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When six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months (2020)

theguardian.com

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Re: When six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months (2020)

#181

Post by Tabular-Iceberg »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #152
nojokes wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "For me it's so hard to process because 'whiteness' believes it can own anything and everything," she said. Sounds overly racist to me. > The New Zealand Oscar-winning director Taika Waititi has weighed in on the conversation, writing on Twitter that in his opinion, "you should prioritise Polynesian (Tongan if possible!) filmmakers as to avoid cultural appropriation, misrepresentation, and to keep the Pasifika voic…

> Sounds overly racist to me. Read “whiteness” as describing culture, and it seems more true than racist. It's your traditional Victorian English capitalist, top hat and monocle, making children work with heavy machinery and turning the sky grey. Your colonialist, beating children for speaking the language of their parents and expecting them to be grateful for it. Your Disney, selling a child-sized “tattooed Polynesi…

> Your Disney, selling a child-sized “tattooed Polynesian skin” costume. (Why are all my examples about children?)

The people who got upset with the Maui costume strike me as the exact same type of people as the characters in the movie who got upset about the titular character's "cultural appropriation" of seafaring.

Re: When six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months (2020)

#182

Post by dmoy »

dalbasal wrote: post #180
bluGill wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a point of a village as opposed to living in separate farmsteads. (there are other points to villages, but putting a group of people together is an automatic form of defense)

Historically, this doesn't seem to be true. Villages appear long before defensive fortifications in the record, in many cases. Pure reason is not very good at forming predictive theories about history, as a general rule. There are many possible reasons for villages, and cultural reasons are a very big determinant of how people live. So are economic reasons. Many of us live in big cities now, and it's generally less s…

You get villages because foraging really sucks. It's an ease-of-survival thing around food production.

Re: When six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months (2020)

#184

Post by jborichevskiy »

gsich wrote: post #173
dalbasal wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDK if its a modern bias or a recurring one, but people are very drawn to the idea of a core human "nature:" what we are when all the surface level stuff is stripped away. The way the conversations I've had tend to go is ever more contrived scenarios. Eventually it gets to spaceships carrying sperm and eggs to be raised cultureless by robots. You need to avoid scenarios like these, where the boys know about raising c…

>Eventually it gets to spaceships carrying sperm and eggs to be raised cultureless by robots. I recommend "Raised by Wolves".

Awesome show; looking forward to the next season. Explores parenting, "religion" vs "science", desolation, and growing up.

Re: When six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months (2020)

#185

Post by bluGill »

dmoy wrote: post #182
dalbasal wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically, this doesn't seem to be true. Villages appear long before defensive fortifications in the record, in many cases. Pure reason is not very good at forming predictive theories about history, as a general rule. There are many possible reasons for villages, and cultural reasons are a very big determinant of how people live. So are economic reasons. Many of us live in big cities now, and it's generally less s…

You get villages because foraging really sucks. It's an ease-of-survival thing around food production.

Foraging is done from villages as well. They tend to not have tents/houses, just a community fire that moves when the tribe moves. Still a village.

Foraging sucks less than subsistence farming. However farmers are able to put a lot more people into given land area and so farming villages won out.

Re: When six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months (2020)

#186

Post by wizzwizz4 »

Tabular-Iceberg wrote: post #181
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sounds overly racist to me. Read “whiteness” as describing culture, and it seems more true than racist. It's your traditional Victorian English capitalist, top hat and monocle, making children work with heavy machinery and turning the sky grey. Your colonialist, beating children for speaking the language of their parents and expecting them to be grateful for it. Your Disney, selling a child-sized “tattooed Polynesi…

> Your Disney, selling a child-sized “tattooed Polynesian skin” costume. (Why are all my examples about children?) The people who got upset with the Maui costume strike me as the exact same type of people as the characters in the movie who got upset about the titular character's "cultural appropriation" of seafaring.

There's a difference between children painting Polynesian-looking tattoos on themselves because they think they're cool, and a multinational corporation exploiting whatever fragments of culture seem profitable, and wallpapering “Disney magic” over the rest.

Imagine the uproar if Disney made a film about Christian culture – maybe some story about St Paul going on a quest to slay a dragon using Jesus Cant (the tongue of magic) – and then started selling tacky Body-of-Christ merch (or something), and that was the only representation of Christianity in mainstream culture. Some people would get upset, and I don't think they'd be unjustified.

Re: When six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months (2020)

#187

Post by __turbobrew__ »

MomoXenosaga wrote: post #124
dalbasal wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDK if its a modern bias or a recurring one, but people are very drawn to the idea of a core human "nature:" what we are when all the surface level stuff is stripped away. The way the conversations I've had tend to go is ever more contrived scenarios. Eventually it gets to spaceships carrying sperm and eggs to be raised cultureless by robots. You need to avoid scenarios like these, where the boys know about raising c…

There is an idea that after the bombs fall we all turn into raping and pillaging marauders. I have no idea why people find this idea comforting. In reality villages will be built, laws written and religions made up.

“A Canticle for Leibowitz” is a great book which follows this scenario.

Re: When six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months (2020)

#188

Post by __turbobrew__ »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #169
finnthehuman wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Read “whiteness” as describing culture, and it seems more true than racist. No, describing a group of people based on their race instead of a more accurate descriptor for the category you're looking to talk about is just plain old racism. Being more specific might also be, but this is guaranteed to be. And your statement just sounds like the contemporary-palatable version of grandpa explaining that when he talks abo…

Fair enough. There are still people I wouldn't begrudge for using “whiteness” like that, but I probably shouldn't assume good faith straight off the bat. You're right that this kind of thing is important to stamp out. That being said, we don't really have a good word for “originally-European (but kinda American too now) take-everything attitudes”. How would you describe this succinctly?

“Western”?

Re: When six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months (2020)

#189

Post by rossdavidh »

lebuffon wrote: post #165
gwbas1c wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The attempt to infuse sociology with biological facts (e.g. genes matter, evolution still impacts humans, etc.) has been controversial (even today the term "sociobiology" is radioactive to some). My immediate reaction to your post was that maybe we could learn something about what causes societies to collapse, and learn something?

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Revised Edition, Diamond Interesting overview

Seconded.

Re: When six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months (2020)

#190

Post by rossdavidh »

fighterpilot wrote: post #168
rossdavidh wrote: post #4

It's not quite as simple as "it works like 'Lord of the Flies' or it doesn't". Nicholas Christakis, in his book "Blueprint", devotes a chapter to a database that he and his grad students made of shipwrecks, where the survivors lived long enough, in enough isolation, that they had to more or less put together a temporary society. There were lots of cases where they turned on each other, and lots of cases where they di…

Did they find any variables that could explain whether or not the group turned on each other? e.g. resource abundance, gender makeup, age of people, N people, N days stranded, etc?

One important factor was, "did they sacrifice somebody early on?", for example in the actual evacuation from the ship. Once it is implanted in everyone's minds that individuals get sacrificed, it erodes trust, and makes everyone suspicious of everyone else. Of course, it's hard to distinguish between cause and effect in things like that.

There's a lot of details in the details, though, you might want to read the whole thing! :)

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