Traditional tithe calibration would be decimation.
While I appreciate the rare times I see "decimate" used with reference to one-tenth, I think this might be one of the times that meaning has drifted from the literal etymology. I don't object to green blackboards either.
Few things warm my heart more than stupid missionaries getting themselves killed. Thank you, Stanley.
People were using it loosely in English as early as the 17th century. Meanings drift!
Even in the classical era, decimare also meant to tithe (religiously - whether Christian or not). Back then, but also now in English, can a tithe only be a tithe if it's 10% exactly?
One of my CELTA classmates explained to me that she didn't actually want to teach English, she just needed it for the Pakistani visa so she could get to the Northwest Frontier Province to spread the word of the Lord. 23 year old blonde girl, mind.
For the record, I am against the killing of missionaries, and pretty much people in general.
I am against killing missionaries, but it's not keeping me from sleeping at night.
I mean, I'm not actively in favor of the killing of missionaries, even stupid ones. I'm just amused when it happens.
I'm good with it. Especially in this case.
The Sentinelese sound like dicks too, mind. Not quite sure why everyone is so keen to preserve them from outside interference.
I can't think of the name of the story, but Watson got a wife and racist stereotypes were displayed by all.
I mean, if you only kill one missionary this year, make it this one.
10: Do they? They seem to be making an entirely reasonable judgement call despite a few teeny gaps in their knowledge.
I bet the last guy who landed was a Jehovah's.
More seriously, I imagine they had a lengthy experience of slave-raiding. Pity we can't check with them.
||
On topic because of shooting-as-greeting (this is room temperature news from this morning):
|>
They probably would've shot Gilligan too.
"They seem to be making an entirely reasonable judgement call"
No they don't. Unarmed man turns up on their doorstep with no intent to harm them and they shoot him dead? That wouldn't be a reasonable call even in an actual war zone.
on the eve of ... thanksgiving ... the phrase "with no intent to harm them" may do more work for some than others.
Fool. He needed to bring two missionaries on the boat, then send back one missionary and one tribesman.
In further semantic drift, they seem to be using "illegally" in the sense of "idiotically."
I think " war zone" is an analogy also.
25: Illegal too. It's in the link.
Anyway, probably somebody selling term life insurance will try next.
We prefer to think of it as selling peace of mind, and isn't that just about the best thing you can buy?
I met some missionaries once, they seemed like nice enough folx, but when relatively intelligent and compassionate people like that surrender all their critical faculties and self-awareness to the chimerical mirage of rightist Christianity, we get president anusmouth, so.
I have nothing against missionaries, but this seems poorly planned.
27: Right, I saw. But whether or not it's reasonable for them to shoot everyone who shows up, they've been doing it very consistently for the last century-plus, so it's not like the no-contact policy is just starry-eyed primitivism; it's a pragmatic measure to dissuade people like this guy (who I'm sure was a nice guy!) from doing something dangerous and dumb. I don't know what alternative arrangement would be possible, other than armed conquest of the island.
Not unless they find pill or something.
Don't limit yourself. There might be pill, too.
Unarmed man turns up on their doorstep with no intent to harm them and they shoot him dead?
I imagine that this story has been passed down among the Sentinelese. And it sounds like when Portman landed, they didn't immediately attack him, so that incident might well be the beginning of their hostility.
And if we want to get into unjustified true beliefs, given their long isolation, any outsider is basically a biological weapon that's likely to wipe them out.
Sentinel Islanders said it:
"Locals Only, or you will regret it!"
But some Jesus freak,
With a foolhardy streak,
Had a fate, and now he has met it.
Some Sentinelese are saying this guy was an enemy of the state, and I don't know if that's true, but even if it wasn't we're going to make a fucking mint off this cowrie shell deal I got going with these Sentinel guys. I guess we'll never really know the whole truth.
If anyone was being a dick it was the missionary who knew the Sentienelese wanted to be left alone, had a history of being violent towards unwanted intruders, and that it was illegal to contact them.
I think it should be a general rule. Anybody willing to use only stone age technology and to give up fire and move to a deserted area should be allowed to shoot whatever arrows they can make at anybody who tries to talk to them.
Because otherwise it's an unfair advantage to one specific group.
Tom, Dick and Harry and Quentin all
Set out for the isle of Sentinel;
Not taking the hint,
They met arrows of flint
That will kill you off quicker than fentanyl.
