domain:freddiedeboer.substack.com
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
20hr ago
Right. No one's willing to make or defend the counter proposal of "You get nothing this time and furthermore we've decided we're taking away what you got last time", so it can only move in one direction.
zeke5123a
21hr ago
And this is why the activists win. Every time you move the line a little, the next movement of the line is only slighter more expensive compared to the new status quo and the government has already admitted the alleged moral case.
I find activists in part evil because they never hold up their end of the bargain. On Friday, they will celebrate their hard won compromised victory and on the next Monday they will be telling us how the status quo is intolerable and needs changed.
faceh
13hr ago
I know you're tongue in cheek with this, but man I don't like that the lesson being taught internationally right now is: "If even a single member of a particular ethnic group survives, and your ancestors did something oppressive to their ancestors hundreds of years ago, they will use this to extract reparations from you in perpetuity and will never let you forget what happened."
Similar logic for why, if you depose a monarch, you have to kill off their entire extended family, lest some loyalists later track down their teenage second cousin thrice removed and try to restore them to the throne.
We have a few social techs for allowing non-genocidal acclimation of oppressed populations but when they can all be trivially overridden by the logic that "any observed inequality in outcomes is proof positive of ongoing oppression which must be rectified" then guess what comes back on the menu.
Perhaps we can counter that logic by pointing out that whatever mechanism allows guilt to flow forward in time should also allow credit and pride to flow forward. So sure, maybe my great great great grandpappy beat some villagers that one time, but my family saved an awful lot of drowning children over the years too, so maybe it balances out.
OliveTapenade
20hr ago
That's what they've been doing with 'sovereignty never ceded', they've been treating it like a slogan for people to say and feel good about.
My lasting frustration with 'sovereignty' dialogue in Australia has been the steadfast refusal of the indigenous lobby to ever define exactly what it is, or what they think it means. These examples are pretty representative - there's a lot of waffle about a spiritual connection to land but it is not remotely clear what that means in practical terms, or what it is that they think they need but do not have. If sovereignty is a spiritual sense of oneness with the land, in what sense do they currently lack it? What do they think other people need to do in order for them to practice it? Or is the idea, sometimes hinted at but rarely expressed, that Aboriginal people are a different nation to Australia? If so, would some sort of secession movement be the result? The establishment of a new and independent nation on the Australian continent, alongside the Commonwealth of Australia? It doesn't seem like anybody wants that, if only because any such nation would be desperately poor and would survive only insofar as the Commonwealth props it up with foreign aid.
It just doesn't seem to mean anything. It's a slogan - 'sovereignty' is a word that people say, but there's no shared understanding, and it feels to me like a set of goalposts designed to be moved.
I don't go so far as assuming there's an intentionally nefarious conspiracy here or anything, but the indigenous lobby definitely has a lot of ambiguity in what it preaches.
hydroacetylene
17hr ago
Ok, Cherokee and Navajo independence are absolutely uncontroversial in the US. The reservations are just uncontroversially sucky places but everyone tolerates them having casinos as a loophole and understands Indians with the means to live elsewhere do so. It’s not very cucked.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
19hr ago
The cuts to science funding seem likely to do major damage to American R&D, cause a mass exodus of skilled workers to Europe, and give China the opportunity to get even farther ahead of us in key fields such as battery development.
The damage was done. The science funding was being used for woke first, climate alarmism second, and any useful science well after that. Politico did an article on the "scientific refugees" moving to France; those identified included only a climate historian, a climate scientist and his wife "who studies the intersection of judicial systems and democracies".
self_made_human
C'est la vie
23hr ago
I've been shaking my head at that particular debacle, it seems that the UK is just about the only country on the planet that takes utterly toothless "international law" seriously. They could have told the Mauritian government to shove it, what would they have done, cancel discount holiday vouchers and row over in a canoe?
I don't really have a horse in this race, but I still find it all too tiresome.
Corvos
19hr ago
Going by my English intuitive sense of ‘sovereignty’, it would mean:
- They own all the land in Australia (and can therefore charge you rent for it or turf you off it in perpetuity).
