and sam bites the dust again..

[S.A.M.]

I've been thinking about this whole fracas a bit and I admit I have been hasty in assesssing Trippy. When someone tells me they don't quack like a duck or walk like one, I tend to take them at their word. When someone is insulted at the suggestion that they may be a kind of modified duck, I assume that they do not associate with ducks. When someone dismisses the fact, that the pond was dried out so that the ducks could not be ducks as they wanted to be, I assume that its not important to them at all.

Now once I accept that they are not a duck they start quacking and jump into the pond and thrashing furiously, then I wonder what all the hullaballoo was about.

As to the other, I would welcome any actions against the Indian government that forced them to get off their ass and implement some kind of accountability against the abuse of Dalits. 60 years into independence, they really should not have to threaten to burn themselves alive, because some idiots with notions of blood rights do not want them in their part of the village or to draw from their well. 60 years into independence when we are a nuclear power and send people into space, kids should not be forced to sit separately in one corner of a classroom or even outside it, in a space set aside for the unclean, simply because they dare to dream of an education which was denied to untouchables for a thousand years. 60 years into independence people should not be forced to drink water from a well with a dead dog rotting in it, because that is all they are good for.

So yeah, I don't give a rats ass for blood ties and ethnocentrism. So if you think blood rights are important, bully for you.

 

[Trippy]

Probably because I stopped inhabiting the religious forums a long time ago. Around the time where you started accusing me of being a bad parent for being an atheist, remember those lovely times Sam?

I generally try and stay out of the religion forums as well.
I have little tolerance for proselytization, and the few times that I have posted in there to ask genuine questions regarding christianity, Judaism, and Islam, I've been responded to (ironically) with a torrent of post proclaiming how great Allah is, and how the ancient of ways (or what ever) is the one true god - inspite of my repeatedly requesting that people stop preaching at me because I'm not interested.

I think, somewhat ironically, that the two most civil conversations I've had regarding religion have been with S.A.M and CheskiChips.

 

[scifes]

i demand to know if fraggle's remark of everybody being allowed to insult any religion openly regarded as being "speaking for the consensuses" of moderators too, or if it was a brief moment of exposure to his sick inner thoughts..

i'm glad bells seems to be out of it.

 

[Bells]

I've been thinking about this whole fracas a bit and I admit I have been hasty in assesssing Trippy. When someone tells me they don't quack like a duck or walk like one, I tend to take them at their word. When someone is insulted at the suggestion that they may be a kind of modified duck, I assume that they do not associate with ducks. When someone dismisses the fact, that the pond was dried out so that the ducks could not be ducks as they wanted to be, I assume that its not important to them at all.

Now once I accept that they are not a duck they start quacking and jump into the pond and thrashing furiously, then I wonder what all the hullaballoo was about.

As to the other, I would welcome any actions against the Indian government that forced them to get off their ass and implement some kind of accountability against the abuse of Dalits. 60 years into independence, they really should not have to threaten to burn themselves alive, because some idiots with notions of blood rights do not want them in their part of the village or to draw from their well. 60 years into independence when we are a nuclear power and send people into space, kids should not be forced to sit separately in one corner of a classroom or even outside it, in a space set aside for the unclean, simply because they dare to dream of an education which was denied to untouchables for a thousand years. 60 years into independence people should not be forced to drink water from a well with a dead dog rotting in it, because that is all they are good for.

So yeah, I don't give a rats ass for blood ties and ethnocentrism. So if you think blood rights are important, bully for you.

And right back at you. Best tell them to start getting educated, so that you'll accept them into your society.

For one thing, Maori's don't have a caste system like India. Hence why Trippy has tried, many many times now, to tell you that in New Zealand, they are all attempting to deal with the issue plagueing their society and all trying to find a solution to it. All as in inclusive, regardless of whether one is Maori or not. Which at the time, I believe you disapproved of.

Maori spiritual beliefs is their own. They don't exclude or make people sit outside in schools if you don't have Maori blood in you.

But next time you demand that Euopeans leave countries like Australia, the US and New Zealand, keep in mind that your demands and style of argument is bordering on the lines of blood ties. Keep in mind how divisive your demands are. Keep in mind the next time you demand that Israeli Jews vacate the Palestines, how divisive your argument is and how it does border on blood ties in that Jews who can't prove a connection to the land going back generations (ie. blood connection to family who have resided on the land alongside the Palestinians), then they would have to leave. Hence why I find your argument to be highly hypocritical.

And secondly, you're telling me you would fall to your knees and thank God if the US stormed India to rid it of the caste system and bring human rights and equality? Ya right.

 

[S.A.M.]

