because in the 90s we started teaching people that their feelings are the truth, rather than mostly stupid and wrong.

if there is anything in common with ignorant fools it’s that they think their feelings is the only measure of things, and truth and knowledge is just a feeling they feel like any other.

i was lucky enough to learn in school that my feelings are stupid and wrong and they need to be verified before i can trust them and that other people know more about things than i do. but i’m part of the homosexual queertrans agenda like that.

what makes it genuine? i have no doubt she feels that way. i can feel lots of things and make statements about them.

that is very different than taking actions regarding those feelings. and that is true of celebrities as is of everyone else. Lots of people I know complain about stuff, but few of them actively make choices to improve the things they complaint about. And the people who tend to actively do such things… don’t complain or make grandiose political statements.

One of my friends and I donate to immigrant families. I take old computers from work, fix them up, and together we give them to immigrant families, because they need computers. I take direct action to support and make their lives better. I don’t complain about how hard they have it and how awful their lives are and how evil ICE is. I simply help them.

right, my 1850s ancestor who was a substance farmer in Italy totally stole the land from the native americans…

You believing in anarchism isn’t doing anything to change the laws that govern your physical and legal body.

But please lecture me about how nothing exists other than the ideal utopia inside your head and anyone who thinks your imaginary world instead your head is the ‘real’ one and the external one with property laws, borders, and real human beings is ‘fake’.

I live in one of the most expensive zip codes in the world. It doesn’t smell like urine other than on the subway elevator, which i never use.

I live here because it’s fucking amazing living here, but no place is perfect. The people generally suck balls, but I love being able to walk to a restaurant with my dog and not having to drive a car unless i want to do so. I’m sure living in 1000 acres in northern California has it’s benefits, but I’m not equipped or interested in such a lifestyle. Maybe if I was a prepper I would be.

If you want to feel your deep profound anarchist liberation feelings, go right ahead.

I’m not an anarchist and I’m don’t care about idealistic sentimentality. I care about reality, and yes, if your world view is that ‘reality is bad and must be abolished’ then yeah, I suppose you’d be pretty annoyed at someone who was pointing out that reality to you.

everyone would magically self determine that and there wouldn’t be any conflict because there would be endless abundance and we would all be endlessly happy forever.

the earth being a finite resource over which there is inevitable conflict is a social construct of our minds, clearly.

who gets to live where in reality, is a determination of systems of government and law. in some systems land is entirely own by the state and the state grants people temporary rights of use. essentially, a lease from the government.

and private property purists will argue without unless government guarantees land ownership and rights in perpetuity, that government can’t be legitimate and they also typically see taxation of land as a form of injustice.

I can rank it, but it would depend on the context and the evidence involved.

I used to work professional in land policy. Land ownership is ultimately about the legal system and who posses the ‘deed’ to the land. Governments are the ones who control this ultimately. They can create, take, and steal land via the law. And different government define land and the rights to land, differently. In China you can’t own land, you only lease it. In America, you own the land and everything underneath it to the earth’s core. Other countries have different laws and definitions.

Proof of theft requires proof of previous ownership, as a starting point. To prove that land was stolen you’d have to prove original ownership, and the series of events that lead to it’s loss of ownership and their illegality or illegitimacy. the further back you go the messier it gets. land records from the past 50 years are quite clear. land records from 200+ years ago, not so much. It’s basically impossible to prove any of it if say, the town or municipality in dispute, had it’s records destroyed in a fire or somesuch, perhaps even maliciously.

Plenty of Europeans have land-conflicts that go back centuries and involve murder. There are also conflicts amongst indigenous people’s over land right and land use and tribal recognition. It’s vastly more complex than ‘hey white people give us our land back because your ancestors stole it from our ancestors’. My ancestors arrived in America in the 1910/20s, personally, and never left the area of the original 16th century colonies, many of which were established with peaceful agreements of the natives and were not stolen at all.

