Homeless Camp In Affluent Neighborhood

[mahagonny]

Two more sources to suggest: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/libertarianism/

Bob Dole, ca 1996: a good day in government is not getting a good thing to happen. It's preventing a bad thing from being done.

ETA: P. J. O'Rourke: America was not created so we could be better. It was created so we could be anything we damn please.

[ciao_yall]

Someone find a country with no functioning government and let me know how well you think it is going over there.

I'll wait.

[marshwiggle]

Someone find a country with no functioning government and let me know how well you think it is going over there.

I'll wait.

You may want to consult the leaders of the CHOP/CHAZ from Seattle last summer, or the ANTIFA spokesperson who told the mayor of Portland that they want to have NO mayors. These aren't right-wing anti-government types; they're left-wing anti-government types. (The wackos at both extremes of the political spectrum look a lot alike.)

[mahagonny]

Someone find a country with no functioning government and let me know how well you think it is going over there.

I'll wait.

North America before the white people ruined it.

[Caracal]

Someone find a country with no functioning government and let me know how well you think it is going over there.

I'll wait.

North America before the white people ruined it.

That's possibly the stupidest most ignorant thing you've said yet. You really don't know what the hell you're talking about, do you?

[smallcleanrat]

Someone find a country with no functioning government and let me know how well you think it is going over there.

I'll wait.

North America before the white people ruined it.

So...you think Native American societies had no form of government? No laws? Complete anarchy?

[Caracal]

Someone find a country with no functioning government and let me know how well you think it is going over there.

I'll wait.

North America before the white people ruined it.

So...you think Native American societies had no form of government? No laws? Complete anarchy?

North America wasn't a political entity or a unified cultural group. It also wasn't static. There were different forms of organization and governments and those evolved. All of this is probably a bit lost on Mahagonny, however.

[smallcleanrat]

This is the sort of thing that makes discussions about stories like Rick Santorum's recent statements so frustrating. Yes, a person stating or implying that pre-colonial Native Americans were savage, unsophisticated, and "uncivilized" is going to draw a lot more criticism these days than it would have in previous generations. Why is that automatically a bad thing?

Santorum likes to attribute this to irrational liberals intolerant of any truth that challenges PC culture. Of course, there are extremists and ideologues who are going to start hollering, but that doesn't mean every criticism is motivated by dogmatism. 

Sometimes what's happening is people pointing out: "Hey, listen...that thing you said is not actually true."

Too many people try to dodge their critics by proclaiming, "Oh, they just don't like it because it's not PC." Saves them the trouble of actually having to defend their statements through argument.

[marshwiggle]

Someone find a country with no functioning government and let me know how well you think it is going over there.

I'll wait.

North America before the white people ruined it.

So...you think Native American societies had no form of government? No laws? Complete anarchy?

North America wasn't a political entity or a unified cultural group. It also wasn't static. There were different forms of organization and governments and those evolved.

However, this does raise an interesting question about which sort of government one of these communities exhibits.

• Does the high degree of interdependence of one of these communities make it roughly socialist or communist in nature?
• Does the very low number of explicit regulations on what individuals can/must do make it roughly libertarian in nature?

It seems that a case could be made in either direction. The reality is that the difference in scale between a community of a few dozen people versus a city (country, etc.) of thousands to millions makes the comparison one of apples to oranges.

[mahagonny]

[

However, this does raise an interesting question about which sort of government one of these communities exhibits.

• Does the high degree of interdependence of one of these communities make it roughly socialist or communist in nature?
• Does the very low number of explicit regulations on what individuals can/must do make it roughly libertarian in nature?

It seems that a case could be made in either direction. The reality is that the difference in scale between a community of a few dozen people versus a city (country, etc.) of thousands to millions makes the comparison one of apples to oranges.

Of course it does. Off the top of my head, a government of centuries ago could be smaller than that found today because the complexities of what government could do weren't yet so evolved. That doesn't mean people thought small government was better, or does it?

