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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   17856 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026

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...you treat Civil Rights era jurisprudence and standards as if they were the only way to view the constitution and the only way the country can be correctly or properly governed, despite such changes being only about half a century old. The country, with largely the same constitution, was governed radically differently before the 60s and 70s....

It was governed, as described by Mark Rosenfelder, such that:

  • In 1951, a black family headed by Harvey Clark, a WW2 veteran and a university graduate, rented an apartment in Cicero, Illinois— a couple miles southeast of here, in fact. He was hassled and beat up by police officers as he tried to move in. He successfully sued to keep the police from preventing the move. Then came the three-day riot, in which 4000 whites mobbed his apartment building, threw stones, destroyed the family's possessions, and finally set fire to the building. Clark himself most regretted the destruction of his piano, which he had bought for his daughter by working overtime.
  • Or there's the case of Malcolm Little. While his mother was still pregnant with him, Klansmen surrounded their house and broke all the windows. His father and three of his uncles were killed by white men, one by a lynch mob. His home in Nebraska was burned by another mob. Malcolm's early childhood was hard, but he did very well in high school— he got top grades and was elected class president. One of his teachers asked him what he might do for a career. Malcolm answered that he thought he might like to be a lawyer. The teacher smiled and told him “A lawyer— that's no realistic goal for a n████r.” He suggested carpentry. Not surprisingly, Malcolm decided that the white man's world was a conspiracy to prevent black progress, enforced with smiles at the top and terrorism at the bottom. Under those circumstances, why not turn to crime? He did, but later he got religion and changed his name to X.
  • August Wilson tells a story about his mother. There was a trivia contest on the radio, in the '50s, where the prize was a new washing machine— something she sorely needed. She knew the answer, called in, and won the prize. But when they learned that she was black, they wouldn't give it to her. They proposed giving her a gift certificate to the Salvation Army instead; she could get a used machine there.
  • Or Commissioner Bull Connor in Birmingham, who used attack dogs and fire hoses against peaceful demonstrators led by pastor Martin Luther King Jr (1963). King was a Christian minister, and advocated non-violence and even non-resistance to violent provocation; four years later, he was murdered. During the Birmingham campaign, the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed, killing four teenage girls. The Klansman who did it was found not guilty, though he was fined for possession of dynamite without a permit.
  • Clyde Ross grew up in Mississippi, where the law was unavailable to blacks, and whites simply stole any black wealth they wanted. (Ross had a horse when he was ten. White men took it from him.) Ross moved his family to Chicago in 1947, where he could vote and get a house. Regular mortgages weren't given to blacks; instead an operator got him a contract house— where the householder was responsible for all upkeep, but could lose the house if he missed a single payment. It was federal policy to deny ordinary mortgages to blacks.
  • James Zwerg, a white divinity student, was one of the Freedom Riders who in 1961 rode segregated buses and refused to sit in the back of the bus. They were met by a mob in Montgomery; Zwerg was held against the wall by a group of men while men punched him and women clawed his face. Some women held up their toddlers so the little ones could attack him too.
  • Fannie Lou Hamer was a black woman who dared to register to vote. She was thrown off the plantation where she lived; when she stayed with a friend she was shot at; her house was assessed a $9000 water bill though it had no running water; she was arrested, beaten savagely, and sexually molested in jail.
  • Nichelle Nichols was once kicked out of a hotel in Salt Lake City, where she had a reservation, for being black. She couldn't find another hotel, either— she found a family to stay with. When she was working on Star Trek, the guard at one gate in the studio lot wouldn't let her in, for being black. It's really really low to mess with Lt. Uhura.

Multiply by 23 million.

Liberals think this is no way to treat people.

But it goes way beyond that. Some researchers claim that liberals aren't motivated by feeling of moral disgust, but I disagree. Liberals think incidents like these are disgusting. Racism is viscerally wrong, it's unacceptable, and it needs to stop.

