Posts by Pompous Git

@ x7 (was Er, what? - effective cat training)

Stupid fucker used a gun. That means he only got to kill one cat. The dudes using bows and arrows manage to kill several because they don't scare every cat for miles around into lying low for a few hours. The greenie-weenies are bitching about the use of bows and arrows to kill poor pussy cats, but that's because they secretly hate our native birds.

Re: Er, what?

Still less lazy and ignorant than the cat "owners"

Who cares about lazy and ignorant?

There's one pet I like to pet, and every evening we get set,

I stroke it every chance I get, it's my girl's pussy.

...

Often it goes out at night, returns at break of dawn.

No matter what the weather's like, it's always nice and warm.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIfcKy-VcXo

Re: And ANOTHER thing...

Robots don't have "buttocks", you gits.

Anita does. And I'm the only real Git around here. Git it?

Yanking the cord is hard work. Much better to keep hold of the handle of the cord and let weight of the chainsaw do the work.

But which leg do you want the saw to do the work on? Drop-starting means two things are in motion and need control. Placing the saw on the ground with your foot on the handle prevents the saw moving so it can't bite your leg(s).

Re: Life with chainsaws

So who trained and licensed the trainer?!? And how on earth did he manage to do this?

Wouldn't have a clue who, if anyone, trained the trainer. Licensing is by a state government department called Workplace Standards. I never bothered getting my licence as it gave me an excuse to refuse to go onto another person's property to cut down a tree as well as saving me the licence fee. Probably the less I say about this issue the better.

Our forests are mainly eucalyptus and they are notorious for dropping limbs. There's no safety helmet that's going to save you when a tonne or so of timber falls on you! Them who harvest dead trees for firewood are most at risk and the dead trees are colloquially called "widow-makers". I've lost three friends over the last 40 years.

Some years ago, nurse training became a degree course, rather than the old on-the-job training. A few years after this change, all qualified nurses were given a pay-rise by the government. This meant those who were doing the training missed out on the pay rise as they qualified before it became a degree course. So it goes...

Re: @My-Handle

It's best to use up all the fuel in the tool before you finish for the day.

First class advice! Also helps if the spark plug is properly gapped and clean.

Re: Bring back Time Team!

Much to my deep and everlasting shame I forgot to mention the hordes of students and other volunteers who shifted an enormous amount of dirt, often in appalling weather conditions, and the excavator driver. The Git dips his lid as we say in these parts.

Re: Bring back Time Team!

We have to complete this project before a fictitious deadline to make for More Interesting television and in the meantime we'll attack the site without sensitivity and leave it a bloody mess for the real archaeologists to repair

My list:

Professor Mick Aston, Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London

Francis Pryor MBE, Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London

Phil Harding, Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, voted Archaeologist of the Year in March 2013 by readers of Current Archaeology magazine

John Gater, BSc Archaeological Sciences, archaeological geophysicist

Chris Gaffney, archaeological geophysicist, awarded an honorary degree by the University of Bradford for popularising archaeological geophysics via Time Team

Carenza Lewis, Professor of Public Understanding of Research at the University of Lincoln

Your list?:

Anonymous coward, no known qualifications or expertise

Erich von Däniken, pseudoscientist

Re: What happened to them?

Ah but you're forgetting that the Vikings and other Norsemen had the ability to navigate along the latitudes with sunsticks (a sort of sundial one held in one's hand).

Not just sunsticks, sunstones when the sun was obscured by clouds and fog. Nature news item here:

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110131/full/news.2011.58.html

The paper referred to makes interesting reading.

Re: Bring back Time Team!

I wish I could upvote that more!

Re: "The Vikings explored farther into the New World than we dared thought"

Their attempt to conquer Arizona was thrown back by the Cardinals though.

Didn't stop them from invading Central and South America, where after a short pause they went on to invade the Pacific Ocean and settle Polynesia. The Norwegian Thor Heyerdahl wrote several books about it. Very convincing they were, too. When I was 8 years old.

