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Any fans of the Great British Bake Off here? I think this season has been a case study in the mechanisms by which wokeness latches on and does its best to ruin things. I'm so sick of people talking about how offensive Mexican week was. If you ask me, I really have no idea what was so offensive about it. Acknowledging that Mexican culture and food exists is not the same as being racist towards Mexicans. Also, since when are Mexicans even considered to be oppressed, and worthy of people getting outraged over? Have Mexicans historically been oppressed, especially by the British?
Following Mexican week, now, I guess the outlets all saw that claiming offense at GBBO was a great way to get more views, because every week I see at least one article about how viewers were "shocked and outaged" at the latest episode of Bake Off. Often, these are related to the fact that several contestants this season aren't native to Great Britain and are not being handled sensitively enough with regards to the recipes they do and their ability to follow the instructions in the technical challenges.
Cultural appropriation is an issue that involves more nuance than the media tends to give it. The part of those complaints that made sense to me is that they didn't know what the things they were baking were and making confidently wrong comments about how they were supposed to be. See this tweet about the s'mores challenge:
with the follow-up
Hard disagree.
Can you give me some example where it is an actual issue. It's one of the topics that I have a tremendously difficult time steel-manning.
Here's a steel-manned scenario:
Group A oppresses Group B.
Group A also berates Group B's culture.
Group A adopts some aspects of Group B's culture.
Group A claims it as their own.
Group A denies Group B had anything to do with that activity/thing ever.
The above is the hypothetical worst possible instance of "Cultural appropriation".
And DESPITE THAT you still can't make an argument that Group A should stop doing what they appropriated from Group B. Yes you can say they are a bunch of jerks.
But (in modern times) then you end up with the reparations argument wearing different clothes all over again. Why should the son pay for the sins of the father?
Let's say you are an oppressed Briton under the cruel yoke of invading German Saxons, c.700AD. After your parents are killed and your wife and sisters are stolen by Germans as sex slaves, you are forced to toil on a turnip farm to provide food to Saxon king Hengist's armies, under pain of summary execution if the crop fails.
You are therefore filled with schadenfreude (a word of Old Saxon you picked up from your cruel masters) when the Vikings invade and do to the Saxons what the Saxons did to you. Hengist fucks off back to Jutland, a power vacuum ensues, and while you are nominally under Viking oppression within the Danelaw, the jackboot lies on the Briton neck much more lightly than it did at the start of the century. Also Viking rule leads to a lot of out-of-work Christian monks and you get one of them to teach you literacy. You write a book about your experiences...
...but you can't make any money. Because Hengist already wrote a book about the life of an oppressed Briton in the 700s. And it was very realistic too - he had intimate knowledge of the Briton plight from all the years he spent inflicting it. The book is already a bestseller and completely saturates market demand for "tragedy porn of Briton oppression". Not only did he and his relatives steal your wife and your sisters, he also stole your story: the broad strokes of your plight are filling up his coffers, not yours. He has appropriated your sad culture.
This seems unfair.
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Eh, I think worse case scenario is that in a weird turn of events the North Macedonians reverse course and cements their claim over the Greek Macedonians and proceed to take not only Thessaloniki and Greek Macedonia but the full borders of Alexander's Empire.
For reference there has been a continual slapfight between the local Greeks and Slavs over the cultural legacy of ancient Macedon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Macedonia#Naming_dispute
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_North_Macedonia#Kutlesh_Flag_(1992%E2%80%931995)
This is how the topic "Cultural Appropriation" was introduced to me, and made way more sense than every other instance I've ever heard.
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Agreed, and to take a different tack - if you said ok to some sort of weird cultural reparations cultural appropriation would still be fucked though, because cultural appropriation is an integral part of how cultures evolve. Mexican food today is nothing like Mexican food two centuries ago, which is nothing like Mexican food a millennium ago, because every culture is always assimilating from other cultures! It is just nonsensical.
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I'm unclear on the distinction you're drawing between saying "If you do X, you're a jerk." and "You shouldn't do X.". I would think the former implies the latter.
Quite. Even if one can't legally stop people from doing X, it could be seen as reasonable to... start a social media campaign to highlight the jerkish behaviour; encourage boycotts of products which rely on the jerkish crux; contact distributors / employers and draw their attention to the jerkish conduct and ask them pointedly if they really want to exercise their freedom of association over the jerk, etc, etc.
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Exact example of your steelman in reality--Rings of Power. Though the "reparations via descendants" part isn't relevant (yet) because this cultural atrocity is currently in progress.
I don't have a settled opinion on what should be done in this case, because I know the real answer will be "nothing, suck it up, bigot nerds."
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