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This won’t be particularly substantive but hopefully it’s enough to avoid a mod-slap. Apparently a group of women customers accosted staff at a Minneapolis yoga chain and berated them for not having some sort of ICE signage up (presumably a “No ICE allowed” sign, as if ICE agents will be stopping in to do yoga).
Here is an article.
Here is a direct link to the viral TikTok in question
The video’s author is Heather Anderson, 51, essentially the archetype of the wine mom, the core demographic of the latest frenzy. She appears to be an elementary school teacher and host of a podcast Belonging in the Classroom which presents itself with this description:
Of course this dovetails nicely with our discussion of another winemom-cum-podcaster, Jennifer Welch and her open calls for Republican blood. In all seriousness, psychologically speaking, what on Earth is going on with 50 year-old women right now? Have Democrats effectively weaponized Karenism?
The incident reminds me almost exactly of scenes that we saw in 2020, like this similar incident you surely remember of diners being surrounded and screamed at for not raising their fists in solidarity with BLM..
There is much endless discussion of peak woke, but to me it feels almost exactly like we are back in 2020, if not for the historic cold weather of the last few weeks and general time of year, I imagine it would be nearly identical.
Interesting. To me the current situation also feels like 2020, but because of coronavirus lockdowns. Again we are being expected to tolerate draconian government interference with our daily lives, because of some supposed threat. Watching people leap to the defense of the ICErs reminds me of how people cheered when Australian police were beating anti-lockdown protestors. Again it feels like the whole world has gone insane, and nobody is willing to do anything about it.
Here is a tweet with 5k upvotes saying that "ICE should start sl**ghtering liberals for no reason at all." I remember seeing opinions like this about anti-maskers, and thinking how weird it was for this "edgy", "transgressive" humor to be deployed in support of government power.
While the governmental interference in people's lives doesn't sound half as draconian or invasive as the worst excesses of Covid hysteria (it's not as if, in the interests of combating illegal immigration, Minnesotans are being prevented from hiking on mountain trails or attending their spouses' funerals; nor has their full participation in public life been made conditional on their undergoing a specific medical procedure), I nonetheless agree with you that many of the people cheering on ICE are motivated by a similar kind of spite. As a committed civil libertarian it's always disheartening to find out what a large proportion of my ostensible fellow-travelers really just want the boot on the other foot.
Yeah, one of the most depressing occurrences of my adulthood has been realizing that approximately nobody in America actually values freedom. Most of my countrymen seem to be authoritarian in their hearts, and the only question seems to be who/whom.
May I suggest that it's more about When/Why? For example, I found myself becoming very authoritarian about immigration and drugs and trans, and I thought 'guess I'm not a liberal after all', then genAI happened and it turns out I'm still very libertarian about software and AI, which was kind of pleasing to me. @FtttG is generally quite liberal but was quite clear in the trans thread that (s)he doesn't think it's okay to write anything you want on a government form just because it makes you happy, and generally also doesn't particularly seem to like people traveling across borders as they please. (I criticise neither stance, I'm just noting.)
Who/whom correlates to some degree with this but doesn't actually match it. It's a bit like the saying that everyone is conservative in their area of expertise.
Don't know if you find this reassuring but maybe worth bearing in mind.
I'm a guy. Although I find it amusing that I apparently have such an – androgynous? – writing style.
I find this characterisation interesting, as while I certainly think of myself as a run-of-the-mill 90s liberal and don't think any of my political opinions would be outside the Overton window for, say, a Democrat or Labour candidate circa 2000 – nonetheless, in my personal life I'm routinely accused of being a crypto-conservative (or even, rather laughably, "far-right"). I certainly don't dispute that I'm more conservative than many of my friends and family, a lot of whom are passively woke, though I still think I'm probably less conservative than the median poster here.
I will freely cop to the former characterisation of my opinions: government forms are for cataloguing demographic data, not for making people feel "validated", and governments should not concern themselves with cataloguing their citizens' unfalsifiable claims about their internal mental states. (Or rather, their citizens' unfalsifiable claims about their internal mental states should not supplant or override objective facts about the compositions of their bodies. "Identify" as whatever you please: that doesn't change what you are.) But when you say I "[don't] particularly seem to like people travelling across borders as they please", I'm a little taken aback. If all you mean as that I'm not an advocate for open borders, that's fair: per an article I read the other day, in order to have laws you must have jurisdictions, to have jurisdictions you must have borders, and if you have borders they must be enforced. But I get the impression you're imputing a stronger claim to me, namely that I'm opposed to immigration into Ireland in general, including legal immigration. If so, that's not how I would describe my own worldview. For example, I live with my girlfriend who's a first-generation migrant who was born and raised Muslim (though no longer practising); of the three long-term romantic relationships I've had as an adult, only one was with a fellow Irish person while the others were with first-generation migrants; it's been nearly a decade since I was physically intimate with a fellow Irish person, with virtually all of the people I was intimate with since being first-generation migrants; I would say a significant proportion if not an outright majority of my close friends are first-generation migrants.
