• Sergio@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Guatemala is awesome. The countryside is beautiful and the people are descended from one of humanity’s major civilizations, the Mayans.

    I realize OP is only half-serious, but they still come off as really ignorant.

    • Omnipitaph@reddthat.com
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      6 months ago

      As someone who is doing a massive research project on the Maya peoples right now, that civilization was technologically way ahead of the game! They had toilets with a sewage system, clean aqueducts and water purification measures, and ball sports a thousand years before the colonizers that fucked em up. A THOUSAND YEARS.

    • I'm_All_NEET:3@lemmy.ml
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      6 months ago

      How did I come across as “ignorant” Take this from someone who has been to Guatemala. Anyone who knows anything about Guatemala would say what I said.

      “The countryside is beautiful and the people are descended from one of humanity’s major civilizations, the Mayans.”

      You can cherry pick nice places from anywhere. Places like Mexico, Baltimore, South Africa, Brazil, Detroit and Guatemala have have some nice places here and there but let’s be honest like most of South America it’s a poverty filled shithole and most Guatemalans/South Americans would even agree with me on that.

  • atlien51@lemm.ee
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    6 months ago

    I’ve been asking this same goddamn question dude. I don’t get it

    • Krauerking@lemy.lol
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      6 months ago

      The Irish was the last white European immigrant community that was treated poorly after immigration so by claiming to be part of that they get to claim to be part of that oppression and use it to pretend to themselves they are an underdog regardless how much their existence would be unlike any actual Irish immigrants.

        • Krauerking@lemy.lol
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          6 months ago

          LOL, but the Italians came with basically the rest of Eastern/southern Europe for work around that time and were just wrapped up in the generic anti-immigration zeitgeist and the Polish, Slavs, Greek, etc didn’t complain as much and didn’t even manage to turn a bedtime story about a creepy Italian dude into a story of how they secretly actually founded America first.

          Though apparently up to like half of Italian immigrants were known to return home after they saved up enough money from US factory work. I think they just didn’t like being in the US.

  • psychadlligoat@piefed.social
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    6 months ago

    I use it to explain my massive capacity for alcohol

    “I’m scotch/Irish on one side and German on the other, 3 generations both sides and they bred in the community until my parents!” as I’m on my third boot and finally starting to slur my speech lol

    • BigPotato@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      I usually joke “The Polish in me knows how to drink, the Irish in me doesn’t know how to stop.”

  • joel_feila@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    We err they obsessed because red heada are hot and irish beer os better the American beer

  • DrSoap@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    I have a friend who came over from Moscow and is an immigrant to the U.S. herself. A few years ago she started telling me she has Irish heritage and she knows it because she felt it in her bones and can see it in her dreams. Now she goes twice a year to ‘reconnect with her roots.’ She was so confident that she did a 23andme and it showed that she was 99% of her heritage with a 1% broadly european. That 1% is what she is now claiming is her Irish portion.

    I don’t know. I really don’t even know.

  • sness@sh.itjust.works
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    6 months ago

    My great grandparents came to the US and claimed to be Irish. We strongly suspect this was a lie and they were German but arrived during a time where Germans were… unpopular.

  • PunkRockSportsFan@fanaticus.social
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    6 months ago

    It’s fun to make fun of Americans who are proud of their Irish ancestry. I dunno why. But it is.

    Source: american cheese American with Irish composing a decent chunk

  • RedFrank24@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    They want to be European, but don’t want the stink of colonialism, whilst also feeling like rebels, so Ireland it is!

  • selkiesidhe@lemm.ee
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    6 months ago

    My dad’s side of the family was supposedly Irish. Bunch of reprobates and thieves. I would admit to being related to none of them even if they could prove it with papers lol

    Nothing against Irish people. Just thought I’d share.

  • y0kai@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    6 months ago

    Idk lol some of our ancestors are just from a place and sometimes that place is Ireland. Want my white-ass to lie to you instead?

    I’m Hatian now.

    • MBech@feddit.dk
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      6 months ago

      It’s just a very foreign thing for us eurooeans. If we’re born in Italy, but some grandparent was born in Germany, we don’t consider ourself to be german in any way. We’d consider ourself italian and nothing else. It just seems so incredibly odd to even consider oneself to be german if you didn’t spend time growing up in Germany.

      • y0kai@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        6 months ago

        I guess that makes sense. We have our “heritage” pushed on us from a very young age, or at least we did when I was a child. In the 4th grade we did an entire reenactment of immigrating through Ellis Island, NY in which we had to research our countries of origin, then draw from a hat to see if we died on the journey, got small pox, or any other number of things all before being “accepted into the wonderful cultural melting-pot that is the United States”.

        Then we grew up and learned that all immigrants are evil and must all be deported. /s?

        Regardless, my family immigrated from Ireland after having lived in County Cork for a very long time. This whole post just seems like shitting on people just to shit on people.

        Sad thing to be, nonsensical thing to want to be

        Well, thanks for calling me sad for a thing I’m mostly indifferent about and have no choice in, OP.