I'm not telling the Maoris what to do. I'm telling Trippy that his whakapapa means nothing to me. I don't really see any difference between noodler, trippy and riple. I see riples opinions as an objective review of current Maori circumstances. noodler gave me historical perspective and cultural differences. Trippy told me that Indians were occupying Fiji and eating their children.

Between the three of them, his opinions are the ones I choose to dismiss.

 

[Bells]

I'm not telling the Maoris what to do.

No. You just think they are delusional and their beliefs irrelevant and apparently you won't have a bar of it all.

I'm telling Trippy that his whakapapa means nothing to me.

Okay.

So next time someone tells you that Islam is irrelevant and delusional, you'll not complain and will tell others to not complain about it either, nor will you make snide comments about it either?

In fact, you will stand up and demand that Q, for example, not be banned for such behaviour?

I don't really see any difference between noodler, trippy and riple.

Really, so when you said that Riple was not all there and that Noodler was more a Maori than Trippy was, and that Trippy was not a real Maori and an Uncle Tom, you weren't seeing a differece between them? And then when you said that you would rather get the opinion of a real Maori, while racially dismissing Trippy, you were not seeing a difference between them?

I see riples opinions as an objective review of current Maori circumstances. noodler gave me historical perspective and cultural differences. Trippy told me that Indians were occupying Fiji and eating their children.

Between the three of them, his opinions are the ones I choose to dismiss.

No, my dear. You told him that he wasn't a real Maori and not Maori enough.

You also dismissed everything that Trippy told you about his culture, simply because you refused to listen or didn't believe in it.

 

[S.A.M.]

I don't think I have ever, even once, demanded that (Q) or anyone else be banned for their views on religion, only that their lack of civility towards theists is abusive. In fact, I don't think that in the four years that I have been stalked by atheists and zionists that I have ever, even one time, made any comments which would indicate their beliefs should be suppressed. In fact, I have stood up for Baron Max times innumerable although to date he has been nose to nose with (Q) in his remarks about Muslims and at one time even had a signature which implied that Muslims were violent terrorists or some such.

And my views are pretty consistent. I do not support any form of ethnocentrism in any form. I am a strong supporter of a one state solution in Israel Palestine and consider it to be the only solution which will be sustainable. Maybe Jews don't want to live in such a state, maybe neither do followers of Hamas but that is ethnocentrism, and I do not support it.

I support the right of Muslims to have minarets where they worship and women to wear veils if they choose to do so. If they are not permitted such in western countries, I recommend they move where they are permitted such. Similarly I recommend that Zionists who do not want to live in Arab lands move out.

My positions are overall consistent and I support my principles, not someones idea of who is more deserving of what. I frankly told Trippy that noodler who may have zero Maori ancestry is more Maori to me, because he is sympathetic to their state. He did not dismiss their "culture of stunning success" as a reason for their suicidal tendencies. I would say the same to any Dalit leader who thought the Dalits had a culture of stunning success or any black man who thought blacks had a culture of stunning success. Throwing a race card in my face is not likely to affect my opinions about the racism inherent in an attitude towards a people.

 

[Trippy]

My positions are overall consistent and I support my principles, not someones idea of who is more deserving of what. I frankly told Trippy that noodler who may have zero Maori ancestry is more Maori to me, because he is sympathetic to their state. He did not dismiss their "culture of stunning success" as a reason for their suicidal tendencies. I would say the same to any Dalit leader who thought the Dalits had a culture of stunning success or any black man who thought blacks had a culture of stunning success. Throwing a race card in my face is not likely to affect my opinions about the racism inherent in an attitude towards a people.

Seriously.
Why are you still persisting with this lie?
I stated that I believe that there were elements of Maori culture, and elements of european culture that meant that where they met, they tended to encourage a culture of failure among Maori.
You stated or implied that this sentiment was racist.
I then asked you if you would rather call it a culture of stunning success.

You have no idea what I actually think and how sympathetic or unsympathetic I am, because you're too busy making assumptions about me, and what I mean.

 

[Bells]

My positions are overall consistent and I support my principles, not someones idea of who is more deserving of what. I frankly told Trippy that noodler who may have zero Maori ancestry is more Maori to me, because he is sympathetic to their state. He did not dismiss their "culture of stunning success" as a reason for their suicidal tendencies. I would say the same to any Dalit leader who thought the Dalits had a culture of stunning success or any black man who thought blacks had a culture of stunning success. Throwing a race card in my face is not likely to affect my opinions about the racism inherent in an attitude towards a people.

I like how you still completely misrepresent what Trippy actually meant by that statement.

And again, even with all this pious defence of the human rights of the natives, here you are saying that a vital connection they have to their culture is irrelevant and delusional.

You'll excuse me if I ...

 

[S.A.M.]