- They are the top level of government, and entitled to make any laws or override any bodies that they please, in the same way that the UK parliament is sovereign.
Now, I would be very very surprised if they ever got that, and there be lots of hammering out of details over which tribes and what bodies own things and have rights. But you can admit those rights in theory and move towards them by e.g. saying that aborigines have the right to charge rent of say £10m per year to the Australian government and treat it as basically UBI. Or by giving them certain veto powers over government.
urquan
Every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.
17hr ago
However, the proper comparisons here are between Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. On those terms I feel like Australia is arguably the least grovelling. All three other Anglo colonies already have treaties with indigenous peoples that make those peoples semi-autonomous. Australia is the only one that doesn't, and the Voice was roundly rejected by the Australian people, which tells me that actual grassroots support for this is pretty low.
I don't know that this really demonstrates an understanding of what the Indian treaty system does in the United States or its historical context.
It's not about being smug, but the situation in the US is remarkably different from the other Anglo colonies. In US history, the concept of treaties with various tribes developed essentially as a way to take tribes out of their land -- the point was "here's a treaty that gives us your land and requires you to leave it and go towards land we consider less valuable." The point of the treaties was they gave a legal veneer for the goal of conquest: we didn't take the land, they gave it to us fair and square. Sometimes this was better, and sometimes worse; every American kid learns about the Trail of Tears.
It's for that reason that any concept of Indian sovereignty above and beyond simply the tribal governments and their reservation land is dead in the water, though some activists still try. The concept in US law is "dependent nations"; the US government has historically seen Indian tribes as completely subsistent upon US sovereignty, but with special carve-outs that make them similar in some ways to states. The fact that tribes have self-governing is kind of a point in federal power above state power, not so much that tribal governments are massively powerful. Only the national government constitutionally has the right to control Indian affairs and make treaties with tribes.
It's true that in the US there are Indian reparation programs and lots of federal funding. But a lot of this is very token, and doesn't help anyone all that much. And there's little or no calls for expanded reparations programs and land acknowledgements are rather rare; black political activism sucks all the oxygen out of the air for anything like that, and for a lot of people the situation for American Indians is basically "out of sight, out of mind."
Land acknowledgments are becoming slightly more common, but only among progressive activist groups, and essentially never with actual native involvement: there's no American equivalent to "welcome to country." Because in the American context, such a thing is incoherent. You say that this stuff is the result of importing American culture war into Australia, but as far as I can tell the land acknowledgement stuff in the US, such as it exists, is the exact opposite.
The two big culture war flashpoints for native affairs have basically been "should they be called American Indians or Native Americans?" which among actual Indians is a generational thing; older tribal members prefer "Indian", younger ones prefer "Native American." The other one is more of a culture war flashpoint in Oklahoma, specifically, but a Supreme Court case said that the five tribes of Oklahoma were never disestablished, and angered a lot of non-Indians in Oklahoma. But the point is that Indian sovereignty is limited to the reservations, and this is spelled out and a matter of consensus.
I think the idea that a proper-noun Treaty or some level of self-government for natives is the high-water-mark of native activism is an importation of Australian political categories upon other countries where they're not relevant. Actually, it surprises me that Australia doesn't have any sort of treaty system with aboriginals and the Torres Strait groups, that clarifies sovereignty and makes it clear what the limits of native power are and are not! I might suggest that one of the reasons why native activism in Australia is so maximalist and the demands so bombastic is that there are apparently no documents or conventions that spell out their obligations and the limits of their sovereignty. So native activists can insist that their due is the moon, and there's no way for this to be effectively rebutted without denying any concept of native political power altogether.
I understand that "aboriginals are just like you and me" is the conservative view of Australian politics, and it follows that any political representation for them is controversial. But the US view is that tribal governments exist, and so there's no need for actual political representation for them. The need for Treaty is forestalled by the existence of treaties.
