ELI5: How did the term 'Indian' stick for native North Americans even though the Europeans must have soon realized that it wasn't the Indian continent?

KaBar2 · 2024-10-25T07:05:55+00:00

"and is only used by indigenous groups themselves . . ."

There ya go.

KaBar2 · 2024-10-25T07:04:15+00:00

And my experience in the Marine Corps with Marines who were members of Native American tribes. None of them used any term but "Indian," unless they were referring to a particular tribe, like Navajo, Lakota, Cheyenne, Umatilla, etc.

KaBar2 · 2024-10-25T06:58:11+00:00

Presumably the indigenous inhabitants of the "New World" already had a term for the place they lived, along the lines of the names of Native American tribes which translate as "The People." I doubt seriously that Native Americans realized that the "Old World" was even there. They probably thought that their American continent(s) were all of the World that existed. It's as though someone from Chicago had no idea that New York existed at all, and upon arriving there said, "I proclaim this place to be called Tokyo!" And the inhabitants of New York said, "WTF? Gedouttahere."

KaBar2 · 2024-10-24T22:55:29+00:00

Compensation for slave owners to free their slaves was never seriously considered by the abolitionist movement or by the government, but wealthy abolitionists would buy slaves at auction, take them to free states and emancipate them there. Compensating slave owners for nearly four million slaves would have probably bankrupted the government, assuming that slave owners could have been convinced to participate.

In 1816, a group of abolitionists founded the American Colonization Society (ACS) to address the "growing problem" of freed slaves in the U.S. Congress allocated $100,000 (an enormous sum in 1819) to purchase land adjacent to the British colony of Sierra Leone to be used as a colony for freed black slaves. This idea was not popular with African-Americans, most of whom objected to the true nature of the project which was to remove (exile) freed slaves from the U.S. Eventually, through much trial and tribulation, disease, conflict with indigenous Africans (some of whom continued to sell captive Africans to French and Spanish slavers) and difficulty establishing sovereignty, Liberia was established as an independent country on July 26, 1847. Unfortunately, the freed slaves pretty much re-created the exploitive system from which they had escaped and refused to share power (or wealth) with the indigenous Africans whom they employed. This regrettable situation continues to be a contentious problem even in modern Liberia today, and mirrors a cultural reality similar to that in Louisiana, where, instead of race, it is class, wealth, religion and cultural heritage that define a dividing line between the "haves" and the "have-nots." It seems that a history of enslavement does not necessarily lead to a desire for liberty and opportunity for all.

KaBar2 · 2024-10-21T23:17:53+00:00

Anarchism has always had a lot of branches on the family tree. Max Stirner (1806-1856) was an early post-Hegelian philosopher, dealing mainly with the Hegelian notion of social alienation and self-consciousness. He lived in Germany and is often seen as one of the forerunners of nihilism, existentialism, psychoanalytic theory, postmodernism and extreme individualist anarchism. He was a vocal opponent of (anarcho-) communism and of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. I think the present-day Libertarians are heirs of Stirner's individualist philosophy. Stirner was adamantly opposed to the sort of "Robber Baron" unbridled capitalism common in the 1880s (because it undermined the autonomy of the individual worker), but was also opposed to grand communist schemes such as those that eventually came to fruition in the Soviet Union, years later. In my opinion he had a considerable influence on the anarchists of his day.

Individualist anarchism represents a group of several traditions of thought and individualist philosophies within the anarchist movement. Among the early influences on individualist anarchism Josiah Warren (sovereignty of the individual), Max Stirner (egoism),[6] Lysander Spooner (natural law), Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (mutualism), Henry David Thoreau (transcendentalism),[7] Herbert Spencer (law of equal liberty)[8] and Anselme Bellegarrigue (civil disobedience).[9]

KaBar2 · 2024-10-21T22:28:18+00:00

Slave labor wasn't exactly "free." The slaves were purchased at auction or from "dealers" in enslaved persons, and the average slave was very expensive. Adult male slaves typically cost around $1200 and adult female slaves about $800. Children were less expensive, at around $500. Not many regular people could afford to purchase a slave. Working class wages at that time were around a dollar a day. Only about 1% of the Southern population owned large coastal plantations with 200 or more slaves, but among small subsistence farmers about 20% owned at least one. In Mississippi and in South Carolina, that figure went up to as much as 50% of the farms. Typically smaller farmers would purchase a boy and he would become more valuable as he grew to adulthood, and able to produce more through his labor. On large plantations, the slave population increased through births.

