Trippy as a good little Uncle Tom, blood libel against Indians , Indo Fiji Apartheid, other sundry thoughts and some comments [all my own work] [aside: why does madant get a long title but I don't???] Where do I start? Oh yes: DISCLAIMER:all views in this essay are general and any resemblance to creatures real and imagined, is delusional and psychopathic /sigh On Trippy being Uncle Tom: According to Webster: For those who had to look it up, here is a brief introduction to the original source of the term [if there are any errors please correct them, they are errors of memory and not deliberate]: Uncle Tom was a pious black slave, who in spite of being owned and sold like cattle by whites, related to a white girl he saved from drowning because he shared her Christian faith. Presumably [and it’s been at least 30 years since I read the children’s edition of the story] he assumed that this elevated his status to something holier than thou. However, when he refused to divulge the whereabouts of some escaped black slaves, he was killed, because frankly, the white slavers didn’t give a fuck about his Christian faith or how decent he was. He was just a stubborn, uppity black slave to them Now that we have the authoritative meaning of the term from a valid source and a brief overview of the story it is based on, let’s look at the argument: Does any of this sound like Trippy? Not to me. I did presume, when he traced his whakapapa to the Maori equivalent of Pocahontas that his Maori heritage was very relevant to him. His constant justifications for the colonization and occupation of Maoris were inconsistent with that view [I know of a Maori who sold the same land twice to Europeans!!! The Maoris killed and ate the Moriori!!! Their condition is mostly self inflicted! ] and, while they might have reflected the identity of a Maori man who has internalized the image of his native people that was imposed upon him by colonial settlers, ultimately they sounded more like a defense of colonialism. [Think about Obama making a speech justifying slavery by saying the Africans did it to other Africans too] The fact that some ancestors of the Maori may have killed the Moriori does not excuse what the Europeans did to the Maori anymore than what some Africans did to other Africans excuses the fact that there are bones buried in NY of black men women and children who have been worked to death. The topic was Maori suicide rates in modern NZ. The fact that Maori suicide rates are higher than all other ethnic groups in New Zealand TODAY is a problem that results from conditions in New Zealand NOW . While I haven’t looked into the Moriori suicide rates, if they are also higher, what is it more likely to be a variable that affects it? Europeans also suppressing their cultural, religious and sociological growth and expression or what the Maoris did 400 years ago? What do you think? However Trippy doesn’t qualify as an obsequious Uncle Tom. He’s not a Foud Ajami or Wafa Sultan. I have long since concluded he is as Maori as Buffalo Roam and Skinwalker are native American. There is probably some indigenous blood there [or not], but overall, he doesn’t identify with it, which is fine. I have no issues with a “mongrel” not choosing to identify with any but his immediate urban environment, which is what most individuals in post colonial societies struggling to redefine their identities and understanding of themselves do anyway. So Trippy is essentially like what I would be if I had a predominantly Anglo ethos and ancestry [and there are plenty of Anglo Indians in Bombay who might share his sentiments] and was married to a British man of mixed ethnicity with no Indian background and kept finding excuses to justify what the British did in India for 200 years and countering them with crimes by Indians as a response to questions about colonialism -as an Anglo-Indian in an Indian society, it would make me irrelevant . As an Anglo-Indian in an Anglo society, it would make me pragmatic and ingroup. In fact, for him, his Maori heritage is a trump card that he only pulls it out when he wants to assure the listener of his legitimacy in the debate. But what if he was a dispossessed Maori? One who had lost his identity and did not know his whakapapa and iwi? Who would he be? What trump card would he pull out for legitimacy to speak as a New Zealand native? That’s what the thread is about, the one who knows there should be a card but his card was taken away before he even knew what it means. And it’s important enough in his mind that he kills himself over it. He dies. He cannot go on. Kaput. Finis. Ram Nam Satya Hai. Inna lillahi wa inna ilaihi rajioon. Rest in Peace. Gone. He is ethnically cleansed. He does not want to live for want of the card that Trippy flourishes under our nose. What does Trippy, the “not much of a Maori who does not identify as one”, have to say to this man? That’s what I wanted to know. It seems to me Trippy would say, get over it, look at the Moriori. [And then, the next time, Trippy would not flourish his card, because it’s so irrelevant, because HE has got over it– he would not flaunt his Maori heritage which he does not identify with –because it’s so unimportant in the vision of NZ that he has, he would only argue as a Kiwi, as noodler did, with greater credibility and no allegations of racism. ] Perhaps Trippy could tell me what he would say to this man/woman/child. So, back to my post, when I said: I was referring to my own observations in a general, undirected way. Since this is the post which gave offence, let me state what I mean line by line [or number by number] 1. He doesn't need to identify as anything I don’t care if he is Maori or European, since he does not claim to be either or identify as either. I don’t. Really. 