East Asian people shamelessly adopting/stealing (a debate to be had there) black American music is a huge growth industry right now. The Teriyaki Boyz were way ahead of their time.
Ironically you could argue that they’ve also appropriated the act of appropriating black culture, because that’s a foundation of white American culture
Do you believe in cultural intellectual property rights, or not?
That’s the real question posed.
hmm arguing with a straight face that racism against white people is bad because it’s a slippery slope that can lead to racism against non-white people
…I
OK separately I think racism against white people is bad because it is racism.
But also I actually think that yes, unironically this? If you officially start designating races and you treat them differently (e.g.: Affirmative action), people will follow suit by thinking of them differently.
Isn’t this just what @mitigatedchaos argues all the time, that all racism is empowered and normalized by all other racism? (And the generalized version of this for the left’s hypocrisies.)
More seriously, while being racist towards white people is bad on its own merits, either as a violation of justice - judging someone for the actions of another - or on more Utilitarian grounds, most of the people that are seriously racist against the whities aren’t going to accept those arguments.
Thus the appeal to something they might actually care about.
It’s possible to create political will out of thin air, but a lot of the time it’s in reaction to historical or material factors, and political will with those factors will have deeper roots.
It’s important to realize along with this, that most politics will occur around the margins - whether groups of white supremacists are growing or shrinking, whether swing voters shift from one party to another, and so on. Strong believers do have an effect, but it’s necessary to have raw power mass at your disposal.
As such, the question is not about “but if we be nice to our rivals, they will still be maximally evil,” but about “what’s the marginal rate that people will enter or leave our enemy’s coalition?”
Now that doesn’t mean playing along nicely all the time, but for goodness sake people should be very careful and specific in who they are targetting, and most racism is really bad at doing that.
hmm arguing with a straight face that racism against white people is bad because it’s a slippery slope that can lead to racism against non-white people
…I
OK separately I think racism against white people is bad because it is racism.
But also I actually think that yes, unironically this? If you officially start designating races and you treat them differently (e.g.: Affirmative action), people will follow suit by thinking of them differently.
Isn’t this just what @mitigatedchaos argues all the time, that all racism is empowered and normalized by all other racism? (And the generalized version of this for the left’s hypocrisies.)
Death to the Imperialists, long live the Empire.
Of course, my personal opinion is that I don’t care if they kneel for the national anthem - but then, I don’t watch football, so what does that matter?
Besides, there’s no way that agreeing to this will save the next Googlebro. As a coordination problem, you can’t pact for it.
Probably, part of what you’re seeing with yaoi being treated the way it is is that men and their sexuality are basically constantly under attack in the culture war as creepy, oppressive, objectifying, low-status, etc.
But of course, as the sex with higher average libido and a more visual sexuality (because hormones), they are far more vulnerable to these sorts of attacks. Someone who has no sex drive at all can basically dunk on someone who does have a sex drive all day long, portraying them as evil and objectifying.
Of course, women (including lesbians, as TUOC has posted about) are not actually pure angels, despite what the culture warriors say.
Yaoi then, under this framework, is an exploitable vulnerability to snap back at the attackers and make them shut up - a weakness in the social justice armor.
And for those who have a Correct sexuality under SJ terms, it can be exploited for social standing.
Then of course there are the people that are actually annoyed by it. Not all gay men, for instance, really enjoy straight women coming into gay bars.
Here’s a conjecture: the rise of “post-truth” politics (defined by the OED as a process whereby “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than emotional appeals”) is in part the product of deindustrialization.
What I mean is that in manufacturing, facts defeat emotions and opinions. If your steel cracks, or your bottles leak or your cars won’t start, all your hopes and fancy beliefs are wrong. Truth trumps opinion.
Contrast this with sales occupations. In these, opinion beats facts. If customers think a shit sandwich is great food, it’ll sell regardless of facts. And conversely, good products won’t sell if customers think they’re rubbish. Opinion trumps truth.
(Finance is a mix of these. In trading and asset management, beliefs are constantly defeated by cold hard facts. In asset gathering, sales and investor relations, however, bullshit works.)
Isn’t it therefore possible that a shift from manufacturing to other occupations will contribute to a decline in respect for facts and greater respect for opinions, however ill-founded? In 1966 – when employment in UK manufacturing peaked – 29.2% of the workforce were in manufacturing. This meant that millions more heard tales from fathers, husbands and friends about how brute facts had fouled up their day. A culture of respect for facts was thus inculcated. Today, however, only 7.8% of the workforce is in manufacturing and many more are in bullshit jobs. This is an environment less conducive to a deference to facts.
Hot take on how method of labor influences mode of thought.
I hereby award this take one pepper for spiciness.
I can think of two supportive facts. One is that post-truth politics seems (I might be wrong) to be less strong in countries where manufacturing still looms large in culture if not in economics, such as in Germany or Japan.
However, many of the people decrying Post-Truth Politics don’t particularly care for the policies of Japan, and Japan’s politics are quite different from Germany’s.
Yes, this is clearly an issue of individual-level evil rather than the inevitable result of a toxic environment that piles on anyone who disagrees and treats charismatic ideologues like gods.
Speaking of Rationalism, it’s no wonder a group which demands exploitable memetic backdoors has had attackers “guess the teacher’s password” (to use Yudkowsky language).