Re: Does this mean

"The first commercial programmable "desktop computer", the Programma 101, was produced by Olivetti in 1964 and was a commercial success."

I don't remember that model, but I do remember the P203. Illustrated here:

http://www.technikum29.de/en/computer/commercial

A friend of mine had one. The accounting machine I owned was a Mercedes illustrated here:

http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/online_science/explore_our_collections/objects/index/smxg-60419

Only reason I purchased it was so I could say, truthfully, "I own a Mercedes".

Re: a tractor company producing real sports cars

Ah! You mean when a tractor company won an F1 race?

I thought he was expressing surprise having "discovered" that a tractor company made tractors. Townies are funny that way. Nothing like the surprise they express when you show them that chickens' eggs come out of their shit-hole though. A surprising number believe you when you tell them that while milk comes from cows, cream come from bulls. "Make sure you grab the fencewire good and tight while you climb through" is good for a laugh as well :-)

Re: HOGWASH!

our (collective) ancestors were a lot more mobile (and capable) that previous generations of historians thought/gave them credit for

The Git noted in another thread:

Oddly enough, the discovery of the Lake Mungo human remains calls into question the Out of Africa hypothesis. As I noted earlier, the mtDNA is not that of mitochondrial Eve that all living humans appear to possess. It's far from the realms of possibility that they were the creators of the Bradshaw rock art that is found at ~100,000 sites spread over 50,000 km^2 of northern Australia. This rock art is attributed by the local Aboriginal people to unknown predecessors and they confess to having no understanding of what the art's meaning is. This is hardly surprising. It frequently depicts people, and boats with keels and rudders rather than animals.

Dating the art has been problematic; the pigments have become as one with the rock. One such work is [partially] covered by a fossilised wasp's nest dated to ~17,000 years before the present. That's considerably older than the pyramids at Gizeh and intriguingly earlier than the supposed invention of keels and rudders. The rudder is supposedly an invention of the first century AD by the Chinese.

While unanswered questions intrigue those of us of a Gittish Nature, the Black Armbanders have thus far successfully managed to stifle any meaningful investigation of such things. So it goes...

Erich von Däniken attributed the Bradshaws to people from outer space. The Git's always puzzled by such fantasies when the truths we uncover are generally fascinating enough to need no embellishment.

Re: HOGWASH!

Valhalla sounds like more fun than heaven where there is only harp playing

Jeshua the Nazarene (aka Jesus of Nazareth for some odd reason) said (according to several Bibles in my library): "The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand". That was ~2,000 years ago, so it seems most likely he meant by "at hand" here and now. Or in the immortal words of Frank Zappa: "You'd better dig it while it's happening".

I'll leave the belief in The Afterlife to those unable to enjoy themselves in the present.

"Any news of clashes with 'the complex and diverse societies of indigenous people/s' during their 'occupation'?"

Yes there is one, a very short one, where some natives turned up on the beach and they went down to kill them. No additional thoughts or details in that short sentence.

There's more than that:

One old source held that Skraelings, or Inuit, who had crossed over from Ellesmere Island in the far north around A.D. 1000, migrated down the west coast and overran the settlement. Ivar Bardarson, steward of the Church's property in Greenland, and a member of a sister settlement 300 miles to the southeast, was said to have gathered a force and sailed northwest to drive the interlopers out, but "when they came hither, behold they found no man, neither Christian nor heathen, naught but some wild cattle and sheep, and they killed as many of the wild cattle and sheep as they could carry and with them returned to their houses."

Not sure if my response is furious, or not ;-)

And it's April 3. Not sure what that signifies.

Re: Downvotes?

There's something else going on here, and I doubt it would bear the light of day.

Problem is that the cockroaches tend to scatter when you turn the light on...

Re: " fair game for a ribbing."

What do you expect here - a big hug and an invitation for a pint?

How about when you're no longer a newbie? Mind you, it's going to take more than a pint before I'm at all likely to hug you, Lester. No disrespect intended, but a bloke has to have certain standards ;-)

I wonder if it would not make more sense to stick a 12v transformer in at the consumer unit and just run the whole ring at 12v, maybe via smallish UPS without the 240v step-up from the battery.

