No, you are fortunate that you don’t live in a country where Indigenous Australian culture is ingrained in your society. Forget same-sex marriage, this is a society which doesn’t even respect your right to date outside of your designated “skin group”. It has no more to teach us than Sharia does.
…oh give me a break. Ingrained in society? How exactly is Aboriginal culture part of everyday life in Australia? A few place names? That’s about it. You didn’t even give them the right to vote in 1962. You guys haven’t embraced the culture at all.
Thanks for sharing your opinion about Sharia law though.
I must have missed those classes in school where mainstream Australian culture ever wished or attempted to adopt some of the cultural mores of Aboriginal culture. When I was growing up (1960’s), they were still referred to as ‘blackfellas’ or the ‘noble native’ in our official school readers FFS. :rolleyes:
And remind me again when Aboriginal elders have tried to impose their laws upon white folk? :dubious:
My favorite response to the onion:
I did not ever expect to see such racist bullshit from a moderator on this message board. You do not ever get to impose your culture on someone else, especially “for their own good.” That’s fucking colonialism. It’s seeing them as monkeys that you need to civilize into functioning people.
Heck, you don’t even need those specifics. Replace what RickJay said to be about African Americans and welfare, and it sounds like the racist shit even the Tea Party is trying to get away from.
Please don’t make a habit of this. I can’t put you on ignore like I can the other racists.
[QUOTE=Banquet Bear]
Don’t blame your countries shoddy treatment of the indigenous people on “fuzzy, soft liberal attitude” and don’t you dare call the simple process of honouring a treaty as “racist.”
[/QUOTE]
I did neither, so go find someone else to be outraged at. You missed about twelve separate points.
Anyone who read my post and thought I was being racist is either a liar or an imbecile. Putting phony quotes in quotation marks is rather bad form, BigT.
Steady on people, I don’t think RickJay said anything remotely racist or condescending.
Canada and New Zealand lead the world in recognising and compensating the original inhabitants of those nations. The process isn’t always easy and there are competing claims, but at its heart there is goodwill and honest efforts to right the wrongs of the past.
By comparison Australia is a wonderfully vibrant country with much to admire but the average person has yet to value that the Aboriginal people were the first inhabitants. From a Kiwi perspective, its a bit of a shock given that we are so alike in other ways.
…I didn’t miss nothing. And you missed about nine separate points in my response.
What you posted was outrageous. You shouldn’t be at all surprised that people are outraged. And everything that you’ve written in this thread has everything to do with your attitude towards cultures that aren’t yours and nothing at all to do with Tony Abbott being a moron.
So because somebody chooses a religion that demands they live somewhere, that justifies everything that comes from that choice does it?
Are you so tolerant of other religions? If a family of Mormon separatists decided for religious reasons to live in the middle of the desert would you also support taxpayer funding for them?
Would you still support the Mormon separatists if you had evidence of multiple generations of child abuse, substance abuse, animal cruelty and incest, often justified on religious grounds?
What about when it emerged that the Mormons were not sending their children to school, and literacy rates were around 5%? How about when it became apparent that there were now over 6 generations who were literally all unemployed? What about when stories emerged of forcible genital multilation, girls being raised as third class citizens and so forth?
Why does the choice of religion of Black people, and the decision justified by that religious choice, get a special allowances that nobody would dream of giving to white people?
These are people who are living solely on welfare, in government supplied welfare. These are people who are actually being offered free transport combined with *more *money and *better *housing to move to other areas. So to claim that there is a lack of economic resource sis ridiculous. The economic resources are lacking where they are, not where they are being asked to move to.
Considering the social support system in these communities has produced rampant poverty, dysfunction, domestic violence, paedophilia, animal cruelty and unemployment, I have to ask you what specifically you think that a family moving form these areas will lose from this lack of social support? Normally when we talk about loss of social support, we are talking about things like the loss of free childcare that means that somebody moving is unable to sustain themselves financially, or the loss of the relatives and friends to lend a shoulder to cry on in hard terms. But when we are discussing people who are unemployed and whose social structure and the abuse and cruelty that it engenders is the *cause *of most of their hard times, I am struggling to see what exactly it is that will be lost.
It’s not, and that’s a good thing.
I was responding to Banquet Bear and his statement that “(i)ts a shame you can’t embrace the culture.” But you do raise a good point, that Aborigines might not want to share their culture. The ones who get butthurt about cultural appropriation if a woman learns to play the didgeridoo don’t. And the ones who sentenced a guy to being stabbed to death for allowing a white man to see their sacred site certainly don’t.
No, it’s recognising that their victims are human beings and not just their parents’ or husband’s property, and thus deserving of what should be universal human rights. If your culture says it’s okay to mutilate your child’s genitals or fucking spear them for dating the wrong person, your culture is shit.
Unfortunately these are all being taken over by Hipsters…
I think the problem with Tony is that he really doesn’t understand what he is going to say is offensive. His knighting recently of the Duke of Edinburgh could have easily been spun as a good thing (Duke of Edinburgh’s Award) but he didn’t talk to a spin doctor. If he had a lot of people would have said good on you Chuck for starting this ting, look how it has helped lot’s of young Aussies become better citizens. I still think it was dumb but the spin was weak in this one.
So is he an moron? No person who climbs to the highest elected position in any country is dumb, I would say he is just out of touch on how to deliver a message and also that he is looking at micro things and not concentrating on macro stuff like he should.
