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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27798 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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The continuing saga of Aboriginal issues in Australia!

You may recall that in 2023 Australia had a referendum on changing the constitution to attach a permanent Aboriginal advisory body to parliament. That referendum was rejected around 60-40. We discussed it here at the time, and since then I've been keeping an eye on the issue. Since then, many state governments have stated their intention to go ahead with state-level bodies, or even with 'treaty'.

'Treaty', in the context of Aboriginal activism in Australia, is a catch-all term for bilateral agreements between state and federal governments and indigenous communities. Whether or not this is a good idea tends to be heavily disputed, with the left generally lining up behind 'yes', and the right behind 'no'.

Anyway, I bring this up because just last week, in Australia's most progressive state, Victoria, the Yoorrook Report was just published.

This is the report of a body called the Yoorrook Justice Commission, a body set up in this state with public funds whose purpose is to give a report on indigenous issues in the state. They call this 'truth-telling' (and indeed 'Voice, Treaty, Truth' was the slogan of the larger movement for a while), though whether or not the publications they put out are true is, well, part of the whole issue.

Here is the summary of their report.

You can skip most of the first half - the important part is their hundred recommendations, starting from page 28 of the PDF, all beginning with the very demanding phrase 'the Victorian Government must...'

This puts the Victorian government in a somewhat difficult position. They love the symbolism of being progressive on Aboriginal issues, and indeed are currently legislating for a more permanent indigenous advisory body to parliament. However, the actual recommendations of the Yoorrook Report are very expensive, very complex, and in many cases blatantly unreasonable, at least to my eyes. Some examples would include recommendations 4 (a portion of all land, water, and natural-resource-related revenues should be allocated to indigenous peoples), 21 (land transfers), 24 (reverse burden of proof for native land title), 41 (recognise waterways as legal persons and appoint indigenous peoples as their representatives, like that river in New Zealand), 54 (decolonise school libraries by removing offensive books), 66-7 (universities must permanently fund additional Aboriginal support services and 'recompense First Peoples staff for the 'colonial load' they carry'), and 96 (establish a permanent Aboriginal representative body 'with powers at all levels of political and policy decision making'). Needless to say the recommendations taken as a whole are both expensive and politically impossible, especially since even Victoria rejected the Voice 55-45.

Possibly from Yoorrook's perspective the idea is just to open with a maximal demand that they can then negotiate down from; or possibly it's to deliberately make demands that cannot possibly be satisfied so that there will remain a need for activists in this space. From the state government's perspective it's tricky, because they will want to appear responsive and sympathetic, but not want to actually do all this. I predict that they will accept a couple of the cheaper, more fig-leaf recommendations and ignore the rest, maintaining a status quo where we engage in symbolic acts of recognition and guilt but nothing more, and the Aboriginal rights industry, so to speak, continues to perpetuate itself.

If the Victorian Liberals (the state branch of our centre-right party) were more on the ball, I might have expected them to politically profit from this and make a good bid at the next election, but unfortunately the Victorian Liberals are in shambles and have been for some time, and the recent smashing of the federal Liberal party at the last election doesn't make it look good for them either.

Is it possible the body writing this is full of true believers who actually think they’ll get all this crap?

Very likely. Also they could be stupid drama queens with poor judgement.

For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidia_Thorpe

In a June 2022 interview, Thorpe said that the parliament has "no permission to be here [in Australia]" and that she’s a parliament member "only" so she can "infiltrate" the "colonial project." She added that the Australian flag had "no permission to be" in the land. Aboriginal, conservative senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price denounced Thorpe's comments as "divisive" and "childish," and called for her dismissal from the parliament.[37]

In August 2022, during her swearing-in ceremony, Thorpe added the words "the colonising" in the required Oath of Allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II, saying

"I Lydia Thorpe do solemnly and sincerely affirm and declare that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to the colonising Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Australia, Her heirs and successors according to law."[38]

Thorpe was immediately criticised by fellow senators. After an instruction by Labor the President of the Australian Senate Sue Lines and interjections from others that the oath must be taken word-by-word, Thorpe recited the pledge once more, this time omitting the two words.[39][40]

On 16 April 2023, footage emerged of Thorpe in a verbal altercation with men outside a Melbourne strip club.[41] Thorpe was filmed telling a number of people they had a "small penis" and were "marked". She claimed the men provoked the altercation by harassing her.[42] The manager of the club claimed she provoked the incident by approaching white patrons, telling them they had "stolen her land;" he announced he was banning Thorpe from the club "for life."

While holding the justice portfolio for the Greens party and serving on the joint parliamentary law-enforcement committee, Thorpe was in a relationship with Dean Martin, ex-president of the Rebels outlaw biker gang. Martin had been president of the Rebels in Victoria, and had been charged and pleaded guilty to liquor offences in 2013.[50] As a member of the committee, Thorpe became privy to confidential briefings about motorcycle gangs and organised crime. She had not disclosed the relationship, which was only revealed when her staff, who became aware of the relationship in mid-2021, notified party leader Adam Bandt's office and an independent parliamentary authority.

It just keeps going, it's a national disgrace that this individual is still a Senator. But this is the intellectual calibre of many in the indigenous movement, not totally unrepresentative:

On 21 October 2024, Thorpe heckled King Charles III by shouting "This is not your land, you are not my King" and making claims of genocide against "our people", after he finished an address at Australia's Parliament House, as part of his royal visit to Australia. As she was escorted away by security, she was heard yelling "Fuck the Colony".

In the aftermath of the incident, she was asked about the oath she had recited and signed during her swearing-in process, in which she had sworn allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II and "her heirs". Thorpe claimed she had instead said "her hairs". Constitutional law expert Anne Twomey stated in response that the signed oath would have stated "heirs", and that the presiding officer could exclude Senator Thorpe if they believed a valid oath had not been sworn.[71]

Simon Birmingham, leader of the opposition in the Senate, announced that the coalition is considering "legal opinions" on the validity of the senator's constitutional duty of affirmation. Thorpe, subsequently, revised her claim, stating that, when she was being sworn in as a senator, she "mispronounced" heirs as hairs, "without meaning to do so", and did not do it deliberately. In the statement, she added that "they can't get rid of me," pointing out she's "got another three and a half years [of service in the Senate]."

