being a bit focussed on keeping up with what the comrades are doing in china, i've been missing out what the topp twins are doing in new zealand.
well actually, i was checking a serious essay in a quite serious chinese journal, and suddenly there's a reference to the topp twins.
i did a double take, but then realised that we live in a connected world and you can no longer confine knowledge to any geographical site.. so meet my new discovery, new zealands own- the topp twins:.
Being a bit focussed on keeping up with what the comrades are doing in China, I've been missing out what the Topp twins are doing in New Zealand. Well actually, I was checking a serious essay in a quite serious Chinese journal, and suddenly there's a reference to the Topp twins. I did a double take, but then realised that we live in a connected world and you can no longer confine knowledge to any geographical site.
So meet my new discovery, New Zealands own- the Topp twins:
the desert areas of central australia, the so-called 'red heart' of the nation, still has a significant population of original australians.
and many of them seem to have difficulty with the law.*.
that's a very brief and simplistic introduction to this video of prison guards in the alice springs jail, manhandling a young boy.
mgmelkat: I am an aborigine, a "murri", I see the plight of our people, very sad that many are like this. I've lived in outback QLD most of my life and questioned why my own people live the way they do. Most of my aboriginal family have done very well for themselves. My generation, all my cousins, my brother and sister and myself, which I am proud to say, (all of us are NOT JWs) has successful fitters, welders, lawyers, doctors, studying politics, business and curators, completed TAFE cert 4s, etc and all of us are doing well except for 2-3bludgers.
And thnx for adding another dimension to the experience of the young lad involved in the incident, which I posted. Its great to hear that your extended family has done well. As I commented previously, I know that some indigenous witnesses, had successful lives. Another one comes to mind in Sydney. His name was Stan Goodvin (or Goodwin). He was Congregation servant (under the pre-elder arrangement) in North Sydney Congregation for quite a while.
I'm thinking that government programs are having an affect. I know that at the university where I study the head of the Dpartment of Indigenous Studies, Associate Professor Michelle Trudgett is an Indigenous Australian
She has an excellent academic background and quite a lot of publications to her name.
Biography
Associate Professor Michelle Trudgett is an Indigenous scholar from the Wiradjuri Nation in Central-West New South Wales. At the beginning of 2013 she commenced a new position as the Head of Warawara - Department of Indigenous Studies at Macquarie University. Michelle is a committed teacher who has been instrumental in developing and implementing the new postgraduate programs in Indigenous Education. Her research provides considerable insight into the area of Indigenous participation in higher education, with a specific focus on the postgraduate sector. Her research has been presented to ministerial bodies and to leading scholars on the national and international stages. Her research is used to inform current national policy, particularly in relation to Indigenous postgraduate student experiences. Her current Australian Research Council funded study with A/Prof Susan Page and Dr Neil Harrison seeks to create a model of best practice for the supervision of Indigenous doctoral students. Michelle is passionate about developing strategies to ensure Indigenous higher education students receive culturally appropriate support throughout their academic journeys.
The University provides good support to Indigenous students, even providing and elder on campus.
Meet Aunty Elaine, Elder-in-Residence
Our Indigenous Elder-in-Residence, Elaine Chapman, offers a friendly welcome and a listening ear to our students and staff on campus. And she knows first-hand the challenges that can face our Indigenous students, as she is completing her own study herself!
As the Elder-In-Residence with Warawara (Department of Indigenous Studies), Aunty Elaine provides support for Indigenous students and staff and a place where they can drop in for a chat. She also offers guidance for anyone across the university who has questions about Indigenous customs, myths or protocols. Aunty Elaine - as she is known - gives talks to a range of visitors to Macquarie and helps with some teaching units.
Aunty Elaine says she loves her job at Macquarie and encourages students and staff to come and meet her.
