TheRealKuni

“Some men may not have had the chance yet to rape women but the majority of them are horrible fucking people. Pretending they’re not is helping no one but the rapists.”

This is obviously nonsense. Most men are not rapists.

You can make statements like this about any group you can stereotype. Stereotypes aren’t real. They’re shorthand our brains use to categorize people.

Try going to an open and affirming church and telling the people there that they’re homophobic because of what the church down the street teaches.

Those are all Christians you’ve listed.

ISIS are Christians?

But even if they were, they’d still be a group more hateful than the larger body of Christianity.

Yeah, horrible things have been done in the name of Christianity. But just like we should not blame all of Islam for the horrific shit that some Muslims do or have done throughout time, we should not blame all of Christianity for the horrific shit that some Christians do or have done throughout time. It’s not productive and only serves to “other” people.

You said to name a more hateful group than Christianity. A group built on hate is inherently more hateful. Some subsets of Christianity, such as the Westboro Baptist Church, are entirely built on hate and are far more hateful than Christianity as a whole.

Christians love hating anyone that doesn't believe in what they believe and will absolutely shun and treat those people with indignity.

Some Christians, sure.

Some quadrilaterals have four right angles, but many quadrilaterals aren’t rectangles.

Absolute statements about a highly fragmented group as though it were a unified whole are erroneous and dangerous. Be intolerant of intolerance, but not of large swaths of people some of whom are intolerant. I know too many generous, kind, progressive, open-minded, charitable Christians to despise the group as a whole, though I freely admit there are large chunks of it that infuriate me.

Name a more hateful group than Christians

Oh that’s easy. Any hate group. Proud Boys, Ku Klux Klan, ISIS, etc.

Certain subsets of Christians are hateful. But there are many Christians out there who aren’t hateful. They understand that the central premise of their faith isn’t about excluding, judging, and power, but rather about inclusivity, forgiveness, and love.

It may be enough to sell my almost unused ps5

I was just thinking the same thing. I don’t think I’ve turned it on in a year.

Patternless. Plain white. Which works well, because if you break a plate you don’t have to worry about whether they still make that pattern.

In the Netherlands? What a shame to learn that level Americanesque idiocy has found a foothold.

(Sorry, I didn’t intend to write an essay here. It just sort of happened. This is a subject I have some amount of passion about.)

I can see where you’re coming from. I’m probably a little triggered by the word. I find the idea that any use of or participation in another culture is “appropriation” to be problematic.

Culture and language (which are largely inextricable from one another) are meant to be shared. That’s their entire purpose. If you participate in aspects of someone else’s culture in a respectful way, that isn’t appropriation. Appropriation, rather, is one part of the broad spectrum of behavior with regard to other cultures.

Humans do this innately. We adjust our manners of speech and behavior subconsciously to better reflect that of those around us. We are social creatures and by nature will act like those we interact with.

Societal views operate on pendulum swings, going from extreme to extreme around the nuanced truth. We went, as a society, from “acting however you want about other cultures is fine, even if it’s offensive,” an unhealthy extreme, to “participating in a culture not your own is not okay and is always offensive,” an equally unhealthy extreme. We like extremes because they are easy to categorize and require much less brainpower to contemplate. They are mental shortcuts our brains make.

But the world doesn’t operate on those extremes. The world is a nuanced place.

An example: a Nigerian-American opera singer was telling me about a time he was teaching a spiritual to a choir of white people. He corrected them when they said ‘they’ instead of ‘dey,’ saying, “The West African slaves who sang these didn’t use the ‘TH’ sound, it didn’t exist in the languages they had grown up with or the accents they had handed down. The proper way to approach this song is to sing it like they would. So you should say ‘dey’ instead of ‘they.’”

But this idea made many of the white singers uncomfortable, because we have shifted to seeing that type of cultural mimicry as offensive. I have seen white people even suggest that they shouldn’t sing spirituals at all, an idea that same Nigerian-American singer found silly. Singing is a way that humans connect with one another, and the best way to do it is to do it as genuinely as possible. It’s a shared experience. But where we are as a society these days, we find that uncomfortable.

And it’s understandable we do, because the extreme, blackface minstrel shows, is rightly seen as horribly offensive. But accurately performing a spiritual is so far removed from the horribly offensive and inaccurate mockery that were minstrel shows that the comparison isn’t a useful one.

We should strive to understand context, strive to be respectful, but also strive to share in the culture of others in constructive ways.

(Also, not that this matters at all on Lemmy, but for the record I wasn’t the one who downvoted you; I upvoted you. I like constructive conversation. 😅)

Edit: fixed a mistake

Yeah but the steak breakfast Crunchwrap (with extra creamy jalapeño sauce) is still the best fast food drivethru breakfast I’ve found.

The use of the word “appropriation” and “appropriated” seems unnecessary when discussing someone’s name, IMO. Especially given you also used the phrase “a celebration of the Western Australian aboriginal culture.”

The connotation of “appropriation” just doesn’t fit.

This is an old screenshot. The Quesarito, God rest its soul, has been gone for a while. And the scroll at the bottom is talking about George Floyd.

I had totally forgotten about that, but you’re right.