Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

Funnily enough I was going to say the opposite. Apparently only white people have enough privilege to allow getting mad about Halloween costumes rather than real issues. We're looking at peak First World Problems.

I think that confuses “getting mad” with acknowledging an issue. I’m not mad about cultural appropriation, but I think it’s worth pointing out. I am privileged enough to have time to address the issue, so I can put my privilege to good use. Lastly, the idea of cultural appropriation didn’t originate with white people, but among (I believe) postcolonial theorists, many of whom are people of color. But I could be wrong.
 
I think that confuses “getting mad” with acknowledging an issue. I’m not mad about cultural appropriation, but I think it’s worth pointing out. I am privileged enough to have time to address the issue, so I can put my privilege to good use. Lastly, the idea of cultural appropriation didn’t originate with white people, but among (I believe) postcolonial theorists, many of whom are people of color. But I could be wrong.

http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095652789

Looks like there's no conclusive origination, but Coutts-Smith appears to be white - not sure about Michael North.

The wiki on cultural appropriation is pretty hilarious. It gives a definition based on majority/minority oppression, and then gives lots of examples of it which do not involve majority/minority relationships, but often among national equals and in both directions among intranational classes.
 
But for what purpose and in what way, I guess is my main concern.
Speaking of systems of control, Asia is pretty high on that list. China, Japan, Singapore--they got that shit nailed down.

I really just don't think it matters. Leftists are the new eternal buzzkills, they're so insufferable and overly political that they try to ruin people's Halloween fun because of some clothing, usually worn by little kids let's be honest here. And furthermore it's a non-issue to the people from the country the costume appropriates from.

I'm not really sure how the systems of control are relevant in their reactions to examples of cultural appropriation. There are videos on Youtube showing the reactions over in those countries and it's overwhelmingly "it looks cute" or "I like that our culture is appreciated in other places."

Ah, good points--cowboys at least, for sure. But I kind of feel like mostly white people dress up as cowboys... no? And furthermore, there were real black and Latino cowboys (maybe not Asian cowboys, but I'm not really sure).

Well, in a majority white country, mostly white people dress up as everything. And yes there were real black and Latino cowboys, were there also not white people living in China or Mexico? That justification for minority kids dressing up as vikings or cowboys can easily be made for white kids wearing ponchos or oriental dresses.

You're right that it only goes one way, but this is where my progressive indoctrination comes into play and I have to point out that the modern image of the cowboy is part of the commodification system that produced all other cultural costumes. It goes one way because of that dynamics. White people don't care about it because they don't have to.

That's my take anyway.

Somewhat misses my point. It only goes one way which also implies that non-whites are never held accountable for appropriation of other non-white cultures. Also as per Dak's comment which he beat me to saying, it seems that the people who care about this non-issue are overwhelmingly white people and more specifically people who are very progressive of any race in the west. You have 12 progressive Japanese-Americans losing their minds over something and then you have people in Japan asking what the Japanese think about it and the two reactions couldn't be more different.

I don't like the whole "you're an Uncle Tom" mentality but tbh it applies much more to westernized progressive minorities than it does [insert black conservative thinker here].
 
The funny thing is that the official narrative is that "Russian trolls" are using these issues to divide the US. I don't think any Russian trolls are needed. They are only accelerating. SJWs and m/Marxists, while screaming about collusion, are acting in concert with Russian trolls.
 
I was going to quote CIG, but I feel like the discussion of cultural appropriation is gravitating toward very specific and quite unhelpful examples such as costumes, which I realize I brought up. I don't think this helps to address the original comparison of cultural appropriation to a kind of "open borders" mentality, i.e. the liberal transmission of cultural forms across cultural boundaries.

