Tollund_Man4
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User ID: 501
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
The United Kingdom
The Troubles Legacy Bill has just been sent to the King for royal assent. It offers conditional amnesty for people accused of killings in the Troubles (counter to popular perception the amnesty given as part of the Good Friday Agreement wasn't total and plenty of people are keeping their mouths shut or are on the run because of this), and prevents any Troubles era court cases or inquests being held.
All of Northern Ireland's political parties opposed this bill but I'm guessing that British Army veterans being put on trial for murder made it a point the parties in Westminster couldn't ignore. There are surely violent republicans that will be let off the hook for this, enough reason for Unionists to oppose the bill, but since so many paramilitaries ended up dead or in prison anyway the feeling among nationalists is that they prosecuted some murderers while refusing to prosecute others.
If there's a silver lining it's that as people no longer fear prosecution we might get more answers to what really happened.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
Conservatism used to be about avoiding rapid change due to the possibility of unforeseen consequences. Now it seems to embrace it.
This leaves conservatives with few useful tools to counteract rapid change which has already produced its consequences. I need to reread Burke, but I don't think there's anything about conservatism that would preclude modern day versions of an invasion of France to restore the monarchy.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
Has anyone here ever been terrible at remembering names and then solved that problem? I'm thinking of just writing every new acquaintance's name into a notebook or something.
It's a weird one alright. Wikipedia goes into a surprising amount of length on why this is the case.
As far as I can tell "Éire" isn't offensive in itself, but can imply disrespect in the context of a long history of the British government using any term but 'Ireland' in official documents and treaties (Southern Ireland, the Irish Republic, the Republic of Ireland), and protesting when the country was addressed as 'Ireland' in EEC and UN meetings. Ireland's constitution used to claim the entire island so it makes sense why Unionists in Northern Ireland would push for the British government to avoid the unqualified name.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
including getting African immigrants spouting the same crap about 'the Feds' and racism
I don't think 'the Feds' is the fault of Irish wokies. It's because every Nigerian in Ireland has a cousin in London and so Drill/Grime music slang spills over.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
I don't think he's anywhere close to achieving that. Irish politics is very local, and the closest thing to successful radical right politics in recent times was done by concerned neighbours using WhatsApp to organise anti asylum seeker protests. These people are nobodies politically or on Twitter, but they actually managed to cause trouble for the Irish government.
I asked a friend involved in the National Party what he thought of Keith Woods and he said "he's doing great work but he's only popular in the general Anglosphere, not so much in Ireland".
If he influences Ireland with his current strategy it will be downstream of whatever success he achieves in America.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
Yes really. Reasonable people don't tend to care about a topic this niche with this much passion.
Not to disagree with the rest of your post, but this place is full of people investing a lot of attention to extremely niche topics in the grand scheme of things. There are very few 'reasonable people' in this thread by such a standard.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
I didn't read any "Democrats bad" in that post, just a cynical take on how they would react.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
The ability to discern between reality and fiction is important
Yes, generally, but your ability to discern fact from fiction isn't put at risk just because you think the veracity or lack thereof of an online story is inconsequential.
In fact, a well written story could be more important than a true account from somewhere like /r/amiwrong for the debate it sparks up and the shared frustrations it articulates, even if everyone were aware that it is a story.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
How quickly did you think that the story is entirely made up?
Does it matter if it is? It being real just means something unlikely happened to someone who is nobody to you.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
While it's debatable whether or not the modern welfare state and social security in western countries really qualifies as a 'vision' of the future, it's absolutely true that the massive social engineering projects we have going on nowadays are far more ambitious and far more expensive than any of the space initiatives that have been proposed so far.
If there is no vision behind the welfare state, that's something new. Whether it's Christianity or the Great Society the promises made were massive and the change was expected to be radical.
"And with your courage and with your compassion and your desire, we will build a Great Society. It is a society where no child will go unfed, and no youngster will go unschooled."
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
From my very imperfect experience, I think that Spanish is a language where early on you can get away with focusing heavily on drilling vocabulary and grammer as the pronunciation is fairly simple (it's hard to sound like a native of course but it's easy to be understood). They do talk very quickly though so you'll want to add some listening practice in also.
French on the other hand, you won't understand anything and you won't be understood if you haven't had a lot of exposure to how it sounds. I'm at a pretty good reading level for French but, unlike Spanish, improvements in reading and writing aren't helping my conversation get any more fluid, it only gets better with direct practice.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
It's worth noting that there's still a lot of effort and study required if you go down this path. Simply living in a country is no guarantee that you'll be forced to use the language, or that you won't settle at a comfortable level of fluency that lets you get by even if it's very imperfect.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
In France there are intergenerational homesharing agencies which offer young people cheap rent in return for living with an elderly person.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
The purpose of getting someone to admit their hero/myth is flawed is because you're trying to signal to others WARNING: HERETIC and poison the well. If it didn't affect the idea, a person wouldn't lead off a discussion with "this guy is a racist, though, right?"
I'll grant that this is often a reason. I do think we have other genuine reasons of it not being an attempt to poison the well, I've brought it up before but philosophy professors will often start their attempt to impress the value of a thinker upon their students by admitting all the terrible and crazy things about them history has revealed.