I wonder about the fishermen who brought him to shore. Like maybe this is their first time or maybe this is just the first time they got caught. It's kind of the perfect crime, especially if the park their car in your lot.
i think there are very difficult issues involved with individual vs group destiny in the context of indigenous and/or minority populations, e.g., i will stand up pretty strongly for the rights of adolescents to access educational opportunities via the majority culture and women to access reproductive health services, even when individuals doing so is contrary to the wishes of their communities (as expressed through those communities power structures). i understand the arguments the other way, and think there is a valuable conversation to be had. but that is an entirely different conversation from what's going on here, and given the loooooong history of christian missionaries, let's just say they have form.
ogged's link says it was the fisherman who reported him dead, so probably not.
add in apostrophes etc., it's been a tiring day. to all usa-ians, enjoy the couple of days off even if queasily from historical context!
I wonder if part if the attraction isn't that you have the last group of people who you are sure have never heard of Jesus and, by some readings of Matthew, the world can't end until all nations have heard the Gospel.
Trying to end the world end seems like a more constructive response to Trump than my own.
It may be worth mentioning that it is illegal under Indian law to land on North Sentinel, and if this jerk didn't know that he must live entirely off grid. The idiots who dropped him off have been arrested.
13: The Sign of the Four.
But the Andaman islander in that story used a blowgun.
They're probably saving the blowguns in case a larger crowd comes ashore.
I keep trying not to come around to "It's hard to feel sorry for this guy" because as much as I dislike the whole idea of missions, I don't actually believe that the penalty for obnoxious but well-intended stupidity should be death.
And yet we can see right from this here comment thread that anybody who took the trouble to look these people up on Wikipedia should come away with the impression that showing up on their island uninvited and unarmed is to put yourself in harm's way. One version of this story I read said that the guy sent a call for help/left a message for posterity (can't remember which, can't find the story now) saying he didn't want to die. But... if you don't want to die and then you do the exact same thing that got a bunch of other people killed...
It's hard to feel sorry for this guy.
Which is not to say that the Sentinelese aren't assholes, too.
They are, but they have deeply committed to the role. The choices are let them be assholes, genocide, or total conquest of the whole people.
But enough about the Republican Party.
total conquest of the whole people
Which is, like, doable -- there's not that many of them. *I'm* not really up for conquest of a people myself, but someday, they're going to tick the wrong person off with this oh-you-brought-gifts-well-here's-a-volley-of-arrows routine, and that person is going to come back with friends and guns.
Or do a fly over dropping used Kleenex. Anyway, making it illegal to go there seems like the best option.
Which is, like, doable -- there's not that many of them.
True. In fact there are so few of them that the line between "total conquest of the whole people" and "genocide" might be a bit blurred in practice. Which is probably why the Indian government has run with the "let them be assholes" option.
The Indian government probably lets lots of people be assholes. But not many get to be homicidal assholes.
Apparently the island is considered a sovereign in Indian law. Sovereigns are homicidal assholes pretty much by definition.
Asshole I may be, but homicidal I leave to my ancestors.
"After the Primrose grounded on the North Sentinel Island reef on 2 August 1981, crewmen several days later noticed that some men carrying spears and arrows were building boats on the beach. The captain of Primrose radioed for an urgent drop of firearms so his crew could defend themselves. They did not receive any because a large storm stopped other ships from reaching them, but the heavy seas also prevented the islanders from approaching the ship. One week later, the crewmen were rescued by a helicopter under contract to the Indian Oil And Natural Gas Corporation"
Yep, they're arseholes. That must have been a pleasant week for the crew...
Given what we know about the sweep of human history, particularly the parts of it that include Christian missionaries meeting Indigenous groups, I'm finding the 'they're assholes' reaction a bit odd. I mean, their supposed assholery is the only thing keeping them from colonialism and genocide. That doesn't seem like assholery to me; it seems like a perfectly measured response. Killing uninvited invaders who represent an existential threat to your very way of life is the kind of thing we treat as the heights of heroism in our popular culture.
(Yes, they don't know what we know about the sweep of human history, but I bet they have lots of cultural memory that makes their hostility to outsiders very reasonable.)
Maybe someone needs to explain human history to them so they can really mean it when they shoot arrows.
62. There's no doubt in my mind that the deceased was the greater arsehole, because he was in a position to do his homework and didn't, or thought he knew better, and then went and broke the law, and induced a number of other people to break it as well. None of which adds up to a capital offence, but to me clearly adds up to "no great loss".
Of course we don't know how long the collective memory of the Sentinelese is, or what horrors undocumented in the west it contains. Certainly they knew without being told how to respond to the threat of a tsunami a few years ago, when there hadn't been one in living memory (when the sea disappears, run for the hills). So they may have better reason for shooting first than we know of.
The fate of indigenous populations that get contacted is pretty grim, also I'd take their handful of deaths over the current actions of our government any day, they're not sending guns to Saudi Arabia.
