I admire your determination, if not your character or opinions.Originally Posted by Looper
I admire your determination, if not your character or opinions.Originally Posted by Looper
Don't be stupid mate. It is not something any culture celebrates. It is conveniently ignored until a society develops advanced human rights including children's rights and then it is eventually exposed and vilified.Originally Posted by chassamui
You do realise that the truly stunning Australian marsupial mega-fauna were wiped out, annihilated completely by the aboriginals. Only dust and bones left to show that these magnificent creatures ever existed. So don't start spewing your garbage about aboriginals being conservationists.Originally Posted by chassamui
Surviving is the bare minimum requirement for any species' DNA to stake a claim to reproduce. That is not an achievement. Lets celebrate termites shall we. They are really amazing. They survive in the harshest environments. Any creature alive today has managed the bare minimum of survival so lets not break out the aboriginal podium finish champagne just yet.Originally Posted by DrB0b
It is virtual certainty that the aboriginal 'race' and culture was splintered into thousands of tribes who lived in a perpetual state of war with each other. Any study of indigenous pre-civilisation tribes (such as the yanomamo - famously studied by Napoleon Chagnon in south America) shows them to live as splintered tribes at permanent war. Killing each other, raiding each other to kill males and to steal and enslave and rape women. Prehistoric human life was brutal not noble and peaceful. Peace is a recent invention.Originally Posted by David48atTD
There have been threads in the past dealing with the old and new Thai capital, and not so long ago, a heated debate on the Australian Aboriginals.Originally Posted by David48atTD
Having researched the subject, it turns out that the Aboriginals had no written history, but what passed for their very long journey, was handed down by word of mouth.
Not surprisingly, with 700 languages and the human penchant for elaboration, much of it is quite literally, lost in translation.
The mere fact that their populations grew slowly, and their respect for the land and resources, means they deserve to be more than a despised footnote in the white settlers history.
Fumbled attempts to correct perceived wrongs, and have the remaining population subsumed by contemporary society are well intentioned, but misguided.
Its not like the continent is exactly squeezed for space is it? The Abbos are only a problem if you try to recreate them in your own image.
Attempts to integrate a primitive but successful culture established over thousands of years, is morally reprehensible and plainly divisive for both sides.
Does anyone wonder why the aboriginals never tried to assimilate the new settlers?
Heart of Gold and a Knob of butter.
Total fairy stories. They burned huge swathes of Australian native forest to ashes to open the land for their hunting exploits and then hunted the most magnificent creatures Australia has ever known to extinction.Originally Posted by chassamui
Ummmm No. They were a pack of warring tribes. Whitey was just another tribe to join in the war games. Unfortunately the spear chuckers met their Waterloo and were outgunned. All's fair in love and war.Originally Posted by chassamui
The 18th century was a little bit different to the touchy feely 21st century Chas
Without Witten or pictorial history, you have no way of verifying that statement in this instance.Originally Posted by Looper
Much like the American native Indians, these people did live in harmony with their environment. To blame them for the loss of mega fauna is simply preposterous. Just a quick look at the languid population growth rates, is enough to tell you that their simple lifestyle would have had very little impact on such a huge and varied environment.Originally Posted by Looper
Yes lets celebrate termites and others who have survived harsh environments. Why not? Survival is not a race anyway. Its about the empathy that exists between species that do survive alongside each other.Originally Posted by Looper
For growth, however slow, to be present, you would have to assume that weaker, less capable tribes would be lost by natural selection. Why would you supplant theories on South American natives onto the Australian Aboriginals? Do you have expertise as a visiting professor of anthropology?Originally Posted by Looper
The entire premise of your argument is based on rapid capitalist growth at all costs western 'civilization'.
My contention is that the opposite might not only be true, but it could also represent a lesson for the future survival of the human species.
Come back when the Chinese have exhausted your once abundant mining industry, I have a sustainable philosophy you might be interested in.
You are talking out of your arsehole mate. The decimation of the native forest and the extinction of the magnificent Australian mega-fauna at the hands of the aboriginals are well known facts.Originally Posted by chassamui
Aboriginals, like all primitive societies, had not the faintest idea what 'conservation' could even mean. Their only interest was in survival. It takes and advanced culture to teach primitive people about the idea of conservation.
Much of Australian flora has evolved to require bushfires to perpetuate. Their fires were all part of the greater circle of life.Originally Posted by Looper
The Australian Museum disagrees with you.Originally Posted by Looper
https://australianmuseum.net.au/mega...-of-extinction
Correct.Originally Posted by chassamui
Correct.Originally Posted by chassamui
That's a load of bollocks. Many native societies preached (and still do) conservation for conservation's sake by way of lore and rules, traditions and myth.Originally Posted by Looper
As was the pre-history of your proud nation. I'm not at odds with anyones version of history. I simply believe that slow and sure is better than rapid expansion without the infrastructure and understanding necessary to sustain it.Originally Posted by Looper
Ring any bells with unsustainable growth in SE Asia?
The aboriginal populations never amounted to much in terms of numbers. Insignificant in terms of the landscape and area available to them.
Primitive cultures understood by experiential learning, to only take sufficient for their own immediate needs. The only time this changed was when woodlands were removed for agriculture and settlement. That scenario never applied to the Aboriginal, nomadic hunter gatherer.
I fully expected a more reasoned and knowledgeable debate from you Looper.
Australian immigrants have in a relatively short period of time created a quite reasonable ersatz American culture and for that they must be commended. It took the Septics over 230 years to achieve the level of fuckwittery that so defines them but the Ocker trash seem to have attained that distinction in a mere 116 years.
