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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29193 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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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.

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You're a little out of date on this - we successfully reduced petrol sniffing in Aboriginal communities by 95%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

“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.

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.

How much of that is authorities tolerating Stone Age norms about consent and marriage, and how much is creepy uncles?

I don't know, but my impression is that there's plenty of both.

While that doesn’t surprise me, and a lot of Stone Age norms about age of consent, marriage, relationships, and sex wind up as just celebrating creepy uncles, it seems like it’s an important distinction to be made, especially because the authorities can in theory just say ‘no, you don’t get to marry 11-year-olds just because it’s your cultural tradition’ and the people stopping the authorities from doing so are probably mostly woke people who will proceed to pointing at that statistic in order to justify more of the woke program.

To be clear, I don't think there's any child marriage going on. But I think there's a non-trivial amount of 17 year old boy having sex with 12 year old girl and that being shrugged off as pretty much normal. As well as much older men using their power in the community to pretty much do what they like.

But, again, I'm no expert.

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