"Primitive populations who hadn't improved the land of course lost that land to advanced civilization."
https://x.com/nxt888/status/2042525637752295802
"Primitive populations who hadn't improved the land of course lost that land to advanced civilization."
Of course.
Let's be precise about what you're saying here, Joe.
You're saying that the right to land is determined by the technological and economic development of the people living on it.
If a more "advanced" civilization arrives and wants it, the prior inhabitants have no legitimate claim.
This is the Doctrine of Terra Nullius. It was the legal fiction used by British colonizers in Australia to declare the continent empty and ownerless despite millions of Aboriginal people living on it for fifty thousand years.
It was deployed across Africa, the Americas, and Asia to justify the seizure of land that had been continuously inhabited, farmed, governed, and fought over for millennia.
It has been repudiated by international law. It has been repudiated by virtually every serious legal and ethical framework developed since decolonization. Colonial courts eventually found it too embarrassing to maintain.
You told me I was being moronic.
While reaching for an argument that European colonial administrators invented in the seventeenth century to make theft sound like progress.
You're also, without realizing it, making the argument that China, with a larger economy, larger population, and arguably more efficient land development per capita in certain metrics, has a legitimate territorial claim on parts of the United States if it can put the land to better use.
I assume you don't believe that.
Which means you don't actually hold the principle.
You hold the conclusion. You find the principle afterward. You discard it the moment it points somewhere you don't want to go.
You told me to use logic.
What you just used has a name. It has a history. That history is not a defense. It is an indictment.
And it is exactly the structure I described at the beginning of this conversation.
You didn't refute it, Joe.
You walked me through it room by room.
posted by Satish Sharma at
17:26
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