Thorpe claimed she had instead said "her hairs". Constitutional law expert Anne Twomey stated in response that the signed oath would have stated "heirs", and that the presiding officer could exclude Senator Thorpe if they believed a valid oath had not been sworn.

Does Australia not include a portion of their oath which reads "that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion" or something to that effect?

I mean yes oaths are just words which are just hot air until someone decides they mean something, but still. For example, on US federal forms, the point is not to catch the honest (e.g., on the US citizenship form the question which reads "Have you ever been a member of, involved in, or in any way associated with any Communist or totalitarian party anywhere in the world?") but to punish the dishonest. The Honest Communist who reads that question and checks the box marked "yes" is not the target of the form, because he does not exist. The Dishonest Communist who checks the box marked "no" is the target of the form, because then three years later when it comes out that yes he was a member of the Marxist International Domestic Workers Political Activism Party (of Lenin) of Farlandia, you can yoink his citizenship for lying on the form.

In this case the context is also that most senators dislike that oath and took it insincerely. If you look at the recording of Thorpe swearing the oath and making a fuss, the other senators in the room were rolling their eyes. One commented, "None of us like it", and a minister afterwards called the oath "archaic and ridiculous".

Australian parliamentarians are legally required to swear an oath to the Queen (as it was at the time; it's now the King) when they take office, but it is safe to say that very few of them actually believe the oath or take it remotely seriously. This is from 2016, but over half of them support a republic (yes, this is significantly out of step with popular opinion, politicians as a class are often unrepresentative), and I think it's fair to say that on a plain reading of the oath, bearing true allegiance to his majesty and his heirs and successors would be incompatible with wanting to abolish him.

But none of them take it seriously. We are not a nation that takes oaths seriously.

(I would not single out Australia in this respect - I think the West in general has largely given up on oaths. My favourite example of this, actually, is that becoming an American citizen requires a person to explicitly renounce any other citizenship or allegiance, and yet large numbers of people become American citizens while retaining prior citizenships. Nobody cares.)

I think back in the day it was so manifestly obvious that swearing an oath meant you had to stand by it they never encoded such a section. In any event she could say 'i take this obligation freely and sincerely' in her usual overtly insincere and obnoxious manner. Root problem isn't solved. In the 1930s a fair few Wehrmacht officers felt restricted from plotting against Hitler because they swore an oath to him. It was not on! People would go around saying 'my word is my bond'.

In any event she did sign the paper so she formally ticked the box. Oaths are just box-ticking these days, no more meaningful than terms and conditions for free software, no more meaningful than the King's Champion who used to ride up, throw down a gauntlet and challenge anyone who disputed the new monarch's right to rule in single combat. He's still there of course, just holds a standard now.

For what it's worth, at least, Thorpe only got in because she was on a bizarre Greens senate ticket, and there is no way in hell she is getting re-elected.

I do think that after she refused to take the senatorial oath, and then, when pressed, said it in an obviously insincere way (and admitted that insincerity on the record afterwards), she should have disqualified herself from taking her seat. There is a valid procedural issue there - she is verifiably not in good faith.

Lidia Thorpe is the whitest black person I’ve ever seen, and I’m old enough to remember Rachel Dolezal.

Do the noble Aboriginal people not have some kind of paper bag test they can use to keep these carpetbaggers out?

No, because there's no umbrella Aboriginal organisation that can police that. It's not like the Maori in New Zealand, who do have their own government-like organisation that can assess who is and who is not Maori.

In theory it's the three part test (descended from Aboriginals, identifies as Aboriginal, is recognised by the Aboriginal community), but as it's hard to apply in practice, most of the time it's just self-identification. This has led to absurdities like people with only tiny amounts of Aboriginal ancestry, who look and sound exactly the same as Anglo people, identifying as a proud Aboriginal man or woman.

I raise you Michael Mansell.

I raise you Michael Mansell.

Confident that they could, and so never having asked if they should, Australian eugenics scientists continue to pursue their goal of creating the whitest oppressed black person to ever live.

Interestingly this is at least partly because Australian Aboriginal genes are even more recessive than white genetics. I often found that strange, since it’s not typically the case with cross breeds of any other sort - any geneticists amateur or otherwise on themotte care to enlighten me why this is?

I could be wrong, but my understanding is that the majority of white-passing "aboriginals" simply have negligible or <10% Caucasian ancestry. At that point, what's surprising about the fact that they look white?

Hapas just look white. 90% of the Cherokee just look white. Most white-hispanic babies look white. White middle easterner crosses too, but in fairness middle easterners are pretty white looking already(although I know a Maronite/Italian couple whose kids look, on average, whiter than either of them). Even the white/black crosses you're probably thinking of look more white than the popular portrayal; America's definition of 'black' just encompasses people of mixed ancestry. There are other countries, like South Africa and much of Latin America, where that's not the case and they're not perceived as looking black.

I don't think the the concept of more or less recessive phenotypes is particularly valid in the first place. Sure, hair and eye color are pretty much Mendelian, and I've noticed a few other discrete traits that seem to be pretty dominant/recessive (Hapas always seem to have the epicanthic fold and Blasians usually have darker skin than the median of their parents), but most traits seem to average out. The American understanding of White features being "recessive", particularly to Black features, probably derives from the existing admixture in the Black population (thus creating a broader range of "Black" phenotypes) and general cultural norms of hypodescent (the "one drop rule").

Interestingly this is at least partly because Australian Aboriginal genes are even more recessive than white genetics.

Looked this up but couldn’t find anything on it. If it is true might be a quirk of their archaic human ancestry.

I have at least heard the idea from Aboriginal people directly, though the way they framed it to me was in terms of having 'weak genes'. That said, I do not rate the scientific literacy of the person who told me that at all, so I have no idea if it's actually true, or just an excuse one might tell oneself on seeing one's pale skin.

