The Irish are not a ´race´

Discussion in 'Human Science' started by Innocence, May 7, 2006.

  1. thedevilsreject Registered Senior Abuser Registered Senior Member

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    they are our spud picking ancestors who we try and distance ourselves from
     
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  3. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    They didn't even have potatoes until they were brought back from the New World. I wonder what they ate in Ireland before that?
     
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  5. PaulS Registered Member

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    Seconded whole-heartedly, regarding race.

    On the subject of diet, the early settlers (8000 - 7000 BC) would have had hunting and fishing, gathering fruits and nuts etc, for a diet of, according to Answers.com/Wikipedia, "seafood, birds, wild boar, deer and hazelnuts".

    Apparently, sheep, goats, cattle and cereals were imported from Britain and the continent with the start of agriculture around 4500 BC. Archaeologists have found the main crops 3500 - 3000 BC were wheat and barley, so the staple would presumably have been bread or some kind of porridge?
     
    Last edited: Jun 15, 2006
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  7. Aoife Registered Member

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    Oh my God, I cannot BELIEVE you said that! Ireland was settled by the English in the sixteenth century but not very successfully - less than 20 percent of Ireland is Protestant.
     
  8. Aoife Registered Member

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    I'm Irish!

    I'm Irish, and I know there is a difference between the Irish and other races. The world average amount of red heads among whites is two percent, but in Ireland it's nineteen percent. There are also a very high number of blondes and brunettes, but very few black haired people. We also have darker eyes. We speak Gaeilge and English. It's proven that people who are raised with two languages are more intelligent than people who only speak one. This contributes to the fact that the Irish are on average slightly more intelligent than the average American white person. You must also remember that Ireland has very few immigrants, so the race has not been contaminated by other races. Even with the English, the Troubles in Ireland between Irish Catholics and English-descent Protestants have kept Protestants and Catholics seperated. This means that while most of the world has been mixing races over the last century, the Irish race has continued on barely affected. So, clearly, scientific evidence required to prove it or not, the Irish race does, in fact, exist.
     
  9. Zephyr Humans are ONE Registered Senior Member

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    Evidently, the Irish are not only a race but have their share of racists too.

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  10. Prince_James Plutarch (Mickey's Dog) Registered Senior Member

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    Aoife:

    What about the Viking Wars genetic influence?

    Dublin was a Viking city, for instance.
     
  11. alexb123 The Amish web page is fast! Valued Senior Member

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    I think that today we can only truly say there is one race and that is the 'egg and spoon' race.
     
  12. Aoife Registered Member

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    I'm sorry, I don't mean contaminated, I know that sounds terrible, I'm not a racist honestly. That was the wrong word. I mean affected. Please believe me I'm not racist.
     
  13. Prince_James Plutarch (Mickey's Dog) Registered Senior Member

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    Aoife:

    Stop getting unreasonably upset about being called racist.

    Anyway: What about the Germanic influence of the Vikings?
     
  14. alai Registered Member

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    I apologise for the extreme zombification of this thread, but I'm afraid to say that there was an RTE News report this evening that without any apparent self-consciousness talking about sequencing "the genetic signature of the Irish race". (Apparently on the basis of one individual with a mighty three generations of confirmed ancestry (thus possibly entirely Hugenot, Welsh, Viking, Pict, or whatever yer havin' yersel').

    The Normans started showing up in the 11th century, and that's neither the beginning nor the end of genetic influence "cross-channel" (as they like to say on the sports reports). You might also like to take note that much of the "English" 16th and 17th century plantation was from Scotland, and latterly was sponsored by a Stuart monarch.

    Obviously an infallible test of "race", as not only is being "culturally Catholic" a key tenet of Irish national identity, but of course rigorous studies have shown that religious conversion produces a Transubstantiation of the Genome. :/
     
  15. Emil Valued Senior Member

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    We are speaking three languages,Romanian, Hungarian and German.
    We must be very smart. :yay:

    Or is valid only for two languages?

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  16. alai Registered Member

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    More like plain old "not valid".

    In any event, true bilingualism is fairly uncommon in Ireland. The considerable majority of children learn to speak in an English-only environment, then have Irish "baiten into them" as a mandatory, but somewhat tokenistic in some ways, part of their formal schooling.
     
  17. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    I've seen reports that it's become fashionable to speak Irish, especially among middle-class professionals in the cities. That in some trendy venues you'll hear everyone trying to speak it, albeit with varying proficiency, and that it can be an advantage in getting a job in some companies. (Not because it's of any great value in conducting business but just because the executives are making hyper-patriotic examples of themselves.) They say that the number of schools in which classes are taught in Irish immersion increases every year, and that a significant fraction of the Irish people (something like one-fourth IIRC) can carry on a simple conversation more-or-less correctly.

    Is this just propaganda?
     
  18. quadraphonics Bloodthirsty Barbarian Valued Senior Member

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    And yet, the concept of "race" as a salient human political and social category has not abated; quite the contrary.

    Which goes to illustrate the settled academic concensus on the nature of (human) race: that it is a social construct, and not a meaningful genetic division.

    In which case, arguing against the concept of (human) races on the basis of genetics is obtuse to the point of irrelevance. If the relevant social groups consider one another to be distinct races and relate to one another on that basis, then distinct races is exactly what they are. It matters not one whit whether there is any basis in genetics for that division, other than to observe that sociological race is obviously not biological race (which does exist in some other species).

    You mean to say that the biological concept of race doesn't apply here. But that's irrelevant - human racism is all about sociological race, and that has fuck-all to do with biology (or any other science). To see this, note how the demolition of the concept of biological race in humans has zero effect on the operation of human racism. You can see this on a microscopic level, in that this argument has been advanced here every time race has come up, without any effect on the discourse. And you can see it on the macro level - it's been widely understood that human races are not biologically valid divisions for well over a generation now, and that knowledge has had zero discernable impact on the salience of race as a social and political phenomenon.