"Probably a lot of Macquarie's students are mainstream, a number of them know that they're Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, but they haven't been involved in Land Councils, or Indigenous community or school groups. They don't know that they can just drop in here and say hello, and they won't be given the third degree. So come in and say Hello! "
In her previous working life, Aunty Elaine has worked with a range of marginalized people. She was a psychiatric nurse before working in education and supporting people with special needs. Upon retiring in 1996, she soon became bored, so she decided to return to study. With some trepidation, Aunty Elaine began a Bachelor of Community Management at Warawara in 2005 at age 58. She enjoyed it so much that she is currently studying her Masters degree! It was returning to tertiary study that also got Aunty Elaine involved in the development of Elder-in-Residence programs at a number of universities over the last few years.
A listening ear
Aunty Elaine is a Wirradjuri woman and her people are from Central West NSW. She says her own experiences in searching for her family roots help her to give guidance to others on the services available for tracing Indigenous family connections. She also understands the range of emotions that can come with looking for one's family.
"I am fourth generation stolen... I came into contact with my brother for the first time in 2002 - when he was 65 years old, it was an amazing journey," Aunty Elaine said.
"People going on that kind of a journey, sometimes they just need to talk. If you are the person that they feel comfortable talking to about it, you don't need to give them advice or your opinions on how they should do things, you just need to be there to listen."
"A confidential listening ear is what I aim to offer to the students and staff here."
Support for Block students
Aunty Elaine is on campus every Monday and Tuesday, and also stays on the campus full-time when the Warawara block students are in residence. Aunty Elaine says the block students travel from Australia-wide to study on campus, and being a long distance from their family can be an added pressure on their study.
"Often during a block residential, one of the students has somewhat of a midnight crisis that is family-related. It always happens late at night when they might receive a phone call. They have a situation where they feel someone needs them at home, but they've got to be here. So I can be a supportive listener for them and help them get through that feeling of the need for immediate flight that you get when you want to go straight back home and sort things out."
The problem is, how do we move a young man like the one that this post is about from his current life (but, I'd like to say, that there are many so-called, "white" kids just like him.) to a situation where he could undertake University or Technical college studies?
the desert areas of central australia, the so-called 'red heart' of the nation, still has a significant population of original australians.
and many of them seem to have difficulty with the law.*.
that's a very brief and simplistic introduction to this video of prison guards in the alice springs jail, manhandling a young boy.
Leeca: l live and work in a very remote Aborigional Community, it's a real eye opener. Most Australians are clueless about what happens in the communities. There is some employment opportunities here but trying to get them to turn up to work can be difficult, hence why white people work in these communities.
Thnk you for your insights into this problem, they add a lot to an understanding of the boy in question.
Its interesting that you chose to work in this field, you must have a strong humanitarian drive.
You also commented:
They just disappear during the day, not turn up for days or months on end. . You can end up hardly functioning yourself, completely exhausted. They call Welfare 'sit down money'. They can be very lazy, have no respect for the hard work you put in helping them.
I wanted to ask, and its OK if you do not feel you can add anything useful, how the problems of the people where you work compare to the problems of some of the 'white' families, in say the poorer areas of large Australian cities.
As you likely know, we have something similar, in that there may be 2 to 3 generations of 'welfare people,' who are essentially unemployable. And, even if they get a job, they are often absent.
are they fearful that they are mistaken, so they must argue with everyone, and try to prove all otehr religions wrong, but their's right?.
i'm not talking about the well-known jw persistence, in which we all once shared.. i'm talking about nearly all brands of christianity, the witnesses and their other branded counterparts.
here are two incidents to demonstrate.. a week or so back, i read in a chinese newspaper of a complaint by two tibetan buddhist women in the city of xining, qinghai province, in western china.
I had a similar experience with obsessed Christians at uni last semester. I was quietly eating some lunch and a guy comes up and invites me to a seminar. I asked what was it about? The conversation went around and aqround again for 5 minutes before I got an admission that they SDA's and the topic was religious.
