211–220 of 233 posts
Question for Australians here: is racism against aboriginals widespread in Australia? How does the govt work to prevent it?
As to the second question, for most of Australia's history much of the most consequential pieces of racism were government policy. To get a sense of injustices inflicted on indigenous Australians, do some reading on the Stolen Generations (for a start).
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Can you explain why thousands of years of aboriginal society doesn't qualify as a civilization?
Civilisation as a value judgement is distinct from the literal description that defines the word, which is the development of cities.
Pretty much all words work this way - see the joke thread under this one saying that the perpetrators in this case shouldn't be called vandals because that's originally the name of a specific German tribe.
The current colloquial definition of civilization almost certainly includes aboriginal society, and from what I can see from a quick online search, the current academic definition often does too - at least, I was able to find several references to Aboriginal civilization in a quick and casual search. However I also checked a few definitions of the word and it seems that's technically incorrect - large scale technical achievements (for example, but not exclusively, cities) are a requirement to be considered a civilization.
Looking a bit deeper, however, I did find some articles pointing out that this definition of civilization is a Eurocentric view and that we should broaden the official scope of the word to include Aboriginal culture since they had a very high level of development in other areas, just not the ones that led to building cities. That seems reasonable to me. It's important not to get hung up on the historical origin of words. Instead we should focus on the most useful definition for us modern humans who are hopefully working towards a more inclusive understanding of the world.
https://mahb.stanford.edu/library-item/australian-aboriginal...
I have a friend on a property with cave art here in the hunter valley of Australia. We really don't do enough to preserve it at all. He's responsible and ensures no harm but it's still weird to own private land with 10k+ year old art and have no one really give a damn about it. Compare it to European attitudes, eg. Lascaux where they closed off the cave completely and only allow tourists near the modern reconstructio…
I think it's because of a sense of ownership and belonging (or lack thereof). People who made the art in Lascaux are, in a distant sense, ancestors of the present-day French. Most of Australia is of British ancestry, transplanted in the past few hundred years. The majority of them, including their government, obviously don't consider the Aboriginal heritage as their own.
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10 years of a person's life for a (really stupid) childish mistake? And of course when they get out of prison there will be serious career impact that will last their entire lives. What they did is horrifying, but barbarism can't be the right answer.
Bypassing security of the type described and being oblivious to why the security is there requires a type of autonomy and narcissism that exceeds "childish mistake".
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We're not exactly talking Michelangelo here. Here's what the art looks like, and there's thousands of square meters of the stuff: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Finger-flutings-in-Koona...
Maybe in another 30k years people think the cave stuff beats anything Michelangelo did. And the only reason today we might feel different is because Michelangelo did his artwork only 500 years ago.
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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 genuinely not realize how absurd and downright offensive the strawmen you're constructing here are? 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 d…
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I dunno, if I had a property with art that is 10,000 years old, I will try my best to preserve it. Regardless of whether they were made by my ancestors or not, because it doesn’t matter. It was made by humans. So in a way, they are my ancestors, whether they spoke French or some other language doesn’t matter to me
The point is you’re in the enlightened minority.
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I think it's because of a sense of ownership and belonging (or lack thereof). People who made the art in Lascaux are, in a distant sense, ancestors of the present-day French. Most of Australia is of British ancestry, transplanted in the past few hundred years. The majority of them, including their government, obviously don't consider the Aboriginal heritage as their own.
People in France now are barely related to the people who were there 10k years ago. Heck, I'm not even sure there are a lot of descendants of the Gauls left.
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> Do you genuinely not realize how absurd and downright offensive the strawmen you're constructing here are? 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 d…
Thoughtless is subjective. Maybe these are like the climate activists destroying art.
When you get to the point that you feel it necessary to destroy things to advance your cause you've entered down the path of leaving behind your humanity.
If thoughtless destruction is just 'in the eye of the beholder' then the 9/11 bombers were simply wrong from one point of view and there is a world in which they were right to kill thousands of people - after all, the West has committed many crimes, yes?
Or we could say that the Trail of Tears was a smart decision to get productive land into the hands of people who knew what to do with it.
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The point is you’re in the enlightened minority.
No most Europeans, including those in Australia care deeply about cultural preservation. In this case every European involved, the government, media and owner of the land all do. The odd thing is how the aboriginal people have done nothing to preserve this art for thousands of years. I would be curious to know if the previous vandals mentioned in TFA were leaving European or aboriginal names behind. One of the compla…
The cultural preservation is utterly unwanted - that's why things like the Benin bronzes have been forever broken and split up amongst Europeans in pieces, rather than retained as the one cultural work of being a history book for people to actually use in benin.
The same happens with Europeans in British Columbia. Rather than cultural preservation, the Europeans put totem poles on metal brackets to make sure they stay up forever and will never fall down, removing the intended time component of falling down, decaying, and being made anew. The intention of Europeans is to remove the cultural component and traditions, and turn it into an ownable artifact.