Tollund_Man4
No bio...
User ID: 501
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
They can’t just declare the travelers oppressed?
You mean traveller gypsies? They have done that, but travellers are a very unsympathetic people and there's no European or American scale media/activism working in their favour to overcome that issue.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
as evidenced by e.g. people in the U.K. and (especially) Ireland participating in bizarre "Black Lives Matter" protests
While I agree that 'Black Lives Matter' makes little sense in a domestic context, protesting about American racial politics something the Irish left were doing decades ago, and it's no further from home than tagging along with the 'Free Palestine' (still a staple of Irish protests), 'Free Tibet' or 'End Apartheid' movements.
What's new is that while Israel, South Africa and Tibet are clearly foreign countries, Black Lives Matter has developed a cottage industry of finding racial injustic within Ireland. Their high points have been getting statues of Egyptian princesses removed a hotel because they mistakenly thought they were slave girls (the council later returned these statues to their plinths), protesting the shooting of a knife-wielding black man by police as if it were evidence of pervasive racism (given how scarce police shootings are this might be the first black man ever shot dead by police here), and calling for an end to the 'Direct Provision' system of processing refugees as the movement's Achilles heel is there not being many black people here in the first place.
It's a strange thing to look at. All of the infrastructure for making race an issue is ready to fire, the NGOs, the university professors and the street protesters, but with Ireland's immigrant population mostly consisting of Slavs (who don't really care about Irish politics and dream of going home) and well-paid Western Europeans whose only complaints are rent and petty crime, there is a severe shortage of discontented minorities. Give it a few years I guess.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
Ernst Junger's 'On The Marble Cliffs', some really beautiful writing.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
Are you talking about it not being feasible in America or it not being feasible at all? All of these policies have been succesfully implemented in other countries at one point in another.
Contraception was illegal in Ireland from 1935 until 1980, most Western countries outside of the US have strict controls on guns and there's no desire to reverse this, drugs are much harder to get in Singapore and far less people are addicted to them in East Asia than in North America and Western Europe, alcohol use is much less prevelant in Islamic countries.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
A norm of long posts is a an effort filter that cuts of some valuable contributions (e.g short points can trigger very good posts in response, a chain of short replies can add up to something very insightful) and I wouldn't mind things moving slightly more in that direction, but it's also a filter that cuts out a large amount of low effort ill thought-out jabs. Maybe being flooded the latter was more of a threat when we were on reddit.
Somewhat contrary to the spirit of the founding of this place there's now enough agreement between people that you probably don't need as much hedging as before before getting to the point, but then again if we figure out a way to draw in new users it'll be offputting if we all just assume everyone agrees on certain things in our discussions, so people still argue for and explain things that most people get already.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
Winter ended. It's warmer and less dark.
I wouldn't say I was in a slump, but my mood has improved significantly since quitting my job and moving to a hotter country. I don't mind the cold, but I've had my fill of dark cloudy days.
Part of that is quitting a repetitive factory job, I had no issue with the repetitiveness for nearly a year, had time to think, then the job stopped posing a challenge and I became irritably bored on every 12 hour shift.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
which has been inflicted on pretty everyone but Trump himself, who is still mostly unscathed.
Isn't this more a product of Trump's character than anything else? It's not like Trump avoided attempts to ruin his reputation or cost him a lot of money, he just weathered them. A lot was inflicted on Trump, he's just got a shameless enough image for it not to ruin him.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
Women, as long as they refuse to wield weapons through conscription, violent revolution etc, do not get a vote. Not because they're unwise or 'vote wrong', but because ignoring them does not result in conflict.
I question the truth of this. Women may not be very good in a fight but they can certainly stir one up.
Men don't act as a bloc that can put up a united front either, each woman has a number of men who she can exert influence upon. Maybe if you had some fraternal organization that demanded loyalty from men this could work, otherwise they'll turn against each other to impress a girl.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
If people simply appeal to the 'better ten guilty go free than one innocent be imprisoned' platitude forever, what is to stop the richest cities in the world turning into uncivilized eyesores?
The 'better ten guilty to free than one innocent be imprisoned' notion far precedes the richest cities in the world becoming uncivilised eyesores. If people in past times managed to have nice cities while still believing in this principle must we really do away with it if we want nice cities now?
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
Finally getting around to Thucydides' The History of The Peloponnesian War, I meant to pair it with Herodotus' Histories which I read a few years back but other things distracted me.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
De Tocqueville (writer of Democracy in America) also wrote a less rosy book on the French Revolution, might be worth checking out.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
Ireland has had a half-Indian prime minister for a few years now (interrupted for a bit from mid-2020-2022) in Leo Varadkar, he originally ran of a rightish platform of clamping down on welfare fraud but overall things just seem to have gotten more woke.
We don't really have a Pakistani grooming problem yet so maybe he just hasn't had time to shine.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
that recognizes the fundamental tension of politics and is maximally inclusive.
Aren't churches only ecumenical these days as a result of a fall in tensions, perhaps as a result in the fall in importance of religion in society in general? The ecumenical church of politics will happen only when something else becomes important enough to serve as the dividing line.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
I won't disagree, but that's far more complex work than I've ever had to do.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
My interpretation is that he's saying the solution to all this crime has nothing to do with public transport. His take on why the crime is happening is a bit simplistic, but there's nothing necessarily wrong with offering solutions that rely on upstream problems already being solved by someone else i.e "given that you guys can sort out your massive crime problem, I'm going to talk about all the cool things you can do".
