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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27726 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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Following on from the defeat of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice referendum (seriously can we just include Torres Strait Islanders in the definition of "Aboriginal"? The whole phrase is too many words) Aboriginal leaders declared a week of silence to mourn the result.

Alas, all good things must come to an end, and the silence is now over. The leaders of the Yes campaign have published an open letter to the Parliament, and it is salty. So salty that reportedly some people refused to sign on to it - and perhaps that is why it appears without any names attached.

It opens by describing Australia's decision to vote no as "appalling and mean-spirited". It asserts that "It is the legitimacy of the non-Indigenous occupation in this country that requires recognition, not the other way around." It says that "the majority of Australians have committed a shameful act". So on and so forth.

In short, it is very much filled with the sort of resentment and hostility that turns people off, hard. Even on the normally far left /r/australia subreddit, posters are tearing strips off it.

This is of course a terrible time for the Yes campaigners to be acting in this way. With the failure of the Voice, indigenous policy is in a state of flux. The government is licking its wounds and weighing how to respond. These activists could not have made a better argument for why they should be sidelined in those deliberations.

I am worried about the "misinformation and lies" narrative they a spruiking here. They have a proposed censors charter which does all the usual things the Europeans are trying, only worse.

The fact that merely disputing Yes narrative is being labelled "misinformation" by exactly the kind of people who likely will man the misinformation bureaucracy is a good example of why speech moderation always gets corrupted. But they government and the Green have no reason to care about that -- they have the numbers in Parliament to pass it, no matter what the rest of society thinks.

Kind of surprised no one has blamed the outcome of the referendum on Russian hackers yet.

We know that the No campaign was funded and resourced by conservative and international interests who have no stake or genuine interest in the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. We know this funding supported multiple No campaigns that intentionally argued in varying directions to create doubt and fear in both non-Indigenous and Indigenous communities.

AFAICT 'yes' outspent 'no' by orders of magnitude. Another nail in the coffin for those who think that you can just buy any election.

There has always been racism against First Nations people in Australia. It increased with multiple daily instances during the campaign and was a powerful driver for the No campaign. But this campaign went beyond just racism. ‘If you don't know - Vote No’ gave expression to ignorance and licensed the abandonment of civic responsibility on the part of many voters who voted No. This shameful victory belongs to the Institute of Public Affairs, the Centre for Independent Studies and mainstream media.

It's funny because lots of people across the spectrum follow "if you don't know vote no" when it comes to referendums where I live. It caught me totally off guard to see that this was such a vehement point of contention in the Australian referendum.

AFAICT 'yes' outspent 'no' by orders of magnitude. Another nail in the coffin for those who think that you can just buy any election.

I believe this is true. This is from the end of August, but back then Yes23 had outspent all other groups by far, and they tracked 1009 Yes ads compared to 164 No ads. As of September the Guardian was running pieces about the No campaign spending four times as much on Facebook ads, but this is misleading - Yes spent far more on Google ads, and overall Yes spent far more - they note Yes23 spending 1.1 million, over ten times as much as the No-aligned Fair Australia. In particular as they got closer to the date, Yes spending on Facebook surged and easily outstripped No. AFR also notes Yes receiving over 26 million in donations.

It does rather bother me that in the face of the Yes campaign's considerably superior spending, institutional support, and visibility, that there is scaremongering around No. I remember spooky stories about No campaign consultants, or the terrifying fact that some people working for the No campaign are Christians. I find it rather surreal to attack the No campaign for working with a Christian marketing company, and to imply that there's something wrong working with 'a firm that specialises in fundraising for church groups', when the last I checked the Yes campaign was drowning in church support.

In the letter itself, there's the implication that 'conservative and international interests' are illegitimate. I'll concede the point around international interests (though I will argue that it is hypocritical for the Yes campaign to suggest that international voices should stay out), but surely Australian conservatives have every bit as much right to participate in the debate and to vote as anyone else?

(though I will argue that it is hypocritical for the Yes campaign to suggest that international voices should stay out),

You make an excellent point, but I cannot believe you missed the opportunity to reference Albanese getting Shaquille O'Neal to endorse the voice.

Even more ironic that Shaq was principally in town to be a gambling spokesperson for Pointsbet when he did so

AFAICT 'yes' outspent 'no' by orders of magnitude. Another nail in the coffin for those who think that you can just buy any election.

I'd be very tentative with this. 'Yes' might not have bought this election in particular but the fact there's money being thrown at it means they can continue bargaining. Who knows, maybe one day, unbeknownst to most, this particular issue might go on sale and if one side happens to have money in the pocket it's an easy buy.

I think this is a problem with the right in general where they don't have a positive affirmational stance to rally behind. Instead they lean on the implicit racism of the public. With how hands off the right is with cultural institutions it's just a waiting game until the Overton Window shifts far enough along that the publics implicit racism doesn't cut it. Or, of course, the demographics shift in such a way that the Abbo rallying cry gets carried along in a coalition of ascendent minority groups.

