Hundreds form chain at University of Hawaii to protest Thirty Meter Telescope

[BumRushDaShow]

45. You continue to force your perspective

I'm still waiting for an explanation of how this telescope is going to utterly wipe out native Hawaiian culture. What I see is a largely-uninhabited remote building on a very large mountain.

And this response reveals the pure arrogance of the argument. What you describe as a "largely-uninhabited" and "on a very large mountain" is your perception, and entirely dismisses the perception of the people who live in the area, and whose ancestors lived there for generations. What you see as bare rock and scrub, others feel a connection to - perhaps a shape that invokes imagery described in stories passed on from generation to generation about the area that guided folks towards respect for the land and to gently warn of hazards. There were most likely stories (folklore) that you or I may never have heard about, as we are not native.

As an example, Lake Nyos in Cameron, where local folklore had warned against going near the place,
yet not heeding it in later times, resulted in the deaths of over 1700 because of what was found as a natural phenomena that periodically released CO2 in the atmosphere, and in the lake (literally causing the lake to acidify as well).

Known locally as "the Bad Lake," Lake Nyos, located in the Northwest Region of Cameroon, Africa, carried a folklore of danger, and tales were spoken of an evil spirit which emerged from the lake to kill all those who lived near it. This legend contained the memory of a very real threat.

http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/lake-nyos-the-deadliest-lake-in-the-world

In essence, continuing to add more and more to that landscape essentially alters it and erodes a culture's imagery and (usually "oral&quot history that evolved about it. When you wipe out a culture's folklore and history, you essentially wipe THEM out. You don't need to physically genocide a people to culturally or psychologically do the same to them. As an African American, so much of my own ancestral history was similarly purged that we, as a lost people here in the U.S., were essentially "wiped out", and continue to struggle to this day regarding who we are by not knowing where we came from.

Rather than fight and attack some of the "myths", really listening to them might help advance the cause of science as it essentially serves, like the memorized stories and genealogies spoken by the African Griot, to "see back in time" and perhaps identify some things that (the European version of) "science" might miss.

Superstitious bullshit is superstitious bullshit, no matter whose superstition.

How is what they are protesting impacting you personally and your survival in any way, regardless of how you label it? It seems any perceived "set back" in life if no telescope was built there, or if feedback be permitted by the people native to there, would somehow result in something devastating to your existence. And as such, this somehow justifies the use denigrating terms to express the disagreement.

Primitivist bullshit is based on the idea that everything was just fine and fucking dandy before humans developed the scientific method and industrial civilization, and that any advance beyond ancient farming and eating roots to treat illnesses is an abomination onto the world.

This applies to pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nuclear power, genetic engineering, and really any advancement more recent than the wheel.

And this statement is the perfect example of hyperbolic invocation of supremacy that again, completely misses the point and goes off on a tangent.

The TMT is being constructed on Mauna Kea because it's one of the only spots in the Northern Hemisphere with reliably clear weather and minimal light pollution.

Not because "hyuck hyuck let's build shit guys."

And the decision to put it there conveniently left out forming a partnership with the people who live there. Imagine that. If you want "clear weather", I have personally (maybe not here on DU) promoted putting a telescope on the far side of the moon or in a geostationary orbit of the sun beyond the moon, and you eliminate the atmospheric distortions.