“Many men have reacted to modernity as to a defeat or conquest: by retreating into fantasy, by trying to recreate the past without the materials or understanding to do so, and by summoning parodies of their old vitality that crumble as soon as they make contact with reality” “For the people were sinking into a collective social and psychic crisis…”

New one from me, i wrote about the strange parallels between how we think and talk about men’s problems/ masculinity in 2024 vs the destruction of the Comanches in the 19th century

Current reading Will likely only skim as it’s not all of interest, will see how it goes

Afaict the biggest thing people are concerned about re covid is the speed getting out the vaccine, but there’s no substantial coverage of that on the @IrishTimes. This is their covid section. What gives? Nothing on the indo front page either

Screen-capping for reference later Ditto

Current reading Picked it up a bit hastily, could be rubbish. We’ll see

The pattern of Irish names over the last 150 years is very interesting. I used to work in a job that had me looking at old title deeds and it was common turn of the century to see catholic Irish people named George, Harry, etc names that are relatively unusual now Ethically Irish names were very unusual. You’d never really see a Conor. Post- independence those names came in but often they were names with obvious counterparts in English ie Micheál or Pól. In turn those names became much less common (I can’t think of many Póls my age)

Current reading, for a glimpse at our future/ present Author seems to regard Xi as the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao

How do you feel about this term in its US context (preferably responses from Irish people): “Scots-Irish” My understanding of the term is that it originates from the famine years - Americans of Protestant Irish stock wanted to differentiate themselves from recent arrivals. Before that they considered themselves Irish (where they didn’t think of themselves as American). could be wrong

Weird thing among left wing Irish twitter users where they assume that an anonymous user they disagree with is the alt of a well known twitter personality. ie they conclude without evidence that x person in their mentions is really Gemma O’Doherty or Gearoid Murphy or whoever I guess the assumption is “so few people could possibly disagree with me” that people must be using alts, nothing else could explain the existence of all these accounts

Current reading. A bit academic looking but every book on the decline of liberalism and democracy I’ve read in the last few years has referenced it in some form so here goes “The age of party democracy has passed”

Current reading I’ll dip in and out of this as it’s hard work

Current reading

Side note: Christ almighty hardbacks are expensive “Civil rights ideology” as “the model for a new and consistently churning political reform”