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Protesters Block Effort To Restart Work On Controversial Hawaii Telescope
sciencehabit writes: An attempt to restart construction on what would be one of the world's largest telescopes was blocked yesterday, after state authorities escorting construction vehicles clashed with protesters blockading the road to the summit of Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano. Officers from Hawaii's Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR), and construction workers for the Thirty-Meter Telescope (TMT), turned back from the summit shortly after noon Wednesday, citing concerns for public safety after finding the road blocked by boulders. The withdrawal followed several hours of clashes with Native Hawaiian protesters blockading the road, culminating in the arrests of 11 men and women, including several protest organizers. The protesters have said the $1.4 billion TMT would desecrate sacred land.
$Bignum will appease the gods.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
They block the very thing that would likely keep the area underdeveloped. I think it likely they actually want more development and more money.
The governor of Hawaii tried a compromise where they would decomission 4 old telescopes, to be able to build this new one.
It was rejected.
My suggestion is, ante up on the compromise. Promise to build the new one on the site of one of the old ones. In other words, don't create any more development on undeveloped land, which seems to be a big part of the what the protestors object to.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
You have an interesting viewpoint. I (too?) live in Hawai`i and I can agree with some of it.
But one thing often said here by those in favor of continuing with the TMT is that the ancient Hawaiians themselves, as master celestial navigators, would have readily embraced something that advanced scientific knowledge. Is the idea of the TMT out of line with Hawaiian spiritual practice? As I understand it, not at all.
There are already about a dozen telescopes atop the mountain. Will one more desecrate the `aina (land) so much more? I'm not qualified to answer that, but it's hard to believe that it's such a make-or-break issue.
Fundamentally, it isn't the telescope or the `aina or spiritual practices that make up the issue. Instead, it seem that it's about an indigenous people resenting the very real slights and persecutions of the past and projecting them into the present; it's also about the Hawaiian sovereignty movement. But in today's Hawai`i, it is most certainly not the haole (general meaning today of Caucasian, though that's not really what the word means) who rules and runs the show.
There are over a dozen telescopes at the same site where they intend to build the TMT, some of which have been there since the late 60s. Their complaints that their "most sacred site will be desecrated" seem to be a bit late. I think there has already been an agreement to remove quite a few of the current telescopes to revert a significant portion of the site to a more natural state. There is another larger mountain on the same island, something tells me if they began building telescopes on that mountain it would suddenly become a "most sacred site". This to me smells much more like a NIMBY group using vague religious/cultural references to try to get there way.
I worship giant mirrors, you insensitive clod!
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
That sad thing is this isn't even all native Hawaiians or even a majority. It's just a small minority of extremely loud native Hawaiians. Plenty of native Hawaiians have no problem with the observatories and actually want them built
The protesters are claiming things like pollution from the telescope will kill fish in Hilo bay. WTF? You can't even sneeze on the MK summit w/o a permit. All the facilities up there get regular inspections, and can get in trouble for even a wayward piece of trash. Construction vehicles must be parked on plastic to catch oil drips. Not so on the rest of the island. Hell, when they change the oil in cars around here, they just dump the oil on the ground. They don't give a damn. Yet they'll claim the telescopes are killing fish half way across the island? They claim it's a watershed, yet the site's chosen b/c of 300 days/year of clear skies, and how dry it is?
Hmph. Nutcases.
i had no idea simply being born gave you property rights.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
The protesters call themselves kanaka, the working class of precolonial Hawaii. Did you know that in that culture only the ali'i, the hereditary nobility, were permitted to go above the treeline on Mauna Kea? Thus by the laws of their own culture, the protesters at the 9,000 ft level, are there illegally.
Just because someone is self desecrating and a walking slab of lard does not mean they don't have a valid argument. Your logic is fallacious.
What law gives the government the right to destroy sacred land?
From http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
I live in california where we always have some group of hairy drugged out morons protesting something. And the construction companies out here just expect it.
They plan for it... they say"well, we need this much cement, this many men, so many machine... and oh yeah, bolt cutters and an overtime budget to bring people in at midnight to do the job when all the hippies are sleeping.
The college campuses for example can't knock down trees on the premises during the school year. So they wait until the summer break then knock the trees back. The hippies come back and possibly see a stump. No discussion. No protest of consequence.
In Canada they had a bridge that needed to be widened. And some trees to the right of the bridge needed to be taken down. Of course the fucking trees were swarming with dreadlocked buffoons. So the city said "you win, we won't take the trees down, everyone go home"... hippies cleared out... and at midnight that very night the city just cut all the trees down that were in the way of the bridge.
And this is what the social discussion is at this point.
The stupid mountain in question is covered with fucking telescopes. Go up there and look at it. There are loads. Saying "oh not one more or it will anger our impotent god!'... please.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Native Americans and Native Hawaians aren't really related. But they both caused lots of extinctions when they arrived, and if they did less than the West it's largely because they had less capability to do anything. What makes you think either was a good steward?
You really are a monumentally stupid cunt, aren't you?
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
If my church were being torn down for a telescope, I would of course protest.
However, I would protest when they were first tearing it down in 1967, and not wait until 37 years later, in 2004, to start protesting.
They've only been protesting about how holy the site is since about 2004. When it benefitted them in ways other than piety for them to do so. This is about trying to garner international attention for the monarchist movement in Hawaii, who would like to bring back the Kingdom of Hawaii, and are still pissed off about the deposition of Queen Liliuokalani, and the effective annexation of Hawaii in 1893.
Protesting a telescope gets media attention, even though there are already 13 telescopes on the site, operated by 11 nations, and they are in fact already the largest astronomical observatory on the planet. The only thing new about this one is that it was easier to latch onto the media attention, since the telescope in question was going to be very large, and was therefore already getting media attention.
Of course, assuming this was granted (thus setting the precedent for all non extinct indian nations to reclaim their lands within the U.S. as well), there would immediately be internecine warfare as to *who*, of the 10 groups claiming to have the "rightful" king or queen among their members, got to be the "official" one.
See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Okay. We've sued and lost.
We've sued again and lost.
We've appealed to every political figure available and lost.
We've tossed up every roadblock imaginable and lost.
So now, despite what the law says and the fact that it's obvious other people want this, we're still going to interfere and be assholes because we didn't get our way.
At this point, I'm with the social darwinists. Just roll over the fuckers. You'll be doing the species good by ridding it of obvious mental defectives.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!