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November 28, 2024 01:25 AM UTC

Thanksgiving Weekend Open Thread

  • 37 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

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37 thoughts on “Thanksgiving Weekend Open Thread”

  3. I see Polsters aren’t rushing to express all of the things for which we are grateful. It is hard to find thoughts of gratitude now. I am convinced the Trump Reich, which will be the fourth one, will decimate the government as we know it, split the nation and bring us to the brink of civil war. 

    This is not just entertainment.

    This is real.

      1. I'm grateful trump got less than 50% of the popular vote.  Small thing, but gives me the right to argue that his so-called mandate is really just his "bro time" with Elon. 

      2. I’m sure feeling grateful this year. Karen survived a heart attack and the open heart that followed. The bills are going to clobber our finances for quite a while, but she’s here, and that’s all I need. 

          1. Thanks, Duke. She's better enough that I've got her starting on her long-neglected project list. She and a friend are going to build a rack behind my stove to hang my cherished cast-iron skillets this weekend. 

          1. Right now, it's a pleasure to be a caretaker, Kwtree, considering what the alternative might have been. You know, that's why they make you make those promises, "Better and worse, sickness and health", etc. 

        4. Good to hear Karen survived and will be with you.  A wonderful outcome — modern medicine does good, and then we just have to figure out how to deal with the costs. May you and Karen have many more Thanksgivings to celebrate.

           

           

    1. I've been asking myself, should I buy a car? I decided to not do that this year, and instead see how far I can get with my 2013 car that has over 236,000 miles on it. Maybe I buy a newer car, and store it??!!

      1. I knew someone whose husband was terminally ill, so he bought two identical cars for her. One was to be driven, and the other was to serve as a hangar queen. 

      2. My suggestion @The realist would be to buy an EV this year while the $7500 and state EV incentives are in effect. Furthermore even if you don't want an EV my suggestion would be to buy a car this year. Cars are comprised thousands of components and no car is entirely produced in the United States. That pretty much guarantees higher prices of cars. Also supply chain issues.

        Drill down further and certain segments have particular exposure to the tariff issue. Minivans by Honda and Toyota are assembled in the United States, while the Chrysler Pacifica is built in Canada. Currently the Chrysler Pacifica is the only car sold under the Chrysler brand. Less competition, higher prices, less innovation, more money going to foreign corporate interest. 

        Regardless of what car you are looking for you'll likely pay less this year. Regardless of what TV, smartphone, kitchen appliance…

    2. I'd imagine if many millions of people bought everything they reasonably need, except non-perishables, before Jan. 20 2025, there would be some measurable negative impact on economic stats for the start of the new administration. The new adminstration would just blame the old administration for the bad numbers, of course, and a third of America would believe that messaging, but it would look good for a while on MSNBC unless Musk buys it.

      1. That's not my intention. Simply seeking to operate in a rational economic fashion. Ex. Canadian Maple syrup will be 25% more expensive, so it's likely that other maple syrup will increase its price relative to the tariff. So even if you are not buying Canadian maple syrup you'll pay more.

        It would be possible to buy a 4 year supply of a syrup. It's up to you if that will save you money. Personally I would think higher ticket items not made in the USA would be a more likely source of return. It will be impossible to avoid the runaway effects entirely.

  8. “No, You are not on Indigenous Land”, Noah Smith.

    “Pieces of territory belong to institutions, not people.” This is a provocative title, but a surprisingly not-so-provocative article, once you think about it.

    “What is Ethnonationalism?”

    The United States, like all nations, was created through territorial conquest. Most of its current territory was occupied or frequented by human beings before the U.S. came; the U.S. used force to either displace, subjugate, or kill all of those people. To the extent that land “ownership” existed under the previous inhabitants, the land of the U.S. is stolen land. 

