In a discussion about cultural appropriation, you’re opting to rank the worthiness of various cultures?
Doesn’t that utterly invalidate everything you say?
6 Likes
Fuck, it’s 20:33…
Next time maybe…
Cracking intelligent post… but… and my but is not a counter or challenge but a different philosophical perspective about the relevance of culture and its evolution… and that is the perspective. All culture evolves and the value or meaning we attribute to it is high because we dont recognose the timeframe of that cultural evolution… all the major global religions and cultural attitudes we currenty consider ‘important’ are but a couple of 1000 years old… for a species that is 2million years old… and with global travel and communications the rate of cultural evlution will accelarate… and has done to the point where we can see it changing and feel threantened by that change… when the realty is the chnge has always been there, just never at the pace we see now…
… naturally we need to be sensitve to that even if we feel that the importance others attribute to it is a load of bollocks… Just nee dto recognise that for some its important and respect it - lifes too short to get all narked about it … no matter what the Daily Mail folks might think…
1 Like
Yep, I completely agree about the pace of change thing. I guess the point is do we want the change driven by combat or by learning. At this stage in our evolution we get to decide that.
2 Likes
Klaus is on form tonight. I’m appropriating many of his views.
2 Likes
I’ve been passing off your views as mine for years.
Also your penis.
I’ve been passing off your penis as mine.
4 Likes
Cultures learn from one another, what can we learn from cultures that allow homophobia, racism, sexism and many other things? Probably not as much as one that doesn’t tolerate it I suspect.
I think as the nation that invented football it is highly offensive that other countries started playing too, and even have the audacity to be better than us and not let us win all the world cups and stuff. If they want to play football they should show us the correct level of respect and let us win, it’s called ‘association football’ not ‘appropriation football’ 
I’ll appropriate what I want, init.
Well yes, unfortunately PC and “Snowflake” now seems to be an online insult for just being a decent person.
Not the way I see it, @saintbristol . I always thought Snowflake meant getting offended on behalf of others. Sometimes, especially when what you railing against is for the good of all, your definition is spot on. Fighting racism would be a great example of that. If we let it proceed, we damage everyone.
There are other causes that are fought just as passionately, but don’t really have the same “hurts us all” impact. In fact, as this debate shows, fighting these issues often hurts more people than it helps.
Great example are trans rights. I honestly don’t give a fuck how someone wants to live their life if it doesn’t fuck up anybody else. If I ever saw a trans person being discriminated against in the street or a club or whatever because they were trans, I’d have no problem speaking up.
Nevertheless, the campaign has created problems. It doesn’t seem to be able to exist without the denigration and Othering of people that object to it, such as the no-platforming of Germaine Greer at an event that wasn’t even discussing trans issues, because of views she had expressed elsewhere. Greer, who is probably one of the pioneers of what we consider women’s rights, is being bullied into submission because she does not believe that a reassigned man is a woman.
Then there are the legal issues and the problems they create, leading us to a situation where all you have to do in the UK to change gender is state that you’ve changed gender. You could have a beard rivalling Bellamy or Gandalf and say “actually chaps, I’m a chick”. There are all sorts of legal issues this creates with regard to gender segregated institutions, be if your public toilet, or worst case scenario, we could end up in a situation where you’ve got a known domestic abuser claiming womenhood and getting into a women’s refuge. It sounds ridiculous, but there are people already looking to exploit the loophole this creates in other areas. Primogeniture inheritance, for starters.
As for cultural appropriation, if you think you believe that this is a problem, apply the concept fully. Would you approach a non-Caucasian and demand that they disrobe their culturally appropriated Western style of dress and adopt their original tribal form of attire? Of course not.
That we borrow from other cultures is a good thing, not a bad one. It means that on some level, we know another culture, and that on some level, we think something they do is cool enough to do ourselves. It is what is supposed to happen, providing shared cultural touchstones and shared ownership is something approaching a mixed culture.
No cultural appropriation, and we don’t get the Beatles, the Stones, AC/DC, coffee, tea, or even the fucking potato. There would be no white rappers, and no black rockers, if there were any of either.
Complaints about cultural appropriation implicitly hinder integration, cooperation and invention, implicitly segregate and you’d have to guess are made loudest by people that don’t understand the world at all.
2 Likes
So, am I getting this right.
A Chinese person, in a shop in Hong Kong, sells my (ex Misses) a chinese dress and tells her that it suits her. The shop (in China) specialises is supplying “western sized” dresses for foreign clients.
So when the (ex) misses wears that dress out to a party she is offending Chinese people?
Yet the definition that Dinger put out about understanding. The ex wore it because she respected the designer, the quality of the workmanship and fabric and knew that she had contributed in some small way to the economy.
How the actual hell can that be offensive?
Would she now have to hold a placard saying that she was wearing this dress because she respected the Chinese Culture?
Here in the Middle East it is actually VERY much simpler. It is perfectly acceptable for tourists to buy “Arab Gear” it is however perfectly illegal for any non Arab to Impersonate one. So wear Arab Gear to a fancy dress in EU? Great they made money from you. Do it down here - nicked.
Anyway it is a circular argument. The best I can say is that this shows how Offensive everything and everyone is these days.
Can I complain about Jon Moss? He offended my Sotonianness.