Oh and there are also all sorts of laws about default ownership. My sister owns a home where their neighbor build a fence about 2 feet into their property line. If my sister doesn’t force the neighbor to move the fence 2 feet back, then in 10 years legally, their neighbor now owns the land. Is that theft? Legally, it isn’t. She can ask the neighbor to move it, and he hasn’t. She has to now threaten to sue them and have the courts legally force the neighbor to move the fence. If he can legally drag it on for 8 more years, he gets the land. The law involved in is a state law. It doesn’t apply in my state. My state requires neighbors to co-own fences along property lines, which hers doesn’t. Hence why their neighbor built this fence without properly surveying and realizing it wasn’t on his property.

The general term of this is ‘adverse possession’ and also applies to squatters and other things. In my state if you squat on someone else’s land for 20 years, you own it. The owner also evict you other than via the legal system. If some bum moves into my cabin, I can’t change the locks on it to keep him out either. I have to go get a court order to evict him.

and how do you rank the ‘stolen-ness’ of land?

is squatting stealing land?

I never claimed that. I claimed there is no utopian state of original land ownership. Indigenous tribes also killed murdered and persecuted each other over their land. But they had no written history of this at least that one be legally viable today. Indigenous tribes allied themselves with settlers to expand their own power and footprint at the expense of other tribes and settler groups. Especially during the French and Indian war. There were also Indians who raped and murder settlers, King’s Philips war was full of Indian atrocities on the settlers, but is rarely talked about in modern times because it doesn’t fit the narrative of ‘white man bad, native American good’. FWIW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Philip’s_War. Frankly the only reason I am aware of it personally, was because I grew up in the area where the war happened and did a history day project on it in high school. Most history text books don’t cover it and it’s not a popular topic because of how fraught and messy the whole affair was.

It’s true the USA government had a written history of land agreements, and the violation of those agreements often violated their own ideals and laws. But typically the law was re-written to justify this. It’s true that with such written records you have some frame of reference, but which ‘state’ was the original one of land ownership you wish to revert to? the ones from 1780, or the some point in the 1800s, or what? There is some arbitrary point at which you must pick, and there will be winners and losers based on that.

The popular narrative today is that indigenous people’s were purely victims of evil colonial settlers. But the truth is far more complex and excludes the inconvenient truth that such people’s were not always peaceful collectivist nature lovers that the mass-media and modern Americans crudely seem to think they are.

Many tribes, to this day, viciously fight in the courts for land and tribal right status, and often larger more powerful tribes seek to deny them these rights. Legally, only certain tribes are recognized by the federal government… usually the largest and most powerful… and use that power to discriminate and deny other tribes recognition, rights, and status.

Again, if you want to fight and donate for these causes. Please go right ahead. You can choose with tribe you support based on which one you think suffered the most. But there is no utopian final endpoint of ‘justice’ at which things will be settled. Land theft and land rights are a perpetual issue. I worked in land policy for 5 years, and while I didn’t work on tribal land policy specifically, the complexities and legality of land ownership and use go far deeper than some convenient catchphrase. And they are largely disputed and governed by the court system, so there isn’t much anyone can directly do unless they are a part of the legal system or able to fund lawyers.

The average person can’t afford a lawyer for themselves, let alone for someone else. But I’m sure Billie could fund lots of tribal buybacks and court cases.

if billie eilish wants to buy up a bunch of land and give it back to people, that’s her business. why doesn’t she do that personally, rather than lecturing people at the grammies? leading my example is a lot more powerful than lecturing from a bully pulpit.

she certain has the money and power to make a difference in this regard. but i don’t think she is talking about this particular issue, so much as grandstanding about being anti ICE for scoring some political points.

i’m not disputing that. most people are armchair activists at best.

and frankly, being an activist requires a certain mentality that most people don’t possess. it requires shutting off rational parts of your brain and giving yourself over to a belief. I gave up on activism myself because many activists are violent psychos and I want nothing to do with people like that. Everything is ‘peace and love’ until you mildly disagree with them, then you their enemy they must destroy. They are often the opposite of what they claim to be, and while some are cool, many are only in it for the feeling of moral superiority and ‘community’ they get from shitting one ‘bad people’ and lauding themselves as ‘good people’.

