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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27731 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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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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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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GATTACA and associated neo-ludditism is excluded from good

But Gore Vidal is in that movie!

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.

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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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.

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.

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.

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

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.

...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.

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

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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'

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.

'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.

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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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.

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

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.

Canada's most famous indigenous woman: not indigenous, not even Canadian

Buffy Ste-Marie is a musician. She has a deep discography of folk music that incorporates her indigenous identity and activism. She has lived a long and productive life as arguably the most famous Canadian indigenous woman. For Americans she's probably better known as the first woman to breastfeed on television, an interesting milestone in its own right. It's also good that this proves she's a woman, as it's the only element of her public identity that is still standing. In news that should shock exactly zero people who are tangentially aware of the notion of "Pretendians" in Canadian high society, the CBC has rather convincing evidence that Buffy Ste-Marie's version of her life's history is fraudulent.

The details have changed over the years - a sign in itself, if anyone would have risked official censure to point it out - but in general Ste-Marie has claimed herself to have been born to a Piapot Cree woman, and then subsequently removed from her birth mother (either because of her death, or forcibly as part of the "Sixties Scoop", which should have itself been a red flag considering she was born in 1941). She claimed to have been adopted by an American family, and later reconnected with and adopted by her birth people in Canada. Well, the documentary evidence seems fairly irrefutable: her "adoptive" parents were her birth parents. Her siblings are her full-siblings. She was born Beverly Santamaria in Massachusetts, and has no ancestral connection to Canada at all. Her father was Italian, her mother English.

She appears to have begun claiming Indian ancestry in her early 20s, first claiming to be Mi'kmaq, a perhaps more believable white lie having grown up in New England. Alternatively, she said she was Algonqiun. A few years later she claimed she was Cree, which prompted her paternal uncle to correct a local newspaper on that fact in 1964. In the next few decades as her career began to take off, coinciding with a general surge of interest in Native American arts and culture, she increasingly resorted to legal threats to silence her family members from contradicting her self-constructed origin story, including threatening her brother that she would tell the world that he had sexually abused her.

I've been watching the trickle of responses over the past day on reddit as news this piece was coming out spread. This thread on /r/indiancountry is generally defensive, arguing that irrespective of the exact circumstances of her birth that she is legitimately indigenous via ceremonial adoption in her 20s. I think these kind of arguments will melt away now that the CBC investigation has been published. It seems clear to me that Ste-Marie's story was not borne of confusion or innocent mistake, but was rather a deliberately and cynically constructed narrative that was upheld through threats and intimidation. The investigation was much more thorough and dug into a lot more nasty stuff than I expected. Ste-Marie was a Canadian legend, and had been endlessly fêted by the CBC (and other Canadian media) prior to this. I would point out that although the CBC has generally gone mushy progressive, its investigative journalism programs, namely Marketplace and The Fifth Estate (who undertook this project) have remained excellent and provide very good value for taxpayer money.

This thread on /r/indiancountry is generally defensive, arguing that irrespective of the exact circumstances of her birth that she is legitimately indigenous via ceremonial adoption in her 20s.

Very interesting that reddit native americans are so hostile toward 'pretendian hunters' as a perceived attack on the sovereign right of each tribe to decide who counts as a member.

The nature of federal and state funding for Indians as determined by tribe as determined (in many cases) by blood as a kind of reparations (explicitly or implicitly) means that 'conversion' to the Indian way of life is complicated, but I wonder what percentage of Indians who live on the reservation would be in favor of a formal conversion process for whites and others who want to become natives. What do they think such a thing would or should entail? Living on the res and making enough of a contribution to be recognized as such by some local community official?

The nature of federal and state funding for Indians as determined by tribe as determined (in many cases) by blood as a kind of reparations (explicitly or implicitly)

A gift-giving, paternal relationship between European/American settler states and native states is a lot older than any sense of white guilt. The US government, for example, has been making at least periodic payments to Indian tribes since the 1790s.

I don't know if I'd call it reparations. This is a traditional form of interaction between the new states and the tribes, including between states and tribes that otherwise had no real relationship.

Sure, but it’s been a century since Indians were confirmed to be US citizens, subject to the general rights and responsibilities of the settler American society in which they now live, and at whose mercy they had been for a hundred years before 1924.

In Canada it might be a little different due to the complex nature of confederation and crown-native relations.

Very interesting that reddit native americans are so hostile toward 'pretendian hunters' as a perceived attack on the sovereign right of each tribe to decide who counts as a member.

I don't know about Canada, but in the States there's often a financial question involved (casino royalties or whatever). I used to live near a rez and would occasionally overhear stories of tribal political squabbles when someone had a few too many beers. This lady over here gets her second cousin on the tribal rolls for a scholarship, this guy over here gets 30 people who've lived on the rez their whole life purged from the rolls because everyone gets an extra 30 cents a month or something trivial. Shit gets stupid.

I would think that should make people more likely to support pretendians not less. If you’re a minority ethnic group that gets money from the government, having fakes out there means less money. Even if you don’t, having more people convert is problematic simply because of a sort of quality control issue (for want of a better term) in which the people “converting” might have very little in common with the natives and know little about their beliefs or culture. They’d also have little interest in preserving or passing along that culture. Basically, it ends up being diluted and becomes a LARP by brown looking white people pretending to be natives and doing a terrible job at it while actual tribes struggle to teach their kids what being tribal is actually all about.

Reddit Native Americans may be disproportionately LARPers. There are relatively few Native Americans in the US/Canada compared to whites, and plenty of white people who would rather be Native American than white; whether the latter group is more common on Reddit is hard to know, but possible.

Actual native Americans I’ve met seem disproportionately not the uh, Reddit inclined set. But that could just be my filter bubble.

favor of a formal conversion process for whites and others who want to become natives.

Yeah, this would be very interesting to see pan out. Amerinds have higher in group loyalty than generic whites so it'll probably take a while but it would amuse me greatly to see an Indian (dot) become an Indian (feather) tribal chief. Probably will be more competent too at getting resources allocated for his tribe.

