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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.
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.
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Complete sidenote but I read Alison Overeem as Alistair Overeem and was overcome for a moment with confusion about ethnicity.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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Might be.
But you'd expect low performers to end up on the receiving end of the oppression more often than not.
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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).
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.
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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.
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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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.
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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.
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