"Stop cringing – at your future, at your failure, at yourself in the mirror – and stand up and look directly at who you are. Not who you should've been, but who you are now. Let that person in. Let her be as mediocre and wrong and shameful and sad and miserable and brilliant and hilarious as she wants to be, because she knows exactly what you need to feel good. She has plans for you. She wants to show you what comes next. She wants to take you into the future you're dreading and say, "See? You never would've imagined this."

– Heather Havrilesky

I need an Irish version of Ghosts soooo bad

u survive literally every single event in your life & still every time a new event happens you feel like this is the event that will kill you and that you will never move on from but actually you will continue to survive like you always have bc u have a 100% win rate of surviving events. btw

Who has a project due in for tomorrow which they got four weeks to complete but hasn’t started yet?

*points at self*

Oh. That’s right. Me.

oh 2015 me we’re really in it now

So, it’s time to be brutally honest about something that’s been happening on the left: we have absorbed the tenets of liberal identity politics. We have nurtured a culture that’s deeply individualistic, where to be seen as a victim, to be able to claim a marginalised identity position, gives you social capital. That capital, unlike its monetary equivalent, isn’t transferable outside left and liberal-leaning environments. It doesn’t prevent you from experiencing discrimination, injustice and even violence in the world outside. But within left- and liberal-leaning spaces, victimhood – a close friend of lived experience – gives one a perch from which to speak with authority. It’s understandable that people want to ‘correct’ for injustices by giving people from certain communities a boost, a better hearing, a bigger platform. But that well-intentioned effort can result in something that’s counterproductive, even corrosive, to the cause of liberation. Instead of fighting to liberate ourselves from harm, we end up attached to the social status that being a victim brings. We maintain a comically low threshold for harm, and a prohibitively high threshold for trust in other people. We turn individuals into standard-bearers for their entire identity community: whatever follows the phrase ‘speaking as a…’ is treated as nothing less than the gospel. We isolate ourselves, insisting that other struggles are simply too different to link up with our own. Attention is treated as currency, and a finite one at that. We are not comrades but competitors in a mad scramble for recognition.

– Ash Sarkar, Minority Rule (2025)

but also maybe the failure to create and Irish national costume was good…since a lot of the time European national costumes were just based off whatever the lower class peasants were wearing and then romanticised by middle class intellectuals. The closest thing to national dress is probably either Irish dance costumes (definitely invented without any real connection to the past) and Aran jumpers, which appealed to cultural nationalists because they came from islands which were seen as largely “untouched” by British colonialism. But to what extent can these jumpers really reflect a national rather than a regional identity? Am I going insane?

really struggling w the concept of invented tradition bc even tho its not the first time I’ve encountered this idea it is the first time I’ve actually had to sit with it for an extended period of time and haven’t been allowed to just move on. So yes I do think that much of Ulster-Scots culture is part of invented tradition in that it only really emerged in the 1990s. But how do I stop my personal biases coming into that? Is such a thing even possible? (No.) More importantly, are my biases sectarian? I’m afraid that they are, and I think there’s actually a bitterness within me wrt how Ulster Scots is often used as a stick to beat Irish with. I think, hang on, Irish culture has been here for thousands of years, it has been persecuted for hundreds of years, why do we have to pretend that Irish culture and a culture that has often been privileged are the same?

But then how much of Irish culture has been “invented” in order to create the illusion of continuity? A fair bit of it. A lot of it really dates back to the 19th century Gaelic Revival, and parts of it very obviously so eg the attempt and failure to create a national dress based off the Scottish kilt, the reintroduction of celtic tara brooches. Is it the case that its all made up? Or at the very least that our connection to the “ancient past”, pre colonial past, is tenuous at best? Or perhaps even non existent? If so, do we really have a leg to stand on? Does any of this really matter? I wear a claddagh ring everyday, but they were probably invented in the 18th century – not exactly a link to ancient celtic civilisation. Yet nevertheless it is an important symbol of Irishness for myself and many others….and to what extent is questioning all this a symptom of colonialism? I doubt English people think about this at all. Then again, most Irish people don’t either.

"Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn't trust the evidence of one's eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice."

- Orientalism by Edward Said

Watched Conclave (2024)

menstruation

northern irish free presbyterianism is so funny bc they make some fair criticisms of the catholic church but then they’ll say something like “and catholics are BRAINWASHED by the UNELECTED pope in ROME and mindlessly do EVERYTHING he tells them to do. unlike us, who are free to listen to and believe everything some guy from antrim made up in the 1950s”

Scotland is so unserious

LET’S HAVE A CONCLAVE

Sergio Castellitto as Cardinal Tedesco
CONCLAVE (2024), dir. Edward Berger