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Notes -
Hated Ancestors
I am part of a family heritage organization. This particular family has been in the US for a little over 400 years. The organization's main responsibilities are maintaining a few old grave sites, and serving as a bit of a repository of information for people going on genealogical hunts. I am possibly going to be joining the board of this organization in the future.
Anyways, these ancestors of mine owned slaves, and quite a few of them fought and died on the losing side of the American Civil War. I feel mostly apathy about this. I did not know these people, I didn't even know anyone who knew them. Any "wealth" they had from slavery was never passed down, they all went heavily bankrupt in the 1870s (they were all lending each other money, and someone made a poor investment so they all went down together when debt collectors came in). I don't feel any need to defend their actions, or to attack them to prove to myself I would not have acted similarly in their circumstances. Its just a fact that sits out there and is kind of interesting, but has no bearing on me personally.
I was aware that my view on this might be different than others, but it was confirmed the other day. We received this email to our general inbox (information in brackets is anonymized from original email):
In most cases I'd be happy to toss this email in the trashbin of my mind. This lady disliking me because of my ancestors isn't really a big deal. Someone lost a property sale somewhere, also not me and also not a big deal. But I do share one thing with this lady that constantly frustrates and annoys me: A Government. It would be nice to be a in a world where I could fully dismiss this kind of thing from my life. But if they vote and too many people that share their opinion vote ... well I'm sure they will find inventive ways to make their feelings towards us a more solid thing. I don't know where this leaves us. I'm certainly not going to respond to this lady's email.
It would be wrong to leave you all with the impression that this is a normal interaction. My mother has been doing genealogical research lately, including some compiling of the slaves names. She has made friends with a man in the state who was trying to research his ancestors. The man had hit a wall and couldn't find out more until my mom published the slave research.
I'll answer questions about my ancestors, but I will generally try to avoid doxxing myself, even if I'm not highly concerned with that outcome.
I mean, I can kind of get that there might be a sort of disconnect about reading what to one might be a traumatic family event and see others discussing it in a kind of blasé, "hey this is kinda neat" way. Personally I'm fairly interested in family history, but some people think it's a strange hobby. While I don't really understand the person being so bothered as to write this email (perhaps your org got conflated with another history org like a few that do operate in bad faith? I wouldn't say they are the majority at all, but I think they DO exist) I also don't really understand you being so bothered so as to think this person should not be voting? Is it simply because of their iffy (stilted but overall good, I'd say) English skills? Their easily-offended nature? Or something else? Because as I said, I wouldn't interpret this in a hate-filled lens. I'd say, oh, misunderstanding, wish we could have had a discussion instead.
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If this wasn't you I would claim this was made up rage bait. It is also mentally unhinged and the person writing it is not well.
I mean, the awkward stilted writing style screams ‘this was legitimately a crazy person who wrote it, not something made up for internet clout’.
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One time while managing a GNC a very old lady customer (I had helped her several times previously) asked me if I was God fearing - I acknowledged no - which frustrated her. Then she told me that I was going to Hell and that she is never stepping foot in such a Godless place again.
Sure enough - never saw her or her husband again.
The older we get the more childlike and idiotic a lot of us become it seems.
This has the flavor of one of those ancient Greek myths where the gods come disguised to interact with mortals and test their faith/virtue. I would warn you to stay on guard for curses, visitation by oddly-aggressive wildlife, natural disasters, and general misfortune.
oddly-sexually-aggressive wildlife if it was Zeus
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So you just recently learned that you share a country with people who hate you and everything you stand for? Really?
There’s a reason the Founding Fathers were skeptical of democracy: they knew people like this exist.
What part of my post implies I didn't know these people existed?
Elsewhere in the thread I discuss it, but having direct evidence of a thing can change your estimate of how likely a viewpoint is. But my belief was never that 0 of these people existed.
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Hmm. I've been digging around in my family tree lately, and it seems like everytime I'm about to come across some post-war embarrassment, there's a plot-twist. That great×6 uncle with a Confederate war record? Turned out to be drafted, and before that was making shoes for black women fleeing to Canada... and also, the rest of the family fled the state because of Sherman's Total War campaign. Other side of the family was known for contributing Confederate soldiers? Surprise: Great×2 grandpa just had a step father from that family, and was just an underaged incest baby, 😥. Hey, remember how great grandma was totally racist when they did the ancestry research in her lifetime? Should have hung out more with her aunt, whose was with a priest who inherited way more land than he needed and converted it into a rest-stop for travelers, only to get burned down by the Night Riders. It's almost scary, as though the people writing these things down in the 19th and early 20th century had some kind of agenda in spite of being states and decades apart and not actually closely related to the people they were writing about.
