The sins of 1920 will continue to ripple through Irish history until the country is whole again. Every self-serving move Britain makes regarding Northern Ireland comes at a high cost to the Irish people. washingtonpost.com/world/europe/b…
As an entity, Northern Ireland is a political myth, created with the same Big Power cynicism and self-interest that created Iraq, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and, later, North and South Vietnam. Outsiders created a ”reality” that didn't exist, for political purposes.
To ”protect” Northern Irish Protestants from the imaginary threat of an ”Irish Catholic” Republic of Ireland, Britain created the equally imaginary entity of Northern Ireland-- and to prevent an imaginary disenfranchisement of Protestants, de facto disenfranchised Catholics.
The hard border Northern Ireland fears is the result of political gerrymandering 100 years ago. The Good Friday Accords were an effective political disguise to avoid revealing the underlying truth: There is no real ”Northern Ireland”-- there is only a divided Ireland.
Sooner or later the people of ”Northern Ireland” need to accept physical reality and quit living in a political fantasy. Britain doesn't give two sh*ts about ”Northern Ireland” except as a Conservative political wedge in Parliament. Ireland is their home and their nation.
The only real solution for ”Northern Ireland” to the #Brexit fiasco is unification with the Republic of Ireland. Britain doesn't care about your problems or your lives. Its government has made that clear repeatedly. Stop being its political football.
100 years of a divided Ireland is long enough.
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Sunday political 🧵: Federalism is the hope and the scourge of progressivism in America. The U.S. has a federal system of political power division; conservatives understand this on a practical political leverage level, progressives don’t.
Up until recently, every school kid learned about the federal system (I don’t know if they still do; schooling has changed a lot since I went), but mostly in our daily lives we ignore it and think we live in a unified nation governed by a single set of laws. We actually don’t.
We I say “federal” you probably think “the Government” and you think of Washington as the seat of government. But that isn’t what federal means at all. Its basis is “federation”— and if you’re a Star Trek fan, maybe the penny is dropping.
A question I’m often asked at conventions is “How do you break into comics?” I have no idea— the last time I tried it was 1967. But a better question might be: “How do you write a ‘good’ comic?” For that, I have a few ideas.
First, foremost: Read. Read a lot. Don’t just read comics, read books. Lots and lots of books. Always have a book with you and read at every opportunity. Read at lunch, be that weirdo. Read on the bus. On planes. On trains. Don’t read while driving.
Second, vital: Keep reading. Read fiction, read non-fiction, read history, science, economics, more fiction, “literature,” mysteries, science fiction, westerns. Stuff yourself with words. Ideas. Odd facts and bits of legend. Poetry, Shakespeare, e.e. cummings, doggerel.
People often asked me this past year*— “Gerry, how do you maintain a mostly cheerful attitude in your daily life, despite daily news accounts of misery, death, and human stupidity?”
“Well,” I tell them, “I practice the patented DDD Sanity Preservation Self-Protection System™!”
*nobody asks me.
What is this patented system of DDD Sanity Preservation™, you may ask? I shall be happy to explain. Thusly.
I have very loud neighbors. Just putting that here.
It’s like living next to a sports bar.
To put this in perspective, this is a quiet suburban neighborhood. The folks who own the house and live in it are 30-40-something with kids. Like the Dunphys in Modern Family. They’re now singing drunkenly, loudly, out of tune.
Spoiler free reaction to Zack Snyder's JL: I wish the man who made this movie had made "Man of Steel" and "BvS". Maybe Snyder took to heart some of the criticism of those two movies, because tonally this is a different piece-- a paean to the power of hope and healing.
I also understand why Ray Fisher was so upset by the "restructuring" of the film (aside from his reports of abusive behavior): The major human emotional arc of this film belongs to Victor Stone, and its loss in the theatrical JL cuts the heart out of the story.
I don't know whether it was because of WB's demand for a much shorter film, and the necessity that created for reshoots to elipsize chunks of plot, which in turn rushed the CGI work, but, boy, does this "rebuilt" cut kick ass visually.
I’ve heard some on the left worry @JoeBiden won’t be progressive enough, won’t fight back against #GOP perfidy, etc., because he’s always been a moderate. Hey. Who a President was, politically, before he becomes President, and what he “stood for”, is historically irrelevant.
Lincoln wasn’t in favor of abolition when he ran for President; he ran as a “moderate” against slavery’s expansion, not its elimination. He fought against emancipation for months until he finally came around. His opponents in the South forced him to change.
FDR ran as a fiscal, social *conservative* in 1932, promising a balanced budget and no deficits. His political party had other ideas— most New Deal legislation was a result of FDR watering down those ideas, not pushing them forward. He took bold action because he *had* to.