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Gazpacho posted:no at this point it's just blatant electoral pandering, Pandering to bigots is essentially still bigotry.
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Aug 29, 2016 19:36
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Lot of people piss-scared of Muslims like little children ITT.
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Aug 30, 2016 06:08
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computer parts posted:If you find anyone claiming to be Romans, you can claim reparations against them. Or, take your logic to its conclusion: should muslims in France be held accountable for the Nice attack? They have the Honor And Responsibility Of That Legacy, yet I suspect you won't apply that bullshit logic in this case, because it's not convenient to you. Which is how you have acted this entire thread. You don't actually believe anything you say, you simply say whatever you think justifies what you want. You don't have principles, that are consistent, you just have useful phrases. We're not talking about too different things, I'm just approaching it from a different angle. Like a thing when you're looking at history is whether or not you believe that there is some amount of 'choice' in history, whether or not history is a result of trends and forces beyond the control of anyone. Marxism has a lot of that 'trends' thinking, to the point where 'what exactly are marxists supposed to do, if history is already decided by this law of the dialectic materialism?' is actually a non-trivial question to answer. Geographic determinism has that same kind of problem. I'm not really talking about the 'choice' of society to 'decide to advance' or whatever, as if that was actually a choice you would decide against, but I mean the intended and unintended consequences of smaller choices, with whatever reasons they used for that choice. For example: is the cultural ideas of europe determined by geography, as well? How about the rest of the world, can be reverse-engineer the environment that people grew up in from the things they believe, and can we do that with certainty? Or is there some about of arbitrariness to it all, that we can call 'choice'? And if we could do that reverse engineering, is that something you would feel comfortable with, philosophically? Now when I say 'leaving little chance', I don't mean to invalidate what I said before that, that we should defer away from cultural shifts as a rule. That kind of intransigence is illogical and harmful, in the long run. What I do think we have to do, is talk about the kind of environments that can generate, or allow to fester, cultural shifts that might create problems. You seem to interpret this as group-versus-group conflict, ie 'privilege the dominant culture'. I see it as 'drawing a line', you've got to set some things as non-negotiable, the issue is always 'what' is non-negotiable', not whether or not that should be done at all, which is what you're seeming to take issue with. Periodiko posted:Why do you need or want a "cut off"? This is a negotiation between cultural groups or nations propelled by popular agitation and moral development.
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Aug 30, 2016 19:42
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rudatron posted:Or, take your logic to its conclusion: should muslims in France be held accountable for the Nice attack? They have the Honor And Responsibility Of That Legacy, yet I suspect you won't apply that bullshit logic in this case How have French Muslims taken on going material benefit from the Nice attack?
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Aug 30, 2016 19:47
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rudatron posted:You don't have principles, that are consistent, you just have useful phrases. To be fair, this describes most "moral" """arguments""" made by most people. I like [thing1], therefore it must be good, but I don't like [thing2 which is very similar to thing1] so they are clearly not comparable and I must find some inconsequential difference to retroactively justify that, but that is hypocritical so I don't think too much about whether I just make poo poo up while I go along.
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Aug 30, 2016 22:07
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Where's your empirical evidence about integration?
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Aug 31, 2016 00:04
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rudatron posted:Okay - France changes it's name to Totes Not France, no reparations required. It's better to think of countries as entities in this case. Obviously there's some gray area if a country has been around for a really long time and had its borders significantly change over that time period, but generally speaking it's not difficult to link certain actions to a specific country and hold that country responsible. If a country hasn't continuously existed since its crimes, then it probably shouldn't be held responsible (unless it only stopped existing for a very short period of time). I think that it's definitely wrong to apply this same logic to ethnic groups or religions, since one person of a particular religion or ethnic group doesn't have any responsibility for what other people of that group do. But a citizen of a nation does have some indirect responsibility for what their country did, just due to the social contract (if a person benefits from their country's actions, they should also have some responsibility for the bad things it does).
