BTW, I will accept your eyewitness accounts when you can find me an eyewitness that can has seen all Australian and can verify that >51% loathe aborigines.
Until then it’s not an eyewitness. It’s just racist anecdote.
Don’t you know what an eyewitness even is? It’s someone who has seen the events in question, not some bloke you met in the pub.
Most of the posts in this thread are from persons who have 1st hand knowledge of attitudes to Aboriginal people in Australia. All of them recount experience and impression on roughly the same curve.
There’s only one extravagant data point. Data off the curve is discounted as a general rule. So, bye Blake.
Thanks though for your POV. I’m also finding your idea novel that to qualify as an eyewitness to racism, one must have seen all of Australia and can verify attitudes held by 51%.
Speaking of touring Australia, where will you visit next time?
You miss the point. I said “speaking for myself, my experience is that human beings are racist. So I’m being prejudiced against people, not people of a particular race.”
I am not ascribing characteristics to human beings based on race. I am ascribing characteristics to human beings, period. That is not racism. It’s pretty much the opposite.
Personal insults indeed. You utterly misunderstood what I’d said. You had, in fact, lost the plot. It’s not an insult, it’s a simple description of what you had done.
You’ve been given good reasons why this evidence won’t be forthcoming even if the proposition is true, but you won’t deal.
You’re hiding behind high a wall constructed of demands for impossible evidence so you can ignore what evidence there is.
You seem again to miss the point. Sevastopol and myself and Cazzle and the people I cited are precisely eyewitnesses to what we are talking about. All you can do is tell us that what we’ve seen is not representative. In which case, the onus is on you, fella.
Eyewitness accounts are evidence. They may not be good enough for you. You may decide you’re not prepared to make the call that we have. Fine. But handwaving won’t make the evidence we are relying upon go away. It may not be great evidence, but it ain’t nothing.
No, you are. Take out the word “probably” from my analogy, it makes no difference. Take out “I think”, it makes no difference.
In all cases, one sees some evidence and one draws a conclusion. Whether you then describe that as what one thinks, or whether one just says what one’s conclusion is, makes no odds. Fact is, there is eyewitness evidence of racism against aborigines and that’s evidence from which a conclusion can be drawn. You may pooh pooh the evidence, you may put up alternate contradicting evidence (something conspicously absent from your posts, by the way), but pretending there is no evidence won’t get you anywhere.
There is a dilemma, you are just refusing to deal with it. In my analogy, it is a given that the premise is true. You are just refusing to deal with the dilemma that can arise if the nature of something is such that while the available evidence suggests that thing to be true, the nature of that thing also means that no really good evidence is or ever will be available.
The fact something is hard to prove does not make it untrue. I appreciate that that also does not make it true, but sometimes one has to work on the basis of incomplete data. If less than ideal evidence is all you have and are going to get about a thing, are you saying we should just refuse to acknowledge that thing’s existence?
No you couldn’t because you would not be able to find a number of credible eyewitnesses who would say that. And if you could, you would have evidence.
Let me ask you something simple. Do you or do you not believe myself and Cazzle and Sevastopol and Imasquare when we say we meet a large number of racist Australians? Are you actually saying we are lying, or do you just think we are unrepresentative?
Oh yes? Start a thread on the subject. See how many dopers come forward and say “I meet large numbers of homosexuals who say things that indicate they are pederasts”
When three or four come forward, you will have evidence. Not good evidence, but evidence. I don’t doubt you could find some who’d say they believed homosexuals are pederasts. But see how many will say with a straight face that they’ve heard a significant number of homosexuals actually admit they are pederasts.
We can talk further about this when you’ve completed this exercise.
Firstly, when half do, it’ll get interesting.
Secondly, the idea of mind control rays is inherently absurd and goes against all known science. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof.
Racism is not an extraordinary claim. I think it would be true to say that all we are talking about is the incidence rate. When half the people in this thread chip in to say they notice a high prevalence of it, you can’t wave that away as being on the same level as anecdotes about mind control rays.
Thirdly, experience of mind control rays is completely subjective. I could be standing right next to you and not have the experience. It’s somewhat different to me reporting that I meet large numbers of Australians who say racist things.
Yes I know what a straw man is. I want to define the scope of the discussion. I get the feeling you are arguing an academic point but when put on the spot, you don’t actually believe much different to what I do. I want to know the boundaries of our agreement.
No, and no. Your first question is interesting. It seems to imply that you accept that Aborigines do suffer from racism in this country. Is that racism widespread? Who perpetrates it? How are they able to do so to a degree that makes such racism important if they are not a significant body of persons?
