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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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I don't have too much to add to what you said, but I think it's interesting to note that Prince Philip's comments in 2002 about Australian aboriginals, specifically him asking if they still threw spears at each other, were vindicated entirely. Even though the Australian media generally still considers him racist over the question, "reality has a rightwing bias" it would seem. I present to you a gang fight in a rural Australian town between two aboriginal gangs, where they literally throw spears at each other (and at a cop car): https://old.reddit.com/r/ActualPublicFreakouts/comments/1gpmasx/brawl_breaks_out_in_remote_aboriginal_community/

Like, I really don't want to be uncharitable to aboriginals, but they have a dysfunction that seems to be on a whole different level than the dysfunction we see in other comparable subcultures. I've been to several Native American reservations throughout the US and gone to school and worked with several natives, I've been in ghetto black parts of cities like Oakland and LA and Baltimore, and I taught several Gypsy families as a missionary in Eastern Europe. All of these groups are doing immeasurably better than Australian aboriginals. Even if you believe that the issues these groups face are due to colonization/slavery/racism/whatever, I don't see how you can argue that Australian aboriginals got treated worse than black chattel slaves in the US. But even blacks the first generation after being freed from slavery seemed to have more civilized behavior than aboriginals centuries after being colonized.

The point I'm trying to make is that blaming colonization for the ills of aboriginals doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Similar to how people point to the Chinese Exclusion Act and the San Francisco Councils of Vigilance Act as proof that historical discrimination isn't keeping present day Asians from succeeding in America, with Australian aboriginals you can point to almost any other aboriginal or otherwise mistreated population across the world and they'll have better results despite often having been treated much worse. Whether that's the Ainu in Japan or the Kurds in the Middle East or the Navajo in America. I just don't see how continuing to lay all the blame on Europeans can continue to hold up to intellectual rigor (though I don't believe my opponents are actually trying to apply intellectual rigor here in the first place).

As a final bonus story about aboriginal dysfunction, because it's simply so absurd that it's hard to believe it's real. Truth really is stranger than fiction:

There was never much in Wadeye, a remote township 420 km south-west of Darwin. It only got its first coffee shop a few years ago. It still doesn't have a public toilet.

But after days of brutal clan warfare, there's even less there now.

About 500 people have fled the township of 4,000 to hide out in surrounding bush after the savage violence erupted and left them homeless.

Famous for its gangs named after heavy metal groups or performers - like the Slayer Mob, Judas Priest Boys, Metallica Mob and, for female locals, the Celine Dion gang, the Kylie Girls and the Madonna Mob - Wadeye has been riven by violence for decades.

But in the latest eruption, one man, 32, is dead, allegedly speared through the head, and another is seriously injured after being shot by a bow and arrow.

Frightening photographs from the township - which is the Northern Territory’s biggest Aboriginal community - have revealed the extent of the war between the tribal rivals.

Likened by some to 'the Wild West', Wadeye has seen pitched battles after dark between rival gang members wheeling around the streets and setting houses and vehicles alight.

https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-10784597/Wadeye-Northern-Territory-burns-22-clans-war-brutal-tribal-rivalry-violence.html

Ironically, the use of archery is itself assimilating- the aborigines didn’t have it until introduced by Europeans.

My mom did a few years teaching in rural Western Australia. Twice a year the indigenous half of the school would empty out for essentially a grand tribal council out in the bush that took a week or so. One of the main functions of this would be that members judged to have broken native law would be speared in the thighs as a punishment