

> “They called the site’s lawyer and said if he continued to protect me they would kill him, along with me, and bury us five metres below the ground,” said Shady, 73. “Then they killed our dog as a warning. They poisoned her, as if to say, look at what will happen to you,” she said.

> In July, squatters using a heavy digger knocked down adobe walls and tore up the ground destroying ancient ceramics, tombs containing mummies, textiles and household remains, before police and the site’s staff were able to stop them.

> The squatters are believed to belong to a single extended family, and claim the land was given to them in the 1970s during Peru’s controversial agrarian land reform which was pushed through by a leftist military dictatorship.

What a mess...

> “There is message there that we, human beings, should live in harmony between ourselves and nature,” Shady concluded. “We are living through this pandemic, in part, due to our mistreatment of nature.”

What does this mean? What part? Endangered Pangolins? Horseshoe bats from Guangdong? Bat research in general? Lab mistakes in Wuhan? What?

Please publish your findings if you have specific scientific insight into how SARS-CoV-2 started, especially as it relates to the harmonious balance between ourselves and nature.

Governments need to get a lot tougher with squatters like these or the Bundy’s. What are all those tanks and fighter jets for? Just send in the team and get the squatters out in cuffs or bags. A government is barely a government if it can’t control its own territory.

Please be sarcasm.

Why? If there is no law there is no government.

If there is indiscriminate use of maximal force in all situations of noncompliance with the law, then there is bad government.

Bad government may be worse than no government at all.

You have never been in a politically unstable place.

That's what local police are for. The moment you talk about tanks and fighter jets, you are talking about the military. When the state uses the military against its own people, it is bound to betray its covenant with the commonwealth. The idea of freedom and liberty is safeguarded by that covenant, that the judiciary, military and government work for the people and not against them.

Im surprised you havent learned that in school seeing as your government excels at destabilizing whole nations. See Libya before and after al-Qaddafi. Who wanted him dead. Who killed him, what became of his country and who is mediating the current filth that is the once proud state of Libya.

On the other hand, you have a country like France where squatting someone's house is ok.

You are not allowed to get the squatters or and it can take years to go through courts to have them evinced.

It is enough that they stay in your house for 48 hours and they are protected by the law.

This is in France. A stable democratic country which puts squatters rights above the ones of owners.

Same thing in America. You can break into a place and bring a tooth brush and when the cops show up just say you live there and signed a lease. Then it becomes a legal dispute and all the squatters have to do is keep changing out the squatter because it takes so long to serve and evict. It’s a nightmare to get involved in.

Right. But in a lot of states, there's a gun on the other side of that door.

Toothbrush becomes a lot less of a panacea, then.

I am not sure how it works in the US: can you actively defend your house once someone is in it and you are not?

What I means that there is a difference between a burglary where you are at home and defend yourself and your family (and accessorily - your belongings) -- and the case when you come back from vacation and find someone installed in your house for a few days.

Exactly. My grandpa died and we came back to his house a few weeks later and people were already living in it. Took over a year and a lot of energy and money to get these people out and by then they'd already stripped the house of anything of value and removed the copper from the walls and destroyed everything else in spite. If we had just stormed in guns blazing--we would have been the aggressors in the eyes of the law. Unfortunately, it seems like the laws in California protect the elites and criminals, but not normal/middle/working class people just trying to get by. You're free to shoot heroin on the steps of City Hall in SF, but god forbid you park for 20 minutes at a 15 minute meter.

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