Yes. Are you familiar with the term “citizen”?
Bolding mine. Like I said: Hands off, but not complete autonomy. If they had complete autonomy, they could forbid any and all contact.
Cite that it is common to tribal societies, please?
How do we know they actually view the gifts as gifts? Perhaps they think they’re tribute because we’re afraid of their Awesome Bow And Arrow Skills?
I’m OK with it. The Sentinelese don’t like visitors, and that’s their right. If I don’t feel like visitors, I have many options. I can ignore my doorbell. I can answer the door and say, “I’m sorry, but now isn’t a good time.” If that doesn’t work, I can say, “Goodbye,” and shut the door. If that doesn’t work, I can say, “GO AWAY, OR I WILL CALL THE POLICE!” If that doesn’t work, I can call the police, and they will use physical force to arrest this obtuse clown, because if someone simply will not respect your rights, you can either be violent or a doormat. The Sentinelese, lacking doors, locks, police, jails, and a language they share with us, don’t have all our options. Furthermore, I see no moral difference between us, who are violent by proxy, and them, who do it personally. I’ve never killed anyone in my life, and sometimes I even escort bugs out the door on little slips of paper, but if I lived in a culture without a legal system, and someone came into my house uninvited, sat in my favorite blue comfy chair, and started singing The Song That Never Ends while ignoring my escalating hints, statements and threats, then, so help me, at some point, I would take the kukri off my bedroom wall, cut the fucker’s head off, and take the corpse outside to feed the crows, who Beckthewrek and I both know are nice, intelligent creatures that live in social groups, and therefore know how to play well with others of their kind.
No; we’re done conversing here. You selectively quoted something to give a false impression.
The law mostly favors your POV, though in practice the Northern Sentinelese have substantial tribal sovereignty. Wikipedia is interesting, though as always is not the final word: Political status
The Andaman and Nicobar (Protection of Aboriginal Tribes) Regulation, 1956 provides protection to the Sentinelese and other native tribes in the region.[44] The Andaman and Nicobar Administration stated in 2005 that they have no intention to interfere with the lifestyle or habitat of the Sentinelese and are not interested in pursuing any further contact with them or governing the island.[45] Although North Sentinel Island is not legally an autonomous administrative division of India, scholars have referred to it and its people as effectively autonomous,[46][47] or independent.[46][48]
They are one of many of the world’s nations-within-countries, more so than most I opine. When Indian admin officials say “minimize” contact, they pretty much mean it, consistent with budgetary issues. Except! There’s a 2018 loosening of restrictions. Except! There’s the clarification of that loosening after the Chao incident. See top of wiki page.
So, your argument is that no interaction with them can be peaceful because of what someone might do not related to those who want peaceful contact? Doesn’t that pretty much make any human interaction suspect and not worth the risk of pursuing?
And if you are willing to say that we have people on ‘our’ side who will take advantage of them, isn’t it just as valid to say that there might be some people on ‘their’ side who don’t want to be left alone? Or are you the type of person who says that the woman just had to call the police to get help if her husband was abusing her? We shouldn’t promote help hot lines, or shelters, etc., as that isn’t what the ‘family’ wants. ‘They’ just want to be left alone.
Well those seem like reasonable and easily answered questions, I’m sure Lemur866 will get back to you on them.
:eek: What the…?
:rolleyes:
Do you know what “ethnocentrism” is? Let me help y’all out:
You simply cannot filter everything about the North Sentinelese (and John Chau’s killing) through your 21st century American biases. Your standards of behavior do not apply to them.
I used your own cite to show that it was consistent with what I said. If you don’t want to continue, that’s fine with me. It also helps you since it lets you off the hook for backing up your claim about “tribal people”, which you wouldn’t be able to do because its incorrect.
Let’s go back to the original claim:
They are mostly autonomous because the Indian government allows them to be so. That could change, depending on the circumstances, so NO, they do not have a “right to run their society the way they see fit”. Had they decided to crucify this missionary on the beach, letting him die slowly over several days (while offshore fishermen livestream the event for everyone to see), the Indian government probably would have sent a mission in to rescue him. And if that meant dealing with the islanders with some amount of force, they would not have violated anyone’s “rights”.
