A quick article this week, but I just wanted to point something out that some of you may or may not have been aware of—It is fairly common in Asian cultures (whether it be in tattoos, video games, television, movies, etc.) to depict writing in European languages (typically Romance languages such as Latin) as something artistic or “cool”.

Yes indeed, that’s true: Just as pseudo-intellectual douchebags in the West will have garbled Hanzi or Katakana tattooed on their arms or used as props in hacky screenwriting, so too will pseudo-intellectual douchebags in the East utilize garbled or misconjugated Latin, English, German, French, or Italian. There’s certainly many examples of video games or animes having songs with Latin lyrics, or dropping names of Western occultism (typically Rosenkreuz for some reason), or utilizing occultic imagery from (usually Catholic) Christianity OR paganism, all in the name of “Derp, it looks cool”.

So why am I bringing this up? Well, mainly because I do genuinely find it interesting, this sort of convergent evolution of half-assed cultural homaging, and I also like to cite this phenomenon as an example of how, once again, everybody is capable of cultural appropriation, and no one culture is superior or inferior to any other.

In the always delicate and not-particularly-amicable state of race relations between East and West, the phenomenon that I am discussing here can be used to shut up any of the pompous assholes that will complain about this from one side or the other. Should you find yourself in the unenviable position of having to talk to the insane Asian nationalist weirdoes on Reddit (whom I have already profiled in THIS video), you can shut them up by pointing out how often their countrymen will, dare I say, appropriate European languages and cultures for their media productions.

Immediately after doing that, should you find yourself in the equally unenviable position of dealing with yellow fever suffering white supremacists (that phrase never sounds quite right…) cackling about “sexual imperialism” and the like, point out the slovenly glomming on that many white people do such as getting characters sloppily tattooed onto their bodies (hell, some of the guys you’re talking to may very well have them on their own bodies)

When you’re done shutting up those chinless wonders, you can then mosey on over to the legbeards—the rainbow haired commune of people whining about cultural appropriation (which is OF COURSE something that only white people do </sarcasm>), and point this out. And while you’re at it, point out the numerous times that rappers and other African-American celebrities have appropriated Asian stuff.

And then when you’re done kindly shut the hell up about all of this, and realize that “cultural appropriation” is the inevitable result of cramming disparate groups of people together.