When it comes to an adversarial discussion, you might be poisoning the well by referring to a thinker's past crimes, you might also just be seeing if your interlocutor holds any insane beliefs resulting from hero worship or ideological blindness. Ideally they come out of it having established their credibility as someone who will admit fault when he sees it but still give praise when he thinks it's due.
Depending where the debate is on the scale of rap battle to Oxford debate you might be able to trust the audience to make distinctions here.
A man being a great man is the best foundation to follow him or be a follower. I sincerely do not understand what would be a better reason. Without men, ideas are irrelevant.
A better reason would be that you follow his ideas because they work no? There are lots of great men of history that would be hard to follow in any political sense because their ideas are either inapplicable in the modern day or obviously terrible. Jefferson is remembered because the constitution he helped design worked well enough that we still consider his political thoughts relevant (in more than a purely historical sense).
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
They are not Greco-Romans.
Neither are most of the people in history have tried to recapture the Greco-Roman spirit (including Nietzsche himself).
The idea that this conflict wasn't ethno-nationalist in character is preposterous.
There's no denying that it was, but there's a question as to whether this was because of an inherent incompatibility or because of particular political problems that shut off other avenues. The Normans were more ethnically different to the Irish than the Scots, they also came as invaders in the name of the English crown, nevertheless the ethnic difference was dissolved (to the point where no ethnic difference is recognized betweens the 'Fitz's and the 'O's).
An alternative history where the United Irishmen got their way would likely see as much division between Ulster Protestants and Irish Catholics as exists between French Catholics and French Protestants.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
Was Switzerland really multicultural? There are French-speakers, German-speakers and Italian-speakers, yet these countries are all right next to each other.
There was a big religious divide which led to some civil wars if that counts.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
Okay, so it's theoretically possible for this to not poison the well or destroy the myth/hero which forms part of the identity the person you're talking to, now what?
I don't need to argue that it's theoretically possible to avoid destroying the myth, just that destroying the myth behind a person doesn't discredit whatever lessons you might draw from their writings or actions.
if the point was to discuss their "still" worthwhile ideas, why didn't the discussion start there? because the destruction and poisoning the well is the point of this sort of comment
The mythology itself can be an obstacle to discussing someone's ideas. "I'm a follower of Jefferson because he was a great man" is no foundation, "I believe in the principles espoused in the Declaration of Independence" is more substantial even if you admit the moral failings of the author.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
"Jefferson was racist, ergo a bad person and all of his works are now discredited."
Maybe this is how things work in the culture war but I don't think the latter has to follow when you admit the former. I've seen plenty of wholehearted defenders of a philosophy say something to the effect of "X (founder of their favourite ideology) was a terrible person, now let's discuss what is still worthwhile about their ideas".
Trying to get completely different groups to work together is bound to fail.
That may be true or it may not be, but Ulster seems like a bad example as for most of its history they didn't even try. In the recent decades where they have tried to cooperate, things have gotten a lot better.
It's also a tiny area which was inevitably swept up in larger currents. The conflict didn't rise up purely from within, whether it was the old IRA down south or the Jacobite threat they had a lot of external disturbances which caused divide.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
Right, Northern Ireland's Protestants are a mix of mostly Scottish descended Presbyterian and a minority of English descended Anglicans who fled north during the War of Independence and Civil War.
Ireland's Protestants are mostly the Anglicans who stayed put during those wars.
Put simply the aristocratic land-owning class of Ireland were Anglican, and the urbanised industrial area of Ulster was mostly Presbyterian. Catholics were harshly restricted by the Penal Laws but Presbyterians were deprived of certain rights also.
The United Irishmen, formed in Belfast by Presbyterian merchants in 1791, were inspired by American and French revolutionary ideals and saw the source of their evils in British rule and the Protestant (Anglican) Ascendency. They were happy to make common cause with Catholics, and Catholics were happy to do the same for obvious reasons. There were also some Anglicans involved who ended up making a majority of the actual military leaders during the coming rebellion.
Supported by a (late) French invasion the United Irishmen led a failed rebellion in 1798 to end British rule. Ironically it was the justification Britain needed to deprive Ireland of its parliament and form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland which led to another abortive uprising in 1803.
I'll quote Wolfe Tone, one of the Leaders of the United Irishmen, because it's about a concise a statement of Irish nationalism as you'll get:
To subvert the tyranny of our execrable government, to break the connection with England, the never-failing source of all our political evils, and to assert the independence of my country—these were my objects. To unite the whole people of Ireland, to abolish the memory of all past dissentions, and to substitute the common name of Irishman in the place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter—these were my means.
This was the first and I think the only time Catholics and Presbyterians worked together under the banner of republicanism. In the 19th and early 20th centuries you started seeing a lot more Anglican figures amongst Ireland's republican and nationalist movements.
Did north Ireland work?
Northern Ireland's political problems are a massive confounder here. In Scotland, England and the Republic of Ireland the Irish (of which there are millions of descendants in Britain) and British live in peace. You could say that Northern Ireland's problems derive from diversity, but really there were wars being fought over the issue of British rule before the Protestants even settled in Ulster.
The most dysfunctional and violent are multicultural.
Northern Ireland's crime rate is about average for the UK and has been falling steadily since the military conflict ended.
Not backing up his general claim, but I think the point is that you won't think of freezing a particular company's assets until you know that it is owned by Y.
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