I'm not sure how I should feel about any of this, but the contrast with OP is starting to make me feel kinda selfish. To the point I almost feel I should point out that the older relatives I actually met were unambiguously racist. Proud of how much American Indian blood was in the family, but simultaneously racist against everyone else.
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Why do you think that there is any chance that there are lot of people who share this opinion? This part:
really makes it sound like a fringe crazy---the left variant of the people screaming about adenochrome. As pointed out below, people who care about racial equality suddenly saying that judging others for their ancestry is ok are preemptively giving up their entire argument.
It's definitely not like a very active forum where merely supporting race blindness makes a comment one of the most controversial in your posting history. I would be much more worried that there are lot of people voting with this opinion.
I maybe should have included two "ifs" there to be more clear.
Basically, I'm not certain how many people share their opinion. Receiving the email is some level of evidence that more people with that opinion exist. I also tried to add in the second to last paragraph to make it clear that this is not the only kind of interaction.
Agreed that it doesn't make much sense. But I also think its silly to believe in ghosts. I have strong doubts that this is anywhere near the most brilliant holder of these beliefs.
I don't really like either extreme. I have lots of evidence already of one side existing, its depressing to get evidence of the other extreme existing as well.
Here's one person's experience that might make at least part of it not so depressing: I've spent a lot of times in universities in extremely left-leaning areas (Like Jill Stein beating Trump extreme). There are routinely literal communists in my circles. I've never not been able to pull an IRL political argument back from extremes through tying everything back to core ideals like egalitarianism (and playing word games to avoid certain triggering phrases)---no standardized testing isn't a white supremacist plot, which alternatives do you think are going to be less biased? Rent control isn't as obviously good as you think it is, you have to be careful not to screw over people trying to move in, have you looked at what the actual minority groups you're speaking for think about police funding? Do you really trust elite college admissions committees to implement a non-transparent, "holistic" affirmative action policy without sneaking in a bunch of details that turn it into something mostly benefiting the privileged under the cover of tokenism? etc.
I therefore thought that both extremes were basically covered by the Lizardman Constant. Reading this forum has been one of the biggest shocks I've experienced to my beliefs about the world in the last 5-10 years (second to the Ukraine invasion I guess)---here are a large number intelligent people I share a country with who actually just have irreconcilable value differences; people who have such crazy policy preferences to me not because they disagree about facts like the far-left people I meet, but because they honestly believe that people should be treated differently solely because of the race they were born as.
This might be less clear than you think. I think quite possibly the largest contingent of people here are in favor of colorblind meritocracy, roughly. But in the absence of data, then your priors would be affected by race. That is, you should think a random Asian you meet is probably a bit smarter than average, until you actually get to know them or they go through some other filtration mechanism so that you know more accurately. This is technically treating people differently by race, but it's due to variation and knowledge constraints, not value differences.
That said, you only said that here are a large number, and the more substantially racist minority may still be a large number to you.
I'm not sure I agree with that. I think the most prominent writer fitting the view you describe is Richard Hanania. I'm searching through comments to see what this place thinks about his writings on racial issues---here's something sitting at +28 against it, though here's another at +14 possibly in favor though it's hard to tell what they would think in the perfect world where colorblindness was possible. (I'm not super good at searching for things, maybe you can do better?). Somehow this still leaves me with the impression that the voting population here is further towards racialism that Hanania.
I also think the link I gave above about what one of the mods thinks about the general attitude towards colorblindness is also very strong evidence.
Oh, but Hanania's known for more generally being a troll and bothering people, so I wouldn't trust opinions of him as reflective of the popularity of this one stance (though I think he not infrequently has interesting things to say). I don't currently have time right now, but maybe I'll look later.
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May I remind you that the VP and the most recent Supreme Court justice were explicitly chosen on the basis of race?
Political appointees are picked for ridiculous reasons all the time. This isn't the most objectionable thing that's happened in VP or Supreme Court choices. I also don't think these choices really made a policy difference over the alternatives. The only material impact was to the other people who could've been chosen otherwise---like 5 people in the whole country who are doing pretty well in life either way and purposefully chose a career where they knew they would be judged in bizarre and unfair ways.