Or, of course, the demographics shift in such a way that the Abbo rallying cry gets carried along in a coalition of ascendent minority groups

Australia not being majority white anymore will not be caused by aborigines, it will be caused by Asian immigrants who don’t care about the aborigines, don’t understand why they should be given more power, and don’t see them as impressive coalition partners.

I can't find solid figures showing how Asian-Australians voted - there's some evidence that Chinese-Australians intended to vote Yes at a higher-rate than Anglos, but there's also lots of grief about them not supporting it enough.

Anecdotally, when I talk to Australians of Asian background, the message I get ranges from "Why are you asking us? We didn't do anything wrong" to "Lol the Aboriginals were lucky we weren't the ones who conquered them", but I rarely hear a lot of sympathy for them.

I remember speaking to a woman from Hong Kong after we were told the usual (in my opinion inadequately-defined, meaningless) claim that Aboriginals are the world's "oldest continuous civilisation", and have "sixty thousand years of civilisation". She confessed to me afterwards that she doesn't believe that's true, because you need to have writing to be a civilisation. To be civilised, you need to be recording and reflecting on your history. In that light she had always been taught - and she continued to believe - that China was the world's oldest civilisation.

(Technically if you date by the invention of writing, well, it depends a lot on exactly what you count as 'writing' as opposed to pictures, pictographs, and so on, but it is a lot more debatable. China is running, but it's not the obvious leader.)

I mention that story just to note that the narratives that take hold among Anglo communities do not necessarily have much resonance for other people.

I wonder if this woman from Hong Kong’s opinion was straight ethnonarcisism or if she would be consistent- eg would she have been impressed with the knowledge that the cherokees are the only people who invented writing by imitation without having been taught it?

I think she'd be consistent, knowing her.

I just remember finding that conversation interesting in terms of the way we frame history and what we choose to value. She described learning history as a civilisational cycle, the narrative of unification and division that we see epitomised in the first line of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Human history goes out from and then returns to a centre, over and over. This seems like a very traditional Chinese way of thinking about it, and the influence of Marxism hasn't been able to fully change that yet.

By contrast, the way I feel I learned history as an Anglo, Western person was basically this - the story of a linear ascent, Mesopotamia to Greece to Rome to Europe to Britain to America and eventually to space. Arguments about how a linear, progressive view of history is an Abrahamic innovation may be overstated but they're still at least partly true. Of the world's great civilisational or religious cultures, certainly Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have clear beginnings, middles, and conclusions in the way they perceive history. This is much less the case in pre-Western-contact China or India. It likely also shaped Hegelian and thus Marxist historical narratives.

At the time I talked to this woman, we were finishing up a several-days-long workshop on Aboriginal culture, and one of the things the first Aboriginal teacher we met tried to impress upon us was that time is not seen like this in Australian Aboriginal culture. Maybe for Westerners it's a gradual rise, and maybe for East Asians it's an oscillation, but for pre-contact Aboriginal people it's flat. Time is flat. Nothing changes. The breadth of the land swallows you up. It's not so much that the same incidents play out over and over repetitively, but that there is just one incident and it never stops happening, and any appearance of change is merely incidental.

Now I do take that with a grain of salt, not least because I am intensely skeptical that anybody in the world actually knows how pre-contact Aboriginals saw anything, and at any rate Aboriginal worldviews have been profoundly altered by colonisation anyway. A lot of them I honestly suspect that most Aboriginal advocates of Aboriginal culture learnt that culture from Western, noble savage type stereotypes. Whatever traditional culture they had would have been passed down through oral tradition and community practice, and when those communities were split up and most of the oral tradition lost, so was the culture. So even Aboriginal people are probably bullshitting a lot.

But even so, I assign some credence to his perspective, even if only a little, and it makes sense to me to say that culture and perception of time influences how people see the world and thus how they behave. For instance, it seems intuitively reasonably that you need some notion of progression and the possibility of upwards change (whether you fit that into a linear or cyclical narrative, they both have this possibility) in order for things like long-term planning and innovation to make sense. Meanwhile if you think that your actions can't really change things, then it seems like it makes a lot more sense to be impulsive and act only for short-term reward.

I'm not really sure about any of this, and I'm just spitballing, but it would not surprise me if there are some cultural effects like this.

Your framing is basically backwards. People can be marginally swayed by advertising. The diminishing returns set in early. The issue will not "come up for sale" but people indeed may change their minds for exogenous reasons, at which point spending billions will still be a waste.

Of course, it benefits nobody in the political machine to notice that campaign spending is largely wasted.

"If you don't know, vote no" is a completely sensible rule of thumb, and it's been used to great effect by the left side of politics here too. Paul Keating campaigned against John Hewson's economic reform agenda by saying "if you don't understand it, don't vote for it" and won what was widely considered to be an unwinnable election. The dummy spit about it in this context is entirely unreasonable.

