Another thing about the analogy. Do you think the inventors of Coke and Sprite would agree with these statements? 
Another problem here is that there is no clear natural line to be drawn here - this is not a case of some people with clearly and obviously genuine complaints arising from harm, and other people with completely spurious complaints that should be pointed and laughed at. It’s more of a continuous spectrum, which means any line that anyone draws anywhere will inevitably divide cases that are almost identical in nature.
I definitely agree. There’s no hard-and-fast line here (or in many other topics). That’s why I offered something of a ranking of obnoxiousness above.
I certainly agree. There are two different, related dynamics that I think make certain behaviors obnoxious in this context:
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Profiting off someone else’s expertise and knowledge without sharing the profits, due to a cultural difference in how knowledge is shared. In our culture, if I know you’re getting ready to make a product and you need my knowledge and experience in order to make the product, I’ll know to draw up a contract where you pay me for my time, or allow me to share in the profits. In other cultures, there may be different understandings of how the value of knowledge is recognized, and those may be less rooted in formal contracts. A person who knows that members of another culture have different ways to reciprocate when knowledge is shared, and who benefits from the sharing of knowledge without reciprocating, because they rely on our culture’s contractual structures and the other culture doesn’t, is an asshole.
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Treating the serious and sacred from another culture with frivolity. Thus my example of the Comanche wedding dress. People who value their culture’s symbolic traditions are often going to hate it when others treat those traditions as fashion accessories, or sports memorabilia, or something similar. If you do so, you’re kind of being a dick. Maybe under certain circumstances it’s justifiable dickery (I’m okay with folks wearing Catholic priest costumes for Hallowe’en, given the harm that the Catholic priesthood has done to society taking them down a peg is fine by me), but it’s dickery.
What really makes people upset is the young child dressed as an altar boy.
Yeah, IMO, the way to do this is draw the line where your conscience tells you to. It will be fairly easy to identify cases that are wide of the line in either direction. Dealing with the middle ground is not so easy. There will be people who think you drew your line wrong in one direction, and others who think the opposite - i.e. people who think you are not sensitive enough to the thing they are offended by, and others who think it’s all nonsense.
Yeah, it’s a big old mess of ifs and buts. For example dressing up as a zombie nazi is somehow less offensive than dressing up as a nazi, I think (I wouldn’t do either of those things, but I would be slightly more willing to laugh off one than the other).
It has been damaged to some extent. To the extent that some people are considering to discontinue using it. So it has lost it’s function, and to some extent its meaning.
Makes sense. The former’s a good Nazi, the latter’s a bad Nazi.
Unless you live in a vacuum that is just the natural human condition.
Things that mean something to you will be emulated or used or appreciated or adapted by others. It is your choice what you do with that but unless you are being forced to accept a new meaning or are banned from using it yourself I don’t see that such “damage” is relevant.
I see a parallel in the hipster cliché of appreciating a certain band or food before it becomes popular, bemoaning the fact of it going mainstream, then disowning your enjoyment of it.
I understand the very human reaction that is behind many of the examples in this thread (I’ve been there myself), sure it may cause you offence in some way but I can’t understand why you would stop enjoying it or using it just because others start to do so.
Well, it was a Nazi that killed Hitler.
No, it doesn’t. It means “nazi”.
I own a small tablecloth covered with hundreds of little swastikas. My grandmother embroidered it when she was a girl, when the swastika, in western culture, was a generic good-luck symbol (often pictured with a four leaf clover and other generic lucky symbols.) She used that tablecloth, despite the Nazi connotation, and I used to eat breakfast on it when I stayed with her.
I value it, as an artifact my grandmother made. But I can’t use it. I took it out once or twice to cover a bridge table, when friends were over. And it was just too awkward. Even though I am Jewish. (a German friend who saw it pointed out that at least I could use it without being thought a nazi sympathizer. All the explanations in the world wouldn’t have let him use it.)
That symbol has been stolen. The Japanese can still use it, but no one who regularly interacts with “the west” can do so. Not without an awful lot of unwanted baggage.
It has that meaning, it does not have that meaning exclusively.
Cultures around the world that know of the west and know of the Nazi atrocities and their use of that symbol still use it in their own specific way and attach to it their original meaning.
Does it have disturbing connotations that some find impossible to look past? yes. That is not true for everyone, everywhere.
The swastika has been an extreme and unique issue of appropriation. Perhaps an ‘edge’ case. But edge cases are useful in that they serve to delimit the scope of the argument.
I only comment on it to challenge the assertion that, the use of a symbol (in this case) by an appropriating group (A) means that an originating group (B) is not able then to use it in its original context and with its original meaning.
I know, I understand the essence of your argument, and I mainly agree. But the swastika, well, use in most non-nazi contexts was OK for a long time after WW2, but after the internet and the upsurge in international travel, it became problematic. In Japan, at least, it was an extremely common symbol on maps to show where religious sites were. Tourists applied their own understanding, and tempers rose, leading to less usage of the symbol.
I can certainly see how such misunderstandings would be a problem and why usage in that context at least would be avoided
Is it actually leading to less usage? Google Maps currently uses swastikas to mark religious sites. Here’s a cluster of such sites in east Kyoto.
I’m sorry, but i stand as a counterexample to your assertion. I can’t use my grandmother’s tablecloth, with its hand-embroidered good luck symbol, because it now means “Nazi”. Literally no one looks at that tablecloth and thinks, “good luck”. My culture has been appropriated.
That’s a fairly minor cultural appropriation, but it’s real.
I notice it’s the (to me) left-handed perpendicular version, so it may be that in this cultural context that is still viewed as distinct enough from the diagonal right-handed version.
But yeah as puzzlegal relates, in the West that has been well and thoroughly (mis)appropriated and ruined.
Okay - I was trying to stay out of this discussion given the demographics of this board, but this is getting unbearable.
The Swastika is not just a Hindu symbol but an European one as well. It is another Cultural Appropriation that White folks try to hide that their ancestors used the Swastik symbol. When the movie Troy came out, the movie tried to recreate a lot of details genuine to the period - The Swastika was left out. The Man Who Brought the Swastika to Germany, and How the Nazis Stole It | History| Smithsonian Magazine
Kids in the US are taught about Helen of Troy or the Trojan Horse but not about the religious beliefs or symbiology like swastika of that era.
Having said that - please carry on,