Why the obsession?
have you seen this article?.
the watchtower is trying to be experts on all things having to do with human sexuality.. repressing sexual desires, gay or straight only creates more problems.. http://www.jw.org/en/bible-teachings/family/teenagers/ask/pressure-to-be-gay/.
.
Youre right, Steve. The site is pure 'propaganda' that is highly dependent on hot-button words.
Consider:
Is it cruel of God to tell someone who is attracted to the same sex to avoid homosexuality?
The statement fails to explain the inconsistency of a god, who supposedly, in a few texts, forbids same sex activity and yet created animals, who according to his "inspired" word, act by god-implanted instinct, and yet have sex with other animals of the same sex. Not on just a few occasions, but consistently over long periods. Will this god destroy the animals who behave like that, when he implanted that desire (according to their theology)?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d68_vlLD60Y
And again from the JW web-site"
If you answered yes to that last question, you should know that such reasoning is based on the flawed notion that humans must act on their sexual impulses.
Notice. They say something is 'flawed', and do not attempt to demonstrate why it is 'flawed.' That is an attempt to use a loaded word to in fluence theri argument. They can only say the bible says it is, and so the argment goes round and around.
The Bible dignifies humans by assuring them that they can choose not to act on their improper sexual urges.
Two words used here without proof of the claim. I'm sure no-one needs me to explain. It's a typical WT way of conducting an argument.
So when, David had sex with his many wives, was he 'acting on improper sexual urges?' Not to mention Solomon and his 1000 women?
It demonstrates how flawed the thinking of Jehovah's witnesses really is.
are they fearful that they are mistaken, so they must argue with everyone, and try to prove all otehr religions wrong, but their's right?.
i'm not talking about the well-known jw persistence, in which we all once shared.. i'm talking about nearly all brands of christianity, the witnesses and their other branded counterparts.
here are two incidents to demonstrate.. a week or so back, i read in a chinese newspaper of a complaint by two tibetan buddhist women in the city of xining, qinghai province, in western china.
Are they fearful that they are mistaken, so they must argue with everyone, and try to prove all otehr religions wrong, but their's right?
I'm not talking about the well-known JW persistence, in which we all once shared.
I'm talking about nearly all brands of Christianity, the witnesses and their other branded counterparts. Here are two incidents to demonstrate.
A week or so back, I read in a Chinese newspaper of a complaint by two Tibetan Buddhist women in the city of Xining, Qinghai Province, in western China. Qinghai has a large population of Tibetan Buddhists and Hui Muslims, and religious sensitivities are often an issue, and the government attempts to keep some balance and coolness in religious matters.
The two women complained that they wanted to learn English, and they answered an advertisement from someone offering free, 'individual lessons.' To their dismay the individual lessons turned out to be a deceptive front for a Christian group trying to win converts by offering English lessons based on biblical texts. They were asking the government to ban such deceptions.
Christians of all types, obsessively and deceptively use this method of trying to convert people all over China. There is even a Science University in North Korea, that by false deception, managed to get permission supposedly to teach science. They were recently exposed by a former teacher at the university.
The second experience is my own: Last week, I was given the wrong directions to a function, and was rather tired after a vain search. I was sitting on a rail station waiting for a train, when a woman sends a child of about six to give me a leaflet. Alarm bells rang when I'd noted the woman giving the child the leaflet and pointing to me. I thought they must be JWs, but the leaflet was some other church.
I politely declined the leaflet, which brought mummy over. Why wasn't I interested? I gave a brief explanation that I'd had enough of Jesus and I did not want to discuss it further.
Not good enough! Then came a rant about all of us having to stand in front of Jesus on his high horse (judgement seat). I declined the conversationagain. But the rant continued. It took five minutes for the ranting to stop.
The incident, so similar to things I'd done myself, gave me an opportunity to examine the nature of Christian obsessiveness. It is all based on 'being right.' That's something they have to keep proving to themselves .
