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So, what should we do about this problem then?

I’m not sure whether we dust off and nuke them all from orbit or just hang them:

The centre is operated by the university’s Student Federation, which first approached Scharf seven years ago about offering yoga instruction to students both with and without disabilities.

The centre goes on to say, “Yoga has been under a lot of controversy lately due to how it is being practiced,” and which cultures those practices “are being taken from.”

The centre official argues since many of those cultures “have experienced oppression, cultural genocide and diasporas due to colonialism and western supremacy … we need to be mindful of this and how we express ourselves while practising yoga.”…

Cultural appropriation of yoga for fuck’s sake?

Perhaps we should drop the use of zero given it’s same provenance?

Hang them first and then space kaboom I think. Only solution…..

55 thoughts on “So, what should we do about this problem then?”

  1. I’m not sure whether we dust off and nuke them all from orbit or just hang them

    Would it be cultural appropriation if we crucified the buggers?

  2. I read a piece recently which said that a lot of Yoga is actually based on 19th century British Army calisthenics, which makes the point that all this ‘Cultural Appropriation’ stuff is cobblers.
    Its fans will no doubt say that it’s different when brown or black people ‘appropriate’ white, European culture.

  3. “all this ‘Cultural Appropriation’ stuff is cobblers.”

    When people were gently pointing out that tedious posh white gap-yaar girls wandering around India with bindi’s was kinda off then I was sympathetic. It’s impressive how quickly the shark was jumped. It was finding out that suede work boots were ‘problematic’ that clinched it for me.

    Some of these people are such awful cunts I think we can do them for culturally appropriating Mick Hucknall.

  4. “Cultural genocide”? How about the actual physical one when the Moghuls invaded Hind. About 80m Hindu Buddhist and Jain dead but mustn’t mention the I word. Slowed down somewhat under vicious colonialism.

  5. So Much For Subtlety

    The Thought Gang – “Some of these people are such awful cunts I think we can do them for culturally appropriating Mick Hucknall.”

    Hucknall has made his career appropriating Black music. Which is turn is appropriated from a whole variety of European cultures. Someone would be meta-appropriating.

    I mean, the man owns a reggae label. Black people culturally appropriating Spanish musical instruments and Indian cultural practices, not to mention Ethiopian hair styles. Where do you begin?

  6. It’s about power. This “cultural appropriation” balls is just cover. The power to shove people around, get them to jump one way then another at your whim. That’s the point.

  7. Are Karate lessons for kids cultural appropriation too?

    Why is it that anything white people do that is taken from another culture is some evil appropriation but anything other cultures take from the west be it eating McDonalds or watching 007 movies is cultural imperialism?

    We cant fucking win.

  8. There’s an odd use of language going on. It’s the idea that ‘you’ve taken from’ a culture. So if I use some algebra today, then I’ve taken something and someone else in the world has a little less algebra. Or yoga.
    Or my nephew puts his running shoes on and does some fartlek today, or a fosbury flop, then something has been appropriated leaving some poor person in colourful pyjama land who invented it stuck with the straddle jump.

    It’s risible thinking.

  9. It was finding out that suede work boots were ‘problematic’ that clinched it for me.

    I’d think something a little more substantial than suede would be desirable in work boots. I have a feeling, however, that this wasn’t the “problem” the people you’re describing had with the boots.

  10. Didn’t the medievalists deal with arseholes using red hot pokers?

    it is that cultural appropriation of horticulture?

  11. Ljh

    Yes funny how it all started with us. Peoples have screwing other peoples since time immemorial. Abel & Cain folks?

    But only what you can blame us for gets a hearing. We must be the pits. Total and utter shi*s. I suppose I ought to commit suicide but surely I would be appropriating that too.

  12. Andrew – It’s the idea that ‘you’ve taken from’ a culture.

    Some primitive tribesmen believed that being photographed would steal your soul. And even they would have thought the superstition of “cultural appropriation” as a bad thing was retarded . They were glad to appropriate all the culture they could get their hands on.

    But to be fair, their brains hadn’t been mashed into a soft paste by modern educayshun.

  13. In summary, childish brats with dysfunctional personalities aka leftists have found yet another pretext to berate and scold other people.

  14. So Peter Hain should have spent his time trying to prevent us from practicing Yoga rather than trying to get oppressed people to humiliate themselves by playing Colonialist games.

