It's absolutely fascinating from a psychology standpoint.

My one big hope for when countries now stop doing the stupid clock change thing, is that people become a lot more flexible around business hours and school hours, and adapt a schedule that fits people.

Have you met people?

I 100% agree with you.

Men hun er faen meg heller ikke norsk.

Because it's weird fetishisation of European cultures that are both seen as superior to American culture, but also at the same time as inferior.

Because it's rooted in weird beliefs in blood magic; that DNA somehow confers culture.

What's wrong with you, you're responding to literally the opposite of what I said? You are free to connect, to seek your roots, figure out weird quirky things from the culture of your ancestors, and nurture as much fondness for Ireland and Irishness as you please. No-one in Ireland (Note, I'm not Irish!!) is gonna object to any of that.

The one thing, the ONE FUCKING THING we're asking you not to do is to call yourself Irish, because that will guaranteed piss off everyone you meet in Ireland.

How is this difficult to do or understand? We're asking one thing.

Everything else is up for grabs. You can appropriate as much culture as you please, real, fake, stereotypical, exaggerated, whatever. Grab it, use it, do it, perform it, that's fine. You don't need to excuse yourself or justify yourself or claim ancestry or heritage or anything. Absolutely no-one will gatekeep the culture. Enjoy it, all of it! Do this one thing, and real Irish people will be super happy to share their culture with you.

But you're not. You're American, with Irish heritage. You were born in America to American parents. You are super welcome to learn about Irish culture, about your heritage. You are super welcome to visit Ireland, visit the place of your fore-mothers and other ancestors. You can enjoy Irish culture as much as you want. Learn riverdancing and blast Michael Flatley all day long. You can even enjoy the bastardised commercialised version that is the totally fake US retail holiday "St Patrick's day". Wear some tacky green beads, put on a green hat, drink fifteen pints of Guiness! Sláinte! Have fun!

The one thing we're specifically asking you not to do, is to call yourself Irish. That's the only thing we're gatekeeping. You're Irish-American. You have Irish heritage. You have Irish ancestors. You have Irish family heirlooms. But you're not Irish.

No no no, no-one is gatekeeping ethnicity. If you have Irish heritage, you have Irish heritage. That's a fact.

We're gatekeeping cultural identity and nationality, because these cosplaying Americans seem to think that their ethnicity confers culture and nationality by weird blood magic or something, and that's not how it works.

> if we ask them if an African who has been there for 5 years is English or German.

Someone who is not ethnically German, but has immigrated to Germany and speaks the language, is way more German than a cosplaying American whose parents and grandparents were all Americans, doesn't speak German, knows nothing about German culture, has never lived in Germany, but who has one ancestor who came from Germany.

If you're a first-generation immigrant, you get to choose what you identify as. If you speak the language of your new country and if you've become a citizen, sure, you can call yourself that. I don't think a lot of people will object to that.

Because, and this is the fuel for this clash, we care the most about culture and nationality, instead of heritage and ethnicity.

> Basically, if an American is claiming to be whatever

Because they're not, their culture is American, their nationality is American, they're American.

> But an Indian or African who arrived 5 years ago is a true blood Aussie mate, because saying anything else would be doing a racism.

No they're not, no it's not, and my what a lovely strawman you made up there.

But Europeans are diverse mutts as well.

I'm Swedish. But my last name is 100% German, easily recognisable as a German name, super common. Because my paternal ancestor immigrated from Germany in the 1600's and brought the name with him. My mother's maiden name was Czech, also very easily recognisable as such, and my uncle and my cousins have that name as well.

But I would never in a million years call myself German. I am not German. I am not Czech. My cousins aren't Czech. All of our parents were born in Sweden. All of our grandparents were born in Sweden. The vast majority of our great-grandparents were born in Sweden. We are all 100% Swedish.

The idea that I would call myself German because of my last name is completely ridiculous, but that is exactly what these cosplaying Americans are doing, even though they don't speak German, and I do. My dad speaks fluent German. My maternal grandfather spoke fluent German. I have so much more claim to "German-ness", whatever that is, than these cosplayers, and I wouldn't dream of doing it.

And then they bleat about how their great-great-whtaever was German, and because of that they "feel so connected to the Alps".

Unlike the fat and rich continental Europeans that the Norse viewed as ripe for plunder, they did not fear them at all.

Yeah, they had completely different lifestyles that were reliant on completely different biomes. The Norse were farmers, they needed farmland and a little bit of forest for wood and hunting. The Sami were reindeer herders, they needed tundra. Neither could live where the other lived, they spoke languages from completely different families, they had completely different cultural traditions. Neither side had much that the other side wanted. Of course they didn't assimilate, how could they?

But when the industrial revolution came and iron ore was discovered up north, suddenly the desire to assimilate them (or genocide them...) appeared, because now they had something that the people in the south wanted very, very much.

> Though already in Harald Fairhair's day, it seems there were also Sami living among the Norse as boatwrights and smiths and maybe also as wandering professional hunters, hunting livestock predators for bounties - we know that kept going for a long time.

My understanding is that the Norse respected the Sami as a people different from them, and were a little bit afraid of their "magic", because they didn't understand it. They were perfectly happy to live apart, and do a little bit of trade in goods and services. Why go north to raid the Sami, when you could sail south and raid the fat and rich English or the French instead?

These findings are very much in line with that, they bring up a feature, a checkbox, a specific thing TikTok did to pay lip-service to protect minors, and then they're simply saying that it doesn't appear to work. So it doesn't matter that TikTok checked the box and crossed the t.

We already know. Everybody knows. That's the joke. There's no need to point out anything.

It's so bizarre seeing Americans in the debate not wanting "crazy high taxes like in Europe", because the US already spends twice as much public money per capita as the OECD average.

The dirty secret of course is that healthcare as a good is much more expensive to produce in the US than elsewhere, and a large chunk of that is because the private insurance system adds a ton of unnecessary overhead. And yet all the healthcare insurance companies in the US talk about making healthcare "affordable for all". Yeah, no, they're leeches. They're rent-seekers. They drive up the cost of everything.

On charges of... uhhh... hm...

Because... uhhmm.. he doesn't like them?

Consumerism demands that everyone buys a tumble dryer, therefore not having a tumble dryer means you're a povvo!

Meanwhile, in civilisation, I have a washer, a dryer, and a collapsible wall-mounted clothesline in my apartment, and I can choose which piece of clothing goes where to dry depending on need!

Sorry for hijacking, but this is quite possibly one of the funniest American poverty markers around.

Every single one of them have ultimately been massive failures, because you are re-inventing the wheel and putting a window system that you control to sidestep the window system that I control.

> I had a lot of fun in building it

Yeah, me too! But I learned my lesson.