Probably will be more competent too at getting resources allocated for his tribe.

https://www.theonion.com/man-finally-put-in-charge-of-struggling-feminist-moveme-1819569515

I was highly surprised by this, and looking up Wikipedia it says there that her mother claimed to have Mi'kmaq ancestry, so maybe it started off as the same kind of Elizabeth Warren "my family history says we have Native ancestry" notion, but since there was that surge of interest in Native American issues in the 60s/70s, she found it a better idea to claim more ancestry than she had, and by shifting it to Canada rather than New England, make it harder for the US side to trace where exactly she supposedly came from:

Her father Albert's parents were born in Italy while her mother Winifred was of English ancestry. Her family changed their surname from Santamaria to Sainte-Marie due to "anti-Italian sentiment" following the Second World War. Though "visibly white", her mother, Winifred, "self-identified as part Mi'kmaq."

Maybe. Who knows? Certainly if you wanted a career in folk music in the 50s/60s, having some claim to Latino or Indigenous or the like ethnicity was an advantage, and if you're a music promoter and a lassie with black hair and olive complexion walks into your office claiming to be Canadian Indigenous, are you going to call her a liar?

The interesting thing about Buffy is that although this was apparently her official bio/story very early on, she didn't really lean into it much until the early/mid seventies when she was already well established. She had the odd song on the sixties albums relating to Indian issues, but most of it was kind of standard hippie/folky stuff. Certainly the big hits written by her ('Lift us up' and 'Universal Soldier', off the top of my head) had no such themes. It's not like she burst on the scene in buckskins and moccasins; she just dresses like a regular hippy in most of the images I can gather, really until almost the 80s/90s.

ED: I'm actually more concerned how come she's LARPing as Canadian at all -- did she get citizenship based on the orphan claim, or what?

Perhaps this is not "really" leaning into it, but here's an early TV appearance:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=KwOyconXiGM

(Incidentally, that's a terrible song. I listened to several of her songs and the melody was awful in just about all of them. I usually enjoy 1960s/early 1970s folk or folky hippie music, but the combination of intense sincerity and awkward melody made me suspect that I have a very filtered knowledge of that period's progressive folk music.)

Universal Soldier works, but even then it's a bit stilted in terms of pure musicality

I've been watching the trickle of responses over the past day on reddit as news this piece was coming out spread. This thread on /r/indiancountry is generally defensive, arguing that irrespective of the exact circumstances of her birth that she is legitimately indigenous via ceremonial adoption in her 20s. I think these kind of arguments will melt away now that the CBC investigation has been published.

Yep, they largely have melted away. There's still a large number of "say it ain't so" folks, but the evidence seems pretty solid. When I did oil and gas law I had to look at a lot of genealogical research and vital records and there's no real question of the circumstances of her birth. If she were adopted and a birth certificate issued, the date of issue wouldn't be the day after she was born and it certainly wouldn't be in-sequence with other birth certificates whose veracity no one is doubting. Questioning the validity of these records has about as much going for it as questioning the validity of Obama's birth certificate.

The evidence seems pretty solid, and I'm sure something hinky is going on.

That said, she looks very indigenous. Of course every race actually spans a wide variety of phenotypes, but she is pretty much the exemplar of the Native American one. Only DNA would say for sure, but until that point I would bet that she's not a pretendian, at least with respect to being of indigenous descent.

I think you're underestimating how much one can do with makeup. Among my siblings, me and my younger sister have brown hair, brown eyes, darker complexions, and at least with my sister I've seen her very convincingly go "mock Indian" with the right makeup/style/accessories (we're like around 5% Métis or whatever; multiple full-blood indigenous relatives from the early 19th century, by all accounts more than Ms Ste-Marie).

My older sisters are both fair, blonde, blue-eyed and would not pass muster as indigenous even though we all have the same parents and otherwise resemble each other strongly. Similarly Ste-Marie looks very much like her (fairer) brother

I feel like it's also a matter of accessories and context as well, for people of a kind of light-medium brown that could plausibly be from anywhere between Mediterreanean, most of the Arab world, most of Latin America etc.

If I see somebody who's about the right shade of brown dressed in an outfit that suggests an ethnicity, I'm generally not gonna fetch out the calipers and take them at face value

At least in terms of facial features, she looks like a lot of people in central Adriatic Italy or Albania.

Interesting, this is not one that I had on my bingo card.

I guess the possibility of extramarital relations on the part of her mother is not addressed -- this seems similarly plausible with Turpell-Lafonde as something which one might know but not want to publicize, leading to the fun web of lies for journalists to dig into. (and not contradicted by the birth certificate)

She certainly looks very indian in all the pictures from cradle to (near) grave -- much more so than anyone else in her family.

She certainly looks very indian in all the pictures

Her father was Italian, so depending where her paternal grandparents came from (e.g. Sicily which has been colonised by Phoenicians, Greeks and Carthaginians, then much later by Arabs, in between bouts of Western Europeans invading), she could be very dark-skinned and 'foreign' looking for someone born in New England.

Yeah, when you say "a lassie with black hair and olive complexion" you could easily be describing my half-Italian (part Sicilian) sister. But I'd be the guy to look at such a person and tell them they looked more like they were from New Jersey than the First Nations, which is probably one of the reasons I'd make a lousy music promoter.

She could, but that's not what I mean -- I grew up around lots of (Western) Canadian Indians, and she looks a lot like them through the years. More facial structure than complexion.

If she could prove recent native ancestry via DNA test (anything more than 10%, even), she obviously would, that would be a slam dunk.

I guess the possibility of extramarital relations on the part of her mother is not addressed

I seem to recall that this was the defense of Shaun King (I think? Some BLM activist) who was accused of Dolezal-ing. This seems like the perfect response to any accusations like this. The people who want to believe have a possible - perhaps even plausible - narrative they can latch onto, giving you the support you might need for facing the accusations. And the people accusing you have almost no recourse to actually verify your claims. DNA tests aren't common, and the father might be long gone anyway, and DNA tests are fallible too.

King probably is ‘biracial’ in the sense that I think he clearly has some black ancestry, even though he’s obviously mostly of European descent.

In the case of alleged ‘pretendians’, DNA tests are an easy way of refuting allegations.

and the father might be long gone anyway,

Very likely in this case -- I think Buffy's in her 80s!

She certainly looks very indian in all the pictures from cradle to (near) grave -- much more so than anyone else in her family.

Iron Eyes Cody was born Espera Oscar de Corti, confusing Italian blood for Native is not unusual.

