Remiel

I certainly believe that the Gripen would be better than the F-35 in the Arctic, where we need our planes the most. Whether they would be better than the other two choices I am not sure, but once we were confident the F-35 is not a foregone conclusion that wuld be an easier question to deal with.

There was a news story I read earlier today about Russia testing our Arctic borders more and more with bombers. We need long range interceptors more than the F-35s boosters have been trying to tell us.

It is a generalization. I did not control for desert wastelands (both hot and cold varieties) either. Besides, mountains have minerals at least.

Perhaps it is time for Israel to retake Gaza. The ongoing instability in the Middle East might even provide the most convenient cover they could hope for: that they cannot risk it spilling over into that lawless area. And that in turn might provide a good cover to deal with the price taggers: that they must confront instability across the board or not at all. I also wish people would stop referring to all three of them as "children" : these matters are deadly serious and not the time to be playing games with language. One was an adult.

kimmy interpreted my last comment more or less correctly: if all the people on Earth were spread out equally amongst its lands then an area of 1750 square km would be home to 87,500 people, give or take a few thousand.

Do you not ever get tired of baiting? Try Tanburi Buyuk Osman Bey, an Ottoman composer. Hammamizade Ismail Dede Efendi is another. Buhurizade Mustafa Itri might be the top classical Ottoman-Turkish composer. Good or important enough for UNESCO to recognize him in 2012. Try YouTube.

I do not know the dollar value of 1750 square kilometres (it was not square miles), but I do know the people value: 87500 . Meanwhile, if I round up generously there are around 5000 Tsilhqot'in.

People like to argue based on what "comes naturally" a lot but the question here is what "comes not, unnaturally" .

I just went on the Six Nations of the Grand River website and tried to right click to open a link in a new tab and it told me that that functions had been disabled on their website. So I got the Hell out of there. I do not trust websites that have weird messages like that.

What exactly about a world that was different is worth considering? That virtually everyone alive today would never have been born? Am I supposed to wax poetic about an alternate history in which sixteen million lived so that over 7 billion could cease to exist?

The problem is not indigenous rights per se, it is governing authority and foresight. We do not have the leisure of making a temporary "fix" to smooth things over in the present: to do this right the solution must also produce a relationship that could be palatable 50, 100, or 200 years from now, when indigenous poverty is no longer out of control. If we just accept indigenous arguments about sovereignty, suddenly we might find ourselves in a situation where hundreds of thousands or millions of people live in "indigenous lands" and are subject to a political authority that has absolutely zero responsibility to them even in theory; where they are second class citizens at best, even on paper. All other things being equal, a tyranny of the majority will always be superior to a tyranny of the minority.

Hmmm... http://globalnews.ca/news/1416321/city-of-vancouver-formally-declares-city-is-on-unceded-aborginal-territory/

How is it meaningless to suggest that had things gone differently no one who was born would have been? The question of whether it is good or bad too have been born is not only not meaningless, it is a question that should be answered before any other arguments about "What should be done now?" can be made.

This article is hands down the best explanation you will find of ISIS successes and failures so far in Iraq: http://pando.com/2014/06/23/the-war-nerd-like-it-or-not-whats-happening-in-iraq-right-now-is-part-of-a-rational-process/ . The guys alias, "The War Nerd" is not an idle boast.

There were some interesting thoughts on the importance of history to everyone here today that might be relevant to this discussion here in this article: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2014/05/slavery-reparations . After this point in the article he actually goes back and reexamines some of this in light of his other intuitions, but I would actual venture some of those intuitions are just wrong and that this here stands well on its own as an explanation on the importance of history.

You know, there is one Jewish group that might make for an interesting comparison: Israeli ultra-Orthodox. Not diaspora ultra-Orthodox, because they do not have any sort of special status in other countries. But in Israel the ultra-Orthodox have special provisions for education and such, and doggedly insist that they have some sort of special knowledge or power derived from their lifestyle. Everyone who is not ultra-Orthodox can see that it has worked out so well for them and Israel. Not.

The thing is though, I do not really hear about the this phenomenon concerning the descendants of Nazi concentration camp survivors. They have emotional baggage too, sure, but it has not crippled them by any means.

I think I have mentioned before that at the time of the Royal Proclamation the Whigs were in power and quite possibly were the ones to draft it, which makes it kind of an even more bizarre dynamic.

Like serfdom.

I think you would find many indigenous Canadians believe that we cannot get rid of the Crown without their consent. I find that completely preposterous for all the reasons its was really crappy of the Canadian government to force foreign governmental systems upon the bands. But the view is out there.

The way I have heard it said is that the courts have given leeway before to the notion that FN did not think they were giving away what they did from a straightforward reading (to us) of the treaties. Almost like what were going on is a reinterpretation of the meaning of the terms used.

I think what is going on here is that some are arguing the "law" while some are arguing the "norms" . The source of Smallc's fervour (and my own, when I reveal it) I think is a sense that normatively what indigenous nations argue is completely bonkers: that a tiny minority has some kind of moral right to everything, and the rest of us are just supposed to be thralls of their entitlements. Which is impossible: everything in the case of Canada is a far greater portion of the Earth than even all Canadians together have a moral right to. We have facts on the ground that mean that Canada is the power in these lands, and when indigenous bands try to influence us away from that based on their own sense of moral superiority it butts up against the fact that they do not actually have much of a moral foot to stand on in terms of how much land they have the exclusive right to. The relationship of legalism to normativity though is a murky one, but not exactly a tenuous one. What we have here in essence is a question of whether the direct or indirect morality leads to the superior outcome for everyone. Me, I am not really keen on treating indigenous nations as some kind of aristocracy. That does not mean that the way they are treated by the state has to be exactly the same, or that we should not adhere to the treaties at all. But considering that band interpretations of what the treaties that conflict with what the Government has always maintained (and which the legal traditions their form finds its source in would assume, I do not think it unreasonable to suggest that where treaties imply something morally appalling about the status of ordinary Canadians that that must be taken into consideration as well. Otherwise, given what I said before about power and facts on the ground, you are really just asking Canadians to be suckers.

Cross-generational nations are a kind of legal fiction. A very durable kind, but by themselves they are not sufficient to carry an argument.

I am guessing you just do not want to understand that FN are entitled to determine who lives on their territory. Maybe you should put up a sign at your house, "Feel free to squat here, it would be unconstitutional for me to discriminate against the members of the group of all people not including me."

I must have woken up in an alternate universe, because I find myself in pretty much complete agreement with bc2004 here. The law is not racist. Perhaps the people applying the law are racist, but that is not the same thing at all. Six Nations of the Grand River is not my favourite band, to understate my sentiment towards them, but the fact is this law would permit them to throw out even any Six Nations members who were not members of the Grand River band.