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Hot Women: Wrongfully Appropriate Nerd Culture At Your Own Risk

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

Olivia Munn - Cliff Bleszinski - Nerd Culture - Geek - Cultural Appropriation - Identity Politics

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Identity Politics has created an arsenal of shrill and illiberal weapons which can now be picked up and used by anyone

The latest addition to the list of marginalised and oppressed victim communities: geeks and nerds, who are being made to feel unsafe because hot girls are appropriating their culture by daring to display an interest in comics and video games.

I’m not kidding:

Yesterday, video game designer Cliff Bleszinski (widely known on the internet as “Cliffy B”) tweeted that actress Olivia Munn was “appropriating nerd culture”, taking advantage of it for personal gain.

That appears to have partly stemmed from an earlier interview wherein Munn was quoted as saying she did all of her own stunts for X-Men: Apocalypse – which, unsurprisingly, has the stunt community pretty unhappy, since it’s typically a stuntperson’s responsibility to test out a physical stunt for safety reasons before they’ll even allow the actor to try and take it on. So while Munn may have performed a large number of stunts herself, she didn’t give credit where credit’s due (and that also may have been an unintentional gaffe). But that’s not what the Internet glommed onto.

Barring whatever personal issues or history Bleszinski may have with Munn, the fact remains that the phrase he used is particularly unfortunate. The accusation is insulting to the real and on-going issue of cultural appropriation: instances of celebrities or brands embracing a culture other than their own and profiting from it without understanding it or fighting for the issues faced by said culture.

[..] Ultimately, it just feels like a slap in the face to real cultural appropriation and a mere rehash of the old and tired “fake geek girl” meme. At the very least, it’s someone using their beef with another person to manufacture outrage over a thing that doesn’t actually exist.

Another delightful case of Identity Politics cult members self-cannibalising and turning their fire on their own? Yes – and so soon after I had mentioned that this phenomenon seems to be less common in America than it is in Britain. It certainly looks as though the United States is racing to play catch-up.

https://twitter.com/therealcliffyb/status/708526086137708544

But there is a fair degree of nonsense to unpick on all sides here.

Take the stuntpeople who apparently feel “invalidated” – their professional accomplishments made to vanish in a puff of smoke – because one actress (probably unintentionally) failed to acknowledge their behind-the-scenes contribution sufficiently fulsomely. And people like TheMarySue’s Carly Lane, who then take offence at the original offence takers for daring to be offended by something which is less offensive than something else experienced by other, more righteously offended people.

What we are now witnessing – with people who were thus far completely removed from the Safe Space and Trigger Warning culture on college campuses now walking and talking exactly like today’s illiberal student activists – is akin to the efforts of a younger teenage sibling trying to ape the behaviour of their older siblings already at college by adopting their language and behaviour in an attempt to look “cool” and grown up.

If older brother or sister spends all of their time occupying the dean’s office protesting for the provision of more campus safe spaces for minorities, the younger sibling will often unsurprisingly learn to think that this is how young adults are supposed to behave, and apply the same nomenclature of Identity Politics, victimhood and oppression to their own, more juvenile lives. And this is the result:

 

Like the Tumblr therians, people who think they are cats and other self-promoting cases of species dysphoria, the idea of nerd culture being unjustly appropriated by outsiders is a natural consequence of what happens when the fussy, victimhood-soaked language of Identity Politics is picked up by ordinary people and used in mundane scenarios to describe everyday life.

The social networks Twitter and Tumblr in particular are awash with outraged ranting and virtue-signalling about the evils of cultural appropriation – only recently, Harry Potter author JK Rowling was hauled over the coals for unintentionally stepping on an Identity Politics landmine – and so it is hardly unsurprising that even people not deeply connected with the movement are adopting the same language and the authoritarian attitudes behind it.

Is the idea that nerd or geek culture can be “appropriated” in a way which is harmful to self-identifying nerds or geeks absurd? Absolutely. But no more so than the idea that a white person practising yoga harms the Indian culture, or that putting an unorthodox ingredient in your breakfast taco causes deep and lasting harm to the people of Mexico.

This is competitive victimhood plain and simple, with Identity Politics cult adherents on both sides of the Atlantic rushing to portray themselves as the most oppressed and “marginalised”, and then furiously denouncing others for supposedly overstating their position in the Hierarchy of Oppression.