A ship runs aground on their island and their response is not "people in distress! perhaps we can help them?" or even "people in distress! but they might carry infectious disease, so alas we will have to stay clear of them" but "people in distress! Let's get out there and murder them all!"
Arseholes.
There are a couple of cases where a shipwreck's been sighted on the reef with no sign of any survivors of the crew. Best bet is the islanders murdered them all. They've murdered escaped prisoners for sure in the past.
went and broke the law, and induced a number of other people to break it as well
"He led the poor simple islanders astray by tempting them to murder him".
I'd take their handful of deaths over the current actions of our government any day, they're not sending guns to Saudi Arabia.
I don't understand why you're so upset about the US government sending arms to Saudi Arabia. I'll take that any day over Pol Pot sending 1.5 million people to the killing fields.
their supposed assholery is the only thing keeping them from colonialism and genocide.
Yes, that is an entirely reasonable assumption. The Indian government is desperately keen to colonise this tiny island and wipe out its inhabitants, but the only thing that is dissuading their 1.5 million strong armed forces with their aircraft carriers, supersonic fighter aircraft, tanks and nuclear missiles is the fear of 80 naked guys with bows and arrows.
Evidently they are not totally uncontaced, peaceful contact was made in the 90s, since then it seems like they've only killed three people. Two poachers and then this doofus.
It's hard to feel sorry for this guy.
Well, I do feel sorry for him. Yes, he was foolish and foolhardy, but however obnoxious his stupidity, he hardly deserved to be murdered for it.
Evidently they are not totally uncontaced, peaceful contact was made in the 90s
Right. So, in fact, they don't have legitimate grounds to be terrified of colonialism and/or genocide, because they have lots of recent history of outsiders visiting and being non-colonial and non-genocidal. But despite that they continue to murder every foreigner they see.
It's not OK to kill unarmed and unthreatening people based on your own irrational fear and loathing of everyone who isn't from the same tiny ethnic group as you!
Actually reading the story I'm less sympathetic. He went on the 15th in a canoe was injured, then went back on the 16th they broke his canoe, then he went back on the 17th and never returned. Expecting them to build a jail to put him in seems a bit much.
Surprisingly few countries accept "it would have been too much hassle not to murder him" as a defence in murder cases.
Maybe he reached into his pocket for a bible and they thought he was going for a gun? Then it would be definitely his fault that he got shot.
Trump seems to be accepting it just fine right now.
73. I'm not an expert on palaeolithic homicide law, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that that was as common as not. And we are dealing with palaeolithic mind sets here.
I guess we can quibble about their death penalty jurisprudence, should potentially dangerous people should be shot if they refuse to stop coming back to the island.
Then those mindsets are wrong and awful and the people who hold them are arseholes.
77: he wasn't potentially dangerous. He was unarmed and did nothing threatening. This kind of "the poor simple savages didn't know any better, not like us civilised people, and we must respect their childlike innocent ways" thing is not a good way to think about the actions of adult human beings.
I'm not a fan of homicide either, but I'm puzzled as to just what is supposed to follow from the "they're arseholes" argument. Are reprisals justified? Should Indian law enforcement get involved? Or is it just that people in this thread are being sentimental primitivists and ought to be corrected?
Do we even know we're talking about an adult who killed him? It could have been a kid and the adults are mad because they wanted the fish.
Surprisingly few countries accept "it would have been too much hassle not to murder him" as a defence in murder cases.
Well, right. But this is not a country, really, or at least, not a modern nation-state with membership in the UN and Geneva Convention-type treaty obligations, and all the rest of it.
It's a remote tribe of, apparently, about 100 people (100 people! how is it even possible that such a small group can survive?!...). They haven't signed on to those treaties, they apparently missed the memos. Their extreme defensiveness looks quite violent (and maybe even a bit Hobbesian) to me; but I'm not quite willing to call them "arseholes," even as I'm unwilling to celebrate their murder of some clueless young Christian (o callow youth!) who fancied himself a missionary, who was only 27 years old.
80: I didn't realise that we were supposed to be recommending courses of action to the Indian authorities. I thought this was just lots of imaginary people talking on the internet.
But this is not a country, really, or at least, not a modern nation-state with membership in the UN and Geneva Convention-type treaty obligations, and all the rest of it.
It is: it's India.
It's a remote tribe of, apparently, about 100 people (100 people! how is it even possible that such a small group can survive?!...).
Incest.
Presumably, to apply Indian law, you'd need to charge specific people with identified crimes, not a whole island, and then bring those people to a trial in which they are able to understand and participate in their own defense. There's probably something about a right to a jury of ones peers.
I don't see how you do any of those things.
85: And India has chosen to protect people from the Sentinelese by banning travel to the island.
