Link to the full piece by @fotoole.bsky.social:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/17/rot-padraic-x-scanlan-book-review
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/17/rot-padraic-x-scanlan-book-review
Comments
A) the vast, vast majority of Trump supporters don’t deserve to die, despite their culpability. It’s a social problem.
B) as this very story teaches us, they’ll do their best to make sure that their nationalistic out-groups—PoC and women this time—will bear the brunt.
Obv I’m just a novice American citing wiki, but idk, seems clear:
I wouldn't agree with o'Toole personally here even if I think his writing is otherwise brilliant and appropriately scathing of how the British responded
1. The British government had the means to greatly lessen the suffering among their citizens.
2. They chose not to.
That said, Ireland's quasi-colonized status drives home the central problem with that framework: the mainlanders (Great British...?) didn't see them as true peers
> [In 1847], the [New York?] Times reported that Britain had permitted in Ireland "a mass of poverty, disaffection, and degradation without a parallel in the world. It allowed proprietors to suck the very life-blood of that wretched race".
Now imagine 90% of the landlords in California identified as Texan…
It’s similar to withholding food and electricity from flowing to a famine-stricken population — a genocide, despite being technically rooted in willful inaction.
It's much more a combination of factors,...
The notions we take for granted, of at least occasionally...
I don't want to absolve the UK Government, or those who profited off the misery of the Famine (or the clearances of tenants in following decades), but it's dangerous to assume others would've been better.