Like I had people threaten me for not being pro bike lane enough, because apparently if I go to a bike lane rally, but I don’t think cars are evil and car drivers are evil, I’m evil. I can’t just be generally supportive of bike lanes, i have to be part of some crazy extremist agenda where own a car makes you hate gay people or something.

sorry, do the majority of celebs fly commercial and show up to protests?

or do they just say crap at award shows to score points with little zero inconvenience or consequence to themselves?

celebrities aren’t normal people. they don’t want to be around you. they just want your money. and they will say what they think will get them money.

the only solidarity they have with is other wealthy people who have the same struggles as they do about wanting to use their private jets.

they don’t.

the ‘stolen land’ argument derives from some idealized utopia that doesn’t and never existed. its similar to the ‘noble savage’ myth that if ‘society’ didn’t exist we’d live in paradise because human beings in their ‘natural state’ are angelic and pure and the world would be abundant and perfectly happy.

and nobody who uses it is going to give way their land they own ‘back’. Billie Eilish has multiple properties and none of them are being donated to indigenous people. If you confronted her about that she’d probably call you an asshole and tell you it’s not her responsibility and that some other rich white person should do it, but not them! it was those bad evil people who they are not one of!

It is quintessential virtue signalling. You argue from an ideal that is far fetched that the very same ideal is not one you’d hold yourself accountable too because that would be ‘crazy’ to do so.

to really give back ‘stolen land’ the us government would have to basically displace it’s entire population to unhabited parts of the country where nobody could really live. the reason the natives were ‘displaced’ is because they lived in the places that were desirable to live in and the settlers wanted the land. most of the world’s land mass is not easily inhabitable or agriculturally productive, so humans fight over the parts that are.

and that’s also why nobody fought for land claims in antarctic or the artic, because there was no point. but with global warming possible making it more habitable, we are starting to see polar powers prep for military conflict over it.

it’s also why if you buy 1000 acres in northern california for a few million, because nobody wants that land, and the same price gets you like 400 sq ft apartment in manhatten.

Sort of an existential external threat, pretty much.

If aliens invaded, we very much would start cooperating. But once they were fended off, we never much would go back to tearing each other apart.

that’s all about the frame of reference and how much people identify and worship the victims. 50 dead Israelis is an outrage, 100K dead Palestinians is an afterthought. why? because people identify with one, and not the other. not much different if a factory explodes and 500 workers die, but the coverage and empathy and ‘tragedy’ will be all about the owner.

the issue is governments are run by people. people don’t want to be held accountable for their actions. violence works because people fear it. violence doesn’t have to be physical either. shame is a powerful motivator.

USA would bomb the shit out of iran under the false pretense they are going to expand democracy and liberal self-determination. that would happen, but that would be the rational, and why the ‘people’ of iran are often seen as victims of their government. plus iran is a developed society and a middle-power. this wouldn’t apply to say Turkmenistan, because there would be no ‘victory’ of democratic there.

It’s all about self-interest. you are talking about broad global princples… that just don’t exist in reality. they are high-minded ideals to which no rational actor would subscribe.

one reason people don’t admit they are wrong is because other people will shame and attack them for being wrong.

admitting you were wrong isn’t consequence free. it’s shameful, bad, and weak and others want to punish you for it. hence why people are incentivized to never admit they are wrong… because that often avoids those consequences and a lot of people admire someone who never admits they are wrong as strong and good and they are inspired by it.

in Tankie logic a few dead americans is somehow means the USA should collapse, but the mass murders of Mao and Stalin are totally OK because it was for the ‘greater good’. because things are SO GREAT in those countries for the average citizen… soooo much better than it is in the USA/Europe.

they can’t. nobody can.