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Reservations are not ghettos. There are no walls and no guards. People can leave anytime. To equivocate them is to diminish the horror of the holocaust. It's tr

Reservations are not ghettos. There are no walls and no guards. People can leave anytime. To equivocate them is to diminish the horror of the holocaust. It's true that they came about as a result of a long and brutal process of conquest, but these were warring nations and different times. It's also true that those living who were forcefully oppressed deserve reparations. Sadly there are few still alive. Those who do leave reservations however, especially those who do so in pursuit of education and not drugs, tend to fare far better than those who stay. This is hardly surprising given that remote areas that find their populations too dense to be supported by their economies tend to do poorly. You don't need to be on a reservation to have awful outcomes in remote areas. The (few) reservations that manage to produce something valuable and govern the proceeds well are hardly grim. People can just leave. Many people do, and many of those succeed. Our free society produces hierarchies of competence (not privilege)[1]. They're still hierarchies however, with winners in opulence and impoverished losers. More than there being nothing wrong with this, it seems to be a completely unavoidable law of nature. I'd say that's a good enough reason to embrace it. 1. The vast majority of intergenerational wealth transfers fail. People with rich grandparents tend to be middle class. It's (very) hard to raise competent people in a privileged environment, and incompetent people tend to fail in our society.

shadowgovt 4y ago
> hierarchies of competence (not privilege)[1]. Oh dear. I hate to be the bearer of bad news but you've been sold a bill of goods. On the social mobility index, United States ranks 27 of the 80 some odd countries index. Poor kids in Estonia are more likely to turn out better than poor kids in the US. And intergenerational wealth transfer is only one way that privilege transfers. Opportunity and connections are the much larger effects. Seriously, do the research on how many poor people move up a social ladder over their lifetime versus how many wealthy people stay in their ladder. You will be disappointed in the story in America. And there's a reason the reservations are in remote places. And if you don't find the idea "all they have to do to move up in society is leave the reservation" to be viscerally revolting, you don't understand how a nation slaughters another bation and I think your comprehension of these problems may be too far away from me to reach. Again, I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news. I believed in the dream too when I was younger.
- thegrimmest 4y ago
  It's a bit more complicated than a single index isn't it? Social mobility varies widely in the US, with the biggest differentiator being domestic value for education. Time spent studying (not household wealth) is the biggest predictor of SAT scores. SAT scores are the biggest predictor of college/university admission. Admission is the biggest predictor of economic mobility. And the biggest predictor of time spent studying? Domestic value for education. If your parents (rich or poor) care about your education, you'll succeed. If the don't you won't. This is particularly evident when examining the social mobility experienced by children of poor asian immigrants. This is all pretty standard Chicago school stuff. For further reading see the work of Thomas Sowell. This is exactly what I'd expect in a free country. Opportunity is abound, you just have to take the appropriate actions to seize it. Conversely, if you're born into a domestic culture that sets you up for (economic) failure, it's no one's job to intervene. People can of course raise their children in any manner they see fit. > be viscerally revolting I'm not sure why I would. Hunting and fishing is simply no longer a sustainable economic model. I did say "that they came about as a result of a long and brutal process of conquest". But all the people who perpetrated it and suffered it are dead. The question is how to make the best of reality today. Living on a reservation in modern comfort (house, A/C, refrigeration, heating, etc.) is just not economically viable, regardless of how one may feel about it.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    > Opportunity is abound, you just have to take the appropriate actions to seize it. It sounds more like you're saying "you just have to luck into having parents who understand this." > Conversely, if you're born into a domestic culture that sets you up for (economic) failure, it's no one's job to intervene. That's terribly cruel and not a way one should structure a just society. And, indeed, bringing the conversation around to the beginning: this is among the reasons we have a public education system in the first place, to attempt to minimize that inherent unfairness. Because sometimes (as you've now observed) parents are wrong, and we have a valid civic interest in a collective process to ameliorate that error and, in so doing, create a citizenry more prepared to inherit the burden of co-governing the country (and, eventually, governing it exclusively when their parents are retired and gone). "What do we do when the parents are just plug-stupid and everyone knows it" is one of the oldest questions in centralized education, and we have multiple overlapping approaches to addressing it (including, of course, the right to pull a child out of school and shoulder the burden of educating them oneself, for good or ill). Your comments regarding reservation life express an incredible ignorance of both the history of reservations and their modern-day structure, and I'm completely disinterested in further conversation with you on that topic. Suffice to say you just don't get it. It would be a useful avenue of study for you to reframe your overall attitude on the inherent virtue of the system you were born (lucked) into.

