Thanks for Not Yet

[l33tminion]

Went home with Julie and Erica for Thanksgiving. Quick trip this time, but was great to see the family. Melissa's family was in town, too.

This year I am thankful that of all the terrors at humanity's doorstep, some of them have been put off so far, and some could continue to.

Best reading from this weekend is Noah Smith's post No, You Are Not on Indigenous Land, a really cogent takedown of (including nominally-"decolonial") ethnonatialism.

The latest political news is Joe Biden's blanket pardon of his son, Hunter Biden. It is sad that we have come to this, and despicable that Biden is reneging on his promises. Unlike Charles Kushner, the father of Trump's son-in-law who he pardoned for witness tampering and then nominated for an ambassadorship, Hunter Biden surely wouldn't have been prosecuted but for his association with the President in question. But say, maybe Biden should just go ahead and pardon the January 6 criminals himself at this point. Surely they are more worthy: After all, not only their prosecutions but also their crimes would not have happened but for Trump.

Comments

[kihou]

I dunno, I don't really think that post is where it's at. It's absurd to frame land acknowledgments as equivalent to a call for ethnic cleansing, or to ignore the differences between colonization and previous territorial changes among indigenous groups. And it feels like the same logic in that post against "decolonization" would suggest that ending apartheid in South Africa or the creation of Nunavut would have required massacring or expelling all white people. And then it circles around by saying giving additional land to tribal governments might be a good thing, so it feels like it's just creating a strawman of the landback movement and but not actually particularly disagreeing with it? I'm not aware of any actual USA decolonization or landback organization that has a stated position of expelling or subjugating white people, and plenty have explicitly addressed this (e.g. https://www.hcn.org/issues/54-9/indigenous-affairs-social-justice-questions-about-the-landback-movement-answered/ or https://zen-catgirl.medium.com/is-decolonization-genocide-lets-see-de91184cb8af). And I don't think assuming a free Palestine would inherently be an ethnonationalist state is reasonable either. Conflating landback and decolonization with ethnonationalism seems highly problematic.