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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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Yes, this is exactly the sort of "context" I was gesturing at (but failed to actually write) in my comment.

Strictly speaking, in the 1840s, the median Irishman was undoubtedly at a lower "civilisational level" than the median Anglo - but there are truer explanations for this than "the Irish are eternal untermenschen".

For example, you mentioned the Border people of the Scottish lowlands, and the Scotch-Irish of Ulster, who played an important role in US history - go back a thousand years for the second half of the first millenium though and you'll see that these peoples are descendants of Irish colonists in western Britain, which is at odds with the eternal untermenschen hypothesis.

For that matter, the median Irishman today is a little bit higher in a material/human capital sense than the median Englishman (though this is only a development of the past 20 years or so)

For example, you mentioned the Border people of the Scottish lowlands, and the Scotch-Irish of Ulster, who played an important role in US history - go back a thousand years for the second half of the first millenium though and you'll see that these peoples are descendants of Irish colonists in western Britain

Are you saying that the group that was essentially sent by the English to colonise Ireland during the Plantation was actually in large part the descendants of earlier Irish colonists who had migrated to western Scotland? And are you referring to Irish colonisation by the Viking kingdom based in Dublin in the late first millennium, or are you referring to an Irish colonization that happened much earlier?

And are you referring to Irish colonisation by the Viking kingdom based in Dublin in the late first millennium, or are you referring to an Irish colonization that happened much earlier?

The latter. There were Gaelic polities that preceded the big Viking one - this is how Scotland came to speak Gaelic, and how the Picts were pushed east prior to Viking invasion