WTF Moments
- Thread starter Snaploud
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Sojourner, who honestly cares about preserving their culture for a few more days? They would have died.
I don't subscribe to White Man's Burden, but I will say that there is nothing noble about maintaining the isolation of less-advanced cultures for that culture's "purity." Life and society are about adaptation and change.
Do you think those isolated Amazon tribes are better off because they are intentionally left alone? They have no access to medical care. Do you think that they should be left alone forever, or contacted and allowed to make their own choices?
Go to Japan today, ask a citizen how he feels about Perry's sailing in to Japan. That act was a humiliation to Japan, yes, but now the average citizen can no longer be decapitated on the spot for looking cross-eyed at a samurai. If Japan's isolation had not ended, they would still be doing that.
I don't subscribe to White Man's Burden, but I will say that there is nothing noble about maintaining the isolation of less-advanced cultures for that culture's "purity." Life and society are about adaptation and change.
Do you think those isolated Amazon tribes are better off because they are intentionally left alone? They have no access to medical care. Do you think that they should be left alone forever, or contacted and allowed to make their own choices?
Go to Japan today, ask a citizen how he feels about Perry's sailing in to Japan. That act was a humiliation to Japan, yes, but now the average citizen can no longer be decapitated on the spot for looking cross-eyed at a samurai. If Japan's isolation had not ended, they would still be doing that.
Ask that to yourself the day Vogons show up at your door.
Because everyone who hasn't been subject to interference is practicing the exact same customs they did in 1853, right?
It's a good thing benevolent aliens arrived since then and made the U.S. abolish slavery, or we'd still be practicing it. (Is it the Vogons we have to thank for that?)
Who decides which civilisation is more advanced? And on what grounds?
Technology? Ethics? Penis length?
Was Nazi Germany "more advanced" than a random tribe in the Amazon? Technologically? Sure. Ethically? No way. I don't know about penis lengths, though. It's entirely possible but I have doubts.
I couldn't care less about "purity" of civilisations. But forcing your way of life on another civilisation only because their technological level isn't as high as yours sounds terrible.
Technology doesn't make people "better".
When we all know that shapeshifters are supposed to be silver blobs.
Hitler had a 1 inch penis.
I entirely support ranking civilizations based on penis length.
Advanced as in technology, of course. Not a moral or values judgment. But you seriously think that it is okay to isolate people instead of making peaceful contact, saying "we exist, you are welcome to know a wider world. If not, you are fine to stay here. Even if you want to stay we will offer medicine if you like."
In general societies tend to change their practices over time, but the samurai caste wasn't going anywhere. Meiji only got his Restoration due to superior firepower.
In general societies tend to change their practices over time, but the samurai caste wasn't going anywhere. Meiji only got his Restoration due to superior firepower.
Of course it's "okay."
Sometimes, making contact is "okay." Sometimes it's disastrous for indigenous peoples. You seem to be laboring under the mis-impression that we have wisely figured out how to make sure that it's the former rather than the latter. Study the history of "offering help to people who could benefit" more deeply before you post that so glibly. Repeating the magic word "medicine" over and over is not making an argument that contact is morally preferable to isolation.
Not necessarily.
The Europeans were more diseased than the Native American population.
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