Sure, and he looks about like DeNiro or Alan Alda (nee Abruzzo) when you get him out of the Indian drag: https://oldshowbiz.tumblr.com/post/187609018569/iron-eyes-cody-and-rodd-redwing-were-a-pair-of

I'm not saying that an Italian can't fool Americans who have never seen an Indian into thinking they're an Indian -- I'm saying that I grew up around little Indian girls who looked just like her in her toddler pictures; their moms looked just like her on her album covers, and now she looks just like their grandmas.

She didn't even start wearing Indian stuff on her album covers until some time in the seventies; I'm not saying I couldn't be wrong, but 'long hair, some feathers and a tan' are what I'm talking about at all.

Does this remind you of anyone?

I am glad to hear the Governor call it desert -- it is desert -- it is pretty good desert.

It is good to be back again in Nevada and get a chance to see things again. It seems to me they look a lot better than they did a few years ago and as you know, your Government in Washington knows that this State is on the map which is something. Some administrations didn't know it was on the map. And, I have been very glad that your State administration, from your Governor down, work so well with all of us on the other side of the continent. We have had real cooperation from the State Government. We have not had any dissention or cross words, and when all of us decided things had to be done, they have been done.

You people know I am water conscious -- although not a strict prohibitionist --

When I was down on the Ohio River the other day I told them I would catch bigger fish than grew in Ohio, though I don't think I will get anything that tastes better to eat than Nevada trout -- the Senator gave me some Nevada trout for lunch -- it was delicious.

It is good to see you all and I hope to get back here again some day. I hope some day to come in an automobile and stay longer and get to know you better.

It is good to see you.

I elided the header, which specified that these were "INFORMAL REMARKS OF THE PRESIDENT, From the Rear Platform of his Special Train" spoken on July 13, 1938. Consider these remarks, spoken by the most aggressive Democrat in history. Compare them to the informal, off-the-cuff manner of our previous President, Donald Trump. Sure, the occasional choice of words is unfamiliar. But the rest is all there: glittering generalities. Praise for those on board. Rambling anecdotes. All these ghostly remnants of what must, at the time, have been raw charisma.

People like to feel listened to. They like to feel part of a conversation, and be reminded that the person is a real human rather than an unfeeling automaton. The kind of performance which successfully conveys that humanity doesn't always translate so well to a recording or especially a transcript. In the 30s, FDR was winning over the populace with informal remarks and fireside chats. Today, a politician can still cultivate that relationship with his base. But every casual remark is a risk. It will be carefully catalogued, preserved in cheap and ubiquitous recordings, and mined for any advantage. When a detractor watches a 15-second clip on evening TV, there is no suspension of disbelief. None of the casualness with which we'd listen in person. It's not just "two screens." It's one team watching a screen, and one holding a conversation.

I remember reading some accounts that Bill Clinton had an uncanny level of personal charisma that people who hadn't met him just didn't get. I think it's probably a more general quality of today's rigorously competitive political world. Maybe that's why politicians so often come off as incompetent or fake, that they're selected so strongly for personal charisma it leaves no room for other qualities.

In my experience most high-level US politicians have an unreal level of charm in person that is almost impossible to fully describe unless you've experienced it firsthand. I've met several politicians who I intensely disliked from afar, only to find myself instantly charmed by them in person. Never met Clinton, but he probably takes this to another level.

Also my experience. Even Newt Gingrich, possibly one of the least charismatic politicians I can readily think of, was quite a bit more charming than the average Joe when meeting him in person.

My favorite Clinton anecdote is that Newt Gingrich needed a chaperone to meet with Clinton because every time he went in alone he got charmed and gave Clinton whatever he asked for.

Bill Clinton (né William Jefferson Blythe III) might not have fallen too far from the tree. His biological father was a traveling salesman who married Bill's mother while still legally married to his 4th wife. He died in a car wreck before Bill was born. I wonder if we'll find the charisma gene?

I suggest getting serially married men and successful salesmen together and giving them all dna tests.

My favorite Clinton anecdote is from TNR or maybe the New Yorker a while back. Doctor said, “Bill Clinton loves to talk; a friend of mine once got chance to meet him when they were both in the locker room of a racquetball club in Manhattan, and enjoyed the first hour of the conversation, but ended up faking a phone call from his wife as an excuse to prevent the chat from entering hour three.”

I suspect the surviving Bush and Obama might both do the same thing—just imagine being the top 0.001% for ambition and extroversion, with decades of life left, and every single job in America would be an embarrassing step down.

Years ago, my uncle met Clinton very briefly and later remarked that Clinton had this incredible power to make you believe that he really cared about you, yes you, personally, even if you were just one person in a queue of hundreds taking turns to shake his hand.

Having met Bill Clinton in a random and non-political situation, I can say that this is spot on. Guy was on the way to Chelsea’s bday party or something and I remain convinced that he would have preferred to stand there chatting with me instead.

Having a very quick hunt for similar anecdotes, I found one of Gillian Anderson who was convinced on the basis of a 30-second interaction that she would get a message from him the next day to meet again.

She didn't.

Not to be crass, but Anderson is way more attractive than Monica Lewinsky. No accounting for taste, old Bill.

His loss.

So he's the real life Carrot Ironfoundersson.

Follow up post time.

There was a discussion awhile back about whether Jamaal Bowman pulled a fire alarm to help delay a bill relating to the government shutdown.

New footage is out. https://www.zerohedge.com/political/rep-bowman-issued-criminal-summons-pulling-fire-alarm

It seems:

  1. Bowman doesn’t try to open the door.

  2. Bowman takes down signs.

  3. Bowman pulls the alarm and walks away without changing how he walks (ie no indication he then tried to use the door).

To me, this seems like very strong evidence he pulled the alarm to cause a disruption.

Bowman doesn’t try to open the door.

From the video that seems to be the first thing he does. Now given that the sign he takes down (one of them simply taken down, one in his hand as he walks away) says "Push Until Alarm Sounds (3 Seconds), Door Will Unlock In 30 Seconds" and that he did not try the door again after manually pulling the alarm there might be some conclusions to be drawn.

I don’t see that — he seems to grab the placard.

That placard is this sign. I know the film is grainy but it's a dimensional match, color match and the text layout is a match. It's the sign.

Edit: it's also placed on top of the bar in the same way.

You can see the right door flex a bit right after he gets there.

Perhaps but at the same time he pulls the fire alarm and makes zero effort to go towards the door nor is there any hesitation.

Maybe he tried to open the door to trigger the alarm?

Stronger evidence than his guilty plea?

