- cross-posted to:
- thoughts_on@lemmygrad.ml
- cross-posted to:
- thoughts_on@lemmygrad.ml
North Sentinel Island is an island de-jure owned by India but is de-facto self-governing. It is illegal to visit the island due to how dangerous it is, along with the risk of spreading diseases that the inhabitants do not have any resistance to.
The island is inhabitated by around 50-500 (true number unknown) indigenous people who have inhabited the island for over 60,000 years. The Sentinelese people are well-known to attack most outsiders who dare to come visit the island. Apparently, one major catalyst was when a British man kidnapped an elderly couple and four children. The couple died and the children were returned but had serious diseases which may have spread to the rest of the islanders.
In 2018, an American tourist illegally visited the island in order to attempt to convert them to Christianity. He was later killed by the Sentinelese.
I don't why, but for some reason, this island is quite fascinating. There is so little known about it. The very concept of an isolated society that wants to be left alone is something that I find interesting.
Have any two cents to give?
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Unconditional support for our sentinelese comrades in their struggle to resist the imperial invader
They should be left alone unless absolutely necessary is my take on it, they're just minding their own business.
Also, retreating into complete isolation as a result of their first contact being with nasty colonial Anglos is totally understandable.
airdrop furry pornLeaving them alone is the only real answer
Not airdropping Danganronpa, BB and BCS in 4K would be biggest mistake, idk how they lasted 60 thousand years without it.
But yeah.
And because of that their day is probablly:
wake up when you feel like it
Do a couple hours of chores and housework
Couple hours of resource management, agriculture, harvesting whatever
Couple hours for lunch whenever you feel like it
Spend the afternoon doing whatever you want
Couple hours of chores for dinner
Go to bed whenever you want
I find it endlessly fascinating too. Uncontacted peoples in general can inspire a lot of wonder and curiosity in me. It's like trying to wonder how people felt throughout history, except that with history you have all these records and accounts and evidence left behind to give you an idea. You'll never know for sure, you can get an idea.
How these people feel and comprehend the world? Total mystery. They are disconnected from the vast majority of humanity in experiences and knowledge.
We know so little about them, and their day to day life would be entirely disconnected from the day to day life of you and me. They know the same about us - basically nothing, except that whenever we visit we tend to bring disaster to their homes. They don't want anything to do with it and will shoot arrows at visiting helicopters.
And how wild is that? I have to imagine seeing a helicopter when you skipped several tool ages would overwhelm the mind, but it doesn't. They're not interested in our planes, helicopters, hulking cargo ships - they just want to be left alone. It's not like they don't know we're cooking some wild shit out here, either. They've looted the wreckage of a cargo ship that ran ashore and since then they've been observed using new tools in new ways.
I sometimes wonder if we'll blow ourselves up one day and leave these guys to inherit the Earth.
Let them be the first to reach out if they want to have anything to do with us. Otherwise just leave them alone.
As the world looks like in it's current state, forcing contact upon them is only going to be cataclysmic to their world. Maybe, in some better future where we are sure we won't kill them with diseases, steal their resources, exploit them or destroy their culture an attempt at contact can be justified but we are currently nowhere near civilised enough to be able to do that.
Earth is the bad neighborhood aliens lock their windows when they drive by
Critical support to the Sentinalese for defending themselves from White Anglo-Saxon Protestant people of liberal belief!
That's what I'd say... but also, leave 'em alone, I suppose....
India's policy of "leave them alone" is the only right one. Maybe someday their culture will change and they'll seek out contact on their own, but until then it's their call to make and anyone trying to force contact on them deserves what they get.
I wonder, in a hypothetical scenario where we achieve global communism, would it still be appropriate to maintain no contact? Let’s assume for argument’s sake that we can get around the practical issues like disease, would we not owe them some form of consideration? As it stands, I feel like contact with the rest of the world would only make their lives worse and probably end their civilization as they know it, but if we had a far more just and equitable society, would refusing to engage start to resemble a form of chauvinism? Or at least neglect?
I’m honestly not sure what the answer is, or if I’m just wrong and the answer is simpler than I’m making it out to be. I feel like it’s easy to argue for no contact, for a variety of reasons, but is there a point at which non-interference starts to look like a form of captivity?
If they want in on FALGSC, we welcome them with open arms. If they want to be left alone (which they clearly seem to want), we leave them alone. It's not complicated.
They aren't imperialists, or capitalists, or colonists. (But I repeat myself.) They pose no threat to a communist state. We leave 'em alone, lest we become imperialists ourselves.
The correct course of action for a post-communist world can only be decided in a post-communist world. Leave it till then, it's enough for us to know that we shouldn't do anything right now.
The question doesn’t necessarily rely on a post-communist society. Assuming so just makes it easier to answer by eliminating some obvious objections, like that they’d have the global financial system forced on them or inevitably become dispossessed and marginalized, all the things that exposure to capitalism does.
The question I have is more about whether there are conditions where non-contact becomes the more ethically dubious position. It seems clear that they don’t want visitors, but if they were suffering greatly or faced existential danger, it would get a lot harder to maintain a non-interference position as you start recognizing that interfering can’t possibly be worse than death.
I imagine that if there was a serious existential threat to the region and/or all life on Earth, it would be wrong to not contact them, such as a mega-tsunami of the century, an asteroid impact, a potential quasar blast, the eventual warming of the Sun, or of humanity needing to leave the Earth in space arks.
