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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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Bryan Caplan complaining on X that Mason U is introducing mandatory Just Society courses; https://twitter.com/bryan_caplan/status/1760048714847064146

It looks Conquest's Second Law is still strong as ever. And I guess Caplan's libertarianism will ask for some intervention against it that will never work.

My sister is going through teaching school right now, and the required ideology-enforcement classes are beyond anything I would have ever expected. She’ll send me examples of test questions that are almost verbatim:

True/False: reverse racism can exist.

And you have to answer false, and explain that white people are oppressive colonizers.

There’s also a lot of making her write short essays on how oppressed she is as a woman, how bad white people are, etc. I’m pretty cynical, but I had no idea it was this bad.

For reference this is in what I would consider one of the most conservative states in the country. I think conservatives right now just have no idea how bad it actually is.

If they used the term 'reverse racism' then I think that is weird to begin with. There is a category 'racism' and then there are subcategories 'racism against X from Y' and 'racism against Y from X' which I assume is what they want to discuss. I would answer false because the statement doesn't make any sense and nonsense statements are false. If you try and argue the statement is true then you arguing with one arm tied behind your back because you are already accepting the main premise behind the 'false' argument. I don't see why 'racism against X from Y' should be privileged linguistically so that there is a normal 'racism' and a 'reverse racism'. I think it is just lazy on their part to use the term 'racism' when they really mean 'racism by the majority group in a country' or something similar. surprisingly, it can be difficult to know what they mean if they don't explicitly say it.

Yes but you know what they mean. Even if the dictionary definition of a word leads you in that direction, surely you can comprehend what the meaning of the words is, beyond formal definitions. Words aren't just words, there's context and tone behind them which I'm sure Stellula's sister is able to interpret and communicate back.