I can’t fathom why he thought pulling the alarm was a good idea. It didn’t work in undergrad, and it didn’t work here…right?

Well he plead to a pretty lame charge. He could have been hit with J6 level felonies. He should be held to a higher level than just one off citizens.

Should I think is the better word. A bunch of people entering a building that is often open to the public, when it happens not to be, but also facing no resistance from security, seem like the sort of people who need a small fine. Whereas congressmen interrupting sessions of congress via fire alarm deserve some orange jumpsuits.

Stronger evidence than his guilty plea?

AFAICT, his plea was solely to pulling an alarm without a fire, probably this law. His position remains that he pulled the alarm to get to a vote faster, insisting that he did not intend to cause a disruption of government functioning. Which is... really hard to match up with the video. Maybe he was running back into the building to find someone to report the alarm-pull, after he'd non-chalantly taken down signs and carefully pulled the fire alarm?

It didn’t work in undergrad, and it didn’t work here…right?

Dunno. The Dem side of the House had been asking for additional time to review the then-pending budget/continuing resolution proposal, and the fire alarm did get a number of House offices locked down. Doesn't prove that it changed the timeline for the next vote, but then again the law "corruptly interfering with" isn't limited to just votes themselves, or even just to Congress itself.

Honestly, the shame's probably a more effective ramification than a criminal trial that'd go nowhere, to the extent any politician can still feel shame; I didn't expect him to even get this slap on the wrist. But there's a lot of people who are going to point to this (and to the increasingly-common disruption of Republican state congresses, or federal judicial hearings) when they do something stupid, and sooner or later the escalation's going to get bad.

when they do something stupid, and sooner or later the escalation's going to get bad.

There's a long history of shenanigans to delay or stop procedures. Early in his career Abraham Lincoln dove out a window and ran with some of the other representatives on his side so that the chamber wouldn't have quorom and the vote wouldn't count.

My favourite is from 2006 or 2007 in an Asia - Pacific country. The opposition wanted to stop a motion from being read in the house, so one of the members ran up and ate it. Which at the time, the rules didn't account for.

I don't mind these events, they give amusing anecdotes and aren't a huge deal.

The issue here is the hypocracy around the "obstructing an official proceding" law. It's supposed to be about destroying documents congress has requested.

Why did the Men of Country Music Lose their Mojo?

Epistemic Status: Elaborate inside joke with myself from spending too long riding in a truck listening to country radio.

I grew up with a certain country music cliche, that every straitlaced city girl wanted to cut loose and ride a dirt road with a country boy. Trace Adkins made it clear that Ladies Love Country Boys; Kenney Chesney’s woman [] Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy and is always staring at him when he’s chugging along; Big and Rich saddled up their horses and rode into the city, where the girls shouted Save a Horse Ride a Cowboy; Joe Diffie found that all you needed was an F150 because women loved a Pickup Man; even mr sunshine on my god damn shoulders John Denver’s the Cowboy and the Lady and country godfather Johny Cash’s If I were a Carpenter play to the same trope.

Today our swaggering country hero has been replaced at the top of the charts with soulful bittersweet songs by small town men who lost their upwardly mobile girls to the city life.

Country megastar Morgan Wallen’s More than My Hometown dominated country radio so hard it even charted on the Billboard 100. The lyrics reflect a man left behind by a woman who loved him, but had ambitions for bigger things than he could give her.

Girl, our mamas are best friends and so are we

The whole town's rooting for us like the home team

Most likely to settle down

Plant a few roots real deep and let 'em grow

**But we can't stop this real world from spinnin' us

Your bright lights called, I don't blame you for pickin’ up**

Your big dream bags are all packed up and ready to go

But I just need you to know …

I ain't the runaway kind, I can't change that

My heart's stuck in these streets like the train tracks

City sky ain't the same black …

'Cause I can't love you more than my hometown

**Yeah, you got a wild in your eyes that I just wasn't born with

I'm a same gas station cup of coffee in the mornin’**

I need a house on the hill, girl, not in 'em

So hang onto these words 'til them avenues help you forget ‘em

23 by Sam Hunt follows the same storyline a few years down the road (as does Wallen’s own Seven Summers

You can marry an architect

Build you a house out on the water

That really impresses your father, yeah

And you can find some grown-up friends

Drink some wine in California ...

No matter where I go, no matter what I do

I'll never be 23, with anyone but you

You can marry who you want

Go back to Tennessee

But you'll never be 23 with anyone but me

We'll always have Folly Beach

We'll always have Delta nights

We'll always be in between real love and real life

**You can ride the train to work

Straighten out your accent in the city

Like your folks ain't from Mississippi, yeah

You probably got an office view

Wearing those skirts you always hated

Yeah, you're so sophisticated**

But I bet you when you drink too much

I bet you think about back then

I really hope you're happy now

I'm really glad I knew you then

Looking at the lyrics, there’s a common trope of an ambitious young woman leaving her country fried boyfriend behind. He was fun while he lasted, but she wanted more from life and he didn’t, she left town he stayed, she wanted bright lights and office views and drinking wine with grown up friends while he wanted gas station coffee with the same buddies he had from high school. Note that neither singer really denies the objective superiority of the city life, or puts in much effort to defending small town worldview, they simply agree to disagree with their lost loves.

The swaggering songs I grew up with reflected a world where the working class country white man was dominant, resurgent culturally. Country music’s crossover popularity reflected it: singers like Alan Jackson and Toby Keith and Shania Twain hit it big, country dominated charts in a way it hadn’t before and wouldn’t since. The cities were hollowed out, the downtowns emptied, the exurbs were being built. The exurbs culturally identified themselves with rural, more than urban, values. Cultural creation is about distinguishing oneself from others, after White Flight they wished to distinguish themselves from the city they left, and with the rural areas they colonized. The suburban dad, the kind who buys a John Deere baseball cap to go with his lawn mower and hoped his wife thought it was sexy, that was the core country music consumer. That was the man who listened to Big and Rich and could imagine himself as “the only John Wayne left in this town;” and who wouldn’t trade his "Silverado for [the city’s] Escalade or your freak parade.” The kind of guy who bought an F-150 crew cab with a sparkling clean bed and fancied himself a “pickup man.” The music reflected a confidence, a swagger, the country man was sexually potent, a real man not like the effeminates and freaks from the city.

