there seems to be no good way to communicate cultural grievances across cultures and this is distressing
as always people want to be listened to but won't listen to each other
---
RT @miftah___ra
@visakanv as an indonesian i would like to stay:everybody please chill we have all suffered enough under colonialism 😢
neither side understands the other's grievances, it's a clusterfuck of asymmetric information and makes me sad
https://twitter.com/miftah___ra/status/1350791648221954051
the only communicable issues are object-level concerns which are fake and has nothing to do with the actual sentiments underlying it which can only be properly understood by studying other cultures with *respect*
reminds me of the issue of "cultural appropriation" which is also fundamentally about respect
---
RT @miftah___ra
failing to do this is what ppl mean by "cultural appropriation" - ultimately it's not about the cooptation by itself, but about disrespecting the culture by making what are effectively parodies
https://twitter.com/miftah___ra/status/1339644429699727360
but when people already feel offended, tribe banners have been raised and respect is the one thing people will not do, when ironically it is the only thing that would resolve the conflict
this is going to keep getting worse as long as people keep claiming the epistemic authority to frame social issues
your frame is deeply rooted in your cultural background and you have NO idea of the worlds that exist outside of it
---
RT @visakanv
A phrase I’ve used in several private conversations:
We are merely in season 2 of the global sourceland vs diaspora culture wars
It’s going to get A Lot More Intense in the coming decades
https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1101424887200047104
I feel like this point is impossible to get across because it involves dragging them to a meta realm outside their certainties to a degree that many people are simply not willing to do
this is probably part of the wider problem that *empathy does not scale*, and afaict we don't yet have social technologies that can do this
question is how to do this kind of thing at scale:
---
RT @dinglevery
@miftah___ra i think the only thing that might be able to help is if people all had to live in a sufficiently different culture for > 6 months. i don't think words can ever translate how arbitrary all the social conventions of o…
https://twitter.com/dinglevery/status/1350806461861961730
scaling up communication channels without scaling up empathy & human decency = our current state
@amir May I add overall reason?
The root of all evil, I claim, isn't that people are stupid (they're not). Rather, it's the need for too tight an identity in a world that is decreasingly willing to provide one.
@srs very well put, and I agree!
now, how to resolve this? how to reconcile a need for identity in an increasingly post-identity world without resorting to silly intercultural knife fights?
@amir Well I'm happy to explore this together with you. Seems to be question bigger than a toot though.
I should perhaps reread Francis Fukuyama's book on Identity...
information asymmetry strikes again
---
RT @miftah___ra
so much information, so much valuable "lived experience" stored in little pockets of perception all over the world
and the Collective cannot access it. this is why we never learn
https://twitter.com/miftah___ra/status/1323316413193334784