Putting an end to such horrors may have nth-order effects that some of us don't like, but they are vastly less bad than the status quo (which had long since lost its status).

Some women held up their toddlers so the little ones could attack him too.

Pull the other one, it's got bells on. Do you think this sounds even remotely credible? If the author was willing to include the likes of that, what else is he willing to exaggerate or make up?

If the people 100 years ago heard of a million women cheering for an infanticidal mother and miming strangling their own toddlers in support, they probably wouldn't believe it either.

Honestly I'm still having trouble with that one.

Do you think this sounds even remotely credible?

Sadly, I find it very credible. I wish to G-d it were not!

Given how often we've seen claims about what happened to someone wildly differ from what video (and/or physical) evidence shows, I think at least the tiniest amount of incredulity would be useful on your part.

See how half the eyewitness testimony (and all of the physical evidence) in the Michael Brown case was counter to the "Hands up, don't shoot!" narrative. Similar situation with Trayvon Martin. Or just start watching bodycam videos.

Have you been around toddlers?

As so often, the demand for outrageous wrongdoings by the outgroup is high.

but they are vastly less bad than the status quo

I hate Jim Crow laws and the related horrors around them, but it's far from clear that destroying freedom of association was the only (or best) way to get rid of them, and it's unclear if the ultimate nth order effects from the CRA will have been worth it.

In any case, I was talking about civil rights era changes to speech and obscenity jurisprudence, not race.

In any case, I was talking about civil rights era changes to speech and obscenity jurisprudence, not race.

They're the same picture.

The ideals of 1776 were, for a long time, treated as having an unwritten exception: "This doesn't apply to people we don't like." The long overdue reforms of the Civil-Rights Era said "No, this applies to everybody. Yes, even those people, or else, they mean, NOTHING!."

they mean, NOTHING!.

Indeed, a piece of paper written by dead white men. And I can only hope one day we all act in accordance with the truth.

The ideals of 1776 were, for a long time, treated as having an unwritten exception: "This doesn't apply to people we don't like."

No they weren't. I can link a random classic Star Trek scene as evidence for my argument if you'd like.

The long overdue reforms of the Civil-Rights Era said "No, this applies to everybody. Yes, even those people, or else, they mean, NOTHING!."

And yet we still have subjective rules around obscenity and speech that are selectively enforced against certain groups (and selectively prevented from being enforced against certain preferred groups) through something that could best be described as "manipulating procedural outcomes", to borrow a phrase. See the Shiloh Hendrix discussion elsewhere in this thread for an example.

No. The claim of the civil rights era was "No, this applies to everybody". The actual result is just that "people we don't like" changed.

Yeah, it's really worth spelling out how fucked up a lot of this is.

It took thirty years for Ames v. Ohio to overturn a 'background circumstance' rule that only applied to majority groups, and Ames still hasn't actually gotten her hearing on remand to see if it counts. United Steelworkers v. Weber and Johnson v. Transportation Agency just spell it out: discrimination one way is fine, still standing law post-Ames. SFFA theoretically meant a lot, and coincidentally schools are bending over backward to obfuscate their selection processes.

California is currently in the process of arguing that 34 USC 12601 just doesn't apply when the unconstitutional behavior is happening to people they don't like, they've already won once on the TRO, they're near-certain to win on the preliminary injunction, and they're definitely not going to be sanctioned for it (or for violating the duty of candor about the contents of one of their own expert witness declarations).

Even for stuff that should be uncontroversial, it's a mess. Oncale had Scalia defending hostile work environment law as applied to everyone, at least in the context of being sodomized with a bar of soap, and several circuit courts twisted it into a 'if you were perceived as gay' case. It's not the most unreasonable interpretation given Oncale's facts, but it's still very much not everybody -everbody.

You know, I would have been fine with "or else they mean nothing". I can see the end result of the fumbling of the bag by "the greatest generation, the silent generation and the boomers".

The exception may have been loadbearing. Time will tell.

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