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Aug 31, 2016 00:33
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So France isn't accountable for anything prior to 1958? It's an incredibly stupid distinction to try to draw, because everyone is just going to declare that the countries they like have changed sufficiently to be absolved of their historical sins, and the ones they don't like haven't.
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Aug 31, 2016 00:56
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rudatron posted:
Oh they certainly would if they were claiming that they are the heirs to French Legacy and all those other fuckers need to act more French. Guess what, by and large they aren't! And I'm glad your tantrum over being a Lumpenprole is still ongoing.
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Aug 31, 2016 01:35
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computer parts posted:If you find anyone claiming to be Romans, you can claim reparations against them. Uh, I know a whole city of people who would claim to be Romans. This highlights exactly the problem with people claiming reparations - still ill-defined, but anyway - are a good idea, at least as a guiding principle for how wealthier nations should dole out their aid to developing ones. There has to be some cutoff, and that cutoff will inevitably be arbitrary. Whether the cutoff is temporal - nothing before 200 years ago counts, say - or ethnic - brown people who were imperialists in the past don't have to abide by this, for example - or anything else, it will end up making the ideology behind reparations inconsistent. This point has been raised many times, and it is a good one. Should Spain be able to claim reparations from Muslim states in the middle east? They were conquered in the 700s and were ruled over by the caliphate. The fact that Spain went on to become a wealthy Western nation, and imperialist herself to boot, should be irrelevant according to the logic that Mel (and presumably those on his "side") has used: the burden of repaying stolen wealth persists regardless of the nation's current status, and returning stolen wealth should take priority over the needs of nations that, while poor, were not directly affected by colonization. I think the main struggle in this thread is the ideal versus the practical. I don't rightly know if, in pure moral terms, prioritizing the previously colonized states over ones which are currently poorer is really more righteous, but I also think it's irrelevant. The world is as it is, and we can't right the wrongs of history, as others have pointed out, by attempting to balance some cosmic ledger. Nor can we worry that we "shouldn't" have a say in how our stolen wealth be used: I am not conceding this point either, but the fact of the matter is that we have this wealth, whether we like it or not, whether we personally acquired it or not, and being the ones who possess it, we and only we can decide what to now do with it. If our goal is a better world, then we can't align our priorities on anything other than the current state of the world, which is to say, we have to put the money where it is most needed, not where it will most assuage our historical guilt. This isn't to say we ignore things like the clearly imbalanced racial divide in this country or others (speaking from a US perspective); indeed, that can be accounted for in our policies. What we can't do is say that a nation that needs our help less than others should be the top of the list for foreign aid or the like simply because, centuries ago, we extracted their natural resources or something. If this still isn't agreeable to the "pro reparations" side (to apply an almost misleadingly broad label), then we have found a genuine moral disagreement, but I have to wonder how the practicalities of the way the world actually is, as we find it today, can possibly be outweighed by anything in a moral discussion.
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Aug 31, 2016 02:05
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GAINING WEIGHT... posted:Uh, I know a whole city of people who would claim to be Romans. They're subservient to a higher power (the Italian and EU government).
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Aug 31, 2016 02:20
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Mel Mudkiper posted:How have French Muslims taken on going material benefit from the Nice attack? That's a distinction without a difference, any one person in a country doesn't have responsibility for what their government does, because they're two separate entities. We don't punish people for the actions of the state they live in, or at least such action is seen as immoral from the get go. That's why stuff like the Iraq sanctions are seen as so bad, yet according to your logic of the social contract conferring guilt (in addition to justifying socially necessary state violence against citizens), those sanctions are valid.
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Aug 31, 2016 03:36
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rudatron posted:Not all colonialist ventures actually made money, and not everyone in the west would have benefited from them. Literally all you've done is assert that the latter must be true. I mean if I pulled some very clever accounting that proved that, actually, Germany lost money from ww2, would that absolve it from reparations, according to you? I guess systemic racism is just clever accounting by minorities to get theirs.