      • ViperActual@sh.itjust.works
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        6 months ago

        I think the reason it’s so prevalent here in the US is because the vast majority of the population ended up here at least in part due to immigration. So identifying as ethnically originating from elsewhere is a part of that self identity.

        The disparity however, is knowing that while traveling through Europe, this style of self identification falls flat because simply being ethnically from a place doesn’t mean you can claim to be born and raised from there. And that meaning is what’s different between the US and Europe.

        • LilB0kChoy@midwest.social
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          6 months ago

          I wonder if some of it doesn’t come from the people who came to America through forced immigration (I.e. the slave trade).

          I think it makes sense for people brought unwillingly to America to hold on to that ethnic heritage and culture work hard to instill it in their children, even if they were born in America.

          • zaphod@sopuli.xyz
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            6 months ago

            Very unlikely, the people who claim to have some european origin are generally not the descendants of slaves. Descendants of slaves generally have very little knowledge about the origin of their ancestors. Slaves in America came mostly from Africa, most likely even displaced within Africa. Very little records were kept of individual slaves origins, because why would anyone do that, they’re slaves. These people identify as “just” African Americans.

            • LilB0kChoy@midwest.social
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              6 months ago

              I think you misunderstood. I wasn’t talking about the people who claim to have some European origin but the practice in general in the US of acknowledging ancestral ethnic heritage as part of where you’re from.

              Descendants of slaves generally have very little knowledge about the origin of their ancestors.

              This might be true now, but 200 years ago people were brought here from other countries unwillingly and had children here. If we’re were forcefully taken to another country and then had children at some point I would talk to them about the people left behind and where I came from.

              • Soup@lemmy.world
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                6 months ago

                If we’re were forcefully taken to another country and then had children at some point I would talk to them about the people left behind and where I came from.

                That’s not how that works, especially when their cultures were specifically purged by the slavers. Your comment reads like the equivalent of saying “I would have just roundhouse kicked the gun away and saved the day” as if it’s the slaves’ fault for not giving their kids rich lessons on their history. It’s amazing that even some of it survived at all.

      • infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net
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        6 months ago

        Americans keep their ethnic identity distinct from their national identity. If an American national tells you they’re Irish, they’re invariably referring to the former.

        • MBech@feddit.dk
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          6 months ago

          Sure, but are they really ethnically irish because their great grandfather was from Ireland? At what point do we consider americans to be their own thing?

          It’s not like the irish, italians or the danish are ethnically pure. Some bloke on my fathers side came to Denmark from Germany in the 1800s, and before that, one of his ancestors came from france, and before that from Rome. Same shit on my mothers side.

          My point is, it’s not like european countries are monoethnic. So why don’t we view someone from Texas, as ethnically texan, when their ancestry probably dates back to 1700s Texas?

          • infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net
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            6 months ago

            I think you touched on why. Ethnic identity is somewhat arbitrary, and tied up with national / cultural identity. In the US, despite our xenophobic phases most of us culturally identify as a nation of immigrants. So in terms of ethnicity, we’re more concerned with where our lineage existed before arriving in the United States, rather than how long it’s existed in the United States. There’s a bit of a hierarchy of “who’s family has existed in the US the longest”, but all of those claims are still anchored by which nations their ancestors came from.

            There’s also the fact that American genetics haven’t been sedentary long enough - And probably never will be - For us to mix evenly enough to develop a unified physical appearance. Ethnicity is of course not just skin deep, but ethnic identity and identification often uses it as shorthand, and there is as far as I know no stereotypical American ethnic appearance.

          • joel_feila@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            Because we generally see ethnic groups as stretching back very far, like pre history far. At some in the future will people be talking about the American erhnic group? Maybe but it take a veey long time or a massive change in what we think of as ethnic groups for American ethnogenesis

  • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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    6 months ago

    I’ve got Irish heritage. My dentist asked me about it because I have a red beard (brown hair). She explained that people with red hair are less responsive to Novocain. I always knew I wasn’t bullshitting that the dentist hurt me as a teen. Finally, proof!

    • jcg@halubilo.social
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      6 months ago

      I suppose you can’t blame your earlier dentists, though. How were they supposed to know? And if they automatically treated redheads differently, would that be racism?

      • why_not_start_over@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Isn’t a racism judging someone’s character based on ethnic heritage or physical expression rather than, you know, their character?

        Medical predisposition, nah that’s racist!

      • DrSteveBrule@mander.xyz
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        6 months ago

        It’s not racist to treat patients differently when you’re talking about how likely they are to react to drugs. Children/teens tend to become bewildered and/or violent when waking up from anesthesia. It’s not ageist to prepare for a worse case scenario by calling all hands on deck to hold them down to prevent injury.

        • shalafi@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Young men come up fighting as well. My ex-wife worked in surgery and got punched a few times. Don’t know what I’d be like now, but as a young men, back the hell up from the bed.

        • joel_feila@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          It is how ever a dick when dad grounds you because you did that in a haze of post anesthesia that you can’t remember at all and had no control over

    • LogicalDrivel@sopuli.xyz
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      6 months ago

      Not only Novocain, but lots of different types of anesthesia. Im a ginger and have woken up in several procedures, even after warning the doctor I probably would.