Probably not. The lighting wiring is designed to run low current/high voltage. At 12 V, current needs to be much higher than at 240 V. Here we have 8 A lighting circuits and at 12 V one of my 50 W QH globes would need ~ 4 A. This doesn't take into account any voltage loss in the wiring due to resistance. The further from the source, the higher the losses are going to be so a 12 V source isn't going to provide anywhere near 12 V at the sink (globe) over any significant distance.

There's a reason we have high voltage, low current electricity supplies. The much heavier, lower resistance cabling needed for 12 V would be far too expensive.

Bakelite Y-adapters (was Re: Dull)

Have two of those. One that's Y-shaped and the other has the branch coming off a straight through. No use for them as The House of Steel has Edison screw fittings instead.

I'm not sure why someone would want the incandescents but they did.

Cost? Just over 15 years ago, we moved into our new home I had spent a very happy 18 months building. Lighting was a mixture of 12 v QH sealed spots, 240 v linear QH, regular 240 v incandescents, and bi-pin 12 V QH.

Half of the conventional 240 v incandescents and all but one of the bi-pin QH have lasted the distance. The replacements for the conventional incandescents have been CFL and have all needed to be replaced several times. They are not as bright, take longer to turn on as well as having a much shorter life. And they cost several times a much to purchase. The first three were north of $AU20 each and the incandescents they replaced cost less than $AU2.00 each.

The sealed spots last from a few weeks to a year at most. The linear halogens last from a few weeks to about 18 months. The transformers for the 12 v globes have a lifespan of about two years.

Last year, I replaced three sealed spots with the brightest LED units I could find. Not only were they much dimmer than the 50W globes they replaced, it took only three weeks for the first one to fail. They cost several times as much. Worse, this bank of three globes lights one of the kitchen worksurfaces where I use very sharp knives and I need more light now for my ageing eyes, not less.

It's a bit hard to see any cost saving when units need constant replacement and those units cost so much more than what they replaced. It's a bit hard to see any energy saving given that the globes and the transformers require energy to manufacture. The cost of the transformers alone likely exceeds the cost in electricity saving; nearly a hundred so far at ~$AU10 purchased locally.

I have been told that the CFLs would last much longer if we left them constantly turned on rather than turning them off when we don't need the light. Also we should purchase a very expensive power conditioner to reduce the swings, sags and spikes in voltage. Our electricity supplier is only required to provide an average voltage of 240 v over a 24 hour period. Several neighbours have installed solar PV in recent years "to save money"* and made the voltage issue much worse: 210 to 260 volts.

I expect to be accused of wearing a tinfoil hat, but it seems to me that the move to make conventional incandescents illegal has more to do with increased revenue for GE, Philips, Sanyo etc than "saving the consumer money and the planet".

* After receiving a quote from a solar PV supplier I questioned their numbers as their claimed cost saving would require the units to supply 140% of their rated output. The supplier either couldn't, or wouldn't respond. My cost estimate was close to that of Choice, Australia's consumer magazine. My estimate of time to payback was 18 years and Choice's was 16 years; different supplier, and presumably different state. There's a reasonable chance of my being dead by then. It's also possible I'll be incapable of finding anything of interest to spend the consequent fairly trivial savings on if I survive.

Re: Seriously

I never implied that the Vikings introduced farming to Britain, where did you get that from. Why do you mention Syria particularly. Why not rather Iran or Irak if you want to mention some particular country, better just to refer to the region, the rivers perhaps.

Apologies regarding the introduction of farming to Britain comment. Mea culpa. The general tenor and inaccuracy of your comments made me rather angry. It's an egregious, old fart's thing.

The reason I mentioned Syria is because that's where the DNA evidence comes from. Not Iraq, not Iran, not Outer Mongolia or wherever your fancy/fantasy lies. Why is it better to refer to the region or the rivers? Why not just tell the fucking truth?

