That shows a fundamental misunderstanding between the leftist POV and the hardcore capitalist (like myself) POV, real capitalists know and ought be honest that the system creates winners and losers, inequity is intrinsic to making the wheels of the system turn. Even a fairly hardcore capitalist might be in favor of poverty alleviation, but we’re not going to advocate for true equity where Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have exactly as much resources as me or you, as we believe that would destroy incentives that make the system function.
Or shorter version–we don’t view inequity as intrinsically bad.
I’m trying to figure out what you’re referring to with this statement. Are you talking about agricultural commodities? Bulk food? Manufactured products?
I would refer you back to my comments. I acknowledged both that there was very little evidence available, and that nobody can possibly know the full truth.
Choosing to ignore those qualifiers and then calling the resulting comments stupid is, well . . . made even more interesting when you then mirror the qualifier “what little evidence.”
I’ll also just note that I mentioned the range of official “guesstimates” for their numbers. One might notice that a “guesstimate” implies even less certainty than an “estimate” mightn’t one? Here again you have crossed out the qualifier and called the result stupid, then acknowledged that you yourself found an estimate that high, though less recent.
In short, your assessment of my intelligence seems to say very little about me.
Out here in farm country, there are shit-tons of wheat, corn, and other grains in elevators and bins which are unguarded. There are also thousands (millions?) of head of livestock in feedlots and pastures that aren’t guarded.
However, I would not recommend pulling your truck into an unguarded pasture and attempting to pilfer some of those cows.
I am now reading that he might have been associated with All Nations (whatever that is, but I assume its got something to do with mission work and the great commission)
I mean think about your local environment where you live. Tons of people leave valuables out in their yards that aren’t guarded, people go on vacation and leave bikes outside. Farmers frequently bale hale and leave the bales in their fields for a long time unguarded. Livestock is frequently unguarded. Most food and cash crops are not guarded at all.
Depending on how we define “guard” (i.e. if a basic security system counts as guarding or not) the vast majority of businesses leave their premises unattended and unguarded every single day. There’s a huge amount of construction and industrial valuables that are left mostly unguarded. One reason copper theft got so popular is exposed copper pipes were frequently in semi-deconstructed houses that weren’t watched or guarded at all.
A lot of things in our society there’s a predicate understanding people shouldn’t steal them, and that frequently is all that’s required to protect them. There are thieves who work on the margins and exploit that fact. But the unguarded nature of things isn’t a prioi proof of “equitable distribution of resources” in our society. We have societal norms against stealing that factor into it, for example. We don’t know how Sentinelese society is ordered who or really gets to control the tribe’s resources. They could be very egalitarian, but they may not be.
I don’t see where I ever made the claim anyone was advocating that.
Well sonny it’s a message board, a day or so for me to check back in isn’t that unreasonable–and other people have already provided examples in my absence. The idea that creating a pile of “valuable resources” that is left unguarded on an island where only members of a small tribe live (and that kill outsiders, so unguarded is actually questionable) is evidence of anything just isn’t true. Drive around any part of America and actually pay attention to your surroundings and you’ll see all kinds of things equivalent in value to hunter-gatherer foraged commodities being left out in unguarded heaps.
No, I don’t agree. Even communism never advocated that people should get equal amounts, it advocated that they should be allocated resources according to their needs - i.e. (in some sense) equitably, not equally. Capitalism does not advocate either equal or equitable allocation of many resources.
I was asking where these unguarded stockpiled goods might exist, and I was expecting an example of ‘rare resources’. Instead, you gave examples of bicycles, bales of ‘hale’, and livestock. I don’t consider farmers storing products or managing livestock as being stockpiled. Neither are bicycles in backyards.
Then I asked where anybody has advocated a position that everybody in this country should have the same net worth. You responded by saying
But in this post, you stated:
I asked where anybody has ever advocated that position. If nobody has, why even mention it?
His encounters began somewhat friendly. Then they told him to leave, and he persisted in “declaring Jesus” at them, so they got more insistent that he leave. This lead to arrows and destruction of his canoe.
Where in this thread has someone mentioned infanticide or that the men abuse the women? The only abuse claims I saw were with respect to a white British guy who oversaw the region for a while in the late 1800s.
I was somewhat surprised to find that North Sentinel is not really that remote. It’s only about 15 miles as the crow flies from Port Blair, the largest city in the Andaman Islands, which has a population of 100,000. That’s about as far as Nantucket is from Cape Cod. While the Andamans themselves are off the beaten track, they have three times the population of the US Virgin Islands. It is very remarkable that the North Sentinelese have been able to maintain their isolation when they are so close to a population of that size.
Yup, the Andamans have about 300,000 people.
And I say the North Sentinelese are in fact neither isolated nor uncontacted except in a technical sense and have not been for decades. They’ve been dealing with and fending off poachers, illegal fishermen, drug and arms smugglers for a long time with a mix of open hostility and hiding. How do I know that? Because the Andaman Islands attract such illegal activity and creeps know no borders. The rest is my conjecture.
Whereas the peoples of Martha’s Vineyard are totally corrupted by modern society, and are no longer of interest to anthropologists. They might was well be mainlanders.
While I agree it’s remarkable, there are a few things that help explain it -
Most of the population of the Andamans (including Port Blair) is on the eastern side of Great Andaman. The western side of Great Andaman is much less developed, in fact a significant part of the western shore opposite North Sentinel is where the Jarawa, the last tribe to be contacted on the main island, live. A lot of that is set off in a reserve for them.
And the islands directly to the east of North Sentinel are mostly a marine park, so they aren’t populated.
Whether (or more accurately, when) the Sentinelese ever had contact with the other Andamanese tribes, possibly before British settlement, I’m not sure. I don’t think the canoes the Sentinelese use now are open seaworthy, but obviously they got to the island somehow in the past…