We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.

Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]

Samizdata Google search of the day

yoga cultural appropriation

h/t Bloke In Germany In Cyprus.

11 comments to Samizdata Google search of the day

  • Paul Marks

    So copying other cultures is not flattery (imitation being the most sincere form…..), it is somehow a bad thing.

    I agree with Tim W. – time to tell the leftists to “fuck off”.

  • AndrewZ

    The accusation of racism has been an enormously powerful political weapon for the left. It’s been so effective that leftists are unwilling to give it up merely because the actual incidence and tolerance of racism has been steadily falling in mainstream Western society for several decades and is now at an all-time low. Instead they have resorted to inventing new and entirely fictitious forms of racism, such as cultural appropriation and micro-aggressions, as a pretext to carry on denouncing their opponents in the same old way as if nothing had ever changed. But in doing so they only highlight the utter dishonesty of the left and its inability to adapt to social change. They call themselves “progressives” but seem quite incapable of responding to real progress.

  • PhilB

    Ok – I can live with that.

    But electricity, modern medicine, sewage systems have all been culturally appropriated from the west so how about they give those up and we’ll give up yoga? Seems fair to me …

  • Rob

    “The accusation of racism has been an enormously powerful political weapon for the left.”

    Not any more. It has been used so often and so widely that it now has the power of a Zimbabwean dollar note. I doubt there is a single person in the country who hasn’t been branded a ‘racist’ on some completely spurious pretext or other.

    Truly, “we are all racists now”.

  • Does the link work for anyone else? It just comes through as an incomplete URI to me.

  • Watchman

    Rob,

    I think the point is that we are truly mostly not racists now – after all, 20 years ago would a racist assualt by teenagers have made the national news, rather than the inside of local papers? Racism is rare and rightly regarded as beyond the pale.

    And as Andrew says, those who have achieved status (even if only in their own groups) through ‘fighting’ racism (probably most have done less than the little old lady down the road who always said hello when you were little, and happened to have been born in Jamaica, but they felt they were doing somehting) and those who want to be like them have a problem. Their cause is going, and they need new racisms to fight. So they keep expanding what is racism. Note this is not some cynical power grab, so much as a group of like-minded people echoing their own ideas and coming to accept more and more silly things (we could do the same, but most of us go and read the writings of these people from time to time – I suspect you can see those who don’t…).

    The good news in all of this is that no sane person is going to accept these arguments. Although it was possible to build a movement against actual racism, no consensus ever arose against ‘offensive’ language (blackballing etc) and this is even more ridiculous – a small group of activists talking to themselves and imagining they are talking to the world.

  • Laird

    “a small group of activists talking to themselves and imagining they are talking to the world.”

    In fairness, doesn’t that describe us, too?

  • I have fairly strong averse views on the subject. Expressing said views once reduced a man to incoherent spluttering rage (literally), not so much because I disagreed, but because I had third parties listening nodding when I said his folkish views on the role of culture and the collective ownership of ideas were nothing less than undiluted paleo-fascist in origin, logically required him to be racist and opposed to miscegenation.

  • PhilB

    @Perry

    “the collective ownership of ideas were nothing less than undiluted paleo-fascist in origin, logically required him to be racist and opposed to miscegenation”.

    Pure poetry. I’ll have to write it down and memorise it for those odd occasions when it might come in useful. >};o)

  • Julie near Chicago

    “Purported or pseudo-“link” doesn’t work Near Chicago, either, but reading the comments convinces me I get the gist.

    It seems that we have experienced the Millenium — going by the virtual, nay, apparently the ACTUAL agreement of the Samisdatistariat on this issue, or at least of this example of it. This makes it difficult to say whom I agree with most, but PhilB comes closest to saying what had popped into my head, in particular the fact that apparently modern medicine is cultural appropriation, if one does not come from a “Western” culture.

  • Paul Marks

    Quite correct Perry.