2. Its his decision to pop into the discussion as a Maori, he could have done it as an European Indeed, even though he does not identify as a Maori, he constantly projected the views of Maoris as facts rather than as opinions. This was his choice, to speak for the Maoris he does not identify as. 3. He is as plausible as Buffalo Roam the part native American. This is with reference to an earlier discussion with BR, where he claimed native Americans enjoyed the best of both worlds. Apparently the statistics which show them at the bottom of the social ladder is due to self inflicted misery I don’t think anyone views Buffalo Roam as an Uncle Tom who is betraying his fellow native American bros. Does anyone? 4. I am free to view his claims with skepticism That’s self explanatory. I am free to not believe what anyone says on the internet. For all I know, Trippy is not who he says he is. If I said I was a mixed heritage African American who did not identify as black and said that blacks who suffer from discrimination in the US should get over it because Africans did it to other Africans, you are also free to view it with skepticism. In fact, I would be very surprised if you accepted it at face value. 5. There are uncle Toms in every society Yes, there are uncle Toms in every society, including my own, it’s not unusual to find people who are servile to power/culture and adopt foreign values which are destructive to their own societies. People like that are not unique to NZ or Australia or the US. Or even India. So its got nothing to do with being descended from Maori or being from NZ or an indeterminate white ancestry. And if the thread had not been locked, I assume, pursuant to Bells, Lucy or Trippy [with Trippy, the most likely candidate] pressing the report button something like the following is what I would have said in response to Lucy’s question. As it was, when Dwydder PM’ed me for clarification of the term saying he had to look it up [apparently even D depends on Wikipedia rather than dictionary.com, which surprised me] I told him to look at a better source of information. It never even occurred to me, until I saw I was banned, that Trippy would take personal offense at something which apart from being stated by me in a vague general sense, he had used to describe himself in an earlier thread -which was what I vaguely recalled when I mentioned it to Bells, not as an endorsement but to underline that I was skeptical of his claims as a pro-European Kiwi who is a good little Uncle Tom and who favours Maoris just as I was skeptical of Buffalos claims that he favours native Americans– which was a direct reference to the post Trippy made about the same term, where he claimed that the Europeans favoured the Maori version of the Waitangi treaty rather than the British version of it. Even if no one else followed that reference – I usually assume people follow my train of thought, which is a mistake, because I connect disparate thoughts from several disconnected places – Trippy surely knew where the reference came from, in relation to him. Or am I giving him too much credit? In effect , I was stating, somewhat clumsily, the opposite of what is claimed. I was stating that Trippy is not, cannot be “a good little Uncle Tom”, because the evidence is against him And especially since, after realizing that he was no more Maori than noodler was where his identity was concerned [they are both equally Kiwis], I merely followed his lead in the discussions and did not attempt to consider him a source of information as a Maori whose heritage is meaningful to him in the way it is for those who have no whakapapa to whip out[I also indicated this when I mentioned to him that imo, noodler was more Maori than he was, because he did not need to show me a card to be able to speak on the situation unbiasedly – which, since he didn’t identify as one, I did not consider a big deal. ] I was not especially interested in the”is he a real Maori [sup]TM[/sup]” issue since I was done with that and Bells was just snapping away like an irritable puppy, interrupting what I was really waiting to hear from Trippy – how many Indians ate their children in the aftermath of El Nino? Not because I was angry or offended but because I wanted to know. I had never before heard about this issue and a quick google search generated nothing on the claim. My entire focus was on that issue. Not on Bells sniping away for whatever axe she is currently grinding. I just wrote a few lines to mollify her while waiting for Trippy to write back and in retrospect, should have connected the dots by linking to the original reference or even