4 ms·

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 b

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. You find out it's all true, your father did murder and steal $1000 and you indirectly and unknowingly benefited from that. Should you legally be forced to pay back that $1000 dollars? But the person is dead, should you have to pay that dead person's son $1000? Should you and any siblings have to divide that sum up and pay back the $1000 collectively? Let's say you have already spent every dime you have on meals out. Should you go to jail because you can't pay back the $1000 your father stole? I think these agreements which weren't honored are equal to theft but how long down the line must you pay for the crime of being born in that situation and pay others that were born into the opposite side of the theft. Even with as close a relation as a father, I find it hard to believe that a child should be responsible for their parents wrong doing. But now assume that not only were you not related to that person who stole $1000, you simply don't have the heritage that the murdered man has. Now assume that hundreds of years have passed and now someone is still asking to collect that $1000 from you. I find it very difficult to find the moral obligation to pay back that money when the people who were the actual victims are long dead, the people who committed the theft are long dead, and there is no connection between your actions and the theft. Voluntary payments I would be all for but using tax money which is essentially taken by force, as if you don't pay taxes you will go to jail, that kind of thing seems very wrong. I would not blame a child for their father's sins.

bzb3 6y ago
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.
- StanislavPetrov 6y ago
  Whether or not you are a terrible person has nothing to do with legal obligations. If your ancestors took out a loan and signed a lien against a property, that doesn't just go away if they die. Its a legal contract. The whole "white guilt" argument about some sort of collective burden that people are supposed to bear is entirely unrelated to a codified, legal treaty signed by our government.
  - astrange 6y ago
    > If your ancestors took out a loan and signed a lien against a property, that doesn't just go away if they die. Its a legal contract. This is true, but only because liens are special, not because it's a contract. You're not a party to your ancestors' debts or contracts if they die. At most, their estate is.
    - StanislavPetrov 6y ago
      Oklahoma is our country's estate.
- CathedralBorrow 6y ago
  What is this obsession with some people in thinking this is all about making them "feel bad"? Feels like such a self-centered point of view.
- danShumway 6y ago
  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.
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    I don't think this is a particularly good analogy either. you don't have some moral obligation to fix up the old code for the other team. you do it because that's what you're getting paid for. if you really don't feel like fixing it, there's nothing wrong with quitting the job.
    - danShumway 6y ago
      Point taken, but I'm not sure what quitting a democracy looks like. I guess legislators in Oklahoma are free not to run for government positions? And citizens are free to either stop voting, or possibly move to a different state? But my instinct is that if someone says to me, "I don't want to deal with fixing inherited broken systems", at the very least my response to that is going to be something along the lines of, "that's fine, but then don't get in the way of other people who are fixing them."
stormbrew 6y ago
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 now it's that your dad killed someone and stole the deed to his land, found oil on it, and is now one of the richest people in the world and the person he killed's kid is now on the street begging for cash and tell me again how little you owe that kid who's father's land gave you your trust fund and your college education.
- berryjerry 6y ago
  I think it is a false dilemma to assume that either person would become rich by means of owning the land at that time. The second the land was stolen it's future was changed forever but that does not change the original value of the stolen land. I assume the land was bought and sold between many parties before the person who finally found oil and became rich owned it, and assuming a tribe recognized ownership at the time the person who had the oil rich land stolen may not even have been of that tribe under an alternate timeline. I do understand the point though that the greater the size of the theft, the more reason to give back but I wouldn't go as far as to say there is an obligation by society in general towards that murdered man's grandchildren. I think the analogy still stands, in that the victim is long dead, the thief is long dead, and there was no crime knowingly committed by the living. I also think if we referred to the country of Spain as the "Spanish Tribe" and the country of England the "English Tribe" and the Colonists the "Colonist Tribe" and said they were warring with each other, then we probably would not even have this conversation.
  - myspy 6y ago
    Some crimes are not forgotten.
- throwqqq 6y ago
  This is an indictment of the American way of dealing with poverty more than anything. Giving some Indian chiefs the ability to decide life and death is a step in the wrong direction. We will not solve the problems of the 19th century with the methods of the 16th. Compare BLM being outraged that blacks are killed by police at 3 times the rate of whites in the US. When the scandal should be that white Americans are killed at 20 times the rate of any British. In short, there's a big problem in America, but no one is even able to see it.
StanislavPetrov 6y ago
>How long should a child be responsible for the crimes of their fathers? This is a fundamentally flawed analogy. Our government - the same government that has existed since these treaties were signed - is still around. > I find it very difficult to find the moral obligation to pay back that money when the people who were the actual victims are long dead The question of a "moral obligation" is entirely irrelevant and unrelated to our government's legal obligation to uphold the treaty that our government signed.
NalNezumi 6y ago
This is a false analogy because unlike money (representation of value), land is not consumed and disappear. A better analogy would be: your grandparent barged in to a persons house at gun point, demanded him to hand over his house. The owner obviously resist, and your grandpa tells the original owner that he will be given his house back in a couple of years(legally signed) to ease the resistance. This paper was also signed "with the current owner of the house", in mind(in case grandpa dies). Now the original owner lives on the street, his grandchilden the same. Each generation have always asked "when would you live up to your promise?" to the descendant of your grandpa (current owner of the house) each year. Now you can of course discuss if you should give additional compensation for their suffering, but the original contract still stands, and you've always been obliged to follow it. It's not about blame. disclaimer: I'm in general in agreement with you that I don't think a child should be blamed for their ancestors sins.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
You're taking a crime that was done to multiple nations and millions of people and trying to turn it into an analogy in a family's personal history, which isn't right; it's nowhere near in the same scale. The facts are that the colonists / invaders genocided and displaced the original inhabitants of a continent and moved the survivors into reservations, probably to avoid it going down history as racially motivated genocide entirely. Sure, you didn't do it, your ancestors probably didn't have anything to with it (or the slave trade for that matter), but that doesn't mean you shouldn't fight for other people's rights. They still suffer under what happened a hundred-and-then-some years ago, they are a people whose country was taken from them, whose culture was (attempted to be) erased, and who today what little they got as a consolation has also been attempted to be taken from them because said consolation actually did have some value. Your analogy is wrong, oversimplified and trivializing the issue.
CathedralBorrow 6y ago
> I would not blame a child for their father's sins. I think you are making this too much about personal blame, and sin, and ego. Your analogy falls apart right out of the gate because the premise is off. It's not about placing blame or making you feel bad.
CryptoBanker 6y ago
It's not just about the literal land and dollars stolen. That theft has contributed to the way that American society sets Native Americans up for failure and repression. That is a systemic inequality that is never too late to correct
Muromec 6y ago
>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 long as restitution has not happened and you are still profiting from the act of wrongdoing and the victim (or their descendants) are still suffering from it. It's pretty simple, isn't it.
SambalOelek 6y ago
I am quite surprised to see this default-to-no-action comment here on HN. Sometimes, a problem isn't your fault, but you are still compelled to fix it. If people have this attitude, then "we" (as a species) are absolutely screwed vis-a-vis climate change. In a generation, nobody is going to be around who did all the polluting, and hopefully everyone doesn't just sit around saying "Well I didn't do it!"
- jaybeeayyy 6y ago
  Is that really surprising on HN? IME there's always been a pretty big politically right leaning presence on here.
itsokimbatman 6y ago
By “we” he means the United States Government. Unlike the father in your example, the USG is still around and still responsible for its actions. As such, I see no moral issue with requiring it to make restitution. If we don’t want to raise additional taxes to do so we can always make some small cuts to military spending or some other bloated program to pay for it.

