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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25086 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 16, 2023

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This is Black History Month

No it's not. Black history month in America is February. Look it up

Seemingly we adopted it in October. Why? I have no idea. Some bunch in Cork back in 2010 for some reason, seems to be as far as it goes:

According to Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute: “Black History Month Ireland was initiated in Cork in 2010. This location seems particularly appropriate as, in the nineteenth century, the city was a leading center of abolition, and the male and female anti-slavery societies welcomed a number of black abolitionists to lecture there, including Charles Lenox Remond and Frederick Douglass.

“Following on in this tradition, University College Cork recently joined the international Universities Studying Slavery consortium. Amongst its concerns, this project addresses historic and contemporary issues regarding race/racism.”

That makes even less sense for a Famine museum (or whatever it is) to go jumping on the bandwagon, but I think the clue there is UCC: college students copying American radicalism.

Why October instead of February? Not a clue.

Why October instead of February? Not a clue.

It's part of the same grift, just a step further along than the Americans. If they did black history month in February everyone would say 'haha barmy americanised amadans, they're just copying the yanks the eejits*!' But since they did it in October, they generate interest, people bitch about it on social media and argue about it, and say 'hey dummies, black history month is supposed to be in February!', legitimising black history month as a concept.

*to be sure, to be sure.

Also there is the long running joke that the American black history month is in February, the shortest month of the year. The Irish are giving it a month with the full 31.

Was this whole thing just a marketing campaign by the Cork Tourism Board that got out of hand?

That makes about as much sense as any other explanation I can think of.

Why does a country which doesn't have a significant black population and no colonial history whatsoever dedicate a month to celebrating the achievements of people who have more melanin than the average? What could be behind this particularly strange new custom?

Maybe if we unlock the key to this mystery, we can then explain why the Japanese love baseball. I always felt the two questions intimately related somehow.

But as you soundly point out Japanese teams don't play in MLB, so we'll probably never figure it out.

I always thought the Japanese love of baseball was a holdover from the post-war American occupation. But Ireland was never formally colonised or occupied by the US, so the influence of American culture on Irish society has always been faintly baffling to me in a way that the historical influence of British culture certainly isn't.

the influence of American culture on Irish society

My own idea is that it's our history of emigration. The "American parcels" from family members in the USA sending home second-hand clothes etc. for the family at home. The remittances. The 'returned Yank'. American politicians doing trips back to The Ould Sod (Biden was the most recent). The people going to the US for summer jobs (and maybe overstaying the visa). Britain is closer, sure, but there's not the same historical resentment of 'former colonial power' for the USA. All this on top of consuming exported American culture the same as the rest of the world.

Not to mention the J1 visas. I'd never thought of that angle.

But it's not just that - I've met my fair share of housebound autistic neurotic woke shut-ins who seem to have never ventured beyond the Pale and who speak in a manner indistinguishable from their housebound autistic etc. equivalents on the other side of the Atlantic.

I always thought the Japanese love of baseball was a holdover from the post-war American occupation.

People expect that, but it isn't actually, predates it by a century. And there were professional leagues in the 20s long before the second world war.

You had people saying "the game spread, like a fire in a dry field, in summer, all over the country, and some months afterwards, even in children in primary schools in the country far away from Tōkyō were to be seen playing with bats and balls." as far back as 1907

We had a big presence in Japan for a while after they opened up to us:

Horace Wilson, an American English teacher at the Kaisei Academy in Tokyo, first introduced baseball to Japan in 1872, and other American teachers and missionaries popularized the game throughout Japan in the 1870s and 1880s. Popularity among Japanese grew slowly and led to the establishment of Japan’s first organized baseball team, the Shimbashi Athletic Club, in 1878. The convincing victory of a team from Tokyo’s Ichikō High School in 1896 over a team of select foreigners from the Yokohama Country & Athletic Club drew wide coverage in the Japanese press and contributed greatly to the popularity of baseball as a school sport. The rapidly growing popularity of baseball led to the development of high school, college, and university teams throughout Japan in the early 1900s.

Ironically, while we already had pro teams, it sounds like the American org that became the MLB was only established in 1871, so our love of the sport really doesn't predate theirs by all that much.

Another interesting thing is that baseball was quite popular in England for a time before it faded away.

Rounders (the version of base ball that was codified in Ireland in 1884, so well after the Kinckerbockers codified American baseball and around the same time that the NL was formed) was one of the big team sports for schoolgirls in the UK (alongside netball and field hockey) and Ireland. It only went into decline in the 21st century once there was a serious attempt to push women's cricket.

TIL that the claim that Abner Doubleday invented baseball was a myth created to refute the idea that baseball was derived from rounders. Unsurprisingly, the truth is that both games derived from informal "base ball" games with uncodified rules that originated in England and were played across the English-speaking world - similarly to how Rugby, association football, and gridiron all developed independently from uncodified proto-football.

You're right, it's absolutely fascinating that baseball was ever popular anywhere.

Wow, I had no idea, that's really interesting!

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