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Comment by timr | Hacker News Reader

> The railroad, lauded as one of the greatest achievements in U.S. history, also set the stage for an era of aggressive westward expansion, empire-building and the subjugation of Indigenous people.

They just had to include that last bit, didn't they? Setting aside the fact that "the subjugation of indigenous people" in the American west began long before the transcontinental railroad, and so the whole comment is debatable at best (the Trail of Tears was 1831, and the first Apache wars were in 1849; the Oregon trail was 1830-1840, and the transcontinental railroad was begun in 1863), it's the sort of drop-in to an otherwise unrelated story that makes you cringe.

Literally anything in the world can be tied back to oppression of a people, if you want it hard enough. You're writing a nice little human-interest story about a train ride...can't you give it a rest for a minute?

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Can't fathom why this bothers you so much but it is relevant as this sentence immediately leads into a story the conductor on the train was giving about the history of the rail. Would you rather the author leave that experience out of the story because it makes you uncomfortable?

>> it's the sort of drop-in to an otherwise unrelated story that makes you cringe.

> Can't fathom why this bothers you so much

Really? They just explained it particularly well.

> because it makes you uncomfortable?

I think they're taking issue over the fact that it is not only mostly irrelevant but it's also completely incorrect.

It doesn't make me uncomfortable. I just think it's stupid. I guess it made me roll my eyes, so that was sort of uncomfortable.

(To be as charitable as possible to your point, I did say "cringe", but I didn't mean it in the way that you're interpreting it. I just meant "cringe", in the same way that I cringe when I see someone who boldly expresses an opinion about anything that is factually incorrect, or perhaps, when a stranger starts selling you on their multi-level-marketing scheme in the bathroom. More like "oh god, we're going to do this now, are we?", than a "I reject basic facts of history that the average US high school student should know, including the approximate order of major historical events" sort of thing.)

I guess it just depends on your point of view. I would have found a sentence lauding the railroads and the mechanized opening of the West to be pretty 'cringe' if they had not mentioned this.

I submit that you could cut the entire sentence out of the piece and not lose anything other than a vague sense of judgment from the author.

But hey, I also don't think observing the basic fact that the railroads led to the "opening of the west" would qualify as "lauding" that fact, any more than observing that "George Washington was the first US president" would be "lauding" George Washington. For that matter, I can also enjoy a train ride without feeling the urge to "acknowledge" that Cornelius Vanderbilt did some bad things.

(...though I sadly acknowledge that we're well 'round that bend as a society)

Because most of the time it takes a nice, feel good story and immediately sets the tone.

It's like having a casual chat with a colleague and then they trauma dump about what happened to them when they were 15 or whatever. Like okay, cool, take it to therapy, this isn't the place, you're just making things awkward for everyone.

>> Can't fathom why this bothers you so much

You're calling timr the bad guy for noticing. It's OK to notice things.

Original comment is not "noticing". It's complaining to people to stop talking about what matters to them.

It's one thing to say "look, they said X" than to say "please don't talk about X on the internet".

Seems like lip service slacktivism that does nothing but inject a bit of weird misplaced guilt. Railroads were a huge technological innovation. Handwringing about the skeletons in the national closet without really understanding how or why the railroad played a role seems distracting. The quote from the article says, in essence: ‘railroads and the Indian Wars happened at the same time, kinda, so… railroads bad, maybe?’

And op’s point stands. Tech is power; and almost any tech can be used and abused. But tossing this in seems lazy at best.

Did you read the article? The sentence OP objects to is the lead-in to a conductor on a trip telling him about how rail passengers were encouraged to help reduce the native population. It's a bit of context for an anecdote, in an article that is entirely compared of lightly contextualized anecdotes.

You could remove the sentence I quoted, keep the thing from the conductor about bison, and it wouldn't make a difference to the story [1]. It's a "lead in" only in the extremely literal sense that the one sentence comes before the other one.

[1] It might even work better, since it lets you draw your own conclusions about the anecdote. Not everything needs to be a lesson.

I agree that the story flows better without it but I'm saying it is not irrelevant like you claim. It is bad writing if nothing else.

The transcontinental railroad was highly significant. Past atrocities don’t negate the unique role the railroad played in a centuries-long process, especiallY when a major stage of it was enabled by the railroad: https://americanhistory.si.edu/explore/stories/TRR

Similarly, the unique role the railroad played does not negate the atrocities that were part and parcel of its development. When talking about civilization-progressing technologies, it is not possible to focus entirely on the technology.

Unless we're also willing to talk about Facebook as a generation-redefining technology that altered how people interact, without mentioning the negatives. I'm sure people will attempt to do that a century from now; it will be wrong then as well.