This is especially the case because the reason why people "didn't know" is because the government refused to provide any relevant details, not because they refused to educate themselves. How many people would be on the voice? How would they be chosen? What sort of powers would it have? What issues would it deal with? Would its advice to government be public? There were no answers to any of this, no endorsed government framework, just "to be legislated later as the Parliament decides".

It caught me totally off guard to see that this was such a vehement point of contention in the Australian referendum

Keep in mind though that before Dutton said it that was the case in Australia too. It became a point of contention when the yes vote realised common sense wasn't in their favour.

The letter says that there was a lot of misinformation/disinformation about the referendum and the mainstream media was complicit in this by showing both sides. Is Australia's media really like this?

I mean I have no doubt that there's probably a lot of partisan media but I'm wondering how true this is because my exposure has usually left me thinking that media there is about as left-leaning as America's.

Anyway, it's probably a good thing they went for that invective though if you don't want the pending disinformation bill to pass. I'd bet if that letter was a lot softer they could convince a lot more people that "a 'false sense of balance' over facts." needs some agency to force the media to make rules to be policed.

No, not really, but blaming Murdoch and News Corp for everything is a time-honoured strategy on the left, much as blaming everything on the ABC and complaining about its funding is a popular pastime on the right.

No, Australia's media is not like this. It's similar to America in terms of its partisan split (a large centre-left blob with some right wing counter-outlets), but less extreme and much more responsible in terms of the accuracy of its reporting. Most of the complaints about "misinformation" in the voice referendum refer to arguments like "this will divide us by race" - e.g. David Speers tried to nail down Julian Leeser on the Insiders program to "admit" that this was misinformation. But of course it's an entirely reasonable argument.

And of course the Yes campaign engaged in plenty of misinformation of their own, for example by touting that 80% of indigenous voters were in favour of the voice - relying on out of date polls from January-March while recent ones found the numbers were more like 59%.

The sheer nebulousness of the Yes case made it hard to directly misinform, too. So many of the 'X is misinformation' articles I saw were of the 'The No campaign's speculative rebuttal of a potential aspect of the Voice is inaccurate since we've yet to establish what the Voice actually is/does'

'The No campaign's speculative rebuttal of a potential aspect of the Voice is inaccurate since we've yet to establish what the Voice actually is/does'

This whole debacle sounds like an episode of The Thick of It but in Australia instead of the UK.

I did feel that the Yes campaign came off as... a bit slimy, if that makes sense? Big on claimed moral authority, but not very willing to nail down specific points. It felt like being asked to vote not so much on a specific proposal, but on the vibe of the thing.

recent ones found the numbers were more like 59%.

As far as I know, both sets of polls are sampling bias all the way down.

Graphs of the vote by locality show that places where you expect Aboriginals to live went pretty heavily "yes". Hard to tell how to translate that into a percentage-of-aboriginals, but 80% wouldn't surprise me. More importantly, this method is disproportionately sensitive to the votes of outback Aboriginals, which means it undercuts the idea that only city-dwelling elite Aboriginals supported the Voice.

I think the remote mobile teams in Lingiari are the most reliable indicators of outback Aboriginal votes, and they were indeed pretty high for Yes - around 73% on average. But of course outback Aborigines are a small minority of total Aborigines - and while they're the ones that we're most concerned about from a policy standpoint, that's tangential to the question of polling accuracy.

So I do think the evidence suggests that white Aborigines voted No more heavily than remote Aborigines did. That doesn't really surprise me - while the elite Aborigines are white, most white Aborigines are poor and working class. It can be simultaneously true that remote outback Aborigines and white urban Aborigines are very different from each other, and that the elite activist class is different from both of them.

I had to look up Lingiari to see that it was an electoral division. It’s huge, and yet the least populated division? I can’t believe that the middle of your continent is so…empty.

Yeah the Northern Territory is about 150k people and electorates are supposed to be about 120k people. So it can either be one overpopulated electorate or 2 underpopulated ones. They went with two, and one of them is basically just Darwin. Lingiari is everything else.

It's incredibly sparse in the interior. Durack is the biggest electorate, covering a huge chunk of Western Australia. It would be in the top 20 largest countries in the world if it were a country, bigger than Peru or South Africa. And it has less than 120k people.

I grew up in the outback, and unless you've lived there you just can't understand it. You have to do pretty much everything for yourself, because there's so few people around you to trade with to do it for you. Our closest neighbour was 40km away, the nearest town was 60km (and was just a few hundred people). Even the mailbox at our front gate was a 10km drive. Our farm was 2.5x the size of Manhattan, and it was one of the smaller ones in the area. The distances are just vast.

Question- do you tend to have large extended families on the farm, with maybe a hired laborer or two, or is it a one nuclear family plus a ranch hand operation?

It seems like this is set up for sons to live at home with their mail order brides well into adulthood, but it also seems like Australia has a culture not-particularly conducive to that.

One nuclear family, no employees, and the kids move to the city when they grow up.

What that means of course is that an incredibly empty part of the country is steadily becoming even emptier. For example this region of South Australia, more than double the size of Italy, with just 2573 people, and losing about 3% of their population each year.

