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U.S. Supreme Court deems half of Oklahoma a Native American reservation

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Re: U.S. Supreme Court deems half of Oklahoma a Native American reservation

#431
"Unlawful acts, performed long enough and with sufficient vigor, are never enough to amend the law. To hold otherwise would be to elevate the most brazen and longstanding injustices over the law, both rewarding wrong and failing those in the right." Courts need to apply the above to Article 1, Section 10 of the US Constitution, as well as the 10th and 2nd amendment.

Re: U.S. Supreme Court deems half of Oklahoma a Native American reservation

#432
post #194

Unlawful acts, performed long enough and with sufficient vigor, are never enough to amend the law. To hold otherwise would be to elevate the most brazen and longstanding injustices over the law, both rewarding wrong and failing those in the right. I disagree with this reasoning. As a counterexample I point you to squatters rights. If I live on your land long and openly enough, my unlawful act will confer ownership of…

Squatters rights only apply to abandoned property though. This land wasn't abandoned at any time. People were forced out and it was occupied.

I don't think he was saying this is an example of squatters rights. He is saying that squatters rights is an example of a principle where an unlawful act done long enough becomes a lawful act.

Re: U.S. Supreme Court deems half of Oklahoma a Native American reservation

#433
post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it amusing that you hold a blanket thought that the theft of Native American land was the result of war games and not a mixture of deception, racism, genocide, breach of trust, and thievery.

How do you think warring tribes treated each other? You are aware that some proportion of native tribes kept both native and black (and probably white to a lesser extent) slaves, right? It's also interesting that you choose the word "theft" as though the natives even had a concept for land ownership. Seems people are too eager to view history through a modern moral lense these days.

> It's also interesting that you choose the word "theft" as though the natives even had a concept for land ownership

There were many tribes living without telecommunications across the Americas with all their varying climates causing different socioeconomic structures to emerge

https://mises.org/wire/did-indians-understand-concept-privat...

Re: U.S. Supreme Court deems half of Oklahoma a Native American reservation

#435

I follow court news pretty closely and was genuinely curious about this decision. Here is a brief description of what I understand the decision to mean (I am not an expert by any means). Under the federal "Major Crimes Act" (MCA) members of various Native American tribes are not subject to state prosecution for crimes committed in "Indian territory". This case was brought by McGirt, a member of the Creek Nation, who…

They guy has already served 20 years for a crime which he originally plead guilty for. He was convited for raping a four year old girl.

Why he is challenging it now and by contesting the court's authority rather than his own guilt? Does he expect to be found not guilty under the Cree Nation?

Re: U.S. Supreme Court deems half of Oklahoma a Native American reservation

#436
post #194

Unlawful acts, performed long enough and with sufficient vigor, are never enough to amend the law. To hold otherwise would be to elevate the most brazen and longstanding injustices over the law, both rewarding wrong and failing those in the right. I disagree with this reasoning. As a counterexample I point you to squatters rights. If I live on your land long and openly enough, my unlawful act will confer ownership of…

squatters rights don't amend the law, they amend ownership.

Squatters rights are explicitly codified in the low

Re: U.S. Supreme Court deems half of Oklahoma a Native American reservation

#437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or alternatively, that the federal government, as it currently operates, is simply no longer up to the task of modern governance. Too slow, too reliant on voluntary compliance, and most importantly, too difficult to make decisions with long term time horizons.

Somehow other countries with federal systems manage to implement “modern governance.” This chart shows government spending by various levels of government: https://images.app.goo.gl/iVpyyr2Ftzo6m7PB6 In the US, about half of all spending happens at the federal level. Germany, which also has a federal system as a matter of its constitution, also has the central government spending about half of all government dollars.…

there's nothing wrong with a federal system, the problem is specifically with the US's system and how there are too many "veto points". Checks and balances and getting policy accomplished are essentially opposing goals. If you allow tons of "veto points" where having literally any control of any branch of government allows you to grind policy to a halt, then getting anything done relies hugely on gentlemanly good-faith.

In a two-party system that gentlemanly good faith eventually breaks down and you end up with our current problem, where you need supermajority control of all branches of government to actually do anything, because if you lack even one single point of control then party-line behavior will allow everything to be ground to a halt.

Parliamentary systems are better, there is just one house in most cases, and the executive is of the same party as the legislature, so when a government forms it has consensus and can execute policy. Yes, this is less checked-and-balanced, and that's a good thing, because accomplishing policy and checks and balances are opposing goals. Too much checks and balance and nothing gets done. If everything is fine that's great, but our system has been deadlocked for 20 years now, things are not great, and nothing can be done about it.

And there are still an executive and judicial branches in a parliamentary system, it is still a federal system, just not the American federal system.

The real "checks and balances" is ultimately voting. Having snap elections allows that check to be manifested much more readily when the government begins to go off the rails of public opinion.

(the queen is actually a very interesting apparatus in the british government... apart from having some kind of maximum duration between elections, you are dependent on someone to decide when to call a snap election. Obviously you can't really rely on a government that is completely off the rails to call an election on itself, and party line voting poses obvious problems. So how do you deal with it? An oracle machine (in the crypto sense) that exists outside the system and can operate independently to decide when to call an election. Which is what the queen does, she can dissolve parliament and call an election.)

Re: U.S. Supreme Court deems half of Oklahoma a Native American reservation

#438

This is a terrible article, it just cites the facts of the decision, teases the implication (OMG half of OK!) and explains nothing. Here's a review article about the same case from a while back which does a better job: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/11/28/half-land-... The tl;dr is that, yes, indeed, half of Oklahoma is part of land reserved for the Creek in a 1833 treaty. And almost two centuries of sub…

Do you realize the word you used is pejorative? Please be kind and show some respect. EDIT - a note about the sarcasm - it is NOT OK to use pejorative or racist terms sarcastically.

[deleted]

Re: U.S. Supreme Court deems half of Oklahoma a Native American reservation

#439

This is a terrible article, it just cites the facts of the decision, teases the implication (OMG half of OK!) and explains nothing. Here's a review article about the same case from a while back which does a better job: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/11/28/half-land-... The tl;dr is that, yes, indeed, half of Oklahoma is part of land reserved for the Creek in a 1833 treaty. And almost two centuries of sub…

Do you realize the word you used is pejorative? Please be kind and show some respect. EDIT - a note about the sarcasm - it is NOT OK to use pejorative or racist terms sarcastically.

soy boy spotted

Re: U.S. Supreme Court deems half of Oklahoma a Native American reservation

#440
post #130

Just a couple notes here from a person of tribal descent (I am Wasq'u, a tribe in the PNW), for those trying to make sense of it. This ruling, as I understand it, resolves a narrow technicality—but that technicality has potentially enormous implications. The Court has only decided that the federal [EDIT: state! sorry!] government has no prosecutorial jurisdiction against citizens of the so-called "Five Civilized Trib…

> This ruling, as I understand it, resolves a narrow technicality That is literally all of the SCOTUS rulings. It's petty listening to bright minds discuss minute details. The fact that technicalities have far reaching effects is a sign that the system is broken.

I almost think they “like” to word things in this way so they can side step the larger ramifications of their decisions to certain people.

It feels frustrating to those outside the law. But that’s always been true of the law, as far as I’ve read.

Also remember that our legal system is a direct inheritance of the English legal system we separated from in the 1700s. There’s actually more history to our laws than to our country. So to some extent the years of buildup contributing to confusion stem back pretty far into the past. We would have a lot of work ahead of us to reinvent the quirkiness out of the system.

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