In the US, tribal governments petition the federal government to do things, and maybe they do them, maybe they don't. But there is no widespread call for, say, a congressional seat. Or a "Voice." Their voice is their own tribal government, which is dependent upon the whims of the federal government and sometimes the courts.
So, I think if we're comparing "who is most concerned about native activism in their country," and we look at one where natives have limited autonomy, clearly spelled out territorial limits (in places like the helldirt of New Mexico and the plains of Oklahoma -- "out of sight, out of mind"), and formal dependence upon federal whims, and then one where the government proposed for a public vote the idea of a formal advisory panel for indigenous political activism which even in its most unclear form won 40% of the vote, and natives are sometimes treated as the quasi-spiritual owners of the whole Country with spiritual welcomes that open meetings like a national anthem... yeah, I'm going to go with the first one as the one that cares less.
YE_GUILTY
20hr ago
But it's a way of seeding the idea that the government isn't actually in control for further usage later on. If you say it and repeat it enough, it becomes true.
Yep, I've never trusted "land acknowledgements" for this reason. They're the camel's nose under the tent. Even the semi-skeptical retort of "ha ha, a land acknowledgment without any concessions is just boasting of conquest" is part of the plan: "so you admit the land is theirs, and yet you don't do anything about it? Well, we've got a few ideas..." Not extending all the way towards handing over full rulership to those with the appropriate ancestry (yet, at least - so long as that tension exists, there's still energy in the system) but plenty of creeping gains presently unthinkable.
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
23hr ago
but have you seen the other Commonwealth states
Have you seen the UK handing the Chagos over to Mauritius these last two months and paying for the privilege? That is just as, or even more, cucked. What happened to the spirit of Wellington or Mccaulay?
For all the UK's faults there is no doubt they would run the place more efficiently than the Mauritians ever could.
OliveTapenade
17hr ago
I might suggest that one of the reasons why native activism in Australia is so maximalist and the demands so bombastic is that there are apparently no documents or conventions that spell out their obligations and the limits of their sovereignty. So native activists can insist that their due is the moon, and there's no way for this to be effectively rebutted without denying any concept of native political power altogether.
Yes, I think this part is probably correct. There is no actual framework to negotiate from, and in effect Aboriginal demands rest entirely on what they're able to guilt the greater Australian society into giving them. If I were feeling suspicious I'd suspect that recent attempts to formalise the relationship with mainstream Australia are motivated in part by the realisation that larger and larger parts of that society are now made of migrants from Asia, and migrants from Asia do not feel guilt about Aboriginals at all.
To the rest of your post, I appreciate all the detail about Native American history, but I do think that on the broader level it's true that much of Australia's most toxic progressive activism is imported from the US. It's just not directly imported from Native American activism, which we are largely ignorant of and do not care about. (Though "the Americans have treaties with Natives" was absolutely a card that gets played over here when Treaty comes up.) However, we did have, for instance, a copycat BLM movement inspired by the American one, which focus on indigenous deaths in custody.
OliveTapenade
8hr ago
For what it's worth, at least, Thorpe only got in because she was on a bizarre Greens senate ticket, and there is no way in hell she is getting re-elected.
I do think that after she refused to take the senatorial oath, and then, when pressed, said it in an obviously insincere way (and admitted that insincerity on the record afterwards), she should have disqualified herself from taking her seat. There is a valid procedural issue there - she is verifiably not in good faith.
Very likely. Also they could be stupid drama queens with poor judgement.