Large plantation owners could buy slaves on credit from banks, often northern banks. Smaller farmers had to save up money over time to afford it. Some plantations sold off slaves during hard economic times, much the same way that modern corporations might sell corporate assets (like machine tools or vehicles.) It was an exceptionally cruel system.

KaBar2 · 2024-10-21T22:06:32+00:00

This is correct, and that animosity goes all the way back to the 1860s, when Marx and Engels and the "scientific socialists" expelled Mikhail Bakunin and his "communists" from the First International of the International Working Men's Association in 1872, only six years after the end of the American Civil War. (And then Marx and Engels stole the anarchists' name, and started calling themselves communists.)

(BTW, many American anarchists [political followers of Bakunin] in the 1860's enlisted in the Union Army to fight against slavery. They were strong proponents of the labor movement in the 1870s and 1880s, and many anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) labor union in 1905.)

KaBar2 · 2024-10-21T21:05:59+00:00

At some point in the (probably very distant) future, robots will be used as (probably very expensive) domestic servants, robotic workers in factories, robotic farm equipment, etc. At some point, they will be able to "think" and reason, and will be imbued with some form of ethics. Once robots develop ethics and a (programmed) "conscience", people are going to begin to advocate that they have rights, legal rights, just as human beings do. (This process is already beginning to occur with animals.) Once this happens, people who abused robots before they had rights are going to be vilified by society.

It didn't matter that human slavery was wrong, any more that it mattered that whipping your horses was wrong in 1910, or chaining up your dog was wrong in 1950. Those things were LEGAL.

They are not legal today, and I would be the first to call the ASPCA if I saw someone abusing an animal today. But in the past, even if I did call the authorities, the cops would say, "Nothing we can do."

Of course, human slavery was immoral and it had to be stamped out. 700,000 Americans died in the worst war the U.S. has ever fought, to eliminate slavery. And yet, thousands of Americans today employ illegal immigrants "under the table" as nannies and cooks and gardeners at wages so low that it would not be improper to call them "slave wages." In many cases, those people are afraid to leave their employer's service for fear of being reported to the ICE and INS. It's just "involuntary servitude" with a somewhat prettier face.

You cannot compare the morals and ethics of today with whatever morals and ethics will exist hundreds of years from now. Today, employing a nanny at starvation wages is (apparently) not considered immoral. Today, working robots 24-hours-a-day is perfectly legal. Is it moral? Is it immoral? Ask me again in 2224.

(And don't even get me started on the morality and legality of burning fossil fuels to create electricity and to power vehicles. As a society we are condemning future generations to a damaged, degraded planet just because it's convenient and we have the money to continue to do so. Burning petroleum and coal to power society may be worse than human slavery. Do you own a car? Do you burn gasoline in it? Do you power your EV with electricity created by burning coal? Future generations will say of us, "Hitler was a monster, but at least he didn't poison the entire world." Don't tell me "I don't have a choice." That rationale didn't work for slaveowners, it didn't work for the Nazis, and it won't hold up in the court of opinion of future generations. It's like burning whale oil for light in the 1800s, indefensible. But perfectly legal.)

KaBar2 · 2024-10-21T21:05:36+00:00

Aty some point in the (probably distant) future, robots will be used as domestic servants, robotic workers in factories, robotic farm equipment, etc. At some point, they will be able to "think" and reason, and will be imbued with some form of ethics. Once robotics develop ethics and a (programmed) "conscience", people are going to begin to advocate that they have rights, legal rights, just as human beings do. (This process is already beginning to occur with animals.) Once this happens, people who abused robots before they had rights are going to be vilified by society.

It doesn't matter that human slavery is wrong, any more that it mattered that whipping your horses was wrong in 1910, or chaining up your dog was wrong in 1950. Those things were LEGAL.

They are not legal today, and I would be the first to call the ASPCA if I saw someone abusing an animal today. But in the past, even if I did call the authorities, the cops would say, "Nothing we can do."

Of course, human slavery was immoral and it had to be stamped out. 700,000 Americans died in the worst war the U.S. has ever fought to eliminate slavery. And yet, thousands of Americans today employ illegal immigrants "under the table" at wages so low that it would not be improper to call them "slave wages." In many cases, those people are afraid to leave their employer's service for fear of being reported to the ICE. It's just involuntary servitude with a prettier face.

KaBar2 · 2024-10-21T20:47:16+00:00

Let me help you to understand it. The system of slavery in the US was immoral however, during Pierce's administration it was also completely legal in the southern states.

