Grand River Transit

[danbrotherston]

Society.

I was pretty clear “I’m not assuming anyone is evil”

Just because no particular person will admit that as intent, does not mean somethings function is not to maintain inequality.

I think we as a society are responsible for that.

Also, the historical claim is not true. The Second World War was not fought to stop a genocide.

We rarely stop genocides even when they are public, just see the Rwandan genocide.

As for what is a genocide, I haven’t heard the missing women specifically called a genocide outside of the context of the genocide we absolutely perpetrated against all indigenous people in the last century.

“Society” doesn’t “intend” anything. I think you may actually understand just fine, but for some reason you insist on using a specific word that does not mean what you want it to mean.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk

You just said it yourself — “Just because no particular person will admit that as intent, does not mean somethings function is not to maintain inequality” — bad things can happen that are not intended. In the case of transit enforcement, a reasonable critique is that it may function to perpetuate iniquity, but without specific evidence of intent it is inappropriate to allege that it is intended to perpetuate iniquity.

Good point about stopping genocides. We seem (as a society) to manage to be quite warlike and violent at times, and yet somehow still unwilling to really drop the hammer to stop an in-progress genocide. On the other hand, maybe the Rwandan situation would have been even worse, hard though that is to imagine, with an invasion attempting to stop the genocide. That being said, yes, the MMIWG report referred to present-day murders as an ongoing genocide, which is incorrect, given that by definition genocide is the deliberate attempt to eliminate a group of people. I think the MMIWG inquiry significantly impaired their credibility by using that word to describe the situation, undermining the goal of the inquiry. I don’t want to get into a discussion of which specific elements of our history qualify as genocide, but I think it’s pretty clear that there have been policies in the past which qualify.

It was very explicitly the intent of our governments policies to destroy the First Nations people. Like, that isn't controversial, that was the stated intent.

If you want to argue that the current murders of indigenous women is not a continuation or direct result of of those policies, I suppose that's a more subtle argument that I lack the background knowledge to discuss.

On the word "intent".  I think we agree that enforcement policies function to continue inequality. You are arguing the word intent does not apply because we are not a master planned society, and we are all contributing to the function of society therefore nobody is guilty of "intent" here.

I am arguing that even as a collective society, we are all responsible for the direction of society, therefore, we have collective intent.  I'll grant you this is a somewhat radical position to take, arguing that a society of people can have intent.