That being said, I'm not going to pretend that all immigrants are created equal; I do think that a significant proportion of immigrants to Ireland (as in the rest of Europe) are a net drain on the public purse, not to mention responsible for a disproportionate share of violent crime; I have a big problem with people emigrating to Ireland solely to claim social welfare indefinitely and never make a positive contribution; and the progressive news media's habitual obfuscation about migrant crime and its wholesale importing of American racial grievance politics are long standing bugbears of mine. Immigrants who come to Ireland with the goal of assimilating and working hard without demanding handouts (either in the form of social welfare payouts or "ethnic spoils" sinecures) are entirely welcome, which is why I get particularly angry when I see immigrants meeting that description (e.g. Ireland's growing population of recent Indian migrants) receiving abuse and harassment from the native population. If you got the impression that I'm opposed to immigration into Ireland on general principle, I'm legitimately curious as to what gave you that impression (and not in a defensive how dare you! sort of way).
What I meant in the context of my last reply is that you clearly not an advocate of totally open borders. That is, when it gets right down to it, you advocate for forcefully (if necessary) preventing people from voluntarily going to certain places, taking up certain jobs, etc. even when they wish to. It makes you less liberal in that area than somebody like Bryan Caplan. Whereas in some places perhaps you hold more liberal opinions around say free-speech on the internet (I don't know). This argument was in service of my overall point that I think the vast majority of people want government force used to bring the outgroup to heel and to enforce their will sometimes in some areas.
On the more general level, I had a vague image of you not being super-keen on immigration partly because I vaguely recall you reporting on the anti-immigration riots in an 'interesting, let's see where this goes' way and partly probably because I am projecting and I have difficulty seeing an intelligent person be super jazzed about the type and level of immigration we're getting in UK + Ireland. I might be wrong about that.
I'm okay with this provided that they and their immediate descendants are capped to approx 2-3% of total population which is, aha, not what we see. I have described elsewhere that I think that there is a slippery slope / addiction mechanic involved with immigration and I am keen to forestall this even when I like and approve of many of the immigrants involved on a personal level. I don't know your feelings on the matter.
It's funny: while writing my previous comment I was thinking of this exact comment, but didn't realise it was you who'd written it!
I agree there's been a great deal of goalpost-moving on the topic of immigration, especially from those in favour. I've been thinking about this a lot in the context of Ireland, and specifically what immigration implies for the Irish national identity, or lack thereof.
What is the Irish national identity, really? Certainly no one would claim that it's based on ethnicity: even the farthest of the far-right would never dare to suggest that e.g. Denise Chaila is anything other than Irish, no hyphen necessary. (As pointed out by Angela Nagle, there's a bit of historical revisionism going on here, with modern Irish progressives loath to acknowledge that the Irish republican movement was always an unabashed, unapologetic ethno-nationalist movement.) It can't be based on a language that almost no one can speak, not even at a conversational level. It can't be based on a shared literary tradition (if the average Irish person has read an Irish novel in their lifetimes, it was probably by Sally Rooney, and I suspect the only dead Irish writer most Irish could name would be Joyce) or a musical one (most Irish people are proudly dismissive of their native musical tradition, and the most popular Irish musicians have always been those who aped sounds coming from the UK or the states). It certainly can't be based on Catholicism, with weekly attendance figures hovering around a quarter of the populace (a figure which is bound to shrink even more dramatically as the older generations die off).
At the height of the clerical abuse scandal (but, I believe, several years prior to the legalisation of gay marriage and abortion), I remember reading an opinion piece in the Irish Times noting that, of the three traditional pillars of Irish society (the Catholic Church, the Fianna Fáil political party and the Gaelic Athletics Association), now only the latter still retains anything like the kind of power and cultural influence it once wielded. After the clerical abuse scandals, the Church's reputation lay in tatters and attendance figures have been in freefall for decades, while it's been nearly five decades since Fianna Fáil secured an outright majority. The tone of this opinion piece was more than a little triumphalist, but in retrospect one wonders why the columnist wasn't a bit more concerned. Yes, these once-powerful institutions are a shadow of their former selves – but what are they going to be replaced with?