Thanks for the info!

Very interesting stuff.

Never half ass a genocide. One of the most important lessons of history.

Even in places like Tasmania where the genocide was arguably complete the supply of self identified indigenous still somehow emerged

Tasmania is an interesting one because it's a case of an almost accidental genocide. The Palawa were quite few in number to begin with, and devastated by disease. They then also decided to set about attacking European settlers in raids, and, because colonial government was fairly weak, the settlers tended to band together and counter-raid them, and since the settlers had guns and the Palawa had sharpened sticks, the results were fairly predictable. By the time the colonial government got together enough to locate and resettle the survivors, there were only a few hundred left, and they didn't last.

Today the Palawa are a rare example of an ethnic group that exists purely as mixed-race. There are no people of pure Palawa descent left in existence - they are all people of mixed Palawa-European heritage, and almost all of them pass as white. Examples today would include Michael Mansell, whom I just mentioned, Marcus Windhager, Alison Overeem, Garry Deverell, and so on. All of them, at a glance, are obviously white or Anglo. However, it is supposed to be racist to question a person's Aboriginality, especially if their appearance makes them plainly white.

Deverell, actually, wrote a piece related to Yoorrook last year that hit many of the same notes as this year's report, albeit focused specifically on churches. The 14 aspirations he links are conspicuously unreasonable, including that every Anglican organisation in the state commit itself to employing Aboriginals as 5% or more of its workforce (bear in mind that Aboriginals are less than 1% the population of Victoria); that all properties granted to the church by the government be made freely available for Aboriginal use and that in the event of any such property being sold, Aboriginal groups with a traditional claim receive it for free; that 15% of the sale of any other church properties be given to Aboriginal people directly as reparations; and that all parishes pay 5% or more of their budgets to local Aboriginal groups. It is primarily a demand for money.

The Anglican response to this, of course, was "no".

Do the Anglicans have the cash to give much? My impression is that while, like most established churches in the west, they have substantial real estate holdings, they don't have enough liquidity to even cover expenses and are reliant on generally-earmarked investments to keep the lights on, pay salaries, etc.

I think that generally holds true for older, more established churches, like Catholics and Anglicans. They tend to be asset-rich and cash-poor, all the more so because many of the most conspicuous assets have substantial maintenance costs. There's a reason why most cathedrals you visit have donation boxes for upkeep, because just having a cathedral is a major ongoing expense.

Younger or more 'low church' groups often don't have this issue. If your church is run out of a big concrete block, or even a warehouse or something, you can enjoy much lower operating costs. You may just rent the building and be quite mobile, or if you own it, it can much more easily be shared with others or rented out for an additional income stream. Traditional church buildings don't have that flexibility.

I note that Deverell's fourteen aspirations put a particular emphasis on property sales, which I take as reflecting the reality that the Anglicans are declining in numbers and are therefore regularly selling church buildings that are no longer used in sufficient numbers to justify their upkeep. The same is true of Uniting, though somewhat less so of Catholics (who have done better at buoying their numbers through migration). Probably there's opportunity there?

Property sales were, to my knowledge, required from the churches to fund compensation about the sexual abuse scandals - or at least, that's what the Anglicans and Uniting did. They just don't have the cash on hand.

Anyway, yes, in general the stereotype that the churches are rich is misleading. The churches often have a lot of valuable stuff, if only because they are very old and have accumulated property intergenerationally, but their actual budgets are much more shoestring than one would expect.

Complete sidenote but I read Alison Overeem as Alistair Overeem and was overcome for a moment with confusion about ethnicity.

I know you're tongue in cheek with this, but man I don't like that the lesson being taught internationally right now is: "If even a single member of a particular ethnic group survives, and your ancestors did something oppressive to their ancestors hundreds of years ago, they will use this to extract reparations from you in perpetuity and will never let you forget what happened."

Similar logic for why, if you depose a monarch, you have to kill off their entire extended family, lest some loyalists later track down their teenage second cousin thrice removed and try to restore them to the throne.

We have a few social techs for allowing non-genocidal acclimation of oppressed populations but when they can all be trivially overridden by the logic that "any observed inequality in outcomes is proof positive of ongoing oppression which must be rectified" then guess what comes back on the menu.

Perhaps we can counter that logic by pointing out that whatever mechanism allows guilt to flow forward in time should also allow credit and pride to flow forward. So sure, maybe my great great great grandpappy beat some villagers that one time, but my family saved an awful lot of drowning children over the years too, so maybe it balances out.

Maybe, but it doesn't seem like most of these efforts get very far.

The real lesson is actually 'if you oppress a group of low performers you must never stop. If you grow tired of oppression then leave no survivors, but only if they are low performers. It's fine to just liberate Chinamen or Ashkenazim because they'll catch up without really needing the help their more unhinged activists demand.'

No that is not the lesson, there is nothing to fear from a "low performer". What you need to fear is the person or group who you dismissed as low performing but have the potential to not be, because if you fuck em there is a good chance they'll fuck you back and you will deserve it.

They can TRY to fuck you back, but they usually lack competence organically, which is why they failed in the first place. They only succeed because their nominal allies of convenience prefer wielding them as cudgels against their proximate enemy. White liberals play the oppression meta to discredit enemies, not to materially advance the cause of their pet projects. Without external support these low performers default to the limit of their capability.

They mostly have not done this. The black and indigenous minorities who are poor performers have tried; the once-oppressed Chinese have been content with their rising standards of living.

the once-oppressed Chinese have been content with their rising standards of living.

isn't the US in a fentanyl epidemic?, last I heard it came to the US through Cartels that bought the necessary precursors from the Chinese.

Have not doesn't mean they will not.

Conceptually, I think the choice of "grifting" has a fairly limited cap on median outcomes. Limited cases might exist, but it's hard to sell indefinite affirmative action or reparations for a minority doing better than the median. I can't see democratic will supporting that for long, and it's unpopular even when isolated exceptions come up: Elizabeth Warren, or affirmative action for Obama's kids applying to college.