The fact that is has now culminated in the spectacle of comic and video game-loving nerds and geeks being outraged that an attractive Hollywood actress has adopted and promotes elements of their lifestyle is only further proof of the ridiculous places you end up when you follow the Identity Politics trail to its logical end.

 

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Tales From The Safe Space, Part 12 – Harry Potter Edition

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

History of Magic in North America - JK Rowling

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Is it always wrong to misrepresent other cultures in art, or only when the culture in question is condescendingly considered to be “marginalised” and therefore insufficiently robust to withstand inaccurate portrayal in a book or movie?

The latest public figure to unintentionally step on a hidden Identity Politics landmine and self-detonate in an explosion of outraged Twitter condemnation is none other than Harry Potter creator JK Rowling.

The Guardian picks through the shrapnel for us:

JK Rowling has been accused of appropriating the “living tradition of a marginalised people” by writing about the Navajo legend of the skinwalker in a new story.

The Harry Potter author posted the first part of a four-part series, the History of Magic in North America on her website Pottermore, on Tuesday. Subsequent episodes are being published each day at 2pm until Friday. Tying in to the release in November of the film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the short piece of writing deals with the magical New World in the 14th to 17th centuries.

Although the new insights into the universe of Harry Potter were welcomed by many, the author was strongly criticised online by a number of voices from Native American communities, particularly over her writing about skinwalkers, which in Navajo legend are said to be evil witches or wizards who can take on the form of animals.

Needless to say, JK Rowling has been summarily tried on Twitter and found guilty of the high crime of cultural appropriation and misrepresentation for taking Native American legends which were not her own (and God forbid that cultures ever intermix or borrow from one another) and using them for her own grubby commercial purposes. For shame.

And public shaming is exactly what was swiftly visited upon Rowling by the Twitter mob:

But campaigner Dr Adrienne Keene told Rowling on Twitter that “it’s not ‘your’ world. It’s our (real) Native world. And skinwalker stories have context, roots, and reality … You can’t just claim and take a living tradition of a marginalised people. That’s straight up colonialism/appropriation.”

The academic also took issue with Rowling’s use of the phrase “the Native American community”, saying that “one of the largest fights in the world of representations is to recognise Native peoples and communities and cultures are diverse, complex, and vastly different from one another.”

[..] Navajo writer Brian Young wrote on Twitter that he was “broken hearted” about the new piece of writing. “JK Rowling, my beliefs are not fantasy. If ever there was a need for diversity in YA lit it is bullsh!t like this,” said Young. “My ancestors didn’t survive colonisation so you could use our culture as a convenient prop.”

Well, when you put it like that, let’s waste no time No-Platforming JK Rowling, emptying library bookshelves of Harry Potter volumes and throwing them on the fire we have already set ablaze to dispose of our unwanted Cecil Rhodes memorabilia. Because the difference between the sins of these two “colonialists” is only one of severity, not of kind, at least according to the Identity Politics police who act as judge, jury and executioner in these cases.

One such typical virtue-signalling, outraged response to Rowling’s creation comes courtesy of Katherine Trendacosta, writing in Gizmodo:

Rowling reveals a lack of knowledge of American history that makes this an extremely hard read. She also either doesn’t realize the sensitive nature of some areas she’s treading on or does not care.

Who could have predicted that a white lady from the UK would have problems with appropriating Native American culture? Oh, wait, that should have been completely obvious to anyone even thinking of doing what J.K. Rowling did. When you’re combining a history of magic with Native Americans, you’re falling into an already prevalent trope of making them “mystical.” And Rowling not only didn’t avoid that trap, she leaned into it.

[..] Associating Native Americans with “animal and plant magic”—with, it should be noted, no more detail than that—is leaning so hard on a stereotype it’s hard not to find it offensive. It’s also not great that she says that wands originated in Europe, which reads very much as a Europe being the center of innovation and building in the magic world. You know, Native Americans and their “Earth magic” while European wizards were the ones smart enough to make wands.

Rowling may say that great things can be done without a wand, but it doesn’t offset the implications—that Native Americans may have raw power, but it’s refinement that only comes from Europe. Implications that she, with her background, was completely blind to.

You get the idea.

