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Posts Tagged ‘cultural appropriation’

Cultural Appropriation

Posted by M. C. on February 5, 2024

by Walter E. Block

So what is the point of mentioning so many reductios ad absurdum? It is this. If you are not an intellectual, a member of especially an elite university, one could be excused for thinking that cultural appropriation is totally and completely unobjectionable. After all, it consists of nothing more and nothing less than people being introduced to cultures, mores, experiences, practices, accomplishments of others.

Queue, Keith Harrop

It is cultural appropriation if a black person listens to Mozart; this dead white male composer is simply not part of that person’s culture. It is cultural appropriation whenever an Oriental person tunes in to rap music; those songs are simply not part of that person’s culture. It is cultural appropriation every time a Jew eats pork; not only is this food simply not part of that person’s culture, it is proscribed by his culture, not to say religion, which, indeed, is part of culture. It is cultural appropriation when a Catholic drinks Manischewitz wine. It is cultural appropriation when a Bulgarian wears a Mexican sombrero. It is cultural appropriation when a non-Indian plays chess, since this game originated in that country. It is cultural appropriation if a non-Jew eats gefilte fish or takes advantage of the Salk polio vaccine. It is cultural appropriation if a Jew reads the New Testament. It is cultural appropriation when a Hindu benefits from the Pythagorean Theorem. It is cultural appropriation when a non-Arab utilizes and benefits from the concept of the number zero, since that insight sprang from that culture.

I could stop here. I have already made my point. But I cannot do so. This is so much fun. So, I’ll press on.

See the rest here

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Cultural Appropriation: The Nontheft of Something No One Owns | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on September 12, 2023

What they overlook is the basic economic concept of rivalrousness. My use of English—a language that isn’t my mother tongue and that I have thereby thoroughly “appropriated”—does in no way prevent another person from using English, or changing English in any which way they prefer (think teenager neologisms). My applying a decades-old recipe for tonight’s dinner in no way strips someone else from the pleasure of using that same recipe.

If all you wield are government solutions, everything looks like a private-sector nail in desperate need of a hammering.

https://mises.org/wire/cultural-appropriation-nontheft-something-no-one-owns

Joakim Book

When I was at the university, I once objected to a classmate’s lazy use of “public goods.” He had used it to favor his policy position, as a shorthand synonym of what’s good for society—only a thinly veiled euphemism for what I want to happen.

“Public goods are things that are nonrivalrous and nonexcludable,” I said, almost sputtering off a nearby economics textbook. “The ones you’re talking about are neither.”

He rolled his eyes in boredom. “Yes, yes, but that’s not what people mean when they say, ‘public goods.’”

Strangely, I think he’s right. These days, the economist’s clear and rather demanding criteria of so-called public goods are largely swept aside in favor of something like “What I think would be good for the public.” And that little linguistic slip opens up a world of economic policymaking from which we still haven’t recovered.

Everything these days are public goods. In a New York Review of Books piece by Helen Epstein we learn that money printing isn’t just important for government spending but “for improvements in health care, education, transportation, the power grid, and other public goods that might foster development.”

To proponents of government services, everything that carries even a whiff of external benefits to someone, somewhere, is therefore transformed into a “public good”—which must be provided by government. We might have excused such convictions, chalking them up to ignorance, if it weren’t for economists at the pinnacle of the profession embracing those views; Nobel Prize winner William Nordhaus is a case in point.

We have to dig about three hundred pages into Nordhaus’s book The Spirit of Green before we get an admission that government failures can be worse than the failures that ostensibly run amok in private markets. Otherwise they’re just technocratic solutions: rainbows and unicorns, public goods this, public goods that. Everything is an uncorrected externality—from the keyboards we write on to gas stations, hospitals, landlords, and the English language.

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How To Cancel Woke U

Posted by M. C. on May 31, 2023

Specifically, conservative and libertarian intellectuals should be hired until the professoriate doesn’t “look like America,” but instead thinks like America in terms of political and economic philosophy.

By Walter E. Block

American Thinker

It should not shock anyone, except for perhaps Rip Van Winkle, and even he should have long ago stopped his slumber, that our universities are now intellectual cesspools.  Political correctness, wokeism, DIE, cultural and economic Marxism, Black History Month, affirmative action, anti-racism, allyship, non-colorblind, hetero-normativity, trigger warnings, cultural appropriation reign pretty much unopposed, at least on campus.

Thank God for Governors DeSantis of Florida and Abbott of Texas.  They, along with the legislatures of a dozen or so additional states, have been trying to do something about this disgrace in academia.

But these folks are like the boy who put his finger in the hole in the dike — well intentioned, but all but powerless to keep the waters from rising and continuing to overwhelm higher education.

The first foray of the good guys was to enquire as to the amount of money spent on DIE for attacks on academic freedom.  The bad guys responded, exultantly, “less than 1%.”  They were saying, in effect, that this can hardly amount to any significant threat to the university mandate — namely, to be a bastion of open inquiry.