Such an obsessiveness is a sign of mental illness.
the desert areas of central australia, the so-called 'red heart' of the nation, still has a significant population of original australians.
and many of them seem to have difficulty with the law.*.
that's a very brief and simplistic introduction to this video of prison guards in the alice springs jail, manhandling a young boy.
Interesting comments. Thanks everyone for some intelligent thoughts.
I posted the incident, as I wondered how it may develop, in comparison to the threads on young black Americans, and the current controversies in the USA that bear some similarities and many differences to the Aussie situation.
Many Indigenous Australians do 'make it' in contemporary Australian society. And, even in JW society. 'Uncle Bruce,' posted on XJW sites for a long time with some insightful thoughts. I've also heard of a family in Sydney's west. And others in various places. In northern Queensland there are many Torres Strait Islanders who are JWs (and probably some XJWs-grin) who come from the islands between Cape York peninsula and Papua, and are usually grouped, for administrative purposes, with Indigenous Australians.
zeb raised an interesting point, in his comment:
saying "he held to kid down with all his weight" is dramatic but quite untrue. and, is a point being made here that that kid was Aboriginal? He is the palest indigenous i have ever seen if he is. I seriously doubt that footage is from the Northern territory.
I see no reason to doubt the ABC's statement or the belief of the people in the report, that counts the boy as Indigenous. But your comment raises the question, just who counts as an Indigenous Australian? For the benefit of anyone not familiar with the issue, there's a heap of emotion in the question. Why? Well, imho, many people are upset at the fact that while Indigenous Australians form 3% of the population, about 6% of government expenditure goes to Indigenous Australians. Broken down, that is $43,449 per person in 2012-13 financial year (compared to an average of $20,900 per person for other Australians, in the same year). And yet, as those who complain about the expenditure, there are such poor results, and the destructive behaviour evident in the video is common.
So how is an Indigenous Australian identified. There have been a number of legal decisions on this, but the result is this:
The Australian Bureau of Statistics defines an Indigenous person as a person of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent who identifies as an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander and is accepted as such by the community in which he or she lives. There are three components to the definition: descent; self-identification; and community acceptance.
and, here are some words from Indigenous people themselves.
We are the Indigenous peoples of Australia — Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Aboriginal people are those whose traditional cultures and lands lie on the mainland and most of the islands, including Tasmania, Fraser Island, Palm Island, Mornington Island, Groote Eylandt, Bathurst and Melville Islands.
The Torres Strait Islands lie between the northern tip of Cape York in Queensland and the south-west coast of Papua New Guinea. The Torres Strait Islanders have many cultural similarities with the peoples of Papua New Guinea and the Pacific. ...
The term 'Aboriginal' has become one of the most disputed in the Australian language.
The Commonwealth definition is social more than racial, in keeping with the change in Australian attitudes away from racialist thinking about other peoples. An Aboriginal person is defined as a person who is a descendent of an Indigenous inhabitant of Australia, identifies as an Aboriginal, and is recognised as Aboriginal by members of the community in which he or she lives. [The same three components, descent, self-identification and community acceptance, are used for Torres Strait Islanders.]
This definition is preferred by the vast majority of our people over the racial definitions of the assimilationist era. ...
Link (for the above): http://www.whatworks.edu.au/1_1_1.htm
How then, can a 'white' looking boy be counted as an Indigenous Australian? I can only generalise about the boy in this way. There must be very few fully 100% Indigenous Australians in Australia. In the 19th century it was common for young white settlers to have a bit of "black velvet" as they were growing up. And, its still common. The boy is likely the child of a 'mixed blood' (awful term) and a white looking male. The male could have 'gone missing' soon after conception and the boy in question then raised in an Indigenous community. He may, not yet, personally identify as Indigenous, but he likely will.
To be honest, I likely have some indigenous background (from the 19th C). I believe that at least one grandmother was part Indigenous.
So that's my explanation of how the boy can look white, and still be an Indigenous Australian.
so i am the weird case that i still believe in the jehovah's organization.
there are a couple of things that stop me from going.
is there anyone else out there that still believes?
