When 'banned' isn't, and 'invasion' isn't either.

Once upon a time, The Phantom started getting his comments deleted on a blog. This is not surprising, I get my comments deleted all the time. Always on Lefty sites like Ms., Vile770, or The Mary Sue. They just love them some censorship, those kids.

This time it was Camestros Felpatron, mostly famous for being banned at According to Hoyt and Mad Genius Club for idiotic trolling. MGC usually lets him have a few free ones before they shut him down, but he's been sent to sit in the corner quite a few times.

Anyway, because I dared suggest the Holy Temperature Record might be a bit dodgy, good old Floppy started deleting me. Which is fine, its his blog.

Every once in a while, he posts something so egregious that I drop a comment in his spam filter, because I know he reads them. This is where 'banned' isn't really banned. Sometimes he makes blog posts out of them.

I don't blame him, really, the Leftosphere is all Trump all the time these days. There's only so many post you can make out of astrologers portending Trumpian doom before is all begins to seem a little pointless.

This brings us to the 'invasion.' It seems it has become populat in certain Lefty circles to refer to the settlement of Australia as an "Invasion." The Floppy One posted about it here.

This is the typical Leftist wordplay, when they substitute the word for "invasion" for "settlement" because it makes victims out of the Aborigines, or the Indians, or whatever group they are trying to claim victim status for.

This balderdash culminates with:

"To accept that the events 1770 and 1788 amounted to an invasion would require them to accept that modern Australia owes a debt to the people whose land was taken."

My comment, which was of course deleted because inconvenient:

“Australia owes a debt to the people whose land was taken.”

Those people died a long time ago. Nobody stole from the ones alive today.

By the way, where are my reparations for the Highland Clearances? I’m sure somebody owes me a bundle, by your reckoning.

For those not up on their history, the Highland Clearances were land seizures, where they basically took farms and kicked off the people living there. The Scottish people were dispossessed and scattered across the world.

I'm pure blood Scots on both sides of the family. I've never seen Scotland. As a mater of both moral and legal principle, nobody owes me any money for the Highland Clearances. The End. Any effort top cast -me- as a victim of that two hundred and someth9ing year ago crap would be farcical.

What happened in Australia (and Canada, New Zealand, most of the USA except the West, and other places,) wasn't a war. It was a migration. Europeans moved to North America and started farming.

Where is something like that happening right now... oh yeah. Europe! People from the Middle East are "migrating" to Europe in their millions. You don't dare call that an invasion, do you?

But now Mr. Flopatron needs something to talk about, so he uses my deleted comment to generate an entire new post:

When Conservatives Accidentally Destroy Capitalism

Wherein Mr. Floppy tries to make a case that the British Crown owes money to the Aborigines of Australia because the British Crown stole their land, which somehow destroys capitalism.

Really, it is idiotic. He's got the magic of inherited blood in there, Capitalism, inheritance taxes, some Scottish tenant farmer guy killed himself, and Conservatives are stoopid. At the end he comes out with Thomas Paine's Agrarian Justice:

Agrarian Justice essentially argued for a kind of Universal Basic Income funded by inheritance tax. The moral justification being one based on notions of property and justice.

Having not read the book I can't say for certain, but I think Mr. Paine was more concerned that people not die of starvation from the Crown selling off the common land they were grazing their sheep on. If the land is in use by the subjects of the Crown, then the Crown should bloody well look after them when the land gets sold. In Feudalism, the Crown has -responsibilities- to its subjects, right?

Essentially, "The Rich" of Britain should pay me, The Phantom Foreigner, by way of inheritance tax. Because my ancestors lost a war to the English. (It wasn't a war, but never mind.)

But then, shouldn't the French be paying for the Norman Conquest? And shouldn't the Swedes be paying for the Viking raids? Shouldn't the Spanish be paying South America and Mexico? And shouldn't the Italians be paying EVERYBODY because Rome took over the whole of Europe? (I should be getting bucks from Italy because Hadrian's Wall!!!) Japan should be forking over large for World War Two, right? That was practically last week.

Oh, and shouldn't the Russian and Chinese Communists be paying a shitlocker full of money for killing a hundred million people in the 20th Century and taking over everything behind the Iron Curtain and the Bamboo Curtain.

Yes, they should. Or, you know, not.

Because there is a place on Earth where this kind of accounting has been taken to a high art. The Balkans. Those guys remember every goddamn sheep that was stolen for a thousand years. They've been doing war on each other off and on since Rome left. The Mooselimbs invaded at some point and got sucked into the maelstrom, as we saw from the most recent Balkan War. Ethnic cleansing from a three sided triangle of hatred that never dies.

There's another place on Earth where they keep score, the Middle East. You've got two kinds of Mooselimbs killing each other over ancestral grievances, Christians getting killed because they're those pain in the ass minority types (who were there first, but never mind) and then the Jews, of course, who are "invaders" despite having been there longer than the Xtians or the Mooselimbs. (The Jews are bad because shooting back is cheating!)

