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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28224 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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“In 2006 when low aromatic fuel was first rolled out in Central Australia, there were around 500 people sniffing in our region with an average of seven deaths per year; it was an epidemic,” Mr Ray said.

This is some black-comedy satire article leaking into real life. I thought I was jaded, but this is horrific.

What's the denominator for those numbers? I'm reading that Central Australia has only about 40K people, 43% Aboriginal + Torres Strait, so call that 17K, so 7/17K gives a drug-overdose-per-100K rate of 41 ... which is higher than the USA (32/100K in 2022) but not by nearly as much as you'd hope. The US already has demographics with worse rates (and I'm talking "males", not anything with p-hacked granularity), and our rates are still increasing, not dropping by 95%. A lot of the increase is fentanyl, but cocaine and meth are going way up too.

I'm not shocked that people use drugs and a minority of them OD. I get that for opioids and meth.

But this is serious talk about an "epidemic" of huffing gasoline. That's horrible and so much worse than an American who sometimes does a bit of coke.

Oh trust me, it gets way more horrifying than that.

For example, approximately a quarter of Aboriginal girls in remote communities are victims of child sex abuse.

Are the pure native Australians able to speak in languages in a fully fluent way?

I'm not quite sure what you mean, but there are still a significant number who use their native language as their primary language. Most of them are still bilingual in English though.

How much of that is authorities tolerating Stone Age norms about consent and marriage, and how much is creepy uncles?

I don't know, but my impression is that there's plenty of both.

While that doesn’t surprise me, and a lot of Stone Age norms about age of consent, marriage, relationships, and sex wind up as just celebrating creepy uncles, it seems like it’s an important distinction to be made, especially because the authorities can in theory just say ‘no, you don’t get to marry 11-year-olds just because it’s your cultural tradition’ and the people stopping the authorities from doing so are probably mostly woke people who will proceed to pointing at that statistic in order to justify more of the woke program.

To be clear, I don't think there's any child marriage going on. But I think there's a non-trivial amount of 17 year old boy having sex with 12 year old girl and that being shrugged off as pretty much normal. As well as much older men using their power in the community to pretty much do what they like.

But, again, I'm no expert.

I’ve definitely read articles about aboriginal tribes that get to marry prepubescent or very early adolescent girls if they pinky-swear not to consummate it until she’s of age, which doesn’t seem like it actually happens(the waiting). Certainly similar arrangements among less sympathetic to the media people(eg Saudi Arabia’s child marriages with a clause delaying consummation), it seems pretty well documented that consummation is not in fact delayed, to say nothing of the ‘duh, married couples have sex’ aspect. But it’s entirely possible the authorities have put a stop to that custom and it’s mostly later adolescent on very early adolescent abuse(statistically the median case of CSA) being culturally accepted.

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