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Aug 31, 2016 03:40
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rudatron posted:Not all colonialist ventures actually made money, and not everyone in the west would have benefited from them. quote:Literally all you've done is assert that the latter must be true. I mean if I pulled some very clever accounting that proved that, actually, Germany lost money from ww2, would that absolve it from reparations, according to you?
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Aug 31, 2016 03:54
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twodot posted:I don't understand this. Suppose a sufficiently clever accounting demonstrated this, on what basis would you oppose that conclusion other than "cleverness is bad"? I don't think Germany is due to pay any reparations they haven't already paid, but it's not on the basis that I have perfect understanding of their accounting. In response to the question of, why, if the French bear collective guilt for their colonial projects, Muslims do not bear collective guilt for the Nice attack, Mel Mudkipper chose to ask how Muslims were deriving on going material benefit from the attack rather than answer the question, which rather strongly implies that deriving material profit is the distinction. If this is the case, it raises the rather obvious question of whether this means that a country doesn't actually owe reparations for its atrocities/colonial projects if they don't turn a profit. He has yet to clarify his position on this question.
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Aug 31, 2016 04:28
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Dead Reckoning posted:In response to the question of, why, if the French bear collective guilt for their colonial projects, Muslims do not bear collective guilt for the Nice attack, Mel Mudkipper chose to ask how Muslims were deriving on going material benefit from the attack rather than answer the question, which rather strongly implies that deriving material profit is the distinction. If this is the case, it raises the rather obvious question of whether this means that a country doesn't actually owe reparations for its atrocities/colonial projects if they don't turn a profit. He has yet to clarify his position on this question. Perhaps you could read up on the on-going conversation a bit before trying to figure out what everyone is arguing from reading just the last page? Its pretty clear what my position is, you don't have to guess it from a single response. rudatron posted:Not all colonialist ventures actually made money, and not everyone in the west would have benefited from them. Literally all you've done is assert that the latter must be true. I mean if I pulled some very clever accounting that proved that, actually, Germany lost money from ww2, would that absolve it from reparations, according to you? If you steal wealth, you are still responsible for that wealth even if you lost it EDIT: And for the love of god don't start with the Sins of the Father thing again, we've gone over it Mel Mudkiper fucked around with this message at 04:47 on Aug 31, 2016 |
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Aug 31, 2016 04:43
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Mel Mudkiper posted:If you steal wealth, you are still responsible for that wealth even if you lost it That doesn't really square with the "on going" part of your question though. If you've lost the wealth, the benefit isn't on going. It also leads to the rather silly idea that impoverished people should owe some sort of debt for long ago crimes.
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Aug 31, 2016 04:55
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Dead Reckoning posted:That doesn't really square with the "on going" part of your question though. If you've lost the wealth, the benefit isn't on going. It also leads to the rather silly idea that impoverished people should owe some sort of debt for long ago crimes. read the thread
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Aug 31, 2016 04:56
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Mel Mudkiper posted:read the thread
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Aug 31, 2016 05:35
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There's no such a thing as historical guilt. If you are doing something for the unfortunate, do it because it's the right thing for the posterity. Framing progressive work as "paying back" for past evils just raises resentment, and encourages people to find an excuse to declare the debt paid up (and therefore all the infrastructure in place to service it obsolete). Find value in good acts by themselves. steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 07:46 on Aug 31, 2016 |
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Aug 31, 2016 07:43
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Who What Now posted:Where's your empirical evidence about integration? The whole assertion that a lack of integration has no drawbacks (even assuming a host society without any bigotry) is ludicrous on its face. Even cursory googling would have pointed this out to you and that reality is worse than this idealised scenario, with examples such as this one
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Aug 31, 2016 08:17
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steinrokkan posted:Find value in good acts by themselves. This is apparently very hard, and unless combined with holier-than-thou bullshit it is also immoral  More to the point, people try to feel good about themselves by balancing out "good" and "bad" things they do, and there's some evidence that having people do "good" things actually makes them feel good enough to act like an rear end in a top hat later. So framing the reparations as not only being good themselves but also about atoning for some vague inherited bad thing is doubly counterproductive. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 08:35 on Aug 31, 2016 |
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Aug 31, 2016 08:20
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Mel Mudkiper posted:EDIT: And for the love of god don't start with the Sins of the Father thing again, we've gone over it Perhaps you shouldn't have started it then, because as you pointed out previously your whole argument for reparations rests on the assertion that Mel Mudkiper posted:B. Because the wrongs are not generations back. The inequality is still on-going and the moral obligation to that inequality is contemporary. You are not responsible for the actions of your father, but you are responsible for the benefits you received from what your father did. You are not being ask to make up for someone else's original wrong, you are being asked to take responsibility for your own privilege. therefore Mel Mudkiper posted:If you steal wealth, you are still responsible for that wealth even if you lost it suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 08:32 on Aug 31, 2016 |
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Aug 31, 2016 08:29
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Trying to reform ongoing injustices can hardly be called reparations. Seems like trying to bolt a veneer of righteous indignation onto standard politics.
steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 08:34 on Aug 31, 2016 |
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Aug 31, 2016 08:32
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steinrokkan posted:Trying to reform ongoing injustices can hardly be called reparations. Seems like trying to bolt a veneer of righteous indignation to standard politics. It can be, if your favourite author made a hamfisted attempt to redefine the word, allowing you to conspicuously distance yourself from lamestream politics.
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Aug 31, 2016 08:34
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So with some mayors still enforcing the Burkina ban despite the French court ruling they don't have the rights to ban them. Will this be the end of it or will Valls and Sarkozy be able to try and get it passed in the parliament to bypass the ruling? Also what do you guys think Sarkozy meant when he called a burkini a provocation?
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Aug 31, 2016 09:55
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drilldo squirt posted:Also what do you guys think Sarkozy meant when he called a burkini a provocation?
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Aug 31, 2016 10:03
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blowfish posted:The whole assertion that a lack of integration has no drawbacks (even assuming a host society without any bigotry) is ludicrous on its face. Even cursory googling would have pointed this out to you and that reality is worse than this idealised scenario, with examples such as this one This doesn't show causation, it shows correlation. So you lied when you said it was empirically proven. Now that we've established that you're a liar, why should we listen to anything more you have to say about this?
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Aug 31, 2016 13:09
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twodot posted:I don't think this is a sufficient response. I've understood all of your posts to be in the context of ongoing benefit. Your position seems plainly untenable absent that sort of moderation. I've also read the entire thread and I have to admit Mudkiper that your entire premise seems based on the notion of reparations being morally obligatory due to the fact that a given population with colonial skeletons in its closet continues to benefit from stolen wealth. If ongoing benefit isn't the criteria for deciding when reparations are necessary, it seems to me that you really are just arguing for Sins of the Father. If this isn't the case, then by all means, clarify.