I know this is the story of every Western nation in the twentieth century: we gleefully tore down all the old institutions without giving any thought to what we ought to replace them with, and now we're experiencing a crisis of meaning. But I feel like the absence is even more keenly felt in Ireland, given how thoroughly we've deprecated everything else that might have served as a placeholder for a national identity while we got to work building new institutions. Woke progressives often talk about "culture" as if it's just another name for "language, cuisine, music, dance, fashion, sport": when they talk about "multiculturalism" and respecting different cultural practices, what they really mean is "you can speak any language you want, as long as you use it to respect everyone's preferred pronouns". But language, cuisine, music etc. is just superficial window-dressing: when we talk about "cultural differences", what we really mean is that people from different cultures have different moral values, and different assumptions they take for granted. Culture is why Arabs throw gay men off of buildings; culture is why Kenyans cut off their daughters' clitorises; culture is why disgraced Japanese people kill themselves rather than bringing dishonor on their families. With the hollowing out of Irish cultural institutions, whatever moral values and base assumptions an Irish person can be assumed to have are functionally indistinguishable from the European average (and, more to the point, the British* average). But unlike France, Sweden, Germany and so on, we don't really have much in the way of "culture" in the superficial window-dressing sense either. What native cuisine we have (aside from the obvious) is limited to coddle, colcannon, and bacon & cabbage; Irish dancing is that thing you're forced to do in Irish college over the summer before you can get back to kissing girls; language and music were covered above; the less said about Irish fashion the better. The only one in which we can really hold our own in is sport, and even then I'd hazard a guess than an order of magnitude more Irish people follow English club football exclusively than follow GAA exclusively. It's for this reason that Irish people tend to sound so faltering and unsure of themselves when attempting to explain what's unique and peculiar about their own culture, and what makes it meaningfully distinct from that of our nearest neighbour. "Emm... mammy'd have the wooden spoon after you, haha... flat 7Up when you're ill... Bosco on the telly... forgot to turn off the immersion?"
Sometimes you can detect the tension underlying all of this when Irish people talk about Irish history. Opposition to British rule occupies such a central role in the Irish psyche that it's almost impossible to overstate, and when pressed for examples of how oppressive said rule was, one will invariably be the penal laws, which placed heavy restrictions on Catholic practices in Ireland. But when you ask the person citing this example what they personally think of the Catholic Church, they will surely reply that it's a repressive homophobic misogynistic patriarchical institution made up entirely of kiddy-fiddlers whose theological beliefs are incoherent nonsense. In sum: "the Brits were bad because they tried to stop people practising Catholicism; also, the Catholic Church is an evil institution which ought to have no power". This cognitive dissonance is almost never remarked upon.
Ireland spent centuries fighting to protect our native culture against attempts from without to destroy it – then, almost as soon as we had won, we decided our native culture wasn't really worth defending in the first place, and tossed it aside in favour of generic, undistinguished universal culture. More provocatively, one could say that Ireland spent several hundred years ruled by a colonial overlord (Britain), finally achieved full independence in 1949, and in 1973 (barely a generation later) voluntarily submitted to being ruled by a different colonial overlord (the EU). Joining the EU was a sound decision from the perspective of economics, living standards and so on. But it's hard to dispute the idea that it ultimately compromised whatever sense of a distinct Irish identity still remained. The average Irish person's worldview owes far more to a gaggle of unelected administrators in Brussels than it does to Michael Collins, Daniel O'Connell or Charles Stewart Parnell, and that goes double for the hordes of woke West Brits and East Yanks who call themselves Irish but have nothing but scorn for every extant Irish institution or cultural practice. Listening to them speak, they don't even sound Irish. I'd imagine that most of them would know who Washington D.C. is named after, but not O'Connell St or Parnell St.
(Keen to hear @HereAndGone2's thoughts on the above.)
*Regardless of political stripe, Irish people can be relied upon to become very irate when you point out alleged commonalities between our culture and British culture. This defensiveness, in my view, has more to do with the narcissism of small differences than with any real factual dispute. Ireland has its own culture distinct from our nearest neighbour's only in the sense that we have an army and a navy: nine times out of ten, what's true of British people can be assumed to be true of Irish people also.
What I'm finding funny is the re-appropriation of traditional culture but stripping out the religious connotations, see the recent St Brigid's Day stuff. Now it's become a proper bank holiday, but along with traditions such as Little Christmas/Women's Christmas, it's being recast as some sort of proto-feminist, New Agey style feast. There was a completely dreadful 'icon' of St Bridget (very much in the Wiccan style) accompanying one such online article about 'traditions and customs and what we can do today'.
Nobody is going to be making Brid's Crosses out of rushes anymore, but what is left then? Fake Celtic paddywhackery. Deracinated for the natives, and nothing there of any substance to appeal to our new immigrant populations as shared culture.
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