Gregory's ServerThe idea of owning land is so weird. At one point, someone just murdered enough people so that no one questioned them when they said it belonged to them, and we just kept on doing that, I guess.
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   @RickiTarr So true. In that same vein, it's kind of odd about borders, the seriousness of these absolutely imaginary lines. @Gustodon @RickiTarr kids on a playground will construct boarders pretty quickly with no direct adult inputs. But that could be an extension of being in a world with borders and knowing of them. @davidaugust @RickiTarr That's interesting but I would agree that it seems more like learned behavior, as opposed to something innate. @davidaugust @Gustodon @RickiTarr No, hanging on to stuff - land, food, shiny things - is a widespread activity of living beings. Even some plants do it. That has little to do with the social institution of property, which is the overwhelming violence of the State being used selectively to enforce the claims of those with higher social status. In our societies, status is conferred by valueless tokens ('money'). But it could be anything, so property is inherently arbitrary.  @RickiTarr "Owning" land is the end result of a process that began when religion moved from being a thing one did to a thing one thought. If one's religion is not grounded in practice, it is inevitable that one will eventually forget that land is something one participates in rather a thing separate from one's self that it is possible to conceive of owning.  @RickiTarr Well, yes - and that is tragic. Have you seen the *cough* tax deducted *hack* memorials that we here at LivEcorp have dedicated to the indigenous people that generations of elders who clearly weren't us did so lets all clap hey? dark humor, forgive me.  @RickiTarr We do need some sort of system where people don't get to wreck what someone else is doing under the mantle of "sharing the land". Though that really doesn't have to mean the current system. I'm all for fallow land and abandoned buildings falling back to being available for anyone who wants it. Use it or lose it should be an integral part of how we respect people's land use. @justafrog It makes me insane that there are more empty houses and apartments than homeless.  @justafrog @RickiTarr My concern with abandoned buildings (etc) is that in some cases those places need a proper cleanup to ensure public safety and environmental health. @fuzzface @justafrog There's just no reason for them to be abandoned in the first place if the need exists, but yes safety is important. @RickiTarr @justafrog Agreed. There are plenty of “idle” places that are ripe for repurposing. However, sometimes it is difficult. An older, but sound, building may not have safety or accessibility systems that are really hard to retrofit. My hometown has a large former hospital in it. There are a lot of good buildings there, but finding people to invest in them is difficult. @RickiTarr @justafrog I guess the point I was trying to make is that if a piece of land is going to have an abandoned structure on it for whatever reason that it needs to be safe. Obviously repurposing or removing the structure is best. @RickiTarr @dnavinci @RickiTarr my wife and I were pondering our ancestries and she only had to go back to the First-Generation Californian to realize her family would also have participated in genocide @dnavinci @RickiTarr Well beyond the midwest. All of the Mountain West, SW, CA and PNW as well. See the Homestead Act.  @RickiTarr The older I get, the more convinced I am that the game “musical chairs” is meant to legitimize “the last person to have this whenever we decided to civilize” as a form of title. @RickiTarr This has always been the basis for everything that is wrong with the modern “western” world. After the warlords got their land, they handed it to their mates, then put a tax on the people who didn’t have any land and we were lumbered with rich, land-owning rulers. And then they travelled around the world, killing all the native people, stealing all their wealth, and drawing lines across the land to protect their interests. With no consideration for the natives (Congo, India etc). @Dziadek To be fair, this was true before colonization too, it just got worse with White Entitlement @RickiTarr Exactly. Land ownership wasn't really necessary until the domestication of livestock. When your wealth was measured in cows, to be really wealthy you needed space to keep them. @RickiTarr Yes, but that came later. When it was just the land you and your family could work by hand, there was plenty to go around. @wanderinghermit Then we get into overpopulation and urbanization lol, and also there's just always been greedy assholes @RickiTarr @RickiTarr Of course, that will support less than 1/1000th of our current population... @RickiTarr @RickiTarr "Sure! Do you want to buy our air too?"  "I'm just gonna spread out. You guys cram together over there, maybe in a prison or something." @RickiTarr Not only that we came up with the idea of owning things, animals and even other people. @RickiTarr “The Land Ordinance Act held the premise that all lands were freely alienable (not held by an overlord). Individuals could purchase land, make it productive, and hold title to it. The Land Ordinance Act of 1785 was the beginning of property rights in the United States. It created the legal framework for land ownership in which lands could be legally transferred through a land patent using a document called a title.” However, in the United States, the concept of land ownership was taken from the Greek, just like the concept of democracy. In ancient Greece, the land was owned by small landholders and farmers who became the citizens of the city-states. If a threat appeared, the landholders banded together to defend everyone's property. Once the threat was vanquished, each went back to his own holdings. @RickiTarr In many parts of the world, the land was equated with power. People who could hold large amounts of land were considered very powerful, and they became the monarchs who owned vast stretches. Then they granted parts of their land to men as a reward for services, making them “landed.” However, the person to whom the land was granted was never considered the owner. He could pass it down to descendants, but the moment there was no heir, the land reverted to the monarchy @RickiTarr Nomadic hunter-gatherers were mostly communal. Land ownership (along with the ownership of "water rights") came along with agriculture.  @RickiTarr |
@RickiTarr
Yep. But I don’t think we learned that story in school.