stating why the Buffalo Roam connection was significant to the claims and how the Uncle Tom reference was from Trippy himself, and was a false claim which I had rejected even though I had considered it because it was not unlikely [as there were uncle Toms in every society]. A mostly western guy, who obviously favours the western lifestyle and defends the European position while not identifying as a Maori, is not an uncle Tom, not even to the Maoris whom he addresses quite unsympathetically by saying their condition is mostly “self inflicted” – he’s like the person who clucks over the situation in Haiti, comments on how bad the Haitians are at taking control of their lives, wishes they would take responsibility for themselves, then changes the channel and goes on with his life, without bothering to think, for one moment, if there could be more to that story. Or, accuses those Indians driven by starvation from their homes, of occupying Fiji and eating their children. Insisting that colonialism is not the defining factor here is like insisting white racism had no hand in affecting the social mobility and progress of blacks. Were black slaves occupying the South as well? However this is all Monday morning QB’ing, since at the time, Trippy kept ignoring the issue of the Indians eating the children, which made me suspect he just made it up, so then I *really* wanted to know. Lol. See, I did several rat studies where under chronic undernutrition, rats ate their new born babies as soon as they were born. It was a major issue for me, because it really shook me up, and since we were studying the effects of chronic maternal undernutrition on the child, we had to come up quickly with a solution so as to at least save some of the litter. Trippys claim sent me back to that room in the animal facility and I really really wanted to KNOW. [More on this later] Back on topic, Trippy was also sticking up for the British Raj in India which clearly showed to me that his sympathies lie with his colonial cousins. Hell I saw this way before in the early stages of our debate, when he challenged the notion that Maoris had been ethnically cleansed by colonization in the Auschwitz sign debate [and especially since he himself implied later that those who don’t know their whakapapa and iwi due to European actions against their ancestors, are rootless and have no standing in Maori society and become like orphans who don’t know their parents – that’s a serious and direct probable cause of identity loss and is entirely due to what European colonialists have done to the Maori]. Trippy of course, has his Pocahontas card still intact so he can assuage the Maoris who looked at his skin color and doubted his credentials as part of the herd. According to Trippy, he brought in the British Raj to compare the colonization of Fiji by Indians with the colonization of NZ by Europeans. It still makes no sense to me because the two issues are widely disparate [see later]. Perhaps kira, who comes from what used to be a Dutch colony can understand better [sorry in advance kira, if I pull you into something you don’t wish to be involved in, but I don’t know anyone else here who is from a liberated post colonial society], the love hate relationship that post colonial subjects of a country have with the history of colonialism in their country. Perhaps kira and I cannot understand the love hate relationship that natives have with the descendents of occupiers who did not leave and whose religious, social and cultural mores are still dominant over their society so that their own are relegated to an exotic rather than everyday status – certainly I cannot even begin to understand what the aboriginals in Australia feel about becoming the dingo in the yard of what used to be their home.. Even the term aboriginal [which James tells us is a “sensitive” one ] is only an issue of political correctness over words – it is Australians who decide if the aboriginal can continue to live as he wants or whether it is time he upgraded to a “better” social system whether his kids should be taken away to reeducation camps [Stolen Generation] or permitted to live with him, whether his flag is the national flag whether his anthem is the national anthem, whether he represents the Australian culture or is just an embarrassing reminder of a shameful past, whether he can vote, stand for elections, whether he can sit in society or is relegated to a reservation. It has been a long hard road for aboriginals for the past few centuries of repression and yet, they are nowhere near the end in sight, when they can step into the house from the yard. Just think what that means for the average indigenous person – it’s a stripping of the right to be who you are at its very basic core. That’s identity loss. It’s a difficult topic because most of us today are born into circumstances that we had no control over, but which determines whether we are on the fringe of what is home NOW or in the fray of it. Its quite possible that after so many centuries the Australian natives are resigned to it, although they too seem to have adopted suicide as a way of expressing this hopelessness recently