Actually, I did not defend all of Ward Churchill's actions. My main concern was to contest the colonial assumptions behind Kamiya's dismissal of oral history and to suggest that Fish's article gives a much better sense of the debate over the academic quality of Churchill's work. You have not responded to any of that in your posts, presumably because you have no answer.

There is no "colonial" dismissal of native "oral history." The "oral history" in question is that which was ascribed to the white settlers, not the Indians. The problem is, that the white settlers represented a literate society, and, unlike most pre-literate societies such as those of the tribal groups inhabiting New England in the 17th century, there really aren't any well-developed mechanisms for the oral transmission of history. Literate societies don't need such mechanisms, because they just write shit down.

The Puritan society of colonial New England was fanatically literate. You can't take a stroll through an old attic in Massachusetts without stumbling on diaries or memoirs or correspondence from the period in question. Yet nowhere in the thousands and thousands and thousands of pages of contemporary documents can we find any corroboration of "recovered oral history" reported by activists 2-300 years after the fact.

Is it possible that someone somewhere traded or sold the blankets of a smallpox victim to Indians (to, in all likelihood, no effect), and that event slipped below the radar of recorded history? Sure. Given that these events predate by some 150-200 years the concept of germ theory I think it's highly unlikely that anyone would have done so in the hope of actually transmitting smallpox, but it's within the realm of possibility. What's not within the realm of possibility, you credulous bumpkin, is the notion that a systematic policy of spreading smallpox among the natives (which, after all, is what Churchill is claiming when he allows the word "genocide" to enter the discussion) could be implemented without ever once appearing in the massive documentary evidence of the period.

It's about the inverted values of a society that promotes losers to winner status while deliberately marginalizing the natural winners. We've built a culture that fears the aristocracy of talent above all others. Our society is pathologically suspicious of and resentful toward those with ability and talent, because they give the lie to our pious fictions about "equality."

This is nowhere more true than in our public schools, which are designed to reward students for "effort" rather than intelligence. Our taboo suspicion of natural talent means that we cannot allow ourselves to reward students for something they haven't "earned" (the ability to process, organize and analyze information more quickly and effectively than their peers), so we instead reward them for keeping busy, for devoting themselves endlessly to menial, trivial and unrewarding exercises (heh, preparing them for the world of American "work," oh so coincidentally). When they can't keep up intellectually, we give them "extra credit" until it looks like they actually achieved something, even when they didn't.

As for the kids who actually have the talent, the ones that possess real ability? Well, screw them. They didn't "earn" it. They can just sit around, bored to tears while we teach the class at the pace of the dumbest motherfucker in the room. Nerds.

Now, why should we be surprised (or deeply saddened, for that matter) when one of the smart kids (say, an Eric Harris) looks around, see's through the bullshit, and shoots a handful of the dull but busy beavers right in the face?

Your drug company conspiracy theories don't become any less wacko through shear tautology, you bug fuck nuts weirdo.

Planetary_Eulogy: Winner take all is a cultural value; I think you were thinking of the school scene, where you were right. But: what about the Wall St. Meltdown? The "Winners" responsible for this have not only "taken all", they are seen as "too big to fail", and are treated like our saviors, being rewarded with taxpayer money to continue and expand their (our) mistakes. Incidentally, Free Will also applies to cultures like Switzerland, where people are armed to the teeth with (real) Assault weapons, but yet shootings are so rare they are not even tabulated.

A couple of thoughts:

1. Our economic system doesn't really reward the natural winners. Businesses are just as suspicious of the truly gifted as everyone else. Consequently, our economic system is designed, not to reward those with actual ability, but to reward those with A.) a willingness to put in absurdly long hours, B.) connections and C.) a severely retarded ethical sensibility. That could better be described as a 'loser take all' system, and, not surprisingly, it doesn't actually work.

2. European countries, Switzerland included, have a slightly less monomaniacal institutional focus on maintaining the appearance of egalitarianism. Note that their schools are pretty much designed to weed out the stupid from an early age and segregate them from more capable students.

You're overlooking the most important factor here: America's much larger population. The US population is roughly five times the size of Britain's and four times that of Germany. Of course there are more school shootings here. The actual prevalence of such shootings in the US isn't substantially higher than that of Western Europe as a whole, however.

So much for ethics...

...I mean, the perps got life in prison. What more could you want?

What a bunch of hypocrites!

At least as we currently define it.

I mean, really?

..."preventative detention" and holding prisoners of war (which, really, is what these people are) "for the duration," which is the unquestioned right of any nation.

I mean, that is the normal procedure.