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
My question: can anyone offer testimonials of having significantly altered their personality through conscious effort? I've become increasingly skeptical that certain kinds of change are possible.
Yes, even in my final year of undergrad at the age of 21 I was far less conscientous and noticeably more awkward than I am now. The first was solved by working a bunch of kitchen and manual labour jobs where I got very good at not being late for things. I think functioning on 4 hours sleep is a trainable skill. I still mess up my focus sometimes by drinking or gaming (the latter has effects even when you're not playing), but in general I can go to a library and study for 4 hours without any deadline to motivate me.
The second I can partly attribute to drugs like MDMA and LSD (but the afterglow wears off eventually), partly picking the low hanging fruit of just meeting more people, and partly as a result of me no longer treating social situations as tests I have to pass or fail but opportunities to meet someone I really get along with. The latter is important as I still think I'd be just as awkward today in a room full of people I don't have anything in common with, but I have been pleasantly surprised at the results of no longer being afraid to tell jokes that are funny rather than pleasing or of giving my real opinions to people (with some sugar-coating or self-censorship depending on what I know about them of course). There are a lot more people I can easily get along with than I thought, I was just not doing a good enough job of going out on a limb and raising a flag for them to spot me. There is a risk with being genuine like this, not everyone will like you, but even the most socially savvy people I know have a few enemies.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
I'm trying to learn French at the moment and I wanted to ask if anyone has experience trying to learn a language while also trying to retain another.
I feel like I might be making it more difficult for myself by continuing to revise Spanish on Anki, it's not time consuming or anything but Spanish often comes to mind first when I'm trying to translate a word from English.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
They are still easily identifiable to people here. Accent, dress, surnames (shared with other Irish people but it's still a useful hint) are all pretty solid tells, and paired with the fact that most people know the traveller families in their area and might even have an idea of what their faces look like (I know a few families that look very distinctive) you'll guess right most of the time.
Discrimination by restaurants, bars, hotels etc is easy to do and very common, although false accusations of discrimination are even more common.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
This was the agrarian dream of people like Andrew Jackson (IIRC, or was it Thomas Jefferson), and it has a sort of charm to it.
Jefferson thought that farmers were more virtuous and more suited to democracy.
Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phaenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example. It is the mark set on those, who not looking up to heaven, to their own soil and industry, as does the husbandman, for their subsistence, depend for it on the casualties and caprice of customers. Dependance begets subserviance and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition. This, the natural progress and consequence of the arts, has sometimes perhaps been retarded by accidental circumstances: but, generally speaking, the proportion which the aggregate of the other classes of citizens bears in any state to that of its husbandmen, is the proportion of its unsound to its healthy parts, and is a good-enough barometer whereby to measure its degree of corruption. . . The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigour. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution. - Notes on the State of Virginia, 'Query XIX. Manufactures’.
The Irish Times and RTE are also going with 'former pupil'. I don't think Irish people (even Irish journalists) are quite yet up to speed on the trans lingo, so I prefer to imagine this as the editor throwing up their hands and using the only identifying fact they're sure of.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
To me it seems like a completely natural kind of politics, just one we haven't had to deal with in a long time. Every people has a need for self-justification: "why do we rule this land and not you?" That question can be settled by a satisfactory foundation myth, in fact it must be settled that way if there is to be peace. The alternative of "we rule because we won the fight" invites the question of "well can you win again?", the vacuum left by a foundation myth no one believes in anymore is a time for people to test the boundaries on that question.
Europeans could honestly say "this is our land because we have held it for thousands of years", nationalism was a fairly straightforward answer even if the details had to be ironed out by seperatist wars. It has run into difficulty now that its excesses have been associated (fairly or unfairly) with the worst of crimes, though only some countries are susceptible to that type of guilt. Countries born out of colonisation have an even harder time with this as the their beginnings are so well recorded and so recent, but reading Leo Strauss' Natural Right and History it seems like ancient societies grappled with the same thing:
Every ideology is an attempt to justify before one's self or others such courses of action as are somehow felt to be in need of justification, i.e., as are not obviously right. Why did the Athenians believe in their autochthony, except because they knew that robbing others of their land is not just and because they felt that a self-respecting society cannot become reconciled to the notion that its foundation was laid in crime?
If it's fair to put the left on one side of this question and the right on the other, the answers the left offer span from trying to reform the foundation myth in a way that the crimes of the past are somehow reconciled, to condemning the current society because they can't be. The right either has the choice of sticking to the old myths, or doing the modern equivalent of tracing the lineage of their king to Adam or Hercules and finding a deeper justification for the present state.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
I haven't actually started reading it yet, but I picked up The First Irish Cities: An Eighteenth-Century Transformation because I think, without the author necessarily intending it, it might serve as an argument for the good sides (in terms of economc development at least) of British rule in Ireland.
The potato famine of the 1840s and the century of population loss due to emigration that followed gives the misleading impression that Ireland was always a relatively tiny country. But it had nearly half the population of England and Wales in the 1750s (roughly 3.2 million vs 6.5 million) and Dublin was Europe's 14th largest city, on par with Berlin. The story of how this happened should be an interesting one.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
The three factors are length of time a nation has been organized as a State (US 247 years England 374 years)
This comparison seems wrong from the start. England and America didn't evolve seperately, England passed the torch to America. The US achieved so much in 247 years largely because they could draw on hundreds of years of English political tradition.
It's much harder to get addicted to books. If teenage girls were reading YA novels for 4 hours a day people would be a lot more worried.
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