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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

#941
post #869

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find your use of "we" interesting because you clearly identify as part of the group that committed those acts hundreds of years ago. How long should a child be responsible for the crimes of their fathers? As an example, assume your father killed someone and stole $1000 dollars from them. You never knew about this didn't choose for him to do this but now someone is coming after you saying you must pay them $1000. Yo…

What GP expresses is called white guilt, and it's brutally amplified by the media nowadays. If you don't feel bad for what your ancestors did, you're a terrible person... Even though you didn't have anything to do with their choices.

I have no personal guilt over my ancestors. I have sympathy for the problems they created, and I have some culpability in benefiting from them. But it's not about guilt. The problem hasn't been fixed yet, and we are responsible for fixing it.

Since HN is the world of programming analogies:

I inherit a broken, bug-filled codebase when signing on for a new job. A year into continued development, a team mentions to me that the codebase is utterly broken for one of the tasks it was designed to do.

I respond, "why are you trying to make me feel guilty about code I didn't even write? The problem with programming 'outrage culture' is we have all these people talking about the flaws of jQuery and coupled interfaces and inadequate testing. It's not my fault the codebase suffers from those problems. I'm a good programmer."

The argument stops sounding reasonable in that context, because we recognize that fixing the code isn't about anybody's ego. Similarly, it is impossible to have a productive conversation about reparations when someone is spending all of their time trying to defend that they're a good person.

In reality, nobody cares about your guilt and nobody cares about whether or not you pass some kind of magic threshold where you can be considered 'good' or 'bad'. The entire question is worthless. They just want the problems fixed, and "we" collectively as a nation are responsible for refactoring and addressing problems that exist in the current systemically biased laws/treaties that we inherited.

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

#942
Does that mean that Native Americans have a court-sanctioned right to racial self-segregation in Oklahoma now?

I have a feeling white and black ethno-nationalists will look at this and feel they are getting wronged by not being granted the same opportunities.

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

#943

We have to recognize how much we screwed over the Native Americans. We took away their prime land on the East coast. We gave them some shitty land in Oklahoma that we didn't think we would ever want. We made them walk there in the "Trail of Tears", and lots of them died along the way. Then we decided to screw them out of the land in Oklahoma after all, but didn't go though the process properly because we didn't think…

As an Okie and a tribal member, the situation is far more complex than what the news/wikipedia can describe. But I think that's mentioned here a lot- the news never does anything justice. The Indians do get billions handed out all the time -ihs.gov.

One of the fundamental issues I see in Oklahoma is the lack of rule of law. I'm not thrilled we're releasing child molesters (that's who filed the suit), but I suppose starting somewhere is good.

As for VC funding, I'd love to see more of that. I do computer vision/nlp for a living, and I've had to leave the state due to lack of work. It's cheap, there are smart people, but they all leave after school.

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

#944

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And I have no input in the government that makes their laws. Nor any hope of ever being heard. Yet those laws apply to me just the same. That is also the reality of 40 million immigrants in the US.

Surely immigrants chose to come to the US. People in Tulsa didn't chose to be in a Native reservation. They chose to be in Tulsa, Oklahoma, US.

I find this delightfully ironic.

Tulsa residents actually _chose_ to live in a land that happens to be a native American reservation. They may not have known prior to this day, but the Supreme Court was there to clarify it.

In fact, and given that the Supreme Court dismissed the state arguments about laws passed around the early 20th century, it is not that these territories are _now_ part of the reservation, they _always_ were.

Now, if you were to argue that there may be uncertainty and prejudice against current Tulsa residents, because of the change of the status quo, I would say that, again, this is the reality 40 million immigrants face in the US to this day.

