The people who's culture you are stealing from care. It's not yours to take.

I've heard something better: what is a costume in one culture is clothing in another:

My general guidelines are

Thank you.

Bravo.

"However, as a Native American woman, it simply wouldn't be appropriate."

So stupid.

When exactly were the Japanese oppressed by white people in Japan? That's right - almost never. And yet the Japanese cultural appropriation of the West is the biggest cultural appropriation in history.

Yes, I am an Inuit from Nunavut. My name is Warm Feet and I am the son of Warm Legs. We have used the mukluks ever since the time of the Great Ice, and as the wise men from my village say "maybe even before Great Ice". We have long debated in our councils if we should allow the pale-face to wear our mukluks. The…

This bullshit has got to stop! Everybody can wear whatever they want to wear if it looks awesome. If you think war bonnets look awesome - wear them! If you think burkas look awesome - wear them! If you think Nazi uniforms look awesome - wear them! And most importantly: Ignore the cultural and historical context of…

"After the gilded era you also got more and more regulation through out the 20th century. And you see that today in countries with out much regulation, workers are treated horribly."

Um...

Most people don't understand that without fracking, the decline in U.S. oil production would continue, and our dependence on foreign imports would continue to increase. The high price of oil has made it economically feasible to extract tight oil — crude oil trapped in rock formations. Here is an excellent short video…

"If you look at the standard of living during the Gilded era (which is as close to free market as you get), the standard of living of living was pretty abismal, people could barely eat or afford proper housing. By the 1970s, the US economy was rather regulated, not anything close to the idealized free market."

"Why wouldn't [they] be abolitionists? Is it genetics or is it socialization? Again, just because a behavior exists doesn't mean it's natural/genetic/inborn."

Just so we're on the same page here: what I am arguing is that if you took 100,000 newborn babies born in 2013 and somehow placed them in Deep South families in the year 1800 the majority of them would NOT grow up to be abolitionists but rather the majority would be in favor of status quo slavery. This seems fairly…

Learn to swim I guess?

1. Not happening anytime soon. Availability of water is a different issue.

I have absolutely no doubt that our society has become far less openly violent (see Stephen Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature"), sexist, racist, homophobic e.t.c. We (or at least most of us) have understood as a society (on a rational level) that this kind of behavior is not beneficial to our collective…

The distinction between genes and the environment is blurred because "natural" (genetically determined) behavior creates the social environment (i.e. how different people act in different circumstances). The social environment, in turn, has a demonstrable impact on behavior and genes. The important question is not…