Your second point is irrelevant to the debate. We may all suffer racism, but the racism of the minority is not going to prevent the majority from appointing a PM in their likeness.
Princhester can you please put all thatinto one post. I’m not wading through 7 consectuvive posts to try to decipher what you mean. There’s no need for multuple posts like that. Think first, then post. Mmmkay.
Just pretend those little blue lines aren’t there. Are you really telling me one post making two points you can cope with, but two in a row making one point each you can’t?
The point that princhester (and several other posters have made in this thread) was, given that imasquare was indeed absolutely correct and Australia is racist to such a degree that electing an aboriginal PM right now would be impossible, point to ONE piece of factual evidence that we could provide that would make you happy. It could be anything, anything at all, just be specific. Do you want a government report on racism? Do you want a survey done by Readers Digest what? What would it possibly take for us to convince you?
Whatever you ask for simply can’t be provided because until we develop a brain scanning system that can catalog our inner thoughts. We’re all dopers of reasonably long standing here. We understand what the weaknesses of anecdotal evidence and how we tend to bias it and so forth. Obviously, we would like for there to be some objective, scientific data. But in this case, we simply cannot provide it for you so we must resort to the next best thing.
There has been a lot of activity on this thread since I last had an opportunity to view it. I’ll stay out of the fight and approach the OP’s question from a different tack.
One thing worth remembering about Federal elections is that strictly speaking you are not voting for the next PM. It’s not a person on person battle where everyone gets to cast a vote for their preferred candidate, as it is in, for example, the US Presidential election.
Voters get to elect local members, with the candidates chosen by party members, or in some cases, a subset of party members. The local members then choose the leader. While elections are generally seen as Liberal Leader versus Labor Leader, it needs to be remembered that strong (or weak) local candidates can have an impact.
At other times, the leader really doesn’t matter. When Bill Hayden was ousted by Bob Hawke just before the 1983 election, he commented that a drover’s dog could lead the ALP to victory. No matter who the leaders were, Labor was going to win that election.
Similarly, it has to be remembered that when John Howard took on Paul Keating, Howard wasn’t seen as the strong leader that he (generally) is now. He was the has-been who had already lost an election (and the leadership twice) and was only leader because the last two, John Hewson and Alexander Downer, self-destructed. Yet he won the 1996 election easily, as virtually anyone would have against Keating in that election (probably even Downer would have won).
I believe that a solid, non-controversial, dependable leader of either gender or any racial/ethnic background could lead his or her party to an election victory. It just takes the right person at the right time.
It has already been pointed out in this thread that a leader often appears out of nowhere. This is especially true if there has been a less-than-successful leader with one or two prominent snipers after his job. The most recent example was when Mark Latham took advantage of Simon Crean’s demise, when Kim Beazley was the sniper. Of course, Latham too crashed and burned, but a more canny politician with a less controversial background may have been more successful.
The ideal time for a non-stereotypical leader to emerge would be during a minor turmoil. He or she would have been a solid worker with successes in a non-controversial portfolio, who had managed to stay under the scandal radar. He or she could be a compromise candidate with that something extra/exotic to set him or her apart from the rest of the field.
This has also been my impression of many Australians that I know.
Ok, now that I’ve read the rest of the thread, I’d better be quite specific about what I am saying. Here you go Blake:
I have lived in the Northern Territory and the north of Western Australia. The group of people I work with and know are generally from Perth or the eastern and southern states.
My impression is, and no I haven’t actually done a survey, that around %10 of my friends and colleagues openly make racist remarks about Aboriginals without provocation, i.e., they will start the topic of conversation. The majority of the rest of them will make racist remarks if they are part of the conversation already started.
I shall give you an example of a common racist statement made by my friends.
Situation: We are walking through town and an obviously drunk aboriginal woman (or man, it doesn’t matter) starts yelling abuse at us for no particular reason.
Statement by friend: “If that was us yelling abuse at her, the cops would come down and take us to jail, but not them, they can do whatever they like, it’s different rules for them and us.”
I find this remarkable because my experience in NZ, where I grew up, was that the people I knew there didn’t say these sorts of things about the Maoris, I myself am part Maori so I might notice racist comments more than others, I also happen to look about as white as you can get, so my being part Maori wouldn’t have stopped people from making comments in my presence. I don’t say this to show that NZers are less racist, only as the background to my experiences here in Aus. I accept that NZers may be just as racist but less vocal.
I also accept that I may know a non-representative group of Australians. I hope that that’s the case.