Stand Grounded - [Hiatus]

wow i wonder if that 300 year gap could be explained by any outside factors…….whoa! for some reason it lines up with the timeline of britain’s invasion and subsequent colonization of ireland! wild, huh? i wonder if the two are connected in some way? i guess the world will never know….

“why do the Irish hate the English so much? It couldn’t have been *that* bad!!”

This was in place till 1973.

Seeing non irish people reblogging this makes me happy

The stereotype of “the Irish are drunks” is English propaganda used to justify paternalism and controlling the Irish. It’s bullshit.

Hey guess what alcohol is often used as a coping method by poor and disenfranchised people in order to get away, if only for a few minutes, from the absolute shithole that is their lives

I WONDER WHY a group that wasn’t permitted to own media, have privacy in their own homes, go to church or any other desired social gathering, and which was considered guilty until proven innocent might have turned to alcohol.

I also wonder why that might have happened at a time when drugging your children with alcohol would quiet their starving screams because the English stole all your food and you had nothing left to feed your babies.

I WONDER.

(In other words any time you see the accusation of “they’re all drunks” leveled at any particular group, it’s a good time to ask what the Irish, Native Americans, Black men, American men in general in the 1930s, Soviet Russian men, and Indians have in common. If you came up with “oh! Absolutely crippling levels of poverty in the face of a government that either valued profit over lives or actively oppressed them, and an inability to change this due to the structural nature of said oppression,” congratulations, you know a depressing amount about history.)

No no nonnie. Irish Americans as a whole were not comfortably white for a "long time." Though our definitions of a "long time" may differ in this.

Historically, even before the immigration boom of the 1920s-1940s, Irish Americans were deemed as lesser than British descended Americans and Scottish descended Americans. They were only given work as domestic servants, but there was a helluva a lot of caricatures and dehumanizing jokes. The whole "St Paddy" (when it should be St Patrick) and ideas of them being drunkards was part of that propaganda to dehumanize early Irish Americans. Then during the immigration boom of the 1920s-1940s, Irish Americans were often excluded from job searches in the early 1900s because of the prior established caricatures. And those things still persist today. Given you think that's all there is to being an "Irish American" with your proclamation of "excessive alcohol consumption being a hallmark of a diasporic national(ist) celebration". This just shows that hundreds of years of propaganda against Irish Americans has been successful.

For people who are actually Irish American and catholic, there is so much more to what they cling to as a culture. And the fact you immediately dismiss that there might be something deeper says you've had the unfortunate experience of only meeting those loud ones - is truly disconcerting. You can't even be a little sympathetic to them that they have been stripped of all connectors of their ancestral culture and left with a dehumanizing caricature authored and propagated by the British.

And before any of you fucks get any ideas of dismissing me for being white, I'm a poc, specifically, Latine (Boricua).

Signed someone who ALSO has had their ancestral culture stripped away by colonizers (Spaniards).

As a descendant of an Irish-born set of grandparents, I also object to Nonnie above. Irish people and those of Irish heritage were NOT considered "actually" white in the USA until World War 2. They were depicted in cartoons as ape-like. Want ads specifically excluded them. They were discriminated against heavily. Example from NYTimes below:

As well, the ones who didn't want to be obvious about it would place ads like these, also from the NYTimes:

Saying "Protestant" or "Scotch" was a way of excluding the Irish Catholic community. Over half the people in the 1840s and 1850s who were arrested in NY were Irish descendants or immigrants.

Even in the 1900s, Irish descent was not considered a good thing. The uproar from the Catholic Kennedy running for president, for example, included a lot of disparagement of the Irish and Catholic history of the family. Our current President Biden is only the SECOND Catholic President ever. And Former President Trump actually said "thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon" in 2017! An Irish citizen I know even said "americans didn't start considering Irish to be real whites until Ireland became a rich country." Nonnie there speaks of alcohol use. This is the same argument used against Nonnie's culture, and the Native cultures, and the cultures of peoples descended from owned slaves (of all colors). Apparently Nonnie doesn't understand how hard Irish-Americans have worked to have only ONE DAY a year that Irish descendants are considered incurably alcoholic nationally. The rest of the time we're treated fairly normally, I suppose. Speaking of Slavery, there was also the very interesting "indentured servant" contracts. Where if you worked hard enough and long enough, you would "buy out" your contract, but if you dropped the serving dish, they added another six months. And if they found a stain on the sheet or a garment, they added another six months. Until it was impossible to "work out" or "buy out" your contract. Sure, we're "white" now, most of the time. And other groups have it far worse, for sure.

More examples of Irish-descendants' treatment in American scientific endeavors and political endeavors:

Notice anything about the faces and body shapes? It's the same stuff they pull on POC. Irish descended Americans are not often the ones that are drinking the disgusting green beer and all that. We're the ones that are thankful we've cut it down to a few weeks a year where people are thinking us lesser and evil for our cultural norms and religion.