Genes, i suppose. Most western migrants seeking work elsewhere are generally deficient in some way or other which perhaps explains the diaspora into shitholes, like, say Australia.
That is total fuckin garbage.Originally Posted by chassamui
When whitey rocked up and traded the redskins a few rifles what did Chief Running Nose say?
'Oh these are dangerous weapons we had better use them sparingly to protect the wonderful environment which we live in harmony with - stupid white man know nothing'
Or did he say
'Woooo hooo! Lets kill every fuckin bison in sight!!'
then
'Oh shit where did all the bison go?'.
Pre-civilised people have not the faintest notion what conservation is and would not understand no matter how long you tried to explain it to them.
They only understand water, food, shelter, sex in that order.
Right, so destroying habitat and effecting climate change (which the burning did) and forcing native animals to evolve in order to adapt to your destruction and then hunting the mega-fauna to extinction is 'living in harmony with nature' when black-fella does it.Originally Posted by Maanaam
But when whitey does it it is wicked evil and they need to learn from great wisdom of black-fella.
The bison herds were wiped out by white nigger trash hunters acting on the initiative of the white ruling classes who knew that with every dead bison there would be another Indian forced to live on the reservation. By destroying the mainstay of the Plains Indian's culture and eroding his economic foundation, they were ethnically cleansing those territories the Establishment wanted to exploit for their own vested interests.
Whites are pretty much vermin, and always have been.
The lengths white australians will go to to pretend their country wasn't build on genocide always astounds me. It's like Turks and Armenia.
Your ability to draw false equivalences is almost Trumpian; you're comparing across vast distances of time and scale. Australia (white Australia, obviously, since it's an apartheid state and you wouldn't want the niggers getting in on the action) has one of the highest per capita CO2 emissions in the world. This is in full knowledge of the disastrous consequences of doing so. To compare that to the destruction of the megafauna is absurd, even by the standards of you and your toy-playing idiocy.
Sorry Looper, tiny population armed with Stone Age weapons wherein no position to do what you accused them of. A few hundred spread over vast acreages, could only hunt smaller fry, gather natures bounty, then move on. Remember these people only covered small parts of the North and the south east. The rest was fairly barren interior.
While they may not have the same comprehension as modern civilizations regarding conservation, their livelihood, culture and spiritual beliefs grew from the bounty that the land provided them. Why would they destroy it because their language had no word for conservation, other than survival?
I agree that they developed very slowly in terms of what we now understand, but the contemporary 'civilization' is actually a very good example of an oxymoron.
That said, even a logical, pragmatic conservationist like me understands that we cannot uninvent the automobile or manned flight. All we can do is improve on it.
Why would we want to uninvent the automobile?Originally Posted by chassamui
It is one the most brilliantest inventions in the history of mankind.
Manned flight is even better.
We are the paragon of animals. Like an angel in apprehension. Like a god.
We gift our inventions to primitive cavemen. They get a free ride. They don't need to exert the meagre contents of their cranial cavities.
They go from scratching like chickens to skyping on 4G and all they do is grumble about it.
When we colonise Mars should we invite Australian aboriginals along for the ride to advise us on environmental conservation of the new red earth?
There's plenty of lore in old cultures that mandates conservatory practices. For example in Fiji there are certain times when a reef, a beach, or an island is and was pronounced tabu and for 100 days nobody was allowed to fish or gather seafood. Besides, a small population can be a bit freer with the environment, especially in a land as vast and productive as ancient Australia.
Looper seems to be playing Devil's Advocate, which is pretty silly really. We know he's capable of better than saying (as he appears to be doing) that American Indians, armed with rifles, killed all the bison.
"The enormous bison herds of North America shrank rapidly in the face of relentless over-hunting during the westward migration of European settlement. The presence of bison conflicted with the aspirations of people looking for land to settle and farm, and with the aims of government, which wanted to subdue the native tribes of Plains Indians.
As the railroads were built through the Central Plains, travelers were encouraged to shoot bison from the windows of the train for fun and excitement. The carcasses were often left to rot. By 1905, the excessive hunting resulted in only an endangered 500 bison left surviving on their range in the United States. A herd of endangered wood bison, discovered in northwestern Canada in 1957, is protected in Wood Buffalo National Park and nearby areas".
My understanding was that they honoured each others' territory or got speared for trespass.
And that occasionally there would be formalised battles in which men would line up with spears and let fly, but when people on the other side got wounded, they would all stop and assess the damage and see whether "an eye for an eye" had been achieved.....whatever the original grievance had been.
And sometimes they all got together, like in the Bunya mountains :
The Bunya Nut festival
An important aspect of indigenous life on the Darling Downs was the Bunya Nut Festival. This festival was held in the land of the Jarowair tribe every 2 to 3 years or whenever the nuts were abundant. Archibald Meston, amateur anthropologist and inaugural Chief Protector of Aborigines in Queensland, recorded the Bunya Nut Festival as attracting tribes from Gympie, Maryborough, Balonne, Maranoa, Moonie, Barwon, New England, Brisbane River, Tweed River and all parts of the Darling Downs. It is estimated that at least 14 different Aboriginal dialects would have been represented at the festival. The festival was important as it was a time for the tribes of Southern Queensland to meet and conduct initiation ceremonies and corroborees (ceremonies in which there is traditional dancing and singing), to settle arguments, swap information and, of course, feast on the bunya nuts. This feast continued in the area until as late as the 1870's.
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