First Cosby. I'm happy that some measure of justice was done. Yet it concerns me how the man was able to get away with it for decades and dozens of victims. Fame, alone or in combination with such things as wealth and power, pretty much gives you a ticket to do what you want in our society. There appears to be a two tier system of justice in America now. One for the elites, one for the rest of us. The Cosby case is an instance in which the tiers broke down and justice was served to an elite, but I'm not naive enough to think that is going to become a trend.
Cultural Appropriation. I can understand that people don't like to be insulted by deprecatory misrepresentations of themselves. So I see it as nonsense when, say, the Redskins football franchise announces that it's keeping its logo despite the nearly universal offense its logo gives Native Americans. The Redskins should ditch the logo, rename themselves, and be done with it. This isn't the 1800s anymore: Conquering a people no longer gives you the right in the eyes of the world to further demean and humiliate them.
That's one thing. There's more to cultural appropriation than that.
Whenever you turn something into a cause, no matter how good the cause is, sooner or later the idiots will ride in on their ponies to "support" you. Those are the people who want to use your cause to make themselves feel big, to put themselves in spotlights, to take out their anger on other people, and so forth. So now you have people writing articles claiming there's something morally wrong with Chinese-American food, or Thai-American. Or finding moral wrong in the fact Buddhism is interpreted in the West differently than it is interpreted in the East. And so forth.
To me, there's nothing wrong with adapting the things of one culture to the tastes and understanding of another. That's how peoples of different cultures at least initially learn from each other. It's been going on that way for thousands of years. One can even make an argument that, human learning being what it is, there is no other way to do it.
The difference between, say, the "Redskins" name and General Tsos' Chicken lies in the intent to depreciate. The Redskins name and logo were from the start depreciating. There is no evidence that General Tsos' Chicken was ever intended to depreciate anyone or anything.