Its irrelevant to me. Just as any of my beliefs are irrelevant to you. Including this one

 

[Trippy]

So here,
http://thesouthasianidea.wordpress....erary-insights-into-colonialism-and-identity/
If S.A.M is still interested in sourcing the claim, is a blog, run by (what appears to be) and Indian playwrite, and one of the people commenting on the blog has the following to say:

Between 1870 and 1900, 30 million Indians dies due to starvation from the El Nino famines that struck India and some areas even resorted to cannibalism, while the British raj justified it on the basis of social Darwinism theories. The solution to the famines lie in the sacks of rice and wheat at the harbours of India that were being exported to UK. This is a piece of history that is today not taught in the British history books or the Indian ones. To me, this particular piece is enough for a conclusive view about what the Raj was to India.

Now, I understand that this may not be the 'strongest source', but, here we have an ostensibly indian source explicitly making the same claim that I did, that cannibalism existed in India as a result of the El Nino events between 1870 and 1900, and then going on to state that it's not something that's commonly taught in Indian history books.

 

[S.A.M.]

So here,
http://thesouthasianidea.wordpress....erary-insights-into-colonialism-and-identity/
If S.A.M is still interested in sourcing the claim, is a blog, run by (what appears to be) and Indian playwrite, and one of the people commenting on the blog has the following to say:



Now, I understand that this may not be the 'strongest source', but, here we have an ostensibly indian source explicitly making the same claim that I did, that cannibalism existed in India as a result of the El Nino events between 1870 and 1900, and then going on to state that it's not something that's commonly taught in Indian history books.

Seriously you have to go to a vague comment on cannibalism by an anonymous person on a blog to validate your claim that Indians were eating their children?

Do you not see the problem with that? Who saw this? Where?

You have a serious problem with bias when you dismiss 130 years of Maori colonialism and cling to an anonymous vague claim of Indian cannibalism as validation that Indians eat their children.

The fact that you cannot see the straw man you erected here:

t I believe that there were elements of Maori culture, and elements of european culture that meant that where they met, they tended to encourage a culture of failure among Maori.

speaks for itself.

 

[Trippy]

Seriously you have to go to a vague comment on cannibalism by an anonymous person on a blog to validate your claim that Indians were eating their children?

Do you not see the problem with that? Who saw this? Where?

Seriously.

Must you be so blatantly dishonest and antagonistic about every fucking thing I say?

Did I not aknowledge that it was a weak source?

Yes?

Then fuck off.

Addendum:
Here: http://www.indianexpress.com/oldStory/76887/ is what appears to be a Gujurat source (guess based on his repeared mentions of Gujurat and events there) who cites Peter Mundy, born in Cornwall, educated in France, WITHOUT criticisizing Mundy's historical accuracy, or questioning his objectivity.

When one the factors of the East India Company’s Surat factory, Peter Mundy, set off for Agra in November ‘‘each village presented a sight more harrowing than the last...mothers were selling their children...the hie wias were so full of dead bodies that that we could hardlie pass them without treading on or going over some.’’

While returning from Agra in 1633, he found that ‘‘women were seen to roast their children and men travelling on the waie were laid hold of to be eaten.’’ There is a school of journalism that relishes in the use of such history as an electric cattle prod to herd today’s politicians into the pound of righteousness. For example, British rule is denigrated for its callous disregard of the plight of the aam aadami during periods of famine.

 

[Trippy]

The fact that you cannot see the straw man you erected here:

I believe that there were elements of Maori culture, and elements of european culture that meant that where they met, they tended to encourage a culture of failure among Maori.

speaks for itself.

Go on then, humor us meer mortals, illustrate how this is actually a strawman.

 

[S.A.M.]

Seriously.

Must you be so blatantly dishonest and antagonistic about every fucking thing I say?

Did I not aknowledge that it was a weak source?

Yes?

Then fuck off.

Addendum:
Here: http://www.indianexpress.com/oldStory/76887/ is what appears to be a Gujurat source (guess based on his repeared mentions of Gujurat and events there) who cites Peter Mundy, born in Cornwall, educated in France, WITHOUT criticisizing Mundy's historical accuracy, or questioning his objectivity.

He doesn't need to. Can you guess why? Its the same reason no one questions the objectivity of reports of Europeans who saw Africans as animals to be put in the zoo. We all know what the East India company was made of. We don't need to be told how objective their reports on India were.

There are hardly any Indians [there are some] who see these reports as an example of the European culture which bred a culture of failure among Indians.

Note what the author says :

Such commentators miss an essential point. Does the pathos stimulated by alluding to the callousness of a previous regime, provide the wherewithal to usher in prosperity by diverting resources to hare-brained schemes today?

