one of my favorite things online is every now and then there's a person in a server that I'm vaguely familiar with tho we're not really friends and their username is like GamerJoe or something and then one day out of the blue I see they've changed it to GamerRose and I'm just like
Just changed my url 💖
EWAN MCGREGOR as OBI-WAN KENOBI STAR WARS: EPISODE III - REVENGE OF THE SITH (2005)
“My sauce is da boss!!” - Remy
It's wild how much of the language of the original Indian Act directly mirrors Kant's description of Enlightenment (i.e., the need to "liberate" indigenous people from their "self-imposed tutelage").
It's usually pretty difficult to draw direct lines of causality or influence between political theories and political policies, but Enlightenment philosophy really was just straight up used to justify colonialism -- if it didn't directly lead to it.
can you elaborate more on this?
@anarchblr Sure!
So, to start, the Indian Act (for those unaware) is a piece of federal legislation in Canada, appended to the Constitution Act of 1867 (which made Canada it’s own sovereign nation no longer directly ruled by the British monarchy, though still part of the British Commonwealth) which was itself a continuation of the British North America Act, essentially codifying into law a set of colonial policies governing the relationship between the Canadian government and indigenous peoples in Canada. The Indian Act was meant to gather together, unify, and in some cases supersede the various treaties made between indigenous peoples and the British Crown and settlers, but it also had the effect of imposing a certain legal relationship between the Canadian government and the many indigenous peoples who had never signed a treaty with any colonial power. While supposedly being for the benefit of indigenous people -- outlining the “rights” and privileges granted to indigenous peoples by the Canadian state -- the Act is, unsurprisingly, primarily a mechanism of colonization with the aim of eliminating/assimilating indigenous peoples, cultures, and traditional modes of governance. It has historically regulated things like: indigenous people’s ability to practice their culture; governance structures on reserve land; whether or not indigenous people were allowed to own or sell property; making possession of alcohol by indigenous people a crime; making frequenting pool halls and other social establishments a crime for indigenous people; who indigenous people could marry while retaining their status as indigenous; and the idea of indigenous “status“ in the first place. There have been several amendments to the Indian Act to try to make it more “fair” and less oppressive (the last one being added in 1985), but it is still primarily used to colonize, regulate, govern, and dispossess indigenous people of their land and culture.
The interesting thing in relation to Kant and the Enlightenment is the way that the Act is framed. In it’s original formulation (which still forms the basis for the Act itself, as per British common law), the Indian Act is presented as being about governing indigenous peoples for their own good and improvement -- the idea being that indigenous people are too “savage” or backward to govern themselves or know what’s best for their own communities. In this way, the Act is a piece of assimilationist colonialism: it attempts to assimilate indigenous people to settler norms and culture.
We can see this perhaps most egregiously in the following passage from the original Indian Act of 1876: “Our Indian legislation generally rests on the principle, that the aborigines are to be kept in a condition of tutelage and treated as wards or children of the State... [T]he true interests of the aborigines and of the State alike require that every effort should be made to aid the Red man in lifting himself out of his condition of tutelage and dependence, and that is clearly our wisdom and our duty, through education and every other means, to prepare him for a higher civilization by encouraging him to assume the privileges and responsibilities of full citizenship”
What’s interesting here for our purposes is the language of “tutelage” and the idea that it is the colonialist’s responsibility to help indigenous people “lift themselves out of their condition of tutelage and dependence” (which also echoes the later idea of the “white man’s burden” as a justification for colonialism). The use of this particular language is interesting because it mirrors Kant’s definition of Enlightenment almost exactly.
From Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenment?” wherein he tries to answer the question by providing a definition: “Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. For any single individual to work himself out of the life under tutelage which has become almost his nature is very difficult. He has come to be fond of this state, and he is for the present really incapable of making use of his reason, for no one has ever let him try it out. For this enlightenment, however, nothing is required but freedom, and indeed the most harmless among all the things to which this term can properly be applied.” (Tutelage is sometimes here translated as immaturity or nonage, but it retains the same meaning: immaturity, tutelage, nonage, etc. is a condition in which one is not intellectually capable or mature enough to guide oneself, but are instead reliant on the guidance of others: priests, teachers, government, etc.).