  15. “Scharf offered a compromise, suggesting she change the name from yoga to “mindful stretching,” since that would reflect the content of the program and would “literally change nothing about the course.”
    […]
    According to email correspondence between Scharf and the centre, student leaders debated rebranding the program, but stumbled over how the French translation for “mindful stretching” would appear on a promotional poster, and eventually decided to suspend the program.”

    Words fail me…

  16. So now their saying that all that diversity.. e.g. food, clothing, art, fucking exercise is off limits?

    So can we tell the diversity merchants to get fucked then?

  17. Give a man a loaf and you feed him for a day. Give a man a bushel of wheat and a hoe and he can feed himself for years.

    Isn’t that the standard mantra?And isn’t this yoga shit the reverse of it?

  18. Yoga has been under a lot of controversy lately

    I bet it hasn’t.

    due to how it is being practiced,” and which cultures those practices “are being taken from.”

    Indeed. My grandfather was part of an imperialist raiding party which landed one night and stole Yoga, bringing it back to the West as booty.

  19. “Give a man a loaf and you feed him for a day. Give a man a bushel of wheat and a hoe and he can feed himself for year.”

    Give a SJW warrior a grievance and he can feed himself forever.

  20. “Jennifer Scharf, who has been offering free weekly yoga instruction to students since 2008, says she was shocked when told in September the program would be suspended, and saddened when she learned of the reasoning.”

    There’s your problem, right there.
    You don’t get “saddened” by assholes like this. You go righteously f**king apeshit & start kicking teeth down throats.
    The human race has a history of violence for a reason.

  21. a day or two ago, someone seemed seriously to be suggesting that cooking food from other cultures is appropriate and therefore racist

  22. Bloke in Costa Rica

    I’ve said it before, but I think it bears repeating, this time in bold, italic, all-caps: ALL CULTURE IS FUCKING CULTURAL APPROPRIATION. That’s how it works. It’s what stops you from having to invent everything from scratch every generation.

  23. Dongguan John,

    “Why is it that anything white people do that is taken from another culture is some evil appropriation but anything other cultures take from the west be it eating McDonalds or watching 007 movies is cultural imperialism?

    We cant fucking win.”

    The only way to win is not to play. Just give these people a long stare and tell them to shut the fuck up. All they want is power. They want to arbitrarily dictate things to others.

    Many of these colleges are now just centres of irrelevant fuckwittery.

  24. sackcloth and ashes

    ‘So, what should we do about this problem then?’

    Tell the SJWs to try and shut down a karate, Taekwondo, kung fu, Muy Thai or Eskrima class.

    Then watch them either bottle it, at which point you can mock them without mercy, or attempt it, in which case you can film the results for our collective amusement.

  25. So Much For Subtlety

    I want to see a campaign to prevent Black people from using mobile phones. Everyone knows that is cultural appropriation as mobile phones were invented by the Americans and Finns. Poor people too. Mobile phones were originally intended for Real Estate Agents and the like. I guess that would be Class appropriation.

  26. Bugger. Can’t eat fish’n’chips ‘cos we stole potatoes from the Americans and fried fish from the Jews. Can’t eat cabbages ‘cos we stole them from the Romans. Can’t eat rice ‘cos the Romans stole it from the Chinese. Can’t eat bread ‘cos we stole it from the Babylonians. Can’t eat carrots ‘cos the Dutch genetically modified them to be oranage.

  27. “Right, so we have to shut down every Indian restaurant in the country then?”

    No it simply means white people aren’t “allowed” to eat there, so most will go bust.

    Social Justice ftw…

  28. There are plenty of well documented punch ups between the students of different schools of yoga in India even before colonial oppresion, sort of a pre cursor to football thugs (of course that word itself is an appropriation). Not the peaceful study it’s always made out to be

  29. So Much For Subtlety

    Johnnydub – “No it simply means white people aren’t “allowed” to eat there, so most will go bust.”

    Not, at least, without three weeks of re-education and the production of a grovelling letter of apology about that whole Amritsar thing.

    Actually, the most sensible comment I know on cultural appropriation would be Rowan Atkinson’s Indian restaurant sketch.

  30. Now, now be fair. You encouraged all this when you all stamped on the EDL etc.
    You ’embraced’ the isms – and ignored your parents.
    And at the same time the folks looking for lebensraum have come back with lawyers rather than tanks.
    You will not win. Becuse you dont wan’t to win.

