251–260 of 378 posts
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You're the one who made the specific assertion; it's up to you to deliver the citation. "Read book X" isn't sufficient.
>it's up to you to deliver the citation. "Read book X" isn't sufficient. What do you think a citation is?
Downvote away, but you don't get to use verbal sleight-of-hand on here (comparing life expectancy in hunter-gatherer versus 'agricultural' societies, when the question involves an industrial/post-industrial society) and top it off with a vague "It's true! Go read about it" argument.
You know that Golden Rule?" Not the one that VCs quote, but the one that goes "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you?" We should think about that when we choose how to deal with uncontacted tribes. It may be that one day another intelligence will need to decide how to deal with us, and on that day I hope we can say, "Yes, we used to have a habit of massacring technologically inferior peoples we encounte…
We should give them access to technology and to our way of life. Our way of life is better. Preserving their backwards culture so they can continue lives of misery and suffering is just as disgusting as the Prime Directive. Help is exactly what I would want from advanced alien visitors. I don't want them to respect my culture just because it is mine; I want something better for myself, not cultural relativism. There…
The fact that illegal loggers are even there to begin with shows that our morality is not greater than our greed in the pursuit of resources. We may have good intentions, but, if these tribes are not completely protected, elements within our society will slowly take every liberty with the land and its people as has been done countless times in the history.
We know nothing of aliens. Any speculation is a reflection on ourselves and, therefore, it is more common to believe that aliens would annihilate us rather than be interested in improving our way of life.
If someone took you and immersed you in the jungle you'd be lucky to last a day or two.
Think of what would happen to one of these people if you put them in a city.
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How does your perspective differ from the perspective of the missionaries who attempted to bring "salvation" to indigenous peoples around the world? How does your perspective differ from the perspectives that led to the imposition of the Residential Schools? https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Canadian_Indi... Also, nothing I wrote says anything about providing them with access , it says something about de…
I readily acknowledge we may agree more than it first appears given the particular emphasis we each chose. But I do think there is substantive disagreement here within the realm of non-violent (and, dare I say it: civilized) ways to approach the matter. The very idea of having a way that "we" deal with "uncontacted tribes" is collectivist on both ends. Individuals should do whatever they want without violating anyone…
If you were about to meet this tribe, there is nothing you can do about the fact that you are a member of a Western culture meeting a member of a tribal culture, and your different groups--national, cultural, philosophical (in the sense of your strict individualism)--are interacting in important ways. Denying the problem by pretending there are no groups does not make it go away.
As far as the argument of contact or no contact, I don't have an answer but I think the issue is that contact often destroys the culture rather than helps it grow and evolve. I have read some things that indicated native americans lost in part because they adopted guns and abandoned bows. They lacked the means to make or money to buy the type of oil that would work in cold weather and used lard instead, which firms u…
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I don't know what they're going to do here. The isolated tribe in India live in a protected zone, but the government regularly offers them a chance to make contact, and the tribe drives them off with weapons. That's a way forward that is neither dragging them into the 21st century nor running a zoo. I'm not advocating for that, of course, just pointing out that contact/isolation is a false dichotomy.
Yeah, I was aware of the peculiarities of this particular case (the tribe not wanting contact) and chose to ignore them in order to make the larger point. Science fiction is great. It lets us look at some of these issues without (perhaps) so much emotional heat. So let's assume that in the 1950s, aliens contacted the president of the United States -- a theme which recurs over and over again in sci-fi. The president d…