The Indian government has, wisely IMO, taken a “hands off but observe” approach. This allows the Sentinalese to retain their culture but also allows intervention should the need arise. I will add, however, that an argument can be made that the children on the island should have access to education and to learn about the outside world. If the Indian government decided to make sure that happened, and did so in a humane way that did not remove the children from their families, I would have a difficult time arguing that they were wrong to do os.
That sounds fine to read, but with further thought, it sounds impossible. How could this possibly be accomplished?
Yeah, like I’m going to believe rich people when they talk about poverty. That statistic even sounds like total bullshit before one even fact checks it. But, for the record …
I cannot help but hear echoes of our friend Maurice Vidal Portman in some of these proposals:
For a tribe that is contacted, the attrition rate after a hundred years is something like 90-95%. If someone were to make successful contact with the tribe, they would be condemning a significant number of them to death or poverty. No wonder the Sentinelese shoot them.
Weren’t the Sentinelese “contacted” like 100 years ago?
Portman was there in the 1880s and 1890s, but since the inhabitants vanished into the forest rather than try to deal with a large, armed landing party, there was not too much “contact”.
A lone escaped prisoner who made his way there in 1896 was killed, naturally, and dumped on the beach.
This is the point where most people say, “Why bother?”, but I’ll persevere for the heck of it.
- Strike “mostly” and replace it with “Almost entirely”. Do the same for the US for that matter: if the US launches nukes on Russia, I would expect Russia to infringe on our sovereignty by launching nukes on us. Analogously, the North Sentinelese are bright enough to give stern warnings to those who want to fish in their waters, and somewhat less stern warnings to crazy and possibly infected invaders who want to settle on their island. Both carry the death penalty though.
In practice the N.S. have hella lotta autonomy now. You are correct though that it could be yanked away at the Indian government’s discretion. (Though they might have to change laws to do so.)
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A more charitable reading would interpret Snowboarder Bo’s claim as normative, not descriptive.
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That said, we’re mostly in agreement: eyes on, hands off is wise policy. We both know it can and probably will evolve over the next 5 or 30 years.
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To other posters who want to share the wonders of the modern world with this primitive culture, I repeat that economic development is hard stuff when applied to rural peasants or urban laborers - both who have a far more developed skill set, even when illiterate. A Kevin Drum blog post from today provides a flavor: Most Studies of Social Interventions Are Pretty Worthless – Mother Jones
That said, certain interventions would be pretty easy. Massacres aren’t difficult for example. Why not just cut to the chase and advocate that, destroying the Sentinelese in order to save them?
That site doesn’t cite where it gets those numbers from, or when they are for. But I do know extreme poverty has been dropping at a phenomenal rate worldwide in the last 3 decades.
Perhaps it’s may fault for underlining “mostly”, but that wasn’t the main point I was trying to make (you edited that part out). I’m OK with what India is doing, but I think reasonable people can disagree because, to quote myself: “they do not have a ‘right to run their society the way they see fit’”. It would appear that the Indian government, from what little observation it has done, has concluded that nothing outrageously barbaric is going on there. But even then, if the Indian government decided, for instance, that the children deserved an education and they could do implement that humanely, I wouldn’t argue that they were in the wrong. Some folks here seem to be arguing otherwise. If they are not, then they can amend their sweeping statements to make it clear.
Do you disagree with any of that? BTW, yes I agree that their current policy is not sustainable long term.
Underline added.
Wording matters here. Currently the Indian government and myself know that they can’t implement that humanely. (The Indian govt did take baby steps in that direction during the 1970s-1990s but were rebuffed. That was the gift giving era.) But if the Indian government believed that and they could get top quality experts to agree with them and make a good case, then I would probably be on board. I’m not sketching a wholly implausible scenario, given that the alternative to reaching out will someday involve having yahoos interceding with their $2000 drones.
Other than that qualification, agreed. I don’t find the idea of keeping the N.S. in touch with their hunter gatherer heritage to be particularly appealing per se. I just think it’s best among limited options - and that furthermore their social welfare all things considered is superior to that of the Dalits IMO. If an expert presents a credible counter-plan to eyes on hands off, and their critics have weighed in with counter-arguments, then I think both deserve serious consideration. Presently, I haven’t come across such a debate among serious experts though.