I feel like I shouldn't have used costumes because it really doesn't get at the complexity of cultural appropriation and is too hot-button. The actual scholarship that I've read on cultural appropriation isn't on fashion but on literature, and what happens here is far from the kind of cultural appreciation that some argue for in fashion. In literary history, cultural appropriation usually takes the form of (generally speaking) the transmission of specific texts across cultural boundaries which are substantially altered--linguistically (obviously), ideologically (less obviously), and sometimes formally (slightly more obviously)--so as to obscure or sometimes erase the original cultural function of a particular work. When this happens, the work comes to represent certain values that may not correlate to those of the culture of origin, and that may in fact be used in opposition to the culture of origin.

Furthermore, this describes cultural appropriation not only in terms of white and non-white, but in its more appropriate context of cultural domination. In this respect, we can observe cultural appropriation occurring between, for instance, China and Japan, or Africa and France, or black folk culture and white American music (to give a few examples). It isn't always between white and non-white, and this isn't the sole focus of those who write about cultural appropriation in academia.

I'm concerned with the ways that appropriation alters the values associated with a particular cultural form in such a way that the culture of origin suffers due to the values perceived/imposed by the appropriating culture. I do believe that can happen with costumes, but the scholarship I've encountered deals with literature. Obviously, literary criticism attempts to overcome (or at least acknowledge) these barriers as best it can, but it still reflects on historical interpretations/translations, which gave rise to (for example) Western myths of the "noble savage" and the "primitive pacifist"--both of which have been shown to function in ways that reduce, demean, and deprive the cultures to which they're attributed, and that reveal some underlying proclivities of Western cultural values.

As I said, costumes don't quite get at this less visible yet, in many ways, more extensive network of appropriation.

As this relates to cultural appropriation = open borders (for the sake of argument): I think this is true. But as I've said in other arguments recently, open borders also correlate to the most faithful realization of a free market, that being a global free market. This is not to say, however, that in such a scenario all parties will remain equal--far from it. In a system of purely deregulated capital, wealth will absolutely accumulate in certain areas and vanish from others, leaving certain parties in the dust. Likewise, cultural appropriation may indeed resemble open borders, but it also inevitably yields inequity among the parties appropriated.
 
Last edited:


There's an irony here in that a legitimate critique of JP involves dismissing the basis for the broad-based post-modern critique. Not that this is new or anything.
 
I remember when that article was published. I didn't pay much attention to it, honestly. I haven't read Nagel's book, but I think the critics/skeptics are right. It strikes me as an instance of someone retroactively imposing necessity onto an evolutionary contingency. Nagel's right that, in a strictly evolutionary sense, the emergence of consciousness was highly unlikely--that there is a virtual infinity of alternative paths that evolution could have taken (not to mention the universe). Teleology explains away the unlikelihood, but at the cost of ignoring entire blackboards of chaos mathematics that support the "fluke" theory. Every single branch of evolutionary existence is (or at least began) as a highly unlikely, highly unpredictable phenomenon. It all could have been otherwise.

Coincidentally, that article pairs nicely with Peter Watts's recent little invective against Bernardo Kastrup's recent article in The Journal of Consciousness Studies: https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=8255
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Dak and CiG
yo @Dak, i heard you calculated and made up an IQ score for yourself in the 160's(lmao) and then got called out on in later when you said that you never actually took an IQ test. :lol: Is this true?

Not to my knowledge. Unless I drunk posted some bullshit like 8-10 years ago. It's true I have not taken an IQ test, but I have taken other tests with high correlations with IQ test results and I also give IQ tests, and my best informed estimate is in the range of 125-130.

Edit: I think I posted about GRE correlations, and I have a super high IQ correlation with the verbal subtest, but not with the quantitative, and I explained that. If someone wants to run with a single sentence and ignore everything else that's on them.
 
Not to my knowledge. Unless I drunk posted some bullshit like 8-10 years ago. It's true I have not taken an IQ test, but I have taken other tests with high correlations with IQ test results and I also give IQ tests, and my best informed estimate is in the range of 125-130.
so you're saying you never made up an IQ score for yourself? Or at least you don't remember doing so?
 
Last edited: