Tollund_Man4
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User ID: 501
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
My penmanship was just that poor.
Same here. Surprisingly I did well in English despite writing slowly compared to most (I wrote 6 pages per paper in my final exams while others wrote 12).
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
'Ye' is still used a lot in Ireland. Up north you'll hear words like 'yous' and 'yousens', Dubliners also have 'yis'.
I've never heard it before, but that seems more due to 'war of independence' having inherited positive connotations which people don't want to grant to an unpopular loser rather than it being an incoherent label.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
We saw this during Covid, in which the US health authorities and experts could only make easily-ignored recommendations, unlike in China, in which people were forced to comply. Same for Europe overall.
I think the American experience with covid rules was quite different to Europe where many of the covid rules were not easily ignored. In Ireland I remember police checkpoints at the city limits enforcing the 5km rule.
Still reading The Seven: The Lives And Legacies Of The Founding Fathers Of The Irish Republic. Not that I know much about the history of socialism, but it seems like James Connolly had the idea of socialism in one country long before Stalin, square brackets mine:
In deference to the nationalism of those he was trying to convert, [Connolly's 1896 manifesto] also denounced the 'subjection of one nation to another, as of Ireland to the authority of the British Crown', and called for an 'Irish Socialist Republic'. This was a novel idea that Connolly developed in three articles in the ILP's weekly, Labour Leader, designed to persuade British Marxists to abandon their belief that Home Rule for Ireland was a necessary stage before the proletariat took over throughout the British Empire. 'The interests of labour all the world over are identical, it is true,' he said, 'but it is also true that each country had better work out its own salvation on the lines most congenial to its own people.'
Edit: More research has me discovering that this wasn't quite a pre-empting of Stalin, and that Lenin saw Connolly as unobjectionable enough to take inspiration from him.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
Isn't that the space 'war of independence' covers?
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
No, but I don't think it's worth ceding ground on free speech to stop.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
On the other hand presumably your great-grandmother was producing proportionally much more for the market than a medieval farmer could have done. Those trucks and tractors and all the new goods that could be bought provided an incentive and the ability to work far beyond what was needed for survival.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
Very few people of course, but then very few people have access to the kind of protection Musk has either.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
I feel fine enough on those days to go to work (manual labour), but not enough to read a book. It's surprising how much you notice about yourself when you try to maintain a habit of reading, things that you would otherwise brush off become noticeable obstacles when you have to focus.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
I think lack of sleep dulls perception and masks the tiredness a bit. When I'm running on fumes I don't notice it, when I get my first day off in a while I realise how tired I am.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
Can someone who has worked in customer service please explain to me how to be less irritating to service workers? I am socially anxious and awkward and am repeatedly finding myself in situations where I feel like I'm making service workers uneasy and it makes me feel terrible.
Having worked a number of customer facing roles in fast food/shops etc my take is that there are very few really bad customers, but when you've got 5 other tasks that need doing even a nice customer is an interruption (maybe I'm an oddity here, some people love spending 10 minutes chatting to customers) so just be clear about what you want so I can do it without having to think too hard. If it helps this also means that they're not really paying attention to you and the frustration they may be showing isn't primarily caused by you, so less reason to feel self-conscious.
Growing up I always admired my dad and grandfather for being able to talk to anyone and make them feel comfortable but this is a skill I never learned.
I think there's another factor in that modern service work environments are less forgiving of this kind of thing these days. You still get the old man trying to talk about his day like he used to, but things on the worker's end are more fast paced than they used to be. I can still go to a family butchers and notice how the interactions with staff differ from those at the supermarket chain.
Alternately, can someone give advice on how to stop ruminating about recent socially awkward situations?
I haven't fully solved this problem myself but I find it helpful to remind myself that people are more concerned with themselves than they are of you. I recently saw a coworker give a nervous powerpoint presentation to the team, exactly the way I have done it, and it was clear how little anyone cared.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
Bringing the most powerful people in society slightly more in line with the level of safety the rest of us make do with? I'll bite that bullet.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
The horrors of history always end up being mundane, and so it will end up too with the XXth century. It's only a question of time.