2 Likes
I honestly think a big part of the problem is white people deciding how non-caucasians are going to feel about any particular issue, and getting it fucking wrong.
Take “Love Thy Neighbour”, for example. Massively derided now for being little but a series of racist stereotypes and pejoratives.
I asked my grandad about his opinion on that show. He loved it, didn’t find it offensive, and reckons people need to take more stuff on the chin without getting upset.
I’ve never seen Love Thy Neighbour myself. I just know it through infamy. For all its faults, it was progressive in at least one sense. It had black and Asian characters on in every episode, playing major roles. Contrast that with traditional portrayals, which normally put non-whites in the background, usually servants handing something off to the white imperialist protagonist.
My grandad’s comments are anecdotal. I can’t tell you that his views can be safely multiplied, not even once, but I did find them interesting all the same. The crystallisation of feeling on Love Thy Neighbour today is an example of a growing tendency to only see the negative in something once you’ve found one bad thing, shorn of the context you need to have an informed view.
1 Like
No…Chill mate, it’s over, gone.
He was sentenced to 3 years in a specially convened Liverpool kangaroo court hearing yesterday.
1 Like
Youre saying that LTN should be seen in context before people make a judgement but your context is, as you readily admit, the view of one person. I can tell you from first hand experience that your grandad is in the minority. Programmes like LTN and Till death do us part may have had good intentions but failed. All they did was introduce the language of racism to more people and the factories around the land weren’t suddenly places of greater tolerance. They became places where uneducated men repeated what they’d heard on the tv, thinking it funny but causing great distress to people. It may have been the first time minorities were represented on tv and that may have interested the minorities, but it didn’t have some great, positive effect. Is it better to have no representation or representation that is offensive?
LTN wasn’t some attempt to counter racism through comedy. It was an attempt to get viewers by copying Till Death. And don’t forget that Johnny Speight (Till death writer ) went on to create Curry and Chips. I suppose blacking Spike Miligan up to be a Pakistani should be seen in context and was really the best way to improve race relations in the UK. He claims that curry and Chips, just like Till death, was a way of countering racism. Well how would he know? How would a white man know the experience of minorities who are abused using the words they hear on his programmes?
1 Like
Technically Spike was an Indian so not to far from the truth here
Great contribution @philippinesaint
Have I logged into swf mistake?
Has anyone mentioned the MOBOs yet?
I’m not here to defend LTN in totality, or on many levels really.
My point centred on people getting upset on behalf of others, specifically white people getting upset about things like LTN. I’ll be honest, when I asked my Karachi-born grandad about the show, I was just expecting confirmation that it was a load of racist shit, not worth anyone’s time, and added to the sense of racism that already existed in society.
I’m not going to sit here and defend their artistic merits, but I would argue that it was worth having all of those shows on, even if all they achieved was a consensus that “yeah, we probably shouldn’t put those sorts of shows on anymore”. For that consensus to have happened, a debate had to be had. Shows like LTN drove that debate, if nothing else.
I suspect the reason LTN seemed so tame to grandad’s eyes is because he’d already seen and heard much worse on the streets of Britain. Nowt that was being broadcasted from a box was going to be quite so dangerous and up close and personal racism, where the antagonists were real, violent and not acting.
I also suspect that from a perspective that is both well meaning and myopic, there are a lot of white people that do not understand the concerns of immigrant communities at all, largely because they’ve never had much contact with them, that operate on a hair gun trigger of offence on issues, that as you say, they’ll have no comprehension of.
1 Like
I find it very difficult to condemn programmes and attitudes “out of time”.
We were less informed less aware of social and racial implications…we laughed at racial stereo-types. Did that make us awful people or did it mean we just didn’t understand the darker side of these stereo-types…the offence it caused didn’t see the light of day until the 1970s when people re-evaluated acceptable behaviour. We laughed because we though ALL would laugh…Alf Garnet was the figure of fun…not his targets.
Scroll on 50 years and nobody is laughing and rightfully so…I laughed at the time but most certainly wouldn’t want to watch it again.
2 Likes
It’s not just the stuff which was specifically going for those kind of laughs. There is a great scene in The Young Ones crafted by the new princes of Alternative Comedy. specifically not racist or sexist, sneering at those that did do those routines.
In the scene, a white policeman is wearing dark sunglasses, consequently mistaking a white Kelloggs representative as a black man. When he removes the sunglasses, he realises his mistake, immediately adopting a position of deference.
I think it’s a masterful skit. It highlights the tendency of some of the police at the time to not engage their brains too much when policing among minorities. It did however contain a series of racial slurs, made by the policeman, that were the presumed reason for it being cut when re-broadcast for an anniversary. This anti-racist sketch ended up being cut from a repeat broadcast because the BBC thought it would be perceived as racist.
It’s a reflection of the public’s inability to perceive context. Those words are now taboo in almost any context, even a supportive one. I broadly agree with you about how we treat those shows. We used to watch the Alf Garnet shows at my nan and grandad’s house, and you’re completely right, the comedy comes from his complete lack of compatibility with modern sensibilities. Marigold was a great comic creation, because he constantly forced Alf to deal with two of his prejudices up close and personal. It was a portrayal of a bloke, on his way out, blaming everyone else for his lot, but deep down, not really believiing many of the things he himself says.
All people see now is an old bloke saying racist things.
2 Likes