Chinese-Americans seem to have taken the "work hard and naturally do better than the median" option, which I think sounds better if it's available.

They tried with "Stop Asian Hate," but it turned out that Asians are doing better than whites by most measures and the people beating Chinese grandmas for bus money aren't white. So I think we've already seen how such a campaign would pan out (i.e. not at all).

I mean, I can envision an America where Asians run black-like racial advocacy. It's just not very plausible.

Its just the racial meta. If Asians could only play that game, they would, but they can play the competence game and achieve greater outcomes. The sympathy game is a means of last resort, played only because there are no other cards to play. Nigerian immigrants in Virginia can play both sides of the fence till BLM figures out a way to kick them out fully and get ADOS as a special protected class without the inconvenient racialization allowing actual high performers to cosplay as oppressed.

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Low performers are irrelevant, it's high performers that are dangerous. Who is more dangerous as a grudgebearer - Joshua VerbalIQbaum or Mgubu the Witless? Likewise it's not unreasonable for Chang, Zheng and much of the Maths Olympiad phenotype to hold a grudge for their treatment in the 19th and early 20th century. You can always ignore Mgubu, he has no armoured brigades or advanced rhetoric.

Mgubu isn't smart enough to recognize when he's gotten the better deal. People of small hats mostly are, and for all of chairman Xi's attempts at becoming grand Chinaman of the race, people of slanted eyes are too.

Contrary to what @George_E_Hale said, this isn't an odd moment of bluntness for you, it's something you've been warned about before.

Drop this "this is just the way I talk" gimmick. You can say "Blacks aren't smart, but Jews and Chinese are," but phrasing it the way you did just reeks of "I'm an edgy ironic racist, hee hee hee." We've told you this already: being racist isn't prohibited, but you have to figure out how to spray your spittle in a polite manner, and if you find that difficult, that's intentional.

As opposed to 'Mgubu the witless'?

Aside from the parallelism in 'people of small hats/people of slanted eyes' it doesn't seem offensive in isolation either.

people of slanted eyes are too.

Are smart enough? I'm parsing your sentence but the general tone seems dismissive, whereas this seems complimentary. The slant eyes bit is an odd moment of bluntness for you.

Might be.

But you'd expect low performers to end up on the receiving end of the oppression more often than not.

It's fine to just liberate Chinamen or Ashkenazim

Looking at the current geopolitical situation, there may have been other downsides.

The moment attitude to China changed from "how do we keep them in eternal poverty and civil war" to anything else, Americans lost.

It's that simple. They're mostly one people, they were backward for historical reasons. They are 1/2 of the world's high average IQ population.

Had US presidents read more Lothrop Stoddard, this would never have happened.

Fuck propping up the USSR to keep Chinese down would have made sense.

As a non-American, I find the notion that America should permanently kneecap anyone who might contest their dominance very off-putting. If America isn't clever enough, organised enough or stable enough to compete with China on an even footing, why should it be in charge of the globe?

I would also argue that even America benefits from having an actual rival that can go toe-to-toe with it. When America was competing with the USSR, it had to be focused and cohesive and attractive to its citizens. When the USSR died and the USA was left without rivals, it seems to me that it sickened and started to alternate between flailing around and infighting. (The same of course applies to China in reverse).

I find the notion that America should permanently kneecap anyone who might contest their dominance very off-putting.

Americans, even pretty smart ones (e.g. eigenrobot ) earnestly believe their country's hegemony is good, proper and should be maintained indefinitely despite material reality. Is that not even more off-putting than wanting to preserve hegemony and actually doing something towards that aim?

Other people’s sincere patriotism is always a little annoying because it’s generally a claim that they consider their country’s ways strictly superior to mine. Nevertheless, I believe that love of country is (usually) a healthy love to have. What I object to is those people deciding to kneecap everyone else.

I don’t necessarily disapprove of tariffs on the other hand. People don’t have to cooperate with their rivals, just ideally refrain from stomping them to the ground. Of course tactics like market flooding make this philosophy more complex to hold to.

If America isn't clever enough, organised enough or stable enough to compete with China on an even footing, why should it be in charge of the globe?

Because the comparison isn't America to some hypothetical perfect country. It's a comparison to China, and China's government is pretty shitty. If you have to choose between China and America and you're not in the Politburo, America is loads better even if you don't like some of the things America does.

If you have to choose between China and America and you're not in the Politburo, America is loads better even if you don't like some of the things America does.

At the very least, this is not an indisputable fact. I've known various Chinese in and out of the country and I've visited briefly; China had much tighter security and much more overt control of information than America, but it was, basically, just another country. The people clearly didn't consider themselves to be living in a dystopia. Nor were they smiling and desperately terrified like somebody in North Korea.

Meanwhile @No_one is literally arguing that America should keep any potential competitors 'in eternal poverty and civil war'. That strikes me as pretty shitty! Like, probably America is still the country that most of us would prefer to win a battle of superpowers if it absolutely must come to that, but that calculus changes very quickly if America starts throwing its weight around even more than it already does.

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We have a few social techs for allowing non-genocidal acclimation of oppressed populations but when they can all be trivially overridden by the logic that "any observed inequality in outcomes is proof positive of ongoing oppression which must be rectified" then guess what comes back on the menu.

But note that this is a civil matter, caused by women/the womanly/progressives seeking more social power. Any nag they can get their hands on will be used, and nags are quite powerful in democracies (commonly referred to as "women's tears winning in the marketplace of ideas"). This doesn't even require women having the vote to work- universal male suffrage is generally enough, the 18th Amendment being a good example of that.

Not allowing credit and pride to flow forward in the same measure as guilt is also a woman thing, because women aren't generally wired to seek credit and pride in the first place- so it makes sense they would simply ignore it exists [at best] and actively seek to devalue it [at worst]. This is related to inherent male disposability in an environment of excess men, and right now there are simply too many men (which doesn't require you actually be a man; which is why women who function like men complain about this just as much as men themselves do).

