251–258 of 258 posts
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Did you try reading any of the links people have added in this thread? Schools and government offices were closed. This was a big event that was planned for months. 10% participation sounds absolutely plausible if not lower than I'd expect.
No. I would assume if this was such a big event that the original article would cover it. I guess it was that big that they did not need to add any details.
Not to discourage, but even reforesting entire land that could possibly be covered in forest will not arrest climate change noticeably. The reason is because forest do not change CO2 levels noticeably, in the long run. The reason is because there is roughly constant amount of carbon in Earths biomass. Planting treas only increases the amonut of biomass by a little bit but has no lasting effect of scrubbing CO2 from a…
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/04/planting... ETH Zürich seems to disagree with that statement.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/01/negati...
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First, I'll note that you haven't addressed the "unlimited land" part at all. Shall I conclude that you agree with me, at least, that appropriation of native land was one of the pillars of US wealth creation? > butter production in the southern states where there was "unlimited free labor" was roughly 20% of the national output, even though they had 40% of the total dairy cows. So from this one example, you're extrap…
Native American Cultures are extremely dynamic. It's hard to define objectively who is native American and who is not. As in similar matters, it may be the best thing to let people call themselves what they want. You can define Native American ancestry in some way or other, but that would say nothing about an individuals connection to that culture which may be high or may be zero.
Sure. To quote the interview linked in my previous comment:
"We have debates amongst ourselves about whether being Native American is about being a citizen of your tribe – a political designation – or about culture and traditional practice. I tend to come down on the side of political citizenship. It’s true that it’s about much more than blood – culture matters. But our political autonomy matters too, and that helps produce a space in which our cultural traditions can thrive."
So it's true that there isn't one unique, immutable rule for determining Native identity.
But there is also a very real pattern of white people claiming Native identity in a way that 1) all tribes disagree with, and 2) erases the voice of actual Native Americans, and sometimes even actively hurts them.
> it may be the best thing to let people call themselves what they want.
They can call themselves whatever they want. But if they're going to use some bullshit blood test as a "get out of jail free card" to make a white supremacist argument, furthering a well-documented pattern of disrespectful behavior to Native Americans, then I'm going to call them out on it.
Just imagine someone saying "Hey, I'm sick of you always bringing up specific people when you mention the Holocaust. A got a blood test and I'm 25% Jewish. Is this my mic drop moment?" . In this context would you also say "Meh, let people call themselves what they want". Context matters.
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Perhaps my choice of the term "direct" is overly specific, but I feel like this is a very nit-picky quibble. The underlying point I was trying to make doesn't change, which is that the United States benefited hugely (in purely economic terms) from slavery. Whether or not we would have been as, less, or more successful without it, or whether it has been helpful to others, is an orthogonal discussion. As I said, I am n…
> United States benefited hugely (in purely economic terms) from slavery. Whether or not we would have been as, less, or more successful without it, or whether it has been helpful to others, is an orthogonal discussion. I don't see how these can be orthogonal. If the claim of benefiting from something isn't a comparison to a world in which you didn't have that thing, then what is it? And since we don't have access to…
The second issue is that regardless of the accuracy of the claim, downplaying the value of slavery is a way to devalue the debt owed to black Americans and has been used as such in arguments. The less valuable slavery was, the less white Americans should feel owed to pay back. So I think there’s a significant moral cost to this argument, and yes I think it’s disrespectful. But again, it’s factually controversial as well.
I had also made a variety of significant points which GP failed to respond to, instead focusing only on a hyper-literal interpretation of one subset of my argument. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The fact that England, another state with a horrific history of exploitation and colonialism, was also guilty of slavery, is hardly exculpatory for the US. Whether slavery was economically beneficial in every single historical example is a separate question from whether it was beneficial to the United States.
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Are you arguing that slavery did not contribute significantly to the wealth of the North, first by using slaves directly, then by integrating advantageously with the South’s economy and the slave trade?