Apart from that, slavery was abandoned like also capital punishment in Scandinavia very early.

While the Scandinavians may have abandoned slavery at home, they were very active slavers in Britain. One of those they took was later become Saint Patrick, patron saint of Ireland and the first person in recorded history to speak out against slavery. But then I guess you are not really a slave-owner if you merely capture people for ownership by someone else.

So let me try on my Viking trousers when we met with the barbaric monks in Britain (look it up on YouTube). That was appalling. only men, dressed like women, what the fuck, speaking barbar on their knees, unwilling to fight and what is that.

While it's certainly true that both men and women wore tunics at that time, the women's had lace-up bodices for the convenience of suckling their offspring. There is no evidence I know of that monks either gave birth, or suckled babies. The youtube clip I found was very nice. Thanks! I prefer Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli myself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMztkrNbZFY

Rather odd that you despise the monks for their lack of bloodlust. Presumably you admire religious fanatics who slaughter infidels. Each to his own...

Re: To the victors, the spoils.

As for "Invasion", maybe everybody ought to "go home". Rift Valley is going to be a bit crowded but the green earthers will be happy that the rest of the planet is no longer being polluted,

Oddly enough, the discovery of the Lake Mungo human remains calls into question the Out of Africa hypothesis. As I noted earlier, the mtDNA is not that of mitochondrial Eve that all living humans appear to possess. It's far from the realms of possibility that they were the creators of the Bradshaw rock art that is found at ~100,000 sites spread over 50,000 km^2 of northern Australia. This rock art is attributed by the local Aboriginal people to unknown predecessors and they confess to having no understanding of what the art's meaning is. This is hardly surprising. It frequently depicts people, and boats with keels and rudders rather than animals.

Dating the art has been problematic; the pigments have become as one with the rock. One such work is covered by a fossilised wasp's nest dated to ~17,000 years before the present. That's considerably older than the pyramids at Gizeh and intriguingly earlier than the supposed invention of keels and rudders. The rudder is supposedly an invention of the first century AD by the Chinese.

While unanswered questions intrigue those of us of a Gittish Nature, the Black Armbanders have thus far successfully managed to stifle any meaningful investigation of such things. So it goes...

Re: To the victors, the spoils.

How long do you have to live somewhere to become a "native"?

Truthfully, here in rural Tasmania, it has been said by more than one newcomer: a lifetime. OTOH, around 25 years ago, one of The Git's neighbours came by with half a dozen stubbies of beer that he put on the kitchen table.

He said: "Fuckin' arseholes come from the city and tell us how to do this and how to do that. Not you ya cunt! Anybody'd think you were fuckin' born 'ere!"

One of the proudest moments in my life so far. We went on to discuss how my neighbours observed that many of my strange (organic) methods worked better than what they were doing and so they adopted them. Of course I also frequently asked their advice and when appropriate accepted it. When in Rome do mostly what the Romans do, but never tell them what to do.

Re: To the victors, the spoils.

How do you know? Did you somehow have a learned conversation with one? Dig up and decipher some writing to that effect? For all anyone knows they may very well have believed themselves to be a superior civilization.

How do we know? We have accounts from shipwrecked and abandoned sailors, and absconding convicts. Some left extensive accounts of their life while living with Australian Aborigines. There is scant evidence that the Australian Aborigines lived their lives any differently in the dim and distant than they were living when the Europeans arrived. These accounts all tell us that the Aborigines experienced little if any hardship as nomads travelling constantly from one food source to the next. They also tell us that they were treated with great kindness and respect.

The only evidence of civilisation comes from stone housing on High Cliffy Island off the Kimberley coast and in one district of Victoria. These consist of stone circles ~2 metres across and 1.5 metres high. Presumably branches and bark were placed over these to form a roof. The reason for this is immediately obvious. As perennial nomads, the Aborigines were completely incapable of carrying these stone circles with them. But this lack of civilisation poses an interesting question: Why didn't the Aborigines develop settled living and agriculture as happened in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas?