For what it's worth Dewey79, I ask the question, what is wrong with being gay?
There was a recent diatribe by a governing body member against gays? But the only difference between gay people and those of who claim to be sexually "straight," is who they sleep with at night. Some may be bad, but most are good people.
My GAYXJW friend, a good friend btw, is one of the best people you could hope to meet. If he was still a witness and he and his male partner were accepted in the congregation, I'm sure they would be regarded as one of the finest families in the congregation. My friend is chairman of the owner's corporation for his apartment block, a job no one else wants. Its a voluntary position (no pay) and all you get is winges etc from "straight" people. His partner (again without pay) does all the gardening and manages to keep a pleasant environment around the building.
Another example. The sad murder of a cafe manager (Tori Jackson) in the recent siege by a mentally disturbed Iranian refugee in Sydney. This young man has been universally praised, both from the way he did his work and the way he conducted himself. Everyone who knew him, has nothing but praise for him, and it seems he gave his life to allow others the chance to escape.
And yet, he was gay. That a JW/GB member could say such stupid things about good gay people would not inspire respect in me (anymore) for that organisation.
It is not hard to find good gay people. The University lecturer who inspired me to spend the end of my life in (real) study was gay, and respected by his peers and students alike.
Something is wrong in an organisation that cannot recognise goodness, just because these good people love someone of the same sex.
Here's Tori Jackson's partner speaking of his sadness at his lover's death.
and
the desert areas of central australia, the so-called 'red heart' of the nation, still has a significant population of original australians.
and many of them seem to have difficulty with the law.*.
that's a very brief and simplistic introduction to this video of prison guards in the alice springs jail, manhandling a young boy.
Or, did the prison authorities just do the best they could with a difficult young boy:
'I will not tolerate young people spitting on my staff'
But the NT's Corrections Commissioner said his staff handled themselves appropriately under difficult circumstances.
"You've got to look at the context of the issue, this about restraining some who was threatening self harm and I support the actions of the officer.
"This young fellow... had a propensity to spit on staff and throw bodily fluids", he said.
"One of the things he did quite regularly was spit on staff, so the action taken was to prevent him doing that while they were putting him into the safety gown."
Commissioner Middlebrook said the officers needed to maintain order in youth detention.
"We have to mange these people when they don't behave," he said.
"No-one likes to us these sorts of methods, but if these young people don't behave then there are things we have to do.
"I will not tolerate young people spitting on my staff, I will not tolerate them throwing bodily fluid or weapons, and if the staff need to constrain those people, that is what they have to do."
the desert areas of central australia, the so-called 'red heart' of the nation, still has a significant population of original australians.
and many of them seem to have difficulty with the law.*.
that's a very brief and simplistic introduction to this video of prison guards in the alice springs jail, manhandling a young boy.
If you've watched the video and read the text, what do you think?
Is the Children's Commissioner correct, when he says:
"I can't say anything about the legality or otherwise of what I've seen, but I'm appalled from what I see from a practice perspective", he said.
"There is no physical intervention training that authorises that sort of manoeuvre.
"There should be no constricting or holding of the neck because it is extremely dangerous," Mr Bath said.
Dr Bath acknowledged the incident involved a child who had threatened self-harm, but said the guards' actions were not an appropriate way to address the situation.
"This aggressive and humiliating response is the way that is dealt with," he said.
"I just find that incredibly sad in this day and age, that this is the response we provide to a young person in need.
He said anyone subjected to the kind of treatment shown in the footage would be physically and emotionally harmed.
'We all know that most of the young people that are in juvenile justice have had backgrounds of extreme trauma, these sorts of approaches to dealing with kids in distress are just going to traumatise the kids again," he said.
"We just don't needs these sorts of responses.
"I recognise that it can be very very hard with these young people, sometimes you may need to physically intervene but if that is the case it needs to be done with sensitive and care, and that is not what I see in this particular video," he said.