My condensed argument is that Slavery per se does not make countries rich. Rather I am only arguing that slavery, in many countries including the USA, Brazil, and others world-wide, did not contribute to the long term economic success of the nation nearly as much as many claim it does (or solely claim it does in the USA). We don't have a counterfactual Twin Earth where those countries did not have slaves, but we know…
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> I wouldn't say it's that stable or that the rest of Africa is instable, especially compared to Europe. It's just that Europe industrialized earlier and got to reap rewards that can only come from most simple needs being met easily. Europe's industrialization as well as other Western countries heavily depended on the exploitation of third world countries in Asia and Africa, especially after WW2. Sweatshops and slave…
> Europe's industrialization as well as other Western countries heavily depended on the exploitation of third world countries Causality and time moved the other direction. Industrialization made Britain and a few other countries rich and technologically advanced. That enabled them to conquer and exploit third world countries. On balance, that enriched a lot of individuals and made a lot of leaders feel powerful, but…
Resources from the Indian Raj, in particular, played a crucial role in enriching Britain and therefore financing the industrial revolution.
(for the record, those evil guys that cut down trees for profit, plant 52 million trees per year every year in the US)
Meanwhile, as per the 353 million-in-a-day estimate: let's say for sake of argument that the average person can manage to plant one tree per minute and they are working an 8 hour shift with no breaks, pauses, distractions or complications. That's close to half-a-million people to cover all three shifts in a single day. And that's with generous assumptions. The Ethiopian government says that they expect a single volunteer to be able to plant 100 trees in a day. Which means if the 350 million in a day is accurate, they had 3.5 million volunteers. Call me suspicious of such an ambitious estimate.
with a little more digging, to their credit, these 350 million trees are just the latest on a re-forestation project that now boasts 2.6 billion trees planted since it began. But math again, that equates to 739 square miles of equivalent US forest (less than 0.2% of the total land mass of Ethiopia or an equivalent square of 27 miles on a side of typical US forest. That's just over half the size of the state of Rhode Island or about the size of Washtenaw county, MI where I live.
Tt their ultimate goal is to plant 4 billion trees total before the project is finished. Admirable indeed. But, I did find figures on my home state of Michigan for comparison. While I have yet to find a number on the total number of trees before the reforestation in Ethiopia, I can guess based on the decline of 25% cited and the goal of 4 billion trees total. ((4/25) * 15) = 2.4 (billion) for a total of 6.4 billion trees assuming their desire is to re-achieve the 40% number from a century ago. Estimates for the state of Michigan are a total of 13.5 billion trees across the entire state. That's more than twice the assumed 'final goal' for the entire country of Ethiopia. Oh, should I mention the land area of Ethiopia is 4 1/2 times more than that of the state of Michigan? Other things worthy of consideration which I noticed while digging. Many areas of Michigan were clear cut in the late 1800s and early 1900s. (i.e. about the same timeline as the de-forestation in Ethiopia) To be fair, some of the areas cut were re-forested by WPA government work programs in the 1930s. But not all. The reports I was pulling my figures from were actually surveys done by the state government for the purpose of evaluating potential future timber cutting, and they noted a large number of hardwoods (oaks, maples, elm, etc) in those numbers (most of the wpa planted trees were pine trees) and a growing quantity of older trees as a percentage of the total. aka "old growth" or mature forests.
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> United States benefited hugely (in purely economic terms) from slavery. Whether or not we would have been as, less, or more successful without it, or whether it has been helpful to others, is an orthogonal discussion. I don't see how these can be orthogonal. If the claim of benefiting from something isn't a comparison to a world in which you didn't have that thing, then what is it? And since we don't have access to…
First of all, I have heard and read from numerous sources that I trust that slavery played a huge role in the early American economy. But that on its own would be a simple factual dispute. The second issue is that regardless of the accuracy of the claim, downplaying the value of slavery is a way to devalue the debt owed to black Americans and has been used as such in arguments. The less valuable slavery was, the less…
My argument re English cotton mills was much more focused than you credit. It was about how rapidly they switched from slave-grown cotton to non-slave cotton, once there was a blockade, not some denial that they consumed slave-grown cotton before this.