Opossums are lovers, not fighters

Do American kids actually recite an oath to their country EVERY DAY? I keep hearing about that everywhere but it kinds of blows my mind to much for me to accept it as fact.

For context, I went to elementary school in China before I came to Canada, and in both countries the most we've done is sing the national anthem during assemblies.

Phones. I haven't been excited about a phone launch in literally years and I really think they're getting worse by the year. Whenever I have to buy a new phone, I feel frustrated and angry because it's never because I wanted to upgrade to the latest model or anything, it's because my previous phone's glued in battery has degraded so much that it's unusable while the rest of hardware is still perfectly capable of running the latest software (or they arbitrarily decide to ban your device from the latest update meaning you either get a new one or expose yourself to even more cybersecurity risks than having a phone already entails).

There's no meaning to life. We are an accidental self sustaining chemical reaction that has lasted for billions of years. There's no creator, no higher power, nothing waiting for us when we die.

We're also about to go extinct and are way past the window of being able to save ourselves. You and I are among the last humans that will ever exist.

And IMO that's extremely comforting once you actually internalize it. Focus on making you and the people around you happy in the short time you're here, don't worry about the far future because it doesn't matter.

Human CELLS. Not human body.

There are human cells in the lab that have long outlived the person they came from. Look up Henrietta Lacks. That doesn't mean you as a whole will live longer.

The replacement of human workers begins with bipartisan support.

How the country should be run, including what kinds of people are on the chopping block.

There's a communist party of Israel? Are they actually communist?

IMO, simple fact that the majority of drunk drivers survive accidents that kill their victim instantly shows that no higher power is looking out to punish the wicked or protect the innocent.

Walk

The aggressor, in the process of atoning for their atrocities, doesn't really have a right to say that the recourse proposed by the victim is unreasonable.

We are the colonial aggressors, Indigenous people are the colonized victims. I'm obviously not saying that eye for an eye doing the same to us as we did to Indigenous people is justified, but simply returning the land we stole is more than reasonable. And the logical extreme of returning stolen land is that if the rightful owners then wanted you to leave, you should.

Let's say a man and a woman live in the same house, and the man hits the woman. If the man is truly seeking to atone for his crime, and the woman tells him to move out because even seeing his face is traumatic for her, would it be reasonable for the man to complain that he has nowhere else to go? To ask the woman where she thinks he should go? To try and guilt the woman into letting him stay? If he does any of those, is he truly sorry for what he did?

You're right that most Indigenous people don't want mass expulsion. We should be incredibly grateful for that and it's a testament of their compassion and desire for equality among all people, even after all we did to them. What we shouldn't do is tell them that they can't tell us to leave or that we'd refuse to leave because we have a rightful claim to this land. Doing so is completely unproductive and will only serve to make us less deserving of staying.

I can confidently say that I, an North American with European decent, also have no interest in “waging a multi-generational genocide”; why must I be punished for it, then? Nobody gets to choose their ancestry.

The goal is not to punish anyone, nor is the goal to kick everyone out. The only goal of decolonization is to give back control of the land which was forcibly taken. Like Cowbee said, you give them the reigns, and then you let go. The logical extreme of this is that if they wanted everyone to leave, they could in theory, but that's only a logical extreme and it doesn't mean it will definitely happen. The majority of Indigenous groups make it pretty clear that's not what they want out of decolonization.

Indigenous peoples are not interested in punishing you. Most aren't even interested in having you go anywhere. They're reasonable people with empathy and compassion. The notion that you were born here not by choice is not lost on them.

I think this thread is focusing way too much on the notion that Indigenous people could force you out of their land and many people are under the assumption that they will definitely treat you worse than the current government treats you for not being Indigenous. But honestly, the way the current government treats even non-Indigenous people is absolute shit and getting worse by the day, so there's no reason not to think our lives would be better under Indigenous sovereignty.

I recommend the book The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save our Earth if you're interested in what decolonization looks like from the perspective of Indigenous people. They certainly don't solely think about benefiting themselves.

Ironically Uranium by itself isn't actually that harmful compared to some of the other stuff on the periodic table. You can hold uranium metal in your hand for short periods of time without too much risk, there's other stuff that will actually kill everyone within 10+ meters of it.

