What bugs me is that contemporary political arguments are never won through a scinetific process. They are imposed by creating a contemporary mythology and let me say that most of the peoples political decisions are based on these myths. I cant find any difference in methodology with that of the ancient greeks who made sacrifices so that they have good wind on their sales, or with astrology or with creationism. 2011/10/19 Kevin Carson <[email protected]>
On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 2:45 PM, Sandwichman <[email protected]> wrote:
What an incredibly odd argument to encounter on a P2P list concerned with reclaiming the commons!
To say that the aboriginal people of the Western Hemisphere didn't "own" the land is as relevant as saying they didn't read English or worship Jesus Christ as their savior. Europeans stole the land by imposing their own peculiar property regime, along with the metaphysics that viewed such peculiarity as both natural and universal.
I agree.
First of all, the "some" Indians who were nomads were pretty much those centered on the Great Plains. That leaves out all those who practiced some form of sedentary horticulture or field cropping, like the Five Civilized Tribes (pretty much anything south of the Ohio or east of the Mississippi), the corn growers of the Southwest, the lodge peoples of the Northeast and Eastern seaboard (who friggin' taught the English colonists about native crops, fer chrissakes), the potlatch peoples of the Pacific NW.... It's a bit like "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
And second, the idea that any form of ownership other than allodial, fee-simple commodity ownership on a one-family-per-parcel basis is invalid is nonsense. The claim that common ownnership of hunting grounds is null and void, and that expropriation is fair game because those who covet them can put them to more efficient use, smacks of the "best and highest use" arguments for eminent domain.
-- Kevin Carson Research Associate, Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com Desktop Regulatory State: The Countervailing Power of Super-Empowered Individuals http://desktopregulatorystate.wordpress.com Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
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