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Native Hawaiian Panel Withdraws Support For World's Largest Telescope
sciencehabit writes: Trustees of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA) – a state agency established to advocate for native Hawaiins — voted Thursday to withdraw their support for construction of the Thirty-Meter Telescope (TMT) on the summit of the Mauna Kea volcano. The vote follows weeks of protests by Native Hawaiians who say the massive structure would desecrate one of their most holy places. The protests have shut down construction of the telescope, which would be the world's largest optical telescope if completed. The vote, which reverses a 2009 decision to endorse the project, strikes a powerful if symbolic blow against a project that, for many native Hawaiians, has come to symbolize more than a century of assaults against their land, culture and sovereignty.
If that is acceptable, what about my claim that science is my religion, and the native Hawaiins are desecrating what I declare as holy land? Will they be forced to stop doing so too?
Probably not, which is why we shouldn't allow them to stop us for this reason just the same.
Native Hawaiians had the misfortune of living on one of the most strategically important pieces of land on the planet. That makes them a natural target for any aspiring global power.
In the grand scheme of things they were lucky to have had the USA and not some other power appropriate that land.
Just how far back into the past are you willing to go to start righting all the wrongs in the world? Every square foot of land on the planet has been invaded and occupied by an ever changing cast of characters with the most strategic pieces of land having had their borders drawn in blood more than once. And the blood letting is still ongoing right this minute in many places around the world. The entirety of human civilization has been built upon might equals right. Civilizations get built using violence and get torn down with violence and that pattern still holds true today and will most likely continue to hold true until the planet is just a big radioactive ball of lifeless dirt. So how about you go start righting some wrongs perpetrated by people who have been dead for a few hundred years but I'd advise you to build up a significant arsenal before starting on your noble quest. Or you could just be happy with the fact that a small number of US citizens exercised their rights to stop a construction project on land they would rather keep the way it is. It doesn't really matter why they were against the project but I have seen people do the exact same thing to keep a strip mall from being built on land near where they live just to keep the traffic down. No need of sacred burial grounds or state sovereignty issues to bolster their arguments.
> And who exactly should the land "revert to"? Are you going to base this on genetic tests?
Just because the answers are complicated and messy does not mean the rights of the people should be abdicated. That's the seductive logic of authoritarianism.
Now, if the USA officially endorsed the philosophy that "might makes right" your ideas would have some standing. But we do not. That is one of the reasons we believe ourselves to be better than countries like North Korea, Russia and China. Perhaps you would prefer living in a place like that?
As a haole[1] living in Hawai`i, I took the time to learn the history and some of the language.
You can't possibly study the events of 1893 and conclude that anything but a monstrous wrong was committed. (I'm writing a novel called "No keia la, no keia po" and to write it I had to read extensively about those days.)
I don't know how to right that wrong. The Hawaiian sovereignty movement has its own ideas, though I don't know how practical those ideas may be. But I do know that something really, really bad was done back then, and it shouldn't be set aside or forgotten.
[1] Today this generally means 'Caucasian' and is sometimes used in a derogatory manner, but in the Hawaiian language, it actually means 'foreigner' without judgmental overtones.
> Seriously, I know this whole campaign is a scam whipped up by the Greens.
You are a fucktard.
Every telescope built on that mountain has been protested. The problem has been that the people protesting are the weakest among us. It took the advent of wide-spread social media for their voices to be heard.
if the USA officially endorsed the philosophy that "might makes right" your ideas would have some standing. But we do not.
Have you seen our national seal? An eagle with arrows and olive branches. We dictate the terms of peace because we have the weapons to do so.
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