    But this is all well-known and settled stuff. You are advancing an embarassingly anarchronistic and irrelevant position on this question.
     
  19. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Back on the original topic, I think the root issue here is that the word "race" has become so politically incorrect and academically obsolete that it's lost its scholarly bearings and no longer has a standard meaning. The inflected forms "racism" and "racist" are much more commonly used, and people unconsciously realign their definition of "race" to conform to the colloquial meanings of those two words.

    Americans who are prejudiced against people from Mexico and their children are routinely called "racists" by their opponents. Yet the Mexican population is a textbook-perfect example of the hybridization of several gene pools and doesn't fit any halfway sensible definition of the word "race."

    In order to purge Germany of Jews, Hitler--the most famous "racist" on earth--felt that he had to kill people who had only one Jewish grandparent!

    The "African-Americans," who are still discriminated against in some ways by some people who are immediately labeled "racist," have just as much variety in their DNA as the Jews. (We keep finding out how many Southern plantation owners found their female slaves very attractive.) Look at President Obama: his mother is "white," but he's still labeled "black," and if you don't like him you will be called a "racist" before long.

    "Race" is a word with more connotation than denotation.
     
  20. Emil Valued Senior Member

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    I am convinced that hybrids are more advanced than decadent "pure race".

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  21. quadraphonics Bloodthirsty Barbarian Valued Senior Member

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    Hogwash. (Human) race has a well-established scholarly definition as a sociological phenomenon, and has never lacked in the slightest for operational salience. Take a group of Americans and show them photos of different Americans, and not a one of them will have any difficulty in immediately identifying the race of each of them (a few ambiguous corner cases notwithstanding). Such a property is essential to the function of race as a sociological construct, and might as well be the definition of an objective natural phenomenon.

    Any sensible biological/genetic definition, you mean. But that doesn't mean that those races don't exist, it only means that they aren't fundamentally biological/genetic phenomena. Nevertheless, it is unquestionable that race is real, and that racism is real. This implies that
    race is a sociological construct.

    Which, again, only illustrates that races are not really defined biologically, and that those who approach them as if they were end up with perverse results (from their own perspective, even). That's a great counter to racists who believe in the biological definitions, but that's only a small subset. The whole artifice lumbers along happily enough without any need for a sound biological basis, and has for centuries.

    So it follows that it's not a genetic profile that is being discriminated against, but some other complex of features. It does not follow that race doesn't exist in the first place - otherwise how could the identification and discrimination even occur? Race has to exist as such before you can even examine any potential biological basis for it - and this simple observation demolishes the logic of a lack of biological basis implying a lack of race.

    And since a "race" is essentially a sociological label, that labelling process implies that he is black, and that those who dislike him for that reason are racists. There is nothing more to race than social labelling based on superficial features. That's the whole point.

    Try it this way: how do you imagine a black American would react if you told him that race doesn't actually exist because of whatever genetics? How would that change - or even relate to - anything about his experiences with racism? It's not like anyone has ever taken a DNA sample from him and sent it to a lab for analysis before deciding that he was black and discriminating against him on such a basis.

    The lack of a biological basis for human races is old news, and only relevant when dealing with racists who actually believe in it. The rest of us have long understood that race is a fundamentally sociological construct, and must be analyzed in those terms. It cannot be wished away by genetic findings - it arose and entrenched itself long before such genetic analysis was possible, or even understood.
     
  22. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Then why is it that the only people who talk about race are retards, rather than scholars?
    "A few"??? Take one of these Religious Redneck Retards into downtown Washington DC at lunchtime and ask him to identify the "races." He'll sputter and misidentify people from India as Mexicans, Vietnamese as Filipinos. And most amusingly of all the Iranians, one of the ethnic groups that most Americans dislike very much, will generally not even be noticed as outsiders.
    Where do you live, Alabama???
    It's a little too capricious for me to accept as "real." It's more like how that RRR felt when he crawled out of bed with his hangover and turned on Glen Beck's program so he could find out how he was supposed to feel and who he was supposed to hate on that particular morning.
    I repeat, Hitler was the most famous racist on Earth, and his racism arguably caused the most misery, and it was based entirely on biology. Anyone who had one Jewish grandparent was an enemy of the state: this took their family tree far enough back in time to when intermarriage was considerably less common so the fallacy of recursion (how do you define the "Jew" who was that "Jew's" ancestor?) wasn't a major problem. He pulled in a lot of people who were completely assimilated and acculturated who had nothing "Jewish" about them except a bit of DNA.
    Of course race existed in the first place. Before our ancestors began inventing faster and larger-capacity transportation technology, populations were sufficiently isolated to remain genetically distinct.
    It's rather amusing that many people's traits are ambiguous enough that they can choose which "race" to belong to. Africans don't think Obama looks very much like them, and if you compare his photo to theirs you realize they're right. They think he looks like a Euro-American. He could have easily chosen to identify himself with the Euro-American community and he would have been accepted, especially since he was raised by his Euro-American mother. He chose to be Afro-American, nobody assigned him.
     
  23. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Oh c'mon. He walks down the street, he's black, in any city in the US.

    What are you imagining he would do, to identify himself in the observer's mind as "white" - carry a sign?

    The Irish can think of themselves as a race if they want to, and maybe make it work in England, but it won't fly in Milwaukee or Detroit or Kansas City. Any more than the Somali impatience with being labeled black in America has any hope of establishing them as a different race there.
     

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