@studentofearth @studentofearth

"Creating and maintaining hostilities between parties is a effective tactic of corporate interests."

Or, let's say, tactic of authoritarian interests, generally.

They didn't kill Malcom X or MLK until they started making appeals for inclusion.

They didn't try to kill Earth First! activists until they started talking to loggers.

Name calling helps to diminish the commonality of the human experience and the potential to build communication bridges. Agent provocateurs are on both sides of the major conflict to keep the disdain for the others at the forefront of our thought and actions. We do not have to fall into their plans by playing out the us vs them roles.

Definitely agree.

If you start out on the assumption that people who disagree with you on one or another matter are racist knuckle-dragging cretinous dupes who would no doubt lack the ability, were they even to try, to comprehend or accept your enlightened view as to what's good for them... Well, not much in the way of finding common ground or effective action is likely to result.

And you end up having done the authoritarians' work for them.

Oregon's first settlements were created with corporate money and it has been a progression of minority (meaning small number not ethnicity) voices of individuals who created a progressive leaning state.

What corporate money? Hudson's Bay Company? After early day traders, trappers and missionaries the big influx of settlement from the 1840's was individual white families coming on their own initiative. There were few natives left to displace in the Willamette Valley as they had almost wiped out by disease by around 1840. Situation was different in Southern Oregon where there initially an uneasy co-existence that later flared into open conflict (Rogue Indian Wars).

As for 'progressive' - well, it's generally a small but motivated minority that makes things happen in any society and yes, Oregon's early adoption of such things as the initiative petition system and universal suffrage stand out. History of anti Asian discrimination not so much.

Unfortunately, much of the previous accomplishments have been undermined or undone more recently under the woke-authoritarianism of the likes of Kate Brown and Ted Wheeler. Who could give a shit less what people in Burns or Baker or Brookings think of them as long as the Good Germans Oregonians in their Blue enclaves continue to put up with their corruption, forever lockdowns, indoctrination of kids with insanity like Critical Race Theory and enablement of Antifa and Burn Loot Murder and allow them to remain in power.

Scholars have deliberated about the factors that contributed to the “Oregon fever” of the 1840s. Geographer William Bowen discounts the themes often recited in Fourth of July speeches that credit the patriotic idealism of immigrants and their “inspired nationalism” to win Oregon from the British. He was inclined toward a more conventional list of motives: the lingering effects of the Panic of 1837; several years of flooding in Missouri, Iowa, and Illinois; the lure of free land; the promise of economic betterment; the quest for adventure and excitement; and the promise of physical health. Chronic sickness and disease in the Mississippi Valley, Bowen concludes, rank ahead of economic considerations and all other factors as motives for people moving to Oregon. Other scholars, including historian Carlos Schwantes, argue that agrarian societies equate wealth with landholding and that hard-pressed midwestern farmers found the promise of abundant and fertile land a sufficient attraction to undertake the arduous two-thousand-mile journey to the Willamette Valley.

They came with a rush. During his reconnaissance of the Oregon Country in 1841, Charles Wilkes estimated a population of between 700 and 800 “whites, Canadians, and half breeds.” Of that number, about 150 were Americans, most of them associated with the mission settlements at Willamette Falls and farther up the valley. By the early 1840s, HBC personnel who had lived in the region for nearly two decades were amazed at the number of overlanders suddenly in their midst. A company trader at Fort Nez Perces on the Walla Walla River reported that the Americans were getting “as thick as Mosquitoes in this part of the world.” When the large immigrant group known as the Great Migration arrived in the Willamette Valley in 1843—approximately nine hundred people from Missouri and the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys—McLoughlin expressed alarm that the country was “settling fast.”

The growth of Oregon City provides an example of the transformation taking place in the valley. Two years after McLoughlin established a land claim at Willamette Falls in 1829, the HBC opened a sawmill at the site. The Methodists then established a mission at the falls, and the settlement grew from a single building in 1840 to several more early in 1843. The newly named Oregon City had seventy-five structures by the close of the year. In the New York Weekly Herald in 1844, Peter J. Burnett reported that the settlement had four stores, two sawmills, one gristmill, and another under construction. “There is quite a little village here,” he wrote. When Joel Palmer arrived in 1845, he reported that Oregon City had taken on the appearance of a village of about a hundred houses, “most of them not only commodious, but neat.” The town had three hundred residents, two conspicuous public buildings—a Methodist church and a Catholic chapel—and the usual array of services.

With only a remnant of the Kalapuyan people still living in the Willamette Valley, the newcomers experienced little resistance as they staked out generous land claims for themselves. Euro-American population increased considerably in the Willamette Valley from 1843 to 1860: to 1,500 in 1843; 6,000 in 1845; 9,083 in 1849; 13,294 in 1850; and 52,000 in 1860. It is nearly impossible to estimate Oregon’s Native population based on the first territorial census in 1850. The Bureau of the Census distributed confusing instructions about counting Indian people, and their populations were in sharp decline. In the Willamette Valley, geographer William Bowen estimates a Kalapuya population of 500 people.

Source: Oregon History Project

Oregon Constitution Article One

Section 1. Natural rights inherent in people.

We declare that all men, when they form a social compact are equal in right: that all power is inherent in the people, and all free governments are founded on their authority, and instituted for their peace, safety, and happiness; and they have at all times a right to alter, reform, or abolish the government in such manner as they may think proper. —

Now *that's* progressive.

#2.2.1 is a effective tactic of corporate interests. Name calling helps to diminish the commonality of the human experience and the potential to build communication bridges. Agent provocateurs are on both sides of the major conflict to keep the disdain for the others at the forefront of our thought and actions. We do not have to fall into their plans by playing out the us vs them roles.

Oregon's first settlements were created with corporate money and it has been a progression of minority (meaning small number not ethnicity) voices of individuals who created a progressive leaning state. Good, glad you provided testimony for the record. Did you also work at creating bridges of communication?