Kant’s vision of Enlightenment is optimistic: he is, in fact, arguing here against state or government regulation of people’s ability to exercise their capacity for reason freely. He thinks that Enlightenment occurs when people are allowed to do so, which, in his time, was being prevented by the governments of Europe, which all exercised a fairly high level of censorship.
However, Kant is also somewhat pessimistic about the possibility of Enlightenment, insofar as he thinks that most people do not possess the courage or conviction to freely exercise their capacity for reasoned thought, and so remain in a state of “self-imposed tutelage”. Moreover, if we look to Kant’s anthropology, it becomes clear that he largely bases his distinction between people who are/are not willing or able to exercise their use of reason on racial typologies that were starting to emerge from the new racial sciences of his day, all of which framed non-white, non-Europeans as not being at a sufficient level of cultural or intellectual development to actually engage in reasoned thought (and therefore, unable to become Enlightened). Essentially, non-white, non-Europeans were viewed as immature children in need of tutelage and direction, to raise them to the level of European society, so that they could partake in the project of Enlightenment.
And so it’s interesting that the fundamental piece of legislation governing relations between indigenous people and the state in Canada basically says the exact same thing, using the very same language as Kant. Colonialism is just an extension of the project of Enlightenment (or, at least, it operates under that guise in order to justify primitive accumulation, resource extraction, dispossession, and genocide).
i love that halo can die from the broken steam pipes at the start of the first game... uh oh earth is really in trouble now, halo went out broccoli style
"strap cant get someone pregnant" clearly your will doesn't match your conviction. persevere
maybe if we torture this kid harder our lives will get even more awesome
Stellaluna by Janell Cannon
I think the only way to save those "booktok romance" girlies is to re-educate them into fujoshis. That way they can still get off to horrific domestic abuse but now those awful men are doing it to each other and leaving women out of it #feminism
perhaps I have been too harsh on this man
ultimately what "the left" in the imperial core actually needs to accept is that there is nothing inherently wrong with feeling discomfort when recognizing any form of privilege you may have and no one should have to water down their arguments to nothing for the sole purpose of not hurting feelings. the right never made you feel "welcomed", right wingers cannibalize each other constantly, they don't even want to fucking date each other because they're that miserable in conservative circles, what happened is you saw benefit in reactionary ideals that managed to outweigh the downsides. this doesn't mean you can't grow and change as a person but it does mean exercising cognitive empathy where you never did before!
Yeah that tracks
An important read, I think, to start really thinking about aesthetics vs practicality in politics
Assorted excerpts, semi out of context
a handful of my own summary thoughts:
This author / journo is relatively unusual in that he is an environmentalist who is also a techno optimist, or a futurist, rather than the much more common Retvrn To TradLife sort of environmentalist.
He does have a book, Regenesis, which is pretty widely hated among a lot of "sustainable local farming" enviro-types for this specific reason:
So the question – one of the key questions of our time – is how we can feed a population likely to rise to 9 or 10 billion by the middle of the century before starting to decline, reliably, equitably and at a much lower environmental cost. In other words, how we might feed the world without devouring the planet [...] There are, as I found, plenty of possible ways forward. But there are no ways backward. If we were to seek to restore the agricultural systems of, say, 60 or 70 years ago, a time, remember, when many people were deeply pessimistic about human nutrition and expected global starvation as the population rose, their grim predictions would materialise. Why? Because productivity was much lower than it is today. In 2023, a world of 8.1 billion people suffers far less hunger and famine than the world of 3.2 billion did in 1963, the year of my birth. Let’s pause to consider this for a moment, because it is one of the most remarkable (and, bizarrely, least celebrated) transformations of our time.
huh.
data up until 2016; it might've gotten worse since then
huh!
It is the great indulgence of those who never miss a meal to celebrate the times and modes in which people missed plenty.
