This is Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality—my attempt to make myself, and all of you out there in SubStackLand, smarter by writing where I have Value Above Replacement and shutting up where I do not… Time for a "Land Acknowledgement"!The SubStack Attempt to Avoid the ClickBait-Rage Trap Is Failing: The argument against the idea that SubStack needed to develop a social-media #discoverability layer in order to reach appropriate...
The SubStack Attempt to Avoid the ClickBait-Rage Trap Is Failing: The argument against the idea that SubStack needed to develop a social-media #discoverability layer in order to reach appropriate audience scale was that to drink from that cap was to drink from a poisoned chalice that would lead to the death of reason and discussion…This morning Matt Yglesias provides a powerful data point strengthening that argument. He finds the best use of his time to be to issue a SubStack note stating that “The United States of America is not ‘occupied Turtle Island’”, and goes on to say that the “movement to delegitimize the United States of America… needs to be contested by American liberals…” How are American liberals to contest it? They are, he says, to do it by invoking a so-called “Sister Souljah” moment, and ostentatiously refusing to do “land acknowledgements”. Me? I think we should do land acknowledgements right. For example: In 1861 U.S. soldiers wrongfully accused Cochise, Chief of the Chiricahua Apache, of abducting a boy. Botched negotiations led to hostage-taking, executions, and an eleven-year mobile guerrilla war across southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico, with Cochise and Mangas Colorados leading the maneuvering and fighting with small, fast bands, deep local knowledge, and selective violence: ambushes of patrols and stage routes, rapid dispersal after strikes, and control of water and passes. The aim was not to hold towns but to impose constant cost on military columns and settlers, deny safe movement, and preserve autonomous living space. In 1872, U.S. General Oliver Otis Howard gave up the U.S. Army’s campaign, and established the Chiricahua Reservation: a reservation in the tribe’s place, not a distant relocation, recognizing Cochise’s authority and military strength. In honor and admiration of their fight and their success—of those who, when relationships between colonial settlers and previous inhabitants degenerated into the unfortunate human social practice of war, were highly effective and punched well above their numerical weight in the use of deadly violence against U.S. military personnel and civilian colonizers in ways their understanding of that human social practice allowed—we have since the mid-1980s had: the AH-64 Apache, the U.S. Army’s primary attack helicopter, built around survivability and precision fires, pairing a nose‑mounted sensor suite with armored, redundant systems and powerful engines for low‑level combat in bad weather and at night:
We have named this helicopter thus to call to the forefront of our minds the memory of what Cochise, Mangas Colorados, and the Chiricahua Apache warriors did and suffered between 1861 and 1872. We hope that calling their deeds to the forefront of our minds will help us acquire some of their virtues today, to maintain and spread human freedom. Let me back up: I wake up this morning to see John Quiggin correctly calling bullshit on Matthew Yglesias:
Matthew Yglesias:
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Time for a "Land Acknowledgement"!
Thursday, 4 December 2025
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