culi4 minutes ago
It's incredibly difficult to do research in West Papua which is under very violent occupation by Indonesia, the US, Britain, South Korea, the Netherlands, and France. Foreign journalists and human rights monitors are basically completely barred. Much of this decades long conflict is around the US-owned Grasberg Mine
culi14 minutes ago
Cogito, who does some of the most astounding and in-depth research on global histories, just came out with an incredible documentary about the history of West Papua that changed the way I see it forever. I highly recommend it (and most of Cogito's work. Even his extensive citations are worth spending time with)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWp5904RkJY
This is an area where raising the West Papua can give you 15 years in prison.
swiftcoder3 hours ago
Really cool. I hope they succeed in establishing native rights to the forest before the logging companies make them extinct again.
RomannBami30 minutes ago
C'est vraiment super, mais faisons très attention quand même
hulitu26 minutes ago
> thought extinct for 6000 years
Does this makes sense for an English speaker ?
bryanrasmussenopa minute ago
In British English it is totally reasonable and in fact relatively elegant, in American it might take a couple of seconds to figure out what was being said and it would seem ungainly for this reason.
On the British elegance: in British English one could of course use "thought to be extinct" and in these kinds of structures it has become common as a stylistic touch to drop the helping infinitive, "to be", considering it implied.
ChrisMarshallNY15 minutes ago
I don't usually use this structure, but my mother did, and she was an awesome writer. She was British, so it may be more common, over there.
culi17 minutes ago
Yes but they could've used the word "considered" instead.
"Possum considered extinct for 6,000 years"
akk014 minutes ago
Yes, with the caveat that it's the distinct dialect of Headlinese
samatman20 minutes ago
It's a bad sentence. They mean "thought to have gone extinct 6000 years ago". But some allowance for headline constraints should be given.
triyambakam3 hours ago
I wouldn't be surprised if more such discoveries were found. Papua is, as best as I can describe it, insane.
abanana3 hours ago
Indeed, it seems the interior of the country is so little-known and so unspoiled by modern civilisation, it would be surprising if we don't have any unexpected discoveries coming out of there in the nearish future.
anon848736283 hours ago
Not to get all internet indignant about it, but the island is currently split into two countries thanks to the colonization by Indonesia. Which human rights advocates and indigenous leaders consider to be a systematic ethnic cleansing and cultural erasure of the indigenous Melanesian Papuan population. Along with an ecocide driven by a toxic mix of military occupation, corporate exploitation, and resource extraction.
The situation in West Papua is essentially one of the least recognized humanitarian and ecological tragedies slowly happening right under our noses.
culi8 minutes ago
The part people especially don't like to talk about is that Indonesia is acting as a proxy for the US, Britain, and France here. Readers of The Jakarta Method won't find this surprising but the scale here is astounding. The largest gold and copper mine in the world is here and it is owned by the US.
The US currently has 8,133.5 metric tons of gold which is more than the next 4 combined (Germany, Italy, France, and China). About 1,700 metric tonnes (out of an estimated total 4,720) has been extracted from West Papua by the US
red75prime2 hours ago
[flagged]
DoItToMe812 hours ago
The military goes in and splits up their communities by murdering them on behalf of logging and mining companies.
red75prime2 hours ago
What it has to do with the "cultural erasure" I quoted specifically? "Who owns the land" is a different problem that is not made simpler by the fact that the land is subject to tribal conflicts.
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