Nonsense on stilts.  A virus can wreak havoc on the human person, even given that it weighs far less than 1% of total body weight.  Ditto for a nail in the tire, which again accounts for an infinitesimal proportion of the car’s total weight.  A few teeny, tiny cancer cells can spell the death knell for their relatively heavy host.  In the magnificent movie The Mouse That Roared, Peter Sellers (who played pretty much all the roles) was the general of a country like Monaco or Liechtenstein, yet his army of about a dozen soldiers conquered the entire United States military (the bigger they are, the harder they fall).

The relatively few deans, provosts, and assistant and associate deans and provosts in charge of the DIE initiatives can totally undermine the academic freedom of literally thousands of professors with their threats to fire them for not toeing the leftist party line.  Endangered, also, are even those who hold tenured faculty posts.

The next missile tossed at the forces of evil on campus by Governor DeSantis was to forbid the teaching of Critical Race Theory, intersectionality, Black Lives Matter, systemic racism and sexism, the abominations of cisgendered white males, and all the other Marxist-inspired accoutrements of modern college life taught by the usual suspects.

But this too will miss its mark.

First of all, there is nothing wrong with teaching — that is, giving both sides of all debatable issues.  It is exceedingly difficult to refute these noxious doctrines if one cannot discuss them at all.

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Media Race-Baiting Americans With ‘White supremacy’ Conspiracy Theories to Hide Class Strife — Strategic Culture

Posted by M. C. on September 4, 2019

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/09/02/media-race-baiting-americans-with-white-supremacy-conspiracy-theories-to-hide-class-strife/

Robert Bridge

The establishment gatekeepers of the mainstream media are fronting White supremacists as the scourge of the land. Yet this movement must have gone deep underground because members of this pale-faced clan are incredibly difficult to track down.

Following the trajectory of Hurricane Whitey as it makes landfall and gradually turns the once lush and verdant American landscape a lighter shade of pale, one can only wonder from where this force of noxious white power first arose. Or is it just a figment of the mainstream media’s excitable imagination?

America’s best-known White Supremacists, the Ku Klux Klan, saw its heyday in the late 19th century, before greatly declining in the late 1920s. Today, they have largely been shunned from polite society and are a mere shadow of their former whiteness, with membership estimated by the ADL at less than 3,000 nationwide. Hardly a tour de force. Meanwhile, when performing a Google search on ‘White supremacist groups,’ the very first entry is an article about – yes, you guessed it – US President Donald Trump.

Dusty@DustinGiebel

the image at the end of the video Trump tweeted earlier was popular amongst the fascists of Lion Guard and the white supremacists of Vdare in 2016

View image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on Twitter
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This makes one question what all of the hype about racism and ‘White supremacy’ is really about. In early August, Fox News host Tucker Carlson called out the hysteria over White supremacy, saying it was “a hoax” thrust upon the American public to “divide the country and keep a hold on power.” The question was appropriate, yet arguably badly timed as it came just after the El Paso shooting, which so saw yet another deranged loner off his meds pen a ‘white power’ manifesto before going on a shooting spree. The media wasted no time finding connections between passages in the killer’s screed, for example, his use of the phrase “Hispanic invasion” in describing the migrants from Latin America ascending on the US border, and Donald Trump’s past warnings regarding the influx of illegals. In that sense, Carlson was right to speak his mind.

“If you were to assemble a list, a hierarchy of concerns, of problems this country faces, where would white supremacy be on the list,” he asked. “Right up there with Russia, probably.”

“This is a hoax. Just like the Russia hoax. It’s a conspiracy theory used to divide the country and keep a hold on power. That’s exactly what’s going on.”

This leads to an interesting aspect about America’s so-called race problem, specifically with regards to ‘White supremacy.’ When it is discussed in the media, the emphasis is not on conspicuous incidences of racial prejudice or violence, apart from the occasional and very horrific cases of mass shootings, but rather on what some activists imagine to be cases of racist behavior. This has opened the door to some very wild interpretations.

For example, did you know that if you practice yoga you are quite possibly a closet White Supremacist? In a report entitled, Yoga and the Roots of Cultural Appropriation, Michigan State University professor Shreena Gandhi, White people are perpetuating “white supremacy and colonialism

“This modern day trend of cultural appropriation of yoga is a continuation of white supremacy and colonialism, maintaining the pattern of white people consuming the stuff of culture that is convenient and portable, while ignoring the well-being and liberation of the Indian people,” Professor Gandhi wrote together with Lillie Wolff, a self-described “white Jewish organizer, facilitator and healer”.

Ironically, Gandi and Wolff fail to mention that millions of newly minted American citizens from foreign lands could be accused, although probably never will be, of the very same charges of “cultural appropriation” and “consuming the stuff of culture that is convenient and portable” by voluntarily deciding to live in the United States, which has welcomed with opened arms people and races of all colors and creeds. Indeed, the fact that so many foreigners continue to flock to America in droves makes all this talk about racism and White supremacists with a weakness for yoga a bit fantastic. But I digress.

