So you’re willing to choose the dictionary over all the history of the word, the etymology, all art portraying the ideas the word is associated with, the news, the present, piles of study about its meaning and the obvious fact that all settlement is dispossession.
Have you ever entertained the possibility that the dictionary is incomplete or not intended as a universal reference? That perhaps a few scant lines fail to communicate critical information that you might be missing?
Yeah. It’s darkly funny that right after the founding of Israel and the nakba the un went and changed the rules so displaced people have no right of return.
Big “”no one’s gonna know” “they’re gonna know!”” Energy.
I think perhaps the best thing to do to be understood is to continue to refer to them as settlers while people are seeing armed attacks and hate.
It doesn’t matter if you can contrive a situation (which has never happened) where someone is referred to as a settler but doesn’t displace someone else because that has never happened.
If over four hundred years, every time the word settlers is used to describe someone they were part of some project to displace someone else then it doesn’t matter that you can imagine some situation where that doesn’t happen, it means that the word settlers means kicking someone out of their home so you can live there.
I asked you to limit your search for peaceful settlers to 1900+ to make life easier on you since it’s shorter time and there’s lots of sources. If you can find a good example before then I’m open to it. The only thing I can think of is Iceland but that’s contentious because there’s the context of controlling fishing and trade routes even though there weren’t people living there permanently (this consensus is changing still and has changed in my lifetime).
Just for clarity, the word settlers came into use in the early 1600s, so examples of settlers from before then wouldn’t really be relevant since we’re talking about the meaning of the word.
What would convince you that you’re wrong and that the settlers are by definition part of the displacement of some other group? Would it be academic work?
So no?
It ought to be easy! We’re talking about what words mean to people now, surely there’s an example of what you’re saying in the last 124 years that would reenforce the meaning you claim everyone understands!
Come on! Just one example of settlers bumbling their way into uninhabited land and living peacefully with the people around them in the last one and a quarter century!
In place of the dictionary, I recommend you read the book settlers instead.
I’m sorry, if you start with a dictionary definition you’re required to use the five paragraph format and start each one with a topic sentence.
Surely you aren’t seriously suggesting that because the dictionary doesn’t explain the etymology, nuance and history that you have yourself recognized, said nuance, etymology and history doesn’t exist?
That because the dictionary doesn’t say that settlers violently dispossess people of their homes it isn’t so?
May I see even one example of that from (let’s just keep it short, we don’t care about history here, right?) the last 124 years?
That ought to be easy. One example since 1900 of settlers just happening to come across a place to live without pushing some other population out or disrupting their lives or whatever.
Why has the negative connotation of the word settlers been removed among people in the United States?
Why has the negative connotation been removed in the state whose subjugation of other nations literally inspired Hitler?
Settlers is absolutely pinpoint precise. There isn’t a need for a different word to describe what’s going on.
Settlers is not a superset of colonizers.
Hypothetical situations don’t matter. There’s no grand council of English language administration that considers every bizarre possibility and issues proclamations regarding them.
The words settler and colonist in science fiction were chosen to invoke our history and imply the question of weather human expansion beyond earth was right at best and used to sell space trades to the same people buying cowboy trades at worst.
Words don’t properly convey their own meaning.
People do when they use them.
Rather than lament the way you perceive the present understanding in absolutes, why not start using the word settlers appropriately: preceded a cuss or followed by spitting.
If you think people don’t understand how the word settlers conveys historical meaning then do something about it instead of accepting your own transport to another grammatical space wherein you colonize the meaning and context of other words.
I know of one example of settlers moving into unoccupied land and that claim is disputed.
If in all but one (possibly) circumstance the situation is the same then is the meaning tainted? No. Of course not. Settlers and settlement violently disrupt and displace the occupants of land in order to claim it for their own.
In the context of Israel, settlers is the best word because Israel is a settler colonial state.
Why do you think a different word is needed?
You don’t need to say any of that because they’re already settlers. They’re already all those things because that’s what a settler is.
There is no need for another word.
No. People coming to the us and integrating into American culture (even if it’s not recognized by the law) aren’t settlers.
A person wrote a book about this called “settlers”. You can read it.
They’re settlers. What they do is violently expel people from their homes in order to claim it for themselves.