I miss Paul Keating and Bob Hawke, now those two blokes heralded major changes in Australia that were not typically left wing (deregulation of banks and unions, floating the dollar etc) but we all knew it was for the betterment of our nation.
Bottom line is that breaking the country’s laws will get you in trouble, aboriginal or not. Respecting a culture that has developed over 40,000 years is right, allowing them to break the law is not right.
Remember a lot of countries still like to kill people for breaking the law and even then I can still respect their culture.
Is there any culture you do not respect?
But it is *not *against the law for Aborigines to spear people, torture animals or do all sorts of other things. Australia has a dual justice system with dual legislation where what is legal for one race is illegal for the other, and vice versa and dual court systems. And this is enshrined in the constitution.
Added to that, many practices such as paedophilia, spousal abuse, marital rape and gang warfare (under the guise of payback) are technically illegal for all races, but accepted by the police and judiciary to such a degree that they are de facto legal for Aboriginals.
- Such practices are not illegal for Aboriginals.
- The law is the culture and vice versa. You can’t claim to respect the culture but not the law.
- I have no respect for a culture that practices forced genital mutilation, endorses raping women as punishment for their religious transgressions, sees mutilation as a fitting punishment for theft and condones gross animals cruelty. I don’t respect that in ME cultures and I do not respect it in Aboriginal cultures. I don’t care if it developed 40, 00 years ago, it’s barbaric and immoral and should have stayed in the past.
No, you respect *parts *of the culture. If you respected the culture then you would find execution respectable. The law is an inherent part of any culture. Some parts of Nazi culture are respectable. That does not mean that we respect Nazi culture.
I never thought I’d ask this of YOU Blake, but CITE? Not that sometimes Magistrates take cultural mores into consideration when sentencing, but that it is enshrined in the constitution? Really? Cite?
Cite? Calling something legal (de facto or otherwise) needs pretty decent backups. Just because the local police and judiciary are unable to police the violence in some communities, does NOT make the violence legal…and you know that. Why be a dick?
We know there are problems in remote Aboriginal communities. But the ones that have threatened closures are those WITHOUT the issues you speak of above. They’re tiny…with maybe 10-20 people (at most) living there. The dysfunctional communities you’re talking about have many living there…and may be soon to have more with a massive influx from the closures.
So what are you saying Blake, that hundreds of Aborigines living in a small area is better than a kin-group of 10?
Cite??
This is without doubt the single most egregious instance of you spouting absolute and utter bullshit I have ever witnessed, Blake. This is a straight out falsehood.
Any white anglo in USA, Canada, Oz, or the UK saying that those dark-skinned other-culture folk get undue privileges and don’t know what to do with them, is to be understood as a white anglo who’s spinning a fantasy…and maybe in the same light as a Slav hating on Gypsies.
It’s not their blackness, it’s their indigenousness, as you well know. And taking that into account, I think you know the answer to your own question. You may not agree with the answer, but you know what answer would be given by those who currently support the granting of special allowances. You’re just playing dumb.
Australian indigenes were pushed off their land by our more powerful forebears. A lot of people feel bad about that and consequently feel like being considerate and concessional towards the descendants of those indigenes. Is that logical? Probably not entirely, Mr Spock. But it’s how many of us feel.
The difficulty is that there is no clear path towards alleviating the problems they have.
[ul]
[li]A highly interventionist strategy (ala Stolen Generations) could no doubt force Australia’s remnant indigenes to adopt a modern culture which would at least if seen-through ultimately result in the disappearance of the poverty, cruelty, lack of education etc. at the cost of wiping the indigenes out culturally.[/li][li]A lassez faire strategy in which all support was removed would wipe out many, leave many destitute, and force the rest into adopting modern culture as above.[/li][/ul]Both of these strategies would themselves be seen as cruel and attract worldwide condemnation.
[ul]
[li]The current support strategy feels good because it’s charitable. But it also doesn’t work because it just perpetuates a culture that - economically and otherwise - just can’t cut it in the 21st Century. The strategy is soul destroying through it’s promotion of dependancy.[/li][/ul]
As Graeme Parker might have sung “Hey Og, don’t ask me questions, ain’t no answers in me”.
His St. Patrick’s Day address is pretty cringe too.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that this may be somewhat at variance with the facts. For all that you claim laws to not apply to Aborigines, the Australian government sure doe seem to put a remarkable number of them in prison. An Aborigine is more than five times as likely (maybe ten times; sources differ) to end up in prison as an Australian of any other ethnic descent. How, I wonder, is that possible if the law doesn’t apply to them?
[QUOTE=Banquet Bear]
What you posted was outrageous. You shouldn’t be at all surprised that people are outraged. And everything that you’ve written in this thread has everything to do with your attitude towards cultures that aren’t yours
[/QUOTE]
Actually, I did not say a single thing regarding a value judgment regarding a culture that isn’t mine. Not one. In fact, I specifically noted my complete neutrality when it comes to people’s “cultures.” I challenge you to show me where I said otherwise. By all means, quote away.
It is, I will admit, outrageous, in Canada, to suggest that something be changed to help First Nations people escape the cycle of poverty and misery so many of them are in. For quite awhile now the politically accepted approach has been to ignore the problem and just let them die. I am opposed to allowing people to suffer and die. Guilty as charged.