The most cogent of various reasons put forth is that they never felt the need. Ever so much of Australia is sufficiently mild in climate that sleeping next to a campfire on colder nights was entirely sufficient. Another is that unlike the other continents, there were no plants suitable for cultivation as a bulk food source. There was no equivalent to maize, wheat, barley, oats, rice, or potatoes. Make no mistake that the Aborigines were ignorant of gardening. There is abundant evidence that there was trade between mainland Australia and islands to the north.

Another reason for not developing any form of agriculture is the general unsuitability of Australian ecosystems for farming. The first colonists went very close to starving to death, though this was not merely the drought they encountered, but also a complete lack of farming expertise of any kind.

These words are not "convenient assertions" alone, but also the result of careful reading of documents written in colonial times, long and rewarding conversations with my Aboriginal brothers and sisters, not always over a bottle of Laphroaig it must be said. And then finally, there is logic; codified long ago by Aristotle, but sadly lacking in our modern civilisation. SiriousLee, you might want to learn some; it's difficult I know and requires no small effort, but the rewards are great :-)

Re: To the victors, the spoils.

The "Stolen Generation" were mostly used as slaves.

It should come as no surprise to anyone with more than a single brain cell that julian.smith's assertions are completely false and without merit. I am not here denying that atrocities took place, but it takes but a few moments to fact-check his assertions.

University historian Peter Read was the first to advance the concept of the "Stolen Generations". He claimed that during the 20thC, 50,000 Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their mothers.

He asserted, without evidence, that state governments removed children as young as possible and reared them in institutions deliberately isolated from any possible contamination from Aboriginal culture. "Welfare officers, removing children solely because they were Aboriginal intended and arranged that they should lose their Aboriginality, and that they never return home."

Keith Windschuttle* analysed NSW case records for the period 1907 to 1932. They

reveal that 66 per cent of the 800 children then removed were teenagers aged 13 to 19 years. Some 23 per cent were aged six to 12, and only 10 per cent were babies to five-year-olds.

Most of them came from Aboriginal welfare stations and reserves. Two-thirds of the teenagers went not to institutions but into the workforce as apprentices.

As it happens, the standard destination for white children in welfare institutions was apprenticeship also, not just blacks. In the early decades of the 20thC, apprenticeship meant leaving home for four years and living with an employer. Apprenticeships for boys usually meant agriculture and domestic service for girls.

AB Facey has given us a truly horrifying account of what his life as an apprentice was like in his memoir A Fortunate Life. There are few who can read this book without weeping. It is on a par with Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. Unfortunately for the likes of julian.smith, AB Facey was a whitefella, not a blackfella. They myth that Aborigines were being singled out, is... just that, a myth.

The laws in Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory during the first half of the 20th century strictly forbade the removal of full-blood Aborigine children. The so-called "Stolen Generation" were either half-caste, or white.

In the 1980s, The Git was an ALP branch secretary and he invited Mike Mansell to address the branch on the land rights issue. Things were pretty well done and dusted with private land-owners mostly happy to play their part in reconciliation. The general membership, too, were largely in favour. Government OTOH, despite their wailing, gnashing of teeth, sackcloth and ashes, were not and stalled as long is it was possible to keep the Crown land then in question from the Aborigines.

It should go without saying that making stuff up does absolutely nothing for reconciliation; rather the opposite is the case. God how I detest and loath hypocrisy.

* Keith is widely regarded by the Black Armbanders as extreme right wing. When Keith and I were attending our respective universities in the 1960s, he was a card-carrying communist. As one of Blainey's students once remarked, when you're politically to the left of Pol Pot, just about everyone's an extreme right winger.

Re: To the victors, the spoils. @Pompous Git

I try to be reasonably open-minded about these things, but...

Congratulations; your arrogance and ignorance are truly astonishing!