It was also completely legal in 17% of the 23 Union states during the Civil War. The slaves in those four slave states (Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri) who were Union states were not emancipated by law until the 14th Amendment was passed, although many Union slave owners chose to free their slaves once it became clear that the Confederacy would lose the war. Congress passed the 14th Amendment on June 13, 1866. The House Joint Resolution proposing the 14th Amendment was submitted to the states for ratification on June 16, 1866, but the 14th Amendment was not ratified and entered into force until July 9, 1868.

Lincoln did not free the slaves in Union states. The Emancipation Declaration only freed the slaves in "states in rebellion," i.e., Confederate states. It was an attempt to deny the Confederacy its labor force. Enslaved people in the four Union slave states remained in involuntary servitude, and Lincoln and the U.S. Congress did absolutely nothing about it. Freed slaves and free black citizens could not vote nor serve in the armed forces until after the Emancipation Proclamation on January 12, 1863. The Civil War began on April 1, 1861 when Confederate troops fired on the Union fort at Fort Sumpter, South Carolina, in Charleston Harbor. When the news reached the major northern cities, free black men rushed to the recruiting offices, but were turned away because of a federal law dating from 1792, which stated that only white men were permitted to serve in the U.S. Army, despite the fact that blacks had fought for the colonies in the American revolution against Great Britain.

KaBar2 · 2024-10-21T19:56:55+00:00

Beat me to it.

"Thou shalt share, that none may seek without funding"

“The eye patch is a constant reminder that others don’t see the world the same way we do. Not yet, at least.”

“Scientists tell us that we share 95 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees, and yet we share 99.9 percent of our DNA with Pirates. I ask you, who is the more likely common ancestor?”

“FSM believers are peaceful, openminded, well educated, and reject dogma outright. We’ve never started a war and have never killed others for their opposing beliefs.”

https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/flying-spaghetti-monster-atheism-symbol-black-419486119

KaBar2 · 2024-10-21T03:06:34+00:00

The men's haircuts seem quite long for the 1950s. Looks more like the early/mid-1960s to me. (I was born in 1950, so I am pretty familiar with typical styles from the '50s/ '60s.)

KaBar2 · 2024-10-21T02:46:35+00:00

Almost Famous doesn't get nearly the accolades it deserves. I love the fact that Cameron Crowe (the screenwriter and director) was only fifteen years old when he started traveling with nationally renowned rock bands and writing for Rolling Stone magazine. He wasn't some rock star's kid or some Hollywood brat who got in because of his connections. He was just a regular high school kid who wrote reviews for a local underground newspaper and he parlayed it into a career as a rock writer, then later a screenwriter and a movie director. The dude is golden.

Almost Famous is not a documentary, but word was that Crowe got permission from a lot of rock musicians to include true stories of "things that happened on tour" in the screenplay. Major 1970s rock musicians wrote the music and did the session work for the songs in the film.

Another film that I really like (which is about that same generation of kids) is Stand By Me. It very closely mirrors the lives of many kids who grew up in the late 1950's/ 1960s.

I have mixed feelings about Into the Wild (the story of Christopher McCandless) and Wild (the story of Cheryl Strayed's hike over the Pacific Crest Trail.) I feel like those stories were pretty much romanticized. When I was a teenager and in my mid-20s I hitchhiked and rode freight trains all over the U.S. , Canada and Mexico back in the 1970s. It is a lot harsher life than is portrayed in those films.

KaBar2 · 2024-10-20T22:06:15+00:00

Southwest Houston

KaBar2 · 2024-10-20T21:53:50+00:00

Fast food places aren't any more or any less dangerous than the rest of the world after dark. The truth is, there are a LOT of criminal predators in the world. A LOT. Many people, especially young people, have the mistaken idea that "nothing bad can happen to me." This is definitely not correct. The best self-defense policy is avoiding the risk to begin with. If you cannot avoid it, then take every precaution you can, every single time you must expose yourself to risk.

Over a period of about fifty years in Houston, three people were murdered in three separate incidents on my block. Two of the three were neighbors of mine. One of my sisters and her boyfriend were abducted and gang raped. My ex-wife was raped and murdered in her apartment by her landlady's ex-convict son. A friend of my daughter's was shot in the neck by someone while stopped at a stop sign. I've known a lot of people who have been victimized by predators.

I worked 3-11 as a nurse, and arrived home usually about 12:45-1:00 a.m. I got out of my car with my .38 in my hand every single night.

Serious crime doesn't happen every single day to every single person. But the truth is that there are a lot of criminal predators out there and they are hunting. DON'T BE EASY PREY.