I took a class on race in Early Modern England once. One of the points the professor drove home is how much of our language around race, including what the word ‘race’ even means in the modern day, comes directly from the period where England was colonizing Ireland. It was a testing ground for all the shit that got repeated later elsewhere.

I have absolutely met the kind of people the anon is talking about. There’s a certain type of American loudmouth who thinks the IRA is cool, who has only a small amount of Irish heritage, and who doesn’t live anywhere near the cities that historically had big Irish-American populations. They’re assimilated and insulated from anti-Irish prejudice. These people are indeed very annoying.

But, like the responses say, there’s been some pretty virulent prejudice, and it’s not in the distant past either.

It's always interesting how trans people see their transition. Some people are like "I was a boy now I'm a girl" and some are like "I was always a girl" and every once in a while you get a fun one like "I used to be a boy but the girl won"

This vessel used to belong to a young man but he had a weak will and gave in to my dark influence

Jack Black performs "We're Men in Tights" live for Mel Brooks and Michelle and barrack Obama

Finding this clip out of context while looking for the soundtrack felt like a fever dream.

this is the most important kennedy center honors bit ever

Respectfully, Ireland is the best country on the planet

from the same thread:

I love Ireland

Today in fighting Christian hegemony, a non-exclusive list of some concepts Christians/culturally Christian people seem to think Judaism and Christianity agree on that they don’t:

1. Original Sin

2. What it means to be “chosen”

3. Sin/Chet

4. Dualistic afterlife

5. Charity/Tzedakah

6. Monotheism

7. Meaning of the Tanakh

8. Theism

9. Blasphemy

10. “The world to come”

11. What “religion” means

12. G-d and gender

13. The role of women

14. Questioning

15. Science and Religion

16. When life begins

17. Modesty

18. Anthropomorphism of G-d

19. Angels (Malachim)

20. Free will

21. Justice

Could a Jewish person please elaborate on the Jewish pov for these concepts?

I’m rarely fast, but I do usually try to answer! I am going to focus on my own list for this response (and even that I will take in chunks), largely because we enter areas of far more complex theologies and differences between denominations of Judaism in the additional list. Addressing them all at once would require a novel, and I’m not so much for novel writing on my cell phone in the tumblr app.

So let’s look at 1-5 today!

wow millennials are glued to their i-phones and laptops so much they cant even be bothered robbing in person anymore!!! maybe these trust fund babies should stop phishing credit cards while sitting on their butts and go out there and put some elbow grease into their thievery!

I know exactly what happened. Because it happened to me.

I trained for years to be a con artist. I told my friends and family that I wanted to be a magician, but that was just a cover for why I was constantly practicing sleight of hand. 

In junior high and high school, I would shop lift a bunch of candy on my way to school, sell it to kids at the morning break, and use that money to run a crooked poker game at lunch.

Finally, when I was 19 or 20, I felt I was ready, and I picked my first pocket. I was on the bus, bumped a guy as I passed down the aisle, got his wallet, super clean.

In the wallet was several hundred dollars. A huge first score, I had been hoping for a couple twenties. I sat there looking at the, like, 400 bucks, thinking.

That was my rent at the time. We were both on the bus. It was likely his rent too. Lord knows the only reason to carry that much cash on the bus is you’re on your way to pay a bill. We were both on the bus, you know? That’s not someone I was comfortable stealing from.

I tapped him on the shoulder and told him “hey i think you dropped this” and gave it back to him with all the money still in it. It was the first and last time I ever picked a pocket.

Picking a rich person’s pocket is a loosing game. They probably have credit cards and not cash, those credit cards probably have the best anti-theft measures their bank can provide, and you probably can’t get close enough to those people to pick their pockets unless you’re already rich yourself.

The people who’s pockets you can reliably pick are the people around you. The people who are also on the bus, who are in this same shitty situation with you.

As wealth inequality becomes more drastic picking pockets has very clearly become “stealing from other poor people” and it’s not satisfying. I want to steal from Google and Apple and Fox and Facebook and General Mills and Hershey and Tesla. Not the person next to me.

Wow. This post went from funny to a life lesson in a way I wasn’t expecting, amd I’m not sorey at all.

See, unlike the capitalist elite, common criminals have a sense of morality and empathy.

[Image description: a card on a lanyard reading “VidCon” in large letters, and above that, reading “In observance of the Sabbath, this attendee is not required to use their wristband at RFID locations from Friday, July 12 at 5:00pm through Saturday, July 13 at 11:59pm.”]

This is so incredibly important. Religious Jews who keep Shabbat (the Jewish Sabbath) can’t use electronics (among other things) from sundown on Friday until nightfall on Saturday. As someone who used to keep Shabbat, it was so hard to participate in so many things. Simple things like electronic hotel door locks — or, in this case, RFID wristbands, can mean an event isn’t accessible to those who keep Shabbat. So, even though I’m not at VidCon myself (I’ve never been and I’m on the opposite side of the country!) and I don’t keep Shabbat anymore, I’m incredibly grateful and moved that they did this. This isn’t just a kind staffer waiving a rule for an individual, this is a convention-wide policy and system that allows observant Jews full participation in the con. This is what inclusion looks like. This is what welcoming diversity looks like. This is what making sure your space welcomes Jewish people looks like. Thank you thank you thank you.