The dynamics of the 2020s’ give us these Sad Working Class Boy country songs. The SWCB is Nashville’s interpretation of the zeitgeist, which reflects material reality: women now hold 3% more degrees, and represent 56% of the current tertiary student population. A 56-44 gender gap of degrees means a huge percentage of men without degrees see women they should be dating, women they may have dated in their carefree teens and twenties, they see these women become upwardly mobile while they do not. This is reflected in populations. In NYC, LA, and Chicago there are 10 adult women for every 9 adult men. Those women came from somewhere, and they left men behind, they left the SWCBs behind, in their rural and exurban hometowns.

The SWCB song taps into a deep vein of truth for millions of Americans who lived that story. Women who dated men they knew in high school or still too young to worry about marriage, “in between real love and real life.” Couples that enjoyed spending time together, but ultimately were unable to bridge the gap between their competing ambitions and lifestyles. The country singer, and audience he embodies, has drifted from being the irresistible object of attraction, to being good enough to bed but not good enough to wed. The swaggering blare of Big and Rich handing out hundred dollar bills has been replaced by the lament of a himbo grisette in a cowboy hat for young female yuppies. Inevitably left behind when his novelty fades, left with memories but no ring in his small hometown.

The traditional character of the Grisette, a young working class girl that the Parisian artist or bourgeois student would have an affair with in his youth before abandoning her for a proper marriage to a woman of his class, provides the clearest parallel to the SWCB. Fontine in Les Miserables is probably the character most likely to ring a bell for the audience here. Where in 18th-19th century Paris, when men had sexual freedom and women were repressed, working class women were used for pleasure and then thrown away; today when women have sexual freedom working class boys are used and then thrown away. Good enough for now, not good enough for forever.

Maybe the transition song is Kenny Chesney’s All the Pretty Girls:

All the seventeen's said, "I'm getting outta dodge"

All the big dreams said, "I'm selling all I got"

All the high rollers busy placing their bets

Me, I'm heading south, 'cause all the pretty girls said

I'm home for the summer, shoot out the lights

Don't blow my cover, oh I'm free tonight

The questions ask themselves: the pretty girls are “home for the summer” from college while Kenny just stayed in his hometown. They still want to hang out, but eventually they won’t, the story goes from In Love with the Boy to All the Pretty Girls to 23. Kenny should have hit the books, then maybe they would have stayed together.

Reminds me of the ‘higher education is for women’ trope- the only acceptable future that can be pushed for women coming out of high school is going to university and seeking a professional class job. Young men, of course, you can tell them to think seriously of joining the military or learning a trade, but don’t you dare advocate anything for women other than university to PMC. Now to some extent this is because parents don’t like to think about their daughters doing dangerous things(getting shot at, working on an Alaskan crab boat) and the trades are not a very friendly workplace for women, other than the butchest lesbians, but see below.

Heck, even the ‘Emily’ ad recruiting for the US army- lots of people missed this for the woke crap about lesbian parents and fighting for equality, but what I noticed was she went to college and then joined the army. Motteizeans who were in the military, sound off- how many enlisted showed up with education beyond high school, let alone a degree? I am not under the impression it was many at all, although I meet plenty of veterans who enlisted and then got a degree.

There is simply a cultural value in the USA where all women must go to college, otherwise they’re going to become either trailer-trash loser single mother fast food workers whose kids don’t share a dad, or horribly oppressed homemakers beaten by their hypocrite alcoholic husbands. I don’t think this is the IRL norm for working class women, although yes they’re more likely to be beaten or be single mothers than degree holding women, but the cultural prejudice is real.

I think it’s this. Culture is saying the quiet parts out loud and the blue collar lifestyle is now seen as undesirable. Either the people themselves are unacceptable (racist, stupid, poor, and so on), or the life itself is seen by the cultural elites as much less than modern exurbs have to offer (mostly fake-authentic foods, night clubs, wine stores, and the option of more culturally acceptable jobs). I don’t think it’s a jobs thing entirely as the vast majority of women I know with college degrees end up in education or other casually full time jobs that allow regular time off and don’t interfere too much with domestic duties.

Although I will say that another part of this is that country singers lost their mojo because they now accept their cultural inferiority— even country artists see the country as old-fashioned places that used to be good where you used to be able to get the good life. Compare that to hip hop and even people rapping about the inner city are talking about fast cars, drugs and alcohol, good times and loose women. They still see their culture as good, something worth embracing.

Young men, of course, you can tell them to think seriously of joining the military or learning a trade

I am about as far from the target audience of the messaging as possible, but my impression is that (apart from the specific appeal to the Violent Class discussed by JTarrou, which only the USMC really features in its messaging) the "join the military" message is a combination of:

  • Enlist in the military as a career with prospects, and chase NCO promotions which (although they don't tell you this) will de facto require you to pick up a degree via distance learning to get the promotion points you need.
  • Enlist in the military in order to get GI Bill money to pursue a degree after you get out.

So I don't think the military (apart from USMC grunt) is sold as an alternative pathway to getting a degree, more as a better route to a degree for less-bookish more-masculine men compared to going to a 4-year college straight out of HS.

There certainly was a message of enlist in the military to figure your shit out, get benefits for life, and learn a trade that you don’t necessarily need college for, at least when I was in middle and high school. There was also a travel the world for cheap angle and an appeal to patriotism angle.

VA loans featured in recruitment ads as much as the GI bill did when I was young.

Yeah. My parents figured that both me and my sister would go to college. They cautioned me against joining the military because of leftist disagreements with US foreign policy; they cautioned my sister extra hard. They were fine with her trying to become an ironworker or something if she wanted, though. IDK how an athletic average size woman pulls off working on an Alaskan crab boat, but if she did, more power to her, she's a badass.

NYC, LA, and Chicago there are 10 adult women for every 9 adult men.

I always wonder what that difference is for say 22 to 34 year olds.

Tbh I suspect that stat to be bullshit for different reasons; huge percentages of the urban underclass are imprisoned, the stereotype is that ghettoes are emptied out of prime age men. If I moved to NYC, the availability of a vast quantity of women in the worse parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx doesn't really matter to me one way or the other, what would matter is the gender balance in my social circle.