Edit: Last year this property larger than Palestine sold for $34 million, or about $21 million in US dollars.

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The letter says that there was a lot of misinformation/disinformation about the referendum and the mainstream media was complicit in this by showing both sides. Is Australia's media really like this?

No, I'm pretty sure this is just standard progressive whining that their enemies were allowed to speak at all, and defining anything that does not agree with them as misinformation. A la Brexit, and Trump, the eternal wheel of cope ever dictates that when the proles get it "wrong", it's because they're stupid/misinformed/racist. No person who is with a conscience and/or in full possession of The Facts could ever disagree with a progressive viewpoint. I'm only surprised that Russian interference wasn't cited.

I'm only surprised that Russian interference wasn't cited.

Yeah about that..

"Nationwide demonstrations took place on Saturday purportedly organised by Simeon Boikov , an online commentator who posts anti-vaccine and pro-Vladimir Putin content."

And more

"Currently Simeon Boikov aka @aussiecossack is fronting the Russian information warfare strategy on the Voice Referendum. He is doing this by supporting the NO Campaign while holed up in the Russian Consulate and last week he was granted Russian citizenship by Russian President Vladimir Putin. "

"‘We don’t interfere’: Russian envoy on Voice debate"

"Moscow’s local envoy says he will not silence a pro-Kremlin conspiracy theorist who is organising rallies against the Indigenous Voice to Parliament while he is holed up in a Russian diplomatic compound in Sydney.

Russian ambassador to Australia Alexey Pavlovsky denied his government was encouraging Simeon Boikov – who goes by the online moniker “Aussie Cossack” – to undermine the Voice referendum."

This guy was on the front page of various Australian news sites in the days leading up to the referendum. Lots of vague gesturing towards Russian interference.

I'm only surprised that Russian interference wasn't cited.

It's Darkly Hinted at.

We know that the No campaign was funded and resourced by conservative and international interests who have no stake or genuine interest in the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Rootless cosmopolitans, even!

Ayo how come OUR rootless cosmopolitans aren't based. Sucks we get stuck with the wrong KIND of international interests in our own back yard.

This shows the disconnect between leftists and Aboriginal leaders and what the actual goal was. Now the mask is off and the leftists see what they really believe.

Australia is our country. We accept that the majority of non-Indigenous voting Australians have rejected recognition in the Australian Constitution. We do not for one moment accept that this country is not ours. Always was. Always will be. It is the legitimacy of the non-Indigenous occupation in this country that requires recognition, not the other way around. Our sovereignty has never been ceded.

It's really that simple.

Wow, that's a remarkable quote. It's incredible that they can openly state they want nothing less than ethno-supremacy while mainstream media sources are calling so many people racist for not being one-sided enough in their favor. A banal and obvious observation I know, but you usually don't hear admission of it that plainly, and that puts into perspective how incredible it is that such a narrative is safely forwarded by people who are treated like they have a monopoly on the concept of racial justice in the mainstream discourse.

It really is incredible that this is has widespread buy-in among serious people living in the west. Apparently an explicit ethnostate is something we should be aiming for and defending. Their ultimate aim is to establish explicit rules around this:

  • Establish "the right to exercise national self-determination" in Australia is "unique to the Aboriginal people."
  • Establish Aboriginal languages as Australia's official languages and downgrade English to a "special status."
  • Establish "Aboriginal settlement as a national value" and mandate that the Australian state "will labor to encourage and promote its establishment and development."

You can read more here. Imagine if something like this actually became law in a nation purporting to be a liberal democracy.

...erm, aren't we talking about Aboriginal people?

Israel does get plenty of criticism for its approach here, obviously, and it doesn't seem relevant to Australia. I think the better comparison would be to other self-described indigenous peoples. Certainly during the Voice campaign we heard a lot of people talking about Maoris and Native Americans and Canadian First Nations.

Honestly something that struck me on doing very basic research into other countries' Indigeous persons was that the Australian Aboriginal's life expectancy gap with the median was about the same size as it is for the Maoris and First Nations people. Despite the latter two having the 'benefits' of deeper recognition in their countries.

Really? Amerinds seem a lot better off than I’d expect aborigines to be, based on how I’ve heard them described.

Well, let's take some specific metrics. Let's compare Australian Aboriginals, Maoris, American Indians, and Canadian First Nations relative to the surrounding culture, on a few different metrics.

Hypothesis: if the claim that the Voice and recognition would help to close the gap is true, the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous people should be significantly worse in Australia than in the other three nations.

Life expectancy:

(sticking with pre-covid figures if possible)

Aboriginals: 71.6 years male, 75.6 years female. Compare to 81.3 years male and 85.4 years female for non-indigenous, for an average gap of around 10 years.

Maoris: 73.0 years male, 77.1 years female. Compare to 80.3 years male and 83.9 years female for non-Maori (same link), for an average gap of around 6-7 years.