shadowgovt 4y ago

> hierarchies of competence (not privilege)[1]. Oh dear. I hate to be the bearer of bad news but you've been sold a bill of goods. On the social mobility index, United States ranks 27 of the 80 some odd countries index. Poor kids in Estonia are more likely to turn out better than poor kids in the US. And intergenerational wealth transfer is only one way that privilege transfers. Opportunity and connections are the much larger effects. Seriously, do the research on how many poor people move up a social ladder over their lifetime versus how many wealthy people stay in their ladder. You will be disappointed in the story in America. And there's a reason the reservations are in remote places. And if you don't find the idea "all they have to do to move up in society is leave the reservation" to be viscerally revolting, you don't understand how a nation slaughters another bation and I think your comprehension of these problems may be too far away from me to reach. Again, I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news. I believed in the dream too when I was younger.

thegrimmest 4y ago
It's a bit more complicated than a single index isn't it? Social mobility varies widely in the US, with the biggest differentiator being domestic value for education. Time spent studying (not household wealth) is the biggest predictor of SAT scores. SAT scores are the biggest predictor of college/university admission. Admission is the biggest predictor of economic mobility. And the biggest predictor of time spent studying? Domestic value for education. If your parents (rich or poor) care about your education, you'll succeed. If the don't you won't. This is particularly evident when examining the social mobility experienced by children of poor asian immigrants. This is all pretty standard Chicago school stuff. For further reading see the work of Thomas Sowell. This is exactly what I'd expect in a free country. Opportunity is abound, you just have to take the appropriate actions to seize it. Conversely, if you're born into a domestic culture that sets you up for (economic) failure, it's no one's job to intervene. People can of course raise their children in any manner they see fit. > be viscerally revolting I'm not sure why I would. Hunting and fishing is simply no longer a sustainable economic model. I did say "that they came about as a result of a long and brutal process of conquest". But all the people who perpetrated it and suffered it are dead. The question is how to make the best of reality today. Living on a reservation in modern comfort (house, A/C, refrigeration, heating, etc.) is just not economically viable, regardless of how one may feel about it.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  > Opportunity is abound, you just have to take the appropriate actions to seize it. It sounds more like you're saying "you just have to luck into having parents who understand this." > Conversely, if you're born into a domestic culture that sets you up for (economic) failure, it's no one's job to intervene. That's terribly cruel and not a way one should structure a just society. And, indeed, bringing the conversation around to the beginning: this is among the reasons we have a public education system in the first place, to attempt to minimize that inherent unfairness. Because sometimes (as you've now observed) parents are wrong, and we have a valid civic interest in a collective process to ameliorate that error and, in so doing, create a citizenry more prepared to inherit the burden of co-governing the country (and, eventually, governing it exclusively when their parents are retired and gone). "What do we do when the parents are just plug-stupid and everyone knows it" is one of the oldest questions in centralized education, and we have multiple overlapping approaches to addressing it (including, of course, the right to pull a child out of school and shoulder the burden of educating them oneself, for good or ill). Your comments regarding reservation life express an incredible ignorance of both the history of reservations and their modern-day structure, and I'm completely disinterested in further conversation with you on that topic. Suffice to say you just don't get it. It would be a useful avenue of study for you to reframe your overall attitude on the inherent virtue of the system you were born (lucked) into.