Month: May 2021

Decades ago – but not too many – science fiction writers used to hypothesize, speculate,  write fiction on what child  minding robots might be like.  Did they ever come to be.

Well here they are.

And they are so different to what was expected or imagined that it seems hardly anyone even realises they’re here.

But who looks after children any more?

Where are all the bored, idle children, meat for the devil ‘finding work for idle hands’ ?   Children ‘up to mischief’ ?

Children whining they’ve got nothing to do.  Children complaining their toy isn’t as good as the neighbour’s toy?

Children always getting in your way wanting to help and see what you’re doing?

Children constantly coming up with schemes for something new they want to do, with our without you?

Where are the children?

In the parks? In the streets?  Hanging around the kitchen? In the lounge?  In the backyard?

Nope.  Gone.

Where are they?  Sitting around somewhere unobtrusive and playing with a smartphone or a laptop or a computer.

Where they’ll easily spend half a day given the chance.  12 hours, no problem.

Day after day after day.

I’ve seen it and tested it.  A whole two weeks school holiday and two children who spent the whole time doing that: ‘interacting’ with their phones, computers, whatever.

And those phones, laptops, computers – they all talk to each other, via the internet, don’t they?

And they talk to other computers: ‘servers’  that no one has ever seen (of us) and which serve up all kinds of stuff:  games, movies, current affairs, porn, education…. everything.

So it turns out there’s really just one great big ‘computer’ or ‘cybermachine’ to which all the kids are connected.

And it looks after them,  tends, apparently, to their every need for hours and hours and days and days on end…

A child minding robot.

A global child minding robot.

And it has taken our children like the pied piper and, unlike the pied piper, it will never give them back.

But it is peaceful without them, isn’t it?

 

 

Indigenes have a magnificent boon denied the rest of us.

They have a guaranteed home, a place, property in the nation.

We have no such thing.  We can pay millions for a home and if we don’t continually pay the taxes and charges eventually it’ll be sold up to pay them.

Hence whatever we call ‘home’ is only ever on loan to us.  We are leasing it.

But indigenes have common land granted to them upon which they can very largely live as they wish.

In whatever kind of home they choose to build.

And they’ ll never get put off that land,  thrown out of that home.

That’s generally true I think.  It follow from this being ‘tribal’ land belonging to them and from which they can ban access to anyone else.

The situation gets very complicated of course because it is a whole industry making profits from this situation and these people and organisations and offices and officers and publications abound.

And you can read them until your eyes fall out and you still won’t really know what’s going on.  Except that quite obviously there’s a hell of a lot of people doing fine out of this.

Here’s one:  The National Indigenous Australians Agency.  I won’t put the link here because the system will make it open up right here in the middle of my text.

But it  mentions all kinds of things and gives me the impression that there could be communities where housing is not free.  Well I know there are.

And I suppose it could even be that not paying rent could cause the council in such a place to tell the occupiers they’ll have to get out.

I doubt that they’d pay rates anywhere because that’s a tax on the ‘value’ of the land and and that isn’t traded wouldn’t have a value in that way.

But the same thing: if they didn’t pay the rates perhaps they’d be ordered out, kinda ‘sold up’ as we would be.

But in either case, if true, the people ‘ordered out’ find themselves standing on a land they own. That they are said to own. That you and I are banished from.

And right there and then they can start building whatever they like, one assumes, all the way from a wurley to a shed to a shack to a home…  wherever they like.

Leave aside the question of any hassles they may get from their local ‘council’  (a western imposition on their traditional life) or from , more properly you’d assume,  the tribe as a whole in the traditional sense,  for we know nothing of this and don’t much care.

What we know is that the land is ‘theirs’ in a communal sense of the most basic kind: i.e. each and every member of the community can take as they wish.

We don’t have that communal sense any more.  Our nation is ‘ours’ in a communal sense that doesn’t allow of us helping ourselves.

But we assume they still cling the more closely to the original meaning of the word and the original habits of human beings.

So to our mind at least any aboriginal on tribal land always has a ‘home’ on that land whereas we don’t  on our land.

And that’s a root difference of the most important kind.

That’s a boon of the most enormous size.

Now here’s a link to that agency as an example of the agencies that exist.  You’ll see here they claim that aboriginals have influence over 40% of Australia’s land mass.

Well what do you know.  It hasn’t automatically opened up.  I think it will if I make it a link.  I didn’t realise/remember that I must choose to do that.

Well I won’t.  If you are interested to look then cut and paste.

🙂

https://www.niaa.gov.au/indigenous-affairs/land-and-housing