The fact that it's impractical to prosecute someone for murder doesn't mean that it's morally OK for them to commit murder.
if a strange person from an unknown culture showed up, started trespassing, ignored warnings, and couldn't be communicated with they'd end up in custody. Which isn't an option for them, do they have a duty to allow strangers to wander around their territory indefinitely til they die of a measles outbreak?
Ajay, you're being obtuse.
Given the island's location, it's very likely that they were contacted centuries ago, likely that some of those contacts were violent, and likely that they adopted their own violence in response.
That a person isn't immediately threatening carries little weight. In SE Asia and the eastern Indian Ocean there were seafarers who didn't specialize. They did peaceful fishing and trading, but also piracy, raiding, and slaving when opportune; so the exact same people who made peaceful contact at one time could be hostile at another. It's not unlikely that the Sentinelese had contact with such people, and not very far in the past; the British only gradually established control of the islands over the 19th C.
Their violence has indeed preserved them. It caused India to quarantine the island; if you think they would have been just fine otherwise, take a look at the rest of the Andamanese.
Should India lift that quarantine, the Sentinelese culture would almost certainly be extinct in two or three generations; whether that extinction would count as genocide and colonialism would depend on the details, but would happen nonetheless.
Whether the Sentinelese are worth preserving is a separate question I won't take a position on, but I doubt the the Sentinelese are being irrational.
They're probably doomed anyway. Between global warming, and being vulnerable to extinction at the hands of anyone with a gun or a virus. I just wouldn't want it to be my fault they were all killed if I were the guy in charge of making the rules.
It is: it's India.
But the Indian government seems to believe they are outside the jurisdiction of the regular application of Indian law: perhaps in, but not of, India, or something like that?
(There are sometimes some conflicts like this in Canada, involving competing notions of sovereignty between the [British] Crown and various First Nations groups...but they almost never have to do with outright murder, admittedly...).
92: I am legit impressed that you've come up with an argument that it would be grossly immoral for them not to murder every unarmed foreigner they see on sight, based solely on your guesses about what might possibly have happened to them two hundred years ago.
if a strange person from an unknown culture showed up, started trespassing, ignored warnings, and couldn't be communicated with they'd end up in custody.
If a strange person sat in their house, refused to communicate with anyone, and murdered everyone who wandered on to their land without warning, they'd end up in custody too.
Let me tell you about a place called America.
The NRA will probably air drop them some guns if it was allowed.
Anyway, they clearly didn't kill him without warning or communicating. They warned him off and he came back. The communication failure was only theirs if you assume a duty to speak English.
95: Why thank you sir.
you've come up with an argument that it would be grossly immoral for them not to murder every unarmed foreigner
I said no such thing. What I said was that I doubt they are being irrational. I'm guessing, yes, but guesses are what we have; I note that you don't offer any rebuttals.
Ajay, my friend (at least, I hope we are friends? our ancestrals being on the opposite sides of that RC-Protestant divide that just looks so silly, nowadays. from so many angles....), I do believe you're being a bit obtuse here. This wasn't Ulster; this was somewhere off the coast of India, or something.
94- When they start using red ink and referring to themselves with weird legal pronouns and capital letters, I'll be on board with colonizing them.
My "Canadians of Scottish Presbyterian origin are fundamentally Scottish" position is basically a pro-Protestant stance, btw, even though I'm a Catholic. The Scots brought democracy and universal health care to Canada; and my dad, a trad. Irish Catholic, loved Tommy Douglas (a radical Scot) like he was one of us. For real, my dad loved Tommy, every Canuck of his generation did.
I just like the traditional element of using arrows.
OK, so you raise a child in a bubble, free from sin or stimulus, and then stick them on a raft to Sentinel Island. On the raft next to it, you have a similarly sterile child, but one raised on colonialist ideology. And then I guess you have a germy but ignorant kid on the next one. In a week, count the arrows in the corpses.
He was being threatening, they drove him away twice and he still wouldn't take the hint and this despite knowing their history. They clearly want to be left alone and have the right to be left alone so people should leave them the fuck alone.
i'm absolutely willing to grant that the folks on the island could be assholes. living a marginal existence on an isolated island i suspect the odds are they are patriarchal, misogynistic, belligerent assholes and that i'd desperately not want to be born there. could be bonobo-like paradise, but i doubt it.
what i kick against is the "no intent to harm," the assumption of innocent, benign and/or beneficent intent by a christian missionary. (the only alternative motive i've heard is "adventure blogger," equally non-exculpatory). from where i'm sitting christian missionary does not equal innocent, benign or beneficent intent, no way no how. so there ajay and i will have to differ.