What kind of government does Antarctica have? Sparsely populated places can have less government.

It seems to me the concepts the far far left (and we might as well say 'the democratic party' since the radicals are being condoned) have been floating are something you'd expect to find in a religious code of law more often than in a government that is not a religion-state government. For example, 'looting is reparations' could ultimately mean that the same act, stealing, could be deemed legal or illegal depend on one's skin color. That is, a religion may define certain people as 'infidels' or 'the enemy.' As long as we're talking about government and law.
We are already getting race-based farm subsidy, and Biden and Co. are acting like they got an FDR landslide victory mandate instead of having eked out a win.
But this is probably a hijack. Well, no one knows what to do about homelessness and narcotics anyway. Too bad.
The forum gets an "A" for effort.

[Caracal]

Someone find a country with no functioning government and let me know how well you think it is going over there.

I'll wait.

North America before the white people ruined it.

So...you think Native American societies had no form of government? No laws? Complete anarchy?

North America wasn't a political entity or a unified cultural group. It also wasn't static. There were different forms of organization and governments and those evolved.

However, this does raise an interesting question about which sort of government one of these communities exhibits.

• Does the high degree of interdependence of one of these communities make it roughly socialist or communist in nature?
• Does the very low number of explicit regulations on what individuals can/must do make it roughly libertarian in nature?

It seems that a case could be made in either direction. The reality is that the difference in scale between a community of a few dozen people versus a city (country, etc.) of thousands to millions makes the comparison one of apples to oranges.

This is what I mean. By some estimates, 40k people might have lived in Cahokia around 1200. That would make it as big as London at the time. No other North American city had that many people till 1780.

The Iroquois Confederacy didn't have that kind of population, but it was a dominant power controlling a huge area through incredibly complicated internal and external diplomacy

I could go on, but the point is the assumption that Native American people in the United States lived in groups of a "few dozen" is just very wrong.

[mahagonny]

I could go on, but the point is the assumption that Native American people in the United States lived in groups of a "few dozen" is just very wrong.

Just curious.

What was the least densely populated region in  what we now call continental USA of say, between nine and ten thousand square miles (roughly the size of Vermont) circa, OK, let's make it easy for an historian of your caliber, in some period of time between 1600 and 1630, and what type of government did they have? I'm asking about the population we refer to as Native Americans.

Someone find a country with no functioning government and let me know how well you think it is going over there.

I'll wait.

I expect the intended inference was 'there are none.' Sorry if I have deprived the forum of something.

[Caracal]

I could go on, but the point is the assumption that Native American people in the United States lived in groups of a "few dozen" is just very wrong.

Just curious.

What was the least densely populated region in  what we now call continental USA of say, between nine and ten thousand square miles (roughly the size of Vermont) circa, OK, let's make it easy for an historian of your caliber, in some period of time between 1600 and 1630, and what type of government did they have? I'm asking about the population we refer to as Native Americans.

I don't know. I'm not an expert on Native American history, and I'm certainly not a demographer. Probably somewhere that has a very low population now.

Since you're asking about 1600-1630, that actually gets to part of the problem. When people like Ponce De Leon and Verrazano came to areas of what's now the eastern United States in the early 16th century, they reported pretty dense populations. We don't really have a lot of reports between then and 1600, but by the time the first English colonies were being established in North America things looked really different. Those really dense populations had become much sparser. Probably this was about epidemic diseases from Europe. Some estimates are that these diseases could have killed 90 percent of the population. That probably caused huge changes in governments and societies and might have made lots of Native American societies less hierarchical-which doesn't mean less complex.

But that's the point. We're talking about a whole bunch of different groups of people over a long period of time. Imagine if someone just said "In Europe they had really centralized governments before 1700 with large populations." We would immediately recognize that as a hopelessly vague statement without specifying where and when at a minimum.