http://www.theage.com.au/national/aboriginal-suicide-rates-at-crisis-point-20080703-319y.html The major difference I see for native Australia and NZ today is that no one in Europe or America will look at India or Indonesia and see it as part of their brethren culture. While NZ and Australia are acknowledged as part of the “western” world. That’s what occupation means – that the natives are wholly irrelevant in the larger picture. They are statistically insignificant. Outliers. They are only “visible” if they adopt the immigrant culture and relegate their own to an anachronistic whakapapa that can be whipped out if needed to get a sense of belonging to their land, to the past. Perhaps as Europeans gradually become a minority in their own societies they will finally be willing to see where that equation goes. How do they anticipate dealing with being replaced as decision makers where religion, society and culture is concerned? How will they deal with the pakeha in their midst and their natural effects on their social identity? The current debate on immigration in the EU and the United States and Australia and New Zealand and Canada gives us a glimpse into how that will proceed. Anyway, I rambled on quite a bit and probably lost a great many of you in the middle of that exploration but I hope it clarified for those in doubt why Trippy could not be an Uncle Tom. He does not qualify for the position. This is not to say I dismiss his opinions, I just don’t agree with his opinions that the identity loss and suicide rate of Maoris can be considered a consequence of largely self inflicted conditions or that we should ignore the European contribution to this phenomenon in favour of singing kumbaya. You can’t resolve this problem with treating the symptoms, it’s important to understand what the root cause of the problem is, unless the eventual desire is to eliminate them. I am quite surprised that anyone would blame them for not being able to identify their iwi and whakapapa or killing themselves over it. Just look at the comparable situation with untouchables. The fact that they are poor, uneducated and have assimilated a mindset of inferiority is not their fault. The fact that they embrace their identity as untouchables is a result of generations of discrimination. It’s not self inflicted misery, even if they have opportunities now that they will not avail of. It is a residue of centuries of being dehumanized. And engaging in a debate about it is not “promoting apartheid” [see more later] – Equality is not apartheid Anyway this teaches me to ignore trolls like Bells [and Lucy] and only respond to the posts I am focused on. It was my fault for entertaining her nonsense. She wasn’t even paying attention to what Trippy was saying, over and over and over. He does not identify as a Maori Period. Well I prefer to take his word over hers. I would really hate it if anyone insisted I was from a lower caste because “its in my blood”. I may speak for the Dalits but never as one. Can you imagine Bells shrieking at an aboriginal Australian, “It is beside the point what you identify yourself as, you’re an aboriginal, its in your blood!” Seriously, all the people with anger management issues go on ignore as of now. He really should quit pulling that Maori card out though, it confuses people. It’s not a problem to be simply a Kiwi, you know. Noodler managed quite well as one with a more productive discourse; no Indian children were eaten in the process. {Edit: Just re-reading the thread, I found a post by ripple who acc to Gustav is a full blooded Maori – and which I somehow missed –maybe it was the colours} Yeah, now THAT sounds familiar to me. It’s what I read when I read the sociological articles on native Americans and aboriginal Australians and Inuit. It is also what we see in other disenfranchised peoples. Drugs, domestic abuse, crime, self mutilation and suicide. If Dywydder will clean and re-open the thread, I’d like to invite ripple to discuss the topic with me. No offence to Trippy but this is what I was looking for. Throughout the discussion with Trippy I felt like I was talking to an European apologist for colonial oppression, rather than someone who is interested in Maori identity. I hope ripple is still interested
S.A.M. I'll admit I thought your responses were a little over the top. Put it this way, if you were in a pub in Avondale, or Otara, say, and you started accusing the patrons of being apologists for colonial oppression, well, I don't know if you've seen Jake the Muss in action, but seriously.... I can sympathize with people of Maori descent being expected to have a foot in both camps, and being damned if they do either. In my case, there was a definite interracial tension, when my grandfather chose to remarry someone who, it meant, would be giving birth to "Maoris"; I was never sure which side of my family was the more tolerant. None of my other European cousins appeared remotely interested in native culture - I was out on my own with it. So anyone, particularly someone who must have only a passing knowledge of the issues, making sweeping statements about race relations in THIS country, can expect some flax, I mean flak....alrighty then? And I wouldn't go near any taiahas for a while.
