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Outside of the few actual connected Hamas terrorists do they even care? Or are they cosplaying civil rights leaders? They are heavily limiting who can talk about what they want. And there are enough videos online about people in the movement not really knowing all the details.
Perhaps they are happy they got their universities to largely do as they are told.
That being said they did get Biden to limit weapons to Israel. Without them Israel may have had more of a free hand to do as any other ME country would do if a rival population killed and raped 1500 of their people.
I think they’re largely cosplaying. Meaning is the only way through suffering, and these people are looking for some sort of meaning to help with their nihilism/depression.
I think there’s also an element of them getting to wear keffiyahs (which look cool) and do a big cultural appropriation without getting in trouble for it socially.
It's too bad that the woke schoolmarms ruined cultural appropriation.
Some people really, really, love to play dress up. Its not for me, but it seems like harmless fun and now its just another fun thing that's been ruined so that some people can signal their own moral superiority.
If some bored college girls want to wear a keffiyah I say go for it. Let's make the keffiyah and low-cut blouse look a thing!
To steelman the original case against cultural appropriation, you really have to understand the context in which it appeared. Think back a couple of decades to when America was maximally hegemonic and arrogant. When I was growing up, it was accepted wisdom in Hollywood that any film that adapted British source material had to be set in America with American children, and the source was often mutilated to make that work: see The Seeker (an adaptation of my favourite childhood book) for a particularly egregious example, but they even tried to do it with Harry Potter.
It's not fun to see your culture stolen or made into a theme park version of itself because Hollywood execs didn't believe that their audiences could tolerate anything too exotic. And it's worse knowing that, because American soft power outmatches yours by an order of magnitude, your children will grow up with the American version of your culture as the default while the original dies a slow death. In the same vein, Hallowe'en is now a much bigger deal than Nov 4th in the UK, and spell-check + Grammarly is slowly killing British English. I can imagine it's even worse for smaller, weaker countries and cultures.
Of course, the anti-cultural-appropriation movement overreached, mostly by refusing to see any difference between genuine appreciation and chauvinistic snatching. But in an age of increased migration and greater communication between cultures (via the internet) it's more likely that, say, Arabs will get upset about American girls using their national costume to slut it up.
(Obviously I'm simplifying and cherry-picking, see for example the chinese dress brouhaha where actual Chinese people didn't give a damn. I'm trying to give a sympathetic explanation of one reason why people started pushing back against cultural appropriation. I enjoy dressing up myself.)
I have always found it distasteful the way Hollywood will import successful foreign properties by remaking them instead of just subbing or dubbing them (such as the Spaniard [REC] movie franchise turning into the American Quarantine film series).
Anime is the only major exception to this, although even then there were American import companies that tried their best to localize shows rather than simply translating them (most infamously 4Kids, which would do weird things like turning rice balls into sandwiches). And who can forget the near-misses of Sailor Moon and Gundam?
Right, that's also a big thing. Seems less prevalent lately: I wonder if it's to prevent accusations of cultural appropriation? Or simply because youtube means that people can watch (and become fans of) the original before the remake is available on television.
It's especially weird that it didn't happen with anime because anime art is actually directly American in origin. Maybe that's why.
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Do you mean they tried to cast North American actors/set the film in NA? That would have been hilarious.
Before the movies came out the books themselves were adapted for an American audience. The example, the first book renamed the philosopher’s stone to the sorcerer’s stone.
There were 2 versions of the audio books. The British version narrated by Stephen fry and the American version narrated by Jim dale.
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Yes. It was well-known at the time but I can't seem to find an online source. This is the best I can do but the article has factual errors.
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Let me be annoying and argue with your steelman case, which I acknowledge you are offering to keep the conversation moving.
Few woke people actually care about appropriation. For example, it's perfectly fine to talk in a silly Italian or British accent. "Its-a bigga pizza pie-a".
But it's actually worse. Woke people don't just appropriate. They want to actively erase non-Anglo cultures. Witness, for example, the use of the term "Latinx". Or the insistence that traditional people abandon their customs and religion to support LGBT ideology.
So why do they pretend to care? Status games. Accusations of "appropriation" are a convenient way to signal higher moral status. If you can get a high-ranking person to grovel before you, you are higher status than them. If you can get a competitor fired for wearing a silly costume, then your chance at the top job just increased. This is why woke status games are most extreme in situations where 100s of people compete for a sinecure such as a college professorship. It's a crab bucket mentality.
Yup, that's a big factor for sure. I have seen exaggerated Italian accents coded as racist, or at least very insensitive. Nobody cares about us Brits :(
Absolutely, it's the old chauvinism in a new form, with no excuses this time. For all its flaws, old Hollywood was just trying to make films that sold well at home, and the cultural appropriation was an unfortunate consequence. The woke should know better.
To oversimplify, I think that real complaints about cultural appropriation like mine or the Australian Aboriginals (which by definition come from cultures lacking soft power) got filtered through woke Americans who did have soft power, and were redirected by those people for their own ends. Often unconsciously.
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