All of this “if you’re X race/sex, you must shut up and listen and not argue” is a pattern for compromising memetic defenses against being subverted, and arguing with it is not very #woke, so you’ve got a flock of the metaphorically immunocompromised just waiting to be preyed on.
It’s a rootkit for your mind.
The year is 2077.
The new ultra-right-wing American Traditional Party clinches control of the government with only 35% of the vote in a divided electorate.
Their executive, President Ronald Jameson, issues an executive order reinterpreting the text of the Culturally Significant Properties Anti-Appropriation Act.
He reclassifies medieval and renaissance Europe, as well as Rome, and all derivative properties, as White European, a group which previously had no assigned cultural properties under the act.
Chaos ensues. Hundreds of thousands of cultural appropriation lawsuits are filed. Challenges are made both to his interpretation, and to the unique ownership of these ideas and concepts.
But it is too late. The Act was never designed with the proper restraints on power. After all, the future only moves forwards, right? And the metaphorical train of Separatism soon left the station.
This Wapo op-ed by deBoer is worth reading, but in his eagerness to prove his point (that employer power over your speech is traditionally bad for the Left) he conflates two very different things.
I think most every liberal and leftist agrees that routine monitoring of employee communications is threatening. And while we may disagree on whether there should be laws against it, we would rather employers not fire people just for saying who they want for President or talking about controversial issues on Facebook.
However, that’s not what happened in any of the high profile cases he mentioned (google, Sacco, Eichs, etc) and it’s foolish to pretend it is. A large, loud mob formed threatening bad publicity and boycotts for the company, unless they fired someone who had become a public fixation (half through error, half through random chance.)
To talk about employer “rights” here is silly. It’s not like the employer innately wants to fire this person (and in most of these cases the employer knew about the offense well before it became public.) They will however, react to the demands of the mob, unless an even stronger force prevents them.
On cases like these, there are the more fundamental ethical questions of “How do we respond to mob demands? How do we respond when we agree with the point of the mob? When we disagree? Do we want a legal framework that limits what responses companies can have?”
It’s true that if we set a norm of “companies should fire someone when the mob finds them objectionable” then that can bleed into your employer monitoring your Facebook at all times “just in case.” But that’s not the only issue at play here.
For instance, I found these tweets by Popehat, a legal explainer who leans hard on “rights have legal meaning but free speech is not freedom from consequences” hilarious:
What what… thousands of people can yell about a person, and that’s fine, but if an institution wants to act on that yelling? Heaven forbid. You fully expect small institutions are gonna be happy keeping around someone who is “shunned and reviled by everyone?” No, that doesn’t work. If you make someone into a public humiliation, and tar everyone they are associated with, those organizations will seek to disassociate themselves. If that’s not a result you want, don’t publicly pile on someone.
(I’m not really trying to defend Peter here. He’s literally in a mob with torches, so if anyone is guilty of mob tactics, its him. Just you can’t really wish for the world where rogues are widely known and intensely mocked and villified by the masses, but they don’t lose their job or school position or anything else. You gotta choose.)
For me, the most exhausting thing about the “why can’t we fire someone for having terrible opinions / it’s overkill to starve people or expel them from society for their terrible opinions” dichotomy is that it feels like it’s really a debate about rights and social support and who is obligated to provide them, but that aspect never gets foregrounded. Like, if we don’t want to force institutions to employ or support pariahs at their own expense, and we don’t want to completely destroy pariahs on principle, the obvious solution is to reduce the extent to which people are dependent on the support of institutions and employers, particularly private ones. People care a lot about school and jobs because those things are crucial to life in our society, and I don’t think there’ll be a satisfactory solution to the shunning issue as long as that stays the case.
Of course, the other part of the problem I guess is that it’s hard to maintain a space between “this person is somewhat unpopular and often criticized” and “this person is universally loathed as an enemy of society” – shunning seems to be a taboo designed that a situation doesn’t decay toward the former equilibrium, not because the latter is correct but because it’s, I guess, closer? Social sanction is not a fine instrument.
I feel like you could make a point in a bias/perspective class by ahead of time getting the unfamiliar names down phonetically so that on your first day taking attendance you could make a show by pronouncing their names correctly but mispronouncing all the names like “John Smith”, “Fred Williams” or “Susan McKenzie”.
Just like in a “Hey class there are subtle little shitty things like this that just exist for some people and if I didn’t go out of my way to do this chances are like half of you would never experience it once even though it’s happening like four times a day to everyone else”
“The very presence of foreign immigrants is changing your culture for the worse, Trumpian immigration restrictionism is in your interest”
@rendakuenthusiast Where the fuck are you getting that? White chicks are able to come with names like Zarowski or Tegan or Kanada or whatever.
I’ll tell you where he’s getting it - this kind of exercise implies that the immigrants would would not have to deal with those terrible, horrible incorrect name pronunciations if the immigrants weren’t in the country, and that the students wouldn’t be experiencing this kind of bias exercise designed to tell them that they’re bad people for not knowing more than a miniscule fraction of the hundreds (if not thousands?) of languages on Earth.
People in the nations of origins of the immigrants may well not pronounce their names right, either. It hits them with a unidirectional moral weight, unless handled very carefully.
…and it won’t be handled carefully, because SJ is a culture weapon.
People can sense the political intent on an intuitive level - and it is political.
