My point about the right wing property thesis underlyingyour argument still stands.
Your proposition that you losde possession once "the crime is acknowledged" is not geberally correct as a matter of law. At least in sales of personal property a purchaser in good faith retais title. I know yoy think there aren't any such, but you'd have to show, as a martter of law, depending on the state, and I don't know if this applies to real estate purchases, but I bet it does, that the buyer had specific knowlede that his purchase was tainted. And within in a certain time period (which we are well out of for any UCC sales of goods purposes.) It wouldn't do even do to show that the buyer had general knowledge that property like his was stolen.
Moreover, there is the law of adverse possession, which does apply to realty, and says roughly, depending on state, taht if you occupy someone' property openly an notoriously without their permission and without their taking specific steps to evict you, after a certain period, usually seven to ten years, it's yours.
I'm not talking ethivs here, obviously, but you raised the legal issues,
This is what really
> drives the fear of accepting responsibility. The
> fear that minorities will demand "excessive"
> reparations.
Don't be childish. It doesn't matter what "reparations" minorities demand; these are merely symbolic statements. There's no serious possibility of any legal; basis for their winning excessive or indeed any reparations for things that happened over 100 years ago. So I don'tthink there's any such fear, even if people know the details, Which they don't.
>
>
> There is almost no way the ceding of native lands
> could ever be considered non-coercive. How would one
>
> work out such a thing? Something like "Well since we
> "accidentially" killed 90% of you and you obviously
> don't need as much space now could you sell us some
> land so we don't have to feel bad about ourselves
> and just take it?" To talk about land being
> voluntary ceded to any conquering invader is hugely
> disengenious. At what point during WWII did the
> French cede their country to Germany?
You should know perfectly well that at least some of the relations between the NAs and the settlers was on fairly equal terms. Moreover, your definition of coercion is too braud. Even if we broaden it to include force or fraud, taht only encompasses some of the property acquisitions. Bargaianing froma position of strength may be unfair, but if it does not involve force or fraud, on your Nozickean theory it is OK. Indeed it is the point of the game.
>
>
> They are the standards claimed to be applied by the
> European invaders. The fact that NA's had differing
> concepts of land ownership is irrelevant. We lost
> and the standards of the conquerers is to be
> applied.
You ought to know that the standrds applied by the Europeans and Americans were quite various. Nozick represents an extreme right wing position that is not widely shared. As a matter of the common law, insofar as that embodies the Europeans' standards, the land belongs to the sovereign and is grantedto citizens as private property onthe conditionthat thsi benefit the public good. A remnant of this idea is in the notionof emionent domanin -- the sov can take his land back wiwith just compensation. (Not taht that was in general offered.)
>
> You can't undo it so you apply the standards the
> conquerers themselves claim they believe. So in a
> country
> where public lands are anethema we're just going to
> conveniently decide that privatizing native lands
> was
> the real problem and make all contested areas part
> of the public trust. To be handled by white male
> representatives of course.
I don't follow your point here. But you can't undo it, that's true.
>>
> No NA's did not steal anything. You can't steal from
> no one. No one was here to steal from. The idea that
>
> NA's behaved except in a few isolated cases "like
> everyone else as a general rule in grabbing each
> other's
> land" is difficult for you to truly believe if you
> also believe, as you claim, "notions of private
> ownership of
> real estate that are Euro-American and (in my
> understanding) often have no NA counterparts.". How
> could
> NA's behave just like Europeans concerning land if
> they held differing concepts about land ownership?
Now you are switching the rules. I thought we were applying European standards as you (mis)understand trhem. But even by NA standards, there were wars, land grabs, dispossessions, and enslavements in many cases that it is hard to believe were acceptable by ethical system.
> You
> can believe one or the other but not both.
> Certainly NA's killed each other for access to
> females, in rituals, to gain access to resources and
> other
> reasons but almost none of it was tied to the
> concept of land ownership.
Oh, so if I still your land, noy because i care about the land per se, but because I want the resources on or it it (say the game), that's OK?
>
>
> Who said collective guilt meant you daughter was
> anything like the moral equivalent of Gen. Sheridan?
It's not hard to read what you are saying as amounting to that.
Whites have a responsibility to
> admit the crimes
> from the past that they directly benefit from and
> make a realistic attempt to make amends on some
> terms
> that recognizes that minorities should benefit in
> similar ways. In the US this means money/land and
> access
> to power/ increased representation. If you can pull
> that off without invoking guilt I'm all for it
> brother but guilt
> can be a powerful motivator and I'm not ready to
> throw it away as a tool to gain social justice
So whoa re whites? Jews (I'm Jewish) weren'tw hite when my ancestors got here -- mostly after the dispossesion of the Indians was complete. Jewsare white now, but how am I responsible for anything bad that General Sheridan did? Maybe I'm responsible for seeing that the oppressed are treated fairly, but that's really something different. Guilt-tripping people seems to me counterproductive.
Back to work, no time to spell-check, sorry
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