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thompsonx -> RE: If you're over 55, do you remember being taught this? (9/27/2016 3:46:12 AM)
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ORIGINAL: Lordandmaster
No, I meant that if Irish indentured servants were sent to the New World, that doesn't mean slavery wasn't an injustice as well. Wasn't that the crux of the shit-storm?
The "shit storm" is wide ranging and that was an aspect of it.
Edited add: Instead of "Two wrongs don't make a right," I guess I should have said "One wrong doesn't cancel out another."
Yes that makes much more sense to me and I do agree with with it.
How to redress the injustices of the past is an immensely complicated question, so asking me "What's your solution?" comes across as disingenuous.
I have been called many things on this board but not disingenuous. My question to you was honest and seeking your input.
How would you redress the unjust treatment of Native Americans?
I would start by honoring the treaties our govenment signed and ignored. I should also think some sort of official appology for the genocide....perhaps clensing mt. rushmore and engraving the apology there would be a start.
Of extinct species?
Where possible, sanction those responsible. Strengthen the epa to enforce existing regulations.
And why are the injustices that I just mentioned less worthy of redress than slavery? They were ALL unspeakable.
Slavery was certainly a form of genocide.
As for affirmative action, since that was your specific question: depends on what you mean. When different people talk about "affirmative action," sometimes they're not even talking about the same thing. I'm all for trying to provide people with more nearly equal opportunities regardless of their background, but I'm profoundly skeptical when the purpose is to try to redress past discrimination.
Redressing past discrimination is the crux of aa. because different groups (native amerikans,women, people of color, the mentally challanged...thinking here of all the mental patients tossed on the street by gov. raygun in california...)have been systematically deprived of not only their civil rights but also access to the "amerikan dream".
At that point it starts to become less effective, in my view, and I'm starting to sense that the crusade for affirmative action has gotten in the way of other possible modes of social justice. I don't believe any interest is served by denying this. Redressing past discrimination is not something that can be achieved, certainly not universally, so it ends up being invoked dishonestly and selectively.
What I have noticed is that it is primarily those who disaprove of the goals of aa are the ones invoking it dishonestly and selectively by consistantly placing unqualified people in positions of visibility so as to point to the "wrongness/ineffectiveness" of aa.
And it's important to remember that no one alive today is responsible for any aspect of slavery in this country,
There are more than a few cases in our history of a decendant claiming redress and being compensated. for example a decendant of a farmer whose horses were commandered by union forces durring the civil war and being issued a reciept that he could present to the government for reimbursment. The decendent, more than a hundred years later found the reciept and submitted it for payment and were reimbursed at current market value plus more than a hundred years of compound interest. If that debt against people dead for a hundred years is valid then why not the uncompensated labor for three hundred years of slavery. Keeping in mind that it was the taxes on the product of that uncompensated labor that supported this country at that time. You and I can leave the largess of our labor to our decendants why not they? By they I am also including the fees and emoulements guaranteed by treaty to the native amerikans
yet although the quarrel is with the oppressive majorities of the past, often enough it ends up being directed at the much more complex majorities of present.
The majorities of today are essentally the majorities of trhe past.
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