Btw… the fact that three and a half years later we are still reblogging this story of being accommodated at one (1) conference over one (1) weekend out of simple joy that we were granted the ability to access things that everyone else can without violating our cultural and religious norms… that says more about the current discourse on cultural Christianity than I ever could in a thousand words or twenty posts

I like the W.A.S. scale for rating anime. It stands for Weeb Ass Shit, and you rate each of those things on a 10 point scale.

So like, a series that requires extensive knowledge of japanese culture, or one that relies on the audience already being very familiar with the media tropes that it’s parodying, would have a high Weeb score while one that any 10-year old american would totally understand would have a low Weeb score.

The Ass column is for how much gratuitous nudity or attempts at titilation there is, with pure and innocent things like most ghibli films getting really low numbers, things like Bakemonogatari or Kill la Kill ending up in the middle of the scale, and borderline hentai at the top.

And finally, the Shit column covers things that are just fucking stupid, or poorly implemented. Low numbers indicate a series that is extremely well written and has a lot of good ideas, higher values come from plot holes, idiot plots, authors shoehorning in some incredibly nonsensical philosophy, etc.

Some people don’t mind the weeb nonsense at all, so they only have to look at the other two categories. Some people have very little tolerance for ass, even in a series that is otherwise of high quality. Some people decide based on a combined score, like they can tolerate more ass if the shit level is really low or vice versa but refuse to deal with both at the same time.

I literally was looking for someone in the notes to mention the Weeb Ass Shit scale, bless you for explaining! Also I feel like even if the person you’re recommending things to is unfamiliar with this scale, it’s a helpful tool to help you break down and analyze different elements of the show.

I think it's so funny how we bred JOBS into dogs. I have two shih tzus and they were bred to be lap dogs. All they care about is looking cute and cuddling with people. Meanwhile my grandma has a border collie and that dog needs to feel so useful all the time, he acts like he will pass away if he doesn't have a job to do constantly

On one hand this is extremely fucking funny, but on the other hand, it really boggles my mind how many people punish their dogs for just… doing the thing they were bred to do.

Your husky isn’t “hyperactive”, it’s bred to pull sleds for 8 hours straight and you have it in a 400 sq ft yard.

Your English sheepdog isn’t “pushy”, it’s bred to herd sheep, and you have neither to space nor the herd to allow it.

Your terrier isn’t “nippy”, it’s bred to kill rats and your hamster looks a hell of a lot like one.

Your Catahoula isn’t “mean to animals”, it’s bred to hunt any and all animals smaller than it, and you didn’t acclimate it to your cat.

Your Lhasa Apso isn’t “yappy”, it’s bred to bark at any tiny noise and alert watchmen to intruders

Like Jesus Christ, if you can’t provide an environment where your dog can’t fulfill its literal life purpose, maybe?? Don’t get that dog??? And if you do, maybe know the breed characteristics so you can redirect those traits into more constructive outlets????

Both your most common doodle's parts (labra and golden) want to hunt and retrieve water birds so the best suggestion I can give y'all is congratulations on your new duck hunting hobby.

#people will overlook the perfect breeds to suit their needs based on just their looks#and get a work dog because it looks cool

tags from @gnarlystarships because YEAH

“Half a million pages have been digitised by the National Folklore Collection, of which more than 100,000 pages have now been transcribed by volunteers, revealing the fairy situation in every townland, the types of leprechaun and butter churn common to each area, the names of people who tried to steal gold and what happened to them, or who had relationships with mermaids. There is material on local cures, holy wells, strange animals, travelling folk and spirits.”

[Image ID/ Tweet from Jack Bernhardt (@/ jackbern23) on 2022-10-19 reading: My favorite aspect of Halloween is the playlists, where people clearly add songs like Zombie by the Cranberries on name alone, so at parties it goes Monster Mash, Rocky Horror, Beautiful Elegy About Intergenerational Trauma of English Violence Against Ireland, then Thriller /End ID]

The more I see my media telling me to mourn, the angrier I get.

I never knew this woman. The only personal impact she had on my life was when one of her relatives died or married, I would get a day off school. I never knew Elizabeth, I knew the Queen. The Queen who wore a crown coated in diamonds stolen from other countries, a crown drenched in the blood her family collected over lifetimes of imperialism.

I should not be told to mourn a 96 year old woman who lived a life of obsene wealth and experience and died surrounded by loved ones, aided by the best healthcare in the world.

The crown disgusts me and anyone who wears it is not someone I mourn. The Queen and her family earnt none of their influence, they earnt none of my respect, and I do not mourn them

ACAB also applies to golfers for some reason it just feels right

Respectfully, Ireland is the best country on the planet

from the same thread:

I love Ireland