Do you have other examples that are a little more materially impactful/out of the ordinary? Maybe you can try for same level of material impact as Trump's policies on legal and skilled immigration that were very plausibly motivated by Stephen Miller/Motte-style explicit racialism?
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I am certainly one of the people here with whom you would say you have “irreconcilable value differences.” However, I’m quite confident that our value differences are not actually “irreconcilable” because I used to have basically the same beliefs as you do now. I was a very committed progressive for nearly the entirety of my twenties, basically from the time I first developed a serious political consciousness. I believed very strongly in egalitarianism and would have been disgusted by “bigotry”, “prejudice”, “hate”, etc. Yet, here I am now, one of those far-right racialists. I “reconciled” myself to these beliefs over time as a result of life experiences and sustained observation of the world - and the people - around me. If I could undergo that process, I have no reason to think it’s impossible/implausible for the same to happen to you.
We have the policy preferences we do because we disagree about important facts regarding humans and what they’re like. You flatter yourself by supposing that your beliefs are purely a matter of understanding facts, whereas our ideas are due to “values” which are, somehow, immutable, immune to persuasion, and presumably assigned to us at random at the moments of our respective births. This isn’t how “values” actually work at all, though. For an intelligent, thoughtful, and perceptive person, “values” should be subject to change in the exact same way that propositional/epistemic beliefs about reality are - in fact, values are simply a type of propositional belief. If you have the same “values” at age sixty that you did at age twenty, that’s probably because you just weren’t paying very much attention to the world or thinking very hard about anything.
I think I wasn't very clear---I totally agree that values differences are in principle reconcilable. I've even on record in this sub saying that values can be derived from other concerns and can definitely be argued.
My point was that I've found that specifically my values difference with most of the racialists on the Motte is irreconcilable. I've been bashing my head against this since my first post in this sub and basically consistently gotten replies that are unmoderated personal attacks instead of any substantive argument, particularly from a certain poster who believes only Russians have souls and his following. Again, one of my very early interactions with this community was someone ban-evading and calling me a slithering rat just for having the temerity to try and argue value points. I guess a lot of racialism is just motivated by idiosyncratic aesthetic preferences that are too strong to be overwhelmed by any other consideration---how is this anything but not irreconcilable?
This experience has not meaningfully changed in the last three years, although I will say that you have been much more reasonable. So trying again, do you mind explaining/linking to some place where you've explained these specific facts?
In that post, you and Yassine are certainly not arguing that your views are in any sense reconcilable with inegalitarian/particularist views. The central argument there is that your specific set of values are the objectively and inarguably correct set of values, given everything that’s true about the world we live in. Nowhere in there is a suggestion that there’s any practical way for anyone to persuade you out of those values; quite the opposite. You’re saying that the only way someone with inegalitarian values could have any leg to stand on morally is if there were massive, fundamental structural/technological changes in the way our civilization is organized; barring that - something which will not happen in our lifetimes - your values are correct, and mine are not even worth discussing because they’re in the dustbin of (current) history. Not exactly an invitation to “reconciliation”.
I read all of the replies to that post, and I can identify not a single one that I would consider an unmoderated personal attack devoid of substantive argument. Perhaps you’re referring to replies to other posts not linked to.
First off, you’re totally misinterpreting his use of the word “rats” in that post. He is using it as a shortening of “rationalists” - a group with which he himself identified at the time, and presumably still does. It was a very common term of self-identification at the time; there was an entire constellation of Tumblr users, for example, who proudly called themselves “Rat Tumblr” (or Rattumb for short), meaning just “Rationalist Tumblr”.
In that post, Ilforte is accusing you of aping the shibboleths of that subculture while working directly and intentionally to sabotage its aims and core values. In the segments of your post that he quotes, you very clearly do appear to be advocating using social shame to rigidly enforce speech taboos around certain topics - to not only ridicule and socially bully racialists, but to actually actively ruin their lives in a professional sense, or at least to celebrate those who do so. This is, indeed, a very serious violation of one of the core values of that subculture at the time, which was strongly opposed to that type of social shaming and speech tabooing.
I’m also unsure what you mean by accusing him of “ban evading”. That post is in /r/CultureWarRoundup, a totally separate splinter subreddit from /r/TheMotte, and not a sub from which I believe Ilforte was ever banned at any point. If you mean he’s ban evading by cross-posting a post of yours from The Motte and criticizing it… that’s not what ban evading is.
