> It's also probably the reason so many of our sports teams bear the images of peoples we committed quasi-genocide [3] against.

Who is “we”? You weren’t alive for the so-called genocide and neither was I nor anyone else on hn for that matter.

The last residential school closed in 1996. Forced sterilizations lasted through the 80s in the US. The current US president was alive during the Navajo livestock reduction.

It wasn't that long ago.

Were they punitive sterilizations? As given our willingness to incarcerate people, I don’t really see an issue with sterilization.

Take it a step further. Who is "our"? I doubt any of the owners of the teams in question are reading these comments.

Well maybe I’d say that by “our”, I mean the people who self-describe as “fans” of at least one of those teams, or people who have been to a live match featuring at least one of those teams in the last five years, or something like this.

Ah, I see you're an adherent of the "finders-genocide, finders'-grandkids'-keepers" sociopolitical philosophy.

Go back far enough and pretty much all land is stolen. It's not like the same native American tribes ruled parts of America since the dawn of man, they fought for territory all the time like everyone else.

> Ah, I see you're an adherent of the "finders-genocide, finders'-grandkids'-keepers" sociopolitical philosophy.

Are you saying that I and every other human are owed for any and all unrecompensed wrongs committed against any and all members of our ancestries and that governments should go about facilitating this “business”?

I think it’s more like should be deep consideration on how can the United States of America as a country acknowledge that it committed genocide against several nations and discussion on how to best support the survivors of that genocide. There are living people now who are survivors of genocidal policies like forced sterilization and family separation; how is the United States acknowledging and supporting them?

What is the test for deciding whether a policy is “genocidal”?

And are “genocidal” policies somehow different from policies that can be shown to have caused harm? And if so are they somehow worse or more deserving of recompense than this category of “harmful” policies? They are in some sense, double harmful?

> What is the test for deciding whether a policy is “genocidal”?

I'm pretty sure "if the policy was driven by a desire for genocide, or results in genocide" would cover it.

> And are “genocidal” policies somehow different from policies that can be shown to have caused harm? And if so are they somehow worse or more deserving of recompense than this category of “harmful” policies?

Some things are worse than other things and we react different accordingly. The justice system of.... well, virtually every society with laws, is based on that idea. You do something bad, you get consequence X. You do something worse, you get consequence Y. The law says specifically what's worse than what other thing and what happens.

The only time that a lot of different things has had the same consequence was the Draconian constitution, which everybody agreed was shit. However, they all liked that it differentiated between different degrees of similar acts, and we still do today.

Right, what I’m trying to say is that I don’t think the label genocide adds anything to the conversation. We can say there were this many murders and this many sterilizations and this much property damage and then do whatever restitution calculation. It’s being or not being genocide seems irrelevant.

Genocide has a specific meaning of a specific set of policies with the intention of causing a group of people to become utterly extinct. I’m surprised you’re unaware of this technical term?

But if the policy fails, then what is the complaint?