On the whole, I think keeping track of shit like the Highland Clearances and demanding restitution from the descendants of those armies is a really, really bad idea and we shouldn't do it. Otherwise we will get Syria and Sarajevo.

But practical matters aside, what this really is down to is racism. The Scots don't get reparations because we are White. We are successful.

We left the Highlands, moved to the howling wilderness of North America, and Australia, and every other Godforsaken shit hole the English could find to dump us, and now we OWN the place. Our people invented the entire Modern world. Name a modern device or product, 80% of the time it was a Scot that invented it.

What have the Mooselimbs invented lately? Suicide bombers. The Aborigines? I can't think of anything. The Indians? Nothing springs to mind.

Camestros Felpatron thinks that we, the White people, the ones who work our asses off and invent everything, make everything, do everything, should help the poor brown people because they are just helpless victims and can't make it on their own.

That is racism. They fucking well can make it on their own, and they do. All the time. The joke around here is that the richest people in Ontario live on the Indian reserve. There are at least five families there with ten-figure (billion) net worth. Oh yeah. Quite a few Lamborghinis on the Reserve these days.

Now, all of the above is based on Group Politics. The Flopatron Conjecture fails even at the group level, because Sarajevo, but where it really fails is when you cast aside these sweeping inclusions and get down to individuals.

Really, lets talk about who, in particular, should be paying me, in particular, for the Highland Clearances. Ultimately there is only one person alive today that could even remotely be considered inheritor of that action. That person is Queen Elizabeth. Did Liz order the Highland Clearance? Nope. Was it even one of her family? Nope. She's a Windsor.

Did the English crown even order the Clearances? Nope. It was economic forces.  (And, hilariously, anti-Celtic racism. Those Celts, they're LAZY y'know. Good for nothing. Not like good AngloSaxon stock.) The land owners went broke, sold out, and the newcomers changed the type of agriculture. Everybody forgets the same thing happened in England, just happened earlier.

So really, can we stick tottery, 91 year old Liz Windsor with this mess? No.

But she's rich! So lets stick her anyway. Make the rich pay. Hellz yeah.

What does the Queen owe me? I'm a Highland Scot! Family comes from the Highlands, for real. I've never seen the place of course, but my great-great-great- seven freaking generations ago Grandad had to leave the Homeland and break sod here in Canada, because of whatever nightmare was happening to him at the time. We don't even know what it was. I can't even remember his name. My mother does, if I need to know I can ask her. But I better hurry up, Mom's 90.

I have zero connection to that time, that land, those concerns. Can I legitimately demand restitution for those things that drove Great-to-the-7th Grandad to flee? No. I don't think so. If the Queen offered me some free money I wouldn't turn her down, but otherwise, I have zero claim. It wouldn't be much anyway, her whole fortune divided among every Scottish descendant nets me about a buck-fifty if I'm lucky.

Can some Indian guy here in Canada claim restitution from me for a transaction his Great-to-the-7th Grandadhad had with mine when the old Indian sold the farm to the old Highlander? Because money did change hands at the time, the deeds and papers still exist. My mother has the original deed for the family farm, duly signed off by the Indian chief of the time. Do I owe that guy money? Especially considering my Grandmother sold that farm when I was a tiny baby?

Because there are a bunch of "Indians" around here (some of them are almost as Scottish as I am) claiming exactly that. Every time they take it to court, they lose.  In 2006 they resorted to guns and burning shit down, and we had the Caledonia Unpleasantness. Eleven years later, there's still a busted hydro tower beside the road where there was supposed to be a suburban building project. Every time somebody sticks a shovel in the ground around here, the extortionists show up with a crowd and try to jack up the developers for money. Lately they aren't getting much play, since the Department of Highways evicted them from the bridge on Highway 3.

Probably they'll burn some more tires at some point, maybe torch the power station again, then more extortion money will flow for a little while.

Funny to see Australia has the same problem.

Oh, and by the way. Did the aboriginal inhabitants of these places that got 'invaded' by the horrible racist British Empire get any -benefits- from being 'invaded?' Things like the Germ Theory of Disease, or in the case of Australia, the wheel and agriculture? Indoor plumbing, and a life expectancy better than 40? Beer? Railways and steam engines? Mail? Email?

No, they still live in the Stone Age. Don't they? They don't have cars and stuff, right? Indians on the reserve still live in longhouses, right? Sure they do. I was just over there yesterday, I'm sure I saw a guy with feathers in his hair standing next to a longhouse. Oh wait, that was a cigar-store Indian standing next to an illegal cigarette shack. My mistake.

The Phantom

Scrub-update! Mr. Floppy has deleted the link to this rebuttal from his blog. Thereby showing the type of sportsmanship and fair play we have all come to expect from Puppy Kickers and Lefties in general. Classy!