Physicist Robert Bacher Dies at 99!

On Mon, 22 Nov 2004 13:10:46 -0700, in a place far, far away, Hop
David made the phosphor
on my monitor glow in such a way as to indicate that:

A stain on our history,

Then you admit the American People _haven't_ always been a deterrence
from abuse of power?

Yes.

Jim Oberg wrote:
"Hop David" wrote in message

After our war with Mexico, the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo gave property
rights to those Mexicans who had homes and ranches on what then became
U.S.A. territory. These property rights were thrown out the window to
accomodate the influx of fortune hunters during the California Gold
Rush. In my opinion, this crime against Mexicans was a repetition of the
same crime commited many times against the Native American people.


ROTFLOL!

So those Anglos (few of them the ancestors of today's Americans)
were thieves for not preserving the 'ownership' of the thieves
who had stolen the land from the Navajo

We took land that we acknowledged to be rightfully theirs by treaty.
http://www.monterey.org/150years/treaty.html
Article VIII

We also broke our treaty.

But hey, it's OK to lie and steal if you're dealing with liars and thieves.

--
Hop David
http://clowder.net/hop/index.html

Rand Simberg wrote:

The aboriginal Americans, for the most part, didn't even have a
concept of property rights when it came to land.


Which would go hand-in-hand with a mobile form of hunter-gatherer
existence; you don't get land ownership till you settle down in one
place, and even then it was tribal, not individual ownership of land in
the case of the aboriginal Americans.
North Dakota's Mandan tribe did settle down in villages, and defended
the areas around them- they built earth-lodge structures to live in
(these were pretty sound structures, as North Dakota's winter weather
demands; I'd hate to think what it must have been like in a teepee at
night in a howling blizzard):
http://www.kstrom.net/isk/maps/houses/hidatsa.html
And of course there is the great Mandan/Welsh mystery:
http://www.kessler-web.co.uk/History...uExplorers.htm
And here after watching Blazing Saddles, I thought they were all Jewish.
(Mel had a little fun with one of the 19th century's greatest and
looniest hypothosis...that aboriginal Americans were the 10 lost tribes
of Israel...how exactly they were supposed to have gotten here is a very
good question that I will leave to the Mormons)

Pat

Rand Simberg wrote:
On Mon, 22 Nov 2004 16:27:25 -0700, in a place far, far away, Hop
David made the phosphor
on my monitor glow in such a way as to indicate that:


Most of us have ancestors that have committed crimes. I would guess even
you. So does that make it OK to take your property?


We didn't take their property because their *ancestors* commited
crimes. Those ancestors had no property, as I've already said. No
living aboriginal American has had his property taken.

(Sigh) Once again, we were talking about the Mexicans in Californa after
the Mexican American War. They had property rights granted by the Treaty
of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

Get it? Not aboriginal Americans. I'll say it slowly:
NNNNNoooooootttttt aaaaabbbbbooooorrrrriiiiiggggggiiiiinnnnnaaaaaalll l
Aaaaaaaaammmmmmmmeeeeeerrrrrrrriiiiiiicccccccccaaa aaaaaannnnnnnnssssss.

Please reread this subthread. You're embarrassing yourself in front of
1000s of people.

--
Hop David
http://clowder.net/hop/index.html

Pat Flannery wrote:

(Mel had a little fun with one of the 19th century's greatest and
looniest hypothosis...that aboriginal Americans were the 10 lost tribes
of Israel...how exactly they were supposed to have gotten here is a very
good question that I will leave to the Mormons)

Maybe Joseph Smith got this notion from Thor Heyerdahl.

--
Hop David
http://clowder.net/hop/index.html

Henry Spencer wrote:
In article ,
Hop David wrote:

There used to be two great powers with Mutual Assured Destruction
holding each in check.
Now the U.S. is the single great military power. The gap between the
U.S. and the 2nd greatest power is large...
What then would be the deterrence to prevent the U.S. from abusing its
power?