American Indians: I'm having a harder time finding a clear result here. This page gives 73.1 years for Indians, versus 79.1 years overall average, though it's not by gender. However, it could be more complicated, and America is the largest and most diverse nation, so I'm more cautious here. Pages like this suggest it might be more complicated. Still, let's ballpark it around 6 years.

Canadian First Nations: 72.5 years male, 77.7 years female. Compare to 81 years male, 85 years female for non-indigenous, for an everage gap of around 8-9 years.

Conclusion: Aboriginals do have the worst figures here, so count that as circumstantial evidence in favour of treaties and recognition. That said I would like to see a lot more evidence around causation.

Income:

(I'm not going to stress about currency conversions here, or weekly versus yearly income, because what matters for us here is the indigenous:non-indigenous ratio)

Aboriginals: Average weekly household income is $1507 AUD according to the ABS (compared to anything from 1358 through 2061 in general)), but equivalised, AIHW says $830 AUD, compared to $1080 for non-indigenous. I'm just going to estimate that Aboriginals are making approximately 77% what non-Aboriginals make.

Maoris: This site tells us that in 2013 the median income for Maoris was 78.9% of the national median, which I'm happy to just accept.

American Indians: Wiki has us covered here: $56,990 USD yearly median household income for Indians in 2021, versus 76,330 for the whole population. This translates to Amerian Indians making about 75% as much as non-Indians.

Canadian First Nations: Per page 32 here, average indigenous income in Canada is around 66% that of non-indigenous people.

Conclusion: I don't see any correlation here. Aboriginals are the 2nd-best-off of these groups, and the gap between Aboriginals, Maoris, and American Indians seems well within margin of error to me. The real surprise for me here is Canada, which I didn't think was that much worse.

I was going to make a pass on education as well, but that's proving harder to find figures for.

Funny, but I think you'll find Israel to have no shortage of mainstream criticism on the basis of its status as an apartheid settler-colonialist etc state. I do not think it is as easy to find such things critical of efforts to constitutionally enshrine the veneration of "designated oppressed minority groups" like the aboriginals.

Even the anti-voice arguments did not speak in anywhere near the harshness that Israel is often regarded with. Instead, they focused on how "This won't even help the aboriginals!" instead of it being a concerted effort to officially develop a new ethnostate policy.

It's especially insane to me in that, if one were going to be racist against any group, Aboriginal Australians have the weakest arguments to make of maybe any ethnic group in the world. They have made virtually zero scientific, economic, cultural, sporting, artistic, political, military, domestic contributions to global culture.

I literally can't think of any other ethnicity, outside of super specific small groups, that I can't make a better argument for. Gypsy culture might be made up of criminals, but Django Reinhardt. We've seen the arguments against Jews and American Blacks rehashed a million times, but vast swathes of modern physics and literature and music and sport argues in their favor. Serbians can't have an independent country for thirty years without starting a war, but there's plenty of great Serbians. Even little Arab Palestine has given us the odd poet, or emigrant businessman or model.

What have Aboriginal Australians ever contributed? The digiridoo?

There is something of a cottage industry here of people arguing about the overlooked complexity of Aboriginal civilisation. Often it's very vague and unquantifiable stuff about having tended the land for millennia. Sometimes it's just noble savage nonsense, like the claim that at least they didn't war with each other (they did) and all respected each other (they didn't) and had gender equality (take a guess).

Sometimes it's a bit more complex. Dark Emu is the most famous text to spring to mind - a fellow argued that Aboriginals had a settled, agricultural civilisation.

As far as I can tell Dark Emu is a simple motte-and-bailey. The easily-defended motte is that Aboriginal people, like pretty much all nomadic hunter-gatherers, recognised good spots, would leave seeds behind them for their return migration, and could make basic fish traps and the like. The implausible bailey is that this constitutes agriculture and the Aboriginals were "ahead of many other parts of the world".

Having read Dark Emu I found it kind of incoherent where a lot of the case for Aboriginal statehood is essentially 'they were unsophisticated to the point that there was not a conventional state to be made war on and/or a concept of territory, therefore the conquest is illegitimate as they never surrendered' then Dark Emu tries to argue that they were notably more sophisticated than the basic understanding which... legitimizes European conquest?

There are some excellent Aboriginal athletes. But yeah, not a ton of scientists or businesspeople.

I'm not a big HBD guy - not because I think all people are exactly the same, but because I think cultural and governance issues are usually much more important - the two Koreas being a prime example. But if I were the kind of guy who wanted to go around making HBD arguments... the ethnic group with an average IQ of 62 that continues to have catastrophic outcomes on every socioeconomic measure no matter how much money and effort is spent to try and help them would be one of the first examples I'd reach for.

Richard Hanania has argued that the example of North Korea supports rather than contradicts the argument: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-east-asian-package

Hanania is an idiot though. North Korea's outcomes are objectively terrible. I don't doubt their people are every bit as intelligent as South Koreans, but that just goes to show the limits of what intelligence can give you.

