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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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The Simpsons seems to be accusing anti-CRT parents of practicing a motte and bailey, where the motte is being anti-CRT and the bailey is being anti-teaching about slavery and Jim Crow. It actually looks like The Simpsons is practicing one themselves, where their motte is wanting to teach about history, and their bailey is wanting to teach CRT. Nobody watches The Simpsons anymore, but the existence of this is still boggling my mind. I'm not offended, just confused. In 20 years, will anyone understand what this was about? Will they think that there were literally people trying to whitewash history in this way?

That's just what mainstream democrats believe is happening. Search "Rosa Parks" on Reddit, where a story is making the rounds that textbooks in Florida are scrubbing all references to race in the Rosa Parks story. (Some side-by-side examples are included in this article.)

The real story is that the editors on the textbook publisher's staff went way overboard in interpreting the law (I suspect intentionally), which only forbids teaching that "any group is inherently racist, implies a person can be considered oppressed because of their race, or infers that one should feel guilty because of actions committed by members of their same race." This sort of nuance does not make the main articles, let alone the headlines, so most people will never see it.

The Rosa Parks story misses many essential components. Had it not been for white people they would be back in Ghana without a bus. The biggest beneficiaries of slavery are black people. African Americans have a 12+ year longer life expectancy than the people who stayed in Africa. They have the best infrastructure, education, health care and infrastructure of any black people. Rosa Parks was not oppressed, she got to coast off the achievements of white people. Black people should be grateful for being allowed to live in the south.

Second, when public transit was integrated, it collapsed due to high crime and anti-social behaviour. Integration has lead to decades of crime against every other group, making urban life infeasible in much of the US. The Rosa Parks story needs to include the realities of people who either have to pay a fortune to commute via car and the consequences of that or the consequences of using public transit in the US. There was a reason why segregation was popular and riding public transit through south side Chicago on a Friday night offers an explanation of why segregation existed.

The IRA wanted an Irish Ireland for the Irish. Catalan nationalists want an independent Catalan. Kurdish nationalists want a Kurdistan. If the IRA had been like African Americans, they would have moved to Canterbury and complained incessantly about everything English. African American nationalists are the only ethnic lobbying group that seems to want to be as close to other groups as possible while continuously complaining about them. Teaching their narratives as the only historic narrative is a misrepresentation of history.

If the IRA had been like African Americans, they would have moved to Canterbury and complained incessantly about everything English.

I think we can agree this is a bit facetious?