as for whether it was reasonable to kill the dude (or any of the prior arrivals), given the risk of fatal infection (and fatal as in wiping out pretty much everyone on the island), i suppose it is down to whether the contacts in the 1990s led the islanders to have sufficient understanding that any contact from a person not from the island was likely to be fatal, in which case the shower of arrows is reasonable based on their knowledge, particularly after several warnings. and who knows what their knowledge base is, what their reasonable by our lights beliefs are.
the missionary chose his fate, it's sad for those who loved him but i've less than nothing invested in evangelical christianity. i'm on Ishi's side. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishi
setting aside the fate of the missionary, what haunts me is the magic carpet where i can establish dream contact with the island dwellers who may want ... out ... and magic them off the island and with immune system protection ... the island people die out as a result, but is it worth it? and i think so, but that thinking is absolutely bolstered and nourished by imagining that the islanders' life would not accommodate what i think of as a sufficient range of human flourishing. neither does what i imagine the missionary's community.
maybe i'm wrong.
I mean the sheer arrogance of this dude.
Peace and love to you on this holiday, Barry! ❤
Just wait until we find out they're some kind of South Asian Wakanda and they're monitoring this blog and planning whose asses to come kick.
As to the quality of my guesses, source (DOI 10.1080/02666030.1989.9628389).
In fairness, the Andamanese have a very old reputation for ferocity, though not uniformly so; the paper also describes several incidents indicating they weren't automatically hostile, but were open to unthreatening approaches, much as described in the 36 link; once they even boarded a British ship and looked around. As to reasons for hostility:
Andamanese were observed to recognize and fear firearms in 1771; the Sultanate of Kedah sent Andamanese slaves as tribute to the court of Siam, where they were present until 1860; a British administrator in western Malaysia in the 1880s reported Malays* had been slaving in the Andamans for "a long period of time". In specific incidents, Andamanese captives were in Pondicherry, 1789; for sale by a French merchant officer, 1791; captured by a Chinese/Burmese vessel, 1819; in Penang, 1841 and c.1838**. All this from an article limited to English-language sources.
The 1819 incident is worth expanding on. Malay and Burmese vessels visited the islands fairly routinely, until at least 1858, to collect sea slugs from the reefs and swifts' nests from caves; British accounts show they were very familiar with the islands. The parties were heavily armed and suspected of piracy and slaving; they were active on South Andaman, only 30km from Sentinel.
*The Malays in question were probably Orang Laut, the multidisciplinary seafarers I mentioned in 92; they are described as being heavily involved in slaving by the later 17th C.
**Plus the 1880 abductions by Portman mentioned upthread.
So "orang" is the Malay for "man" as in "orang utan"?
I think the boy was an idiot, but have known some really impressive fundie missionaries. I am not too worried that their motives are mixed. I don't expect anyone's not to be.
Adventure blogger seems a easier conclusion given the content of his instagram account - where he also self describes as a 'brand ambassador' for 'perky jerky'.
I'm hoping he didn't bring jerky with him.
Brand ambassador meets Oral Roberts. Truly we live in a wonderful age.
I've been on a road trip with someone eating smelly jerky in a tightly enclosed vehicle, and I definitely wanted to murder that person.
Apart from the ornamental gold and silver tree, some of the other tributary states offered forest products of commercial value. These included wood, beeswax, birds' nest and gum benjamin. Cambodia's most valued tributary product was cardamom.19 From the northern states, Siam obtained wood, lacquer, hides, horns and benzoin. Birds' nest, a prized item in the Sino-Siamese junk trade, was procured mostly from the island of Phuket (Junk Ceylon or Thalang) in the south.Phuket, part of the Kedah sultanate, home to numerous Orang Laut, nearly opposite the Andamans.
The model I'm using is that the Sentinelese are a state at war with the rest of the world. They have good reasons for being so--they've had, given Mossy's research, bad contact experiences in the past. They might not know, but we certainly do, that sustained contact with isolated low technology peoples pretty much universally ends badly for them. (In some aspects: maybe they'll get some modern medicine from us. Maybe.) If they wanted* to contact us, they know how to, we're champing at the bit to talk to them. In the meantime, we're at war, and if someone crosses the battle lines it's going to end up badly for them, no different from crossing the Korean DMZ or the Western Front. Particularly so in that any single "civilian" has the ability to overturn this society on their own. Given that, from their perspective, it would be reasonable to not have civilian as a category.
(I see that these specific analogies have already evoked the banning rule, but whatever, I'm late to the party anyway.)
* I'm being reductive in considering them to have a single perspective. But we routinely treat other, much larger nations that way.
Chau's riveting journal of his last days, shared with The Washington Post by his mother, shows a treacherous journey by dark in a small fishing boat to the area where the small tribe lived in huts. The men -- about 5 feet 5 inches tall with yellow paste on their faces, Chau wrote -- reacted angrily as he tried to attempt to speak their language and sing "worship songs" to them, he wrote.