With such a damning comment, do you know any Aboriginal Australians?

A post modern belief system that had a lot of influence on the Cthulhu mythos?

As a random aside, there was a great supplement to the Cthulu RPG based around the Mythos in Australia. Bunyips vs Elder Things etc. It was even added to the National Library.

It also inspired a board game, which is pretty good if you like the idea of chasing down Bunyips with an armoured train.

Link doesn't work, but that sounds like fun.

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That's awesome, I am going to have to track down a copy! Are you very familiar with it? I see I can buy the pdf from chaosium, but I'm not buying a second edition from 2019 sight unseen, not for more than $10.

I've browsed it, but sadly don't have a copy myself and can't help tracking it down.

That’s the point though. You’ll notice most of what the ultra woke point to as ‘whiteness’ is the very things that make or made whites so successful. I’m trying hard not to straw man but it really does seem like a bunch of this crap is just cover for worshipping lack of success through bad behavior, stupidity, and dysfunction, and stigmatizing productivity and contribution. I couldn’t tell you why that worldview exists; I think it’s a side effect of turning African American cultural complaints into mental masturbation, but it really is what it looks like.

I couldn’t tell you why that worldview exists; I think it’s a side effect of turning African American cultural complaints into mental masturbation, but it really is what it looks like.

Ultimately you can see it as a rejection of the idea of competence and hierarchy. All hierarchies and power differentials are inherently unjust according to a far left view, because they involve one being dominating another. Competence is simply a way to justify the hierarchical subjugation.

I typed out and then deleted a longer comment - something which I’ve done several times before whenever the subject of Australian Aborigines comes up. There’s nothing I can say that won’t be perceived (correctly) as cruel and dehumanizing. As far as I’m concerned, they are an actual honest-to-god Stone Age relict population. Not the blue-eyed fake Aborigines who’d be empowered by this farcical “Voice” venture, but the real ones out there in the Outback sniffing gasoline. They appear to have somehow avoided most of the evolutionary pressures which have caused nearly every other human population to develop modern human physiognomy and cognitive aptitude. I get genuinely distressed when I look at them or when I think about what Australia could possibly do about this population, and it would be beyond the bounds of tolerable behavior in this community for me to comment in any detail about what I foresee for them moving forward.

I've honestly always wanted to see a proper, unbiased longitudinal study of the Stolen Generation to establish what the life outcomes of the 'stolen' were versus those who remained remote. I suspect the results would shock the common narrative.

the real ones out there in the Outback sniffing gasoline.

You're a little out of date on this - we successfully reduced petrol sniffing in Aboriginal communities by 95%

All we had to do was develop special petrol that doesn't get you high when you sniff it and ban normal petrol in Aboriginal communities.

LMAO WHAT, I thought Rama Rama was just a meme.

“In 2006 when low aromatic fuel was first rolled out in Central Australia, there were around 500 people sniffing in our region with an average of seven deaths per year; it was an epidemic,” Mr Ray said.

This is some black-comedy satire article leaking into real life. I thought I was jaded, but this is horrific.

What's the denominator for those numbers? I'm reading that Central Australia has only about 40K people, 43% Aboriginal + Torres Strait, so call that 17K, so 7/17K gives a drug-overdose-per-100K rate of 41 ... which is higher than the USA (32/100K in 2022) but not by nearly as much as you'd hope. The US already has demographics with worse rates (and I'm talking "males", not anything with p-hacked granularity), and our rates are still increasing, not dropping by 95%. A lot of the increase is fentanyl, but cocaine and meth are going way up too.

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Oh trust me, it gets way more horrifying than that.

For example, approximately a quarter of Aboriginal girls in remote communities are victims of child sex abuse.

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I get genuinely distressed when I look at them or when I think about what Australia could possibly do about this population, and it would be beyond the bounds of tolerable behavior in this community for me to comment in any detail about what I foresee for them moving forward.

Gene therapy. If there's a good reason we're not going full steam ahead on it, it's yet to find my ears (GATTACA and associated neo-ludditism is excluded from good).

Oh wait, the sterling and terminally resistant to reality claim that all human populations are equal, especially cognitively so, acts as a barrier to even recognizing there is a problem, or at least it's not the kind of problem you solve by giving them handouts or schools.

I'd argue that the prior British policy of encouraging interbreeding was a step in the right direction, even if I suspect that diminished the capabilities of inter-racial children. It would all have been worth it, if it eliminated a disgruntled population of millions that modern Wokists can point to and yell "systemic racism" without much in the way of pushback since HBD left the Overton Window.

If there's a good reason we're not going full steam ahead on it, it's yet to find my ears (GATTACA and associated neo-ludditism is excluded from good).

Can I interest you in Brave New World, or the more recent and pop-sci-fi Red Rising? This is the first step towards genetically predetermined caste systems, for further hominid speciation. You don't get Gammas or Reds without people like you arguing for Alphas and Golds.

While mildly entertaining works of fiction, they're about as accurate a representation of the future.

