Folamh3
User ID: 1175
For what it's worth I disagree that Ireland isn't "particularly woke". I mean, the general population finds wokeness bizarre and alienating, but that's true of every country in which wokeness has found any kind of purchase: it's an ideology by and for the elites, and for the most part the elites in Ireland are just as woke as in any other Anglophone nation. We have self-ID (and the attendant rows about males in women's prisons and sports); controversies over youth gender medicine; massive BLM protests in 2020; the incidence of words like "racism", "transphobia", "homophobia" etc. in our two national newspapers has skyrocketed since 2010, and demands for draconian hate speech legislation - in short, everything you'd expect from a woke nation. The point I was trying to make is that Irish support for the Palestinian cause predates Ireland's great awokening by decades, and pro-Palestine marches were a common sight to see long before anyone here had heard of a preferred pronoun.
I also think @2rafa is being a bit sweeping by putting a slash between leftist and woke. Many wokes are liberals, many leftists are not wokes, although they do both tend to favour the Palestinian cause if for different reasons.
Folamh3
20hr ago
What exactly is it with Ireland and Israel?
Brendan O'Neill has an interesting write-up today about Bambie Thug and the historical links between Ireland and Israel.
Folamh3
1d ago
Is it common for Eurovision to consistently have so many LGBT performers?
When I was a kid, my memory is that the western European entrants tended to be knowingly, overwhelmingly camp (over-the-top dance-pop songs, garish stage production etc.), while the eastern European entrants tended to be more serious and subdued (mid-tempo ballads accentuated with traditional instrumentation). The audience for Eurovision has always been as gay as they come, but I think it's only within the last decade that many European countries have started consciously leaning into this by submitting performers with the intent of appealing to gay audiences i.e. performers who are themselves LGBT.
What exactly is it with Ireland and Israel?
As a country which got its independence in the last century, the Irish carry around a residual postcolonial sentiment and (rightly or wrongly) see the struggle for Palestinian statehood as analogous to the battle for Irish independence. It may be "performative" in some sense, but the Irish support for the Palestinian cause predates the modern progressive/woke movement by decades e.g. when I was in primary school, every Easter we'd raise funds for the charity Trócaire, who even at the time were outspoken in their support for Palestine. Even many social conservatives are sympathetic to the cause: my mum often tells the story of her father (a devout Catholic who was opposed to the legalisation of divorce, never mind abortion) visiting Israel in the early 2000s and describing how appalled he was by the security checks Palestinians were made to go through on entrance to the state. The Provisional IRA (active in both north and south from the 60s to the late 90s) were in direct contact with the PLO, and even received training from them. I was in Belfast in January, and when driving through heavily Catholic districts of the city (e.g. the Falls road), I saw Palestinian flags hanging from every pub, which were conspicuous by their absence in the Protestant districts. A friend of mine joked that this makes Israel-Palestine one of the most effective shibboleths for gauging someone's religious background in Northern Ireland. Even prior to October 7th, it wasn't remotely uncommon to see Palestinian flags adorning the balconies of working-class council flats in Dublin (October 7th has "gentrified" the cause such that the middle-class houses who were displaying Ukrainian flags for the last two years have now added Palestinian flags, or even replaced them). I doubt it will surprise you to learn that I don't think the alleged parallels between Palestine-Israel and Ireland-Britain really hold water (e.g. to my mind, Hamas leaders have made it perfectly clear that their ultimate goal is the extermination of every Jew from the face of the earth; while I have nothing nice to say about the IRA, they did not have the stated goal of massacring every Briton), but that's neither here nor there.
I've never gotten the feeling that Ireland is an antisemitic country (the most famous novel to come out of the country has a sympathetic Jewish protagonist; there's been at least one prominent Jewish elected official in my lifetime; there was a Jewish guy in my class in secondary school who was far more popular than I was). If there had been scenes similar to London or Sydney over the last six months (e.g. rabbis getting harassed on the street, mass crowds chanting "gas the Jews"), I imagine I would have heard about it. There aren't many Muslims in Ireland, but thirty times as many Muslims as Jews according to the 2016 census, and the ratio is probably even more skewed now. Even the numerous pro-Palestine protests that I've seen seem to be principally attended by native white Irish people rather than first-generation Muslim immigrants.
