May 30, 2008: Uncontacted Indigenous People

[jinx]

Originally Posted by smoothmoniker

Every one of those deaths are people sacrificed to the idea of cultural purity. What's the preventable death count that we're willing to force on them by refusing contact?

How many advanced humans slip/fall/die in their showers everyday? Car crashes? Mall shootings?
Maybe these people should come save us!

[HungLikeJesus]

Too late. I've already sent that one an e-mail.

[smoothmoniker]

I don't understand this kind of reasoning. If someone in this tribe gets cut, and the cut gets a bacterial infection, would that person be better off with or without penicillin? If you think without, then you and I are using a sense of the word "better" that is simply unfathomable to me.

Communication, progress, advancement of knowledge, trade, these are the normal practices of human society, and you'd better have a damn good reason for preventing them. The prevention of them costs lives - not theoretical, notional lives, actual people who die because we did not share with them knowledge that would have saved them.

Why is the act of forced cultural isolation in Myanmar a moral outrage, while in this case it's some higher "enlightened" obligation to withhold from these people the incalculable benefits of participation in human society.

[TheMercenary]

Why not just drop a cell phone and ask them all these questions? Oh and lets drop in a few IPods. Steve Jobs wants to control them.

[classicman]

Originally Posted by HungLikeJesus

Why should we be obligated to contact them? It's their turn to call.

For goodness sakes, Just have our people call their people . . .

[spudcon]

They will probably live their lives to the fullest, as long as their chief forces them to wear seat belts and helmets. And as long as every member pays the Tribal Witch Doctor General one buffalo for Universal Health Insurance.

[Undertoad]

The sooner we contact them, the sooner we can get their money.

[SPUCK]

Originally Posted by spudcon

They will probably live their lives to the fullest

18 years...


Now I ask. What would they do if they actually stuck an arrow into the tail rotor.. Four tons of aluminum, steel, plastic, cameras, radios, seats, carbon fiber, and 100 gallons of gasoline crashes down on them and ignites in the middle of their village..

[Shawnee123]

Originally Posted by SPUCK

Now I ask. What would they do if they actually stuck an arrow into the tail rotor.. Four tons of aluminum, steel, plastic, cameras, radios, seats, carbon fiber, and 100 gallons of gasoline crashes down on them and ignites in the middle of their village..

They know nothing about that: I wonder what the heck they made of the giant flying bug buzzing above them?

Have we learned nothing from the sleestacks?

[DanaC]

What's their infant mortality rate? How many of them die of starvation when local food is scarce and traded food is unavailable? How many die of diseases long since cured by modern medicine?

How many of them starve in the midst of plenty? How many of them are unable to access medical care that their fellows take for granted? How many of them work in backbreaking poverty to ensure the more powerful of them live in luxury? How many of them face rape and violence on a day-to-day basis due to the breakdown of their social structures?

Not all that the modern world offers is beneficial. What's the infant mortality rate in the Sudan, in Zimbabwe, in Mogadishu? What's the life expectancy in the shanty towns of Rio? How much modern medicine is available in Bangladesh?

Modern civilisation relies upon inequity. The market as we understand it cannot bring the benefits of prosperity to all, there is always a loser. This is the case even in wealthy nations. What's the life expectancy of a black boy in the projects? What's the infant mortality rate in the poorest parts of europe?

They will not be sharing in many of our advances, but for all we know they may not be sharing in some of our less savoury civilised practices either. There was a tribe contacted for the first time about tqwenty years ago (can't recall its name now). They were a collectivist society to a large extent. If there was plenty nobody starved. If there was scarcity, all hurt. Their culture has been fundamentally altered by modern contact. A new elite has become separated off from the rest and a new group of poor who have not succeeded under the new system. They have become fragmented and their young are leaving in droves to do menial work in the nearest cities. They still have only minmal access to modern medicine because of their geographic distance and relative poverty. But they do have t-shirts.

[smoothmoniker]

I'm not trying to be an apologist for the whole of human society.

I am saying that there are benefits to be gained from connection with the rest of society, benefits that a slight of geography has denied these people. It's incredibly condescending to choose for them, that they ought to be preserved in their present state, without those benefits.

Dana, you're worried that if they are exposed to new ideas, and offered a choice, they might make the wrong choice. You're withholding the option to choose because you have decided that they are better off without the choice.

[Shawnee123]

Oh for god's sake, next thing you know we'll be hearing from those who need to get in there and shove a bible into these people's hands lest they burn in hell forever for not knowing teh LAWD.

I'm amazed at the arrogance of people who believe we have anything to offer them that they need. They've been existing there for hundreds of years...but let's get in there and show 'em how a can opener works. "Hey y'all, I betcha you get a load of this here can opener you'll want to live just like us."

Sad, really, how egocentric we are.

The people who are colored brightly are thought to have donned the pigment after the first fly-over, after which they were ready when the giant bug thing came back.

Logging is a threat, and that should be looked into. It's not the 2 acre lot behind your McMansion, folks, it's the freaking Amazon forest.

[HungLikeJesus]

It's just like the aliens that keep visiting our planet. I think we're better off without them.

[DanaC]

Dana, you're worried that if they are exposed to new ideas, and offered a choice, they might make the wrong choice. You're withholding the option to choose because you have decided that they are better off without the choice.

Not at all. I do not believe that they will necessarily be better off having been contacted. Nor do I believe they will necessarily be worse off. I am simply suggesting that it is not a given that entrance into the 'modern world' is an automatically positive step.

In terms of making choices for them. No, I don't believe I know better than them, nor do I believe that they are incapable of making choices. But the choice to reveal the modern world to them is ours and if we exercise it we make a choice on their behalf: we make them aware of our world. If they have not chosen to venture out as explorers and 'discover' this world for themselves, what right have we to take that world to them? What right have we to remove their choice in that regard? Granted they may have made that choice with no knoweldge of what is out here.....what right have we to enforce such knowledge? Once the knowledge is there, it is there.

[Shawnee123]

Well said, DanaC. Your analogy regarding explorers venturing out makes sense. What some others are speaking of is, to me, imposing ourselves on a culture that we have no right to impose upon. We take away their choice; whether or not we believe it is an un-informed choice is completely irrelevant.

Then again, they'd like some can openers.