domain:npr.org
aldomilyar
1hr ago
Yeah but the point of 'sovereignty wasn't ceded' arguments is essentially that the lack of any sort of a coherent political union or body of Aborigines with which to negotiate a surrender means that they didn't surrender meaning that they still own the territory of Australia under illegitimate occupation. Galaxybrain shit.
It also contributes to an active resistance towards archeological or other historical investigation of Australian history in order to reduce the chances of anything that might contradict the official narrative. There was a semi-recent case in which Mungo Man, the oldest Homo Sapiens discovered in Australia, was reburied in accordance with Indigenous wishes to prevent further scientific inquiry.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2hr ago
Yeah, the Aztecs did have something substantial. Pretty sure the Indigenous know they lost a war (they want recognition of massacres on the frontier after all) but want to relitigate it. There's a website that shows you what was happening (or at least what they managed/chose to record) and it was totally one-sided: https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/map.php
With the Native Americans in the US, they managed to somehow eke out 2:1 or 3:1 native deaths for each white death. In Australia it was 20:1, maybe as high as 60:1.
aldomilyar
3hr ago
In my experience it's Indians who do far the most racial aggrandizing of the Asians about 'India would be hovercars and perfect development without the Raj' topics and the everpopular riffs on 'descendant of top caste complains about anglo oppression whilst having to leave India for better opportunities due to intense affirmative action for the people they've historically oppressed' though I've generally found Indian Idpol actively contradictory and absolutely insane.
aldomilyar
4hr ago
Complete sidenote but I read Alison Overeem as Alistair Overeem and was overcome for a moment with confusion about ethnicity.
aldomilyar
4hr ago
Still you can't deny the Aztecs had a political assemblage which could be meaningfully bargained with about concepts like land ownership and fealty. The Indigenous take in Australia is essentially they were too primitive to 'lose a war' and therefore couldn't have lost a war.
2rafa
4hr ago
And that’s most of what’s necessary. Some kind of soft-kefala where the migrants don’t stay, don’t have or bring over children, and go home at the end of the season.
cjet79
4hr ago
Calling for collective action seems to have an abandonment of responsibility that I dislike.
I love the phrasing of your second paragraph because it illustrates the problem.
It's not "I want to throw you in a wood chipper for your annoying pedantry" it's 'someone should throw people like you into a wood chipper for their annoying pedantry '. The functional result on my end is the same, but you've dodged responsibility for directly calling for me to be killed.
2D3D
4hr ago
They can TRY to fuck you back, but they usually lack competence organically, which is why they failed in the first place. They only succeed because their nominal allies of convenience prefer wielding them as cudgels against their proximate enemy. White liberals play the oppression meta to discredit enemies, not to materially advance the cause of their pet projects. Without external support these low performers default to the limit of their capability.
cjet79
4hr ago
Possibly it is one of the oldest and most successful social projects. I guess that would make me some kind of arch conservative.
cjet79
4hr ago
I think the problem of petty tyrants crosses systems.
Breaking down life into multiple areas:
Family, Social, Market, and Government.
Of these areas I think petty tyrants are weakest and least effective when wielding the market against their victims. The word Tyrant literally comes from someones name in Greece who was wielding a government against people.
The other answer which I know people hate is that markets are going to reflect reality. And when reality is ugly markets will look ugly. But punching a mirror doesn't fix the ugly face staring back at you.
I don't think markets are the end all be all of all problems. There are certain classes of problems that they solve extremely well. And plenty of problems that they do very little about.
I do think governments are generally terrible at solving most problems, and often make things worse They can certainly supercharge petty tyrants.
2D3D
4hr ago
Its just the racial meta. If Asians could only play that game, they would, but they can play the competence game and achieve greater outcomes. The sympathy game is a means of last resort, played only because there are no other cards to play. Nigerian immigrants in Virginia can play both sides of the fence till BLM figures out a way to kick them out fully and get ADOS as a special protected class without the inconvenient racialization allowing actual high performers to cosplay as oppressed.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5hr ago
Problems with CO2 in the Southern Ocean? Need it quickly absorbed? One man has the most based idea of all time: https://arxiv.org/html/2501.06623v1
True. But really, being proud that you reached agriculture and tribal-level development isn't very impressive. Only a few thousand years behind the curve on metalworking! One wonders whether formerly-Aztec Mexicans or Mayans are snooty about being lumped in with mere nomadic 'native Americans' who never got that into astronomy or stone-working.
JarJarJedi
5hr ago
I am extremely skeptical at that claim. I mean, surely, if you examine LLM at what humans are usually examined at, things that are hard for humans - like perfectly recalling bits out of huge arrays of information - it would probably do pretty good. However, at things that human are never examined it - like common sense - because most humans that got through law school would have it, otherwise they'd fail out and probably be either institutionalized somehow or ejected from the society in some other way - LLMs are still terrible.
Just days ago I tried to use LLM advice to configure a scanner on my Mac. It managed to give me ton of advice that didn't work (because it kept hallucinating and confusing different Mac models) but then it managed to give an advice that seemed to work. I stupidly followed it. It broke my Mac completely. I decided to take hair of the dog approach and asked the same GPT for the fix advice. After another hour or so of hallucinating and meandering, it managed to make the problem worse. Then it had me to try a dozen or so non-working solution, each one ending with congratulating me on discovering yet another thing that doesn't work on my Mac - this despite me telling it upfront which Mac it is and it being aware to quote the exact source that says this wouldn't work - but only after suggesting to me repeatedly it would 100% work for sure. Eventually, it started suggesting to me deleting disk partitions and reinstalling the whole OS - while claiming this can't hurt my data in any way, everything would be OK - and I decided to call it quits. I tried to fix it using my wits alone and plain old internet search, and was able to do it in about 15 minutes.