bzb3 6y ago

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.

StanislavPetrov 6y ago
Whether or not you are a terrible person has nothing to do with legal obligations. If your ancestors took out a loan and signed a lien against a property, that doesn't just go away if they die. Its a legal contract. The whole "white guilt" argument about some sort of collective burden that people are supposed to bear is entirely unrelated to a codified, legal treaty signed by our government.
- astrange 6y ago
  > If your ancestors took out a loan and signed a lien against a property, that doesn't just go away if they die. Its a legal contract. This is true, but only because liens are special, not because it's a contract. You're not a party to your ancestors' debts or contracts if they die. At most, their estate is.
  - StanislavPetrov 6y ago
    Oklahoma is our country's estate.
CathedralBorrow 6y ago
What is this obsession with some people in thinking this is all about making them "feel bad"? Feels like such a self-centered point of view.
danShumway 6y ago
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.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  I don't think this is a particularly good analogy either. you don't have some moral obligation to fix up the old code for the other team. you do it because that's what you're getting paid for. if you really don't feel like fixing it, there's nothing wrong with quitting the job.
  - danShumway 6y ago
    Point taken, but I'm not sure what quitting a democracy looks like. I guess legislators in Oklahoma are free not to run for government positions? And citizens are free to either stop voting, or possibly move to a different state? But my instinct is that if someone says to me, "I don't want to deal with fixing inherited broken systems", at the very least my response to that is going to be something along the lines of, "that's fine, but then don't get in the way of other people who are fixing them."

stormbrew 6y ago

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 now it's that your dad killed someone and stole the deed to his land, found oil on it, and is now one of the richest people in the world and the person he killed's kid is now on the street begging for cash and tell me again how little you owe that kid who's father's land gave you your trust fund and your college education.