This level of wand-obsession is more commonly associated with the likes of Donald Trump than Social Justice Warriors, but when it comes to the Identity Politics brigade clearly no literary or descriptive detail is too small to be pecked over and analysed to death in the search for smoking-gun evidence of cultural insensitivity.

Note also the constant references to JK Rowling’s ethnic background. It almost seems as though Trendacosta’s anger is not so much that somebody misrepresented Native American culture, but rather that a “white lady” did so. It is almost as though there is some latent anger and rage against whiteness bubbling away under the surface, and that this whole cultural appropriation furore is just a convenient device with which to bash “white privilege”.

And this is the key question (to which we already really know the answer). Is the failure to represent every culture in a painstakingly accurate way always such a terrible crime, or is it only truly offensive when somebody from a majority (i.e. white) culture do it to a supposedly marginalised culture?

I’m British, and constantly see my culture represented less than wholly accurately in all manner of ways, particularly in American movies and television shows. A character might be studying at Oxford University and yet inexplicably live in London (because of course England is just one small, uniform place), or everyone might speak like Hugh Grant in one movie and like a soot-smeared Cockney in another. More galling still, Hollywood seems to go through phases where every villain in every movie has to be a suave, upper-class British guy, speaking in an accent not unlike my own. Sure, it’s irritating, but am I incurring “harm” when this happens?

Or is any harm that I might have suffered because of the misrepresentation of my country and people in the popular culture negated by the fact that as a British citizen, I hail from an Evil Colonial Power, responsible for so much that is terrible in the world? The sun may have set on the British Empire, but has it set on my apparent share of our collective guilt for the actions of kings and queens and statesmen who lived and died centuries before I was born?

The fundamental question is this: are JK Rowling’s critics angry because Navajo culture was misrepresented or because Navajo culture was misrepresented? Was the offence to commit an apparently heinous act of cultural appropriation against Native Americans specifically, or to have misrepresented any culture in the first place?

It hardly needs pointing out that it is the latter. Because the whole Identity Politics culture is based on the neo-colonial and racist assumption that certain cultures are “weaker” than others, and that the people belonging to those cultures are childlike victims with less agency than those from white, Western backgrounds.

Without a steady supply of “victims” to protect – and unwitting “villains” to blunder into their cultural booby traps – Identity Politics practitioners would have nothing to do, and so have no means of asserting their power over our language and discourse (which is the ultimate goal).

Of course, this dogma presupposes that those from minority cultures can actually be physically or mentally harmed by the mere act of having their culture, customs or history either accidentally misunderstood or deliberately misrepresented, even if they are not necessarily aware that it is happening at the time – a hugely condescending attitude to hold toward racial and cultural minorities in the present day.

At every stage it is taken for granted that even today, those from minority cultures totally lack any agency to seize control of the narrative for themselves and disseminate more truthful and accurate perceptions of their culture if they wish to do so – and if how they are perceived by complete strangers really matters that much to them.

And as always, it is the Identity Politics practitioners and those who believe that individuals can be harmed by non-malicious misrepresentations of their culture in the media who display the real contempt for these “marginalised” groups, even though that contempt is dressed up in the language of care and concern.

 

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Tales From The Safe Space, Part 11 – From A Dissenter Behind Enemy Lines

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Conservatives Libertarians Campus

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From deep behind enemy lines…

The following lonely cry for solidarity and advice comes from a British student posting on a libertarian Facebook group, and gives a snapshot of the current climate of hostility facing conservative and libertarian students who refuse to buy in to the Identity Politics orthodoxy reigning on university campuses.

The student asks:

Any libertarians or even Tories here struggle with being shut down at uni? I’ve just handed in the most left wing essay I’ve ever written in order to get a good mark, I lost marks in a presentation for stating that the EU arrest warrant is unjust (because we signed up to it, so it’s voluntary according to the lecturer), a girl was literally shaking with rage when I said I will be voting to leave the EU and she had a lot of back up…but it gets to a point where it’s having a negative effect on my education and not sure how to tackle it. Should I just keep my views to myself and write left wing essays? Advice needed. I am treated like a fascist.

Such students increasingly face genuine hostility when they insist on being true to themselves and refuse to hide or disown their sincerely held political opinions, both from peers and even their own professors.

