I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea (notnottalmud.substack.com)

46 points by networked 3 hours ago

9 comments:

by yreg a minute ago

There was a discussion on it here yesterday: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1wfdnus/why...

by itake 12 minutes ago

PNG is on my list to visit. It’s relatively complex to get to. Most flights either leave from Australia or Jakarta, they don’t run frequently enough to where you will probably spend the night in Jakarta or Australia in order to catch the flight the next day.

I visited Timor Leste earlier this year and what an interesting country

by damidekronik 6 minutes ago

Any cool facts to share about Timor Leste? My usual go to - wikipedia - does paint a rather mundane picture of it.

by nephihaha 9 minutes ago

It sounds like it is easy to get to Port Moresby (which is apparently a bit of a dump and very dangerous), but difficult to get anywhere else.

PNG has changed very rapidly. Parts of the country were in the Stone Age within living memory and are moving over.

by lifestyleguru 2 minutes ago

lol don't go there it's a trap. Civilization, despite all these people, is good.

by mike_tyson 9 minutes ago

two great films in PNG are joe leahy's neighbours and black harvest

really excellent insight into society and values there as it meets capitalism

by nephihaha 6 minutes ago

One of my parents' friends had spent a lot of time doing research in PNG as well as remote parts of South America. He was the nearest real life equivalent to Indiana Jones I've ever met. He told us some wild stories about the place. He would have been old enough to see the place when cannibalism was still around.

by karel-3d 13 minutes ago

I have read somewhere that the cannibalism claims are overrated and kind of artificially inflated by the natives. (Most natives are actually Christian.) I have not looked closely into it though.

Unrelated. We have servers across the world; one in Mount Hagen. It has by far the biggest latency in the world; so I always use it as a "benchmark"; if it works in Mount Hagen, it works everywhere.

by applfanboysbgon 27 minutes ago

I feel as though it's a bit uncouth to mention Mick Leahy's exploration and documentation in fawning terms, in material meant to introduce the subject to people who are unfamiliar, without also mentioning that he was a colonialist murderer personally responsible for the killing of dozens of the people whose land he was invading. I don't deny that the material is historically interesting, but it is nonetheless kind of gross to admire someone for making historically interesting material with his own two hands in part by killing people.

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