Comment by ninjagoo
16 hours ago
It's an interesting piece. Makes one think about all those folks that have a lot of pride and vanity for a place that they had no control over being born in. The luck of the draw.
And very likely had very little to do with the current state of the place. Pride at age 21? Meaningless vanity, like being proud of being born with a silver spoon. Pride at age 80? Sure, if it was a life well-lived.
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Such anger and contempt, for no good reason. If we're going to be calling names, I think the "twelve-year-old" moniker fits your attitude better.
> This is a core tenet of the Rawlsian religion, of which you are a (probably unwitting) fanatic.
Ouch. How warped does one's thinking have to be to call "A theory of justice" (1971) for pluralistic, democratic societies, a "religion"?
It seems to me that right-wingers love hyperbole and rhetoric, without addressing the meat of the matter.
Your post is no different, being entirely free of reason. A good day to you, Sir.
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.. what?
There's no luck involved in the fact that you were born to your parents, as they were to theirs. It is right to be proud of the achievements of your ancestors who have, over countless generations, toiled and strived to deliver the place that we were so fortunate to inherit from them. It reminds us of our responsibility to defend and improve that place for the coming generations of our people.
Are you claiming to have controlled where and to whom you were born?
You did not choose your parents, country, ancestry, class, era, genes, language, or inherited institutions. You may be inseparable from those facts, but you did not earn them.
These two statements appear to be contradictory.
And what was your contribution to those achievements to justify this pride?
You have to be careful to not fall into the trap of borrowed glory: treating an ancestor’s achievement as your own personal merit, or using ancestry to rank yourself above others.
Are you implying that the place belongs more fully to descendants of earlier inhabitants than to newer members of the community?
So then Native Americans have a stronger claim than European descendants? Or is that a standard to only be applied moving forward?
That's also like the caste system in India: only children of brahmins can be brahmins, children of shudras can only be shudras. One is superior to another by inheritance, not merit.
That's ugly and abhorrent.
Are you then also ashamed of their crimes?
>Are you claiming to have controlled where and to whom you were born?
My parents did. Their parents did. My children will.
>you did not earn them
My parents did. Their parents did. My children will.
Everything I have today has been hard-earned by my ancestors. Everything my children have will be hard-earned by my ancestors and I. We earned them.
>These two statements appear to be contradictory
Only if you believe such things to be due to purely random chance. I can feel 'fortunate' that my parents got me the bike I really wanted for Christmas, but there's no randomness in my parents working overtime and budgeting responsibly that made it possible.
>And what was your contribution to those achievements to justify this pride?
I am a part of the same collective, the long and continued story of my people. I am proud of those who came before me.
>You have to be careful to not fall into the trap of borrowed glory
You have to be careful not to fall into the trap of nihilistic individualism. You are part of something much bigger than yourself. Be suspicious of anyone trying to sever your connection to your people and your history.
>Are you implying that the place belongs more fully to descendants of earlier inhabitants than to newer members of the community?
That makes sense, yes. To your example, I would say that Native Americans have very little claim to the modern USA as practically everything was built by Europeans. They failed to defend their lands and were successfully conquered. In the same way, it would be absurd in my view for the majority non-White population of London (almost all of whom are very recent colonisers) to gaze around at the infrastructure and architecture and think "We made this."
>Are you then also ashamed of their crimes?
Sure, but not nearly as ashamed as our enemies would like us to be. Isn't it funny how we are supposed to recoil in shame and horror with the constant reminders of the worst parts of our people's history, yet we are condemned for also proudly owning our best?
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I think that kind of pride is pointless and unproductive.
I think it is right to be grateful to your ancestors for their achievements in ultimately giving you the life that you have.
But proud? Hubris lies down that path.
Re: luck, yes, it is absolutely luck that you were born to the parents you were born to, located in the place you were born in. I think you have the sense of the luck direction flipped from what GP meant. If you look at it from the perspective of your ancestors, then sure, your birth wasn't luck: it was a choice (or an accident, I suppose).
But from the perspective of you, it's luck: you didn't get to choose the circumstances surrounding your birth. You got lucky in that sense; you could have instead had bad luck and been born on the streets in a third-world country to a drug-addicted single parent with no money and no prospects.
>you could have instead had bad luck and been born on the streets in a third-world country to a drug-addicted single parent with no money and no prospects
No I couldn't, it's totally impossible for the embryo formed by my mother and father to have teleported into the womb of a junkie on the other side of the world. I was always and only going to be born to my parents.
I do agree that it feels like we're arguing different things, as I know you know this. And I am very suspicious of people who argue the "luck" angle here as it is usually an attempt to erase my entire history and assert that some random "unlucky" starving Ethiopian has just as much right to be in my shoes instead. When zoomed out, this can clearly be weaponised as a justification for mass migration.