For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidia_Thorpe
In a June 2022 interview, Thorpe said that the parliament has "no permission to be here [in Australia]" and that she’s a parliament member "only" so she can "infiltrate" the "colonial project." She added that the Australian flag had "no permission to be" in the land. Aboriginal, conservative senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price denounced Thorpe's comments as "divisive" and "childish," and called for her dismissal from the parliament.[37]
In August 2022, during her swearing-in ceremony, Thorpe added the words "the colonising" in the required Oath of Allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II, saying
"I Lydia Thorpe do solemnly and sincerely affirm and declare that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to the colonising Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Australia, Her heirs and successors according to law."[38]
Thorpe was immediately criticised by fellow senators. After an instruction by Labor the President of the Australian Senate Sue Lines and interjections from others that the oath must be taken word-by-word, Thorpe recited the pledge once more, this time omitting the two words.[39][40]
On 16 April 2023, footage emerged of Thorpe in a verbal altercation with men outside a Melbourne strip club.[41] Thorpe was filmed telling a number of people they had a "small penis" and were "marked". She claimed the men provoked the altercation by harassing her.[42] The manager of the club claimed she provoked the incident by approaching white patrons, telling them they had "stolen her land;" he announced he was banning Thorpe from the club "for life."
While holding the justice portfolio for the Greens party and serving on the joint parliamentary law-enforcement committee, Thorpe was in a relationship with Dean Martin, ex-president of the Rebels outlaw biker gang. Martin had been president of the Rebels in Victoria, and had been charged and pleaded guilty to liquor offences in 2013.[50] As a member of the committee, Thorpe became privy to confidential briefings about motorcycle gangs and organised crime. She had not disclosed the relationship, which was only revealed when her staff, who became aware of the relationship in mid-2021, notified party leader Adam Bandt's office and an independent parliamentary authority.
It just keeps going, it's a national disgrace that this individual is still a Senator. But this is the intellectual calibre of many in the indigenous movement, not totally unrepresentative:
On 21 October 2024, Thorpe heckled King Charles III by shouting "This is not your land, you are not my King" and making claims of genocide against "our people", after he finished an address at Australia's Parliament House, as part of his royal visit to Australia. As she was escorted away by security, she was heard yelling "Fuck the Colony".
In the aftermath of the incident, she was asked about the oath she had recited and signed during her swearing-in process, in which she had sworn allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II and "her heirs". Thorpe claimed she had instead said "her hairs". Constitutional law expert Anne Twomey stated in response that the signed oath would have stated "heirs", and that the presiding officer could exclude Senator Thorpe if they believed a valid oath had not been sworn.[71]
Simon Birmingham, leader of the opposition in the Senate, announced that the coalition is considering "legal opinions" on the validity of the senator's constitutional duty of affirmation. Thorpe, subsequently, revised her claim, stating that, when she was being sworn in as a senator, she "mispronounced" heirs as hairs, "without meaning to do so", and did not do it deliberately. In the statement, she added that "they can't get rid of me," pointing out she's "got another three and a half years [of service in the Senate]."
We have a few social techs for allowing non-genocidal acclimation of oppressed populations but when they can all be trivially overridden by the logic that "any observed inequality in outcomes is proof positive of ongoing oppression which must be rectified" then guess what comes back on the menu.
But note that this is a civil matter, caused by women/the womanly/progressives seeking more social power. Any nag they can get their hands on will be used, and nags are quite powerful in democracies (commonly referred to as "women's tears winning in the marketplace of ideas"). This doesn't even require women having the vote to work- universal male suffrage is generally enough, the 18th Amendment being a good example of that.
Not allowing credit and pride to flow forward in the same measure as guilt is also a woman thing, because women aren't generally wired to seek credit and pride in the first place- so it makes sense they would simply ignore it exists [at best] and actively seek to devalue it [at worst]. This is related to inherent male disposability in an environment of excess men, and right now there are simply too many men (which doesn't require you actually be a man; which is why women who function like men complain about this just as much as men themselves do).
The reason incomplete genocides could work in the past is because the rulers at the time were less vulnerable to them; the womanly could cry "no ethical consumption under capitalism" all they wanted, but at the end of the day the only way they have power [outside of a post-industrial society where women are productive in their own right] is if a man listens. And men with power are far less likely to bow to the demands of useless people.
Is this risk completely mitigated? Well, no- you can still have the Church organize moral movements, but even in that case the Church is made up of people and property, those people have names and addresses, and since they have organization they have pre-scribed outlets for any charity they might feel (it's their own money, so the moral hazard is avoided). In a democracy like this you can't pull off that kind of suppression.