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Aug 31, 2016 14:18
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Who What Now posted:This doesn't show causation, it shows correlation. So you lied when you said it was empirically proven. Now that we've established that you're a liar, why should we listen to anything more you have to say about this? The whole article is about how a lack of integration is a big problem. The only causation/correlation thing in doubt is what's preventing further integration. Now that we've established that you're a liar, why should we listen to anything more you have to say about this? Giggle Goose posted:I've also read the entire thread and I have to admit Mudkiper that your entire premise seems based on the notion of reparations being morally obligatory due to the fact that a given population with colonial skeletons in its closet continues to benefit from stolen wealth. If ongoing benefit isn't the criteria for deciding when reparations are necessary, it seems to me that you really are just arguing for Sins of the Father. Note: If M&M fails to clairfy, then I charge him with wanting to bleed countries and communities he doesn't like to satisfy his personal lust for revenge, and coming up with post-hoc excuses for why it totally isn't revenge. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 15:00 on Aug 31, 2016 |
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Aug 31, 2016 14:56
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blowfish posted:Note: If M&M fails to clairfy, then I charge him with wanting to bleed countries and communities he doesn't like to satisfy his personal lust for revenge, and coming up with post-hoc excuses for why it totally isn't revenge. Somehow I'll survive this condemnation
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Aug 31, 2016 15:39
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GAINING WEIGHT... posted:This highlights exactly the problem with people claiming reparations - still ill-defined, but anyway - are a good idea, at least as a guiding principle for how wealthier nations should dole out their aid to developing ones. There has to be some cutoff, and that cutoff will inevitably be arbitrary. Whether the cutoff is temporal - nothing before 200 years ago counts, say - or ethnic - brown people who were imperialists in the past don't have to abide by this, for example - or anything else, it will end up making the ideology behind reparations inconsistent. This point has been raised many times, and it is a good one. Should Spain be able to claim reparations from Muslim states in the middle east? They were conquered in the 700s and were ruled over by the caliphate. The fact that Spain went on to become a wealthy Western nation, and imperialist herself to boot, should be irrelevant according to the logic that Mel (and presumably those on his "side") has used: the burden of repaying stolen wealth persists regardless of the nation's current status, and returning stolen wealth should take priority over the needs of nations that, while poor, were not directly affected by colonization. Was that conquest a massive human rights abuse involving the wholesale plunder or oppression of the Spanish? My early-medieval history is a bit fuzzy, but I don't remember that being the case. I certainly don't remember anything on par with, say, Spain's wholesale expulsion of Muslims a century or so after taking full control of the Iberian Peninsula. We're talking about reparations for human rights abuses, not disagreements between kings and land changing rulers, and the fact that you're comparing conquests to colonialism and genocide suggests that you just don't get it. The problem with having cutoffs at all is that they incentivize countries to stonewall and "run out the clock". Take, for instance, the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide. Germany admitted to its crimes and is still paying Holocaust reparations to this day, while Turkey continues to deny that its crimes ever happened and hasn't paid a cent in reparations as a result. The direct survivors of that genocide are likely all dead as of a few years ago; does that mean that the genocide has reverted from being a crime against humanity to just a bygone unfortunate historical fact not worth holding anyone responsible for? quote:I think the main struggle in this thread is the ideal versus the practical. I don't rightly know if, in pure moral terms, prioritizing the previously colonized states over ones which are currently poorer is really more righteous, but I also think it's irrelevant. The world is as it is, and we can't right the wrongs of history, as others have pointed out, by attempting to balance some cosmic ledger. Nor can we worry that we "shouldn't" have a say in how our stolen wealth be used: I am not conceding this point either, but the fact of the matter is that we have this wealth, whether we like it or not, whether we personally acquired it or not, and being the ones who possess it, we and only we can decide what to now do with it. If our goal is a better world, then we can't align our priorities on anything other than the current state of the world, which is to say, we have to put the money where it is most needed, not where it will most assuage our historical guilt. This isn't to say we ignore things like the clearly imbalanced racial divide in this country or others (speaking from a US perspective); indeed, that can be accounted for in our policies. What we can't do is say that a nation that needs our help less than others should be the top of the list for foreign aid or the like simply because, centuries ago, we extracted their natural resources or something. If you steal all of someone's money except for $20 and then bulldoze their home while their family is inside, can you then refuse any responsibility or punishment for their crimes because it would be immoral to pay back what you stole because a totally unrelated homeless orphan who only has $10 is clearly more deserving of charity than your victim is? What if you spent all that money and don't have it anymore - does that mean you don't have to pay it back anymore because you didn't end up with a net profit anymore? What if you gave it all to your kid - does that mean they don't have to return the stolen property when the crime is discovered, because they're not the one who personally stole it? Where exactly is the dividing line that grants total immunity to responsibility for robbery, plunder, destruction, and murder? Dead Reckoning posted:That doesn't really square with the "on going" part of your question though. If you've lost the wealth, the benefit isn't on going. It also leads to the rather silly idea that impoverished people should owe some sort of debt for long ago crimes. Even if the benefit isn't ongoing, the losses certainly are! For example, the Congo Free State had profitability issues, which is part of why Leopold cranked things up to such an extreme level...but I doubt the victims of his hand-collecting squads considered that to be a mitigating factor!
