Just when I thought Social Justice Warriors couldn’t delve any deeper into the absurd
Student leaders have pulled the mat out from 60 University of Ottawa students, ending a free on-campus yoga class over fears the teachings could be seen as a form of “cultural appropriation.”
Jennifer Scharf, who has been offering free weekly yoga instruction to students since 2008, says she was shocked when told in September the program would be suspended, and saddened when she learned of the reasoning.
Staff at the Centre for Students with Disabilities believe that “while yoga is a really great idea and accessible and great for students … there are cultural issues of implication involved in the practice,” according to an email from the centre. […]
The centre goes on to say, “Yoga has been under a lot of controversy lately due to how it is being practiced,” and which cultures those practices “are being taken from.”
The centre official argues since many of those cultures “have experienced oppression, cultural genocide and diasporas due to colonialism and western supremacy … we need to be mindful of this and how we express ourselves while practising yoga.” […]
Ahimakin said the student federation put the yoga session on hiatus while they consult with students “to make it better, more accessible and more inclusive to certain groups of people that feel left out in yoga-like spaces. … We are trying to have those sessions done in a way in which students are aware of where the spiritual and cultural aspects come from, so that these sessions are done in a respectful manner.”
In related matters, don’t you dare be caught White-While-Eating-Foreign …
But, food is appropriated when people from the dominant culture – in the case of the US, white folks – start to fetishize or commercialize it, and when they hoard access to that particular food.
When a dominant culture reduces another community to it’s cuisine, subsumes histories and stories into menu items – when people think culture can seemingly be understood with a bite of food, that’s where it gets problematic.
It’s also harmful when the dominant culture controls the economic and material resources to produce that food for their own consumption and profit.
There are some people who just did not receive enough beatings as a child.
****************************************************************
Heh.
.@fmanjoo @rsmccain @KevinNR
To be fair, yoga pants are aesthetically offensive… pic.twitter.com/HfxFVAuAeL
— Evi L. Bloggerlady (@MsEBL) November 22, 2015
indian girls and indian guys aren’t even from the same planet in terms of being easy in the eyes
this is why when they accidentally spawn a handsome guy they make him do bollywood films til his gums bleed
I hereby demand all non-whites immediately vacate all colleges and universities in the US. As a creation of white culture, it is clearly cultural appropriation for non-whites to think they can just come in and enjoy our system of higher learning.
instrumental appropriation
Greetings:
I could use some help on my “cultural appropriation” analysis for the following:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5ekB4l-6wg
My wife and I ate at a Mexican restaurant tonight, and nobody could do a thing about it, because the people who own the restaurant don’t care as much about white, black or brown, as about green.
Since they are therefore inauthentic Mexicans, I appropriated nothing by eating there.
To the SJWs shrieking in outrage I say, “Chupa mi pinga.”
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I’m part Scot … I will now demand proof of Scot’s ancestry from everyone I see wearing plaid.
I consider “cultural appropriation” to be on par with making us feel guilty about breathing out carbon dioxide. All peoples take from the cultures they encounter. It’s been that way since Oog met Moog from the other side of the valley.
I’ve long had a simple problem trying to understand what culture is, partly because it doesn’t seem to be anything in particular as the term is applied to nearly everything or anything (supply your own examples here). Nevertheless, it does also seem to me that in some weird sense people who use the term culture are by that very act expropriating something from another people or group; something “invented” somewhere around the 17th century by Europeans in an attempt to help explain the world of human beings. But hey, let’s all just keep on keeping on without ever a thought what the hell it is we’re keeping on about. Y’know?
Greetings, sdferr: ( @ November 22, 2015 at 9:17 am ):
My father was a truck driver in New York City’s construction industry. He thought that culture was the behaviors one found acceptable.
That puts the onus or burden on each individual then, 11B40, even to the extent that the “behavior” of defining culture as a term will fall within the class. Which, again, seems strange, if culture had ever been intended to get it’s metaphorical arms around anything larger than an individual person. But we’ve all heard of pottery, say, or dance or music practices of a people or group as objects of interest to say **such and such or this and that are indices of one culture or another** (I leave aside so many categories of interest there, like dress, grooming, birth and death celebrations, etc.).
Culture in this context would include the food you eat and how you prepare it, the clothes you wear, the dances you have developed, and the music and musical instruments you create.
