Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!yale!mintaka!bloom-beacon!mcgill-vision!quiche!utility
From: utility@quiche.cs.mcgill.ca (Ronald BODKIN)
Newsgroups: alt.activism
Subject: Re: Akwesasne Notes -- Basic Call to Consciousness 1977
Message-ID: <2011@quiche.cs.mcgill.ca>
Date: 19 Jan 90 19:51:42 GMT
References: <3096@umn-d-ub.D.UMN.EDU> <1257@milton.acs.washington.edu> <1963@quiche.cs.mcgill.ca> <521@smcnet.UUCP>
Reply-To: utility@quiche.cs.mcgill.ca (Ronald BODKIN)
Organization: SOCS, McGill University, Montreal, Canada
Lines: 48

In article <521@smcnet.UUCP> byoder@smcnet.UUCP (Brian Yoder) writes:
>I seem to remember an old european fable about King Midas being too
>greedy and getting in trouble for it. To claim that excessive greed 
>is a property of people with white skin is a racist sentiment, don't
>you think?  Perhaps IF it was true that there was no greed (whatever that
>means) before the europeans came, it may have been because natives had
>so little to be greedy of (few machine, nice places to live, etc.) comapred
>to more modern societies. 
	Taking greed as short-sighted pursuit of self-interest, I'll agree
that excessive greed is an insult.  And as for greed being a property of
skin colour, I'd say that of course its racist, but as a property of a
CULTURE it is quite accurate to say that greed is more common in the West
(although it should be replaced by a more rational form of self-interest).
Re: so little to be greedy of, good point.

>Quite true, why should a Thomas Edison spend all his time, effort, and
>talent inventing things if they are of no particular benefit to him?
>Or would you claim that the world is better of without the things that
>people like Edison have created?
	You contradict yourself here BADLY.  Edison profited both
financially and spritually from his achievements.  I cannot IMAGINE
anyone producing a worth-while creation without having a large amount
of self-esteem and (in most cases) a fairly large amount of contempt of
a large number of people and their negative view of the planned object.
Do you think Ford created the assembly line with the idea of "helping
his fellow man"?  HOGWASH.

>...  Interpreting their
>way of life as COMPLETELY socialistic (as many do these days) is perhaps
>a distortion of the truth.  It was more likely the case that individuals
>living alone would have had a very hard time of it under those primitive
>conditions and chose to organize in that way voluntarily (of course this
>is a gross generalization, but we are talking in generalities here already).
	You are probably right to a significant extent, but the ARTICLE
is different.  They are chanting "turn back the clock" -- "usher in a new
dark age" along with all the other "Greens" of this world who would be
delighted to "solve" the environmental problems of the World in this
fashion.  When an individual eats spoiled food through necessity, I don't
fault him the way I do one who would advocate voluntary consumption of
same.

>the situation to the homelessness problem.  Just send them into the
>wilderness to live the utopian lives of savages, living off the land
>and happily avoiding the complications of modern life.
	I am not sure I'd like to contend with bands of maurauders
in the wilderness.  Send them to Brazil's rain forests to give the
Brazillians a few more woes attendant on cutting down the rain forest (-:
		Ron