this won't please anyone as well, it's not like the british state are gonna let them off the hook for it. i do wish they had doubled down, obviously easy for me to say but they had an opportunity to be very cool and they undermined themselves.
you're fine, he is still widely known/portrayed, here and elsewhere, as The Cool Irish Revolutionary (we are even taught in school that he was brave and good for signing the treaty) so i totally get it. just something i feel the need to push back on when I see it because it's a symptom of the prevailing liberal historiography of the period.
i understand. his vulgar nationalism is one of the more forgiveable things about him. however his actions from 1921 onwards are totally unforgivable in my view and him and his ilk are a big part of why the country sucks so much shit today.
yeah, my friend who's a modern Irish historian and a comrade is no fan of him at all and neither am I. i mean like i said he was a force for good at times, but it's not like left wing anti-imperialist nationalism hadn't been invented yet, James Connolly being the shining example of that on this island. Collins' nationalism was qualitatively different and of a vulgar, right-wing nature.
I don't know what you mean by "benefit of the doubt", we can acknowledge Collins' material contribution to the struggle while criticising his significant shortcomings and reactionary tendencies. no need to let him off the hook because he was effective at killing Brits.
and again, signing the treaty was unforgivable in my view. after which he led his guys to fight on the wrong side of the civil war (the bourgeois counter-revolution), violently enforcing the will of the British crown against his fellow Irish people. playing an active role in dooming the nation to a century of rule by a bourgeois comprador class. these aren't things you can just handwave away, it's clear you don't know much of the history here. he tends to be upheld these days by social chauvinist and right-wing nationalists, and it's not some great contradiction, they kind of are his inheritors. he was a bad guy and frankly a traitor.
fun fact baileys was invented by an american, irish cream liqueur isn't a "real" thing, just marketing. it is very delicious though. also, it originally had a more "traditionally irish" name but the guy changed it to baileys after doing market research and discovering that drinks with protestant names sold better.
ehhhh Collins undoubtedly was a force for good at times but it's probably fine that he got whacked because he was very much on a proto-fascist trajectory. also signed the anglo-irish treaty which, you know, not great. unforgivable in fact. most irish communists wouldn't really uphold him as he was by no means a comrade, very much a right-leaning, "pragmatic" nationalist. he was good at killing brits and insurgency, spycraft etc. but suffered from a vulgar patriotism unguided by any real left-wing ideals.
he is also an elf who has lived in the phoenix park for 100s of years
privileged, chauvinistic, ignorant nonsense.
i don't know what you really expect from the BBC, by their standards this is quite a damning exposition. it's not really meant to be a "critique of Israel", just to show the truth of settlers and what they are like, their mindset which i think it does a decent job of. of course they have to get the usual October 7th spiel out of the way near the start but it mostly moves on from both sidesing after that imo. i don't think it's fair to say Theroux tries to both sides things, he obviously does skirt around using certain language but he repeatedly points out settlers' hypocrisy, double standards and contradictions throughout the piece. he also asks a settler if he is from brooklyn which is hilarious.
Louis and the Nazis, and the Westboro Baptist Church one i remember being very good
basically i never managed to qualify for actual disability payments (in my country it is extremely difficult if you're a young person), but I did qualify for a bridge payment while my application was pending. they kicked me off that because I went to see my gfs family in the US and i guess they just make you reapply if you miss a couple of payments, i was never informed of that. they make you go in person to the post office to get paid as a kind of capitalist humiliation ritual so i was unable to get them. i figured then that i would be denied reapplication because my gf had been sending me money during that time (all welfare is aggressively means tested and you're not allowed take a holiday basically). since I've been able to survive without the bridge payment for the last few months they will just use that as an excuse to not give me disability anyway so i just gave up.
yeah I'm disabled and got kicked off welfare last year. haven't worked in almost 3 years after crashing out of an awful "career" job into the psych ward so idk how i would even go about getting work.
pity he is a nazi, not the kind of PR we should be happy about really.
i am not american or on capitalist social media, but it's my impression the group harping on about this stuff is essentially still a very loud, fringe minority. it's not really gaining traction or affecting game sales or anything. i think you can safely just tune it out (or better, stop going on reddit).
they absolutely do... i mean most of all people have started believing COVID denialism on some level, stopped masking, etc. because their govt told them to in the name of continued economic growth.
i don't really play AAA games, but a couple i can think of are Cyberpunk (character gender + pronouns tied to voice), and Elden Ring (pronouns tied to body type). Oblivion Remastered obviously does it too. Cyberpunk is the especially irritating example for various reasons. Baldur's Gate 3 set a new standard which i'm hoping becomes more the norm. like i said i don't play many games like this but i personally haven't seen one with body types that isn't also essentialising in some way. would like to hear about them!
tangential: the "body type" stuff is annoying because stuff like pronouns and voice options just end up getting tied to the choice anyway in a lot of games. i get that it's like a liberal baby step in the right direction but the form (at least in mainstream or AAA) is still doing a lot to uphold Gender and has a long way to go.
the UK never had a bourgeois revolution or grappled with their toppling as world hegemon and their politics is still firmly stuck in 100 year old colonial mindset