The reason incomplete genocides could work in the past is because the rulers at the time were less vulnerable to them; the womanly could cry "no ethical consumption under capitalism" all they wanted, but at the end of the day the only way they have power [outside of a post-industrial society where women are productive in their own right] is if a man listens. And men with power are far less likely to bow to the demands of useless people.

Is this risk completely mitigated? Well, no- you can still have the Church organize moral movements, but even in that case the Church is made up of people and property, those people have names and addresses, and since they have organization they have pre-scribed outlets for any charity they might feel (it's their own money, so the moral hazard is avoided). In a democracy like this you can't pull off that kind of suppression.

No evolved solution to this currently exists. Men are not wired to resist women when they believe themselves rich enough to be above needing to put themselves first (for a bunch of complicated reasons), but this is not symmetric. Only once men have been exposed to being poor will this change, and that only lasts for a little while.

Like leaving a beaten opponent with one or two crappy cities in Civilization V. They'll denounce you at every turn for the rest of the game.

Possibly from Yoorrook's perspective the idea is just to open with a maximal demand that they can then negotiate down from; or possibly it's to deliberately make demands that cannot possibly be satisfied so that there will remain a need for activists in this space.

I have an informed source in this general area. According to my friend, the indigenous lobby generally is full of maximalists, they've always been into maximalism and word-games to achieve maximal gains rather than good-faith bargaining. That's what they've been doing with 'sovereignty never ceded', they've been treating it like a slogan for people to say and feel good about. Universities don't actually mean that the Australian government is not sovereign and Eora tribe is in control when they say it. They just mean 'I'm progressive and left wing and a Good Person'. But it's a way of seeding the idea that the government isn't actually in control for further usage later on. If you say it and repeat it enough, it becomes true.

There are similar games being played with 'First Nations'. Nation means race or ethnic group in English but it can also mean state. They wanted to insert into the constitution, IIRC, recognition of First Nations and they said 'oh this is just for aesthetic purposes, recognition, just being a Good Person'. This got watered down in the public referendum question since the more sensible white lawyers saw through this immediately, but that's what the activists wanted. Later on, when there's a friendly High Court, the idea was to reimagine it to meaning First Nations as a political entity still around today, so then they can get a Treaty and even more gains. There's no such thing as a compromise with these people (exceptions exist obviously), only an endless struggle.

That's what they've been doing with 'sovereignty never ceded', they've been treating it like a slogan for people to say and feel good about.

My lasting frustration with 'sovereignty' dialogue in Australia has been the steadfast refusal of the indigenous lobby to ever define exactly what it is, or what they think it means. These examples are pretty representative - there's a lot of waffle about a spiritual connection to land but it is not remotely clear what that means in practical terms, or what it is that they think they need but do not have. If sovereignty is a spiritual sense of oneness with the land, in what sense do they currently lack it? What do they think other people need to do in order for them to practice it? Or is the idea, sometimes hinted at but rarely expressed, that Aboriginal people are a different nation to Australia? If so, would some sort of secession movement be the result? The establishment of a new and independent nation on the Australian continent, alongside the Commonwealth of Australia? It doesn't seem like anybody wants that, if only because any such nation would be desperately poor and would survive only insofar as the Commonwealth props it up with foreign aid.

It just doesn't seem to mean anything. It's a slogan - 'sovereignty' is a word that people say, but there's no shared understanding, and it feels to me like a set of goalposts designed to be moved.

I don't go so far as assuming there's an intentionally nefarious conspiracy here or anything, but the indigenous lobby definitely has a lot of ambiguity in what it preaches.

There's also this trend towards this Schrodinger's box of Indigenous society in which it simultaneously was too primitive to have concepts like land ownership and losing a war but also simultaneously owned the land and actively worked on upkeeping. Depending on the particular circumstances the declared nature of Indigenous society flip flops a lot in Australian politics.

Going by my English intuitive sense of ‘sovereignty’, it would mean:

  1. They own all the land in Australia (and can therefore charge you rent for it or turf you off it in perpetuity).
  2. They are the top level of government, and entitled to make any laws or override any bodies that they please, in the same way that the UK parliament is sovereign.

Now, I would be very very surprised if they ever got that, and there be lots of hammering out of details over which tribes and what bodies own things and have rights. But you can admit those rights in theory and move towards them by e.g. saying that aborigines have the right to charge rent of say £10m per year to the Australian government and treat it as basically UBI. Or by giving them certain veto powers over government.

Ok, I have a perhaps stupid question. But my impression is that unlike Amerinds, who often have actual tribes and in some cases a continuation of the old tribal government, aboriginal Australians absolutely do not, only the names remain in most cases. So who would be the actual people that own the land and can overrule the Australian federal government? @RandomRanger @OliveTapenade

The short answer is no.

There are a small handful of tribal communities that are mostly continuous with pre-colonial groups, but they are very few, remote, and largely irrelevant to this conversation. The comparison that I usually make is with the Maori, who did have a significant level of political organisation prior to European contact, and when Europeans showed up, pretty quickly recognised the value of having organised representatives for negotiation. That is not the case for Aboriginals, who are not a single unified ethnicity and never had much political organisation beyond the level of the local tribal chief.

Yeah but the Maori had a bunch of hallmarks of settled agricultural society that the Indigenous lacked plus entrenched defensive positions which made it easier to just cut a deal with the local headsmen on the absolute colonial fringe.

In the Northern Territory (tropical, desert wasteland for the most part) and parts of Queensland there are tribes with some significant level of continuity from elder to elder. The last uncontacted ones were only found in the 1950s I believe. But that's not really the case down in the populated, developed south east of the country. American tribes were much more organized, they had chiefs who could negotiate treaties whereas the aboriginals never really got that far, it was all a very collaborative, collectivist, longhouse kind of society.

Part of the slogan we hear so often, at almost every event and in many meetings is some variation of:

acknowledges Traditional Owners of Country throughout Australia and recognises the continuing connection to lands, waters and communities. We pay our respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures; and to Elders past and present.

