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Notes -
Have the campus protests had any sort of effect on Israel? It seems like no.
Outside of the few actual connected Hamas terrorists do they even care? Or are they cosplaying civil rights leaders? They are heavily limiting who can talk about what they want. And there are enough videos online about people in the movement not really knowing all the details.
Perhaps they are happy they got their universities to largely do as they are told.
That being said they did get Biden to limit weapons to Israel. Without them Israel may have had more of a free hand to do as any other ME country would do if a rival population killed and raped 1500 of their people.
I think they’re largely cosplaying. Meaning is the only way through suffering, and these people are looking for some sort of meaning to help with their nihilism/depression.
I think there’s also an element of them getting to wear keffiyahs (which look cool) and do a big cultural appropriation without getting in trouble for it socially.
It's too bad that the woke schoolmarms ruined cultural appropriation.
Some people really, really, love to play dress up. Its not for me, but it seems like harmless fun and now its just another fun thing that's been ruined so that some people can signal their own moral superiority.
If some bored college girls want to wear a keffiyah I say go for it. Let's make the keffiyah and low-cut blouse look a thing!
To steelman the original case against cultural appropriation, you really have to understand the context in which it appeared. Think back a couple of decades to when America was maximally hegemonic and arrogant. When I was growing up, it was accepted wisdom in Hollywood that any film that adapted British source material had to be set in America with American children, and the source was often mutilated to make that work: see The Seeker (an adaptation of my favourite childhood book) for a particularly egregious example, but they even tried to do it with Harry Potter.
It's not fun to see your culture stolen or made into a theme park version of itself because Hollywood execs didn't believe that their audiences could tolerate anything too exotic. And it's worse knowing that, because American soft power outmatches yours by an order of magnitude, your children will grow up with the American version of your culture as the default while the original dies a slow death. In the same vein, Hallowe'en is now a much bigger deal than Nov 4th in the UK, and spell-check + Grammarly is slowly killing British English. I can imagine it's even worse for smaller, weaker countries and cultures.
Of course, the anti-cultural-appropriation movement overreached, mostly by refusing to see any difference between genuine appreciation and chauvinistic snatching. But in an age of increased migration and greater communication between cultures (via the internet) it's more likely that, say, Arabs will get upset about American girls using their national costume to slut it up.
(Obviously I'm simplifying and cherry-picking, see for example the chinese dress brouhaha where actual Chinese people didn't give a damn. I'm trying to give a sympathetic explanation of one reason why people started pushing back against cultural appropriation. I enjoy dressing up myself.)
Do you mean they tried to cast North American actors/set the film in NA? That would have been hilarious.
Yes. It was well-known at the time but I can't seem to find an online source. This is the best I can do but the article has factual errors.
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