Certainly Bambie Thug is nowhere near as omnipresent in the popular imagination as Jedward were at their peak. I would put "the celebrity everyone is currently talking about" in a very different category to "the political topic everyone is currently talking about", though.
Folamh3
1d ago
I've no problem with the gays and Eurovision is camp as Christmas and all the better for it. "Non-binary" is lame and cringe, and "Bambie Thug" seems to take herself awfully seriously for someone with such a silly stage name.
Representing Ireland is a (sigh) non-binary singer-songwriter calling herself* (sigh) Bambie Thug. Her decision to participate was controversial, with many figures in Ireland's music scene likening her to a scab worker for not honouring the Eurovision boycott in protest of Israel's participation. She has given multiple interviews defending herself and insisting that she is acting in accordance with her values. I believe I read somewhere that she claimed she was originally planning to wear a dress with the word "ceasefire" or something to that effect emblazoned on it in ogham (am ancient Irish script) but the Eurovision people made her wear something else.
*Don't care.
Folamh3
5d ago
Savita Halappanavar's death
Such an obvious one, don't know how I forgot it.
My theory is that at any one time, there's one "primary" international news topic which dominates the Anglosphere discourse for months or years at a time. This topic is sometimes coupled with a "local" topic which only dominates the discourse in specific Anglosphere nations. In addition to the primary and local topic du jour, there are smaller secondary topics which take up a great number of column inches for a few weeks, but rarely longer than a fiscal quarter, and never threatening the status of the "primary" topic.
A history of international "current things" in Ireland:
- Brexit (June-November 2016; intermittently recurs as a secondary topic whenever there's a lull in one of the subsequent primary topics)
- Donald Trump election and presidency (November 2016-March 2020)
- Covid (March 2020-December 2022)
- George Floyd/BLM protests (May 2020-September 2020) [I'm cheating a little bit; while the protests were ongoing they seemed to take up exactly as much space in the discourse as Covid, then after they died down Covid returned as the sole current thing)
- Russia-Ukraine war (February 2022-October 2023)
- Israel-Gaza war (October 2023-present)
A history of "local" topics which dominated the Irish discourse almost as much as the dominant topic du jour, but only locally (with some maybe getting a few write-ups in British outlets:
- Death of Savita Halappanavar (October 2012-January 2013) [as noted by @AvocadoPanic]
- Murder of Elaine O'Hara (September-December 2013)
- Introduction of water charges (mid 2013-mid 2014)
- Cancellation of Garth Brooks concerts (July 2014)
- Gay marriage referendum (January-May 2015)
- Berkeley balcony collapse (June-July 2015)
- Traveller mobile home fire (October-November 2015)
- Abortion referendum (February-May 2018, having been a secondary topic for years prior)
- CervicalCheck scandal (April-December 2018)
- Murder of Ana Kriegel (May-July 2018)
- Music Industry Stimulus Package (November 2020)
- Killing of George Nkencho (December 2020-February 2021)
- Murder of Aisling Murphy (January 2022)
- Parnell Street stabbing and subsequent riots (November 2023-January 2024)
Folamh3
12d ago
Ugh, I can't watch more than five seconds because I know where it's going.
Folamh3
12d ago
I saw a woman explaining why she chose bear over man, and almost all of her answers were variants on "bears can't speak, men can" (e.g. no bear ever catcalled me, no bear ever accused me of being a lesbian because I didn't want to have sex with him, no Vietcong ever called me a nigger etc.).
Folamh3
14d ago
I don't think the average woke person or leftist would be that put off learning that Che Guevara was an incompetent loser. But learning that he said something (GASP!) racist...
Folamh3
14d ago
Everyone tears down the other team's idols. What sets wokeness apart from other ideologies is that they apply this approach to everyone. Freddie deBoer said one of the defining aspects of social justice politics is the belief that "almost everyone you encounter in contemporary society is a bad person". Credit where credit is due, that blog "your fave is problematic" is relentless: in no way do celebrities get a pass from them merely by having the appropriate skin tone or mouthing the right shibboleths. When hardcore woke people say "everything is problematic", they mean it.
Folamh3
14d ago
Valid point, although this theory has a lot of degrees of freedom. One might argue that it would predict that Churchill would get a pass from the anti-fascist collective, given that the thing he's most famous for is helping to defeat the most prominent example of fascism in human history.
I don't know if Sam Kriss counts as rat-sphere.
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