How dare you write that! The final word.

The final word on this SJW bunfight goes to John Robson of the National Post, for sheer eloquence in defending the obvious, and for mentioning Rick Riordan's books. Which rock.

This rubbish about cultural appropriation, if taken seriously, would produce not broad views but unimaginable narrowness, a death by suffocation of dialogue and sympathy. What would To Kill a Mockingbird be without black characters? Or Invisible Man without white ones? If we share Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream of judging people by the content of their character not the colour of their skin, we should do the same with books, including efforts to see the world through the eyes of others to explore questions of morality and culture. Like, say, Percy Jackson's half-brother Tyson struggling against bigotry because he's … a cyclops.

I guess that's not appropriation, just as nobody's going after J.R.R. Tolkien for depicting hobbits, elves or trolls. But if you can't see that the Lord of the Rings is a profound meditation on the human condition, you need to get out more … to a library. And if you think Tolkien should have stuck to bookish male Oxford professors, as his subject and audience, you deserve to be cast into the company of orcs.

Indeed you have put yourself there, for Tolkien himself called this world's bullies who detest life in its infinite variety "orcs." Like those who decry "cultural appropriation" to silence the human conversation with nasty narrow zealotry.

May Zeus strike them with lightning bolts. Borrowed if need be.

Sadly, I must disagree with Mr. Robson on one point. They are not worthy of Zeus' lightning. I think a nice plague of boils is more what they deserve. Appropriately appropriated from the Jews.

The last-but-one last word belongs to Kathy Shaidle:

I give zero fucks about you people losing your jobs because you dared to talk like a normal person for once.

You are all — and yes, I KNOW THIS — closest conservatives.

You are the elites Charles Murray (who is JUST AS BAD half the fucking time, too, actually) identifies as "not preaching what you practice," to the detriment of the rest of the "society" you pretend to care about.

You present yourselves as liberals for careerist hack reasons, but you all live un-diverse, non-green, traditional-family lives, with your private schools and your genetic lottery media complex.

You also think my friends and I are "deplorables" and so on.

We're your mopeds, your shadows, your whatever Freudian thing that is.

You all commit the only sin liberals still recognize — hypocrisy — every day.

And finally, you and your Filipino nannies and Moleskine notebooks and "play dates" and French immersion and Priuses and artisanal jam just went boom.

Slather on your Burt's Bees and kiss my lumpy ass.

But I get the last word. Because its my blog.

I, in my own little way, am a writer. Most of my characters are white. Some are not. Most of my characters are human. Some are not.

I will borrow from Canadian Indian culture, or American Indian culture, or Australian Aborigine culture, or Chinese culture, or Indian-from-India culture, or Greek, Roman, French, German, Nordic, or any other culture I goddamn well please. Furthermore, I will get stuff wrong at times, and I will even make shit up from whole cloth to curtain over the gaps in the story.

I may even get people to pay me to do it! How about that, huh?

Your SJW tears are the sweetest wine. Fill my cup.

The Appropriating and So Inappropriate Phantom