At one point it was elders, past, present and emerging. But nobody really knows who is an emerging elder, so apparently the progressive thing to do is to take out the 'emerging'. There's not really any way of determining who is aboriginal, indigenous or first nations either. That's because the mostly or nearly-all white people who claim to be indigenous are naturally the most charismatic and well-organized in the movement (they're the people graduating good universities as doctors under affirmative action), while the most indigenous and blackest out in rural, remote parts of the country are the least educated, least charismatic and generally criminal sort.

You'll also observe that it's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders too, the Torres Strait Islanders totally refuse to be lumped in with the rest even though only 3000 of them live on the islands and the other 80,000 live on the mainland. It's a huge mess.

You'll also observe that it's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders too, the Torres Strait Islanders totally refuse to be lumped in with the rest even though only 3000 of them live on the islands and the other 80,000 live on the mainland. It's a huge mess.

Torres Strait society was pretty different to Aboriginal society. Having done a year in Darwin and been around a bunch of those locations, they had agricultural and land ownership norms that weren't really a thing on the continent itself. I think the validity of their argument for ownership of their islands is more reasonable than the Aboriginal one by some degree.

True. But really, being proud that you reached agriculture and tribal-level development isn't very impressive. Only a few thousand years behind the curve on metalworking! One wonders whether formerly-Aztec Mexicans or Mayans are snooty about being lumped in with mere nomadic 'native Americans' who never got that into astronomy or stone-working.

Not really, no- indios in Latin America are very heavily the descendants of settled tribes. There's only a few thousand Chichimeca even left and they occupy the same very bottom of the racial hierarchy that Mayans do. Latin American racial snootiness is mostly about being whiter, sometimes with a dose of hybrid-vigor ideas, not about differences between various tribes.

Still you can't deny the Aztecs had a political assemblage which could be meaningfully bargained with about concepts like land ownership and fealty. The Indigenous take in Australia is essentially they were too primitive to 'lose a war' and therefore couldn't have lost a war.

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There's not really any way of determining who is aboriginal, indigenous or first nations either. That's because the mostly or nearly-all white people who claim to be indigenous are naturally the most charismatic and well-organized in the movement (they're the people graduating good universities as doctors under affirmative action), while the most indigenous and blackest out in rural, remote parts of the country are the least educated, least charismatic and generally criminal sort.

I’ve got to admit, it would be pretty funny if, 80 years from now, there are just a bunch of lily-white, blonde, “Aboriginal” people leading the various tribes, like some sort of real life Burroughs or Haggard novel.

We're already there to a large extent: https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2015/12/unsw-s-newest-indigenous-doctors-come-from-all-walks-of-life

But in 80 years they'll be Indian.

Paging the actual Australians here, since I have no idea.

But if I were an aboriginal rights activist trying to win as much as possible, I think I would push the argument that deciding exactly how ownership is distributed amongst aborigines is a detail that only becomes relevant once it is correctly admitted that ownership does in fact belong to the aborigines, and that quibbling over downstream details is a ploy to avoid ceding the base point.

If there were no clear institutions to inherit the rights of aborigines (I would argue) then a trust or a parliament or an advisory body could easily be set up. Something like the Scottish parliament, say, or the Norwegian oil depository.

That's essentially what was proposed with the National Voice, which got shouted down hard in the most recent referendum. Now certain states (ironically the ones with by far the actual lowest population of Aborigines and highest population of liberal Whites) are trying it on a trial basis.

But it's a way of seeding the idea that the government isn't actually in control for further usage later on. If you say it and repeat it enough, it becomes true.

Yep, I've never trusted "land acknowledgements" for this reason. They're the camel's nose under the tent. Even the semi-skeptical retort of "ha ha, a land acknowledgment without any concessions is just boasting of conquest" is part of the plan: "so you admit the land is theirs, and yet you don't do anything about it? Well, we've got a few ideas..." Not extending all the way towards handing over full rulership to those with the appropriate ancestry (yet, at least - so long as that tension exists, there's still energy in the system) but plenty of creeping gains presently unthinkable.

Is it possible that they worked with government to produce this? As you say, it allows the activists to perpetuate themselves but it also produces sympathy and understanding for the government. More reasonable proposals might have been harder to scotch.

You know, the UK gets plenty of flak for its groveling attitude towards anyone with a slightly different shade of skin and the most threadbare justification behind seeking reparations for past injustice, but have you seen the other Commonwealth states? Australia and NZ are so cucked it beggars belief.

They all seem to cling on to a form of DEI that's about a decade out of date, at least compared to the US, and even there, it was never as strong and all-encompassing.

What even drives people to such abject and performative self-flagellation?

Eh, I think it's contextual? The terrain is different depending on each nation. You don't find exactly this sort of thing in the UK because the UK isn't a colony.

However, the proper comparisons here are between Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. On those terms I feel like Australia is arguably the least grovelling. All three other Anglo colonies already have treaties with indigenous peoples that make those peoples semi-autonomous. Australia is the only one that doesn't, and the Voice was roundly rejected by the Australian people, which tells me that actual grassroots support for this is pretty low.

Yoorrook is part of the activist industry, and it's supported by the government because the government and the public service are deeply in bed with Group-like NGOs. That's a bad thing, but I'm not sure it tells us that much about l'Australie profonde, so to speak - and if the existence of that whole complex is the problem, well, half of that is imported from the United States anyway. We're downstream of American culture wars and tend to absorb their worst elements, albeit a few years too late.

So I certainly wouldn't advise the Americans to be too smug.

As for the British... honestly, I think they have their own issues to deal with. They aren't colonial in nature, but national pride and identity in the UK are complicated enough as to need their own post.

Ok, Cherokee and Navajo independence are absolutely uncontroversial in the US. The reservations are just uncontroversially sucky places but everyone tolerates them having casinos as a loophole and understands Indians with the means to live elsewhere do so. It’s not very cucked.

