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Comment by sc68cal | Hacker News Reader

> the pioneer days when land was plentiful.

I think you mean to say "When we could steal land from the people who were originally on that land"

We can still steal land from people who were originally on that land, happens all the time in America.

- Land Appropriation for "Public Need" with Direct Transfer to Wealthy: https://fastercapital.com/content/Land-appropriation--The-In...

- Heirs property, property tax sales, and Torrens Acts (article focuses on black people, yet works equally well on all skin colors): https://inequality.org/article/black-land-theft-racial-wealt...

- Wealth City / Suburb secession to leave poor areas to pay bills, and then buy them in destitution: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-02-11/atlanta-s...

- Rezone areas to make new cities, take all the businesses and good land, and leave the remaining "city" with the bills (another Atlanta idea): https://www.google.com/maps/place/Union+City,+GA/@33.6158433...

- Sell vacant land out from under land owners with false listings: https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/newark/news/fra...

- Purposely Induced Foreclosure, Bankruptcy or surprise tax assessments to cause a forced sale: https://www.businessethicsnetwork.org/forced-sale-implicatio...

Define "orginally". You might be interested to research how the Native Americans interacted, especially the Lakota. Rights by conquest was not a new idea.

Well the obvious response is then "can I conquer your land by force too?". No. Because there is a construction of "lawful property rights" that starts with the appropriation of land by force but protects the new owner from the same.

Well technically the land can still be appropriated by force, only you have to apply it against the entire system which enforces "lawful property rights"

The most human thing ASI could do would be to have its own Manifest Destiny

or just use the system which enforces "lawful property rights"

see: Adverse Possession

I mean murder's not a new idea either but it's broadly condemned in most moral vibes

"Right by conquest" is sort of a cope, like "You might have a green light and the right of way, but Isaac Newton always favors the semi truck"

If the land had been the basis of North American prosperity there would have been civilizations there capable of resisting European colonialism.

The Americas had no horses before Europeans brought them.

Also no sheep, no dogs, no cows, no chicken.

Native Americans did have dogs. They didn't have sheep, but the Incans did have access to wool-bearing animals in the form of the alpaca (though the Incan Empire was geographically isolated so these animals never reached North America). Guinea pigs were also domesticated in this region. There were neither cows nor chickens, but there were other forms of poultry such as turkeys and ducks.

There sure was buffalo though.

Others disagree.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/native-americans-s...

> Spanish settlers likely first brought horses back to the Americas in 1519

No they don't.

Yes they did, even if they were present in the continent before humans, they died out at least 10ky ago.

I uh, source?

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/native-americans-s...

I think the issue was whether they were hunted to extinction or not

what

There were a few hundred thousand of them across the entire continent. In the best case scenario, most of them still would have died to disease. Unless you believe a few hundred thousand people own should own an entire continent as their blood and soil birthright the land was always going to end up like this

There’s still a lot of land out there. The only problem today is nobody wants to start over with no plumbing, electricity, or other modern conveniences.

The numbers you mention don't match what I see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_the_Indi...

You’re right, I mistook the Canadian numbers for all of North America. I know south and Central America had a much higher population but that’s not what this thread is about. It looks like a more accurate number is in the low millions so my point still stands.

I'm gonna go conquer Georgia, then. Genocide some country folks, burn every Confederate flag I see, end some bloodlines forever. There's not many people living there, right by conquest, etc., plus Reconstruction wasn't finished properly anyway.

Hell yea brother. Blood and soil. Georgia is for the Georgians and nobody else should be allowed to settle there

The truth has always been and will always be that the people who are most technologically advanced will end up with the land, weather by force or purchase.

Simply due to the fact that it's more valuable in their hands. Driving out some campers to build a town is the rule, not an exception.

More valuable? More valuable… to whom?

In human affairs there is no such thing as absolute value.

The reason is simply that it is inevitable as much as gravity is inevitable.

Making a moral law against gravity isn’t going to get you very far.

> "When we could steal land from the people who were originally on that land"

That's every single society ever. This has been the civilizational algorithm. It predates our species.

That same tactic is alive and well today.

A gross oversimplification of anthropology.

> It predates our species

People will really say this and then still be mad when I want to marry just a couple of my cousins

European colonization of the world is a unique enough phenomenon to not hand wave it away as business as usual. Further, the industrial intensification and financialization of this colonization through the 18th-20th centuries alone is singular on its impact on human civilization with no precedent.

I don't think so. How many genocides can you think of on the scale of the Native American genocide? Such events seem rare to me.

Rare in absolute numbers, but not rare on a percentage basis.

That was, what, a 95% extermination? Native Americans probably committed 100% exterminations e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorset_culture

Apart from the Sentinelese, I can't think of one civilization that hasn't warred and taken over land and resources from others. And we really don't have proof the Sentinelese didn't do this at some point themselves.