"I hollered, 'My name is John, I love you and Jesus loves you,' " he wrote in his journal. One of the juveniles shot at him with an arrow, which pierced his waterproof Bible, he wrote.
"You guys might think I'm crazy in all this but I think it's worthwhile to declare Jesus to these people," he wrote in a last note to his family on Nov. 16, shortly before he left the safety of the fishing boat to meet the tribesmen on the island. "God, I don't want to die," he wrote.
"God, I don't want to die," he wrote.
There are several articles about Chau's misadventure in Wednesday's WaPo. His mother shared his journal with them. He was an evangelical martyr-complex-ridden end-times-believing asshole, the islanders were paleolithic assholes. Shocking that there were problems.
Interesting thread on Maurice Vidal Portman (Wikipedia article linked upthread by ogged) and his creepy erotic fixation on the Andamanese including erotic photography and detailed penis measurements. More here.
If you're going to take measurements, you might as well be detailed about it. That's just being thorough.
After all, they've never even seen simple machines.
They've never heard Florence and the Machine.
It's kind of nice to know that if somehow some disease wipes out all of the interconnected people of the modern world, the Sentinelese wil be able to rebuilt a world full of fearful, violent people overly eager to kill outsiders. The singers change but the song goes on.
I want scientists to make some provision so that if we go, everyone on Earth goes with us.
You're going to have to endow a whole philosophy department to get a moral system that allows that.
it would have been magnificent had the thread ended with moby's 127, but alas it didn't so re 114, i think this illustrates a difference in the weight we give the incontestable known history of christian missionaries' contacts with indigenous people. for christianity to be aware of that history and not change how they implement their proselytizing practices weighs very heavily for me in considering whether they have "no intent to harm." christians want to proselytize to annoyed post-religion suburbanites the western-developed-world over, sure whatever. that's most decidedly not what he was doing.
he grew up in washington state and went to school in oklahoma. a reasonable person of his age growing up in these places (washington! oklahoma! if you wrote this in fiction it would be TOO OBVIOUS) would be aware of how contacts between christian missionaries and indigenous peoples played out in the americas.
This kind of "the poor simple missionary didn't know any better, not like us civilised people, and we must respect their childlike innocent ways" thing is not a good way to think about the actions of adult human beings.
You're dead to me, dq. I ruin nothing.
Ha! (from beyond the grave ... )
Can it end with "Walt is endowed like a whole philosophy department"?
I like my women like I like my philosophy departments, well-endowed and paying no more attention to undergraduates than is strictly necessary.
Aihmb, someday there is going to be a last comment on Unfogged. 127 is not that comment, but 127 last is its content.
Or maybe it'll be more like 134.
@121 You have to set the journal alongside the contents of his instagram account.
There will never be another comment 134 posted at 11-23-18 11:40 AM.
Years ago somebody posted a little dystopian thing about how the last comment on Unfogged would be from the few remaining spambots before the power finally goes out.
Buck seventy-five! Buck seventy-five!
(Surely there's been a thread that's just the punchline to various dirty jokes?)
Google says the more common version is buck forty. I heard three quarters and a dollar, they say nickel dime quarter dollar.
Me, reading the thread backwards: "Why is everyone harping on the fact that this dumbass had it coming? ...wait, Ajay is defending the missionary?"
Buck seventy-five is clearly the funniest, which reminds me of this panel discussion from the writers for the Sid Caeser show.
doesn't it seem likely, as dq obliquely suggests, that the island is a hellhole combination of a) people dying of easily treated wounds/sepsis from childbirth complications and b) a pitcairn island-esque community of sexual abuse? aren't there too few people and too little technology for it to be much otherwise? and the wikipedia article suggests they don't even use fire? if there were ever a technological advance we had a duty to impart to people, it's the use of fucking fire (hopefully avoiding the fate of prometheus). I am naturally fascinated by their language which I want to know everything about, but equally I am unwilling to kill one half of the people in order to "civilize" the other. however it seems unfair to the children to prevent them from learning to read great books, from experiencing the peculiar satisfying logic-click of math, from becoming free men and women able to see everything in the world and avoid the sexual advances of their uncles. it's true that at some level I want indigenous peoples in brazil's rainforest to be left alone, but those people use fire, and most have at least one tribal member who's been to a logging camp or little town; they're aware they're missing out on beef jerky. this seems almost...perverse. that they're relentlessly murderous obviously creates a significant barrier, but if there are real people suffering behind that hail of arrows we might owe them a moral duty.
Of course it's a hellhole. Goes without saying.
I was thinking I'd probably related the story about a young distant cousin of mine whose visit to the jungle went bad.