And particularly where students’ academic results are at stake, this real-world hostility stands in stark contrast to the largely imaginary hostility (microaggressions) dreamed up by the Identity Politics brigade as a pretext for demanding ever more restrictions on liberty, and ever more transfers of power to themselves from fawning, deferential university authorities.

 

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At Least Jeremy Clarkson Is Honest About His Euro-Federalist Dreams

Samuel Hooper12 Comments

British television presenter Clarkson returns to his home in west London

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Unlike most people in the Remain campaign, at least Jeremy Clarkson has the courage and decency to admit that he doesn’t just tolerate the European Union but actually dreams of Britain being part of a federal European country

So that great producer-punching pseudo Man of the People, Jeremy Clarkson, has come out definitively in support of Britain remaining in the European Union – and not just the EU as it is now, but the EU as it yearns to become in the near future, a fully politically integrated federal European state.

No great surprise there – Clarkson has made pro-European rumblings before. But what is surprising (and actually rather impressive) is the full-throated way in which Clarkson embraces his support of the EU.

Unlike nearly every leading politician and personality in the Remain camp, Clarkson does not attempt to flatter us or pretend that he “gets” our concerns about Brussels gradually usurping our democracy. Unlike the deceitful-yet-ingratiating Sajid Javid, Clarkson makes no promises to go back to ranting at Brussels the moment he has helped doom us to continued membership of the EU (though in Clarkson’s case, more ranting is all but guaranteed).

Jeremy Clarkson actually does something which almost nobody in the intellectually squalid, fear-based Remain campaign dares to do – he owns his pro-Europeanism and wears it as a badge of honour, rather than doing what so many Turncoat Tories and others have done, prancing around like the World’s Biggest Eurosceptic before meekly running to David Cameron’s heel and supporting Britain’s continued membership of the EU as soon as the prime minister snapped his fingers.

Clarkson writes in the Sunday Times (+):

I suppose that now is as good a time as any to declare my hand. I’m with the man whose wife we fancy. I’m in.

When Mr Cameron was touring Europe recently, seeking a better deal for Britain by sucking up to the leaders of such places as Romania and Hungary, I watched on YouTube an MEP called Daniel Hannan make an anti-EU speech to a group of, I think, students. It was brilliant. One of the best speeches I’ve ever heard. And, I’ll admit, it made me question my beliefs. But despite his clever, reasoned and passionate plea for us to leave Europe, I’m still in. He talked sense, but a lot of this debate is about how we feel.

In 1973 my parents held a Common Market party. They’d lived through the war, and for them it seemed a good idea to form closer ties with our endlessly troublesome neighbours. For me, however, it was a chance to make flags out of coloured felt and to eat exotic foods such as sausage and pasta. I felt very European that night, and I still do.

Whether I’m sitting in a railway concourse in Brussels or pottering down the canals of southwestern France or hurtling along a motorway in Croatia, I feel way more at home than I do when I’m trying to get something to eat in Dallas or Sacramento. I love Europe, and to me that’s important.

I’m the first to acknowledge that so far the EU hasn’t really worked. We still don’t have standardised electrical sockets, and every member state is still out for itself, not the common good. This is the sort of thing that causes many people to think, “Well, let’s just leave and look after ourselves in future.”

In other words, Jeremy Clarkson is your garden variety Euro-federalist. He looks at the bureaucratic opacity of Brussels, the contempt in which the EU is held by many of its citizens and the fact that cultural and regulatory harmonisation has not been completed to produce a single cultural identity where we all identify as Europeans first and use the same electrical outlets, and concludes that the correct answer is “more Europe”.

Fair play to him. He’s completely wrong, and betrays an almost criminal contempt for the democracy and right to self-determination for which our ancestors fought, bled and died. He is the archetypal person who votes as a consumer – because a harmonised, federal Europe would be better for his wallet and his weekend jaunts to France – rather than as a thinking, engaged citizen. But at least he has the god damn balls to honestly state his position. Hardly anybody in our own elected House of Commons supporting the Remain campaign would dare to do the same.

But then it begins to come off the rails (or the test track). Clarkson continues:

Britain, on its own, has little influence on the world stage. I think we are all agreed on that. But Europe, if it were well run and had cohesive, well thought-out policies, would be a tremendous force for good. I think we are all agreed on that as well. So how do we turn Europe from the shambles it is now into the beacon of civilisation that it could be in the future?

