191–200 of 233 posts
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Depending on your definition of "civilization", indeed what existed in Australia for thousands of years probably does not qualify.
Can you explain why thousands of years of aboriginal society doesn't qualify as a civilization?
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Sure, as long as it's a strawman Louvre with no connection to what the previous poster was saying.
I'm not sure why you're bringing another poster into this or why you bring up a strawman Louvre. But it does seem like you are pretty committed to your belief that wiping out culture is okay as long as it is non-Western. I wish you well with this.
The cave we're talking about here are one of approximately 100,000 Aboriginal art sites scattered around Australia, and best we can tell was abandoned by all, including the Aboriginals who once lived there, for around 19,000 years until rediscovered in 1956. Yes, it would be nice to preserve it and the teenage edgelords who vandalized it should be punished, but their thoughtless graffiti isn't exactly genocide.
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Yeah I would say its quite a big problem, lots of people have derogatory views about first nations peoples. Government basically uses marketing tactics to portray us all as a big inclusive happy family, but that couldn't be further from the truth.
> Government basically uses marketing tactics to portray us all as a big inclusive happy family, but that couldn't be further from the truth. It's the same way in the US with native Americans. They teach you about the genocide committed. What they don't teach you is that the government aggression towards natives didn't actually "stop" until Kennedy (and even then I'm still in doubt) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indi…
It is still very much in progress. Native American activists are not exaggerating when they describe reservations as third-world countries located in America. The sovereign status of first nations is in many ways used against them and prevents real help from arriving (e.g. the horrendous alcoholism and abuse that exists in some areas).
It was a big deal that US President Joe Biden named a person with indigenous background (Deb Haaland) to be Secretary of the Interior, as the Bureau of Indian Affairs exists under that function.
As they say, politics is war by other means.
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I'm not sure why you're bringing another poster into this or why you bring up a strawman Louvre. But it does seem like you are pretty committed to your belief that wiping out culture is okay as long as it is non-Western. I wish you well with this.
Do you genuinely not realize how absurd and downright offensive the strawmen you're constructing here are? The cave we're talking about here are one of approximately 100,000 Aboriginal art sites scattered around Australia, and best we can tell was abandoned by all, including the Aboriginals who once lived there , for around 19,000 years until rediscovered in 1956. Yes, it would be nice to preserve it and the teenage…
Do you?
You haven't actually responded to any of the points I've made, you're simply insisting that because "there's a lot" of Aboriginal art sites, vandalizing them is somehow okay or not that big of a deal.
> their thoughtless graffiti isn't exactly genocide
Thoughtless destruction is pretty much the exact definition of genocide.
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Eh, maybe that's taking it all a little too seriously. For all we know, the original art was the work of some ancient hooligans.
We don’t have very much evidence of ancient human art work around the world. Each one of them is precious. To make it morally equivalent to graffiti is ridiculous.
It's a shame that this happened, but it's not unsurprising. If you put a probability of loss on every relic of antiquity, they multiply out to a substantial amount of destruction every year. Ultimately it's a matter of cost. The cost to secure all of these pieces is extremely high. We won't be able to safeguard everything, but there are probably low hanging fruit in applying basic security measures to the items most…
The tragedy of heritage sites in Syria being blown up in the past few years by ISIS also comes to mind. Turkey plundered as much as possible before ISIS C4'd the sites.
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> Compare it to European attitudes Yeah... Can we swap? Or like find a middle ground? Here in slovenia, we have socialist buildings from 1970s that someone decided to culturally protect, and the owners cannot renew the leaking facade and add insulation, because the outside has to stay the same, and puting insulation on the inside would reduce the inside space and make walkways and doors too narrow to pass (or carry a…
It's important to preserve modernist and brutalist architecture, so I can sort of see their point. I'm surprised there isn't another option in that specific case though (Can they not just add doors to the stairwell? Or do they oppose that too?) Too much brutalist architecture is being covered in tacky "neo-classical" plaster facades.
Not every piece of a particular architectural-style is a masterpiece worthy of preservation.
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That pretty much boils down to Euro-centric judgement, early British, Dutch, and French reporting, different ideals of what constitutes "culture", destruction of effective but hard to see artifacts (wells, river and ocean fish traps, degradable townsites), etc.
"Culture" and "civilization" are different things. Chimpanzee tribes have culture, as do orcas and dolphins, but I don't see how you can call their societies "civilizations". The group of people here on HN have a "culture", but this is not a "civilization", it's just a website (though it's part of a civilization). Humans lived in hunter-gatherer tribes for hundreds of thousands of years or more before they invented a…
If it's a matter of long establish trade routes, borders, territory, stone housing, multi generational aqua culture infrastructure, agriculture, oral transmission of history, etc. then yes, civilised.
If it's a case of a bunch of euro colonisers going "Yeah, Nuh" then no, not civilised.
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"Culture" and "civilization" are different things. Chimpanzee tribes have culture, as do orcas and dolphins, but I don't see how you can call their societies "civilizations". The group of people here on HN have a "culture", but this is not a "civilization", it's just a website (though it's part of a civilization). Humans lived in hunter-gatherer tribes for hundreds of thousands of years or more before they invented a…
It's nice that we can agree that this come down to a Euro-centric judgement as to what constitutes "civilisation". If it's a matter of long establish trade routes, borders, territory, stone housing, multi generational aqua culture infrastructure, agriculture, oral transmission of history, etc. then yes, civilised. If it's a case of a bunch of euro colonisers going "Yeah, Nuh" then no, not civilised.