First up, hunter-gatherers were not "little better than cattle or dog-packs", rather the reverse. From the accounts left us by absconders and sailors abandoned far from settlement we know that the Aborigines made their living with far less labour than Europeans. That is, they had far more leisure time than those like yourself who casually assume you are superior. This appears to be true of hunter-gatherers everywhere. It should also be noted that where the Aborigines make their living from the bush today was not where they were living when they became displaced by white settlement.

Second, and this is where The Git will attract the slur of racist [sigh], the Australian Aborigines have very much superior eyesight than any other group of humans on the planet. They can descry detail that is entirely invisible to the rest of us.

There is an invisible line north of New Guinea called the Wallace Line. The stretch of deep water dates back to the breakup of the supercontinent, Pangea. On the southern side, animal types long extinct to the north survived: namely marsupials and monotremes. The Australian Aborigines crossed that stretch of water and have thus been called the world's first sailors. The Vikings were latecomers indeed, beaten by 60,000 years. I suspect that the Aborigines were upset by the Lake Mungo discovery because that put them second. And the discovery of the Kow Swamp people puts them third if, as likely, they turn out to be another separate human species.

The Australian Aborigines invented the boomerang, beating their European counterparts to the invention of the aerofoil by several thousands of years.

There's far more than this that could be said and I can do no better than to recommend (again) Geoffrey Blainey's superb Triumph of the Nomand. You, sir, are a fool and given the choice of being in a room with you or putting my head into a bucket of shit, I would have no hesitation choosing the bucket of shit.

Re: We never invaded anywhere, we civilised

Admittedly we failed with Australia

And thank whichever deity is responsible for that!

PREAMBLE FOR NEW AUSTRALIAN CONSTITUTION

We, the people of the broad brown land of Oz, wish to be recognised as a free nation of blokes, sheilas and the occasional boong. We come from many lands (although a few too many of us come from New Zealand) and, although we live in the best country in the world, we reserve the right to bitch and moan about it whenever we bloody like.

We are One Nation but we're divided into many States.

First, there's Victoria, named after a queen who didn't believe in lesbians. Victoria is the realm of Mossimo turtlenecks, cafe latte, grand final day and big horse races. Its capital is Melbourne, whose chief marketing pitch is that it's "liveable". At least that's what they think. The rest of us think it is too bloody cold and wet.

Next, there's NSW, the realm of pastel shorts, macchiato with sugar, thin books read quickly and millions of dancing queens. Its capital Sydney has more queens than any other city in the world, and is proud of it. Its mascots are Bondi lifesavers who pull their Speedos up their cracks to keep the left and right sides of their brains separate.

Down south we have Tasmania, a State based on the notion that the family that bonks together stays together. In Tassie, everyone gets an extra chromosome at conception. Maps of the State bring smiles to the sternest faces. It holds the world record for a single mass shooting, which the Yanks can't seem to beat no matter how often they try.

South Australia is the province of half-decent reds, a festival of foreigners and bizarre axe murders. SA is the state of innovation, where else can you so effectively reuse country bank vaults and barrels as in

Snowtown, just out of Adelaide (also named after a queen). They had the Grand Prix, but lost it when the views of Adelaide sent the Formula One drivers to sleep at the wheel.

Western Australia is too far from anywhere to be relevant in this document. It's main claim to fame is that it doesn't have daylight saving because if it did all the men would get erections on the bus on the way to work. WA was the last state to stop importing convicts, and many of them still work there in the government and business.

The Northern Territory is the red heart of our land. Outback plains, sheep stations the size of Europe, kangaroos, jackaroos, emus, Ulurus and dusty kids with big smiles. It also has the highest beer consumption of anywhere on the planet, and its creek beds have the highest aluminium content of anywhere too. Although the Territory is the centrepiece of our national culture, few of us live there and the rest prefer to fly over it on our way to Bali.

And there's Queensland. While any mention of God seems silly in a document defining a nation of half-arsed agnostics, it is worth noting that God probably made Queensland. Why he filled it with dickheads remains a mystery.

Oh yes, and there's Canberra. The least said the better.

We, the citizens of Oz, are united by the Pacific Highway, whose treacherous twists and turns kill more of us each year than die by murder.

