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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)

#191

Post by fighterpilot »

rossdavidh wrote: post #190
fighterpilot wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 whol…

That makes sense. Nobody has a monopoly on violence so everyone wants to front-run their own demise by killing the person that will kill them with a small but non-trivial probability. Pre-emptive violence becomes rational in such an environemnt.

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

#192

Post by nojokes »

totetsu wrote: post #153
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…

not sure of your context, but I often find that concepts from outside (de(post(colonial))) national experience are tricky to translate directly into it. The word racism particularly has a lot of unstated philosophy behind it depending on which country it is used in. To be plain, white people in history did try to 'own' everything in the Pacific, and that history is the base of the present we have today ect.. As for t…

I think I understand. Still this comment made me uncomfortable.

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

#193

Post by nesarkvechnep »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #7
beachy wrote: post #3

That's a wonderful story and and an uplifting rebuttal to Lord of the Flies. But to be fair, six Tongan boys were probably far hardier and well equipped than the typical British schoolboy of that time would have been. It seems they thought nothing of stealing a fishing boat and heading to sea, and they most likely had abundant life skills already - they basically relocated from life on one pacific island to another.…

> So a great story but I don't know how much can be extrapolated from it about human behaviour in general. Given that this really happened, a lot. Lord of the Flies came out of the fantasy of an English superintendent. Yet, it has permeated our culture as a cautionary tale about human behavior. It is 100% fiction. I’d like to recommend Humankind by Rutger Bregman - a wonderful book dismantling the toxic narratives we…

I second that book, it's great.

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

#194

Post by souprock »

goatlover wrote: post #166
souprock wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We now have proof that it really is "going far beyond the author's intention". Texas licensed a poem for a standardized test. The poem's author was still alive, and was unable to "correctly" answer test questions about the meaning of the poem. So yes, the English teachers really are spouting nonsense, and we have proof.

Depends on whether you subscribe to the "death of the author" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGn9x4-Y_7A ) or not. Does the author's intent in writing something trump everyone else's interpretation? What if we don't have the original author around to ask? A good example of this is all the interpretations of various passages in the Bible different groups have had throughout history. Instead of privileging the autho…

You can find your own meaning, but you should be honest about the fact that it is your own meaning.

English teachers are demanding "correct" interpretation that has nothing to do with what the author intended. It's bullshit, and they need to admit that. It's also squeezing very important topics out of the schedule, such as the teaching of proper grammar and other things needed for non-literary writing in a professional career.

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

#195

Post by rufus_foreman »

caligulatte wrote: post #86

Is it a coincidence this is posted now? The Peter Warner written about in the article drowned just recently, on April 13th.

I went down the rabbit hole reading about the incident when that happened, pretty interesting.

He didn't just rescue the shipwrecked kids and move on, he was treated as a hero in Tonga, the king of Tonga asked him what we wanted as a reward and he asked for fishing rights in an area he had been denied before and it was granted, he lived in Tonga for 30 years after that.

He was involved in a second shipwreck rescue of a yacht named the Sospan Fach. The member of his crew that spotted the second shipwreck was Sione Filipe Totau. Sione was one of the boys rescued from the first shipwreck.

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

#196

Post by Tabular-Iceberg »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #186
Tabular-Iceberg wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

I do have a problem with movie merchandise in general for being cheaply made plastic garbage, I just don't think there's anything more egregious about the Maui costume than anything else. And Christians already have the market cornered with tacky Body-of-Crist merch in the form of Mass play sets. If you ask me the Orthodox have the right idea, just give the kids the real Holy Communion from the moment they're baptised, bypassing the whole need for that garbage, but that's besides the point.

I think Moana was actually very good, and I was greatly and pleasantly surprised to see something of that quality come out of Disney. It's a captivating story that stands on its own legs without any pandering or preaching, and I see nothing wrong with how it represents Polynesian culture.

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

#197

Post by nojokes »

Tabular-Iceberg wrote: post #196
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

I do have a problem with movie merchandise in general for being cheaply made plastic garbage, I just don't think there's anything more egregious about the Maui costume than anything else. And Christians already have the market cornered with tacky Body-of-Crist merch in the form of Mass play sets. If you ask me the Orthodox have the right idea, just give the kids the real Holy Communion from the moment they're baptise…

I can confirm that Moana (the movi) induced respect and interest in Polynesian culture in me. Fortunately prevalence of crap merchandise is not wide where we live (in EU).

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

#198

Post by eric-hu »

db48x wrote: post #117
eric-hu wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was wondering why you wrote Babylon 5 when I can think of earlier long running shows, I.e. the original Star Trek, but I guess those are more like soap operas? Hm.

It’s not about how long a show was on the air, it has more to do with how interconnected the episodes are and whether the work has a story arc that was planned in advance. In a purely episodic work, you can experience the episodes in any order and have the same enjoyment. In a purely serial work, the order of the episodes (or should we call them installments?) matters a lot. Star Trek was episodic. No matter what hap…

That makes sense. Thank you for the explanation.

Lost definitely felt episodic and incoherent at times. I think they did plan out some arcs loosely that worked over the course of a few seasons. Some character progression and morality flip was clearly unplanned, and those arcs felt like a soap opera.

I’ve seen the other shows you’ve mentioned, but not Babylon 5. I had read of comparisons between it and DS9 before, and now that comparison makes more sense.

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

#199

Post by bane »

Syonyk wrote: post #14
chriskanan wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be a voracious consumer of fiction, but somehow critical reading of Lord of the Flies knocked that out of me in sophomore high school English. I think it was all the deeper meaning analysis I was forced to do moreso than the book. It just seemed like we were going far beyond the author's intention in a joyless analysis exercise.

> I think it was all the deeper meaning analysis I was forced to do moreso than the book. It just seemed like we were going far beyond the author's intention in a joyless analysis exercise. That was literally my entire high school honors English program. You must interpret everything, to the satisfaction of the English teacher, or else. It quite reliably took people who absolutely loved reading and made them hate boo…

I remember suffering through that nonsense as well. Then I remember a moment in a class in college where something "clicked" and I suddenly understood the game. After that it became simply tedious, but not raw torture like it had been. To be honest, it has helped me think a couple layers deeper about some of the media I consume.

I still think it's stupid and trite in the way it's handled in the educational setting and completely agree it mostly a garbage way to analyze things. Once you understand the game it becomes quite brainless and formulaic in most cases.

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

#200

Post by 7952 »

bluGill wrote: post #146
dr_dshiv wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These villages better build defenses against the marauders or all is for naught. And of course, the best defense is a good offense. And... Fast forward to the presently peaceful times of mutually assured destruction!

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)

Don't underestimate just how many people are needed to defend a village.

A village has a lot of land to defend and not many people to do it. The local town or city sized group will just pitch up with many more men and overrun you. All whilst having enough people left for defence. And they are likely to have more access to heavy weapons that can blow your house up from a distance.

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