Tollund_Man4
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User ID: 501
Tollund_Man4
1mo ago
Going by surnames they're Irish-Americans.
Tollund_Man4
1mo ago
We can, and should, frown on and punish that behavior. But it's not rape.
Reading him as charitably as I can I'd say he's advocating something like what the French had before they brought in age of consent laws a few years ago. You still got sent to prison for having sex with a minor but it wasn't called rape, and you got sent to prison for much longer if your case satisfied the coercive bar needed for a rape conviction.
Ireland
More suspicious fires on real or rumoured asylum accomodation. I think the story is getting to the point where every instance of arson or accidental fire in one of these places is going to be reported as an attack (to be fair to the media this is more a conclusion you're pointed towards rather than a direct claim, but one case of police not treating a fire as suspicious was omitted by the Irish Times and reported in other papers), but since the police keep mentioning their investigating of far-right rumours online there is something of political substance to fires that may have had no political motive.
Last Sunday at Sandyford, Dublin. Article claims that there were online rumours circulating about the building, the Department of Integration is checking whether they had any plans for the place, police are investigating and haven't said whether or not they're treating it as suspicious.
The early hours of Tuesday the 9th of January in Buncrana, Donegal. This building was certainly an asylum centre and was the first building that was actually occupied. Some people have been taken to hospital over smoke inhalation. Police have said that the fire was likely started within the building, but online commenters are pinning this one on our new domestic terrorists.
There was also a far more direct political angle to this story. Fianna Fáil councillor Noel Thomas and a person known to another FF councillor Seamus Walsh were subject to dawn raids by police in relation to a fire that took place in Galway in December. Thomas and Walsh were criticised by party leader Michael Martin for making criticisms of the government's immigration policy in December. Walsh's comments about the raid are fairly radical for a politician:
“I will never while there is breath in me cooperate with the guards on anything.
“My wife is some woman, she has been with me 43 years and she is well used to me and politics but this broke her. She burst out crying.
“I’m not a man who goes running to the press – I avoid the press in fact. But this was cynical and came about from (political) pressure being applied.
“They feel like if they can break Noel Thomas and myself that he will frighten other councillors into their way of thinking.
And finally some good news for the moderates I guess. Two buildings in Carlow and Mayo that were earmarked to host male asylum seekers will now be hosting 'families and children' after local, peaceful protests. These families will still be asylum seekers, but I guess it's much harder to protest over 50 women and children being brought in than 50 single males.
Tollund_Man4
5mo ago
One big distinguishing factor is that Ireland’s immigration experience is much more recent.
It’s hard to find a red line to rally around when your country’s first experience of mass Muslim migration happened in your grandparents’ days and when you’ve already learned to avoid the ghettos. Anything short of a drastic acceleration is just boiling the frog.
Ireland has never had ethnic ghettos, Dublin youth excepted we’re not used to the violence that’s accepted as part and parcel of normal city life, a ratio of 1800 Irish to 700 MENA males isn’t something Irish towns are used to.
I’m doubtful that this was a terrorist attack, but yesterday it was unclear whether Ireland had just experienced it’s first ever Islamic terrorist attack. Even though Ireland does have a high proportion of foreign nationals it’s nearly all working class Eastern Europeans or middle class Western Europeans who don’t cause much trouble, having areas suddenly gain a large population of young African and Muslim males is jarring and easy to rally around (I know this guy is much older but tension has been building for a while). All this when house and rental prices are through the roof.
Tollund_Man4
9mo ago
In France there are intergenerational homesharing agencies which offer young people cheap rent in return for living with an elderly person.
Tollund_Man4
1yr 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.
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
1yr ago
I think he shot himself in the foot by using that term. I had never heard it before and my first impression was also that it was something extreme. 'Enforced' isn't a word that goes down well in today's liberal world.
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
I found it! It's from Roger Scruton:
Moreover, the pursuit of irrelevant knowledge is, for that very reason, a mental discipline that can be adapted to the new and the unforeseeable. It is precisely the irrelevance of everything they knew that enabled a band of a thousand British civil servants, versed in Latin, Greek, and Ancient History, to govern the entire Indian sub-continent—not perfectly, but in many ways better than it had been governed in recent memory. It is the discipline of attending in depth to matters that were of no immediate use to them that made it possible for these civil servants to address situations that they had never imagined before they encountered them—strange languages, alphabets, religions, customs, and laws. It is no accident that it was a classical scholar—the judge Sir William Jones, founder of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1788—who did the most to rescue Sanskrit literature from oblivion, who introduced the world, the Indian world included, to the Vedas, and who launched his contemporaries on the search for the principles and repertoire of classical Indian music.
Tollund_Man4
4mo ago
Ireland
Another fire at a building (believed to be) earmarked for asylum accomodation. A vacant pub in Dublin which was also the site of anti-migrant protests last year was set alight during the night, but the government and homeless charities are saying that it was ultimately going to be used for homeless families and not asylum seeker accomodation.
An angry crowd of masked men was out at a building in Finglas, Dublin last night so I guess that's the next probable target.
True, though some of the ones brave enough to set fire to buses might be.
There’s been a lot of tension between Brazilian couriers and Dublin’s feral youth these last few years. A lot of Brazilians work courier and food delivery jobs and a certain section of young Dubliners like stealing their motorbikes. I don’t know the number but a few Brazilians have been severely injured or killed by joyriders and thieves (or in one case by the police trying to stop the thieves).
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
11mo ago
I can't see why you couldn't drink 8% all day though
If you're used to drinking 5-10 pints on a night out 8% will get you way too drunk. Source: Irish drinking culture met Belgian beer.
Tollund_Man4
1yr 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
1yr ago
For who? 100 IQ short guys?
