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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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Blacks were the recipients of moral progress in the West not the drivers. Physicists and engineers actually drove material progress. That's the difference.

Your point about the Irish isn't exactly wrong, the Irish monks certainly maintained classical works through laborious reproduction, but I find people lionizing their ethnicity as somehow world historically special a sad genre. People needing to look back at their 'ancestors' (these monks didn't leave any descendants) to feel good about themselves is kind of pathetic. Especially when the whole reason they are doing it is that their ancestors in the recent past were so pathetic.

Your point about the Irish isn't exactly wrong

I haven't made a point about the Irish. Nor a point about African Americans. I have simply tried to clarify the nature of the claim made by the OP.

But, in the substantive point, I took the OP to be referring to things like the Civil Rights Movement, where I think it is fair to say that blacks were the drivers of moral progress.

And all of us who either immigrated after the Civil Rights Movement ended or lived in places with few or no Blacks?

I don’t understand your question.