Th3 Core

Man, yoga is getting hit from both the Right and Left.  This from 2015:

A university yoga class was cancelled because it was 'cultural appropriation' of a non-western practice

https://www.businessinsider.com/yoga-class-cancelled-because-its-cultural-appropriation-of-a-non-western-practice-2015-11?op=1

>cultural appropriation

I really dislike the concept of limiting ones activity to what people find acceptable for one's ethnicity.

Agreed.  "Cultural Appropriation" is a phony sin invented to allow somebody to feel righteously offended and to put somebody else at a seeming disadvantage.

1. Nobody can own a culture.
2. No two cultures encounter each other and come away unchanged.
3. Cultures have been selectively stealing from each other since before recorded history.  It's part of progress.

Remember when that American high school girl wore a Chinese dress to her prom?  People piled on that poor girl like crazy.  I read through a massive Twitter thread about it at the time.  I followed that thread across all the US time zones and people were piling on that young lady saying the most terrible things about her and her cultural appropriation.  Nasty stuff  but I kept following that thread until it hit China.  The Chinese were very polite but they made the following points:

A. They pointed out that nobody owns a culture.
B. They pointed out that there is no monolithic "Chinese" culture as American's seem to think, but that there are 8 Chinas (I don't remember the number TBH).
C. When the girl wearing the dress hit the media it was much discussed on Chinese social networks and the overwhelming consensus was that the Chinese were flattered that a young American woman chose to wear a Chinese dress to her special party.
D. They said they don't understand the concept of cultural appropriation and wondered if it was being pushed by first generation immigrants who were feeling the loss of their parent's heritage.
E. Many ventured that it looked to them like it was an excuse to bully a young woman.

That pretty much stopped the Twitter pile-on for that thread in it's tracks.  I got quite a chuckle out of that.

"Some of the decline is attributable to changing generations, with about 66% of people born before 1946 are still members of a church, compared to just 36% of millennials."

"Many Americans – especially young people – see religion as bound up with political conservatism, and the Republican party specifically,”

"Just 47% of the US population are members of a church, mosque or synagogue" I'm guessing including the others makes the decline even steeper amongst the church demographic?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/05/americans-religion-rightwing-politics-decline

>David Caradine

I think that's a bit of a sore spot for Jen too and it is closer to BoL's example.

>>protestant work ethic

There has been a lot of pushback on the Weber thesis. Some have argued that what he saw as the "protestant ethic" was actually a refugee community ethic, for example, given that when Weber said "protestant" what he really meant for the most part was Calvinist.

The protestant ethic results in accumulation of wealth precisely because the wealth was an accidental consequence of calling and service - those societies valorized work and criticized spending, so people tended to accumulate wealth. And most of those societies also had sumptuary laws that prevented conspicuous consumption.

The David Brooks argument is that what happened is that the accumulation of wealth has become divorced from any traditional break on the use and abuse of that wealth and has resulted in breaking the social contract that previously existed, because those religious beliefs in charity and even the nobility of the poor have diminished while the accumulation of wealth has accelerated.

Personally, I have a number of issues with Brooks' thesis, but just throw it out there as food for thought.

^{worth a read}

"The nones aren’t just young, highly educated, liberal white people.
Compared to the U.S. population overall, nonreligious Americans are younger and more Democratic-leaning. But the number of Americans who aren’t religious has surged in part because people in lots of demographic groups are disengaging from religion — many nones don’t fit that young, liberal stereotype. The average age of a none is 43 (so plenty are older than that). About one-third of nones (32 percent) are people of color. More than a quarter of nones voted for Trump in 2020. And about 70 percent don’t have a four-year college degree.

The decline over the last decade in the share of Black (-11 percentage points) and Hispanic adults (-10 points) who are Christians is very similar to the decline among white adults (-12 points), according to Pew. The number of college graduates leaving the faith (-13 points) is similar to those without degrees (-11 points). The decline in organized religion is indeed much bigger among Democrats (-17 points) than Republicans (-7 points) and among Millennials (-16 points) compared to Baby Boomers (-6 points), but the trend is very broad.

The growing diversity of nones explains a lot of dynamics we see in America today. For example...."

It’s Not Just Young White Liberals Who Are Leaving Religion | FiveThirtyEight
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/its-not-just-young-white-liberals-who-are-leaving-religion/