Subject:
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Re: One nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Thu, 4 Jul 2002 10:08:22 GMT
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Viewed:
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3904 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Lindsay Frederick Braun writes:
> In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Pedro Silva writes:
> > > > Could you have kept them? (see the concept for African partition in Berlin
> > > > Conference, 1883 - you can only claim it if you occupy it ;-)
>
> 1884-5. "Effective occupation" is the term.
>
> One reason the US hasn't tried to claim it is because that would be
> simply too much arrogance. To claim the moon, Mars, and perhaps the
> stars? Bad precedent
I'd think that effective occupation is really the deal. For us to have claimed
the moon in 69 would have lead to strife because our claim would not have been
honored. We couldn't deploy enough force to the moon to keep others off, so
what would have been the point? I don't think it was our generosity of spirit
or lack of arrogance. It was just obviously a stupid idea.
If we had invented low energy matter transporters and found some resources up
there, you can bet your as...donkey that we would have claimed it.
> If you've ever seen what happens when one
> black family, however neighborly and affluent, moves into a white
> neighborhood, you know exactly what I mean.
Have you _seen_ it? I haven't. I've been the white family moving into a
predominantly black neighborhood. And I've been a white guy attending a 70%
black school (5-8th grade). I never thought of it like this, but I don't think
there was ever any mean-spiritedness about race in either of those
circumstances. Occasionally some friction due to different cultural norms, but
not based on racism. I wonder, is it peoples' general perception that blacks
are better about that than whites?
> > Name some categories, if you like (just for me to use as a guideline as to
> > what is acceptable in this "celebrity deathmatch" :-)
>
> Population? Life expectancy? Access to medical care? Infant
> mortality? Per capita GNP? In all of these categories, the US
> is not the greatest.
But could you pick out a weighting scheme that rolls them all into one that
does put us at the top of the list?
> It's not geography. It's biology. What do you think happened to
> the Native Americans when Europeans showed up? They weren't sedentary,
> but they did not place value on the same sorts of things that Europeans
> did. In fact, because they didn't, the extractive resources were
> there for us to grow fat and wealthy upon.
But why didn't they? I'm thinking that at least to some extent, it is because
they did not fill the land with people, forcing a more material culture. And
the reason they did not fill the land is because they were exploiting basic
food resources with haphazard efficiency.
I think there was dumb luck involved. Even lots of it. But that's not all.
Chris
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