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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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Anyone want to talk about test cases? Rosa Parks' name has come up again to remind us that there is a group of people who didn't know the incident was staged by the NAACP as a way to put segregation on trial. I hope that everyone knows test cases are a thing and I'm a little curious what percentage of the famous judicial cases this would apply to. I guess it tarnishes people's fuzzy feelings about the scrappy individual with pure motives facing off against evil oppression but it doesn't change the facts of the case. Personally I have the impression that the judicial system is skewed against the poor and un-savvy and rewards those who have resources behind them and know how to work the system. So it does seem to the outsider as if everyone could benefit from having an organization behind them to raise attention and mount a strong defense. Rosa Parks may have been one person but her case ended up helping the many not-so-sympathetic individuals who were also victims of the unjust system. So when you hear about a high profile case, does it matter if the person was specifically set up as a test case, and if it matters, why?

So when you hear about a high profile case, does it matter if the person was specifically set up as a test case, and if it matters, why?

Because the rest of your framing is wrong.

Rosa Parks may have been one person but her case ended up helping the many not-so-sympathetic individuals who were also victims of the unjust system.

Rosa Parks was one person but her case ended up helping the many not-sympathetic individuals who were kept in check by broad rules. If you want to assert that the system that produced order was "unjust" you also have to own what Detroit and Newark and Camden and Gary look like without that "injustice".

That's the problem with test cases - they present an implicitly false case intentionally designed to confuse people and play on sympathies. The legal principles would have been the same if the case was about Corner Man and it would have been much less deceptive.

Regardless of segregation’s general effect on crime, Rosa park’s case was about segregation of buses, and the rule of ‘blacks sit in the back of the bus’ has nothing to do with the crime rate except creating an additional crime that could be committed.

The connection is there, but it's a lot less direct than our local George Wallace fan is making it out. Once anti-discrimination became one of the core principles of the Federal government and any actions with disparate impact on blacks became suspect or verboten, crime was allowed to thrive; this crime was instrumental in driving whites out of Northern cities (and thus turning their rule over to Democrats), a phenomenon usually called "white flight".

Well yes, but you can easily imagine a scenario where governments don’t carry out explicit racial discrimination, but laws still get enforced. Notably this policy is what drove down crime rates in the 90’s.

But no, you can't because then you have a dispute between progressives who say "the law is so unfair because mostly blacks get arrested" and a pathetic side who says "the law is even handed" - which concedes the frame that if the law was somehow unfairly applied, they'd concede and just allow the progressive pro-crime position. Of course, progressives are able to find some case that they convince themselves is unfair and GOPe types cuck on it as is their job.

On the other hand, if a society has an attitude of "we don't care if you find some specific unfairness, things happen and massive amounts of crime are way way more unfair" then the progressive gets shut down.

You'll note that crime did get driven down in the 90s and this low crime drove progressives into a frenzy and they desperately reversed it as soon as they were able.

You can totally have Michael Bloomberg policies and Michael Bloomberg policies totally work. The fact that progressives are often retarded is not specifically about race.

Except that progressives hated that Bloomberg's policies worked and only Bloomberg's persistence in the face of progressive opposition (rare) and the level of power he was able to exercise as mayor (also rare) allowed them to continue. Bloomberg would even point out when asked about stop and frisk "disproportionally" targeting blacks that blacks weren't stopped and frisked disproportionally compared to the population of felons.

Yes, progressives are retarded about crime(and likely many other issues). This does not mean you can't tell them to pound sand without reintroducing Jim Crow, which we know because Michael Bloomberg did that.

That's the entire point of my post.

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