I’m sure that in some cases this is probably true! However, again, many of us racialists once shared your liberal priors, instincts, and aesthetics. Yet this was not enough to stop us from eventually adopting these views. Why do you think that is? Clearly in that case it can’t just be due to some ineffable, inarticulable, subconscious psychological difference between us and you, right? If I was progressive once, I must contain the capability to inhabit the brain states compatible with progressivism. And yet obviously I also simultaneously contain the capacity to inhabit the brain states compatible with rightism. Are you so certain that you lack that capacity?
That would be difficult, simply given the lack of any effective search function in this site’s design. I have been meaning to put together a master spreadsheet of links to some of my more successful/important posts, such that I would be able to supply those links when prompted, but I have not gotten around to doing so. I don’t have time to pull those right now, but I’ll see what I can do at some point in the future. However, I would caution that I’m not confident the posts alone will be persuasive to you, since they will not be in combination with the specific and non-transferable life experiences I’ve had which caused me to be more sympathetic to these ideas than I likely would have otherwise.
It's a point that can actually be argued---if you don't agree maybe you can describe why instead of pulling out about 150 words of debate-team kritik?
On the other hand, this:
is not something that can be argued or lead to any kind of reconciliation. I either have the same life experiences as you or there's no way that I'll ever understand why your values are valid?
This is a frustratingly long post that somehow manages to dodge every possible chance to give a concrete argument on the actual value issue in favor of making meta points. I guess the most productive thing to do here then is wait until there's an actual substantive point to discuss. I mean, there hasn't been much in 3 years of trying, but maybe something better will come out of this.
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Huh? With all the constant complaints about racism, you're shocked at the possibility of racists existing?
Who are you even talking about? We have holocaust deniers, we have HBDers, but I don't remember seeing anyone say an intelligent black people shouldn't be treated as intelligent, because they're black. It sounds like you're whipping yourself into a frenzy.
I honestly thought that most of the complaints about racism in the US were mostly caused by unconscious bias---things that the perpetrators would feel very guilty for and stop if they realized what they were doing. Otherwise, I thought the stories were some combination of exaggeration, cherry-picked bad luck, or very special circumstances---being in a certain part of Idaho or in a circa-2002 airport.
People maybe don't say this---they'll question whether there are intelligent black people in the first place or say that people should be treated differently based on how far back their ancestry goes in the US. The first is a factual point that can be pretty quickly refuted, but the second is a values difference.
I'm talking less "complaints about racism in the US", and more complaints like "Trump supporters are racist". You're telling me all the post-2016 drama was about "unconscious bias"?
Well then I have a bit of an issue with making claims like "they honestly believe that people should be treated differently solely because of the race they were born as". I agree there are actual values disagreements here (no shortage of folks here supporting monstrous things like surrogacy), I don't even mind slapping negative valance labels on them, like "racism", anymore. But if you're going to make an elaborate descriptive statement about what people believe, you should make sure it's accurate.
The first is a point I haven't seen anyone make here, and the latter is already a step down from your original claim, and I still want to know who you're talking about, because it doesn't quite fit into any conversations I remember.
See the discussion here.
Sorry, let me clarify---I also think there are a lot of people here who "honestly believe that people should be treated differently solely because of the race they were born as". I think the strongest evidence for this is what I linked above: one of the mods of this place saying that their posts supporting colorblindness tend to be very controversial because those posts are against the prevailing attitudes here.
There's another sort of of-topic interesting point: I'm not really sure that "people should be treated differently based on how far back their ancestry goes in the US" is significantly different from "people should be treated differently solely because of the race they were born as". The cardinal, anti-meritocratic sin of judging people by their descent instead of their own accomplishments appears just as strongly in in both cases.
I find it amazing that someone who's been here for a long time and is clearly pretty smart can end up with these interpretations of themotte's viewpoints, reading the same words I have but interpreting them so differently, lol.
From the post you linked about someone being downvoted for advocating colorblindness, I upvoted this reply:
This is ... not speaking against meritocracy. If you have a way to measure someone's merit, use it, If not, because it's being suppressed, then use race as bayesian evidence. The replies to the post are evidence against, not for, your claim that a lot of mottizens believe 'people should be treated differently solely because of the race they were born as'.
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I disagree with your interpretation somewhat. He's talking about inventors and scientists, so the extreme end of intelligence. This is "tails of the bell curve coming apart" argument rather than intelligent black people not existing.