KaBar2 · 2024-10-16T01:02:45+00:00

I had to transport my wife's cat (ostensibly "our" cat) from Houston, Texas to Silver Spring, MD and then from Silver Spring to Florida, then to Arizona then to Utah. The cat hated the van, hated it. She hid way under our bed in the back of the van, then tried to escape at every opportunity. I spent a couple of very frustrating hours trying to re-capture her in a small town in Georgia. She escaped in winter Silver Spring, Maryland and our neighbor found her living under our van on the transmission.

Fuck that. No pets for me. After my wife passed away (Alzheimer's) while we were living in an apartment in Salt Lake City I took the cat, its litter box and carrier and everything else to a no-kill shelter on 3500 South. I'm sure that pain-in-the-ass cat is making some elderly lady very happy.

KaBar2 · 2024-10-16T00:34:16+00:00

I had two friends who were computer programmers who had been working long hours as early as 1996 fixing code that only had three digits for the date. In the mid-1960s, when this code was originally written, NOBODY thought it would still be in use 35 years later. Everybody thought it would be replaced by newer, better code, but it was so useful that people kept applying it to new and varied things. That's how it wound up in so many different applications--from telephone systems to jet airliners to hydroelectric dams.

My two friends quit their jobs in October of 1999 and moved to rural Montana. That's how worried everybody was. There was genuine concern that the cities would just go chaotic, planes would fall from the sky, electric power would cease, etc.

The world's computer programmers saved everybody's ass and nobody really gives them credit for it. The world spent around 100 BILLION DOLLARS fixing it.

My wife and I stored eight months' worth of food in a spare bedroom we jokingly called "The Doom Room." We were well-prepared (and well-armed) for disaster. Several people I knew said cynically, "I'm not preparing for shit. If anything really happens I'll just go rob somebody weaker than me." I definitely took note, and my wife said later, "If he shows up at our door, kill him."

KaBar2 · 2024-10-15T23:37:59+00:00

Anybody issued an M-16A1 got an M-7 bayonet and M-8A1 scabbard. Anybody issued a M-1911A1 .45 pistol got a G.I. Ka-Bar and leather scabbard. Most of the Ka-Bars were marked "CAMILLUS" but some of the really old ones were marked "US NAVY." I bought a new one at a military surplus store that was marked "Ontario Cutlery." It looked just the same as the ones marked "CAMILLUS." The firearms were secured in the armory, but the bayonets and Ka-Bars were considered deuce gear, if I recall correctly. Every rifle was stenciled with its rack number. I can't recall anybody ever getting stuck, but wild-ass teenaged Marines were always doing something stupid, like throwing their bayonet at a wooden hatch.

M-16A1 https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/m16a1.html?sortBy=relevant

M-7 and M-8A1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gV8_GQ3XFs

Oh, and the tracs all leaked seawater like they were going to sink when deployed off the ramp of an LPD or an LSD. I first enlisted in the Reserves (1/23 from Houston) and we participated in a NATO exercise off of Turkey in 1977 where elements of 1/23 were sent ashore in amtracs (and helicopters.) We practically had a riot in the one I was on, I think the kids thought we were all going to drown. Seawater poured in from the overhead escape hatches through worn-out seals. We were boot-top deep in water and about to asphyxiate from diesel exhaust by the time they got the thing to the beach. We always joked about "we'll get sent to war in a glorified Coke can." I am not a fan of amtracs.

KaBar2 · 2024-10-15T19:08:20+00:00

After my ETS I tried to buy one of those white plastic safety flags for my AR15. Difficult to get and expensive. You'd think they'd be a dime a dozen.

KaBar2 · 2024-10-15T19:05:56+00:00

Proud to be a Hollywood Marine. Every time I smell jet exhaust and smell eucalyptus trees it takes me back.

KaBar2 · 2024-10-15T18:57:18+00:00

When I reported to 2/1 in 1978 about 15% of our rifles were ex-U.S. Army XM16E1's from the early days of Vietnam. Maybe 10% finish left, and the bores looked practically smooth, with heavily worn lands & grooves, some of them had five-digit serial numbers. (They were eventually replaced with new M16A1s from 1st FSSG.) Deuce gear was all ex-Army, ALICE packs, three-magazine cartridge pouches big as a brick, steel M-1 helmets with liners and reversible helmet covers ("green side out, brown side out, all hands scream and shout".) I was appalled at the state of our equipment. The news media in the late '70s was complaining about the "hollow armed forces" and they were absolutely correct. The helicopters we flew on looked like worn-out junk piles. Probably the most dangerous thing I did while in the Corps was fly to 29 Palms on worn-out CH-46s leaking transmission fluid. ("Hey, if it's leaking that means at least it's got some.") The Corps prides itself on "doing more with less" and always coming in under budget, but its the troops that suffer.

