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by ijpsud 2269 days ago
You're right that my tone wasn't great. I was surprised by your confidence coupled with what seems like complete ignorance of the severity of the treatment of native peoples during the colonization of the islands in Indonesia and elsewhere.

> blood feuds

Again, no one is arguing for that. We're trying to create policies which incentivize good behavior and disincentivize bad behavior in the world, in the long term. The straw person that you're fighting there has been defeated, but this has not (from my above comment):

> They're making the very reasonable claim that one group of people oppressed another and that this put the oppressed people at a significant disadvantage relative to those who benefited from the oppression, and thus that resources should be redistributed to balance that - a policy that makes perfect sense in terms of economic incentives.

1 comments

The treatment of the native peoples is a subject I am very familiar with, far more than I'd like to. I have to count a murderer and torturer in my family because of this history. However, and perhaps I didn't make that clear, I was trying to respond to something else, GPs first line:

> Forcing colonialist countries to return their ill-gotten wealth is nothing but justice.

Even though I am a firm believer that we are not nearly doing enouhhto equalize wealth in general, that statement seems to be to be all about some sort of blood debt. That I cannot agree with, which I have tried to make clear.

The matter of these particular victims is in my view another one, and I wish the compensation would have come decades sooner (and any other victims that have died by now), and had been compensated much better, by trials preferably.

But that is a far cry from what I understood the GP meant with his or her post, in particular the first line.