Tollund_Man4
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User ID: 501
There aren't any other non-white TDs (members of parliament) to make the attempt in the first place (and Varadkar is already half-Irish). At the moment it looks like Simon Harris is going to be the next Taoiseach, he's shifty-eyed even for a politician.
If we're counting kings then we should count presidents. Michael D. Higgins is the Irish head of state.
That's more Irish than I expect any of us here know! For example using Google Translate I discovered that 'ugh' is a valid way to spell 'ubh' and the same for 'eun' and 'éan', if you have the source I wonder if it's an old Irish text (the spelling has changed a lot over the years)?
Tollund_Man4
8mo ago
To be pedantic it hasn't toppled the government (yet), assuming they can find a successor he or she will have a year before the next general election.
Read 52 books - Not gonna happen. I just don't like reading books enough to knock this out. Better to acknowledge that and read when it strikes me than keep trying to be book-guy.
52 is a lot either way, but if you don't care about what books you read I've found you can definitely hit the 1 a week pace with audiobooks (I work with my hands so don't lose anything focusing on something else). Doesn't really work with dense nonfiction but old sci-fi/fantasy books are an easy listen.
Tollund_Man4
8mo ago
I've failed to make any progress on my fitness goals due to lack of gym attendance, but I've got a good enough baseline that this just means I'm continuing to slowly lose weight. Since I hit 1/2/3/4 in 2022 my lifting motivation has gone down a lot but I haven't found anything to replace it with.
Reading sort of, I've read a lot of books but they're not the history/philosophy ones I marked out as wanting to cover. My main excuse is that some of the latter are 1000 pages and it's taking a while to get through them.
Learning French I'm not sure, I feel like I'm making progress but random encounters with French speakers remind me of how bad it is.
Tollund_Man4
8mo ago
Finally, you are asking for something and offering nothing.
I can imagine some people who know a lot about something don't write about it because they don't think there will be any interest. Might be useful for both parties.
Tollund_Man4
8mo ago
This is true to an extent but sometimes it really is just the place. Personally every big move in my life has changed things up a lot (sometimes better sometimes worse).
Tollund_Man4
8mo ago
I would personally want a knife, but I've seen enough videos of Irish police handily sorting a knife-wielder out with a few swings of a baton that I have to second guess myself.
Tollund_Man4
8mo ago
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.
Tollund_Man4
8mo ago
You'd think a loss like that would fall the government. Any inkling of that?
There’s a problem in that nearly all of the opposition parties were also campaigning for a Yes vote. Besides a few independents and Aontú (a party with 1 seat) there’s no one in opposition ready to capitalise on this.
Tollund_Man4
8mo ago
I’ve been getting through quite a few audiobooks at work, mostly sci-fi and horror classics. Recently finished 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Trial. Right now I’m listening to Dracula, despite me thinking I knew the whole story already it’s surprisingly good, so far it’s more impressive than the Cthulhu stories I’ve read.
I’m also working through Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy. Given how little I know of the history covered I doubt I’ll be able to catch any wild claims but I have to start somewhere.
Tollund_Man4
8mo ago
The first thing I can think of is that utilitarianism doesn’t have much to say about what happiness actually is beyond subjectively defined well-being. It would seem hard for a utilitarian to say that a state where everyone deems themselves happy should not be pursued, no matter what this happy life actually consists of, but Western philosophy tackles this question very early on (I’ll try and find the quote from Socrates where he flat out denies that the interlocutor claiming to be happy is really happy). If someone thinks that true happiness requires certain prerequisites (say freedom from ignorance or a well moderated character), then schemes for promoting happiness which have the force of moral obligation under utilitarianism can be dismissed as misguided, shallow or evil.
As a thought experiment you could imagine a world where technology has granted the ability to shape the wants of humanity such that everyone can attain maximum subjective well-being. The catch is that this is achieved by a numbing of the feelings that make man dissatisfied with who he is and his lot in life. The current mix of virtues and vices will become all that a man could ever expect from himself and he will be satisfied.
It’s hard to see how a utilitarian would object to this, but it brings to prominence the question of “what are the proper things to want?”. Ironically it was Mill who put this best when he said “better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied”. It seems like there is ethical import to wanting the proper things and a person who is well ordered in this way is on an ethically superior path even if he is subjectively suffering from the difficulty of it.
Tollund_Man4
8mo ago
I didn’t mention it because I couldn’t have done it justice like you have!
It looks like both proposed amendments have failed to pass, but I won’t be surprised if they try again in a few years.
The gold is a mystery to me. Apparently it was there in case of a collapse in fiat currency.
Accommodation has been expensive and in short supply for years but the ‘making it to Ireland be homeless’ thing is new, we took in a lot of Ukrainian refugees and the normal asylum seeker numbers increased a lot too following this.
As for the arsons, unless there’s a deterrent effect in play I doubt they’ve changed things much. I doubt many people have been deterred, there’s a lot of money to be made from hosting asylum seekers and insurance still pays out in cases of arson. Iirc the homelessness thing was picking up steam before the arson became common (there have been arson attacks going back years ago but it picked up a lot in the past few months).
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.
Tollund_Man4
8mo ago
For your consideration, you forgot one genre...The murder confessional.
MF DOOM has a funny song about that: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gQtKJbptcns
There's also the I'm literally on the run for murder confessional.
Tollund_Man4
8mo ago
If the secessionist group has a good chance of turning into some kind of functional government, and the current situation is one where unity with the larger doesn't offer anything to the smaller (or actively hinders them), and you aren't dooming your people to a hopeless and bloody end, then I think you can try your hand at seceding in good conscience. The last qualifier is up for debate as martyred heroes can inspire future generations, but as an uninvolved outsider it's probably a moral line you want to draw.
Tollund_Man4
9mo ago
It's not hard to find recent news stories of people driving off cliffs and dying. Either Teslas (a small portion of modern cars) are just exceptionally safe or that family was miraculously lucky.
Tollund_Man4
9mo ago
Yes, but if it's true then you could just take this as much a mark against gradual reform as a viable tactic. Liberal democrats often aren't very liberal or democratic when they're busy trying to do away with the king.
Tollund_Man4
9mo ago
He also did a 3 and a half hour interview with Lex Fridman.
Tollund_Man4
9mo ago
I do most of my listening at work or the gym.
Tollund_Man4
9mo ago
A considerable amount of research has taken place;
Oh definitely, I just meant the change from one status quo to another isn’t scientifically relevant.
Not to argue about taste, but I think she looks particularly bad in that movie and much better in interviews/photos. I didn't know who Zendaya was before right wing twitter started making la goblina memes about her, but looking her up I think a lot of it is that stillsuits aren't flattering.
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