So says a commenter named GothHillbilly on this article: SJWs Lose It After Peter Dinklage Cast As ‘Filipino.’ There’s Just One Problem.
The problem, of course, stems from stupid Wikipedia claiming that Hervé Villachaize, he who played “Tattoo” on “Fantasy Island”, was half Filipino…the problem being that it’s not true. As the article notes, he was French, and of German and English descent.
But that isn’t stopping the SJW brigade from opening mouth before engaging brain…and sticking their foot in clear up to the knee.
We’re in for a major smashup if certain people on BOTH sides of the political and social spectrum don’t start using the brains so thoughtfully placed in their heads instead of just using all that grey matter for ballast and running on emotion alone. What’s truly annoying is that the actual number of people involved on left and right is tiny compared to the vast bulk of Americans who wish this noise would just go away so they could get on with their lives in peace.
There is no such thing as “cultural appropriation.” There’s just everyday people who see something they like in another culture and adapt it to their own daily lives. French fries aren’t French, Chinese food isn’t Chinese, Taco Bell isn’t authentic Mexican food, the American concept of pizza isn’t the same as the Italian concept of pizza. And that’s just food. God help you if you decide you want to adapt clothing from another culture, or hair styles, or makeup, or shoes…even yoga has caught shit for being culturally appropriative.
The idea that cultures must remain separate and pure is about as laughable as the idea that we must preserve endangered species from extinction. We preserve endangered species because we want to, not because it’s the way of nature. In fact, the theory of evolution suggests we’re doing the wrong thing. For millions of years, this world has operated under the biological law that if you can’t keep up, your species dies out. It’s even true of primate species like ours. Neanderthals and Denisovians died out, probably because they were evolutionary dead ends; Homo Sap (with some genetic material from the others, because humans will screw anything that breathes, and even some things that don’t) keeps on truckin’, and will continue to do so, so long as we don’t find ourselves stuck up our own blind alley with no way to turn around and choose another route.
Social justice is just such a blind alley. In the quest to make all men (and women, and the other 70-odd genders) equal, all will be brought low except for the people at the top. It’s the nature of the beast. Look at Venezuela, which is admittedly a gangster regime, but one whose leaders continue to insist that socialism (and thus social justice) would work just fine if it weren’t for the wreckers and counter-revolutionaries…while Venezuelan society and infrastructure crumbles around their feet, and hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans flee the country. But everything is fine, there is nothing to fear, we’ll just chop a bunch of zeros off the currency and magically the economy will revive.
There’s a lot of magical thought in both socialism and social justice. Too bad magic isn’t real.
I grew up in a religious denomination which taught that social justice was a replacement for the living, true God. God wanted us to work for social justice, to the point where it became the be-all and end-all of the denomination. Worship and traditions became rote social constructs holding a people together, rather than plain old belief in God. The idea that God loved and cared about us receded to the point where God did not materially affect the world, but merely sat back and expected humans to do the work of social justice without a whole lot of guidance from Him. We prattled a lot about “tikkun olam”, repair of the world, considering it as a literal absolute, while entirely missing the philosophical point raised by those who first articulated the concept. For many years this felt wrong to me, until I finally walked away and am now only nominally connected to the community through an orthodox outlet that does understand that concept. My own personal religious views tend more toward those of the Buddha, but that’s neither here nor there.
Tikkun olam properly refers to leading a righteous life, by which is meant that man should live according to the precepts revealed by God to Moses on Sinai, and later redacted, codified, and commented on by the rabbis who were responsible for the Mishnah and the Talmud. Modern “liberal” offshoots of Judaism (because that’s the religion I’m referring to) have twisted the concept into a social justice imperative — rather than working to make ourselves better and provide an example of the righteous life to others, we are now dedicated to forcing the rest of the world into our mold. As anyone with a lick of sense knows, that’s doomed to failure. People are who they are until they make a conscious effort to change, and being badgered by do-gooder outsiders doesn’t make them any more accepting of making those changes. Ask the black community. Ask anyone from small-town Appalachia. Or from any other enclave of a particular group of people.
PJ O’Rourke used to call attempts to bring everyone together and create a viable, diverse community out of groups that really had no interest in such, “kumbayah.” And that about sums it up. The lion will lie down with the lamb, but the lamb had better be armed and dangerous, or eventually it’s going to be lamb chops. Kumbayah is one of those visionary idiocies that sounds great when you’re singing it around a campfire, but in practice will never actually happen. Human communities don’t work that way. Someone is always “the other”. The only thing that unites diverse human communities is a common threat. Once the threat recedes, the communities may hang together for a time, but eventually they’ll all go their separate ways again.
Until the next threat arises.
Perhaps the best solution is to let communities decide for themselves what is best. And for individuals who see something they like in another culture or community, perhaps we should stop scolding and marginalizing so-called “cultural appropriation”. It’s like sports teams taking on Native American names and mascots. The teams didn’t take on those names and mascots because they were perceived as weak or silly. And when questioned, Native Americans generally don’t have a problem with that. It’s the rabid SJWs who require conflict for self-validation who do — and they should be ignored in every arena where they try to stir up trouble.
If cultural fusion creates good feeling between diverse communities — and nothing else — I’m all for that. The end goal is not for us all to be equal, but for us to treat each other fairly and with good faith, and for us to live the kind of life that presents an example for the rest of the world to emulate. The world cannot ever be a place of complete equality, because the only way to get to complete equality is for everyone to be equally poor. Someone will always have more than you do. Someone else will always have less. Socialism and social justice try to reconcile this, but human nature defeats them every time. The only true equality lies in the grave, which is also where socialism usually ends. I do not think this is a coincidence.
So the next time a social justice warrior tries to tell you you’re doing it wrong, do me and the rest of the world a favor. Just ignore them. They’ll go away and bother someone else, who hopefully will ignore them too, until eventually, they get the idea that nobody gives a damn about their childhood trauma. In the meantime, the rest of us will keep living our lives and setting the example for the world we want to live in.