You are spot on Individual. I have seen the scenarios you paint many times over. The non acceptance of responsibility is rampant. I know a number of young Indigeneous men who have had jobs in the mines but their woman complain constantly they are not at home doing the cooking and housework. Inevitably they end up in crime and prison. Many of the Mining companies have bent over backwards to give Indigeneous people jobs but it has ended up costing them big time. Maories, Fijians and PNG people end up taking the jobs because they appreciate an opportunity and turn out to be reliable most of the time.

T2 , take your blinkers off!

Joe, thanks for the the detail you post and the message in those posts.

R0bert

Dear Thinker 2,

Thanks for your well reasoned
and logical arguments.
It's a skill not easily acquired.

Sweet Lexi,

You and I inhabit more or less the same universe, out there on the left somewhere. But even so, one needs evidence, not just stance, for a convincing argument. One thing I've learnt is that I can go well and truly up the creek - and for many years - by relying on assertions, stance, passion, indignation and that feeling that "Yeah, that sounds about right."

We all make assumptions, it saves time and thinking, and so we accept apocryphal stories rather than find out the hard truths, and build our ideological edifices on those stories, not facts.

For example, I used to assume that it would have been out of the question for Aboriginal people to be allowed to have access to guns in the nineteenth century. But here in SA, I learnt later that the Protector provided any Aboriginal people living and fishing along the Murray with a rifle or shotgun every seven years (repairs free), a 5m x 5m tent every seven years and a 5m 'canoe' every seven years. Fish-hooks, cartridges and blankets every year; flour, sugar, tea and tobacco every month.

When the missionary George Taplin was looking for a likely place for his school, he landed at one place, gave a couple of Aboriginal men (who he had never seen before) a rifle each and asked them to go off and get some ducks for him (they came back hours later with one duck. Yeah, right :) It blew my mind to read that he had given them guns: weren't they sort of at war ?! But no, there it was.

The problem with apocryphal thinking is that, if one of your premises is actually inaccurate (for want of a more inflammatory term), and the actual truth simply doesn't fit your picture, then your whole picture can collapse.

Assertions are fun, they are easy, they don't need anything as bourgeois as evidence. It's the facts that have to be made sense of, not fantasies.

Cheers,

Joe

entrenched, irrational and deep seated form.
thinker2,
the ball's in your court ! It's up to you to make that move & discard the blinkers.