[mamselle]

I don't know stats, but I know of complex cultural products that didn't come about by happenstance. The narrow date range you've cited is far too small for objective comparison, civilzations lasted in many areas for millenia.

I'll discuss the 3 I know best, omitting the NW, Central Plains, and SE societies. Others may like to chime in on those....

SW: Pueblo communities (and those that preceded them) in several waves. Some final failures were brought on by climate-related disasters (some of those the same that led to crop failures in medieval Europe), others due to attack and defeat by equally complex civilizations that wanted their land, etc.

Their cultural products (and those of other societies in the area) included underground ritual structures, pottery and seriously complex basketweaving patterns, finely-attuned ritual practices linked (further south) to a complex calendrical system we haven't yet completely decoded (so they were smarter then than we are, now).

They (or, probably, their predecessors) aldo did a nice line in petroglyph that show music and dance practices we still can't describe directly, but were probably also tied to ritual observances, which in turn have been taken as indices to complex subdivisions of task-related classes for political and religious organizwtion, farming, fishing, and trade, which now appears to have been even more extensive than previously believed: feather capes and bird/wildlife exchanges just turned up that extend the distances of interaction to many thousand miles south (i.e., Central and South America).

OH Valley/ Lake Erie area, and radiating points south and west: Some links to the lower Mississippi were being suggested awhile ago for the Mound Builders in S. Central Ohio; I'd have to see if that's been updated, but by  18,000 BCE, last I heard, the folks resposible for the large earthworks like Serpent Mound and many other smaller structures in the areas  near Chillicothe, and larger burial sites around Cincinnati (Ft. Ancient, for example) were in the area and creating, not only those structures, but whimsical pottery, like the small pipes and bowls that still turn up in excavations, and a governmental infrastructure that got large-scale, very technically sophisticated (and apparently astronomically alligned), public works projects done.

By the time you're looking at, there were several dentifiable societies (Huron, Wyandotte, Iroquois, and Shawnee among them) living, trading, and fighting in the area. They (and others) were there when Marquette and Joliet arrived, when Gnadenhutten was built, and when Chief Logan signed over land to the incoming English. Their names for things denominate about half of the state's counties and county sears, and many of its rivers, hills, and other landmarks...each group had a strong, functional grammar and an interactive trade language, in part through hand signals, that facilitated peaceful, economically productive encounters.

NE/E. Canada The Algonkians and several related subgroups populated a wide extent of land in what is now both south and north of the US/Canadian border. A splintered patchwork of independent groups inhabited much of the East coast from Maine to what's now CT, although due to higher ocean-reflective heat, and the green and black fly infestations in the summer, several of those groups migrated inland, some as far west as the Berkshires, before returning in the fall.

I've described them recently elsewhere; the Algonquins in the L17th-E18th c. were used by the French to fight for them against the British settlements over the border when the French English conflicts of that era spilled over into their respective N. Am. settlements. (Barrels of knives were captured in the Halifax area at one point, labeled for specific distribution to named First People contacts (Parkman); contracts for kidnapping and ransom deliveries are securely attested in cases like that of Jemima (Howe)Tute and her children in Vernon, VT(MA Hx. Soc. deposition, E 18th c.).

Very few to none f these human exploits in any of the sites I've (very broadly) described are possible without high intelligence, strong social bonds, well-defined civic expectations, and long experience of working, living, fighting, farming, and surviving together.

M.

* All due respect, I  don't mean this as snark, but, I'm truly somewhere between puzzled and incredulous that you'd have to ask....I learned this stuff as a kid, visiting Serpent Mound in the 60s, and taking Ohio History in the 8th grade in the 70s, and when I started research the NE area for tours in the 80s, and when I worked on SW colonial churches for comps in the 90s...and just the odd news article, since....where were you?)

[mahagonny]

I don't know stats, but I know of complex cultural products that didn't come about by happenstance. The narrow date range you've cited is far too small for objective comparison, civilzations lasted in many areas for millenia.