Some were short, some tall and handsome. 100 IQ sounds about right, maybe less.
How'd they even afford the plane ticket?
I'm not American so maybe it's different there, but it's not that hard to save up a few grand on minimum wage over the course of a year. If you're willing to work in a bar or something you can probably even find a job at your destination.
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
Influence is earned, not given
Influence is won and lost, and even the top dogs don't always get to set terms.
If Third World countries want to demand the West make good on its humanitarian promises, promises upon which the soft power of the latter largely depends, then either the West makes good or people learn not to take their humanitarian promises seriously. A space opens up for China to step in.
Given disparate birth rates over the world, a growing imbalance between countries who hold the actual power versus where most of humanity will increasingly be located could lead to increased international tension.
If that tension can't safely be ignored, then maybe the Third World countries are correctly assessing a growing power to make demands. In the age of mass immigration and poor integration a population disparity seems like quite the weak point.
Are you willing to allow for finer distinctions like 'the Hungarian race' and 'the Dutch race'?
If not, your definition of ethnicity leaves us lacking a term for the noticeable differences between groups within a race* . Maybe this isn't as clear in the US where whites are all mixed together, but a Pole looks different to a Scotsman (even if there's enough overlap that you won't always guess right).
*though I think race could be dispensed with altogether as it just marks a point where the differences between distantly related ethnicities are obvious.
Still reading Kissinger's Diplomacy. A few surprising things I found out (coming from a background of not knowing much about WW2):
- America was already attacking German submarines in the Atlantic before Pearl Harbour
- Roosevelt intitially overestimated Britain's post-war potential and planned to pull American troops out of Europe while letting British garrisons pick up the slack.
- Stalin was proposing post-war plans while German troops were outside of Moscow.
- Churchill consistently tried to convince Roosevelt on the need to take land before the Soviets got to it, and he was consistently ignored. One plan was for D-Day to include the Balkans.
Aside from that I'm doing more 'reading' than ever by listening to audiobooks at work, I'm on my 30th this year. It's mostly light reading, classic sci-fi, horror and now Sherlock Holmes novels.
Does being atheist really preclude being culturally Protestant? The momentum still carries you even if the engine has been turned off to use a metaphor, it takes a lot of work to actually change direction towards morals which are alien to the Christian.
Ireland
The arson attacks have died down (barring one seemingly apolitical attempt to burn down 5 shops in one day in Cork city) and the government has hardened their attitude somewhat towards the abuses of the asylum system, sending one man to prison and arresting dozens of others for showing up at Dublin airport without a passport and promising to resume deportations of failed asylum seekers on chartered flights (the covid response involved putting a moratorium on deportations).
I'm a bit late with this news but it turns out the man charged with setting fire to a Luas tram during the Dublin riot is a member of the National Party, so there is some evidence to the claims that far-right agitators are taking advantage of these protests to commit crimes. Stirring up violence is about all the National Party seems capable of, right now there are two self-proclaimed leaders of the party since Justin Barrett was ousted as party leader (something he denies) after a controversy over a large amount of stolen gold and a police investigation into who actually owns it.
Another slightly out of date headline is that the number of asylum seekers without state provided accommodation broke the 1,000 figure last month, but given the rate of increase it is likely still higher today:
On Friday 9 February, the figure passed 800 for the first time, the following Friday it passed 900, and today, one week on, it has passed 1,000.
Many of these asylum seekers have pitched tents outside the International Protection Office and are protesting the breach of their human rights given the sometimes freezing temperatures and constant rain. It has been the case for a while now that if you show up in Ireland claiming asylum that you will be sleeping on the street, but that doesn't seem to be much of a deterrent.
I find a lot of the pro/anti car arguments get bogged down in the fact that there aren’t many Americans who have lived in Europe and vice versa, for example practical confusions about how stock resupply works on pedestrianised streets or why Americans actually want to be somewhat isolated from the dangerous inner cities (I’ve seen this problem with Irish anti-car advocates too when they oppose pro-car compromises that are normal in very walkable European cities).
Personally I find these conversations very interesting, but you can’t really get anywhere when a good chunk of either side of the debate hasn’t experienced the alternative.
Tollund_Man4
5mo ago
I’m not a Dublin native but I think it would be very strange if turned out that the rioters weren’t mostly Irish.
There are lots of videos and newspaper articles about the absolutely wild behaviour of Dublin youth over the years, they’re definitely capable of burning down trams and stealing buses (not so different from Belfast youth in that regard though riots are still very rare in Dublin).
A shitty life is hard to solve, being poor and sick are real hurdles, being bored is another matter.
If you have a range of options going from fulfilling but difficult to unfulfilling but easy it's hard not to say that going with the latter is the cause and not just the effect of your life being unfulfilling.
And people do have options. Opportunity costs aside books are basically free, volunteering in a totally new type of work and dealing with new types of people is free, travel is expensive but if you've already got a shitty job you won't be sacrificing much in terms of material conditions. There is a whole lot of challenge in these options and they might not provide ultimate fulfillment (though there's something to be learned from the search), but they're surely more fulfilling than being stuck in a rut of heavy gaming and porn addiction.
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.
Ireland
Riot police have been called out to the small town of Newtownmountkennedy (population 2,800) in response to another protest outside a site which is soon to become an asylum centre. It got violent and the riot police charged the protesters after they set fire to a building on the outer portion of the site. It seems like most of the protesters/rioters have been pushed into an adjacent field, but police are still moving through the town and running into more angry locals.
Ballina had a ]far larger peaceful protest](https://x.com/Mick_O_Keeffe/status/1781727303283692017) a few days ago, it would be harder to shut this one down given how big the town is (c. 10,000) and how isolated it is.
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