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

#945

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find your use of "we" interesting because you clearly identify as part of the group that committed those acts hundreds of years ago. How long should a child be responsible for the crimes of their fathers? As an example, assume your father killed someone and stole $1000 dollars from them. You never knew about this didn't choose for him to do this but now someone is coming after you saying you must pay them $1000. Yo…

This analogy falls apart rather quickly when you recognize that the north american indigenous population still suffers greatly under legal systems built on the treaties that weren't even honored while the descendants of those who perpetrated great crimes against them collectively constitute the greatest mass of wealth in the history of the world while also pretending to have done nothing wrong. Re-do your analogy but…

tell me again how little you owe that kid

That's actually not that hard to do, both from a legal and a moral standpoint. Legally, the "you" in your analogy has never committed an unlawful act and is therefore not personally beholden to any restitution to the victim's side. It is the purveyance of a well-functioning justice system to provide adequate restitution for victims of crimes, but that does not extend to a personal obligation on people that had no part in said crime.

Morally, the story is a bit more convoluted but your premise falls back to the theory of original sin: that people can be personally held responsible for their heritage. In the past two-thousand years it has been proven a very powerful argument because it "feels" right, but at its core it is still a rejection of the individualist premise that all people are born equal. And I'm still on the side that believes all people should be born equal, even though that stance seems less and less prevalent nowadays. Once you start arguing for collective punishment of past crimes, it's very hard to argue your case without at the same time defending the same practice throughout many wars in history, and now explicitly outlawed in the Geneva Conventions.

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

#946

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only way to stop our neverending war on drugs is a Constitutional amendment that guarantees every American the right to consume anything they want for any reason. In the next several decades there will be un unprecedented number of elderly Americans living below the poverty line with no pension and medical issues they can't afford to fix - euthanasia will become something of a nuclear option that they'll want ava…

> the right to consume anything they want for any reason How about human flesh? Nuclear waste? Bombs? Bags of dangerous quantities of hard drugs [a la drug mule]? Endangered species? Just like with free speech, "do anything you want for any reason" has the potential for abuse (both by a person to themselves and by other persons to other entities), and the majority of society is not comfortable with that. Sometimes we…

do you seriously think it makes any sense to make laws that forbid eating nuclear waste or bombs? Thats ridiculous.

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

#947

We have to recognize how much we screwed over the Native Americans. We took away their prime land on the East coast. We gave them some shitty land in Oklahoma that we didn't think we would ever want. We made them walk there in the "Trail of Tears", and lots of them died along the way. Then we decided to screw them out of the land in Oklahoma after all, but didn't go though the process properly because we didn't think…

People were displaced from most of the land area of the United States, not just from the east coast.

From pretty much all of it it seems: https://www.whose.land/en/

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

#948

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People were displaced from most of the land area of the United States, not just from the east coast.

From pretty much all of it it seems: https://www.whose.land/en/

This map shows why Houston is such a shit hole (I live here). I often explain there were no dominant indigenous tribes in the Houston area when white men settled because it was a malaria infested swamp. That's what the summers feel like. No one in their right mind would live here without air conditioning.

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

#949
post #682
post #664

The genesis of this case (it started with Murphy) is an amazing and wonderful story. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/05/us/05bar.html ... and for more depth, check this excellent podcast series: https://crooked.com/podcast-series/this-land/ Full disclosure -- I knew and worked with the attorney who discovered the original issue. She was also a geologist, so she checked on the mineral rights to see if she could develo…

> It started with Murphy What do you mean? Murphy is reported as a murder, whereas McGirt is a rape. Do you mean that McGirt's defense adopted the strategy Murphy introduced...?

Sorry if I wasn't clear, the initial jurisdiction (state vs federal) issue started with Murphy, a murder case. When the Murphy jurisdiction issue began to achieve significant legal traction, McGirt adopted the same strategy. The SCOTUS reviewed the Murphy case with only 8 Justices, didn't issue a decision (they probably voted 4:4 in conference), and used the McGirt case (with 9 Justices) to decide the jurisdiction issue. The links in my comment provide a lot more info, it's a remarkable narrative. If the initial Murphy attorney had not first been a geologist (and then a mineral rights litigator) the whole situation probably would never have surfaced.

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

#950

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't retroactive laws a thing?

Like wearing white shirts is illegal, effective 2001? So anyone you can prove wore a white shirt 2001-2020 is going to jail? That would be pretty stupid.

It's possible in some jurisdictions although as you say they can very easily be unjust.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law

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