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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.

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.

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?

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.

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.