EntheogenicPeace said:

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But weapons alone can't account for the breathtaking speed with which the indigenous population of the New World were completely wiped out.

Within just a few generations, the continents of the Americas were virtually emptied of their native inhabitants

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That's simply not true. (Did you not see the Ponca reference for the treatment of "good Indians"?)

I don't know enough south of the current border (U.S. and Mexico) to argue w/confidence (although there still are millions left from southern Mexico down into at least Bolivia), but when the "Indian wars" of the middle to late 19th were fought in the central to western parts of the U.S., many remained. They had traded w/Europeans for hundreds of years by this time. Although the specifics of every encounter (among different Natives) w/respect to disease and death are different, they most often didn't just all drop dead upon any amount of contact w/Europeans, if so Lewis and Clark (among others) would have wiped them out entirely by then. Instead, it was the ongoing (and usually brutal) colonization that resulted in loss of land and loss of life (the two being directly related), factors which accelerate disease. Either way, the deaths of the Natives (regardless of how they occurred) were celebrated (some even claimed an act of God to remove the wicked heathen from the land), not mourned by most Europeans.

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EntheogenicPeace said:

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Most of the deaths of Indians were inadvertent from disease.

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They most certainly were not inadvertent. For instance, the Poncas (northern Nebraska at the time of removal) who had always lived peacefulyl w/Europeans and who farmed, when their rich agronomic was coveted, they were removed at gunpoint to "Indian territory" whereby 25% of their tribe died from the brutal conditions of forced relocation in the 1st year, starvation & freezing (which weakens one's ability to fight disease, in case you didn't know) was the leading cause along w/malaria (since they were relocated to concentration camps further south from where they had lived, w/no medicine provided). Again, this was done to a peaceful tribe who had never fought the Europeans. The treatment was usually worse for those who did fight back. To call this inadvertent is just stupid if you really believe that foolishness.

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I'm part Indian myself.

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I'm very skeptical of your claimed heritage.

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Enlil said:

I doubt it.  The easiest way to stop illegal immigration is to make all immigration legal.

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Enlil said:

I doubt it.  The easiest way to stop illegal immigration is to make all immigration legal.

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Enlil said:

Not really.  Lower wages mean lower prices.  Maybe we'd become competitive in manufacturing again.

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Gilgamesh18 said:

Enlil said:

Not really.  Lower wages mean lower prices.  Maybe we'd become competitive in manufacturing again.

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Ha I would rather not live a lifestyle that is equivalent to the Chinese or Mexicans. We should restrict immigration and make it impossible to hire illegals for jobs.

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Enlil said:

There's no way to make it impossible to hire illegal immigrants.  That's just fantasy.  Protectionism has failed,

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