It might have begun far before the railroads but it only became worse with time. The sand creek massacre was in 1864. Square in the railroad era. Not to mention every broken treaty of that era that was directly incentivized by the new massive industrial access to western land.

One could and probably should understand that the beauty of the Railroad is inseperable from the subjugation of the indiginous tribes and the labor abuses that built it. Should those things be ignored because they make you uncomfortable? It's perfectly contextual to have that in this piece....

... though I do concede the way that's mentioned and the article in general seems low effort and mediocre. But that's a different argument than "stop making me uncomfortable".

Sure. But you can pick pretty much any piece of technology from the era and say the same thing: "How the hammer led to the oppression of Indigenous People in the American west".

> One could and probably should understand that the beauty of the Railroad is inseperable from the subjugation of the indiginous tribes and the labor abuses that built it. Should those things be ignored because they make you uncomfortable? It's perfectly contextual to have that in this piece....

Someone else on this thread tried the same rhetorical feint. Who told you that I am "uncomfortable"? Did the fact that I cited events and dates somehow convince you that I didn't know about these events before now? That I just became aware of the story of the US westward expansion because this author dropped it into her Amtrak feature?

Look, if you want to write (or read) a thesis on the influence of the locomotive on the oppression of indigenous people, that's great. I bet there's one to be written. But this is just lazy, dumb, superficial propaganda, dropped into a puff piece.

The wording is slightly imprecise (if they had said "accelerated subjugation of" it would have been perfectly accurate), and a bit jargon-y; but can't you just go with it?

The degree of indignation you're expressing here at this ancillary snippet (as opposed to the historical genocide itself, and the continuing injustices suffered by the survivors' descendants to this very day) seems to be in itself rather cringe.

> The degree of indignation you're expressing here at this ancillary snippet...seems to be in itself rather cringe.

I am not expressing "indignation" -- I don't think the author was unfair to me. I'm not even remotely upset. I just think it was a silly and unnecessary inclusion (in your words: "ancillary") that detracts from the piece.

"Indignation" was a poor choice of wording, then -- I take it back.

Still - it does seem to be such a trifling fault with the article that it seems strange that it would be seen as worth devoting the time and energy to call out. When I come across minor hiccups like this (either in something I'm reading, or when someone is giving a talk) I usually just say to myself:

  "Mmm -- but was it in good faith at least? Not too preachy / overbearing? Yes? Then let's move on ..."

Yes, it is when I closed the tab. Enough with the self-flagellating virtue signalling nonsense, it does not do any good for anyone other than for the grifters who make their living off selling indulgences for past sins. Not to mention the fact that those indigenous tribes were quite the quarrelsome bunch themselves which makes all those land acknowledgements another level of silliness: "we acknowledge that we are standing on the land of the Comanche" upon which a Cheyenne stands calls out that it was their land until those bastard Comanche came along and took it, followed by an Apache who hollers at the Cheyenne who took their land whereupon an ageing Kiowa stares down the Apache who took their ancestral lands. Rinse and repeat for the Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw and Choctaw, the Sioux and the Crow, the Iroquois and the Huron, the Iroquois and the Powhatan confederacy, the Navajo versus the Hopi, etc. They made war against each other, they sometimes won, they sometimes lost. Eventually a stronger tribe came and conquered them all just like they used to conquer others. Since we're not at the end of history - Fukuyama [1] was wrong - the story will move on from here and who knows what - and who - will come next?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...

In Soviet times, if you didn't include a quote from Lenin or Marx or at least the latest Party Conference in your article, you could be seen as dangerous dissident, pretty much regardless of the topic. The quote could be completely unrelated to the rest of the content, but as long as it's there, you've paid your respects and you're ok, and everybody knew this is just one of the things that is done.

Looks like it's more universally human than one would like to admit.

The line from Chicago to Seattle is literally called the Empire Builder

Well golly. I guess they should name it something more maudlin. That will fix everything. "Engine of oppression", perhaps?

There's definitely a delicious irony that Amtrak is about the furthest thing from an "empire" that you can find in America, though. They don't even own the tracks they run on.

https://writinforthebrand.com/the-railroad-and-settlement-in...

> "the subjugation of indigenous people" in the American west began long before the transcontinental railroad

So did "empire building" and "westward expansion," but those assertions don't seem to have bothered you despite suffering from the same deficiency in the same sentence.

Indeed. I didn't specifically call out every incorrect thing in the sentence, and chose only one. Westward expansion and empire building both existed for even longer before railroads existed. Touché.

I see, good to know you weren't looking to make the political point you expressed above but merely wanted to be technically correct.

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