Its like the US rescuing the Afghans from the Taliban, necessarily need to repeat over and over how demonous they are.

Go on then, humor us meer mortals, illustrate how this is actually a strawman.

Is racism and oppression a facet of European culture? Is the unwillingness to accept being dehumanised a weakness of Maori culture?

If a woman is violently gang raped and shows fear in the presence of a man, is this a facet of anyone's culture?

 

[Tiassa]

Oppression, obviously, is merely a symptom

Is racism and oppression a facet of European culture?

No, greed is a longstanding aspect of European culture. Historically, at least. There are, of course, any number of caveats that go there, but the essential point is that racism was one of the easiest justifications of greed. You weren't really stealing from a person if the person isn't a person.

That, of course, is a starting point centuries, or millennia ago. The heritage has transformed its superficial manifestations several times, but certain defining elements remain largely unchanged.

One of the hardest things about racism is to properly explore its psychological processes. People don't like to do it because such explorations often reveal our own human shortcomings. And in a time when the majority of the world still doesn't believe in psychology, or else believes in a mythical representation of what it is and does, we need not wonder why such a closely-drawn human conflict is so difficult to dissect objectively.

 

[S.A.M.]

No, greed is a longstanding aspect of European culture. Historically, at least. There are, of course, any number of caveats that go there, but the essential point is that racism was one of the easiest justifications of greed. You weren't really stealing from a person if the person isn't a person.

That, of course, is a starting point centuries, or millennia ago. The heritage has transformed its superficial manifestations several times, but certain defining elements remain largely unchanged.

One of the hardest things about racism is to properly explore its psychological processes. People don't like to do it because such explorations often reveal our own human shortcomings. And in a time when the majority of the world still doesn't believe in psychology, or else believes in a mythical representation of what it is and does, we need not wonder why such a closely-drawn human conflict is so difficult to dissect objectively.

How would you debate that against say, Asoka's epiphany at Kalinga after the massacre of millions over hubris? Is greed an European character defect?

Or even say, the mountains of skulls that the Mongols erected in their trans-European or trans-Asian sojourn? So that Iraqis still shivered in their souls over it until the Americans once again brought death and torture and suffering to them for the last 20 years for no reason at all?

How is that significantly different from Churchill choosing to spend money on poison gas to kill Kurds rather than feed Indians who were dropping dead from starvation when they weren't dropping dead as cannon fodder on the fields of British imperialism?

What would be interesting to explore is why, unlike Asoka and the Mughals, the Europeans never reached a point where the indifference to suffering matured into a moral understanding that bloodbaths were not the epitome of human growth. Why after centuries of wealth and education and yes, peace, the European mind still wants to aim for better weapons rather than better humanity, why they have substituted slavery and colonisation with white phosphorus and cluster bombs.

The appetite for killing in and of itself is a reflection of something - what that something is, we don't understand.

 

[GeoffP]

I support the right of Muslims to have minarets where they worship and women to wear veils if they choose to do so.

I agree generally with the latter, but not the former, given the restrictions on church building and repair in the Islamic world, and the point that the minaret is as much a symbol of triumph over other cultures as anything: in short, a symbol of ethnocentrism. Surely no pious Muslim who has a watch can really be ignorant of the appropriate times to pray?

 

[S.A.M.]

I agree generally with the latter, but not the former, given the restrictions on church building and repair in the Islamic world, and the point that the minaret is as much a symbol of triumph over other cultures as anything: in short, a symbol of ethnocentrism. Surely no pious Muslim who has a watch can really be ignorant of the appropriate times to pray?

Question: Why do Islamic prayer times change from day to day?
Muslims pray at five appointed times each day. The precise timing of these prayers often vary by a few minutes each day, so that over the course of a year there is a wide range of prayer times. Some communities publish prayer "schedules" to keep track of the times, and specialized computer programs can also calculate the prayer times for each area, for each day of the year. Why is this so? Why don't Muslims just pick the times and stick with them year-round?

Answer: The Islamic prayers are fixed at the same "time" period each day -- before dawn, noon, afternoon, sunset, and evening. Because of the rotation of the earth, the revolution of the earth around the sun, the tilt of the earth, the various latitudes of the earth's locations, daylight savings time, etc. -- the "times" (according to the clock) for these prayers do change from day to day and depend on location. Islamic prayer times were traditionally set according to the movement of the sun, not of the clock, and this is how they continue to be observed.

http://islam.about.com/od/prayer/f/prayer_times.htm

 

[Trippy]

And so then it would seem, that if every british source is automatically untrustworthy, and every indian source is automatically being effectively misrepresented, and the chances of me finding a page on the internet with a very few specific keywords is vanishingly small, that we are at an impasse.