Settlers are people who do that.
There’s no need to stop calling them the word that correctly describes what they do.
So I gotta ask…
What’s with calling the Israeli settlers immigrants?
There’s a decent amount of people posting in this thread who have some kind of mental block that keeps them from recognizing settlers as inherently violent and dispossessive, and I kinda understand that from liberals, they’re wrong and displaying a crazy amount of chauvinism but I at least can understand how they came to believe what they do. but what’s up with your immigrant rhetoric?
Mormon settlers migrating to the salt lake valley were moving into Mexican territory during the Mexican American war and fighting on the American side.
They werent immigrants to mexico any more than Israelis are immigrants to Palestine.
They were settlers taking over a piece of land during a war.
Israelis are not immigrants going to a new nation, they’re settlers pushing people out of their homes and taking territory during a war.
The difference is that immigrants go through some process to get citizenship in the place they’re moving to. Immigrants are subject to the laws and norms of their new home country.
Mormon settlers moving into the salt lake valley and Israelis are not immigrants because rather than gain citizenship in Mexico or Palestine they instead actively and violently displace the people and borders to either expand their own nation or create a new one.
Settlers from Europe could never have coexisted with first peoples.
They couldn’t do that because their mode of living, as well as the pressures they were under from their home countries would never have allowed it.
It is literally not possible to say “uhh, George, I know there’s all these great resources you want in the new world, but we decided to instead live as Cherokee. Bye now!” and not face either reprisal or replacement with new settlers who will comply with the demands of their home countries.
You said Israeli settlers are just immigrants and implied that Israel’s unwillingness to punish its immigrants is unique.
In my reply I compared Israeli settlers and American Mormon settlers who both cannot be called immigrants because they’re not moving into and integrating into an existing nation, but pushing that nations people out in order to create a new nation or expand an existing one.
Settlement and immigration are wildly different things.
Ah thanks for clarifying that. I wasn’t aware that Joseph smiths followers integrated into Mexico and that Israeli settlers are really just Palestinians.
They followed those nations norms and laws around immigration, right?
Right?
Who can send settlers into the desert? Where is the desert empty? Who can have them get along with the native population? Has that ever happened?
That’s… what settlers are.
The land isn’t unoccupied. The people who were there before are going to be a constant problem for the settlers because they will always resent being pushed out of their homes.
The settlers have to kill or permanently displace the people who lived in the land they’re trying to settle in order to settle it.
That’s what the process is.
Theyre settlers.
They’re violently displacing and killing the people on the land they want to settle.
you really might not.
before there were mobile phones there was analog dtmf wired telephones. they replaced pulse dialing and allowed for all kinds of additional signalling and triggering. ring a bell, operate a relay, kick people off so you could call the president, entire automated analog switching centers, you name it.
when mobile networks came on the scene there were all sorts of additional triggers but because the (second gen? the ones that could do sms) signals were actually digital, there was a much wider array of possibilities. dtmf had a handful of frequencies it supported and if you wanted to do something more you had to basically make sure the entire network you were using could send, transport and receive those frequencies.
now imagine instead of sixteen combinations of frequencies played at the same time you have access to thousands of possible triggers. once you have simple stuff like the basic receiving of text and lighting a led or playing one of several legally distinct jingles covered, you could do do much more. and people did. there were all kinds of things pagers could do through combinations of local interface and digital communication with a cell tower, all mediated through a handful of baseband chips on the pager pcb that could have the pins for stuff they wouldn’t be used for disconnected.
but how would you make a pager set off an explosive?
well, the same way you use a casio f91w wristwatch to. you use its built in functionality (the speaker when the alarm goes off) to trigger a battery that can deliver enough electricity into a resistor to heat it up enough to make your (primary) explosive detonate.
in the case of a pager, those baseband chips have all kinds of on and off switching built in. it’s not hard to imagine that basic, out of the box functionality would include pulling a pin high when it gets “*97” or some such. now tie that pin to the base of a transistor across the positive and negative terminals of the battery and sitting against a little petn and you got yourself a remotely triggered explosive.
you wouldn’t even need a pcb.
there’s probably a lot of stuff thats incorrect in this reply. it’s late and this is off the dome.