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Comment by pfannkuchen | Hacker News Reader

Why would it be symmetric? This is like if North American natives had successfully expelled the Europeans after some amount of time, and then saying that the natives were meaner to the Europeans than vice versa. Wouldn’t expulsion be justified from the North American native’s perspective?

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Note that there was about 9 centuries between the Umayyad conquest of Iberia (8th century) and the explulsion of Moriscos (17th century). So the analogy with North American natives would be something like - if somehow the Native Americans win political/military control in the 23th century (9 centuries after the arrival of the Europeans) and then decide that all non-native Americans will have to leave the country to wherever their ancestors came from - do you feel that would be justified?

From the native perspective that would absolutely be justified. At the same time from the European perspective they should resist being expelled (just as the equivalent people in Spain should have and probably did resist being expelled in their time).

As a side note, I feel a lot of people have a hard time processing conflicting perspectives and instead project their own moral views as a uniform perspective onto everyone at once, which does not produce a useable model of reality IMO.

> I feel a lot of people have a hard time processing conflicting perspectives and instead project their own moral views as a uniform perspective onto everyone at once

Thanks for putting into words something I've been feeling for a long time! It's like people think that conflict is unnatural, when really it is one of the most fundamental aspects of nature.

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