Oh really? We are “all agreed” on that, are we?

Actually, no we are not agreed at all. Our prime minister and foreign secretary may hold our country, its history and present capabilities in astonishingly low esteem, but fortunately the same cannot be said for many of the people. Many of us correctly believe Britain to be one of the few truly indispensable nations on Earth, that our contributions to the arts, sciences, commerce and global security are almost unmatched, and that we could throw our weight around in the world accordingly, if only we cared to stand up for our own national interest once in awhile.

But such views are unheard of outside the Chipping Norton set, the middle class clerisy in general and the fawning circle of friends and admirers surrounding David Cameron (of whom Jeremy Clarkson is one). These people, many of whom came of age at the peak of 1970s declinism and economic doldrums, have at their core a deep pessimism and scepticism about the ability of Britain to survive and prosper as an independent actor on the world stage.

So deeply have they internalised this self-doubt and self-loathing that no matter how much evidence you show them to the contrary – the examples of Australia and New Zealand, say, somehow surviving in the world without being part of an Asia Pacific Union and sharing a common parliament and court – they bat it away without even stopping to think.

Clarkson then sums up:

Right. So let’s switch our attention. Let’s leave the “parish councillors” alone and concentrate our big guns on the real decision makers in Brussels. Let’s have hacks outside their houses all day long, waiting for one of them to do or say something wrong. Let’s make them accountable. Let’s turn them from “faceless bureaucrats” into household names.

That is the biggest problem with the EU right now. Nobody is really concentrating on its leaders. Nobody is saying: “Hang on a minute . . .” And this means they are running amok.

It’s why we need to stay in. So our famously attentive media can try to stop them. To make them pause before they move. To make the Continent work the way the Continent should — as a liberal, kind, balanced fulcrum in a mad world that could soon have Trump on one side and Putin on the other.

And here we have the classic pivot back to “the answer is more Europe!” Rather than looking at public attitudes toward the European Union which range from disengaged indifference to blind, seething rage, Clarkson concludes not that the experiment in political integration by stealth has failed, but rather that we should just come to terms with it and re-order our media and culture around the EU’s artificial construct.

Clarkson is actually saying that if only more journalists doorstopped Jean-Claude Juncker and Martin Schulz every morning with awkward questions about budgets and foreign policy, we would immediately begin to feel more vested in the EU project and finally become enthusiastic Europeans. It’s pure wishful thinking, of course, but then so is everything about the EU, an political organisation build on the the principle of “If you build it, they will come” (they being a European demos willing to be led by Brussels).

But though Clarkson is wrong on nearly every point, cavalier with our democracy to the point that it does not even merit a mention in his article and unabashedly in hoc to the establishment’s ingrained europhilia, still he somehow comes away as the most intellectually honest and respectable of all the high profile Remain supporters.

Unlike an oleaginous Turncoat Tory, Clarkson does not feel the need to butter us up with constant anecdotes about how he hates Brussels just as much as we do, honest. And unlike those bland Remainers on the Labour benches, he does not just mutter inanities about countries “working together”, as though intergovernmental co-operation were not possible without the umbrella of an undemocratic political union.

No, Jeremy Clarkson owns his position, and has the guts to tell us that not only should we learn to love the European Union as it is now, we should actively fight for further political integration:

But, actually, isn’t it better to stay in and try to make the damn thing work properly? To create a United States of Europe that functions as well as the United States of America? With one army and one currency and one unifying set of values?

At last, an honest argument from a Remain supporter – someone who is brave enough to stand up and say “actually, I feel more European than British, I think that the nation state is kind of passé anyway, I’m envious of the size and power of the United States and terrified by the sight of Russia; therefore, we should proceed full speed ahead with the creation of a European country”.

Again: I find Jeremy Clarkson’s argument utterly repellent and contemptuous of our hard-won democracy and liberty. But my God, it’s refreshing to hear from someone from the Remain camp who actually says what they really feel about the European Union.

David Cameron, Philip Hammond, Theresa May and other assorted peddlers of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) – your turn next in the honesty corner.