The underlying phenomenon driving the More than my Hometown/23 vibe (that rural-to-urban migration is now a mostly-female phenomenon except where strong patriarchy prevents this, and that one of the drivers is that women do not want to end up as farmers' wives) is global - Fred Pearce's Peoplequake is where I read about it, but is now probably out of date. But that ground truth hasn't changed over the timescale you are looking at with the change in the vibes of Country lyrics, so the vibe shift you are looking at is probably driven by something else. Someone more familiar than I am with fine-grained US economic data could probably confirm if it is the same rise in economic anxiety in rural and small-town America that drove the rise of Trump - the dates superficially match up.

  • Ladies Love Country Boys strongly implies that the male lead got off the farm and met the Yankee chick while they were both undergraduates at one of the SEC party schools.
  • In Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy the male lead is mostly attractive because he is rich, with the source of funds never specified.
  • Cowboy and the Lady is about a "cowboy" so far from the ranch that he is wearing a rhinestone-studded suit and cowboy boots in an airport business class lounge (and is also wearing a hat indoors, which would be a faux pas for an actual cowboy-with-a-hint-of-class).
  • If I were a Carpenter shouldn't really be on the list - the Carpenter is asking the question to the Lady with no particular expectation of getting the answer "Yes".

That leaves Thinks my Tractor's Sexy and Pickup Man as songs that portray rural lower-middle class men as sexy. And Thinks my Tractor's Sexy is very definitely about a country boy attracting the attention of a country girl - it isn't claiming that a "lady" would find the tractor sexy.

So the Country-is-sexy vibe was about the aesthetic of Country being the sexy icing on a cake which consists of money and status. All the Pretty Girls is getting at something similar, but without the cake - the pretty girls find the country boys superficially attractive and want to have some illicit sex with them before heading off to pursue lives elsewhere, and the country boys know that illicit sex is the only kind on offer so they sneak past the cops to get it. And of course this is in the general context of a genre which disdains outlawry and has lots of songs about people and their families ruined by breaking the law and ignoring basic sexual morality - so by the rules of Country music this is an account of systemic failure, not a "we cucked the white-shoe boys" brag.

FWIW (my exposure to Country is limited to what I hear at the house of a relative whose gateway drug was Dolly Parton), I think Hlynka is right and it was the swagger that was aberrational, not the maudlin.

It's fascinating how different our interpretations of the same song lyrics are. I always thought of the male lead in Ladies Love Country Boys as a townie from around Charlottesville or Durham or Chapel Hill, who the female law student ends up dating. Many such cases. Meanwhile, Rich is attractive because he's rich, Big is attractive because...and I always kind of pictured them as Texas ranchers or something.

so by the rules of Country music this is an account of systemic failure, not a "we cucked the white-shoe boys" brag.

That's a weird perception of country music. Even the old guys of country are Outlaw Country types these days, long gone are the Louvin Brothers who were playing genuine gospel music. Country music's average morality is closer to Toby Keith for the past decade or so. I'm counting at least two dozen songs on the top 100 that are about premarital or extramarital sex. Certainly country makes room for marital love and family in a way that other popular genres don't, but it hardly frowns on premarital sex anymore.

A quick google search of the newer songs you reference reveals they are all "co-written" by the referenced artists. All the other co-writers are professional industry vets: song writers and arrangers who work mostly in pop music, which modern country is a sub genera of. The co-writer credits for the performer are usually a legal/financial arrangement. Its very likely they had little to no creative input in these songs, though I could be wrong I don't think I am. While modern pop-country likes to tie itself to older country artists and imply a continuity, on the business side there is very little. What there is is much more related to Conway Twitty than Johnny Cash. FWIW I am a huge fan of original country western and old time music but I start to fall off when they started adding string sections (not fiddles, which are pure) and horns in the 60s.

Country still sells records and makes money off of it. Standard pop less so and rock has been dead from a music-business point of view for a while. Like any business they want reliable output that moves units and sells tickets. The trend you're seeing is not anything driven by performers or fans, its professional pop songwriters. The same sort of people that write songs for Taylor Swift. Probably some of the exact same people.

The sort version of this is that country songs were a lot more complementary of the performer when they were actually written by the performers, which they largely aren't anymore. Modern country is pop music with accents, slide guitars and rural themes.

Great post, and thanks for reminding me of a different song of the same name I used to listen to constantly and haven't heard for years.

American country is simply obviously trying to reach the lyrical heights of Finnish rural-themed music. (I'm linking to the Nightwish cover because it has English lyrics, the folksier original is here.

Kim Stanley Robinson, science fiction, and the limits of what you can imagine

A couple times on this forum Kim Stanley Robinson (KSR, for short) has come up. He's an American science fiction writer who plies mainly in hard(er) science fiction, and especially likes to play with themes that explore the interactions between technology, culture, and economics. He takes some limitation of humans and imagines: what if it were not so? How would we change, what could we do, what new things would we discover about ourselves? He's a bit of a granola-eating utopian socialist so I'm sure some here would have certain ideological objections to his writing. But it's nice sometimes to read work from someone who has a fundamental sort of optimism for humanity, that we might one day be able to put aside our differences and Figure It All Out.

His "Mars trilogy" (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars) might be his masterpiece, and extends his inquisitive nature. A depiction of the colonization of Mars over centuries, there is an endless series of problems for the characters to solve; some scientific in nature, but more than that organizational and cultural. The colonization of a virgin world yields all kinds of conflicts where there can be no true compromise between people with differing fundamental values. Alongside the geoengineering of Mars proceeds the genetic engineering of the human race, as scientists begin to unlock the ability to greatly extend the lifespan of humans. This might just have originated as a conceit by KSR to keep most of the characters across the centuries required for the geological drama to play out, but he dives fully into imaging all the upheaval such an advance would yield.

There are Luddites, reactionaries, those who wish to monopolize longevity for themselves, a great and deep anger from the masses at the prospect that immortality might be denied to them. There are myriad complications and problems; certain limits prove tricky to overcome. But technological progress is an unyielding wave, and by the end of the series humans dabble in every kind of imaginable self-customization, from the crucial to the trivial: yes, all sorts of environmental adaptations to Mars' ecosystems are quickly developed, but so are custom mixes of psychoactive drugs. People create physical backups of themselves so they can do dangerous sports. All sorts of modifications can be sought to fill the spiritual and emotional void. People delay their physical decrepitude indefinitely. Women put off having children into their 300s.

