Even a cursory glance at the legal code should convince you that "free speech" is a convenient fantasy mostly used to hoodwink liberals into supporting the KKK. Why not call it a "speech" issue?
Isn't this a wittgensteinian problem? ie how you interpret language is inherently subjective. But regardless of what language you use, or how you intend to bind the terms to reality semantically, apriori truth is still apriori truth. It's the only basis of objective "truth" we have access to. Throwing that out the window feels like tossing the baby out with the bath water.
Imo, this just comes down to the fact that most people would consider "standard" to be a floating signifier. I don't think the idea that mathematical concepts changing definitions when you change axioms is at all controversial in itself.
Back? This country was built on taking and retaining land with violence. We just call it "property" now and act like everyone thinks this is fine. we now refer to human sacrifices as "essential workers" and "terrorists". Same fundamental dynamic tho—we just replaced the gods with the economy; but either way, people gotta die to keep it running.
Which country? I think you'll find that the Americas and the "New World" consist of dozens of nations, and the confluence of several empires and other overseas powers which sent people here, in the capacity of explorers, evangelists, colonists, traders, you name it.
And let us not discount the possibility that land in the Americas was the site of violence before 1492. Perhaps underpopulation kept that violent contention to a minimum, but surely, Indigeneous peoples learned warfare from practicing it on one another, whether in the Polynesian islands, AUS/NZ, China, or the Americas.
And, White people have used more varied means other than violence in order to get around. Indeed, there has been intermarriage, and economic trade, and all sorts of peaceful, in fact quite agreeable means, of intermingling our culture with the indigeneous ones. It was the same with the Norsemen, the Vikings, the Slavs, and Celts, just to name a few: sure, there was conquest. There was violence and raping and pillaging. But there was also intermarriage and trade routes and merchants who picked up quite willing spouses. It went in both directions.
Let's not attribute to violence what has also been achieved by diplomacy and peaceful means.
Well, sure. But it sure as hell aint't diplomacy and peace that built this society we live in now. Or at least, not a good sort of peace. That's especially true for the US and Canada. What went on before europeans made an appearance doesn't change this observation. I'll leave defending that to the people whose world we destroyed.
And yet, our borders have been peaceful for the most part, as really no foreign army has invaded the United States in a long, long time. There have been two World Wars in Europe, yet our interior has remained sacrosanct for longer than that.
And the United States has established embassies and consulates all over the world. We're founding members of the U.N.; we're on the Security Council. We send humanitarian missions all over the place. Surely you cannot argue, with a straight face, that "peace and diplomacy" have not built the society we enjoy today?
Peace and diplomacy are not in a vacuum for us, certainly -- there have been wars; there has been espionage; there have been terrorist attacks. But peace and diplomacy are the primary way, and a more excellent way, and they are avenues that will always be explored and exhausted before violence takes over.
The USA has also successfully completed multiple full on genocides rivaling Nazis with their eugenics and "purity" ideals.... You act like all these good Americans blessings came from the upstanding moral character of Americans and not from overwhelming brutality and violence to steal it or have slaves build it. To this very day with prison work and minimum wage indertured servants.
> the possibility that land in the Americas was the site of violence before 1492
It's a certainty. The tribes were well armed for good reason. The Inca had an army before Pizzaro arrived. Cortez allied with neighboring tribes to go after the Aztecs, as those tribes very much wanted to destroy the Aztecs for their depradations. The warrior culture in N America was very well developed. The Commanche carved out their own empire in the Texas area before the Spanish arrived. They did not learn how to fight from the Spanish, it was the other way around.
Well we have plenty of records of people who did pay attention. (American?) Society as a whole isn't very good at focusing on what will care about in the future.
Anyway, it's not easy to turn oral history into speculation about the literal past. There's a reason such work focuses so much on geology! It's likely oral traditions encode a lot more literal history than we realize, but the ability to verify or interpret this as "history" in the western sense of "historiography" may be fundamentally impossible for large swathes of it.
Western disbelief in the veracity of oral traditions isn't confined to cultures outside the West. It's as strongly antagonistic, if not more so, to Western traditions. If it's not written down, it didn't happen; and if it contradicts even one scrap of written literature, it absolutely couldn't have happened, no matter how overwhelming the non-written corpus of evidence. Heck, Europe birthed an entire religion, Protestantism, predicted on "sola scriptura".
OTOH, this insistence on verifiable data that can be easily shared and critiqued undergirds much technological progress. If the price to be paid in its excesses is the loss of historical knowledge, perhaps it's been worth it.
I mean you could, but we're inherently dependent on each other. I'm not sure I see the value of building a society around personal liberty. It wouldn't make much of a society, would it?
I'm quite the introvert. I just am flummoxed why you would build around something so much less substantial than equitable distribution of resources, which necessarily implies our bothering each other to enforce.
If you want to be left alone above all else, you can always turn into ted kaczynski.
But reaping the benefits of society comes with costs. one of them is accepting annoying neighbors and other social contracts that might not specifically cater to your desires.
"No, Radio on the Internet."