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I.

A: I like Indian food.

B: Oh, so you like a few bites of flavorless rice daily? Because India is a very poor country, and that\u2019s a more realistic depiction of what the average Indian person eats. And India has poor food safety laws - do you like eating in unsanitary restaurants full of rats? And are you condoning Narendra Modi\u2019s fascist policies?

A: I just like paneer tikka.

This is how most arguments about being \u201ctrad\u201d sound to me. Someone points out that they like some feature of the past. Then other people object that this feature is idealized, the past wasn\u2019t universally like that, and the past had many other bad things.

But \u201cof the past\u201d is just meant to be a pointer! \u201cIndian food\u201d is a good pointer to paneer tikka even if it\u2019s an idealized view of how Indians actually eat, even if India has lots of other problems!

In the same way, when people say they like Moorish Revival architecture or the 1950s family structure or whatever, I think of these as pointers. It\u2019s fine if the Moors also had some bad buildings, or not all 1950s families were really like that. Everyone knows what they mean!

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/fake-tradition-is-traditional\xa0