However, the proper comparisons here are between Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. On those terms I feel like Australia is arguably the least grovelling. All three other Anglo colonies already have treaties with indigenous peoples that make those peoples semi-autonomous. Australia is the only one that doesn't, and the Voice was roundly rejected by the Australian people, which tells me that actual grassroots support for this is pretty low.

I don't know that this really demonstrates an understanding of what the Indian treaty system does in the United States or its historical context.

It's not about being smug, but the situation in the US is remarkably different from the other Anglo colonies. In US history, the concept of treaties with various tribes developed essentially as a way to take tribes out of their land -- the point was "here's a treaty that gives us your land and requires you to leave it and go towards land we consider less valuable." The point of the treaties was they gave a legal veneer for the goal of conquest: we didn't take the land, they gave it to us fair and square. Sometimes this was better, and sometimes worse; every American kid learns about the Trail of Tears.

It's for that reason that any concept of Indian sovereignty above and beyond simply the tribal governments and their reservation land is dead in the water, though some activists still try. The concept in US law is "dependent nations"; the US government has historically seen Indian tribes as completely subsistent upon US sovereignty, but with special carve-outs that make them similar in some ways to states. The fact that tribes have self-governing is kind of a point in federal power above state power, not so much that tribal governments are massively powerful. Only the national government constitutionally has the right to control Indian affairs and make treaties with tribes.

It's true that in the US there are Indian reparation programs and lots of federal funding. But a lot of this is very token, and doesn't help anyone all that much. And there's little or no calls for expanded reparations programs and land acknowledgements are rather rare; black political activism sucks all the oxygen out of the air for anything like that, and for a lot of people the situation for American Indians is basically "out of sight, out of mind."

Land acknowledgments are becoming slightly more common, but only among progressive activist groups, and essentially never with actual native involvement: there's no American equivalent to "welcome to country." Because in the American context, such a thing is incoherent. You say that this stuff is the result of importing American culture war into Australia, but as far as I can tell the land acknowledgement stuff in the US, such as it exists, is the exact opposite.

The two big culture war flashpoints for native affairs have basically been "should they be called American Indians or Native Americans?" which among actual Indians is a generational thing; older tribal members prefer "Indian", younger ones prefer "Native American." The other one is more of a culture war flashpoint in Oklahoma, specifically, but a Supreme Court case said that the five tribes of Oklahoma were never disestablished, and angered a lot of non-Indians in Oklahoma. But the point is that Indian sovereignty is limited to the reservations, and this is spelled out and a matter of consensus.

I think the idea that a proper-noun Treaty or some level of self-government for natives is the high-water-mark of native activism is an importation of Australian political categories upon other countries where they're not relevant. Actually, it surprises me that Australia doesn't have any sort of treaty system with aboriginals and the Torres Strait groups, that clarifies sovereignty and makes it clear what the limits of native power are and are not! I might suggest that one of the reasons why native activism in Australia is so maximalist and the demands so bombastic is that there are apparently no documents or conventions that spell out their obligations and the limits of their sovereignty. So native activists can insist that their due is the moon, and there's no way for this to be effectively rebutted without denying any concept of native political power altogether.

I understand that "aboriginals are just like you and me" is the conservative view of Australian politics, and it follows that any political representation for them is controversial. But the US view is that tribal governments exist, and so there's no need for actual political representation for them. The need for Treaty is forestalled by the existence of treaties.

In the US, tribal governments petition the federal government to do things, and maybe they do them, maybe they don't. But there is no widespread call for, say, a congressional seat. Or a "Voice." Their voice is their own tribal government, which is dependent upon the whims of the federal government and sometimes the courts.

So, I think if we're comparing "who is most concerned about native activism in their country," and we look at one where natives have limited autonomy, clearly spelled out territorial limits (in places like the helldirt of New Mexico and the plains of Oklahoma -- "out of sight, out of mind"), and formal dependence upon federal whims, and then one where the government proposed for a public vote the idea of a formal advisory panel for indigenous political activism which even in its most unclear form won 40% of the vote, and natives are sometimes treated as the quasi-spiritual owners of the whole Country with spiritual welcomes that open meetings like a national anthem... yeah, I'm going to go with the first one as the one that cares less.

To add to this, I regularly visit now-technically-Cherokee territory in northeastern Oklahoma(a major rad trad religious site is built there, and the locals- both tribal and white[not that you can really tell the difference]- are totally OK with it). It's just... rural Oklahoma. There's no added racial tensions. There's probably some legal weirdness in the event of a felony but we're not committing those, or dealing with them against us. Not a lot of people really care.

I have relatives living near the only reservation in Louisiana. The locals are grateful for the casino money(there aren't enough working-age Indians left on the reservation to staff it) but the Indians aren't different enough from the locals for anyone to care about. The white/black(and on top of it, the creole black/economic migrant black) distinction dominates the local racial division to the exclusion of all else.

There's a pop culture portrayal of Indians as these brown-skinned sages with long hair, who may or may not be oppressed but probably have special powers. Lol. They look whiter than your average Mexican(who looks whiter than you'd think) and work normal jobs. Some of them have unusual superstitions(when I worked construction I had a Cherokee coworker who wouldn't pick up sharp objects unless he knew who owned them) but they're pretty average.

I regularly visit now-technically-Cherokee territory in northeastern Oklahoma(a major rad trad religious site is built there, and the locals- both tribal and white[not that you can really tell the difference]- are totally OK with it).

In the Tulsa area? Connected to St. Mary’s up in Kansas, I presume?

They look whiter than your average Mexican(who looks whiter than you'd think) and work normal jobs.

To be fair, this is mostly because they’ve intermarried with white people at high rates, particularly the Cherokee. Basically every white Oklahoman has some story about how great-aunt somebody or other was Cherokee and great-uncle sonofabitch didn’t let her sign up for the tribal roll.