147: I'm sort of fascinated by the fact that they can't start fires but try to maintain the embers of fires caused by lightning.
I once knew a guy whose parents were medical missionaries. That is, a doctor and a nurse who spread Lutheranism by providing medical care to people who had none. Anyway, is "arsonist missionary" a thing?
Probably, if there is, they aren't Lutheran.
I'm not sure Zoroastrianism is still a thing.
154: It totally is! For tiny-and-moribund values of totally.
I guess the stench of unburied corpses is a small price to pay for fire.
I admire ajay's jiu jitsu in condemning these people by holding them to the same moral standard to which he holds his own social set. No soft bigotry of low expectations here, no sir. And it does make me think a thought I've thought before: classifying people as "savages" leads to all sorts of bad outcomes, but there sure are cases where it's apt. The Sentinelese are people and we should leave them alone, but do we really think they're morally culpable in the same way that even someone from, say, New Jersey is? I sure don't.
Do not disturb the noble people of New Jersey. They know not what they do.
I admire ajay's jiu jitsu in condemning these people by holding them to the same moral standard to which he holds his own social set.
He only does this by dint of a bad analogy. He compares the missionary to a visitor to a nation-state, when the situation is more accurately described as an invasion of someone's home.
And it does make me think a thought I've thought before: classifying people as "savages" leads to all sorts of bad outcomes
And some good ones! I'm not quite sure what to do with alameida's 147, but I don't think it's obviously wrong.
Alameida you've understood me re the islanders but there is no way to scratch that moral itch morally there while there are plenty opportunities to do so nearer home, imo. And for anyone feeling the risk of fatal measles adds an indispensable frisson to the enterprise feel free to enroll your own kids in the local waldorf school.
New Jersey ran out of spears and arrows, so now it punishes visitors by refusing to allow them to pump their own gas, thereby forcing them to stay in New Jersey longer, which sucks.
149. I remember the story well, but didn't realise he was a relative of yours. Hope they're both doing well these days.
Alameida, the Tasmanians lost the use of fire at some point over the last few tens of thousands of years; which led to them being hunted for sport like animals by the British and Irish settlers. There are now no pure native Tasmanians left in the world, although a few interbred with the settlers (under what degree of compulsion I have no idea). But as a precedent it doesn't look good.
He compares the missionary to a visitor to a nation-state, when the situation is more accurately described as an invasion of someone's home.
In the U.K. has different laws about that than we do.
It's probably not easy to make fire if you're trapped on an island with no metal and the wrong kind of rocks. Especially a rainy one.
Full disclosure: I don't actually know what rocks are available on North Sentinel or Tasmania.
You traditionally make fire by rubbing two boy scouts dry sticks together. You don't need any particular kind of rock, provided you have a sharp pebble that can dig a hole in one of the sticks.
I've never actually seen that done. It seems like a lot of work.
Among the crimes of Grindewald is that it costs $50 to take three people to see the movie in Imax.
161: We cunningly permit visitors to enter our tribal territory without any cost, but exact tribute by requiring all invaders to pay tolls to leave.
I am going to that island and playing them the youtube clip of Turkey Lurky Time because no one should move through this world without seeing Donna McKechnie do that insane arm spin thingy at the end.
149: my really disturbed uncle lived in Papua New Guinea for a while. He and his ex- wife were trained as agronomists. She went on to work for USAID, but at the time they were working for Catholic Charities.
If I remember correctly, the tribes they dealt with really did not care that much about preserving their own culture; I think that's why their language was dying out. They also weren't all that interested in improving crop yields.
It's sometimes really hard to be polite when agronomists are talking.
*Googles Turkey Lurky Time*
*sharpens makeshift spear*
174. Joins in. We may have the makings of a small tribe here.
It you can't make a good stone tip, harden the wooden tip in a fire. If you can't make a fire, rub two sticks together.
Or make use of one of the many plastic cigarette lighters that wash up on your shore.
Do not disturb the noble people of New Jersey. They know not what they do.
The worst drivers I have ever come across, and yeah, I do hold the noble people of New Jersey responsible. They do this move that I call "the Jersey pullout" (not a reliable method of contraception, btw, and I speak from experience...) where they aggressively pull out into the road against their right-of-way, and just dare you to hit them. Also, why signal your intention to turn, when you're a total narcissist, and if you mean to turn, everyone else on the road should already have divined your intention, because it's all about you?
Used to feel nervous about driving in NYC. Then I moved out to New Jersey, and realized New York drivers are actually quite reasonable and sociable.
