• AernaLingus [any]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian-American_Civil_Rights_League

    The Italian-American Civil Rights League (IACRL) was originally formed as a political advocacy group created in New York City in April 1970. William Santoro, a defense attorney that represented many Colombo crime family figures, was responsible for the legal work that incorporated the league. Its stated goal was to combat pejorative stereotypes about Italian-Americans, but in actuality, it operated as a public relations firm to deny the existence of the American Mafia and improve the image of mobsters.

    Indistinguishable from a bit, this is incredible

  • Rom [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    anti-italian-discrimination is apt because it’s from an episode of Sopranos where they were mad about people protesting Columbus day lol

    Also fuck Christopher Columbus. He was a genocidal, racist piece of shit even for his time.

    • 7bicycles [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      I had a based as fuck history teacher and when I told her “This guy sure seemed to kill a lot of people in the new world” she was like “Well, it’s complex, but if you were to google it you’d find a lot of historians agreeing”. Which obviously I did to feel like a smart boy back then and going off that probably sparked a life long personality trait of going “This official version is probably wrong as fuck” as a baseline

      Shout out Mrs. B, you knew what you were doing

      • Adkml [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        AIways crazy how quickly learning accurate history eliminates patriotism.

        Like when I was 15 and came back from a mission trip to Nicaragua (I know, white colonizers but i was a dewey eyed 15 year old literal boy scout and the mission had open health clinics for the community it was in and repeatedly told people not to take a bunch of selfies with random locals to talk about all the good work you were doing). Got back and was like “why the hell is Nicaragua in such a shitty place politically” and then 40 minutes of reading later I arrived at “death to america” and never looked back.

        • 7bicycles [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          3 months ago

          I feel like in the fight of “I have a bachelors degree in this”. vs “I read maybe 3 wikipedia articles about this” the latter shouldn’t have a fighting chance, but alas

          • Adkml [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            3 months ago

            Yea chuds are right that college can very much be indoctrinating they just don’t realize it’s indoctrinating people to be part of the PMC and teach people that chuds should be respected.

            One of the non hard sciene classes I took was some nebulous bmshit like “science, technology and culture” that was taught by a stereotypical reddit atheist. Our final was to turn in our weekly journal we’d been keeping all semester. I didn’t so this and 4 days before it was due just went through all the class power points and rephrased them to just be saying the professors opinions back to him.

            He called me into his office and told me he was super impressed and I had the outline of a textbook here lmao.

            • 7bicycles [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              3 months ago

              The whole idea of any educational facility not be indoctrinating is honestly just fucking stupid from the start. You can, maybe, sort of, look at STEM objectively and even then whenever it hits “doing anything in real life” it gets political, everything else is just that from the start.

              Counterexample to your bad thing here, I once had an english teacher who I proposed the wildest theories about a book we were reading to and she was like “…well, neither me nor the “scientific” community agrees, but I don’t think any of your arguments are realistically refutable, A+” and that was when I was like “Oh damn I can interpret things” instead of “this whole thing is a waste of time unless I submit to whatever authority”

              Shout out Mrs. S, I don’t think you know what you were doing in that specific scenario but you fell ass-backwards into the coolest possible response

              • Adkml [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                3 months ago

                Yea that was an outlier for me too.

                I had the polar opposite teacher who was an awesome sweet hippy lady who wore birks and a sundress everyday even when it was -20 and snowing and the two classes I took with her were about engineering disasters like bhopal and how the most vulnerable ultimately pay the price for engineering laziness or oversight and another class where we did a “model UN but for the paris accord” that ended up with *every other country telling America to fuck off and stop being so hypocritical and siding with China.

                • 7bicycles [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  3 months ago

                  that ended up with every oremovedry telling America to fuck off and stop being so hypocritical and siding with China.

                  I beg you rephrase this on account it got sremovedhorpe filtered and I wish to know what it said

    • BobDole [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      wojak-nooo nooooo you can’t judge historical actors by contemporary morality

      Uh, how about the priest the Spanish court sent to see what he was up to who listed all of the monstrous shit he did?

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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        3 months ago

        Right? It’s always BS. there have always been people who recognized that hurting and enslaving others was fucked up. There’s no point in recorded history where there weren’t people who would have agreed that some of the shit their neighbors were doing is fucked up.

        • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          3 months ago

          Two gauls in chains being marched south to a life of Roman slavery. The first one says “man, fuck Caesar.” The second one says “wait, hold on there, buddy. Who are we to judge?”

    • Adkml [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      And a huge fucking dumbass.

      The whole mythos that nobody knew what was over there is bullshit but it would be pretty hard to lionize a guy who had the bright idea to get to Mexico by leaving Arizona travelling north.

    • PaulSmackage [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      Even better, in that same conversation the guy from Italy is like, “you know, people in the south don’t like Columbus. They don’t like the north. The north punishes the south. Fuck the north.”

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      Typical Italians; Demanding to be represented by a murderous slaver who was dragged back to Europe in chains because he was too violent and cruel for even European proto-colonizers to stomach.

    • EmoThugInMyPhase [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      It’s funny because Columbus Day was created to placate Italians after Italians were frequently killed by American lynch mobs. Not only is Columbus a piece of shit, but the entire holiday should be denounced for being an actual tool to erase Italian culture and their history of being victims to the American menace.

      So much of the “diversity” that the US celebrates is the result of massacring people then appropriating their culture when it became profitable/politically useful, then erasing those massacres from history.

  • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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    Eternal reminder that back in the day Italian citizens groups trying to promote the idea that Italians were “real Americans” picked Columbus out of a hat because he was the only important Italian (he is not) anyone could think of that had anything to do with the US. He was an actual DEI hire. They formed groups like the Knights of Colombus and that’s basically the only reason anyone in contemporary American knows or cares who Colombus was.

    • Jew [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      Knights of Colombus

      I legitimately thought they were a white supremacist group that originated in Columbus,OH until now

    • LaughingLion [any, any]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      he was such a vile rapist that his own men reported him to the crown

      imagine being so awful that a bunch sailors in the 1400s were like “yo wtf” and told on your ass to the aristocracy who were the absolute most lecherous and debaucherous bunch imaginable and even they though “yo wtf is wrong with you”

    • edge [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      because he was the only important Italian (he is not) anyone could think of that had anything to do with the US

      lmao they must have forgot where the name “America” came from then.

  • PKMKII [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    Yeah a guy hired by the Spanish crown who never stepped foot on the mainland is super important to Italian-American culture. If they want an explorer figure to venerate, Giovanni de Verrazzano makes way more sense as he explored most of the east coast.

    • oregoncom [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      Wouldn’t be surprised if this thing was engineered by the democrats to make walz seem cooler than he is. I can imagine some zoomer staffer coming up with this and purposely riling up their elderly italian uncle at the IACRL.

  • TC_209 [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    From Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut: "Teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy:

    "1492

    “The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them. Here is another piece of evil nonsense which children were taught: that the sea pirates eventually created a government which became a beacon of freedom to human beings everywhere else.”