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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   26263 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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[The Irish] hate our order, our civilization, our enterprising industry, our pure religion. This wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and superstitious race have no sympathy with the English character. Their ideal of human felicity is an alternation of clannish broils and coarse idolatry. Their history describes an unbroken circle of bigotry and blood.

I feel so seen, so known, so recognised! 🤣

Many English criticisms of Ireland are/were factually accurate, but incomplete and lacking context.

There's no question that 19th century Irishmen and women generally lowered the tone of the US, though.

If you follow this line of thinking further, though, isn’t the North of England, all of Scotland, all of Wales, and northern Ireland from roughly infinity BC until 1650 also extremely well-described by this, and isn’t this exactly the population that made up most of what would become the United States as it existed in 1776? It wasn’t the Norman-descended Roger Fitzwilliam doing most of the fighting at Bunker Hill, but rather the descendants of Scottish peasants and Yorkshiremen who had spent the previous thousand years continuously assassinating all of their earldormen. And it’s not like the Normans and Anglo-Saxons weren’t continuously killing each other in blood feuds as well; the latter invented the weregild, after all. And the former, well, is it an improvement over clannism if instead of just killing those outside your clan, you kill those inside it too? And I haven’t even gotten to the Vikings, whose genetic and cultural contributions to the North are huge and unmistakeable!

(I’ve clearly talked myself into the position that the above quote, meant to refer to Ireland, is in fact a universal description of all pre-modern societies without a consistently-enforced-over-time-and-space rule of law - and for most of our ancestors this is a very recent development.)

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

There's no question that 19th century Irishmen and women generally lowered the tone of the US, though.

Image taken from life of my phizzog on the right 😂

I didn’t expect to think “Florence Nightingale: WOULD” today. Yet, here I am.

The idealised version might be different from the real Florence, but if your alternative to that is Bridget, I can understand your choice 😁

I was not expecting a @FarNearEverywhere self-doxx/face reveal today, but I’m here for it.

That's me on a good day! 😂

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