But what people don't do is change their sex. The trilogy was published between 1992 and 1996; KSR likely would not have understood the concept of "changing gender". Despite the near-infinite possibilities of changing one's physical form that is offered, no one seeks to transform themselves; no woman decides to father children, no man bears a child. There is no mention of purely cosmetic alterations to simply imitate the opposite sex, or become some even more complex sexual entity now that technology enables them to do so. No character ever feels any deep or emergent desire to push past this one final barrier, when all the others have already been crossed. And it's not like KSR is some prude or philosophically opposed to it; his more recent novels feature trans and non-binary characters, and in those that feature similar types of possibility with respect to genetic engineering people freely experiment with switching sexes even if they do not have some form of dysphoria. The simplest answer is that the notion that people would want to change their sex simply did not occur to him, and this is remarkable in the context of the books trying to imagine all the possible physical and societal limits that humans could push.

Most of the original hundred colonists are either American or Russian; one might speculate that if the books had been started five years earlier, the latter would have been Soviet, and if they had been started five years later, perhaps Chinese. To some extent this is the problem of all science fiction that deals in the near future (the the trilogy begins in the far-off future of 2026); it is far enough away to be unable to predict with certainty but close enough that mistakes seem obvious in hindsight. But I think this is also somewhat of a humbling notion that we just might not be as good at predicting societal changes as we might flatter ourselves to be. I used to feel that they were more strongly tied to material/economic forces; in recent years I've become less sure. When it comes to predicting the grand arc of human civilization it is a lot easier to look a fool than a wise man. I'm glad that there are people who are willing to ignore that and take a stab.

Contrast Banks’s Culture.

As I recall it, sex changes are casual and fully functional. People transition over an extended period of time when they feel like it, and they can and do switch back and forth. It can be a fashion, idle curiosity, or a sense of obligation. Not that the Culture would admit to something so primitive as obligations, but apparently, one of its deep-seated norms is that each citizen fathers one child and mothers another. I can only assume this is part of its casual dismissal of Malthusian growth.

As an aside, omnisexuality is normalized in the Culture. Naturally, none of the male protagonists seem to go in for it. Whether this is author oversight or an intentional surrogate for his male audience, it’s almost conspicuous. For that matter, I can’t think of any characters, male or female, who are exclusively homosexual. The classic Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism isn’t actually all that gay.

I don’t remember any mentions of gender identity, dysphoria, or affirmation. (Caveat: I’ve read about half the series, with a bias towards earlier books.) Perhaps this is to be expected given their publication dates. I’d go further, though, and argue that gender essentialism is incompatible with Culture metaphysics. This is an aggressively materialist setting. The godlike machines which can swirl around your constituent atoms at will have found no evidence of a soul. Gender, as it might be formulated today, is relegated to a preference.

Good to see someone else rep the Culture, I just wrote a comment suggesting the same before I saw you had first.

I think this is more a limit of KSR's imagination than commentary on the time period. Le Guin wrote The Left Hand of Darkness in 1969. It features a population that ordinarily have an asexual appearance (no secondary sex characteristics) but go into a kind of heat during which they can develop either set of secondary sex characteristics. What set of characteristics they develop isn't even consistent across heats! It's a setting where one's biological sex is very literally contextual, though not necessarily chosen.

I read The Left Hand of Darkness earlier this year and was sort of surprised to see the amount of reading into it of exploration of trans topics. To me the novel did not really address what I could recognize as transgender/sexual themes. Rather Le Guin seemed much more interested in exploring masculinity/femininity as social constructs, and how a culture might be affected without "true" masculinity/femininity. Besides the toying with the reader of seeing the characters as male by default, the introspection seemed mostly to focus on what the cultures lacked in their essence by not being sexually dimorphic. E.g., Karhide is a society that simultaneously lacks female affection and childrearing, but also male obsession and capacity for war.

Maybe I have a sort of inherent bias against reading things as trans metaphors, but some of the reflections I read afterwards trying to tie the novel to contemporary trans politics seemed like rather clear misreads of the novel to me. Just my impression

Le Guin has this problem, in general , as also shown in A Wizard of Earthsea. Where, in every badly made adaptation the protagonist is made white instead of the intended black. I also imagined the protagonist white when I read them as a child.

Her problem is she is to good of a writer to make truly progressive works. "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto."

instead of the intended black

Wasn't his skin bronze or red-brown or something like that? I've always pattern-matched him to some sort of a Mediterranean dude in my childhood, darker than what we are accustomed to seeing today due to a more outdoors-oriented life of an islander.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/feb/09/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.ursulakleguin

UKL: I see Ged as dark brownish-red, and all the other people in the book (except the Kargs and Serret) as brown or brown-red, to very dark or black (Vetch). In other words, in the Archipelago "people of color" are the norm, white people are an anomaly. Vice versa on the Kargish islands. That much is pretty clear in the books. How dark you want Ged to be is pretty much up to you! Why not? Readers rule, OK?

I read this as more Polynesian than Mediterranean, but unsurprisingly, it sounds like it’s not supposed to map straight onto real demographics.

I broadly agree that it's not, like, very specifically a trans metaphor. I think it is getting at something a little more fundamental, the idea of sex being social and contextual. This has obvious implications for trans people so I can see how people read a trans metaphor into it.

Heinlein’s “All You Zombies” was 1958. I’m sure there are examples of earlier stories featuring gender reassignment as well. To the extent KSR chose not to have gender modification in a transhuman milieu, I doubt it was for lack of exposure to the idea.

The trilogy was published between 1992 and 1996; KSR likely would not have understood the concept of "changing gender". Despite the near-infinite possibilities of changing one's physical form that is offered, no one seeks to transform themselves; no woman decides to father children, no man bears a child... The simplest answer is that the notion that people would want to change their sex simply did not occur to him, and this is remarkable in the context of the books trying to imagine all the possible physical and societal limits that humans could push.

That's possible -- I learned about trans-* stuff pretty early, chronologically, due to the overlap in some fandom spaces, and I still didn't learn a lot of the more practical details for trans men until ~2003-05ish -- but I'm not sure it's obviously true. People have already brought up Heinlein, but scifi and general literary fiction already had some heavy genderfuckery already; while not all of it would fit the modern-day understanding of transgender (Woolf's 1928 Orlando: butch woman or nonbinary, greatest thread ever, locked by moderators after 10000 pages), or be particularly palatable to the modern-day trans movement (When Gravity Falls postulates a Muslim-dominant future where the protagonist's girlfriend is a trans woman prostitute, 1987).