This was a low risk activity - I actually had pretty recent backups and all important shit I have backed up in several places locally and online, so if it killed my Mac I maybe would lose some unimportant files and some time to re-configure the system, but it wouldn't be a catastrophe for me. Now imagine something like millions of dollars, or decades in jail, or the entire future of a person is on the line. Would I trust a machine that claims X exists and solves my problem only to cheerfully admit X never existed and even if it did, it couldn't solve my problem a minute later? Or would I trust a human that at least understands why such kind of behavior is unacceptable, in fact, that understands anything and isn't just a huge can of chopped up information fragments and a procedure of retrieving some of them that look like what I want to hear?
Sorry, I can't believe this "as good as a fresh graduate" thing. Maybe I can believe it's "as good as a fresh graduate on things that we check on fresh graduates because they are hard for fresh graduates so we want to make sure they are good" but that misses the obvious pitfall that things that are very easy for a fresh graduate - or any human - are very hard for it in turn.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
6hr ago
people of slanted eyes are too.
Are smart enough? I'm parsing your sentence but the general tone seems dismissive, whereas this seems complementary. The slant eyes bit is an odd moment of bluntness for you.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
7hr ago
They tried with "Stop Asian Hate," but it turned out that Asians are doing better than whites by most measures and the people beating Chinese grandmas for bus money aren't white. So I think we've already seen how such a campaign would pan out (i.e. not at all).
OliveTapenade
7hr ago
Tasmania is an interesting one because it's a case of an almost accidental genocide. The Palawa were quite few in number to begin with, and devastated by disease. They then also decided to set about attacking European settlers in raids, and, because colonial government was fairly weak, the settlers tended to band together and counter-raid them, and since the settlers had guns and the Palawa had sharpened sticks, the results were fairly predictable. By the time the colonial government got together enough to locate and resettle the survivors, there were only a few hundred left, and they didn't last.
Today the Palawa are a rare example of an ethnic group that exists purely as mixed-race. There are no people of pure Palawa descent left in existence - they are all people of mixed Palawa-European heritage, and almost all of them pass as white. Examples today would include Michael Mansell, whom I just mentioned, Marcus Windhager, Alison Overeem, Garry Deverell, and so on. All of them, at a glance, are obviously white or Anglo. However, it is supposed to be racist to question a person's Aboriginality, especially if their appearance makes them plainly white.
Deverell, actually, wrote a piece related to Yoorrook last year that hit many of the same notes as this year's report, albeit focused specifically on churches. The 14 aspirations he links are conspicuously unreasonable, including that every Anglican organisation in the state commit itself to employing Aboriginals as 5% or more of its workforce (bear in mind that Aboriginals are less than 1% the population of Victoria); that all properties granted to the church by the government be made freely available for Aboriginal use and that in the event of any such property being sold, Aboriginal groups with a traditional claim receive it for free; that 15% of the sale of any other church properties be given to Aboriginal people directly as reparations; and that all parishes pay 5% or more of their budgets to local Aboriginal groups. It is primarily a demand for money.
The Anglican response to this, of course, was "no".
aldomilyar
8hr ago
That's essentially what was proposed with the National Voice, which got shouted down hard in the most recent referendum. Now certain states (ironically the ones with by far the actual lowest population of Aborigines and highest population of liberal Whites) are trying it on a trial basis.
aldomilyar
8hr ago
You'll also observe that it's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders too, the Torres Strait Islanders totally refuse to be lumped in with the rest even though only 3000 of them live on the islands and the other 80,000 live on the mainland. It's a huge mess.
Torres Strait society was pretty different to Aboriginal society. Having done a year in Darwin and been around a bunch of those locations, they had agricultural and land ownership norms that weren't really a thing on the continent itself. I think the validity of their argument for ownership of their islands is more reasonable than the Aboriginal one by some degree.
aldomilyar
8hr ago
Yeah but the Maori had a bunch of hallmarks of settled agricultural society that the Indigenous lacked plus entrenched defensive positions which made it easier to just cut a deal with the local headsmen on the absolute colonial fringe.
anti_dan
8hr ago
Hamas is primarily an enemy of Israel
This is not an uncommon position, but it is clearly incorrect. At the very least, someone who makes this line of argumentation needs to give a disclaimer to avoid being correctly called a liar. That disclaimer would be something along the lines of, "because of Hamas' strategic and military incompetence, and the vast distance between us and them I don't consider them a threat."
I don't find these arguments FOR incompetence compelling, but if you are adopting them you should be clear about it. Because I know in my heart that if Hamas had our army and we had Hamas's militias, they'd simply kill us all with nukes and laugh while doing it.
Browser
8hr 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.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
8hr ago
Even with no statute of limitations, children of the denaturalized person wouldn't be affected.
Paralleling @JarJarJedi's story, I tried to outsource some annoying research to Gemini and it just gave me the run around. [TW: Boring ops work] I was trying to find a way to copy a large-ish Cloud SQL MySQL DB from one GCP project to another. Solutions I was given:
In the end I probably could have just spent 30-45 minutes reading the docs and figured out what my real options were rather than spending severally hours trying half-baked solutions. I just use Gemini for short scripts, text editing operations, and boilerplate now.
[PS. I think we can use PSC to solve the problem above]
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