I’m convinced this is mostly grifting — wouldn’t it be so nice if we could get some of that sweet oil casino money? But when Elizabeth Warren’s claims started to come under scrutiny, I never believed them, and I also thought it was really funny how she believed the grifting family legend enough to humiliate herself by taking a DNA test. Her pretendian thing isn’t weird, or unique — she’s just a white lady from Oklahoma.

I have cousins through adoption and marriage who are on tribal rolls. They’re ahem rednecks same as any rural white people.

In the Tulsa area? Connected to St. Mary’s up in Kansas, I presume?

Clear Creek Monastery(https://infogalactic.com/info/Clear_Creek_Abbey). No official connection; it's a daughterhouse of Fontgombault which isn't technically affiliated with apostolic work.

My words are chosen carefully and not subject to elaboration.

And there's little or no calls for expanded reparations programs and land acknowledgements are rather rare; black political activism sucks all the oxygen out of the air for anything like that, and for a lot of people the situation for American Indians is basically "out of sight, out of mind."

Land acknowledgments are becoming slightly more common, but only among progressive activist groups, and essentially never with actual native involvement: there's no American equivalent to "welcome to country."

That may be how it is in the Lower 48, but not so much here in Alaska. At least partially because the [Native corporations](Alaska Native Regional Corporations) serve as loci for activism, as well as helping maintain the individual tribal identities, but also that we have the highest population percent Native at 20.7%, and, further, we already have a precedent for reparations in ANCSA (even if it was meant to settle all such future claims, it hasn't stopped activists from seeking more).

I might suggest that one of the reasons why native activism in Australia is so maximalist and the demands so bombastic is that there are apparently no documents or conventions that spell out their obligations and the limits of their sovereignty. So native activists can insist that their due is the moon, and there's no way for this to be effectively rebutted without denying any concept of native political power altogether.

Yes, I think this part is probably correct. There is no actual framework to negotiate from, and in effect Aboriginal demands rest entirely on what they're able to guilt the greater Australian society into giving them. If I were feeling suspicious I'd suspect that recent attempts to formalise the relationship with mainstream Australia are motivated in part by the realisation that larger and larger parts of that society are now made of migrants from Asia, and migrants from Asia do not feel guilt about Aboriginals at all.

To the rest of your post, I appreciate all the detail about Native American history, but I do think that on the broader level it's true that much of Australia's most toxic progressive activism is imported from the US. It's just not directly imported from Native American activism, which we are largely ignorant of and do not care about. (Though "the Americans have treaties with Natives" was absolutely a card that gets played over here when Treaty comes up.) However, we did have, for instance, a copycat BLM movement inspired by the American one, which focus on indigenous deaths in custody.

but have you seen the other Commonwealth states

Have you seen the UK handing the Chagos over to Mauritius these last two months and paying for the privilege? That is just as, or even more, cucked. What happened to the spirit of Wellington or Mccaulay?

For all the UK's faults there is no doubt they would run the place more efficiently than the Mauritians ever could.

I've been shaking my head at that particular debacle, it seems that the UK is just about the only country on the planet that takes utterly toothless "international law" seriously. They could have told the Mauritian government to shove it, what would they have done, cancel discount holiday vouchers and row over in a canoe?

I don't really have a horse in this race, but I still find it all too tiresome.

Accurate. There is a cultural and probably (my theory) genetic temperament that makes whites share and care. Think European killing Winters in the old days.

Beyond this its performative luxury beliefs. Rich whiteys living in gated communities that will never need to deal with the consequences of their actions.

Happy to be corrected by others.

I predict that they will accept a couple of the cheaper, more fig-leaf recommendations and ignore the rest, maintaining a status quo

A great way to predict most western government actions these days

And this is why the activists win. Every time you move the line a little, the next movement of the line is only slighter more expensive compared to the new status quo and the government has already admitted the alleged moral case.

I find activists in part evil because they never hold up their end of the bargain. On Friday, they will celebrate their hard won compromised victory and on the next Monday they will be telling us how the status quo is intolerable and needs changed.

I find activists in part evil because they never hold up their end of the bargain. On Friday, they will celebrate their hard won compromised victory and on the next Monday they will be telling us how the status quo is intolerable and needs changed. Every time you move the line a little, the next movement of the line is only slighter more expensive compared to the new status quo and the government has already admitted the alleged moral case.

I don't really understand how this makes activists 'evil'. If they believe in A, how is trying to get to halfway to A first an illegitimate way to pursue your goals. Compromises never constitute a recognition on the part of one party that the new status quo is actually desirable, merely better than the alternative, and this is always how politics has functioned. Most obviously, as soon as each thought they had the ability to put their cause in a better position, those both North and South who had acceded to the compromises of 1820 and 1850 were more than willing to jettison them.

It is evil in the same way that when you strike a bargain, you ought to uphold the bargain.

Sure bargains are revisited after some time. But most people understand that a bargain is designed to last at least for some period of time; not weeks.

Activists therefore are violating the spirit of the bargain.

I also think activists frequently have wrongheaded goals and make things worse off but that’s a separate matter (though it no doubt makes me less favorably disposed to activists in general — in truth I think an activist is a shameful “profession.”)

I kind of see activists in a posiwid sense - yeah nothing is ever good enough for them, their job depends on it. What I find truly frustrating is that even after a decade of this, many people still somehow think progressive lip service is fine or even morally just - they will even joke about how useless activists are in one breath before condemning conservatives for racistly not want to throw money away on performative bullshit in the next.

many people still somehow think progressive lip service is fine or even morally just

This is natural- casting shade on people not wanting to conspicuously consume (in this case, from the society-wide patronage network that activists embody) is a thing rich people do naturally.

When you're rich in virtue, conspicuous consumption is saying "yeah, polygamy is totally for everyone".

When you're rich in rent-seeking, conspicuous consumption is saying "yes, my property values the environment is more important than developing the next generation".

It's not necessarily realized by people doing that, since this is just copying the fashions of the richest- but it is still that thing either way.

Right. No one's willing to make or defend the counter proposal of "You get nothing this time and furthermore we've decided we're taking away what you got last time", so it can only move in one direction.

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