I'm more pessimistic, I think ideology can buttress whatever gap the passage of time leaves. Anti-semites still hate Jews for things that happened in Biblical times (or Quranic(?) times), Irish nationalists were more militant against the British in the 1920s than they were in the 1840s.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
Every case of significant immigration I'm aware of has resulted in the formation of group identities for the immigrants
I don't think anyone can dispute that, but then there's the question of whether those group identities are at serious odds with the native one (beyond the small degree of natural friction that seems unavoidable).
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
In any case, I don't think the amount of profit derived from India really matters. The actions I listed were still taken to benefit Britain, even if the resulting profit wasn't huge.
Even if there was no profit I think you could just say it was misguided economic policy intended to benefit Britain, like mercentalism was.
India was ultimately a net drain on the British Empire, though.
There's a popular position that Europe benefitted greatly from colonisation and therefore owes the world. There's a less popular take that colonialism was in many cases a lose-lose proposition just like any other bad economic system, but despite this Europe still thrived due to other factors.
In Ireland's case I think it was a matter of Britain securing a military weak point at great cost (Ireland gained its independence only after it stopped being considered a valid staging ground for an invasion of Britain), and the counterfactual where they both remain Catholic or both convert to Protestantism or achieve good relations some other way is one where both are much wealthier today.
The "bad thing that complainants are mad about" is "losing self-determination in one's homeland".
But losing self-determination to whom? A mix of 30 different poor countries? I'd say that people today are angry about losing their say in the running of the country to the whims of the elites. The proper frame isn't colonialism vs anti-colonialism but democracy vs tyranny, or populism vs technocracy. More evidence in favour of this is that the problem is perceived to go much deeper than immigration, it's just one issue among many where the elites have acted with arrogant dismissal towards the concerns of the everyday man.
That's all to say that internal vs external loss of control doesn't seem like an arbitrary distinction, but a central one.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
As I understand it, the principle behind “Anti-Colonialism” is that Group A is never entitled to move into Group B’s space and take it over, replacing Group B’s preferred culture and/or method of governance with Group A’s preferred culture and/or method of governance, thereby subjugating Group B as second class in their own space.
All this by means of violence is a big aspect of the objection to colonialism I think you're missing.
With an “Open Borders” mindset, there is no stopping Groups B-Z from moving into Group A’s space and altering its culture or assuming control of its institutions if any of those Groups does so with enough numbers or organization. “Open Borders,” on principle, refutes the very notion of any group’s ownership of any space, which more or less dismantles the paradigm of “Anti-Colonialism.” How do these two ideas co-exist in the same mind without producing uncomfortable cognitive dissonance?
But are group B-Z altering Group A's culture and assuming control of its institutions by means of violence? If not, and if violence is the aspect of colonialism that people object to, then there is no tension between the positions of open borders and anti-colonialism.
There's a reason that anti-Open Borders people draw attention to lawless migrant enclaves in big cities where rules different to the ones legally sanctioned are enforced by the sword: They want to say that open borders will lead to the same objectionable consequences as colonialism.
The Seven: The Lives and Legacies of the Founding Fathers of the Irish Republic, tells the story of the seven signatories of the 'Proclamation of The Republic', the people who led the Easter Rising of 1916: Thomas J. Clarke, Seán Mac Diarmada, Thomas MacDonagh. P. H. Pearse. Éamonn Ceannt, James Connolly and Joseph Plunkett.
I'd disagree somewhat with them being called the 'Founding Fathers' given that they were all dead before the Irish Free State was formed, but they certainly inspired a lot of people and got the ball rolling on violent resistance. And 'trying to get the ball rolling' well describes a good portion of their lives, the popularity violent resistance was at a low point at the turn of the century as Irish nationalists were making significant gains working within the system (or in the case of boycotts and rent strikes, partially within it). Nevertheless they started newspapers, travelled to America to procure funds from sympathetic Irish-Americans, groomed protégés, subverted other nationalist organisations to their ends, waited for the right moment to strike, and eventually got their wish of emulating nationalist heroes like Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone in being sentenced to death after a failed rebellion.