Yep, I guess. I’m a bad guide on the subject though, since I haven’t devoted sufficient energy to make my way through the wilderness I perceive there, as well as have a bad attitude, a mistrustful and uncharitable one, toward the subject “culture” in general. A bad attitude to start with, I mean, which only seems to worsen as the term is evermore abused as I find it. It’s gotten so bad that I play an internal game with myself making a substitution of other terms when I encounter culture being used or misused, just to see whether another term can make more sense of the idea being articulated. And worse, I think now and again I succeed. It’s horrible.
I condemn the shameless cultural appropriators who only wear mustaches for one month out of the year.
If it helps, this story I defines the concept of culture in pretty stark terms.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/for-the-first-majority-muslim-us-city-residents-tense-about-its-future/2015/11/21/45d0ea96-8a24-11e5-be39-0034bb576eee_story.html
That’s the thing I think, culture is more a concept than a scientifically discoverable thing. Like when you talk about an individual’s “personality”. You can quantify a individuals personality to some extent, but the concept of having a personality in the first place is harder to pin down. To me “culture” is the personality of a community.
Oh, I hasten to add that by “community” I’m talking about whatever group one identifies with, not necessarily the general population you reside with.
So if I’m socially isolated and self-identify as an island, do I get to define my own culture, or do I have to share it with other islands?
The metaphor of personality is kind of congenial to me, as for instance we used to hear jokes about different flavors of European nationalities (taken as collectives) told comparing them as though they had personalities associated with distinct types of occupation, or the characteristics of the cars they designed for instance.
The Post article on the other hand seems to me to use culture about three or four different (and possibly incompatible) ways, in general a hopeless mess if one were to attempt to extract a cohesive definition of culture from the tattered remains of linguistic, political and religious differences on parade in Hammtrack.
McGehee, I guess choosing to isolate yourself from any community is a culture unto itself, though I’m unsure if you define it, or it just IS. I also don’t know how you share isolation.
Aristotle, Politics I., 1253a2-8
Imagine there’s no dialectic
It’s easy if you can see
No right or wrong side
Guiding human history
Imagine just enough people
Not believing in false guarantees
Imagine there’s no utopia
no constructed state of mind
no hope of ideological purity
only an exhausting moral grind
Imagine all those people
Daring to have their own face…
Imagine being separate
Then choosing who you’ll join
Imagine owning what is yours
Be it food, shoes, land, or coin
Just think of winning and losing
Because of decisions you made….
You may tell me I’m regressive
But you’re not nature’s chosen sons
I hope someday you’ll join us
In doing real work that needs to be done
Imagine no collective guilt
No debt to myths or dreams
No need for envy or sabotage
No submission to wanna-be kings
Imagine just enough good people
Working to survive in this world…
You may rage and shriek against me
Until your time on Earth is done.
You may tear yourself apart inside
Insisting I’m the only one.
You may say I’m a bigot
That I’m evil, selfish or insane
I hope someday you’ll join us
And lay aside your hopeless pain.
And here I thought that I was helping the Chinese couple who own and operate the Chinese restaurant from which I frequently get my lunch while at work. I had thought — silly me! — that they were in business to do something really radical like make money and support their family, but apparently I was simply oppressing them with my curry chicken order.
I denounce myself for my racial insensitivity.
Mr McGeehee wrote:
You can be a rock, you can be an island!
Like the hysterical racial attacks on Clarence Thomas or Michelle Malkin, this is *exactly* liberals ordering people to behave or not behave certain ways according to their ethnicity.
No one has ever been able to explain rationally how this is not gutter racist bigotry.
The discussion has reduced liberals to sputtering, incoherent rage rather than admit their gutter racist bigotry.
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McGehee,
I’ll raise your November with a March (mustache)
“Appropriation” is how cultures work.
Somewhere, millions of years ago, someone figured out how to make fire. The other members of his tribe used that fire to burn him at the stake for witchcraft. That was one of the first acts of cultural appropriation in human (pre-)history.
Before that, some not-quite-yet-human picked up a rock and threw it at a small animal (rabbit, squirrel, maybe even a bird) and invented hunting with weapons. Others appropriated that.
The notion that it’s “inappropriate” to copy the customs of another tribe is just silly. In a free marketplace of ideas, the good customs are copied.