 

European Union - United Kingdom - Britain - Flags

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Tales From The Safe Space, Part 10 – Competitive Grievance Culture

Samuel Hooper4 Comments

Germaine Greer - Cardiff University

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In Britain, the Identity Politics revolution is starting to devour its children. But the same climate of open “competitive grievance” warfare is less pronounced in the United States

One aspect of the Identity Politics / Safe Space culture which genuinely seems to differ between the United States and Britain (following close behind) is the different dynamic which exists between all of the various arrayed grievance groups.

In America, Identity Politics practitioners tend to practice solidarity and stick together – you will often read stories of the various campus cultural centres, women’s centre and LGBT centre (for all must have their own safe space) collaborating together when producing their tedious lists of demands for campus reform.

But in Britain, Identity Politics seems to be a bit more competitive, and you are more likely to see the various victim groups (or generations) acrimoniously competing with one another for the limelight and striving to portray themselves as the most oppressed and victimised (thereby, conversely, granting themselves the most power and authority in the New Order).

In his latest review of Stepford Student activity for the Spectator, Mick Hume outlines the self-cannibalising nature of the Identity Politics movement in Britain:

Barely a week goes by without similar student-eat-student lunacy. Campuses are becoming ‘intersectional’ war zones, where identity zealots compete to see who can appear the most offended and victimised and so silence the rest.

In British universities, a rising ride of intolerance sweeps away anything that might make students feel uncomfortable. A leading anti-fascist campaigner has been ‘no-platformed’ by the NUS black students’ group, who branded him ‘Islamophobic’. The NUS lesbian, gay, bi- and transsexual officer refused to share a platform with Peter Tatchell, doyen of LGBT lobbyists, because he had opposed bans on Terfs (‘trans-exclusionary radical feminists’). After standing up for free speech, it seems, the likes of Tatchell must be denied the right to speak on -campus.

[..] The campus censorship crusade is not craziness so much as a logical extension of the ‘no platform’ policy so beloved of the left. This dates back to the ‘no platform for racists and fascists’ policy adopted by the National Union of Students in 1974. Today it seems more like ‘no platform for racists, fascists, Islamists, Islamophobes, homophobes, Nietzsche, rugger-buggers, pin-ups, rude pop songs, sombreros, sexist comedians, transphobic feminists, Cecil Rhodes or anything at all that might make anybody feel uncomfortable’.

[..] The irony is that many throwing up hands in horror at today’s promiscuous ‘no platform’ antics have themselves tried to ban speech of which they disapproved. It will come as little surprise to those with a sense of history that among the latest ‘victims’ of ‘no platform’ are those who demanded campus censorship in the past, up to and including St Peter of Tatchell. Those who live by the ban can perish by it, too.

As this blog wearily pointed out when Peter Tatchell (of all people) found himself ostracised by a group of virtue-signalling young activists who had the temerity to accuse him of prejudice while themselves standing on the shoulders of Tatchell’s own achievements for their cause:

That’s the rotten core of today’s student identity politics movement. A constant, bitchy, backbiting game of snakes and ladders, with one insufferable petty tyrant rising to the top of the Moral Virtue Pyramid only to be brought down by their jealous rivals, either for no reason at all, or for having unknowingly violated one of the many red lines that they themselves helped to draw across our political discourse.

This phenomenon of competitive grievance within the Identity Politics movement does not currently seem to be as common in the United States, at least to the same degree. The same Hierarchy of Privilege exists in the minds of American devotees of Identity Politics – that much is the inevitable consequence of intersectionality. But at present it does not seem to be leading to the same degree of internal warfare as we now see in Britain, which is odd when one considers that America is traditionally more individualistic and Britain slightly more collectivist. Surely, by this logic, America should be leading the way with a ruthless rat-race between the different groups for the coveted title of “most oppressed”.

One of the things which gives me the most encouragement – besides the sight of feisty, no-nonsense university leaders like Dr. Everett Piper and Chris Patten showing some backbone and standing up to increasingly ludicrous student demands – is the way in which our competitive grievance culture, so pronounced in the Identity Politics debate here in Britain, is now threatening to bring the whole edifice crashing down in an enormous word cloud of overwrought self-pity.

It is curious that the United States – typically in the vanguard of this movement – does not yet seem to be witnessing the same furious self-cannibalisation of Identity Politics preachers as we are currently witnessing on this side of the Atlantic. Perhaps this can be Britain’s contribution to the cure.

 

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