One thing the book doesn't do is try to justify their ambitions. The term 'Anglophobic' is used a lot, and you get the impression that all it took was for them to be radicalised by a school teacher or parent for an unshakeable hatred of Britain to be formed* although the spectrum ranges from uncomplicated radical and would-be terrorist Thomas J. Clarke, to Patrick Pearse, half-English romantic and intellectual who was known to James Joyce (who disliked him) and W.B Yeats. Pearse is also one of the best writers I have found as a result of this dive into history, alongside Terence MacSwiney.
Clarke's spell in jail provides a good example of the predicament Irish-nationalists posed from the British side: execute them and they become martyrs, exile them and they either escape or stir up trouble abroad, imprison them and they become sympathetic figures who clearly aren't the real culprits according to the newspapers and MPs courting the Irish vote (this was a thing in Britain just as it was in America), let them out of prison after 15 years and they seem to be just as single-mindedly devoted to being your enemy as they were in their 20s.
The second Boer war gets mentioned a lot too. Clarke's father was a British army sergeant in South Africa until the family returned to Ireland in 1865, but by the time the events of the book were taking place Irish opinion was firmly on the side of the Boers (the "Fusilier's Arch" in Dublin dedicated to the members of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers who died in the Second Boer War is also known as the "Traitor's Gate"), Clarke even named his dog Kruger.
I still have to get through reading about Ceannt, Connolly and Plunkett which I'm looking forward to.
*Alexander Martin Sullivan's The Story of Ireland was an apparent favourite among schoolteachers at the time, and was enough to convice Dan Breen and his friends to set up a basically autonomous IRA squad as soon as they were finished school. Iirc it was torn apart by later Irish historians but I'd like to read it to see if it's where Breen got the strange phrasing he uses when he describes people selling out for the 'Saxon gold'. I'm surprised the British authorities let teachers get away with that stuff, but then again I'm not sure how much teaching was done in the National Schools (which Pearse accuses of trying to mold people into good English boys) and how much was done unofficially.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
Big and ripped = some medical help.
I'd add the caveat that 'big' means bodybuilder big. I know plenty of 'big' (compared to the average guy) people who are pretty ripped, and personally I have yet to hit a point where I get so fat I don't have visible abs (despite currently being 90kg at 5'10").
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
All that excess energy needs to be directed somewhere
My impression is that it is directed towards the wealth of distractions that exist in the modern day. Video games, porn.. actually I don't need to list more, that's already enough to remain docile through your 20s.
but here in Belgium non-EU migration has been a net negative. Our national bank did a study on this a few years ago.
This is a 244 page document, can you point to where this is shown? Ctrl-Fing for 'GDP per capita' seems to contradict your claim:
Summing up results from the different impact channels, recent immigration has a positive impact on GDP, pushing it up by 3.5%. The effect is positive for both origins with a 2% increase from EU immigration and a 1.5% rise from non-EU immigration. Evidently, immigration also induces an increase in the population. Nevertheless, it still leads to a 0.7% rise in GDP per capita
And the Dutch study isn't loading for me.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
I suppose this is like calling France part of Southern Europe?
Now you're confusing me, surely France straddles both Northern and Southern Europe, while also being firmly within Western Europe?
Wikipedia says no, TIL, the Pyrenees and the Alps mark the borders of Southern Europe, being on the Mediterranean coast isn't enough.
I've sped through tests where I knew all the answers and I've sped through tests I was woefully unprepared for. For me it was just a matter about being confident about what I knew and what I didn't know. Aside from a quick double check at the end, no amount of head wracking was going to help me recall papers I hadn't read.
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