We are united in our lust for international recognition, so desperate for praise we leap in joy when a ragtag gaggle of corrupt IOC officials tells us Sydney is better than Beijing.

We are united by a democracy so flawed that a political party, albeit a redneck gun-toting one, can get a million votes and still not win one seat in Federal Parliament while bloody Brian Harradine can get 24,000 votes and run the whole country.

Not that we're whingeing, we leave that to our Pommy immigrants. We want to make "no worries mate" our national phrase, "she'll be right mate" our national attitude, and "Waltzing Matilda" our national anthem (So what if it's about a sheep-stealing crim who commits suicide).

We love sport so much our newsreaders can read the death toll from a sailing race and still tell us who's winning in the same breath. And we're the best in the world at all the sports that count, like cricket, netball, rugby, AFL, roo-shooting, two-up and horse racing.

We also have the biggest rock, the tastiest pies, the blackest aborigines and the worst-dressed Olympians in the known universe.

We shoot, we root, we vote. We are girt by sea and pissed by lunchtime. And even though we might seem a racist, closed-minded, sports-obsessed little people, at least we're better than the Kiwis.

Amen. Oh, and awomen, too.

Re: Their list is not entirely accurate

Steady on Pompous Ignoramus!!

Ça va sans dire, that the good minister's speech would be translated into English. Most of our indigenous brothers and sisters in the Northern Territory are polyglots, speaking their own languages, several other indigenous languages and English. So other indigenous members would understand and some of the less ignorant non-indigenous Australians would also understand.

Not all of us are not monolingual English speakers who need to resort to vulgarities to express ourselves.

The Git is rather proud of his ignorance as it happens. There are ever so many things I do not know and am happy to be enlightened. However, you have failed utterly to explain why the good minster wishes to speak in a language in all likelihood unknown to her listeners. They too are presumably ignoramuses who for one reason or another failed to learn a language almost certainly spoken and understood by a handful of people. As I said, I would not be so presumptuous.

I'm having trouble parsing your final sentence. Some people express negatives by using double-negatives while those of us trained in mathematics and/or logic are trained to parse double-negatives as positives.

The gist I take it is mainly an objection to The Git's use of vulgarities (word use characterised by ignorance of or lack of good breeding or taste). As it happens, this is in the Nature of being The Pompous Git. It is also the case that such word usage was common when The Git began posting here and when in Rome, do as the Romans do as us common muck are wont to say. If your effeteness finds this offensive, please feel free to complain to the site owners and if they tell me to fuck off, I will certainly do so.

Re: invasion, colonisation, occupation

Funny how white fella gets tagged with being invaders, but the invaders of darker skin tones who pushed the first wave of indigenous Australians down into Tasmania (who then became known as Tasmanian Aboriginals), get let off the hook.

The difficulty here of course is who is a whitefella and who is a blackfella? A good friend came by with a bottle of Laphroaig* some years ago and during the ensuing conversation posed the following question: How come Jim Everett's 90% white and a blackfella, and I'm 10% black and I'm a whitefella?

* No, the reason we are friends is not because of the Laphroaig, but a consequence of our friendship.

Story here about Dallas Scott, a man obviously Aboriginal, but not accepted as one by the Aboriginal Community:

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/life/weekend-australian-magazine/no-so-black-and-white/story-e6frg8h6-1226305047298

I've never had a Certificate of Aboriginality - never needed one," he says, "but when I moved from Brisbane back to Victoria last year, they said I would need one if I wanted to get Aboriginal housing." He filled out the paperwork for the Dandenong & District Aborigines Co-operative, which hands out certificates in certain Victorian regions, and he went to the trouble of meeting some of the elders who sit on the board. He waited a few weeks and when he didn't hear anything, he called to find out what was going on. "That's when they told me - my claim to Aboriginality had been rejected.

Re: Invasion of Europe

the refugee influx is not an invasion but what the British did in 1788 was. Fully armed and ready to use said weapons?