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Aug 31, 2016 15:48
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Main Paineframe posted:The problem with having cutoffs at all is that they incentivize countries to stonewall and "run out the clock". Take, for instance, the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide. Germany admitted to its crimes and is still paying Holocaust reparations to this day, while Turkey continues to deny that its crimes ever happened and hasn't paid a cent in reparations as a result. The direct survivors of that genocide are likely all dead as of a few years ago; does that mean that the genocide has reverted from being a crime against humanity to just a bygone unfortunate historical fact not worth holding anyone responsible for? For a counterexample, let's say your great-grandfather was an immigrant, after slavery ended. He never stole any wealth, and was not born with priveleges related to that wealth, but he probably did eventually spend his fairly earned money on things that were created indirectly by stolen wealth. Is he less culpable than his neighbors who were around to reap the rewards of colonialism directly? Are you, his descendent, more, or less culpable than he was? How much more or less? Does it change your culpability if he was brown, and from a place that was colonized, instead of colonizer? Isn't it important to know exactly how much guilt to feel, before you try and make up for it? It seems like a very insincere apology if you don't even bother knowing what you personally did wrong.
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Aug 31, 2016 16:47
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rudatron posted:That's a distinction without a difference, any one person in a country doesn't have responsibility for what their government does, because they're two separate entities. We don't punish people for the actions of the state they live in, or at least such action is seen as immoral from the get go. That's why stuff like the Iraq sanctions are seen as so bad, yet according to your logic of the social contract conferring guilt (in addition to justifying socially necessary state violence against citizens), those sanctions are valid. But no one is being punished here. Chances are most of the things people think of when it comes to reparations wouldn't even require an increase in tax rate. It's no different than a country spending money for any other reason related to social welfare (either within or outside of the country); it's just that a country's moral responsibility towards alleviating the effects of its own past/present crimes is higher than its moral responsibility to just help some random country. (Also loving lol at "socially necessary state violence against citizens"; I'm pretty sure no one but the radical leftist inside your head thinks that a country's citizens should be arrested because of the country's past crimes*) Using your logic, welfare is collectively and disproportionately punishing the rich since taxes help pay for it. In the same way that many people would argue that the rich in a country have a responsibility to pay higher taxes due to poverty, the citizens of a country as a whole have a moral responsibility for helping alleviate the effects of past crimes a country committed. (Also, "citizens as a whole" does not mean "every single citizen"; it just means that all citizens taken as a whole end up helping to an extent reasonable for their own personal situation, just like we do with taxes.) * i mean seriously that is some hilariously disingenuous bullshit Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 17:11 on Aug 31, 2016 |
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Aug 31, 2016 17:07
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Then call it what it is - welfare / social programs.