At what scale? I'd say it's definitely closer to colonialism than it is to Indigenous wars. No doubt some Indigenous groups were capable of immense cruelty to those around them, but a continent wide ethnic cleansing is something utterly incomprehensible to even the most expansionist Indigenous groups.

Colonialism developed logistics, beauracy, and governing bodies specifically for genocide, which happened over generations. The people in charge of perpetuating it didn't even know all the people they killed, the concept of those people alone were enough to condemn them. By contrast, even the largest scale Indigenous wars had the combatants reasonably familiar with those they were fighting.

The thing that gets me is that even if we catch sight of what is indisputably signs of intelligent life from another planet, due to the magnitude of the universe and the comparatively slow speed of light, what we're seeing is thousands or millions of years in the past. Even if we get a transmission from an alien species, they're likely long extinct by the time we receive it, let alone the time it will take for a reply to get back to them.

Same for us too. Any life that can see us will not be from our time, they will be eons in the future by which our species will be long gone.

As if indegenous societies never fought wars and claimed land between eachother.

Not at the scale colonialism has, no. Skirmishes and even conquest between individual tribes is fundamentally different from the systematic genocide of an entire continent's population.

The human population is the highest it's ever been and is only increasing, yet the average person has never felt more alone.

Not having to use JS is below all of those.

I hate how that's the language everything is slowly converging to. Even if you don't work on websites, you always have this fear in the back of your mind that one day your project will be infected.

It's not even easy like people claim it is. I find JS significantly more difficult than Java because there are way more things that can go wrong and troubleshooting is way more frustrating. Just because the app will launch even with errors in the code does not make it easier in the long run. Compile time errors are good actually.

I'm not saying it's okay or not okay to treat you like anything. I certainly don't want you to be treated badly. I'm saying it's not my place to say what Indigenous people want out of decolonization.

I admit I was being snarky in a lot of my replies because I was ticked off by your comments. You mentioned deportation and jail and I just said "yeah those are possibilities." Reading it back I can see how I should have put more nuance into this.

I should definitely have stressed this in my previous responses, but Indigenous people are naturally extremely diverse and there is no single agreed upon narrative of what decolonization will entail. There will be some Indigenous groups that only want to be left alone on their land, but there will be others that don't have a problem with anyone living on their land. You can see some of this diversity in the different Indigenous groups' views on immigration, but those views are likely different from the views they will adopt after decolonization. The notion that all the Indigenous groups will either unanimously let you stay or tell you to leave is not the correct way to think about it.

Also, Indigenous territories overlap and Indigenous people generally have more nuanced ideas of "territory" and "ownership" compared to European cultures and their strict borders for property and sovereignty. Go to native-land.ca and see for yourself. Indigenous peoples tend to focus more on mutual agreements and understanding between neighbors as to who uses what resources, agreements which are fluid and based on the needs of the people living there, as opposed to drawing lines on a map. Concepts like citizenship and deportation are based on the European framework of sovereignty, not Indigenous ones.

As to what all this entails for the settlers living here? I can't say. Everything in North America is built around colonialism and we settlers can't really imagine what it will be like for all of that to be removed with any degree of accuracy. But I highly doubt there will be large scale forced expulsions. I'd say it's more likely that the notions of property and land titles dissolve in favour of a more nuanced and community oriented approach to where people live. We will have to adopt this paradigm if we want to continue living here.

Tbh if you're ever told to leave, this kind of mentality will probably be why.

Every Indigenous person I've ever met has been super nice and welcoming. They're not out for revenge like you seem to think they are. I obviously can't and shouldn't speak on their behalf, but just from my limited experience talking to Indigenous people where I live, they're perfectly willing to work with the people living here, Indigenous or not. Indigenous peoples have also been some of the first groups to advocate for the government to accept refugees, using the fact that it's their land as an argument for people from elsewhere to live here. Your strawman notion of the racist, exclusionary Indigenous person who seeks to do to white people what they did to them is just that, a strawman.

You're also working under the assumption that they will treat you worse than the current government treats you. News flash, even with white privilege, you're currently being treated like you don't have a right to the land. How much is your landlord charging you to live here? Do you have a right to a home under the current laws? No you don't. If you lose all your money, you will become homeless, and plenty of jurisdictions outright criminalize homelessness and will throw you in jail because of it.