Like I said if Trippy is a Kiwi there is nothing stopping him from representing his opinions as one. Did I insinuate anything about you? No, you did not whip out a whakapapa card and then essentially tell me the Maori situation is mostly self inflicted. I come from a country where people are untouchables for gods sakes. Do you think for ONE MOMENT that anyone who presented himself with Dalit ancestry has the prerogative to say, its mostly self inflicted by them simply because he whipped out the ancestry card? If you had made similar sweeping judgements, you would have received the same treatment as he did. If he makes such statements, I have a right to tell him that his card is meaningless before his insensitivity. Meanwhile, on the topic of sweeping statements: On Indians eating their children during El Nino… Trippy said: This is so ridiculous that I cannot believe I have to explain it – a disclaimer, I am referring to what I can deduce from the convoluted conglomeration of words masquerading as the English language. I already gave the reason for my “aggressiveness” in the thread on this issue, so here I am going to deal with the reality aspect of it. First off, I am not offended that there may be cannibalistic Indians. Ritual killing and cannibalism is an archetype, as Fraggle might say, in all societies and India is not an exception. But to believe that British reports on Indians eating their children due to hunger have any validity, would be equivalent to believing, from the 13th to 18th century, British reports on Jews drinking the blood of Christian children. Does Trippy believe that Jews in Europe were drinking the blood of Christian children for Passover because there are British reports that say so? Does Ben consider it part of the “dark history” of Jews? There were numerous articles with even a dead Christian child found in the cellar of a Jewish home, indictments and prosecutions; even though the Church kept on insisting that it was ridiculous to believe that religious Jews would drink blood, since it’s not kosher. So are we to conclude that it’s all true? Is it history? Similarly, for me to believe that Hindus in Bengal and Baroda, as the reports go, were eating their children when they would not even touch beef is a bit beyond ridiculous . It would be like insisting that Elvis lives because of independent reports of sightings of Elvis in the American media. Or, believing in UFOs because there are independent reports of UFO sightings in England. As Indians, we are pretty free in discussing our own shortcomings – indeed we wear our most base motivations as status symbols - [cue the tantric dismemberment of children] - and eating our children when hungry hasn’t been one of them afaik. A little digression into psychology… Ever notice how many colonial societies have the same meme? They don’t love their children. We will never forgive them for forcing us to kill their children to defend our children? They threw their children at the bayonets. They strap bombs to their children. They hide behind their children. Human shields of children. They don’t care for their children. If they cared for their children’s future they would do this and they would not do that. Their children are taught to hate in school. They brainwash their children into violence Or the variation? They breed like rabbits or rats. They have too many children. Demographic bomb. What I find MOST remarkable is the ease with which people have accepted that Indians ate their children. No one wants a direct quote, evidence of such or even a look at any objective work on the matter. This is a science forum? You could have fooled me. Oh those Jews, I mean Indians, they drink the blood of Christian children, I mean, eat their own. Me, even if someone told me the British ate Indian children, I’d need pretty solid evidence [like a video or a confession] before I’d even accept it, and would probably suspect there was some chicanery involved anyway. And I have a really low opinion of British colonialism. But, to the so-called rational people here, its India’s “dark history”, an established fact that needs no hard evidence. I suppose this requires what Fraggle terms as a Paradigm Shift to comprehend. I didn’t even believe rats ate their own children if starved, till I saw it with my very eyes. Further, I am not certain what Indians who “resigned their contracts” [I assume he means signing them again as opposed to handing them in] as indentured labourers on British plantations after the British destroyed their food security in their homeland, has to do with Indians eating their children or even with Maori identity loss and suicide, never mind APARTHEID [see next issue below], but that tortured sentence requires a tortured logic even to comprehend it, which I am incapable of summoning. I mean, it is not only general knowledge that the British destroyed the farming infrastructure in India and simply took the lands of Indians, but also that, even at the height of famine in India, there was sufficient food so that the British were exporting it abroad while expropriating arable lands for their own use and making it unavailable to farmers [e.g. by forcing farmers to grow opium instead to pay off “debts” where interests were higher than principal ensuring that debts were never repaid, this more than anything