BluesF

Here's a fun fact I just learned!

It's fairly well known nowadays that lemmings do not, in fact, follow one another off cliffs to their deaths. The myth has been persistent for many years, and was notably perpetuated by Disney in their documentary White Wilderness, which showed lemmings apparently diving from a cliff to their deaths. Truly though, these lemmings had been flown half way across the world and were thrown from the cliffs by the documentary's producers.

They're afeared of fire!

If shareholders' profits are affected then so will the decisions lol

Mm, I've already seen marketers present outputs from GPT models as if it's useful customer feedback. My suspicion is this bubble will burst though, because at some point it will become clear that they are not as good as what they're doing as execs have been told they are.

I've done it, was great would recommend.

Obviously I do think that there's a place for cars in the world. But most transport happens along routes that could easily be trains with good infrastructure. Camping isn't a good use of trains really tho lol

Are you suggesting that the tow bot takes your camper to the site and then leaves? It's like a municipal resource?

A lack of infrastructure is not a failure of the train, it is a failure of us to properly utilise the train.

I mean obviously you would never build a train line to every campsite. That's what busses are for.

It's a complex and multi-layered topic, as I alluded to in my previous comment, but I'll do my best to answer this. I'm by no means an expert on this, and I'm a white English dude so far from qualified really... But I have read a lot on the topic in addition to my own gut reactions to these things.

So... First let me clarify that by "wearing someone else's culture as a costume" I am really talking specifically about people in wealthy Western countries wearing the cultural clothing of (almost always) historically colonised peoples from elsewhere. With that being said the first point to call attention to is a kind of dry economic one - the outfits you see being worn as a Halloween costumer are broadly mass produced by companies with no affiliation to the cultures they are imitating. They make huge amounts of money selling these costumes to Westerners like me, while giving nothing back to the people they've taken them from. This follows a long and difficult history especially in the context of colonies - historically (not at all that this doesn't continue today) the West has plundered the world for all its worth, and this is just a relatively subtle modern example. So even before anyone puts the costume on I'm uneasy about it, personally.

The second point is specific to certain cultural garbs which are 'closed' within the cultures they come from. While the other reply points out that they, as a Mexican, don't mind seeing people dressed up in Mexican costume, you would be very hard pressed to find anyone Native American who is happy seeing anyone in a mass produced war bonnet. I won't pretend to understand the full significance of the headdress, but its well known that it is not something you just 'put on' if you are a Native American, and divorcing it from that cultural context both cheapens it and shows a general lack of respect towards the people whose clothing you're wearing.

I think that lack of respect is really the main part of my problem with costume-ising culturally significant clothing. Obviously there are clothes from all over the world which are just clothes, and quite likely the people who make those clothes would be delighted to see them being worn all over the world! But if you don't give enough of a shit to a) learn about the culture they come from and what the significance is and b) buy them from the actual people who created them, then you lose that connection and it ceases to be cultural exchange and becomes instead appropriation.

That's reasonable. I suppose there's something distinct in the "costume" based on how significant the cultural garb is. I don't know much about mexican culture so correct me if I'm wrong, but is the stereotypical sombrero/poncho combination more a product of convenience and weather than culture? Contrasting with the Native American headdress or Hindu bindi which are culturally significant in (I believe) a different way.

Cultural appropriation is such a strange issue. It's obvious to me that wearing someone's culture as a costume is fucked up... And it's pretty obvious too I think that opening a restaurant selling food from overseas is almost always cultural exchange... I don't really think you can open a restaurant without a solid understanding of the food you're making (quite unlike putting on a headdress and getting hammered on Halloween)... Somewhere in between there's a line, perhaps, but I have absolutely no idea where it is. White people with dreads is in there somewhere, no one seems to agree on it, personally I think it's pretty far removed from its origins and is basically a white hippy thing in it's own right, regardless of how it began, but I know a lot of people disagree.

Yes, no one who says "I love pasta!" is saying that to mean "I love just the pasta on its own without any sauce"

And his face half stopped aging! Wild story, always love being reminded of this guy.