• 1 Post
  • 17 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 20th, 2023

help-circle



  • It’s important to recognise the mechanism is more important than the intent. If people cannot blow the whistle safely, then the “government” can freely keep secrets. “Government” is in air quotes here because often it’s the spooks or the military who get to keep secrets, often from the elected officials. This means that MPs are often kept in the dark (and sometimes on purpose, in a Berejiklian-style “I don’t need to know about that” sense) and this means that a bunch of people who we pay taxes for can do what they like with impunity.

    If the secrets are kept, then the people keeping the secrets are not accountable to anyone. This is a serious problem if they start to violate the rights of people on Australian soil. You might feel like it’s not going to be you, but it well could be. There is no safety on that gun. The only way around it is to make whistleblowing safe.










  • Where is the line between inspiration and a knock-off?

    So firstly, just like critical race theory, cultural appropriation is meant to be analysis. Fixing it doesn’t just mean “OK guys don’t do a cultural appropriation”, it’s meant to explain why cultures can lose their identity, and how they struggle.

    A big part of the analysis is the power differential. One of the problems is that the culture is more associated with the trope than the real culture. It’s a very large and powerful community (or individual) taking art from a small community. It’s Taylor Swift using a drawing to promote her songs, not paying for it, and asking the artist to be glad she gave her the attention. It’s Britney Spears (IIRC) making a pop song using ideas from an online subgenre and not crediting it, causing the subgenre to implode.


  • Cultural Appropriation is real, but it usually refers to entire nations or massive artists or corporations adopting a caricature of smaller cultures, to the extent that people start associating it with that nation or artist rather than the culture. An example here is Picasso using African imagery, or pop stars copying underground music genres and effectively killing them off.

    The problem is that people use it to talk about regular people starting a Sushi restaurant or whatever. They do not have the power to do this sort of thing.