Post Punk Kitchen Forum

Jinkies is really onto something. The millions of people starving in Sub-Saharan Africa must be pretty stupid. Why don't they move to the United States and become investment bankers?

Okay, fine, about half of the posts have been mocking you, because what you said was, frankly, uninformed and rude. The other half have been very good social and historical context as to why your statement that they should just leave is, again, uninformed and rude.





And so on and so forth.

It's really not until you decided that those very reasonable and grounded-in-reality explanations don't hold a candle to your brilliant plan to just move an entire people (move them where, by the way?) that the mockery started. Because actually engaging meaningfully with you was going nowhere, and it's rather exhausting to keep hitting your head against a concrete wall.

And, no, I was commenting ironically on the fact that your comments are based on an ignorance of history and a complete lack of regard for the effects of colonization on Indigenous people while also comparing the PPK to Stormfront.

I just want to say, before I leave, that I linked to the Wikipedia page for the Trail of Tears and thought it would be self-explanatory as an example of why it's not okay to move whole groups of people and why it hasn't worked before.

He only skimmed those posts because he isn't wrong.

Seriously, if you have an opinion, others present ideas that your opinion is possibly wrong, then you insist your opinion is right with no factual information, what do you expect?

And I should also point out that none of the touchy-feely vegans haven't even touched this thread yet.

Hee hee.

Sorry, I was so busy crying all I could do was lurk.

And I was busy singing Kumbaya.

And I was busy buying vegan leather so I could dress as Al Pacino from Cruisin'

This is a really dumb question, but I'll ask anyway. Does the Canadian government do anything to subsidize food/food prices directly or do they just subsidize an elite subset of workers?

It seems as it if it would make so much more sense to use the same money to ship in food or to provide some similar service to maintain a food distribution center somewhere.

They used to give direct transportation subsidies, but they've shifted to subsidizing retailers directly, with the idea that the savings would be passed on to the consumers. It seems like that change has not worked out well, which probably has something to do with the lack of competition and inelasticity of food.

Canada also seems to be committed to both food security and cultural autonomy, which is one of the reasons ideas like "Just move!" are kind of the opposite of helpful. The reality is that there's probably something wrong with how the current program is handling subsidies, and that means it's going to take political pressure to get people in the relevant fields to work out a solution. Which is, as far as I can tell, what the protests are about.

Honest question: Ignore present-day realities. How did the Inuit come to inhabit (and remain in) such an inhospitable place? I guess for them, it hasn't been inhospitable, but being able to survive there required so many technological innovations* that it's hard for me to understand why they didn't just keep on walking south way back when.

*I mean, like, things people have to craft.

Well, for one thing, it's harder to hunt now because of thinner ice from global warming.

I was too busy singing Kumbaya while mindlessly touching and feeling myself. That's my standard lady behavior, because my teensy-weensy sparkly pink brain is incapable of logical and rational thought. Tee-hee!

There were already people living to the south, and they weren't singing Kumbaya.

As littlebird mentioned, due to pressure from colonialization, it seems they were pushed further north. And then there are also the issues of thinner ice as vegimator mentioned.

The Thule culture, from which the Inuit derived, arose relatively recently. Norse settlers arrived in Greenland before the ancestors of the Greenlandic Inuit did.

They were well adapted for living in arctic environments, and were in frequent conflict with the non-Inuit people to the south. I suspect that moving further south would have represented a huge risk to them.

High Arctic relocation - Google that shiitake for an example of what has happened to the First Nations people in Canada. Also, I love that it's assumed that everyone disagreeing with you is a "lady" and too filled with emotion to see the logic of what you posted.

well, people have been carving out niches in inhospitable regions for as long as there have been people. we are kind of weird like that. clearly, at some point in the past, it was actually possible to support a small community in the region, otherwise they would have been forced to move or simply died out. there is actually lots of archaeological evidence to show that that's happened in lots of different areas in the world, including smaller tropical islands and so on.

also, it's not like today where our knowledge about general geography is so ingrained we can't imagine not knowing that there was a much more hospitable region just to the south... to ancient tribal people, that kind of information didn't exist. the polynesians spread across the pacific through luck as much as anything... they had great navigation abilities and good boats, but they were mostly just sailing into the unknown. some of them ended up on very inhospitable islands where they carved out a small niche, and some of them ended up on really rich islands where they were able to form complex societies (hawaii, for example). it would have made more sense for the ones on the chatham islands to keep going til they got to hawaii, but we're talking gradual moves taking thousands of years, you know?

anyway, if the Inuit people had decided to pack up and move south permanently, they would have been rebuffed by any number of other groups that had kept moving south earlier and had settled in a certain area. of course, it turns out that living in an area so inhospitable that the europeans mostly didn't want it was a good idea in the long run, because the Inuits have survived much more intact than other native american groups.

Cut it out. I am cranky this evening and my banning hand is itchy!

Mat.

Above, it was said that indigenous people had lived there ("there" being a pretty broad area) for 4,000 years, long before the Europeans.

They (Thule/Inuit) came across the land bridge via Alaska in about 1000 BC, so I believe that puts them at closer to 3,000 years in North America. According to reliable ol' Wikipedia, the Thule crossed over to Greenland in 1300 or so. There were indigenous people who were in northern Canada prior to the Inuit (the Dorset culture) but who died out following the Thule/Inuit arrival.

well, lots of people don't count the norse in the same category as other european invaders. the norse colonized a very small area and i believe (correct me if i'm wrong) either died out or returned back to europe. so yeah, not 4000 years before the norse, but 4000 years before the rest of the european horde arrived.

So a big part of the answer is that the Inuit (or the people who would become the Inuit) were relatively late arrivals to North America?

Stop dishonoring Pinkie Pie with your ... whatever it is you're doing here. Pinkie Pie don't troll.

And...scene.