Canada is making some pretence of recognising aboriginal rights, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of mines, clear cuts or pipelines.
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For the Oz version:
Total land value of Australia: estimated at 5.8 trillion dollars.
Number of surviving Australian Indigenous people: about 650,000.
So, that comes out to about nine million dollars each.
Unsurprisingly, when you mention this calculation to White Australians, they usually respond with “well, that’s why we can’t pay any reparations, so shut up about it”.
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we were thinking about broader concepts of nationalism and separatism — things like American pride and Basque separatism, which are an important part of people’s identity
Yeah, well believing in the eternal supremacy of the glorious Aryan race over the untermensch is an important part of my identity, Facebook, so why are you suppressing that? /s
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perhaps they all look like one might suspect BoingBoing’s feared Florida Man must look.
To be frank, I and the other surviving Neanderthal people are still waiting for the white race to compensate us for invading Europe in pre-history.
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No kidding. I assume those outside of Canada don’t know Rebel Media, but we’ll say it’s pretty much on par with the worst dog whistling you see on Fox News, probably even a little worse than that. To get kicked off that for causing a stir with your white supremacy you’d pretty much need to shout “Hitler was right!” on live TV.
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“But we said we’d remove hateful content! Isn’t it enough that we said we would? What do you want?”
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Truthfully, she wasn’t kicked off Rebel Media for being toxic. It’s only that she was caught being a public neo-Nazi at Charlottesville without a euphemism to sit on when the music stopped.
They all play that game. Spend some time in the penalty box, play the “misunderstood” card and good to go – until the next time.
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I guess I have to question: how far back do you go?
I mean, almost everywhere has people in it that didn’t originate there. And most of those places have people who were conquered, replaced, or otherwise subjugated within the last 300-400 years.
I think we should focus on not fucking these people over further in the here and now. Possibly as part of that would be specific social programs to lift them up to a starting level they would normally have been at if they hadn’t been screwed over so much in the past.
I say this as someone who would probably benefit from a program for reparations to Native Americans, but I by no means speak for all of them. I am sure that many others hold contrary views.
This is still lived memory, when aboriginal children were being kidnapped and taken from their families. People alive today experienced that, much like people in the US alive today experienced that same thing with their children being taken from them, and Native women being forcibly sterilized. That happened into the 1980s… So, lived memory for me and you. This was happening when we were kids, this is not hundreds of years in the past, this is recent years.
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Have we really stopped? In Canada:
While just 7.7 per cent of all children under 14 are Indigenous, they account for 52.2 per cent of all children in foster care — astonishing numbers that demand some sort of response, Philpott said.
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At this point, I think it’s a given considering now they’re actually asking for email account passwords for “verification” and other nonsense. I’m pretty close to deleting my account even if my parents are upset by it. I just can’t see any purpose in keeping an account with a platform that invades privacy and enables fascism.
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I don’t know all the history of the Aborigines in Australia, so fair point that the damage is new enough there should be compensation.
Fair point on the more modern programs. I guess I wasn’t thinking of those. Something that targets people who were directly effected sounds like a different issue that I could agree with. Another case that is similar that I would agree deserves compensation is the Tuskegee syphilis experiment.
I think your answer to the question of “How far back do you go?” being “living memory” is a good one.
In the US, tribal members can take possession of any child in the tribe to foster them vs a state program.
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Good point.
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I believe that was in direct response to the US taking children away from Native families… which I think still happens, too. This is still ongoing destruction of these communities, in all the settler colonies. It’s shameful.
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This is why the whole issue is so comically far above Facebook’s level of ethical competence.
“American pride” and “Basque separatism” – along with nearly every other abstract identity that’s ever been important to anyone – have both been used to incite and justify literal murder on countless occasions. Facebook are clinging to the fantasy (invented, to be fair, by old media) that there exists some neutral political position, and everything’s OK if you stick within two standard deviations of it. But that has never been true. The very idea is an instrument of right-wing authoritarianism – it gives free rein to the “common sense” of the brutal, reptilian hindbrain we all share, and rejects as extreme any position that requires thought to arrive at.
Facebook and Twitter will be seen as willing tools of the far right, because they are, until they take some motherfucking responsibility for the political positions that they are supporting. It’s like… you voluntarily go to work every day to keep servers running, or sell ads, in order that actual Nazis can keep spreading their message like wildfire. YOU ARE NOT BEING COCKSUCKING NEUTRAL GOD DAMN IT
And it’s not just Nazis either. Facebook aims to host all human interaction; that means they have a position on everything. So they better decide what their position is on Mauritian territorial claims or ethnic conflict in Malaysia, or else someone (probably the bad guys) will decide for them.
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Right. That was a point I was trying to make that maybe got lost. “we should focus on not fucking these people over further in the here and now.” I mean how can you even talk about reconciling past damage, if there is active damage still being done.
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