Dream Catcher

tillotoro

Stuff: is made to not be repairable

Tools & Materials: are priced as a luxury

Working Hours: have expanded to take up a lot of people’s whole day and weekends

Wages: have stagnated so that everyone has to work full time

no bro

You don’t if he’s Northern Irish. You don’t know if he’s Catholic. You don’t know if he grew up watching his people get murdered by Loyalist Protestants and British soldiers who carried heavy racial prejudice against Irish Catholics (hellooo, Bloody Sunday anyone?), who had for centuries been characterized as barbaric, racially inferior, lowly people who needed to be wiped out or converted. Attacks by the IRA, and therefore retaliation by the British, didn’t completely cease until 1998, I believe? This film came out in 2002.

You don’t know if he was an Irishman who grew up in England. Bomb attacks carried out by the IRA in England kindled misplaced aggression toward innocent Irish civilians living among the English population and Irish people were verbally and physically attacked and their businesses targeted. Perhaps similar to how ordinary Muslims bear the brunt of aggression after attacks by Muslim extremists…

You can still find yourself threatened and demeaned if you’re a Catholic in Northern Ireland or if you’re a Protestant in Ireland and some older dude in a pub in a smaller town straight up asks you if you’re Catholic or not and you’re afraid what’ll happen if you don’t lie about who you are.

You can still hear casual racism toward Irish people in everyday life and in publicly broadcast media in the UK.

You can still see and hear “Kill All Irish” and other pretty heavy anti-Irish sentiment among Loyalists in Northern Ireland who don’t consider themselves Irish at all.

Just because it now appears that the island of Ireland has been allowed to move on from war and their appearance and culture generally allows them to blend into and reap the benefits of the White European demographic doesn’t mean that this character does not have the background suitable to fully empathize with her. Maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t, we just don’t know his story.

First of all, pretty much yes to everything about Ireland up there. Growing up in Northern Ireland, I saw the violence from all sides - my father is a British Protestant and my mother is a Catholic, so I basically couldn’t win because according to one side I was a dirty taig and according to the other I was a filthy hun. Luckily I managed to make friends with a mix of both Catholics and Protestants who all thought this attitude was just as stupid as I did, but between all of us, we saw our fair share of sectarian violence, and the Catholics, without a doubt, got it worse.

Irish Catholics were robbed of their country by Protestant invaders centuries ago. They fought and fought and eventually got the Irish Free State (now the Republic of Ireland), however, thanks to the deliberate plantation of Protestants to eradicate the Catholic majority in the North, it was left under British rule. Since then, Catholics have been murdered, arrested, terrorised, tortured and driven out of their houses just for being Irish Catholics. 

I moved from Northern Ireland in 2010 and to the day I left, the violence was not over. I couldn’t wear certain colours in certain areas because I would be beaten. I had fake names depending on where I was stopped, as attackers can determine what religion you are from your name alone (and this is a trick I learned, too, for defence). I can recite my rights if I’m arrested because if I was stopped in certain areas I could be, on the assumption I could be Catholic. I know the subtle sectarian geography of the city of Belfast because if I cross the road in the wrong place I’m in enemy territory. I have been chased by a group of forty people, throwing fireworks at me, because they assumed I was a Catholic. Police were parked on nearby streets and didn’t acknowledge the commotion. My friends and I walk past graffiti screamed “Kill All Taigs”. A fifteen year old boy who lived half an hour from me was beaten to death by a group of adults for being Catholic. For fifty years, people have been detained without trial, tortured, beaten and wrongly imprisoned just for being Catholic, because apparently, being Catholic means you must be in the IRA. 

Even now, I can’t escape it. I have a noticeable Northern Irish accent, which is stronger when I’m around people from there and is noticeable as a strong accent whenever I’m not in the country. At airports, I’m always the one stopped and frisked if they hear my accent. At ferry ports, it’s alway my car (which has Northern Irish registration plates) that’s “randomly selected” for a search. All of this just happened to me, a person who got off lightly.

To say someone can’t experience this because [x] is a way of dehumanizing them, making them the other you claim them of making you.

It’s the most Tribal and simplistic way of viewing things, it’s a view that lacks empathy to say that someone can’t experience something because of the colour of their skin, it’s also Extremely Racist.

1) honeybees do not produce “extra honey.” And beekeepers don’t take some of the honey, they take all of it.

Because I am!

Beekeepers make sure hives are fed before there is pollen in the air, protected from predators and the elements, and have enough honey to sustain themselves. We don’t take all of it.

But overproduction of honey leads to stagnation in the hive. It puts stress on the queen to lay eggs, and when they inevitably fill up all their space with honey (instead of filling up the multiple empty, clean boxes of frames beekeepers might put on top of the main hive box), the queen can get so stressed she dies. If there’s a spike in the weather and the hive hasn’t prepared new queen brood, that’s it! The colony is dead. Because there wasn’t enough space for eggs and honey in the hive.

Beekeepers take excess honey. We are constantly monitoring the state of the hive, checking for parasites, analyzing the eggs for diseases, and making sure they are fed and healthy (usually with sugar water and pollen substitutes until they have made enough honey to sustain themselves in the early spring months). If a queen dies prematurely, we make every attempt to replace her to save the colony.

I know there’s an urge to patronize everyone who works in the farming industry, but try to understand the differences between small scale agriculture and industrial farming. There IS a difference. And stop spreading misinformation.

If you’re this passionate about ethical consumption, look into some of the ecofeminist research on non-hierarchal interspecies relationships (working on building animal-human relationships in a non exploitative way).

Yea Chickens are some of the most abused animals on big factory farms and I’ll be the first to admit it’s criminal and more needs to be done to regulate this.

Yes selective breeding over time has caused an increase in the ammount of eggs produced by chickens and factory farms have some messed up practices to get more eggs from them including forced moutling.

THIS IS WHY YOU SUPPORT LOCAL FARMERS AND THEIR EGGS

It’s not ‘polyester’ it’s plastic

It’s not ‘vegan leather’ it’s plastic

Its not ‘faux fur’ it’s plastic

Plastic is a pollutant and causes far more damage to the environment both now and in the future than leather or wool.

This kept happening no matter where I went in Morocco. Even fluent English speakers decided to give me alternative names, and I just shrugged it off as the consequence of one of the syllables being very unusual in Arabic.

That is, until one day I was talking to a shopkeeper in the souk and he asked me my name. I gave him my English one, and explained that I also answer to Brahim (and Daud, and… more than I can remember). He laughed hysterically and looked shocked, calling his friend over from the back of the shop.

“Tell him your name,” he said excitedly. I did so.

The other man’s face cycled through several expressions very quickly—surprise, anger, suspicion, and then exasperation when he realized his friend had set me up.

They very kindly explained to me that my name spoken with a Moroccan accent sounds very much like an Arabic profanity, and that I should definitely introduce myself as Brahim or give an alternative English name when meeting new people, because shaking hands with strangers and saying “Hello, I’m Fuck Your Mother’s Religion” is not a greeting that will win me many friends.

and you’re just?????? but what?????????? is the point of dating someone if you don’t like them??????????????