berryjerry 6y ago
I think it is a false dilemma to assume that either person would become rich by means of owning the land at that time. The second the land was stolen it's future was changed forever but that does not change the original value of the stolen land. I assume the land was bought and sold between many parties before the person who finally found oil and became rich owned it, and assuming a tribe recognized ownership at the time the person who had the oil rich land stolen may not even have been of that tribe under an alternate timeline. I do understand the point though that the greater the size of the theft, the more reason to give back but I wouldn't go as far as to say there is an obligation by society in general towards that murdered man's grandchildren. I think the analogy still stands, in that the victim is long dead, the thief is long dead, and there was no crime knowingly committed by the living. I also think if we referred to the country of Spain as the "Spanish Tribe" and the country of England the "English Tribe" and the Colonists the "Colonist Tribe" and said they were warring with each other, then we probably would not even have this conversation.
- myspy 6y ago
  Some crimes are not forgotten.
throwqqq 6y ago
This is an indictment of the American way of dealing with poverty more than anything. Giving some Indian chiefs the ability to decide life and death is a step in the wrong direction. We will not solve the problems of the 19th century with the methods of the 16th. Compare BLM being outraged that blacks are killed by police at 3 times the rate of whites in the US. When the scandal should be that white Americans are killed at 20 times the rate of any British. In short, there's a big problem in America, but no one is even able to see it.

StanislavPetrov 6y ago

>How long should a child be responsible for the crimes of their fathers? This is a fundamentally flawed analogy. Our government - the same government that has existed since these treaties were signed - is still around. > I find it very difficult to find the moral obligation to pay back that money when the people who were the actual victims are long dead The question of a "moral obligation" is entirely irrelevant and unrelated to our government's legal obligation to uphold the treaty that our government signed.

NalNezumi 6y ago

This is a false analogy because unlike money (representation of value), land is not consumed and disappear. A better analogy would be: your grandparent barged in to a persons house at gun point, demanded him to hand over his house. The owner obviously resist, and your grandpa tells the original owner that he will be given his house back in a couple of years(legally signed) to ease the resistance. This paper was also signed "with the current owner of the house", in mind(in case grandpa dies). Now the original owner lives on the street, his grandchilden the same. Each generation have always asked "when would you live up to your promise?" to the descendant of your grandpa (current owner of the house) each year. Now you can of course discuss if you should give additional compensation for their suffering, but the original contract still stands, and you've always been obliged to follow it. It's not about blame. disclaimer: I'm in general in agreement with you that I don't think a child should be blamed for their ancestors sins.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

You're taking a crime that was done to multiple nations and millions of people and trying to turn it into an analogy in a family's personal history, which isn't right; it's nowhere near in the same scale. The facts are that the colonists / invaders genocided and displaced the original inhabitants of a continent and moved the survivors into reservations, probably to avoid it going down history as racially motivated genocide entirely. Sure, you didn't do it, your ancestors probably didn't have anything to with it (or the slave trade for that matter), but that doesn't mean you shouldn't fight for other people's rights. They still suffer under what happened a hundred-and-then-some years ago, they are a people whose country was taken from them, whose culture was (attempted to be) erased, and who today what little they got as a consolation has also been attempted to be taken from them because said consolation actually did have some value. Your analogy is wrong, oversimplified and trivializing the issue.

CathedralBorrow 6y ago

> I would not blame a child for their father's sins. I think you are making this too much about personal blame, and sin, and ego. Your analogy falls apart right out of the gate because the premise is off. It's not about placing blame or making you feel bad.

CryptoBanker 6y ago

It's not just about the literal land and dollars stolen. That theft has contributed to the way that American society sets Native Americans up for failure and repression. That is a systemic inequality that is never too late to correct

Muromec 6y ago

>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 long as restitution has not happened and you are still profiting from the act of wrongdoing and the victim (or their descendants) are still suffering from it. It's pretty simple, isn't it.

SambalOelek 6y ago

I am quite surprised to see this default-to-no-action comment here on HN. Sometimes, a problem isn't your fault, but you are still compelled to fix it. If people have this attitude, then "we" (as a species) are absolutely screwed vis-a-vis climate change. In a generation, nobody is going to be around who did all the polluting, and hopefully everyone doesn't just sit around saying "Well I didn't do it!"

jaybeeayyy 6y ago
Is that really surprising on HN? IME there's always been a pretty big politically right leaning presence on here.

itsokimbatman 6y ago

By “we” he means the United States Government. Unlike the father in your example, the USG is still around and still responsible for its actions. As such, I see no moral issue with requiring it to make restitution. If we don’t want to raise additional taxes to do so we can always make some small cuts to military spending or some other bloated program to pay for it.