Without something going seriously awry, there's no chance that humanity ends up in a caste system of that nature, since-

  1. We have robotic automation, which is more efficient and less ethically dubious than breeding a slave caste.

  2. Genetic augmentation is unlikely to be expensive after economies of scale develop, and there is no plausible path to having such a wide gulf between the haves and have nots.

  3. HBD suggests we already have stark differentials between different populations, so it's a moot point. How many aboriginal Australian Nobel Prize winners are there again? And how many Jewish ones? Your brand of ludditism makes a terrible tradeoff of denying the uplift of one end of the spectrum while claiming to prevent what already exists.

Oh wait, the sterling and terminally resistant to reality claim that all human populations are equal, especially cognitively so, acts as a barrier to even recognizing there is a problem, or at least it's not the kind of problem you solve by giving them handouts or schools.

I predict that progressives will turn on a dime on the idea of HBD as soon as gene therapy becomes a viable way to bring all groups into IQ parity. They might not acknowledge the change publicly, but there will be zero barriers to implementation.

Just as environmentalists dismiss geoengineering out of hand, modern progressives will never accept eugenics.

I'm going to take the opposite side here, progressives tend to go by moral purity over factual accuracy, the denial of HBD will continue far longer than we have robust methods for intelligence augmentation. Right now, the best bet is embryo selection, which may be good for 2-8 IQ points unless you go for more intense selection, at which point you can really push the envelope.

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Aren't there already gene therapies being developed? Isn't it instead that testing on human subjects is subject to agreed upon international standards? I think you can do this research but you are subject to Institutional Review Boards or your country equivalent. I don't see any involvement of neo-luddites in preventing this research, unless you consider human rights to be a stumbling block.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_Helsinki

With how much panic and FUD there is over simply eating GMOs versus becoming them?

https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/crispr.2020.0082

A large majority of countries (96 out of 106) surveyed have policy documents—legislation, regulations, guidelines, codes, and international treaties—relevant to the use of genome editing to modify early-stage human embryos, gametes, or their precursor cells. Most of these 96 countries do not have policies that specifically address the use of genetically modified in vitro embryos in laboratory research (germline genome editing); of those that do, 23 prohibit this research and 11 explicitly permit it. Seventy-five of the 96 countries prohibit the use of genetically modified in vitro embryos to initiate a pregnancy (heritable genome editing). Five of these 75 countries provide exceptions to their prohibitions. No country explicitly permits heritable human genome editing. These data contrast markedly with previously reported findings.

That seems like regulatory hell if I've ever seen one.

I think you can do this research but you are subject to Institutional Review Boards or your country equivalent

Ah, IRBs, a pox on human progress, without even smallpox around to contest for the greater evil.

unless you consider human rights to be a stumbling block

Why, I do, so good guess even if purely by accident.

The AMA condemns it, for example:

The American Medical Association's Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs stated that "genetic interventions to enhance traits should be considered permissible only in severely restricted situations: (1) clear and meaningful benefits to the fetus or child; (2) no trade-off with other characteristics or traits; and (3) equal access to the genetic technology, irrespective of income or other socioeconomic characteristics.

Imagine if they banned elective surgeries or something like braces because, gasp, it costs money, and the rich can better take advantage of it than the poor.

Make no mistake, the whole field has been pushed back decades by intentional lobbying from bioethicists and the usual useful idiots on the environmentalist side.

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It would all have been worth it, if it eliminated a disgruntled population of millions that modern Wokists can point to and yell "systemic racism" without much in the way of pushback since HBD left the Overton Window.

Interbreeding was a good idea, and European genes seem to be dominant over aboriginal ones in basically every instance, but it’s important to note that the remaining pure-blooded aborigines aren’t the ones that are crying racism, it’s the mixed race descendants who everyone thinks of as just white.

I'm aware of that, but I think they'd have a much harder time getting sympathy if they didn't have their pure-bred cousins to point at, implicitly conflating the problems they face.

It's not like you can tell most of them apart from "pure" whites, which makes keeping identity cards straight when you're a card-carrying activist difficult.

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GATTACA and associated neo-ludditism is excluded from good

But Gore Vidal is in that movie!

Consider the Dingo which may be a feral descendant of previously domesticated canines brought to Australia but for some reason were neither managed nor bred for thousands of years. The implications make it a bit of a controversial explanation.

Even if you take out HBD, they live in the middle of nowhere. How can they possibly generate wealth out there? I was just in the Midwest and the rural downs out there are straight up just dead and full of zombie opiate addicts wandering downtown. I was just in Peoria, IL and I have never seen such a dead rust belt city before. And this is with white people in the US. There is no opportunity for them where they live.

Each year millions of people willingly uproot themselves to go to a different country in search of better economic wealth etc, and those who have potential manage to achieve it to varying degrees. India is extremely poor, Indian Americans are very rich, high human capital Indians when placed in an environment conducive to generating wealth do extremely well. Australian aboriginals don't, e.g. Australian aboriginals in large cities don't do paticularly well compared to the median inhabitants of those cities.

