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Notes -
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.
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..
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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