resulted in farmers losing their ancestral land and being forced to work under dire famine conditions as slaves on their own land, where they were forbidden to grow food, simply to stay alive. Many didn’t survive this “free trade model”; some of them chose to leave instead, hoping prospects would be better abroad – for an Indian, with his close knit communities and deeply embedded roots, this was an unthinkable and extreme option at the time [now of course, we’re global desis]. Its comparable to the Irish moving to the US under the potato famine, except these Indians were put on ships and sent to work for the British on British plantations in Fiji and the East Indies. Now how is this even remotely comparable to the occupation of New Zealand by the Europeans? I guess that 19th century Creole writer didn’t consider what an urban Kiwi could come up with where “trick of sophistry or twist of logic” was concerned The British were starving the Indians throughout the famine years by taking all what they were growing and selling the surplus to others. This “free trade model” has been used time and again by Europeans since [now the “debts “are handled through the World Bank and IMF] and we have only to look at Haiti today to see how it works and what the consequences are. Oh wait, isn’t the US in a lot of debt? Wanna apply this “free trade model” to the American people?. How long would they last if they were really really really hungry? Will they eat the little ones first or the big ones first? How many of you are willing to accept that Americans will eat their children if subject to famine? Meanwhile, just as a matter of academic rigor, I note that none of Trippy’s links in his response to kira [and I read them superficially] support his claim that Indians were giving away and eating their children during El Nino. Perhaps he may yet share the source of this claim, since I am interested in looking it up. Because, notwithstanding what I know about Bengal and Baroda, anything is possible. Elvis may still be alive, aliens may walk among us, Jews may drink the blood of Christian children [if only to find out what the hype is about] and Indians may eat their children. I don’t consider my demand to see source/evidence as irrational, but merely what I presume would be the demand if I were to claim that the British were eating Indian children as explanation for why they did not starve during the same famines while occupying the country. So I really really really want to know the source of this claim. And finally I’d like to know what any of this has to do with Maori identity loss and suicide rates, since if there was a link to Fijian suicide rates, I have missed it.
But SAM. Uncle Tom is not simply a descriptive term, it is pejorative. So it's an ad hom and it focuses on the person in a negative way, rather than focusing on the ideas in a critical way. Maybe I missed something in the back and forth with Trippy, but one can make poor comparisons and weak arguments but these should be welcomed, since this can be pointed out. Once you shift to ad hom, and SAM Uncle Tom is a very strong ad hom in most contexts I know of, the whole thing goes down the shit can.
I understand. But I was referencing Trippy's post, which I rejected. As in - so what if he claims to be a good little Uncle Tom? They have them in every society. I don't believe him.
I look at it this way: Maori first encountered European "tribes" back in the [18th --oops] century, when whaling ventured into the Southern Ocean, and England and Holland were competing for space in the Western half of the Pacific - the Opium wars, Singapore and Hong Kong, Dutch East India, and all that. NZ was a preferred location because, well there were women living here, and whalers had liquor, and also introduced those native tribes who had contact, to the axe and musket. This was all in the North of the North Island, where today the Treaty House and Te Tii marae are. Anyhoo, the natives were concerned about the British, and their wild ways and lascivious ways with the wahine, who were naturally happy to have men with booze and other delights looking after them. They petitioned the King, George, and wanted him to guarantee that his subjects would behave better. Eventually more whalers arrived, more settlers and then, there were the gold rushes. By the time these and the land wars had ended, Maori were a reduced fighting force and had much of their ancestral lands confiscated, especially those in the North who had rebelled against "Wikitoria" and Governor George Gray's edicts. There are now reparations that have been made against these historical, and illegal, landgrabs, which were simply the victors deciding the terms of surrender. The reparations have been underway for over 20 years now, and there are still outstanding claims, contentions between local tribes and hapu, and of course, the fact that things have changed a lot since 1860 something. The differences between the history of British colonialism in India, and in the antipodes is marked by 1) an available labour force which did not require extensive training, versus natives who were indifferent to paid labour, and 2) there was no existing post-iron-age civilization in NZ or Australia, or in the Indonesian archipelago when Europeans arrived, as compared to the one in the subcontinent.
