Ah, the classic we’re all just squatters on a rock defense. This is the intellectual equivalent of throwing a smoke bomb and hoping no one notices you’re trying to justify a very specific and recent theft by invoking a vague, ahistorical free-for-all. Let’s unpack your masterclass in bad faith.
First, the statement nobody has any claim to any land is a philosophical thought experiment for freshman ethics seminars, not a serious framework for modern justice. If you genuinely believed that, you wouldn’t be paying a mortgage or respecting property lines. You’d be trying to plant a flag in your neighbor’s backyard. But you don’t. You only trot out this radical nihilism when it’s time to dismiss Indigenous sovereignty, because applying it universally would immediately collapse the society you benefit from.
Then we get to the core of the argument, the whole they did it too school of history. Sure, conflict and displacement happened between pre colonial societies. To then equate that with the organized, state-sanctioned project of genocide, land theft, and cultural eradication enacted by European empires is so laughably dishonest it borders on parody. It’s like saying a bar fight and the Normandy invasion are the same because both involve violence. The scale, intent, and lasting structural power are so fundamentally different that only someone desperate to avoid accountability would conflate them.
Your hypothetical about one tribe taking over if left alone is pure fantasy, a just-so story you’ve invented to make colonialism seem inevitable. It’s not history. It’s fan fiction for the apologist. You’re judging real people who suffered a documented catastrophe against your imaginary scenario of what might have happened, and then using your own fiction to wash your hands of the real consequences. This is the ultimate colonial mindset, projecting your own violent assumptions onto other cultures to make their dispossession seem like a natural event rather than a deliberate crime.
The punchline, of course, is that this entire line of reasoning only ever flows one way. It’s only ever used to undermine Indigenous claims. You never apply this nobody has a claim logic to the current title holder, the corporation, or the state. Their deed, derived directly from that original theft, is somehow treated as sacred. So your whole philosophy is a sham. The goal isn’t to debate land claims. It’s to freeze the current distribution of power, which you benefit from, by pretending all claims are equally invalid except, conveniently, the one that gives you your house. It’s a shell game of morality where you get to keep the prize and call everyone else a hypocrite for wanting it back. 🤡
Ah, the classic we’re all just squatters on a rock defense. This is the intellectual equivalent of throwing a smoke bomb and hoping no one notices you’re trying to justify a very specific and recent theft by invoking a vague, ahistorical free-for-all. Let’s unpack your masterclass in bad faith.
First, the statement nobody has any claim to any land is a philosophical thought experiment for freshman ethics seminars, not a serious framework for modern justice. If you genuinely believed that, you wouldn’t be paying a mortgage or respecting property lines. You’d be trying to plant a flag in your neighbor’s backyard. But you don’t. You only trot out this radical nihilism when it’s time to dismiss Indigenous sovereignty, because applying it universally would immediately collapse the society you benefit from.
Then we get to the core of the argument, the whole they did it too school of history. Sure, conflict and displacement happened between pre colonial societies. To then equate that with the organized, state-sanctioned project of genocide, land theft, and cultural eradication enacted by European empires is so laughably dishonest it borders on parody. It’s like saying a bar fight and the Normandy invasion are the same because both involve violence. The scale, intent, and lasting structural power are so fundamentally different that only someone desperate to avoid accountability would conflate them.
Your hypothetical about one tribe taking over if left alone is pure fantasy, a just-so story you’ve invented to make colonialism seem inevitable. It’s not history. It’s fan fiction for the apologist. You’re judging real people who suffered a documented catastrophe against your imaginary scenario of what might have happened, and then using your own fiction to wash your hands of the real consequences. This is the ultimate colonial mindset, projecting your own violent assumptions onto other cultures to make their dispossession seem like a natural event rather than a deliberate crime.
The punchline, of course, is that this entire line of reasoning only ever flows one way. It’s only ever used to undermine Indigenous claims. You never apply this nobody has a claim logic to the current title holder, the corporation, or the state. Their deed, derived directly from that original theft, is somehow treated as sacred. So your whole philosophy is a sham. The goal isn’t to debate land claims. It’s to freeze the current distribution of power, which you benefit from, by pretending all claims are equally invalid except, conveniently, the one that gives you your house. It’s a shell game of morality where you get to keep the prize and call everyone else a hypocrite for wanting it back. 🤡