  31. The Stigler

    Spot on – why these people aren’t just treated with abject disdain is quite beyond me…….

  32. “Spot on – why these people aren’t just treated with abject disdain is quite beyond me…….”

    Because many people seem to have lost the moral courage to say that they are just plain wrong.

  33. Can we have our aircraft cars motorbikes tv computers pianos radio telescopes modern medicine modern science classical music and so on and so forth back then please.

  34. @SMFS – your link explains it all

    Cultural appropriation is when members of a dominant culture adopt parts of another culture from people that they’ve also systematically oppressed.

    They get to keep all the goodies from the patriarchy.

  35. So Much For Subtlety

    Roue le Jour – “Sooo, yoga pants, good or bad?”

    I can’t believe that Lululemon guy was forced to resign just for saying fat women should not wear his yoga pants.

    Which pretty much answers this question – fine for some women, eye-ball-searing public affront for others.

    gunker – “your link explains it all”

    I find it hard to believe that anyone could argue men are not the oppressed section of the economy here. After all the serf might have earned all the money, but his owner spent it.

  36. SMFS

    I can recall a comment from you (amongst numerous excellent insights) where you said that the ideological trends within Western society in general (And especially academia) were such that ISIS would be considered the lesser evil by many – reading that article on ‘foodie without appropriation’ makes me think that for all the UN declarations on ‘unified action’ against them that ISIS are on to a winner. Is a society that can produce apparently legions of beings with such a total disconnect from reality even worth saving from the barbarians at (and inside) the gates….

  37. These folks when imported into the UK are dangerous. They racialise when there is no racialistization and want, like the racists they are, separate monoculture instead of the glorious mismash of culture we see in the UK.

    These people would have if around in the 1960s, 70s and 80s had a go at all the white youth who were friends with dressed like, listen to music with and made bands together with the black youth and created things like two tone ska and everything. The meeting of black and white youth experience.

    Cultural experiences I might add that eroded the racism of their parents generation, an appropriation of culture than meant black British people were seen as part of society and the national culture. Leading it to reduce racism and towards an integrated society.

    These North America idiots and their British counterparts are working for us to go backwards and be more divided. These people must be fully opposed, I don’t want to live in a more racist society.

  38. I’m appropriating a calzone tonight. But it’s OK ‘cos Guiseppe (who owns the place said appropriation is taking place in) says he owes us for WW2, when my grandad stopped the Germans appropriating his “eeentire focking country”.

    We’re quits with the eyeties, folks. Break out the prosecco! Appropriate your heart out!

  39. So Much For Subtlety

    MyBurningEars – “Also it’s conceivable that white women wearing “black” hairstyles will come to be seen as racist as someone blacking up is now…”

    What is a Black hairstyle? Cattle dung and beads? I don’t see many White girls trying the full Afro. At least only after a particularly wild night.

    Anyway, anything that stops those blond dreadlocks (appropriated from India of course) can’t be all bad.

  40. It seems to me that this is an easy issue to clear up.

    As the issue at hand is at the University of Ottawa then I will make the assumption that this was communicated though either, or both, English and French which are languages that have culturally appropriated greatly from other languages.

    To have a valid point the complainers must make their statement in a language that hasn’t used cultural appropriation which as far as I know doesn’t exist. Therefore they must make up a completely unique communications method(come to think of it any currently know language can’t be used as a model) to express the idea. As soon as the complainer has set this up I will me more than receptive to the idea, expect that I won’t be able to understand them making the point moot.

  41. John Square,
    “We’re quits with the eyeties, folks. Break out the prosecco! Appropriate your heart out!”

    But, hang on. Should we not be resisting Italian Cultural Imperialism?

    And what’s the situation with Chicago deep dish pizza? May we?

  42. So Much For Subtlety

    Jack C – “And what’s the situation with Chicago deep dish pizza? May we?”

    The Guardianistas won’t abandon this campaign as long as the Right as the only ones feeling the pain. The solution is to make them suffer too. Once it hits closer to home, they will re-think their priors.

    Therefore I declare the following is racist and to be avoided at all costs:

    1. Croissants,
    2. Rocket,
    3. Pannini, baguettes and in fact any type of continental bread,
    4. Expresso and cappucino,
    5. Any form of pasta with double bad racist points for saying “al dente”
    6. Anything endorsed, recommended or otherwise mentioned by Elizabeth David.

    That should sort the f**kers out.

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