    This was also true before the U.S. arrived. The forcible theft of the land upon which the U.S. now exists was not the first such theft; the people who lived there before conquered, displaced, or killed someone else in order to take the land. The land has been stolen and re-stolen again and again. If you somehow destroyed the United States, expelled its current inhabitants, and gave ownership of the land to the last recorded tribe that had occupied it before, you would not be returning it to its original occupants; you would simply be handing it to the next-most-recent conquerors.

    If you go back far enough in time, of course, at some point this is no longer true. Humanity didn’t always exist; therefore for every piece of land, there was a first human to lay eyes on it, and a first human to say “This land is mine.” But by what right did this first human claim exclusive ownership of this land? Why does being the first person to see a natural object make you the rightful owner of that object? And why does being the first human to set foot on a piece of land give your blood descendants the right to dispose of that land as they see fit in perpetuity, and to exclude any and all others from that land? What about all the peoples of the world who were never lucky enough the first to lay eyes on any plot of dirt? Are they simply to be dispossessed forever?

    I have never seen a satisfactory answer to these questions. Nor have I seen a satisfactory explanation of why ownership of land should be allocated collectively, in terms of racial or ethnic groups.

    …

    But even in those cases when it did exist, why should land ownership be assigned to a race at all? Why should my notional blood relation to the discoverers or the conquerors of a piece of land determine whether I can truly belong on that land? Why should a section of the map be the land of the Franks, or the Russkiy, or the Cherokee, or the Han, or the Ramaytush Ohlone, or the Britons? Of course you can assign land ownership this way — it’s called an “ethnostate”. But if you do this, it means that the descendants of immigrants can never truly be full and equal citizens of the land they were born in. If Britain is defined as the land of the Britons, then a Han person whose great-great-great-grandparents moved there from China will exist as a contingent citizen — a perpetual foreigner whose continued life in the land of their birth exists only upon the sufferance of a different race. This is the price of ethnonationalism.

    The downsides of ethnonationalism have been exhaustively laid out in the decades since World War 2, and I’m not going to reiterate them all now. Suffice it to say that most nations of the world have moved away from ethnonationalism — there is an informal sense in which some people still think of France as the land of the Franks and so on, but almost all nations define citizenship and belonging through institutions rather than race. Israel, one of the few exceptions to this rule, receives a large amount of international criticism for defining itself as an ethnostate. 

    And yet these days I am subjected to a constant stream of ethnonationalist claims from progressives in the country of my birth.

    1. Written by someone who never took property law. Yes, this land was stolen, all property is documented theft. Informal property rights are non-codified or documented, but recognized among local residents to varying degrees. We just ignored their natural rights and later courts compensated based on evidenced takings. Similarly the Crown Estates belong to the "King" because we choose to accept that. 

        1. The whole issue of "ancestral lands" and acknowledgements is a muddled mess. Colorado is supposedly the ancestral lands of the Ute, Arapaho, Cheyenne, per the acknowledgements. Yet, those tribes were on the lands of the ancestral Pueblans and Fremont peoples. SW Colorado is well known for its archeological treasures. NW Colorado is much less known, but does have scatter sites where arrowheads were made and many petroglyph locations. 

          1. Checked out "Hanta Yo." Unfortunately, the book is pretty controversial, especially with Native Americans. Some of that is "cultural appropriation" in that whites shouldn't be writing about indigenous peoples. But others question if her assistant on the book for many years is actually Lakota. Among other problems I found on Wikipedia. Checked out "Black Elk Speaks," which is older than I thought it was, altho with more recent updates. Same type of issues. I will keep looking.

        3. I think Noah's point is that yes, the land has been stolen numerous times over before white men showed up, stole it once again, and then set that ownership in law.

          Right. Noah Smith makes two pretty big points: 

          Legal ownership of the land is INSTITUTIONAL.

          What is the moral right of ethno-nationalism to "own" land?

           

          1. 1) To say ownership is institutional is only to recognize dominion of the state. The state through courts has stated land was stolen and retroactively compensated while other claims remain unsubstantiated. Further courts at the time highlighted the criminal action of the state.

