Cultural Appropriation And It's Farmyard Melange

HERE is an article about the problem of cultural appropriation.

Or rather, it very adroitly explains why "cultural appropriation" is mostly a pile of horse hockey.

The Dead And The Undead

History is replete with examples of marginalized people and people groups who have suffered genuine injustices.  Women have often found themselves at a disadvantage politically and economically in societies across the planet and throughout time.  They still do in most of the non-westernized, non-industrialized world (though progressive fabulists will have you believe that it is largely a crime of the west and that we should somehow look to times and places that in reality still suffer some of the worst human rights abuses).  Brown (or "black") people have suffered in the West in recent centuries without a doubt.  No serious minded student of history denies this, shockingly even among the vast majority of "right" leaning members of society who are accused of hate for "people of color" (as if being non-brown makes one what?... clear?...).  But long before the majority of oppressed races in the west were brown, there were millennia of white people oppressing other white people... and brown people oppressing brown people.  White people from the West (along with the brown members of their societies) have been getting in the way of brown on brown genocides and human rights debacles in Africa and Asia regularly for over a century now, unless we are progressive, and then we don't talk about that.

The point is, that serious people don't deny that marginalization has happened, and still happens, and that it is wrong.  Where progressives and non-progressives differ, is largely a matter of how we determine wrong from right.  And that makes all the difference. 

Justice the thing that is wanting when a marginalized group is oppressed (which means THIS).  But 

not all discrimination is bad. Marginalizing bad things and bad actors is good - we may differ on what is bad and good, but the problem then becomes not whether we should marginalize, but rather what we marginalize based on what is objectively true.  There is the rub, as, leftism is so often woven inextricably with relativism that truth is thrown out the window in favor of political power based ultimately on the idol of self.  We have the law of the jungle by any other name, and human history is replete with examples of the horror that follows that. 

It has been observed that there is nothing new to learn, but only to be retaught to each new generation.  What we find here, is that while we have buried the leftist wight many times before, we have to keep facing the ravenous hunger of the thing that rises from the grave over and over, making more undead in it's wake.  This is a political zombie apocalypse, and we are in the midst of that war.

Magical Thinking Nonsense From SJWs

HERE is another article by a well intended SJW, who nonetheless seems utterly ignorant about the topic of which he speaks.

The short of it is this:

Things like the Hermetic type of magic in World of Darkness games and D&D’s rote magic have never set my imagination on fire. Mind you, I don’t think they are bad, exactly. They just never rang ‘true’ for me. They never had that sense of verisimilitude that never has anything to do with reality, but rather how real something feels.
And magic in the hands of the already enfranchised never feels ‘real’ to me. Why would a guy like Harry Dresden need to search for another source of power, for instance? He’s a white, straight, good-looking dude. He’s 99 percent of the way there. Or Harry Potter for that matter? Or Dr. Strange? Yes, they have challenges. But in the context of the greater society, their challenges are ones that almost tailor-made for resolution within the existing power structure.

While WOD certainly takes it's liberties for the benefit of gamifying magic, it actually does base Hermetic magic in the game on historical Hermetic magical thinking.  And, oh-by-the-way, Hermetic magic never really had anything to do with SJ (silly fellow).

For that matter, it was merely a codification of the sort of looser magical thinking that every culture across the planet through history has practiced.  And, oh-by-the-way, that sort of magical thinking, while culturally detailed, was practiced and thought about by all sorts of people of every different color, race, and sex.  The wizard was on the margins, because they were weird and not entirely understood, not the other way round.  I will concede the possibility that in some cases, marginalized folk took up the practice, but it was undoubtedly for the same reasons that rich non-marginalized people in other times and places did: they had a lust for power that they did not possess.

There are no new sins, and humans across the board have them.  Every one of the seven deadly sins is held in the hearts of humans in both marginal and non-marginal social positions, and because we are sinful, we seek a way to "cheat" the universe in order to get what we can't otherwise.

This article is a load of crap.