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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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Orange Shirt Day update:

(edited original comment, but no one saw it, so posting the edit here.)

Lots of ideas worth considering from everybody. Thank you all. In the end, I just didn't wear the shirt. It turned it to have been hugely overthought on my part because:

a) 4 other people had no orange shirt, and 5 more had shirts of strategically (cowardly!) ambiguous orangeneity.

b) A kid GRIEVOUSLY injured himself in the shop class, which made everyone forget about Orange Shirt Day entirely. Apparently he's fine.

As an aside, I am increasingly doubtful of the sincerity of the people who are the public face of this stuff in schools. Twice now I have seen people go all in on this stuff, then 2 years later apply to become principals, fail to become principals, and then set it all aside, thereby revealing that the entire thing was resume padding. I believe I am seeing a third case now. For a day of grim solemnity, the video they used to Educate students was some instragram girl's "Top 5 questions about truth and reconciliation" (it's really called that here) but it was an actually an ad for her online feather-and-bead store. The bathos boggles the mind.

I'm honestly very sorry for the kid who hurt himself, but it's a good thing it didn't happen last year when he probably would have gotten yelled at for trying to appropriate the pain of indigenous children or something

  • -16

This is really unnecessarily antagonistic. If you're unfamiliar with the idiom "borrowing a jack," you should read about it. There are plenty of examples of people out there actually doing stupid or horrible things; there is no need for you to invent extra examples from whole cloth.

So my mistake was not linking examples of this exact thing happening? Because you know I can, however much people here try to ignore the mass insanity of '20-'21 and pretend it never happened.

No, your mistake was contributing nothing but heat to what was a relatively anodyne post. "Oh, that went well, but you know my outgroup could have made it much worse, and probably would have just last year" is unnecessary heat. When your outgroup fails to be as horrible as you expect them to be, let them.

Go on then, link to your examples of 'this exact thing' happening.