M.A.D. never did restrain superpowers from abuse of power very much. Both
meddled constantly in the internal affairs of other countries. As witness
Afghanistan and Grenada, even invading independent countries was perfectly
possible, if you were a little bit careful about *which* country you
invaded. (Grenada was fine, Cuba was not...)

Restraints on the abuse of power by the US, in particular, really have to
come from within. Constitutional restrictions like habeas corpus, the
right to a speedy trial, the need to justify a search warrant in detail,
the right to legal representation, the requirement that only Congress can
declare war, etc., are too important to be set aside indefinitely by a
President, no matter what excuses he makes. They are, if anything, even
more important in wartime than in peacetime.

I hope that our system of checks and balances continues to work.


--
Hop David
http://clowder.net/hop/index.html

In article ,
Rand Simberg wrote:
...If it's OK to steal land from thieves, then nobody has any property rights.

The aboriginal Americans, for the most part, didn't even have a
concept of property rights when it came to land.

Careful here. Remember that the aboriginal cultures which are well
documented are typically ones that were encountered centuries *after*
first European contact... and in particular, after European epidemic
disease had ravaged the locals.

The report of the de Soto expedition, which ventured inland in the US
southeast circa 1540, shows that the aboriginal cultures found there
*then* were far more sophisticated than the ones settlers met there a
century or two later: large-scale agriculture, organized religion,
centrally-ruled agrarian city-states. The country cousins of the Aztecs,
not nomads living in huts. You can bet your booties *those* people had
the idea of property rights. But the destruction of their culture by
disease epidemics was already visibly underway.

By and large, we don't know what the true aboriginal Americans thought
of property rights.
--
"Think outside the box -- the box isn't our friend." | Henry Spencer
-- George Herbert |

Rand Simberg wrote:
On Mon, 22 Nov 2004 17:02:46 -0700, in a place far, far away, Hop
David made the phosphor
on my monitor glow in such a way as to indicate that:


Get it? Not aboriginal Americans. I'll say it slowly:
NNNNNoooooootttttt aaaaabbbbbooooorrrrriiiiiggggggiiiiinnnnnaaaaaalll l
Aaaaaaaaammmmmmmmeeeeeerrrrrrrriiiiiiiccccccccca aaaaaaaannnnnnnnssssss.

Please reread this subthread. You're embarrassing yourself in front of
1000s of people.


All right, I'll let you and Oberg argue about that one. I'm possibly
arguing a strawman in your case, but I stand by the general point.

In the past I _have_ argued against Scott Lowther's claim that it was OK
to take Indian land because they had no concept of property rights.

However in this thread I was arguing that it was wrong to take land from
Mexicans. Oberg's reply seemed to be that it was OK to steal from
Mexicans because they stole from Indians. I don't buy that either. But I
will note that your argument is undermining Oberg's.

--
Hop David
http://clowder.net/hop/index.html

Hop David wrote:


The aboriginal Americans, for the most part, didn't even have a
concept of property rights when it came to land.


What's your point?


Yeah, Clovis or Pedernales? :-)

Pat (running)

Rand Simberg wrote:

That it's meaningless to say that we *stole* it from them. We
committed some regrettable crimes against them, including the
occasional mass murder, but taking their land, which even they didn't
consider theirs, isn't one of them, and they were hardly innocent
themselves.


They considered the land to be beyond anyone's ownership; the way we
consider air and sunlight; if somebody showed up and took all the air of
your house while placing it in eternal eclipse, you might be a bit
torqued off...even though you never claimed to own the air or sunlight
over your property.
If that someone was a Caucasian Lakota tribal member, and then gave you
a handful of yellow roulette chips to be used at the Crazy Ass Casino,
and a Skunk's skull with an odd design painted on it in exchange for
that sunlight and air...well, I'd say you'd be getting just what you
deserve, kemo sabe. ;-)

Pat