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Aug 31, 2016 17:11
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Main Paineframe posted:Even if the benefit isn't ongoing, the losses certainly are! For example, the Congo Free State had profitability issues, which is part of why Leopold cranked things up to such an extreme level...but I doubt the victims of his hand-collecting squads considered that to be a mitigating factor! Mel Mudkiper posted:Somehow I'll survive this condemnation
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Aug 31, 2016 17:28
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Dead Reckoning posted:Which is it? Does the obligation for reparations stem from and ongoing benefit from the harm inflicted, or does it stem from having inflicted harm in the first place, even if any benefits from that harm have been lost in the interim? It's not a binary
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Aug 31, 2016 17:31
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Mel Mudkiper posted:It's not a binary What if the benefits of oppression were lost because the oppressor became oppressed in the intervening historical period before the first act of oppression and today? What if elements of the initially oppressed people eventually came to identify with their oppressors as to be indistinguishable today, and as such enjoyed some benefits of the violence against their people? Would they be forced to pay reparations for crimes committed against their own ancestors? steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 17:37 on Aug 31, 2016 |
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Aug 31, 2016 17:34
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rudatron posted:A 'negotiation between cultural groups' is not justice. Justice is for righting wrongs, a negotiation is made for the sake of the naked self-interest. A state of limitations is necessary for justice because history is unreliable, and literally history, in that people have an obligation to move on from it, for the sake of the present and future. That's an absurd standard and betrays a real misunderstanding of the subject. Was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission "not justice" because it was assembled ad hoc to deal with a specific crime which was entirely and fully legal at the time? This is how the world works. Again, to expect some universal "cut off" that encompasses both a hundred year occupation as well as a year of wartime genocide is stupid. If you really want an analog to statute of limitations, it's like demanding a statute of limitations that encompasses both shoplifting and murder. It makes no sense. The scope of state crimes cannot be encompassed in a single blanket statement of a "cut off", and probably more importantly, it's unnecessary. There are myriad examples of successful reparations without this framework. The ideas you're suggesting have no purpose, they don't clarify anything, they don't enable justice, they just make it arbitrarily more difficult for the natural process of aggrieved groups to make moral, political cases to those in power. Reparations is the contravention of power and law. It takes things that were completely legal, that were enforced by the police or army, that had a majority of favored intellectuals and academia providing rationales and frameworks, and labels them a crime in hindsight. It is by it's very nature outside the legal system. By the time you get to the point of potentially receiving reparations you've already cleared the modest hurdle of identifying the legitimacy of the crime, because you've convinced the people that still have the money and the guns and so on that they have an unavoidable obligation to give some of that away. There's already a probably too-strong check against reparations, it's called "nuh uh", and it's overwhelmingly the chosen defense. You're arguing as if we're trying to construct a specific law, enforced by an imaginary international body which needs the clarity of law. That's not remotely how reparations works. This isn't "justice" in the sense of traffic laws, this is "justice" in the moral, political sense.
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Aug 31, 2016 17:37
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steinrokkan posted:What if the benefits of oppression were lost because the oppressor became oppressed in the intervening historical period before the first act of oppression and today? What if elements of the initially oppressed people eventually came to identify with their oppressors as to be indistinguishable today, and as such enjoyed some benefits of the violence against their people? Would they be forced to pay reparations for crimes committed against their own ancestors? Let me use a metaphor  This is a gradient between yellow and green. Can you objectively pinpoint the EXACT spot that yellow stops being yellow and becomes green? Can you say with absolutely certainty there is an exact agreed upon spot that yellow becomes green? If you can't, does that mean yellow and green can't exist? Any human moral idea is condemned to implode from deconstruction. Its the entire reason deconstruction exists. It's not logically possible to create a moral or intellectual framework that survives deconstructive scrutiny. However, it is nihilistic to claim that because no idea can survive being deconstructed, ideas do not have value. All human ideas are built upon a pillar of mush, but we still need and use those ideas to function. Equality, Liberty, Justice, etc as ideas all fall apart if you push against them hard enough, but it doesn't mean they don't have value and we don't apply them to our lives. To apply it to the reparations debate, yes, the further back in history you go and the more obscure you make the chain of interactions, the harder it becomes to ascertain a clear moral mandate. However, that does not mean that we should ignore situations in which the mandate IS clear. No, I do not think it is moral or practical to try to apply reparations to the Assyrians and Mongols. However, the fact that the line eventually becomes blurry does not mean the line is never clear. If you want to argue the mandate has expired for colonial reparations, fine. People have done that, and I strongly disagree with them. But if you want to argue that creating some idea of moral mandate should never be done because you can imagine a situation in which the mandate might be obscured, I think you are trying to distract from the actual argument.
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Aug 31, 2016 17:56
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