But, alas, as Evan Sayet’s Unified Field Theory of Leftism states, the Left does not believe that certain customs are beneficial to those who practice them (and therefore worthy of being called “good”), so when they observe different tribes copying each others’ customs, it must not be allowed. The Victim tribes must not assimilate the customs of the Oppressor tribes, nor may the Oppressors appropriate the customs of the Victims.
Because if people could copy ideas from other cultures, then we could see that some ideas lead to better outcomes than others, and deserve to be copied, while some others lead to worse outcomes, and deserved to be scrapped. And since that does not fit into the Leftist worldview, it must be opposed at all costs.
Dead solid perfect, TM.
*Rubs chin*
So how does “cultural appropriation” compare to “gay marriage”? It appears to me that the arguments given by the left concerning cultural appropriation are similar to those given by the right concerning gay marriage.
I’ve squared the circle in my own mind, but I want to see what you folks say.
If your mustache is a microaggression, you’ve shaved too recently.
Isn’t a really long tradition of no gay marriage a bit different than a new rule that you have to give the cultural booty allegedly stolen by your ancestors back because reasons and shit?
Haven’t the gays culturally appropriated marriage from straight people?
Clearly some condemnations are in order.
There is, of course, a difference between your Culture appropriating ‘the good customs’ of another Culture for the purposes of building the strength of your Culture and appropriating a custom, such as Marriage, for the sole reason of destroying it.
The reason we even have marriage is to protect the children produced by good old-fashioned P-in-V sex. No other “sex act” can produce children* so the things that happen between two men or two women do not give the state the excuse to say it’s protecting the interests of the potential children that may be produced by a marriage.
Lesbians can get some help from a turkey baster or grit their teeth and put up with a direct insemination, but the latter is a violation of the terms of marriage. That illustrates the fundamental reason why a same-sex couple can’t “appropriate” marriage: The nature of a union between a man and one or more women (especially when all of them are presumably fertile) is different from any arrangement comprising only one gender.
This illustrates another problem leftists have. They are unable to distinguish between man-made facts like “The minimum age to buy cigarettes is ___” and “Men and women are inherently different from one another”, which leads them to try to legislate reality.
___
* Except for that one gal who got knifed in the abdomen after giving her BF a BJ (which opened a way for a sperm cell to get to the ovum before it could get dissolved in stomach acid) but that’s a one in a billion freak chance
Note that in the preceding I explicitly allow for polygamy, because many societies have recognized that as a form of marriage, while none recognized “SSM” until about yesterday in historical terms.
The reason why monogamy and polygamy can both be called “marriage” is that in both cases, the man has certain responsibilities toward his wife/wives, who in turn have responsibilities toward him, and all are responsible for the children they produce. There just isn’t a way to stretch that definition far enough to include “SSM” without stretching it to the breaking point.
The idea behind SSM is, of course, to stretch it ‘to the breaking point’ and beyond.
The Utopias dreamed-up by Ideologues [of all types] cannot come into being until those institutions and customs which hold Western Civilization together are reduced to small bits of unrecognizable rubble. This is so because all Utopias are constructed of materials that have no relation to Reality, to Life As It Is, that reject the Eternal Truth that A is always A.
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That’s actually an excellent example of the absurdity of this cultural appropriation nonsense. Tartans were invented by London advertisers for English cloth merchants marketing their wares to consumers in Scotland.
If you wanted to parody this on Saturday night live, you’d have three dweebs wearing nike, adididas and underarmor branded apparel arguing intensely over whose shoes/shirt is an authentic expression of shoeness/shirtness. The punchline would come when the preppy kid in the Izod polo shirt walks on.
Okie Dokie.
My squaring of the circle was when I realized that…
1) Nobody really insists that (say) the American version of Chinese food is exactly the same or even better than the Chinese food in China. Or that the American/Canadian version of Yoga is exactly the same or better than the version found wherever Yoga originated. Whatever was absorbed from another culture changed by being absorbed and is now something similar but different.
2) Proponents of gay marriage insist that it’s exactly the same or better than what we’ve called marriage for over 2000 years.
That’s why not too many folks were against some other state recognized pair bonding for 2 members of the same sex, as long as it was called something other than marriage. Because it was something similar but different.
YMMV.
Why did McGehee take down his youtube post?
Wasn’t getting any response, would have been stale by the time readers came back after the holiday, and it just wasn’t very good.