It's fine and well if this is how you see it, but there are people who don't agree. If you treat these things as interchangeable you'll be slandering your targets in front of them.
I don't think everything should be meritocratic, though. I wouldn't let some random dude take the place of my cousin in my family, just because he's more competent, and/or more pleasant to be around, for example.
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Eh, nobody denies that intelligent black people exist, but we certainly have a few people who believe they are so rare as to be irrelevant, and/or that if any "good" blacks exist, they should be treated the same as all the others (e.g., expatriated to Africa, herded into reservations, or whatever).
I am having trouble remembering anyone saying anything like that, and believe if any example is found it will already be a step or two removed from this description.
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My impression is that very few mottizens are racialists, in that they think that eg black people should be treated differently from white people 'solely' because of race? Some people here don't really believe in HBD and are 'liberals' or 'progressives' on immigration. There are people here who want to treat people differently based on IQ and genes, but with genetic predisposition to IQ or other traits set equal would happily let in the few Nigerian or Iraqi neuroscientists if their merit was assessed accurately. There are people here who are more like normal American conservatives on the topic, and would judge people not on their race or IQ but their culture, their willingness to assimilate to American ideals and national identity, etc. I think all of those outnumber people like SecureSignals
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I had generally similar experiences in college. Could talk with far extremes on either side but you can still come out thinking some version of mistake theory where everyone is just trying to do their best, and we just disagree on how to get there.
Outside of college was always the real kicker. People in college always seemed at times a bit fluid with their values, or that their values were at least subject to some social desirability bias. Well once you can start picking your social circles and you've done it for over a decade, those values seem to calcify.
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The sentence structure and grammar of that email is incredibly weird, though it's good she's aware of that. It's genuinely hard to make out what she's trying to say in parts of it. This makes me seriously wonder what this person's background is.
It's also just incredibly bizarre to randomly send an email to a historical society complaining? I guess? about someone's unrelated family on the basis of an unrelated history. It's also weird to send such an email in which the main argumentative thrust is "you family is horrible and I bet you're haunted by ghosts" while apologizing for her writing style and thanking you for your time. It's hate mail written in a polite tone, which is simply strange.
Also, who the heck "begins their morning" looking to purchase land in a random state and by the evening has decided a family she doesn't know is haunted by ghosts with enough confidence to want to send an email?
This is the sort of thing that just leaves me scratching my head, like those weird pseudo-Catholic cultists who think the third secret of Fatima is that Marcionism is true and the psalms are chants to an evil God.
Interesting because I totally interpreted the ghost thing as a rhetorical flourish rather than a literal statement about fear of being actually haunted, though I'm well aware those people exist, and those are after all the kind of people I would expect to send unsolicited emails.... wait...
I joke but I do think "rhetorical flourish" still has like a 40% chance of being the case vs 60% crazy, so with these odds charity means I select rhetorical flourish from a well-meaning person as the default unless demonstrated otherwise.
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I ran it through ChatGPT to anonymize it. After I was done with that I also asked ChatGPT how it would rewrite the email if the original sender had asked. That email actually didn't seem unfriendly. So yeah maybe they weren't actually that hostile, their signoff doesn't imply hostility. Just the whole pondering how the country might have been better without my ancestors existing. I originally interpreted it as "english as a second language" but I looked up the lady who sent it (she gladly attached her name to the email), and she did seem to be born in the US. But yeah, hate mail written in a polite tone is strange.
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Just to psychoanalyze from afar, she (for some reason, the writing seems very feminine, and I'd bet good money that the writer is female--a male wouldn't bother writing this email, and if he did it would be written more as a string of curses without any attempt at politeness) is a not-particularly well-educated but generally well-meaning individual from a bad background who has probably done things mostly right (at least within her context) but nevertheless has accrued a lot of damage over her life and isn't particularly successful. The letter is half an outpouring of frustration at where she's ended up, and half an attempt at some kind of connection. What kind, it doesn't matter--the response could be an angry condemnation back, and it could be self-flagellation from the recipient. Doesn't matter. She just feels very lonely and isolated and desperately wants some kind of reassurance that she's seen. She makes her pain obvious by lashing out in the hopes that it will create some kind of response.
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This lady isn’t a majority, as you note. And there’s simply not enough people in the voting public who are legitimately afraid of the ghosts of slaves to worry about it. I would suggest that those of these who do exist contact a priest, not an uninvolved geneological researcher.