And all of which has what to do with the Maori suicide rates today? Could you explain the relevance? Next and final issue from the Maori thread: On the apartheid of discussing the pernicious and pervasive effects of colonial dehumanization on the identity of indigenous peoples in New Zealand and other colonies Okay I have to scratch my head at this, I wanted to take it up in the thread after we had clarified what Trippy meant about the apartheid of Fiji Indians, which would be after we had figured out how many Indians ate their children. We were unfortunately, interrupted. So in the interest of closure: Since I have yet to figure out how farmers escaping the destruction of their farms and livelihood, reduced to hunger and poverty [and presumably killing and eating their children] and working as contracted slave labour on British plantations, were occupying Fiji [or how this was “advantaging muslims”, [which I admit, sidetracked and entertained me in my Google searches for “apartheid+Fiji+muslims” ], I have yet to give due consideration to the discussion point that Trippy raised in response to my comments to noodler i.e. Europeans were not a majority ethnic group of NZ, rather they were immigrants who had persecuted and displaced the indigenous populations, viz [yes, this is an extraordinarily large sentence with too many uncomfortable and non-intuitive punctuations]; I would like to clarify here that I did not address this point because it was too moronic to take seriously. But we can discuss it if you like, i.e. how I am promoting apartheid by discussing the pernicious and pervasive effects of European colonial policies on Maori identity and perhaps their suicide rates in modern NZ. It would be a delicious [delirious?] addition to my list of growing crimes [ie not allowing for compromise with segregation and apartheid and my bigotry against occupation and those who send drones to kill civilians as well as my inability to have other than a liberal bias] – Clearly such deviance from the norm can only be sociopathic [or even perhaps criminally psychopathic] in nature Okay that’s it for the Maori thread. Is this detailed style more useful? Should I ramble on like this as a matter of course, writing down everything I think about a topic? It will not be pretty, and you may have to read more carefully to see all the connections. I used to do this in earlier days before I realized, no one actually reads the posts, well almost no one.
I don't know if there is any, I was pointing out that the two situations, although driven by the same initial conditions - colonise other lands for a monarchy - are fairly different. I thought you were the one looking for a correlation...
No I wasn't. I already explained that I compare the Maori situation with the Inuit, native American and Aboriginal Australian situations. The common factors in all of them is alcoholism, drug abuse, domestic and other violence and high suicide rates. And European colonisation. I should also add that I don't buy the Paradigm shift theory. These kids are born into some of the most modern societies in the world today and have everything they could possibly need access to. So why are they killing themselves at increasing rates?
On being insensitive Is this sensitive? http://img246.imageshack.us/img246/5301/indianseatingtheirchild.png Nah you can relax, they are just Indians. You can say anything you like about them. We don’t take offence easily. <Pheew!>Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! And finally, something personal and heartfelt. sciforums has been a real eye opener into people. And how. Sometimes the integrity and honesty is from the unlikeliest of places and many times, it’s the ones you think you know best and admire a lot that turn out to be the least you know about, so that when push comes to shove that’s when you know who you can really count on. I’m not going to name all names because I think it may affect them adversely, but I have been pleasantly surprised by madant, Michael, Geoff and Baron Max [people I have disagreed and argued with on almost every single issue we have debated on] in their support and bitterly disappointed in some “friends” I thought I had. For someone from a karmic society, it makes sense in a twisted kind of way. I always knew that good friends are not found by ideology and this has stood the test of time. Some of the vitriol I have received from so called liberals here is only matched by the understanding of the redneck “retards” . So thanks, you know who you are. Also I’d like to thank Doreen, Signal, and noodler for the Maori identity debate. I did read a lot on Maoris due to their interest in debating the topic and know a lot more about their situation and history now than I did before. Especially noodler, whose views in the racial division thread were very illuminating. If most Kiwis are like you, the future is a good place to be, since it would mean that no Maori would need to worry about where he belonged. And nor would any of the non-Maori immigrants [like a couple of my friends out there] Also, I did not say this yet - I’m sorry if I offended Trippy, I’m going to avoid him as I had previously intended after the Magen David debate– I think it would be better for both our sakes for reasons we had already discussed at the time.
I have decided to write down everything I think while addressing a topic. That way no one can say they did not understand what I wrote Apparently it is now a crime to view other peoples claims of being a good little Uncle Tom with skepticism.
I really would think a bit harder about repeating _those two particular words_, and where exactly you are standing, if you end up in Aotearoa. They would be viewed with the same cocked-eye, but a lot less leeway, as the sort of thing one of the Harawira's had uttered on a marae, where of course, there is immunity from pakeha cultural norms, and a rangatira or minitira can say a whole heap of... stuff. Sometimes they do it at press conferences too. There was a very popular centrist politician who had a lot of retired, and relatively wealthy European electorate in the main--the golden oldies--in Tauranga who was very noticeably part Maori, but was definitely no longer dancing with taniwha.