Robby Starbuck

@robbystarbuck

Seattle is trying to figure out how to clean poop off their streets but A Democrat Councilman doesn’t like the idea of using a pressure washer hose because it reminds him of hoses used against civil rights activists…

You can’t make this stuff up. Insane.https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/judges-complain-its-unsafe-unsanitary-outside-county-courthouse-in-seattle/ 

From 2017: Judges complain it’s unsafe, unsanitary outside King County Courthouse in Seattle

Two judges said assaults on jurors and courthouse employees, combined with conditions, including the stench of excrement and urine, are creating a frightening atmosphere around the courthouse at…

seattletimes.com

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If yoga isn’t necessarily your cup of tea, then perhaps you are a serial milk drinker. Then you too could be a foaming at the mouth White supremacist, reveling in your lactose tolerance that is sometimes lacking among African Americans. Thus, America’s budding White supremacists are taking great pleasure drinking cow’s milk, using it as some sort of ‘white identity’ message, or so goes the disjointed argument in a New York Times’ article entitled, ‘Why White Supremacists Are Chugging Milk (and Why Geneticists Are Alarmed). After consuming this story the reader would almost think that local bars across the land are serving up cold white milk to patrons instead of beer.

But perhaps you are not a yoga practitioner or a regular consumer of white milk, but just an exceptionally bright white kid. Well, sorry, that ‘privilege’ now also comes with some very heavy strings attached, if delusional New York Mayor Bill De Blasio gets his way, the New York Times reported.

De Blasio envisions getting rid of public school programs for talented children, as they are filled “mostly with white and Asian children,” which of course carries ugly overtones of racism.

“If the mayor adopts the recommendations, elementary and middle schools would no longer be able to admit students based solely or largely on standardized exams or other academic prerequisites, and high schools would have diversity requirements.”

In other words, the incentive for bright kids to do well in school is now threatened with extinction.

Perhaps what White folks should do in order to avoid any criticism or suspicion is to just stay around the neighborhood and walk the dog. Oh wait, sorry, that mundane activity is also suspect to recrimination since White dog owners use their leashed pets to “stake out territory,” you know, like modern day Christopher Columbus’s while fraternizing with other “white owners excluding minorities.”

Soon I suspect it will even be considered unfashionable to have white teeth.

Andrew Lawrence@ndrew_lawrence

Tucker Carlson: White supremacy is “actually not a real problem in America.” Calling white supremacy and issue is “a hoax” and “a conspiracy theory used to divide the country”

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So what is the motivation behind all of this incredible nonsense with regards to racism? Part of it is certainly an effort to bolster the claim that Trump supporters are nothing more than a clan of White supremacists since much of this racist propaganda was unheard of prior to 2016. With the conspiracy theory of ‘Russiagate’ completely debunked, the Liberal mainstream media, with all of its attention on the 2020 presidential election, must conflate Trump with yet another loathsome creature, and who better than the racist?

At the same time, all this fake news about rising racism and milk-drinking White supremacists intent on walking their dogs helps to obfuscate the real problem in America which is the great class divide. As the titans of tech continue to hoard fantastic amounts of wealth, oftentimes, as with the case of Amazon and others, without paying any tax on the loot, average Americas are struggling under a mountain of inescapable debt on their homes, cars and most especially college tuition loans, which largely funded impressionable students – with heavy interest rates – to subscribe to the myth of racism in America.

The Liberal social justice warriors, intent on characterizing every White person as a racist or supremacist, are acting in accordance to the designs of the establishment elite, who rely on these misguided activists to focus the narrative far away from the most critical topic in the United States, which is not racism, but rather the great class divide.

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The simple truth of nationalism

Posted by M. C. on March 25, 2018

You can be anything you want as long as it is approved and non-Western. Gang rape in a European town square is PC, diversity correct and acceptable. You could ask Angela Merkel and the media except they don’t seem to know about that cultural proclivity. I’ll take my brand of culture appropriating, Elvis loving nationalism.

Speaking of cultural appropriation, read Myth of the Andalusian Paradise to see learn about the masters of “appropriation”.

https://aussienationalistblog.com/2018/03/24/the-simple-truth-of-nationalism/

While globalists have resources, Hollywood, the media and government policy (largely) on their side, nationalists/ identitarians/ pro European advocates have an eternally powerful tool: the truth.

Amidst smears, doxxing or physical attacks, this sincere, rooted perspective should never be forgotten. Read the rest of this entry »

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The left’s misguided obsession with ‘cultural appropriation’ – The Washington Post

Posted by M. C. on May 14, 2017

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-lefts-misguided-obsession-with-cultural-appropriation/2017/05/12/59e518bc-3672-11e7-b4ee-434b6d506b37_story.html?utm_term=.c9cfee144f9a

Indignation about appropriation is a new frontier in the ever-expanding empire of cultivated victimhood: “Marginalized” persons from a particular culture supposedly are somehow wounded when “privileged” people — those who are unvictimized or less victimized — express or even just enjoy the culture of more pure victims without their permission. Read the rest of this entry »

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