I can eat sushi, pizza, samosas, kebab (kabobs, döner or shawarmas depending on your frame of reference), gyoza/pot stickers/tortellone/pasteczki (or whatever), noodles/ramen/spaghetti, knödeln/kroppkakor and so on and so on. Leaving lots of cultures unsaid.

I can enjoy music, cringy cultural movies (animated and not), fun cirque sessions (even without animals being endangered), go to festivals for various cultures, enjoin then in our cultures of scouting, mountaineering, hiking and share my love of enjoying nature.

I can drive electric cars, communicate on Internet forums, keep in touch with new friends as well as loved ones across the world.

I would be in a much poorer world without you all.

  • rumschlumpel@feddit.org
    3·
    19 hours ago

    But the claim that you have to whip people and chain them up to synthesize European folk melodies with African base rhythms seems at once absurd and sadistic.

    Cool, I never made that claim. They probably needed to immigrate to a western country to invent it and popularize it, that they went there as slaves is a different matter.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      12·
      19 hours ago

      Cool, I never made that claim.

      How do you think Africans came to be in the New World?

      They probably needed to immigrate to a western country to invent it

      Brits didn’t need to immigrate to the US in order to learn about American rock music.

      • rumschlumpel@feddit.org
        2·
        18 hours ago

        I did write that they came as slaves, but that’s not the necessary part. I’m starting to think that you just really want me to be racist, facts be damned.

        Brits didn’t need to immigrate to the US in order to learn about American rock music.

        Yeah, because american rock music already existed, and USA and UK have a long shared history. Inventing rock music without close personal proximity is much less likely, and inventing a style is one thing but popularizing it is quite another. It wouldn’t have gotten as popular in the USA and Europe if all the early blues and jazz musicians were in Africa.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
          21·
          17 hours ago

          you just really want me to be racist

          I don’t think you’re racist. I think you’re clinging to this idea of the Transatlantic slave trade as some kind of necessary evil.

          It wouldn’t have gotten as popular in the USA and Europe if all the early blues and jazz musicians were in Africa.

          Cultural traditions have cross-pollunated without mass migrations on plenty of prior occasions. The Silk Road didn’t need to move legions of displaced people in order to bring food, clothing, and music into the Mediterranean. Neither did Dutch traders need to flood into Japan in order to convey their art and technology.

          The idea that you need a mass resettlement in order to mix musical traditions doesn’t bare out in practice.