People move for economic opportunities all the time. The catch, of course, is that they have to be economically useful.

I think it goes to show how little the regime takes these kinds of people as threats. They can say this because they pose no threat and are often useful to the people running these countries. Meanwhile, the far right groups in the West get treated like a threat because they actually are. Say what you want about the trucker protest or Jan 6, but they actually threatened the regime and elites so they were dealt with harshly. There's a buffer zone on the left where they can be radicals and not really cause any issues or threaten anything. They are running up against it now with Palestine and Israel and finally getting serious push back so you can tell that is one stance that actually threatens the regime and the elites.

You'd think being a very immigration friendly nation would prevent blood and soil rhetoric like:

"It is the legitimacy of the non-Indigenous occupation in this country that requires recognition, not the other way around."

But apparently not for all groups. I guess the brown "occupiers" just stay out of this stuff?

It has been very striking as well, at least to me, the way that rhetoric has blamed the result specifically on white Australia, and not on multicultural Australia.

There are significantly more Chinese-Australians than there are Aboriginal Australians. There are more Indian-Australians than there are Aboriginal Australians. But they apparently don't merit a mention?

You know, I find the implication that there's something wrong with "blood and soil" a bit odd. Citizenship is always jus soli or jus sanguinis.

It's not about whether it's wrong to me. As a migrant it's not in my interests but I don't really see it as inherently wrong.

The point is that many pro-immigrant regimes and the most cosmopolitan amongst their number tend to, for obvious reasons. Except when they apparently don't.

It's always been ethnonationalism for me but not for thee with these types.

I don’t think Australia is best described as “very immigration friendly.”

Australia is the only country in the world with a policy of mandatory detention and offshore processing of asylum seekers who arrive without a valid visa.

Whether or not that makes sense, it’s been a point of contention.

One of the reasons we are very immigrant friendly is that we are actually serious about, and effective at, keeping illegal immigrants out. Don't conflate immigration with not enforcing the border.

Australia is around 30% immigrants. They are excessively immigrant friendly.

Asylum seekers are a small and special subset of would be immigrants. Making them stay on Asylum Seeker Prison Island is a good choice.

More than a quarter of the population are first generation immigrants. Expand that to second generation and it's almost half of us.

We are extremely immigration friendly. Including for refugees. We just insist on people following the rules.

What about economic migrants though? I think asylum seekers are their own kettle of fish.

(Canada, for example, has a lot of both forms of migration but would still be incredibly immigration friendly by most standards if they just stuck to economic migrants and foreign students).

... yeah, a lot of what people think of as immigration-friendly is mostly the backpacker's / working holiday visa, and that's really a short-term labor thing that's near-impossible to turn into long-term residence.

Yep, Australia actually has a pretty restricitve immigration policy where if any single one of your family members has a medical condition the Australian government deems too expensive to treat, every single one of you can get your visa refused.

Aboriginal leaders declared a week of silence to mourn the result.

Were these actual aboriginal leaders, or were these white activists with a great-great grandmother who may or may not have been 1/16 aboriginal, no one can tell for certain?

The latter, obviously. Last time I was in Australia the attitude I was picking up from young educated Australians was "This is obviously a racket, and someone who isn't Pauline Hanson needs to sort it out before she gets a chance to." The cultural display put on for us included a bunch of whitefellas (presumably with the requisite blood quantum - I didn't check) performing traditional Aboriginal dance in a way which was cringe for everyone involved, although I assume the fake abos were getting paid.

There’s a minimum blood quantum to be aboriginal in Australia?

There's no formal requirement - this was one issue with the Voice. In theory there's the three-part test (have Aboriginal ancestors, identify as Aboriginal, be accepted as Aboriginal by the community in which you live), but what it mostly boils down to in practice is self-identification.

There isn't really. Which is how you end up with white neurologists identifying as aboriginal with only a great grandfather who was indigenous.

Collective decision making isn't best even in nominally very smart populations.

E.g. as someone on twitter observed, Israeli PR would have been far better had they started bombing after spending a week showing decapitated babies and bloody child rooms to the world.

A cold blooded autocrat in charge of Israel could have managed that..

A cold blooded autocrat in charge of Israel could have managed that..

could have managed that. The median cold blooded autocrat would have carpetbombed the place and be gassing the rubble as we speak.

Given how much damage the success of the initial Hamas raid did to Netanyahu's authority, an effective cold-blooded autocrat would surely be focusing on identifying the wreckers and saboteurs who could be blamed, which is far more important to their long-term survival than the details of the inevitably successful punitive expedition in response.

Isn't that the most salient critique against someone like Bibi? Putting short term political goals and victories over the long term goals for Israel?

Maybe try find a more opportune time to kill your enemy than when the entire world is feeling sorry for them. Reflexively raising your hand in anger is a poor look. Especially when it ends up impotently flailing around killing civilians. Hard to call that a success.

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