More broadly, Ranma 1/2 had its American debut in 1993. In comics, Alan Moore's Promethea (with a very explicit contrast between gender-stuff and homosexuality) wasn't at that part of the plot until 2001 or so, but Camelot 3000 had a person reincarnated into the opposite gender in 1982. Neil Gaiman had Wanda Mann, who outside of the unfortunate name, was otherwise handled pretty well in 1991 (and probably a response to an earlier Sandman series only mentioning trans women as a serial killer's victims. Grant Morrison wrote Lord Fanny in 1994, who... was about as poorly written as you'd expect given the name or Morrison being involved. There were a handful, and of course outsider pieces tended to be even more esoteric.

Transmale characters were much less common, but they did exist.

This isn't to say Robinson had to know of any of these, but neither was it that far off from the opportunity. (Including physically; Davis California isn't San Francisco, but it was only an hour or hour-and-a-half drive, and the DSA circles there in the 1990s had a lot weird people of all kinds.)

((And, on the other direction, I'm pretty sure your point would apply to Woolf; the mechanics and philosophy for gender stuff in that era existed, up to and including Hirschfeld giving out 'gender passes', but was different enough from modern understandings that even had the notorious recluse learned of them they wouldn't have been very predictive for the future.))

An alternative explanation is that regardless of what Robinson could have imagined, he was writing for his audience, and while trans stuff wasn't well-known in that era, The Silence of the Lambs was 1991. I (and the film) would argue Buffalo Bill is not trans so much as just hates himself, but the film had to argue that in part because trans_vestitism_ at least was well-enough known for at least part of the audience to react to that. A careful author can avoid issues, but a careful author can also avoid problems by not stepping on landmines.

People seeking sexual reassignment surgery goes back to the 1950's. Probably the first normie-famous case was Renee Richards who transitioned in the 1970's and played women's tennis as a transwoman. I'm not sure about the legal history in the US, but in the UK the classical legal case was Corbett vs Corbett in 1970 which held that a marriage between a man and an MtF transsexual was invalid on the grounds that she was legally male. So trans people existed at the time KSR was writing, and someone who was familiar with the weirder fringes of progressive politics (as I think KSR was) would have known about them. But even among people who were all-in on the 1990's PC wave, they were not an important left-wing cause. In UK student unions, the "T" got added to "LGBT" around 2000.

Ian Banks (one of my favorite authors, whereas Aurora makes me despise KSR) had characters switching their phenotypical sex on a whim in the Culture novels written in the late 80s and early 90s.

I don't think he was a trans ideologue, it simply makes sense in a setting where people can trivially become post-biological, and external sex is just as much of a choice as one's hair color.*

Now, if today, we miraculously had a pill that swapped genders quickly and reversibly, I think the majority of people would try it, yet switch back to their original after the novelty wore off. I'm perfectly content being a man, even if I have no particular sense of "gender identity" as some claim to possess, yet I think I'm better off as a man than a woman, all else being equal.

*Changing sex is something most Culture denizens do throughout their lives, as a sort of loose cultural expectation. They often opt to child bear, swapping genders with their partners if necessary. Then again, they can just upload into computers or change their species outright, so they'd look at you askance if you thought that one's choice of gonads was a particularly defining feature. I suspect it would take time for our society to get to a similar point, but it seems inevitable enough to me over long enough timescales.

I find myself in the likely unique situation of writing my own novel in a similar setting, including the near-term colonization of Mars.

Mars is a backwater, an insignificant ball of rusty dirt colonized more for the cred (and countries simply aping Elon rather than any true economic incentive), rather than any concrete benefit. Terraforming is stupidly wasteful, the same time and effort could let you make exponentially larger volumes of permanent space habitats, and cater to far larger numbers of people. Thus, there's no effort to do so there, at most people build massive biodomes that cordon off chunks of the surface, and combined with an artifical magnetosphere from a fusion plant hooked up to an asteroid at a Lagrange point, means you can walk around on the surface in some places with only mild physiological or pharmacological augmentation. Add in VR, and the sheer inconvenience of options like smashing water rich comets into an inhabited planet, and barring a few kooks, nobody takes it seriously.

It's also set close enough to our time that people don't regularly swap sexes, at least outside of say, VR, in a more involved manner than modern equivalents like a weeb using an anime girl avatar in VR Chat. Transgenderism as we know it is still mostly dead, because anyone who feels that strongly about it has availed of opportunities to get far better treatment than we have today.

Your post about Aurora was the inciting incident for this post. Is all you've read of KSR Aurora? Because I'm sure the context would be rather lost on someone new to him given it's essentially KSR meta-critiquing himself by reversing all his usual tendencies. It's not really his best work, especially given that it is so inward-focused.

I've read about half the Culture books (whenever I come across one in the library), and I really should start hunting down the rest.

Indeed, Aurora is all I've read, and it was bad enough to put me off him, albeit I am considering reading the Mars trilogy since it seems less odious.

I think describing it as "meta-critique" is being overly generous to the man, from what I've heard about his politics he's an environmentalist wingnut, and that shows in spades in Aurora.

The only gripe I have about the Culture books is that Banks had the temerity to die instead of spending the next few centuries writing more of them haha, let's see if GPT-5 is good enough to write pastiche. I've read every one, and most of his other works, barring The Wasp Factory, which isn't particularly scifi, and which I didn't enjoy.

What's in some ways even weirder about this is that you don't have to look very hard to find examples of science fiction, from the same time as Kim Stanley Robinson or earlier, in which people in the future make radical changes to their gender. Around the same time as the Mars trilogy, Greg Egan published Distress which features a future in which there are seven different genders (including asexual) which people switch between based on their self-identification and in which such gender changes are accompanied by medical interventions and changed pronouns. Much earlier than Kim Stanley Robinson's work, there's Venus Plus X by Theodore Sturgeon which features a society of people who have intentionally modified themselves to be gender neutral.

Egan’s Oceanic, from 1998, has sex change as part of casual sex. Pretty sure all the characters are engineered organisms, so it felt like a commentary on what a LeGuin analogue would choose were she intelligently designing a species.

Egan’s “Closer” (1992) story also focuses on sex change. Strongly recommended, goes in pretty hard.

I think about that story a lot. That and Baxter's Mayflower II.

I am always amused by the fact that the scene in which the protagonist gets his penis back is simultaneously so emasculating.


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