Because of course no Muslim refugee has ever been known to bear arms, shoot people, or blow them up? Sounds like some version of reality I've not heard about. Do tell us more...

Re: Their list is not entirely accurate

I would respect these good academics more if they had vocally supported a Northern Territory government minister, Beth Price, in her attempt to be permitted to speak her native language, Walpiri, in the assembly. But since she is a member of a conservative government, that would be too much to ask.

While this is the first I have heard of this, it doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility that it's because apart from herself nobody else in the assembly would have a fucking clue what she was saying? You do know that the purpose of speech is something called communication. Understand though, there's this deep need in me to communicate in English, rather than bore people shitless by writing in Old, Classical, Vulgar, Mediaeval, Renaissance, or God forbid, Modern Latin. Perhaps I'm missing something...

Re: Invasion of Europe

Alienating land and resources without adequate compensation? Check!

You Black Armbanders really fucking piss me off! The Aborigines had a completely different concept of land and resources to the European settlers. The above quote would have been utterly meaningless to them. They did understand trade of course, which is why they so readily sold their women to (mainly) American sailors in return for flour and sugar.

Relations between Aborigines and white settlers in Tasmania were mostly cordial. There were however occasional and sporadic violent incidents, mainly the killing of isolated shepherds. Two exceptions to this were the notorious Aborigine bushrangers, Musquito and Black Tom. The former was not a Tasmanian and the latter had been raised by Thomas Birch, a white Hobart merchant. The predations of the two criminals have been elevated by Manne, Ryan, Reynolds and their ilk to a the status of a patriotic Black War. Indeed, Reynolds once claimed it was "the greatest internal threat that Australia ever faced". It's hard to reconcile this with the killing of exactly one soldier by an Aborigine. I quote Windschuttle again:

Let me finish by talking about reconciliation, which Manne claims my book tries to undermine. I cannot see how a story about violence and warfare between blacks and whites, if it is untrue, can help reconciliation at all. What good does it do Aboriginal people to tell them the whites wanted to exterminate them, when they never did? What good does it do Aboriginal people to tell them they were a conquered people, when they never were?

There are many Aboriginal people today who actually support my case, especially in Tasmania. I have been invited to attend a ceremony on September 12 which the Liah Pootah people will conduct jointly with other residents of Hobart to commemorate the bicentenary of the first British settlement in Tasmania at Risdon Cove in 1803. These descendants of the Aborigines are commemorating the British arrival because, like all Tasmanian Aboriginal people, they are also descendants of the British settlers. They are celebrating both sides of their heritage. Compare this with the contribution towards reconciliation made by the Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan version of Australia history. The message Aboriginal people have taken from their books is that the British arrival was comparable to an invasion by the Nazis. The Reynolds and Ryan story, which Robert Manne's book tries to perpetuate, does not foster reconciliation, it only fans racial hostility and hatred. It is not only historically untrue. It is also racially divisive and politically inept.

Each of us is responsible for what we believe. By and large, we don't just believe anything merely for the sake of believing in something. We can be said to exercise intellectual responsibility by believing what is true and refusing to acknowledge what is false. The Git believes that to do otherwise shows profound contempt for the rights and liberties of others.

[Aside]

Before anyone takes The Git to task for plagiarism, he freely admits this. By the wildest of coincidences, never noticed by those making that accusation, the person he is plagiarising is also called The Pompous Git. The Git also freely admits to having stolen the handle he uses with considerable pride, though rarely if ever with decorum, from Stuart Littlemore when he became Stuart Littleless following one of the seemingly endless series of budget cuts at the ABC.

Re: I have no problem with the use of the term "invasion"

Maybe they should have been called refugees...

In a very important sense they were refugees. The convicts were leaving a land where they were living in abject poverty for one where ever so many went on to become prosperous land and business-owners. Documents in the archives record that many deliberately committed crimes in order to be transported. Even in 1965 when The Git and his family left England's "green unpleasant land" for Australia, The Git's mother referred to us as "rats leaving a sinking ship".