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[Shadowlord]

Huh?

[Neonivek]

Huh?

Cultural appropriation is where you use something from outside your "perceived" culture ("Perceived" is important as being part of a multi-cultural society one could consider your culture to be multi-cultural). So Eating Tacos, listening to Jazz, and watching anime are all forms of cultural appropriation.

There are two additional qualifiers people add onto it: 1) Done in a disrespectful way (AKA: Don't create the Jazz Singer. Which I just consider to be racism not appropriation) and 2) an exchange of power

I am dealing with the second. It REQUIRES you to assume that whatever culture you exchange with is the lesser culture.

[Shadowlord]

Huh? That makes no sense.

If I like watching something, I'm going to watch it, and if someone else is upset by that, that seems like a personal problem on their part. (Or eating something, or listening to something)

[ChairmanPoo]

I find the concept of cultural appropiation  as something negative dubious for the same reasons as Shadowlord. If anything, I think the very concept is segregationist (eg: intending for every culture to remain isolated) not to mention unnatural. People have been loaning  concepts and ideas from each other since the beginning of time. And it's bidirectional: conquerors have adopted the practices of the conquered as often as viceversa.

[Reelya]

It's a thing in social justice circles. Just did a college class on Post-modernism, so we covered all that stuff (had two lecturers, one cool one and one uptight retard PC type, who talked about how all belief systems were relative, and open to critique, which was cool, except as soon as you gave a perspective that wasn't in line with his agenda on some social issue he'd turn mega-passive-aggressive. So it's like "all the traditional thinking has been overturned by post-structuralism. But don't you little assholes question a single thing I tell you is certified truth").

For "cultural appropriation", one example I read about is for kimono manufacturers in Japan. The industry is gradually going broke because few of the wealthy Japanese these days buy expensive kimonos like they used to. So a group of Kimono manufacturers set up a cultural exchange with museums in the USA, and those museums had a thing where they did kimono fittings for visitors. Cue: Asian-American college kids picketing the whole thing protesting about "cultural appropriation", forcing the thing to be shut down. Very few of the protesters were Japanese-Americans however, and almost no Japanese understood why it was considered racist.

But when you think about it, is there really much difference between protesting people in America wearing kimonos because racism, or protesting kimonos because you're racist. Both are trying to prevent cultural blending, but for opposite stated reasons. Both associate race with a cultural artifact, and say you should stick to cultural artifacts that are appropriate to your race. I'm skeptical of the value of screaming about "cultural appropriation" in this manner. Like that asshole lecturer who uses "political correctness" to dominate other people's viewpoints, this sort of angry activism could be part of a movement to project social dominance over the public sphere of a particular social class. After all, they completely trampled over the thoughts and feelings of the group they're purported to be "protecting" from cultural appropriation, which just doesn't sit well with me at all.

[hector13]

DF isn't the only game that Toady has made.

What exactly is the argument here? Are you saying that LCS could account for the gender-skew, but not DF? It seems kind of silly to say other Toady games are responsible for the forum gender skew.

Yes, those are the exact words that made up that sentence I don't even know how you inferred that from what I said

Anyway, you now seem to be cherrypicking the argument, so I see no point in continuing. The three factors you provided statistics for are not the only factors that are going to influence the gender distribution on the forum, and my argument was that you were using statistics to suit that particular data point.

[Shadowlord]

I assumed Reelya's motivations were more like "I saw statistics that appeared to explain this! I should share this!"

[NJW2000]

College students? There's your problem, anyhow.

The kimono thing seems more tacky than actively bad, as in taking a fading aspect of Japanese culture and whoring it about a bit for Western amusement, from one perspective. Depends on how they did it, though. It being the USA, I'd assume tastelessly, but no idea.


But if you're looking for stupid protests against Western uses of foreign labour, try the people that refuse to buy from sweatshops.

uptight retard PC type, who talked about... his PC post-structuralist interpretation

Tempted to sig this for a laugh.

[Reelya]

Anyway, you now seem to be cherrypicking the argument, so I see no point in continuing. The three factors you provided statistics for are not the only factors that are going to influence the gender distribution on the forum, and my argument was that you were using statistics to suit that particular data point.

I'm cherry picking? I included an entire statement you wrote, I also quoted the previous sentence, which you ironically ignored to make the cherry-picking accusation (I picked all the cherries from the tree). Your entire paragraph was thus, and I bolded the bits i quoted throughout my response:

Then there's consideration of joining the forum, too, which was what encouraged you to go to the stats. I don't think all the DF players are going to join the B12 forum, and even then, DF isn't the only game that Toady has made. So... yeah. I think it's reasonable for someone to say you might be interpreting stats to suit your argument.

I ... don't think the final sentence which I culled changes the meaning of what you wrote. Pointing out non-DF games by Toady is pretty left-field. It has absolutely nothing to do with the discussion. "grasping at straws" is what it looks like.

And I'm stretching logic by making the observation that DF is PC-only and that male gamers overwhelmingly list the PC as their preferred platform compared to female gamers? Couple that with the genre (roguelike) where similar gender-splits are seen (90% from some survey I read about), and the fact that it sucks large amounts of time to get anywhere (and male gamers spend way more hours on average than female gamers). So that's another way to look at it: a really time-consuming roguelike on the PC is much more likely to gain a male following than a female following.

[hector13]

Evidently you didn't finish reading that sentence regarding cherry picking, as it said I wasn't going to discuss it further.

I responded to that part because you put words in my mouth. I did not say to exclude DF from forum gender distribution, I did not say that LCS was solely responsible for forum gender distribution and I certainly did not understand how you could draw those conclusions from what I said.

If I wanted someone to misinterpret everything I said, I'd play Mafia, and would prepare myself mentally for it. This isn't Mafia, so I'm not really in the mood to deal with it, thanks.

[Reelya]

I didn't "put words in your mouth". What i wrote was "What are you saying here? Are you saying XYZ?" which makes it clear that that was my interpretation, and I asked for clarification. I have not received any clarification.

After all how else can it be interpreted? "games other than DF" really can only mean LCS ... and we are talking about things that explain the gender breakdown of the forums, so naturally it would sound like you're saying that LCS is more responsible for the gender-breakdown than DF is (otherwise it would make no sense to list "games other than DF" as a rebuttal).

[IronTomato]

Guys tend to not notice a gender-skew in the first place. Default human = white male and all that.

no

[Loud Whispers]

das raycis mang

[Reelya]

You know what I meant, e.g. assuming forumites are white males. That's the default assumption people make if they don't have any other information.

And a guy isn't going to notice that the room is full of guys, not as much as a woman would.

[TheBiggerFish]

You know what I meant, e.g. assuming forumites are white males. That's the default assumption people make if they don't have any other information.

And a guy isn't going to notice that the room is full of guys, not as much as a woman would.

Aye.  If they made an assumption at least.