[ExI] it's the yoga! was: RE: The Doomsday Clock

[Dave Sill]

On Fri, Feb 9, 2018 at 12:04 PM, William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> I am hardly without sympathies for all the people Europeans slaughtered
> and decimated with small pox, though it was just like what always happens
> with two cultures with far different technology clash.
>

You said:

  The Indians should have, from the beginning, appropriated American's
culture and just blended in to it.

I don't think anything short of evacuation would have appeased the
Europeans. The problem wasn't that the natives refused European culture
(which they had every right to do), it's that the natives stood in the way
of greedy and insensitive Europeans.


> It's not so much blame the victim to me, it's just that they did not have
> the right stuff to compete with Europeans.
>

Maybe it shouldn't always be about competition. Maybe we should elevate
ourselves to the level respecting others' rights and cultures.


> And still don't.  You can argue heredity/environment endlessly, but what
> American Indians have accomplished, before and after we came, is very
> little.
>

Yeah, this 60000-structure city built 1500 years ago had nothing on ancient
Europeans:


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5365015/New-images-reveal-Mayan-megalopolis-stunning-detail.html


> Other groups with mindbending poverty, illness, oppression, and so on in
> their backgrounds, have blended in - assimilated.  Not so American
> Indians.  Look at the California Vietnamese.  Doughnut czars now.
>

Maybe they don't want to blend in. They shouldn't have to. And they
shouldn't have to measure up to your standards of worthiness.


> On the positive side, the Indians now have all the opportunities of modern
> society, health care, food stamps, TV, firewater, which they would maybe
> never have had had they been left alone for another thousand years.
>

Oh, yeah, that's a huge positive. I'm sure they're thrilled and thankful
for having met us. :rolleyes:

Dave?  Do you think we owe them endlessly?  Reparations forever?
>

No, we can't undo the damage that's been done. But we can stop inflicting
more and we can leave them the fuck alone.

-Dave
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