History was full of violence.

You can think of many examples of war and conquest, but what happened in America is more than just war. Genocide is more than just war. Framing the atrocities upon which the US was founded as merely "historically normal" is a deeply revisionist view of history. Technological development at that time allowed for many great evils which were simply not possible before.

How do you know that what happened to the natives was so much worse than the hundreds if not thousands of similar fates that must have befallen other cultures over the last several tens of thousands of years?

Because the things you're referring to didn't happen. That's why you say they "must have happened" instead of "actually did happen". I can think of some examples of similar treatment, for example the British in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland around that time, but even then we see that there are many living natives in those lands today. America is unique in that the overwhelming majority (97%) of the population is non-native and has no native ancestry.

> overwhelming majority (97%) of the population is non-native and has no native ancestry

Em. First, numbers of "native ancestry" are almost all self-reported which has more to do with self-identified culture than genetic ancestry.

Second, trying to argue through the use current numbers of native ancestry is nonsensical given the US has been an outlier in terms of immigration for a very long time making it impossible to compare against. For goodness sake, around a tenth of the population has been foreign born for the better part of two centuries which has had a dramatic effect on ancestry (both genetic and self-reported).

Wait, you think that the “natives” of the countries of today were the original inhabitants?

That's what YOU mean to say.

Most first nations at first contact had 0 conception of ownership, rather seeing it as some sort of stewardship (or if you put it in modern terms you could use the marxist notion of personal property where it's 'use it or lose it') as well as low enough populations that they figured there was enough to go around to share the land with settlers.

Even if the land was "shared", settlers still stole it for themselves.

Isn’t this the definition of a settler?

Source?

Some of the nations were large, such as the Aztec. And at least a few of them understood right by conquest. They also had extensive trade routes across the continent, seeming to disprove the lack of ownership.

You seem to be confusing the concept of "ownership" with that of "private property" (on immovables, especially). The "Marxist notion" of personal property still requires the concept of ownership.

And if there happened to be people on the land they “wanted” well then there’s guns and smallpox blankets to take care of those pesky details.

“The people there didn’t have the concept of ownership” but some pioneers sure as hell made sure to enlighten them by laying claim to that same land and then threatening anyone for encroaching on it.

Except it was not shared, it was almost a genocide.

Nothing almost about it. This and the smallpox thing the sibling brought up are what we tell ourselves to feel better about what the truth is.

genocide is an intentional act. Smallpox did 90% of the work and nobody lifted a finger, at the time nobody could have forseen the effect of smallpox on the native population.

After smallpox when the population of the Americas had been reduced by something like 90% they most certainly didn't need all the land.

If the settlers had done what the first thousand or so invading cultures did and just exterminated the natives, they would have been able to cast them in whatever light they chose. Instead they gave them rather a lot of autonomous territory relative to their population, along with legal monopolies designed to prevent them from being forced into wage slavery.

Oops!

> at the time nobody could have forseen the effect of smallpox on the native population

Are you really unaware that the colonials intentionally spread smallpox to the natives? This is not some obscure detail - it's in approximately all of the history textbooks in a fair bit of detail.

Sure, some tried, but smallpox and other diseases were doing a great job on their own. It didn't need a few blankets to make it a real pandemic.

The few references to potentially intentionally spreading disease, all well after they were spreading in the Americas, are unlikely to be the cause of more than a tiny sliver of deaths due to disease. The timelines simply do not match.

I can't say I fully agree with the premise, but suppose we run with it.

If someone acted with clear intent to commit genocide, but the mass deaths would have happened anyway, does that clear them of the charge?

Put another way, if I stab someone, the knife goes in and all, but as I'm doing it a car also runs over him, am I no longer guilty of murder? Seems pretty questionable to me.

The people who committed genocide (or simply murder without cause) are clearly to blame for those they killed, directly and in many cases, indirectly.

As for your example, that's a bit convoluted. Perhaps clearer would be if you intend to genocide say, a town and meteor hits killing everyone before you get there as well as the neighboring town, it would be difficult to argue you're to blame for their deaths. That doesn't mean you're a nice person and we'd generally still lock you up for attempted genocide of the town you attempted to murder, but not of the town you didn't.

The meteor in real life was disease. By some estimates, 90% of the population in the Americas died from diseases the Spanish accidentally introduced by 1600, most the Spanish did not know existed.

It was an intentional act. They wrote about it being an intentional act. The violence was not an accidental nor rare event either, it was an intentional act too.

The east expansion took a lot of time, involved quite a few massacres and invonluntary relocations.

And yet we took 100% of it, and forcibly relocated the survivors.

If you steal something from someone who stole something, I'm not going to cry for the original thief.

Most of us were born into land that was colonized in written memory.

I would definitely cry for the death of the innocent grandchildren of thieves.

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