The Coddling Of The American Mind (Trigger Warning Article In The Atlantic...)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobiography_of_a_Yogi

This book is largely about the charge to bring yoga from the east to the west.

damn how many of these stories start w someone writing an email?

but it was through them that the genie got out of the bag and it isn't going back

eh, Crowley was there first iirc although he was not quite the popularizer what with his nutjob satanist rep and everything

xp

These people are going to be pretty busy when they find out about restaurants

everyone knows when those genies get out of their bag it's damn near impossible to re-bag them

oh great, now we've brought genies into it -- the appropriation trail of tears continues

jinni is the correct plural GET IT RIGHT

These people are going to be pretty busy when they find out about restaurants

― Why because she True and Interesting (President Keyes),

Heh

haha didn't know about Crowley but my point stands as he would not be in no way a popularizer.

maybe we can get some gun control passed

yup.

also came across this just now: https://twitter.com/Will_Antonin/status/668872659359440896

and the link within..

honestly i wonder how much of this has to do with the frustration young political activists must feel. to the nascent political activist, the sheer amount of injustice can be overwhelming, and changing things of actual importance seem impossible -- either because doing so requires a level of organization or coordination they're not ready for, or because the opposition (moneyed interests) are too formidable, or because doing so would take too much time, or may even lead to failure or stalemate. so instead, they content themselves with fighting and winning these meaningless battles

"cultural issues of implication..."

did one of my undergrads write this?

xp imagine this has something to do w/ bds as well -- easy, ultimately toothless victories

why don't they just go with "mindless stretching"

xxp

i mean these kids are probably putting this shit on their CV

maybe

but to look at the kids that occupied the police station vestibule here the other week…

they're in it. this isn't applied oppression studies for them.

so i don't see why it can't be for others, even if they protest in connection with a university.

occupying a police station vestibule is awesome, as is basically everything going on at missouri and most of the other campus protests going on atm. i'm RME at the yoga kids

i guess it's unfair to expect undergrads to have that sort of discriminatory ability at their age and stage of learning/understanding. on one hand, it's great that they are applying what are learning from twitter in class to the wider world. on the other hand, it'd be nice if they were able to realize that there are...varying degrees of harm with these sorts of things, and that not all perceived 'cultural appropriations' require this sort of remedial action

the very idea of 'cultural appropriation' in this sense is pretty nagl and the yoga examples just makes that a bit more obvious

xp hahaha ok yeah cmon kids just let people stretch or whatever

seems like a really exciting time to be an activist. imagine organizing something and seeing it in the Atlantic the next week. or seeing someone in another country write about it like an hour later. pretty cool. pretty empowering. this is a unique time in human history to do this sort of thing!

the people writing these articles are just unwittingly promoting this stuff imo.

Swear to God mordy if ur referencing the boondock saints im giving up on u

lol no

I don't really think this has much to do with BDS

i kinda think it does tbh and it explains why an otherwise unrelated phenomenon keeps appearing in hashtags next to blacklivesmatter or occupymizzou or whatever. easy activism.

Nothing really strikes me as new about campus activists declaring semi-meaningless solidarity with unrelated causes (other than it being in hashtag rather than written statement form), but the "cultural appropriation" fight seems to have been taken to levels that were not there when I was in college.

This yoga thing

I sort of *got* the appropriation concept when it seemed to be about privileged white kids adopting hip-hop slang and stuff, but even there I felt weird about it, like you have this pop culture that is being sold to white kids as what's cool and cutting edge but then they should also be shamed for imitating it?

Have agreed with stuff I've read about native american kids challenging clothing companies who put that skull-in-feather-head-dress image on their stuff, mind

Dunno, complicated

i think i'm on record on ilx as being anti the appropriation idea. it goes against everything i've ever learned about how art + music + literature + religion + language works which is it spreads everywhere and touches everything and so fighting against that seems like fighting against how all human culture works. i can understand how infuriated an historically suppressed minority who developed their own culture would be seeing a white guy getting millions of dollars for imitating that culture while they were kept out. but really the bad part of that is that the minority group is being suppressed! if they could freely participate in the economy then who would care if a white guy was influenced by them. but then to apply this to every expression of every ethnic culture in history? it's insane.

well who really owns culture?

i can speak most specifically to what i studied which is eastern european jewish music which had broad and significant exchanges with other local populations and is incomprehensible as an ethnically specific style of music. this is esp true w/ the arts where artists are often the most cosmopolitan ppl in their community.

Have agreed with stuff I've read about native american kids challenging clothing companies who put that skull-in-feather-head-dress image on their stuff, mind

― cardamon, Monday, November 23, 2015 5:10 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, I mean I think there's a type of "appropriation" that can properly just be called "racism"? Like calling your team the Redskins or having Chief Wahoo as a mascot is not really just "appropriating" anymore. I do get that there's a mild form of orientalism going on in a lot of yoga classes, but it strikes me as relatively benign, and I haven't actually heard a lot of Indian people say they feel harmed by it, but IDK?

I guess the best Jewish analog would be celebrity infatuation with Kabbalah, which I think is sort of dumb but I also just put in this separate box and don't give much thought to.

idk in the context of i.e. music appropriation is a way for ppl to make money off other people's work

its not so much about when fans use a slang word as it is when a million selling white artist does by using the ideas of the not million selling nonwhite artist (nb this is obviously a simplification—bc its also about the labels benefitting & et al)

which is to say its about ppl being disconnected from the places that could channel their labor into proper remuneration, then that labor is skimmed by others who benefit massively from it...

this is not to say all cries of appropriation are created equal but that there are legitimate grievances in the current system & the people who benefit from creative labor are not the people who do the creative labor

i said 'nonwhite' but i mean black

yeah I get that, although it seems like it was a more salient charge when black artists legitimately did not have full access to the music marketplace, whereas now they mostly do.

now that the marketplace has been destroyed

thx obama!

"here we burned this place down... I guess you can come in now"

Still waiting on that 'full access' too

i feel like every time the cultural appropriation topic comes up people are like "but elvis covered ray brown and ray brown didn't get any royalties!" which is, you know, less a matter of elvis "appropriating" a style of music and more a matter of the record industry being imbued with racism through and through. two different things.

i mean there's no such thing as discrete 'black' and 'white' musics anyhow, it's all intertwined. obviously. or it should be obvious.

I agree that the problem isn't really artists stealing from each other, it's generalized stealing from artists, which also happens to reflect institutionalized racism in the society at large.

Cultural exchange is exploitative under capitalism because cultures never encounter one another on equal terms. This is a symptom of the inequality rather than its cause. It doesn't make sense to be against cultural exchange because of this, instead we should be against inequality.

Really, the alternative to a world full of cultural appropriation is one in which white people willfully close themselves off to other cultures. This seems way worse for everyone involved. It would create artificial divisions among people, for one, and also avoiding influences from other cultures for fear of "harming them" just seems gross and condescending, like white people would be viewing other cultures as if they were specimens that needed to be preserved in their pure form

Alternatively, things and stuff and oh look the world

Cultural exchange is exploitative under capitalism because cultures never encounter one another on equal terms. This is a symptom of the inequality rather than its cause. It doesn't make sense to be against cultural exchange because of this, instead we should be against inequality.

^^ I like this, thanks

yeah, booming post treeship.

I feel like we should hand that post out on a flyer at student protests