The descendants of my ancestors’ slaves are mostly successful and bear us no ill will, although they don’t particularly want to live in the small town in Louisiana where our plantation was located(in fairness, no one else does either). Nor do they bring up that, uh, the connection is because our ancestors owned theirs. Everyone likes to believe they were kind to their slaves, but no one actually knows, and the best evidence that can be obtained is a few scattered mentions that Cajuns were known for treating their slaves somewhat better than average. That some members of my family are quite proud of the victories our confederate shock formation won isn’t much bother either. Everyone broadly understands they’re my ancestors, and I didn’t choose them, and to disown your ancestors would be a horrible thing. Family, the weight of generations, is fundamentally what it is, and demanding performative dissociation from it is the ultimate price of atomic individualism. It’s one I won’t give, and it’s one that hasn’t been asked.
This has been part of my Mom's research actually. One of the things that made it easy to track the slaves that my ancestors owned is that one of the guys would write a paragraph or so about each slave when they passed away. Some aspects of their personality, some positive traits, some things they liked, etc.
I think the whole concept of being "kind" to a slave is a bit oxymoronic. The kindest thing to do is to free them immediately. Most slave owners fail by that standard. There are of course different levels of how terrible you can be to a slave. There isn't evidence that my ancestors were fucking their slaves (and yes, it is definitely possible to know that sort of thing. They knew it about some of their neighbors and gossiped about it in letters.) There are two ways to motivate slaves, the carrot and the stick. We do know they used the carrot, some of the slaves were paid wages. We don't know how heavily they used the stick. Quite a few of the freed slaves took on the family name of my ancestors after they were freed during the Civil war. The men that were older when the civil war broke out thought it was a horrible idea. The younger men were excited by it ... and most of them fought in it and died.
I don't feel like I'm forced into disassociation about it. I feel mostly the same way about my parents. They have done things in their past that I don't condone. Even though I know them and I share half my genes with each of them I feel zero responsibility for their actions. But I know I am probably a bit weird in some areas. I often think the "tribal loyalty" part of my brain is broken and doesn't work. I care about and feel loyalty towards specific individuals, but for anyone I don't know .. there is zero chance I care about them.
It doesn't really matter. My family arrived after the Civil War. My wife's earliest American ancestor arrived on the Mayflower, but none of them ever owned slaves (as they were religiously scrupulous against the institution). This sort of thing gets you exactly zero credit with the progressive race-pushers, you still "benefited from a system of oppression" or whatever. So them trying to shame you for what your ancestors did is double-dipping the shame.
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It's a social dynamic that doesn't exist today, and paternalism was a big part of that dynamic. The paternalistic aspect was very real but isn't to be recognized in this day in age. It certainly isn't an oxymoron.
Luckily someone in my family already compiled all the archival research going back to the 1730s: enlisted in the Revolution, 300 acres, 4 horses, 0 Negroes according to archival documents. It's wild reading wills and such. The first ancestor to arrive to America left his son a Bible, a stove, and a pipe in his will.
The longer fleshed out statement I had originally was something like "it would be kind to not punish them for anything that isn't an actual crime, and pay them wages for the work they do, not forcibly separate their families, and allow them some avenue of exit from the situation if they think its not working out for them." But that was basically the equivalent of freeing them, so I shortened it. But quite a few of those things have no place for someone being "paternalistic". When paternalistic and economic concerns were at odds the economic concerns won out. I say that not as judgement, but as a simple statement of facts. Just like today a company that is unconcerned with economic realities will eventually go broke.
I also believe paternalism does exist today. It is the government as parent to everyone. The government is not as limited by economic concerns, which honestly makes it more frightening. In both cases of paternalism I don't think of them as "kind". The proponents of paternalism probably wouldn't describe it as "kind" either. At best they might say it is a "kindness". Paternalism is a belief that a strong hand is needed for guiding the less able-d and less intelligent to the right paths in life. That the strong hand will dish out measured punishments that are less harsh than what the world itself might dish out (thus the sort of "kindness").
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Unless this person is Native American, I don’t think they really have good standing to piss and moan about the sins of the past. You know, given that they happily live on land seized by sword and ethnically cleansed i.e. the entire United States.
But Native Americans seized land and ethnically cleansed each other. Any surviving Native Americans are descended from the victors of these myriad wars. The email sender referenced being haunted by spirits because only extinct bloodlines are innocent. The only way to be good is to go extinct in this doggy dog world.