            2. The courts have held there is no blood quantum to squaw tribe heritage as tribal members included war captives, the enslaved, intermarrying. The author is applying an ethno-state bent to the discussion presumably about his guilt for supporting Israel? IDK but Charles Curtis the 31st Vice President of these United States and member of the Kaw nation is spinning in his grave. 

  9. Do you "own" your children?  Do you own the changing trees and mountain grandeur?
    "Belonging" is about  who gives back to and takes care of the land. Most indigenous peoples of whatever tribe have that concept in their teachings. So did our tribal European ancestors, pre-feudalism.

    By that standard, native tribes, organic farmers,  regenerating cattle grazers, those who practice soil conservation instead of just using it up, are "owners" of the land. That is , in the immortal words of Rogers and Hammerstein, "we know we belong to the land."

    I recommend reading Thom Hartmann on the Commons for an understanding of ownership and belonging. 

     

    in the meantime, let us shed a tear for the suffering of white men like Noah Smith, who must be subjected to “an endless stream of ethnonationalism from fellow progressives in the land of their birth.” It is so clearly more poignant than the death and suffering of Cherokee on the Trail of Tears, those massacred at Sand Creek, and more.

  10. What are Property Rights, Anyway?

    Reading History can make you cynical. And raises a lot of awkward questions.

    Justifications for Land Ownership or Possession – Sometimes moral, sometimes ideological, sometimes just raw power:

    (1) First Claim
    (2) Good Nurturing/Stewardship
    (3) I'm starving
    (4) I'm the King/Duke/Warlord/TribalChief
    (5) Violence/Dominance/Revenge
    (6) Ethno/Religious (Manifest Destiny, "Our ancestors from 2000 years ago lived here")
    (7) Nationalism – wrapped with Ethnology, Religious, 
    (8) Ideology. (I guess it's always SOME kind of ideology)
    (9) Legal Institutions.

    First, I agree with KWTree that nurturing and living at one with nature are extremely good moral reasons for existing on our planet, and the land and environment certainly DESERVE that kind of stewardship. Noah Smith clearly agrees with her that the Europeans conquered the natives using violence and aggression.

    JohnNorthofDenver thinks Noah Smith has some kind of "guilt for supporting Israeil"? Umm, I think Noah is saying exactly the opposite. ReligiousEthnoNationalism is pretty much Israel's entire justification for dominating the land there in Palestine, combined with power. And the people who lived there before, (i.e. the most recent before people, not the before-befores), are also using a Religious/Ethno/Nationalist justification.

    Which "before-people" have the actual right to claim the land? And why them, not the other?

    Noah Smith sees the only way out of those darker and immoral reasons, is that ownership must belong to institutional organizations, i.e. laws, and political or economic institutions.

    I just read an extremely fascinating history of Venice. (Who invented banking & double-entry book-keeping?) Notably, it is a long story of violent interactions between Venice, Genoa, Constantinople, the spice trade markets of Caffa & Alexandria the Venetian Empire, the Crusades, the Ottomans, Hungarians, the Austro-Hungarians, etc.

    It is not at all a story of legal and moral justifications for "owning" the land or the trade cities.

    I don't believe that the ur-history of humans is as idyllic as we like to imagine.

    Small hunter-gatherer bands striking out into the unknown when their population outstrips the food & resources of their valley. The next valley over is ripe with game and food, perhaps because it's empty, or maybe the neanderthal band isn't as efficient at killing off the big game, or because a previous band has a herd of goats and planted a bunch of crops, or whatever.

      1. "Venice: A New History" by Thomas Madden.

        From high school history I knew about Marco Polo, but that's about it. Venice had a huge mercantile empire across the Eastern Mediteranean, invented banking, pursued a kind of democracy, and was the spearhead of multiple crusades that tried to restore christianity. Actually, Venice had a specific interest was protecting the merchant cities and the spice trade. 

        1. "spearhead of multiple crusades….." Unfortunately, that included the notorious 4th Crusade that took over Constantinople in 1204 CE. 

           

          Thanks for the Madden reference. 

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