Actually I looked up the real story of Johnny Appleseed and he was more about making hard cider and selling land. 🙃

  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    IIRC

    You don’t recall correctly, and I have no idea where you got that information. Appleseed actually was a successful businessman who bought some land, owning about 1200 acres (~5 km2), but by all accounts he was a genuinely good person, and I’ve never heard what you’re saying (and not substantiating) that he did.

    • GhostPain@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Dude, who knows where I saw it but Honest Opinion says he’s a useful idiot and you’re saying he’s a successful businessman who bought land, completely ignoring the whole homestead laws of the day.

      I’m too old and cynical to buy “he was a good person” in the US during that time frame. Sorry, not gonna happen.

    • papalonian@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Ah but you see, their comment has the message of “capitalism bad”, so it doesn’t really matter if what they wrote is true.

      • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        I’d go even further and say that this is more generic than capitalism/anticapitalism wish fulfillment. It’s a desire to speak truth to power but without any of the effort or sincere curiosity to learn what that truth is. To have that truth condensed onto a smaller and smaller spoon until you don’t even realize you’re being spoonfed at all is the ideal.

    • FlexibleToast@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      I thought he made his name by basically being a consultant and helping others plant their trees. The law at the time was you had to grow X number of apple trees and the land was yours. That was because apple trees take multiple years to grow so it proved you were taking care of the land for multiple years.

      • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        Yeah, Appleseed would generally move ahead of pioneers and start nurseries on land he thought would be settled. It wasn’t some land shakedown scam like the original comment is implying; it was a very useful service that Appleseed would even forego payment for to those who couldn’t afford it. Apples were a dietary staple on the frontier, often used for bartering, and sometimes, as you said, you even legally needed an orchard.

        • in_my_honest_opinion@piefed.social
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          2 days ago

          Well it was useful for the pioneers, however you have to acknowledge the massive genocide that was committed to make that land “available” to those same “pioneers”.

          Apples were a dietary staple in so much as they could be brewed into cider and the resulting mash was then used to bulk up food stocks as feed for invasive farm animals.

          Your comments don’t seem to address any of this. Why is that?

          • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
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            2 days ago

            Your comments don’t seem to address any of this. Why is that?

            Because that’s not at all what the original comment was about. Why am I expected to offer up a treatise on the consequences of apples on the American frontier in order to debunk someone purporting – unsubstantiated and evidently with no regard for the truth – that Appleseed was running “a land grab scam based on the laws of the time”?

            Edit: I guess since the original comment mentioned it, I could mention the obvious that, no shit, this was stolen land just like effectively every parcel of US land. But what good does this do our discussion of Appleseed’s character as an alleged scam artist? It’s generally understood that Appleseed had a very good relationship with the Native Americans he encountered, and yes, sometimes you can be an overall well-meaning person while advancing a deeply unethical system.