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I'm a broken record on this, but Native Americans have no better standing. They ethnically cleansed the pre-Clovis peoples from North America, with the only difference being that they were smart enough not to leave any records of their existence (aside from traces left in their mtDNA).
And even the original inhabitants of the Americas have no great standing in my view. Does the first person to cross the land bridge get to claim the entire continent for themselves?
Well mixing your work into the commons and maintaining it, makes it your property. But obviously the original inhabitants have failed on the second clause.
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And if they do, what does that say about migration more broadly?
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Your ancestors lived in a peaceful part of the world. Compared to Nigeria, the level of violence in America was mild.
The difference is that your family was organized enough to have records stretching back 400 years while others barely know who their grandparents were. Being capable of record keeping is nothing to be ashamed of.
I work in a fairly disreputable field since it pays well. My retired father has been doing a genealogical deep dive, and it appears that my family has done this for generations. Whaling, slave trading, mild piracy etc etc etc.
I might be anti-slavery, but I personally feel that if I had been born into the world that my ancestors had been born into that I likely would have gone to sea in pursuit of a better life, and that likely would have come with a certain form of cargo. So I don't feel I can really cast judgement on my forebears.
Whaling was seen very positively in its heyday, being an officer on a whaling ship was a high status career. It’s seen negatively now but 19th century Americans didn’t care about whales.
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I feel nothing either way. No shame, no pride. It is semi-interesting to me that my ancestors happened to be in America so early, and that they have been intimately involved with some major events. But its not much more to me.
Its kind of like this: I was born in a place, and when I was 3 my family moved out of that place and never returned. I have zero memories of living there. The fact that I was born there is just kind of a fun and not-so-interesting fact about me. I feel similar about the ancestors, its just more interesting to most people.
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Man, I don't know how other people react to these sorts of things, but my reaction certainly isn't anything remorseful or kind. While I am not responsible for either the good or evil deeds of my ancestors and I know that well intellectually, my gut response to someone speaking to me this way is that I'm glad my ancestors won and theirs lost. If the best way someone can think about their ancestors is thinking of their them hanging around my property being spiteful ghosts, it's no wonder that they couldn't do any better during their lifetimes.
Of course, as I think you imply later when speaking of the kind relationship your mother has with her interlocutor, that kind of spiteful response isn't good and isn't healthy either. These identitarian sentiments that dredge up centuries old wrongs and treat them as contemporary are absolute poison to discourse. The people telling others to dwell on them, to hold this sense of grievance dear to their spirit are undoing decades of progress towards healing and camaraderie.
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Perhaps it all comes down to a misplaced, illogical application of instinct. Nothing more or less than that?
The instinct of justice. If someone in your tribe is exploiting another member for wealth, you should shame the exploitative member and pursue a form of reparation. This is a pretty universal rule: a child might apologize and make up for it with a friend; a husband might get a gift for an insulted girlfriend.
The instinct of judging by bloodline. Humans all come equipped with the knowledge that child is like parent, whether in humans or husbandry or agriculture.
The problem with (1) is that “the moral standard of freedom to your out-group” is purely an invention of Whites, and “exploiting out-group member for gain” is plausibly universal among non-whites in the same era. So, our “instinct of justice” should make us love Whites for ending extra-group slavery and exploitation, rather than illogically applying an anachronistic standard (which they themselves discovered) to a pre-standard era. We should always rejoice in moral development and probably give the discoverer extra honor, which in this cause would be Europeans, who risked their lives to save many millions of Africans when they placed their ships off the African coast and threatened Africans and Ottomans to force them to stop slavery. But there is something pernicious about those who fail to see this, because they are now committing an evil, by impugning the very people who deserve honor. Re: (2), it makes no sense per the above, but it ironically makes sense for judging the allegedly oppressed class, because of their lack of development. Do the people who judge by bloodline apply the same instinct to the children of criminals? Very likely not, as their instinct has been subverted.
The ghosts are probably the most coherent complain here. Ghosts are bad vibes, and it is hard ignore the vibe of a place which you know was depressing.
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It really is a shame that people who are afraid of vengeful ghosts wield so much power over us.
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Until she is in position to direct the FBI to ensure that the settlers get no futurity.
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I strongly suspect she's otherwise a loud member of the "trust the science" tribe.
Sigh.
More effort, less sneering, please.
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