I'll discuss the 3 I know best, omitting the NW, Central Plains, and SE societies. Others may like to chime in on those....

SW: Pueblo communities (and those that preceded them) in several waves. Some final failures were brought on by climate-related disasters (some of those the same that led to crop failures in medieval Europe), others due to attack and defeat by equally complex civilizations that wanted their land, etc.

Their cultural products (and those of other societies in the area) included underground ritual structures, pottery and seriously complex basketweaving patterns, finely-attuned ritual practices linked (further south) to a complex calendrical system we haven't yet completely decoded (so they were smarter then than we are, now).

They (or, probably, their predecessors) aldo did a nice line in petroglyph that show music and dance practices we still can't describe directly, but were probably also tied to ritual observances, which in turn have been taken as indices to complex subdivisions of task-related classes for political and religious organizwtion, farming, fishing, and trade, which now appears to have been even more extensive than previously believed: feather capes and bird/wildlife exchanges just turned up that extend the distances of interaction to many thousand miles south (i.e., Central and South America).

OH Valley/ Lake Erie area, and radiating points south and west: Some links to the lower Mississippi were being suggested awhile ago for the Mound Builders in S. Central Ohio; I'd have to see if that's been updated, but by  18,000 BCE, last I heard, the folks resposible for the large earthworks like Serpent Mound and many other smaller structures in the areas  near Chillicothe, and larger burial sites around Cincinnati (Ft. Ancient, for example) were in the area and creating, not only those structures, but whimsical pottery, like the small pipes and bowls that still turn up in excavations, and a governmental infrastructure that got large-scale, very technically sophisticated (and apparently astronomically alligned), public works projects done.

By the time you're looking at, there were several dentifiable societies (Huron, Wyandotte, Iroquois, and Shawnee among them) living, trading, and fighting in the area. They (and others) were there when Marquette and Joliet arrived, when Gnadenhutten was built, and when Chief Logan signed over land to the incoming English. Their names for things denominate about half of the state's counties and county sears, and many of its rivers, hills, and other landmarks...each group had a strong, functional grammar and an interactive trade language, in part through hand signals, that facilitated peaceful, economically productive encounters.

NE/E. Canada The Algonkians and several related subgroups populated a wide extent of land in what is now both south and north of the US/Canadian border. A splintered patchwork of independent groups inhabited much of the East coast from Maine to what's now CT, although due to higher ocean-reflective heat, and the green and black fly infestations in the summer, several of those groups migrated inland, some as far west as the Berkshires, before returning in the fall.

I've described them recently elsewhere; the Algonquins in the L17th-E18th c. were used by the French to fight for them against the British settlements over the border when the French English conflicts of that era spilled over into their respective N. Am. settlements. (Barrels of knives were captured in the Halifax area at one point, labeled for specific distribution to named First People contacts (Parkman); contracts for kidnapping and ransom deliveries are securely attested in cases like that of Jemima (Howe)Tute and her children in Vernon, VT(MA Hx. Soc. deposition, E 18th c.).

Very few to none f these human exploits in any of the sites I've (very broadly) described are possible without high intelligence, strong social bonds, well-defined civic expectations, and long experience of working, living, fighting, farming, and surviving together.

M.

* All due respect, I  don't mean this as snark, but, I'm truly somewhere between puzzled and incredulous that you'd have to ask....I learned this stuff as a kid, visiting Serpent Mound in the 60s, and taking Ohio History in the 8th grade in the 70s, and when I started research the NE area for tours in the 80s, and when I worked on SW colonial churches for comps in the 90s...and just the odd news article, since....where were you?)

Uh...I'm just trying to remember. Oh yeah, reform school.
I scored 100 on the state administered final exam for Algebra, ninth grade, and now I can't remember any of it. Just imagine it.
And BTW I didn't ask for most the stuff you posted, though if you're welling up with pride now I'm happy for you.