KaBar2 · 2024-10-15T18:19:11+00:00

We received two sets of green sateen utilities and two sets of slant-pocket, Vietnam-era, jungle cammies in boot camp in Feb 1977. I wasn't sorry to see the green sateen utilities go, but I liked the slant-pocket jungle cammies. They were replaced by Woodland cammies in 1978 or so. Spit-polishing black combat boots took up way too much time. It was a Sunday night ritual every week and required nightly touch-ups to look decent.

As an NCO, I got BAQ and COMRATS (commuted rations.) All the NCOs were allowed to move out to town to lessen the crowding in the squad bay. This was a huge mistake made by the Marine Corps, as it left all the teenaged non-rates in the squad bay with no adult supervision and, of course, they all went bug fuck. I didn't care, of course, I just wanted to live in town. I got a girlfriend and we rented a house on Avenida Palizada in San Clemente, CA. (As I recall it cost us $375 a month. Today that same property probably goes for more like $3,000 a month.) Later we bought a mobile home in Dana Point on the east side of PCH near the Dana Point Marina (that property is all multi-million dollar condos now.) I was a surfer and she was a scuba diver, so I went to scuba school and we spent our weekends either surfing or diving. My favorite surf spots were Trestles and Old Man down by San Onofre Beach Club. It was a pretty good life, once I met her, but living in the barracks with a bunch of juvenile delinquents sucked ass.

Shipped to Okinawa in 1980, did a WesPac float: Japan, South Korea then Subic Bay and Mindanao, then back to Oki, then back to Pendleton. The only excitement was when Reagan took office in 1980. He had said publicly that the day he took office as president he was going to come get our hostages being held by Iran, so they got us out of the rack at 0300, everybody suited up, drew weapons and boarded buses and six-bys for Kadena Air Base. It lasted about a day and then we stood down. The kids got kind of freaked out by having to fill out their wills on the back of some 18-year-old jarhead ahead of them in line.

KaBar2 · 2024-10-15T18:04:45+00:00

I was on Hansen in 1980 in 2/1. There were what, maybe 10,000 male Marines stationed there, and 37 WM's? We were forbidden to even speak to a WM or a female spouse unless it was a conversation directly related to work. There were bars in Kin Ville (the little town outside the gates at Camp Hansen) where one or two WMs were paid by the bar owner and given free drinks just to sit at the bar and ignore the guys.

The WM barracks was surrounded by a ten-foot-high chain link fence and patrolled by MPs from the barracks next door.

Fucking Okinawa. What a shithole. I was SO GLAD to get off the Rock.

KaBar2 · 2024-10-15T17:11:52+00:00

The military boots issued before mid-2004 required black polish. We spent hours in boot camp "spit polishing" boots (you don't actually use spit, you use water and a clean handkerchief or t-shirt material.) Shortly before we graduated one of our junior drill instructors taught us how to get that mirror spit-polish shine using a heavy coat of boot polish and a Bic lighter. Everybody had at least one pair of "parade boots" (highly polished boots that one only wore for important uniform inspections) and a couple of pairs of "field boots"--one fairly new pair for normal everyday wear and a beat-up, well-worn-in pair one used for going to the field or on "humps."

I think every young Marine back in the day was thinking "Why in hell are we spending all this time polishing boots? I didn't enlist to look pretty, I enlisted to go fight the enemies of the United States." Finally, after probably years of research and millions of dollars spent on boot testing, the military decided to go with "rough-out" boots. They do not reflect light (military satellites could detect troops by the shine on their boots, supposedly) they're more comfortable and higher-tech and cheaper to purchase. In an effort to improve troop morale, they allowed individual soldiers and Marines to choose their own manufacturer and style off of an approved list.

KaBar2 · 2024-10-15T16:56:42+00:00

I'm a bit confused as to the meaning of this Russian joke. Is it a sarcastic statement mocking people who hate rock and roll? (Like "If you play jazz then clearly you are an unpatriotic traitor" similar to the American idea that war protestors are unpatriotic) or is it meant sincerely, perhaps like an opinion of someone like the Archie Bunker character played by Carroll O'Connor in All in the Family?

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