Comment by scoofy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scoofy | Hacker News Reader

I mean... I stopped reading after the first dozen paragraphs... because I hate the reductionist logic here. I am neither irish, nor and expert in irish history (though I actively listen to a pretty thorough podcast about it), but I am a philosopher by training, and this read like big fat True Scotsman logic.

Perhaps the author misdirects in the opening (I hope so), but they seem to be caught in the reductionist culture=identity trope that much my home country of America suffers from. Examples here include absurdisms like "Obama isn't black enough" as if a black man isn't black if he doesn't act a certain way.

Many cultures are built in opposition to other cultures, yes, and while that is true, the entire of culture is that it's made up of the people within it. When that starts to change, it just changes, it doesn't go away. In my life America went from being known for it's light lagers, now it is know for over hopping all our beers. We went from Safeway to Trader Joe's being the dominate grocery chances. Is America not America? No! Is California more Californian? No!

Culture is the culture that the people in the culture choose to celebrate. There are no True Scotsmans, only Scotsmans, who occasionally disagree.

Ireland is the people in it. If they change their religion, and their national sport and drink, then they will be a different Ireland than they were, but they will still be Ireland so long as people identify as Irish.

I think this argument makes sense when talking about individuals and their culture (like your Obama example) but not necessary the culture itself. The danger with the former is it assumes any time norms change the culture goes away so the only way the culture can exist is if everyone stays a "True Scotsman" and does everything like the average Scotsman. Clearly that's not the case, a regional culture can still exist even when an aspect of it changes and may be very different than it was in the far past. Instead it's defined by what the people are like now which allows for the culture to be both identified/defined and still change. That doesn't really apply to the culture as a whole becoming like other culture(s) though - if everyone in two groups start sharing the same norms, institutions, beliefs, arts, etc it no longer makes sense to define them as separate cultures just because there used to be more than one set of these values. Not because the culture isn't like it was before but because what made them one culture vs another is no longer present - being from a certain square area of land isn't what makes a regional culture. Just as it makes sense new cultures can form by being different in some way it makes sense old cultures can go away by becoming homogenous with others.

I don't necessarily agree with the article as a whole, I think Ireland is still plenty unique even if different than it was in the past because of outside influence. At the same time I don't think "When that starts to change, it just changes, it doesn't go away." is always true in the context of the whole culture becoming like others. Obviously not every regional culture still exists today even though most have living decedents.

I think you're right, that's why I use the term "identity" apart from "culture." I see that when people stop actively identifying is Irish, then yes, Ireland isn't Ireland. My point is precisely to say that "Ireland" is still Ireland insofar as the Irish still identify with their land and their history. Yes, these are all social constructs, but there is a line of reasoning. If the Irish started identifying as EU citizens, then yea, it could die, but it's obviously not dead. This, of course, happens all the time, it's just that nobody really notices because no one is usually speaking for the old, often reprehensible (hence the cultural death) culture. Cultural evolution is evolution. It usually lives on in some form or another, and only occasionally goes extinct.

I would not take the article seriously. The author is an "investment professional" twitter addict who thinks COVID lockdowns are the cause of the NHS collapse in the UK.

Obama is very far from the "median black guy", but it's irrelevant, especially since both median Londoner and Dubliner shifted towards the median NYer...

How does the median relate to the whole? If someone is far from the median Texan do the stop being a Texan? If a Korean person loves and emulates French culture do they stop being Korean? If a white person grows up in a heavily Chinese neighborhood and subscribes to the culture they grew up with are they less white?

The idea that drifting from the median of a given ethnic/cultural group invalidates you as a member of that group is disturbing. Doubly so with race.

the median matters as in most distributions that's what others will see as "representative" of the whole population.

Unfortunately with our amazing engagement-maximizing hate machines like Twitter/Facebook/FoxNews (and their older, but still generally fucked up kin, 0-24 news cycle, MSM, Hollywood) what people think of other people can be very distorted, but there are trends that percolate through.

The original post basically has a claim that "Ireland is more like UK now than it is like old Ireland", which is true, but it doesn't explicitly talk about how "UK is also not like old UK". (Those London inspired bars are themselves inspired by NY bars.) It just mentions how Irish cultural politics is American.

> The idea that drifting from the median of a given ethnic/cultural group invalidates you as a member of that group is disturbing. Doubly so with race.

.. yeah. and ... nobody said that.

Again, my very point is that caring, at all, about median-ness of a person when it comes to identity, is very much a True Scotsman game. It is reversing the directionality between an identity and a cultural norm, and redefining the identity by the norm, instead of the other way around. Lots of people do that, many as a proxy for a completely different argument, but lots of people also do lots of things that aren't sound reasoning.

Yes, indeed.

I think this particular section of the text is okay, because it has a very simple and sane claim that culture shifted, and it's simply comparing Dublin to old Dublin, London to old London, etc.

(I don't want to really go into this, but there are definitely Irish pubs in Dublin that are more old-Dublin-like than modern London bars. But the claim is at least not a fallacy.)

Talking about culture, certain elements of it, behaviors, their prevalence, origin, cross-pollination between cultures, etc. are completely valid. The problem is that many people automatically bring their own value judgments, their nostalgia, and their imprecise colloquial language into these discussions, which then - understandably - cause others to hyperreact to these, as these are hot topics.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com