No evolved solution to this currently exists. Men are not wired to resist women when they believe themselves rich enough to be above needing to put themselves first (for a bunch of complicated reasons), but this is not symmetric. Only once men have been exposed to being poor will this change, and that only lasts for a little while.
TowardsPanna
16hr ago
Like leaving a beaten opponent with one or two crappy cities in Civilization V. They'll denounce you at every turn for the rest of the game.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
19hr ago
If Iran has the bomb, they can provide it to a smaller, far more suicidal group of allies (the Palestinians) to lock the Israelis into their current borders unless they negotiate with Iran. Technology transfers, taxes, religious rites/rights, not purchasing American weapons, etc. is what that looks like.
Israel is obviously not going to agree to that. If Iran provides Hamas a bomb, Hamas will use it; Hamas does not have the self control to merely threaten for long, nor the ability to hide it for long (which means "use it or lose it" makes sense), regardless of what Israel does (aside from cease to exist). If Iran threatens to provide Hamas a bomb, that's the same as Iran threatening to nuke Israel; the presence of Hamas changes nothing.
They didn't like the paragliders the first time; imagine how much they're not going to like them when the settlers further encroaching on their territory prompts an air-borne SADMization of the Israeli countryside.
Little nukes like that don't change much unless they can get them into the Knesset. (And the settlers are irrelevant; every Israeli could fuck back off behind the Green Line and the Palestinians would still demand the river to the sea)
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
15hr ago
Because the conclusions of any given paper are the same "Climate change is worse than we thought in some new way, it's caused more by human activity than we thought, we're all going to die even sooner than we thought, and if there's any chance to avert catastrophe it's in turning over control of all energy usage to boards of people like me who will be stewards for the common good." If this is true, we've already heard and we don't need any more. If it's false, it's even more useless.
hydroacetylene
17hr ago
Is it possible the body writing this is full of true believers who actually think they’ll get all this crap?
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
23hr ago
Accurate. There is a cultural and probably (my theory) genetic temperament that makes whites share and care. Think European killing Winters in the old days.
Beyond this its performative luxury beliefs. Rich whiteys living in gated communities that will never need to deal with the consequences of their actions.
Happy to be corrected by others.
Browser
6hr ago
There's also this trend towards this Schrodinger's box of Indigenous society in which it simultaneously was too primitive to have concepts like land ownership and losing a war but also simultaneously owned the land and actively worked on upkeeping. Depending on the particular circumstances the declared nature of Indigenous society flip flops a lot in Australian politics.
No, because there's no umbrella Aboriginal organisation that can police that. It's not like the Maori in New Zealand, who do have their own government-like organisation that can assess who is and who is not Maori.
In theory it's the three part test (descended from Aboriginals, identifies as Aboriginal, is recognised by the Aboriginal community), but as it's hard to apply in practice, most of the time it's just self-identification. This has led to absurdities like people with only tiny amounts of Aboriginal ancestry, who look and sound exactly the same as Anglo people, identifying as a proud Aboriginal man or woman.
I raise you Michael Mansell.
stuckinbathroom
10hr ago
When religious leaders reveal that a proclamation of doctrine (e.g. a fatwa or encyclical) was just a ruse to mislead the unbelievers, they are making a mockery of the religion
On the contrary, lying about one’s true beliefs for the purpose of self-preservation is explicitly permitted in Twelver Shia jurisprudence.
Paging the actual Australians here, since I have no idea.
But if I were an aboriginal rights activist trying to win as much as possible, I think I would push the argument that deciding exactly how ownership is distributed amongst aborigines is a detail that only becomes relevant once it is correctly admitted that ownership does in fact belong to the aborigines, and that quibbling over downstream details is a ploy to avoid ceding the base point.
If there were no clear institutions to inherit the rights of aborigines (I would argue) then a trust or a parliament or an advisory body could easily be set up. Something like the Scottish parliament, say, or the Norwegian oil depository.
Never half ass a genocide. One of the most important lessons of history.
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