[ExI] "an aboriginal human from 70,000 B.C."

[Damien Broderick]

At 10:29 PM 3/20/2008 -0700, Lee wrote:

> > A world where all that he cared about is very ancient and
> > not very interesting history.   Are you sure any but the extremely rare
> > individual would thank you or be able to cope?
>
>Do you think that an aboriginal human from 70,000 B.C. could
>somehow be brought to cope with living in a modern apartment
>with running water and a well-stocked refrigerator?  If he had an
>income, he and his friends could even buy replicas of the old
>sacred drums or whatever he missed.  Somehow, I don't think
>he'd be too crushed and bewildered to prefer being dead.

This seems to be my day for feeling astonished disbelief at Lee's posts.

Lee, do you think an aborigine from 2008 could make those adjustments 
(unless he'd been brought up to them), without being crushed or often 
stranded fatally in a world he'd never made, a stranger in a strange 
land? Read about the outback communities in Australia if you maintain 
this airy notion: the ruinous failure to adapt even after 200 years 
of European penetration and remaking of the land, even after 
schooling and policing by this alien culture. The very bases of 
traditional culture are all but gone; the land and animals and plants 
are either obliterated or held under lock and key by aliens; the 
languages have all but perished--and, far from nipping out to K-Mart 
to buy a replica drum, the kids sniff petrol until their brains rot, 
while the adults beat each other brutally and fuck everything that 
moves, including the petrol-sniffing kids. Yes, that's an 
exaggeration, but it's real to a bitter extent.##

The difference, you might reply, is that *we* start with a 
cosmopolitan sense of the contingency of our own culture, a trained 
capacity to adapt to change. Maybe. Or better yet--in the future, new 
knowledge will be implanted directly. You'll thrive by becoming, in a 
jiffy, rewritten into someone other than you. How wonderful. Sure you 
want that?

Damien Broderick
##<http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22896877-601,00.html>

No jail for rape of girl, 10

NINE males who pleaded guilty last month to gang-raping a 10-year-old 
girl at the Aurukun Aboriginal community on Cape York have escaped a 
prison term, with the sentencing judge saying the child victim 
"probably agreed" to have sex with them.

Cairns-based District Court judge Sarah Bradley ordered that the six 
teenage juveniles not even have a conviction recorded for the 2005 
offence, and that they be placed on a 12-month probation order.

Judge Bradley sentenced three men over the age of consent of 16 - 
aged 17, 18 and 26 - to six months' imprisonment, with the sentence 
suspended for 12 months.

Because the 28-day appeal period has expired, the sentences cannot be altered.

Judge Bradley said from her Cairns home yesterday that she considered 
the sentences "appropriate" in the case because they were the 
penalties asked for by the Crown prosecutor.

=========================
from an email exchange last year following the court case:

========
>So ... they don't have any minimum age of consent?

I'm sure they must have. But it's a hierarchical male-brutalized 
sub-society at the end of its tether.

The article depicts a terminal "behavioral sink" with the top rats 
picking with impunity on the lower rats, but everyone seething with 
barely controlled fury, ready to kill each other, so the judge tried 
not to inflame the brain-damaged lunatics. Not good law, but maybe 
workable politics.