Also, driving in my home town up in Soviet Canuckistan is a bit of a trip, after the dog-eat-dog, post-apocalyptic urban/suburban/exurban hellscape/roadscape that is Bergen County, New Jersey. In Ottawa, people will just shrug helplessly and let you in: they don't want you to get in an accident, after all. In New Jersey: eff you, and you are very much on your own....
This is not over. Indian police are trying to recover the body.
182: Somewhere it was reported that Chau himself did not want that. I actually think it makes sense to respect his wishes in this case. However misguided his actions, he was trying to help them. His parents say he knew the risk he was taking.
Speaking of self-defense, the "And like many around him, he was brandishing a handgun," line makes me wonder exactly how many people pulled their guns and whether they were all white except the one killed.
Anyway, maybe the NRA and TSA will combine forces to give out something like TSA-Pre, but for shootings. Like a vest that signifying that the Department of Homeland Security has certified that if you are seen in a mass shooting situation with a gun, there's probably less than 1 in 20 odds you're the shooter.
Maybe 1 in 50? The signal is the important part, not the exact cut-off.
In fruits of my fascinating weekend: Portman's anthropological abduction wasn't the first. This lists 9 incidents from 1792-1863. On the slaving, in 1859, p. 292.
The Malay pilot who accompanied Captain Haughton from Penang to Atcheen informed him that he had, on two different occasions, accompanied expeditions from Penang to the Andaman Islands for the express purpose of obtaining Andamanese for sale at Junk Ceylon [Phuket] to the Raja [of Kedah] there, who required them as a rarity, for presentation to the Court of Siam. [...] Haughton was informed [by the British minister to Siam] that there were several Andamanese at Bangkok.With some interruptions, Kedah paid tribute to Siam from at least 1788. The Siam tribute wasn't just quirky, but part of a wider pattern:
Local rajahs and chiefs who emulated their superiors tried to have some forest people at their courts too. At the turn of the century, the ruler of [Thai] Nakon si Thamarat had Ngo Paa [Orang Asli] at his court and so did the rulers of [Malay] Singgora (Songkla). Malay tributary-states such as Pattani had alliance relationships with forest people too.Malay tributes to Siam formally ended in 1909. In the same decade, the Thai king requested an Orang Asli orphan of his very own. When one arrived at court it was greeted with a ceremony very similar to that given for white elephants, the other pre-eminent wilderness display good of the region.
No. His actions were misguided. He was not trying to help them. Any beliefs he had that he was well intentioned were irrational, not reasonable and flatly contradicted by all available knowledge. Stop this.
And British control of the islands was leaky. Malays were poaching slugs and nests at least into the 1860s, probably the 1880s. In 1862 the holders of the official slug-and-nest monopoly were caught in Burma transporting escaped convicts from the Andamans. The monopoly was held by a Chinese person, running Malay-crewed vessels from the Mergui islands in Burma (another Orang Laut center). (187 link 2 p. 369.)
And, per 187 links 1 and 2, there was at least intermittent contact between N. Sentinel and Great Andaman before the British period. The Andamanese weren't uniformly or automatically xenophobic and violent, they were pragmatic and adaptable. They raided the British penal colony but also traded with it; they killed some escaped prisoners, but took others in; later, they routinely helped recapture escapees when the British paid them for it. Sometimes they attacked and drove off overseers but left prisoners unharmed; the British suspected they were trying to make common cause with the convicts to drive the British out; they staged some ambushes which I speculate were attempts to capture firearms. Also, measles killed maybe 2/3 of the islanders in about a year.
Trying to help someone without figuring out that by merely being there you may kill *all* of them is exactly why the whole thing is so galling, or anyway one revolting, bewildering part of it.
Which is why it looks sensible at first sight for the Indian government to ask the Andamanese police to look into it, except that the officer commanding the Andamanese police lived in Delhi until six months ago.
I bet there's a good detective show in that. Detective steps on the wrong toes in Delhi while solving crimes, gets posted to the Andaman Islands as a punishment. Finds corruption to root out, love, and a sense of respect for the locals he had originally looked on as simple-minded yokels.
188: only trying to say that it seems like he wouldn't have wanted anyone prosecuted.
Just out of curiosity, are countries allowed to tear gas over the borders into other countries? Asking for a friend.
193: Basically Bergerac, then. Who is the John Nettles of the Admananese?
How many detectives has the man played?
It would make sense if Indian police often transferred people across the country - anti-corruption. They do have federalism in law enforcement but that doesn't preclude such a policy.
Also Andaman is part of a Union Territory rather than a state, so likely more federal control than the norm.
I'm picturing an Indian version of Columbo. "Oh and, uh, one more thing---[collapses in hail of arrow fire]".
Hey, the man himself went and solved crimes in both Mexico and England at different times.
How did I manage to misspell Andamanese so badly? I can't even blame autocorrect.
