939
Anon goes to dinner with coworkers (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 2 years ago by [M] to c/greentext@sh.itjust.works
209 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 95 points 2 years ago (3 children)

The potato joke is also a joke about a genocide.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 6 child comments
    •
  • [–] 60 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    It’s a joke about being the victim of genocide.

    In this case the equivalent joke would be a holocaust joke, which would probably get you fired even faster.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [+] 24 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 child)
    [deleted]
  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Oh, then what's the problem?

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago* (5 children)

    The Irish genocide is far enough in the past to have become sort of "folklore".
    No one who experienced it is still alive or in living memory.
    That makes it better suited for small talk, and not equivalent to the Israeli genocide.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 10 child comments
    •
  • [–] 35 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Oh it's still in living memory, Ireland and Irish culture still hasn't recovered from it.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Can't hold a potato if both hands are full of grudges, though. 🤷🏼‍♂️

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago

    Also, unlike the Shoa/Holocaust, it's not that commonly known that the potato famine was a genocide, inflicted by the english.

    That doesn't make the Iseraeli's comment ok. Just that they probably didn't know how much their comment was in bad taste.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    By that logic we'll be allowed to laugh about Jews and ovens in about 60 years, right?

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] -2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I don't know what you mean by "allowed", AFAIK there is no western country (not even Germany) where it would be illegal. I don't know the law in Israel.
    My friends and me made lots of those jokes 30 years ago.
    Not proud of it at all, but we were edgy 12-year-olds.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Would you mind explaining what happened? I don't know anything about Irish History.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    They were colonized by the British and essentially taxed through landlords above their ability to produce, but were allowed to support themselves on potatoes, which was okay (not really) until there was a blight damaging the potato crops, which brought on huge amounts of emigration and led to over a million people starving to death. If you want to read more

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    I'd like to tangentially add that Irish people are possible the most chillest when it comes to their ethnicity and identity. About 11 years ago, I got obsessed with pretending I was Irish for a few months during and after dating an Irish-American girl. I had a terrible fake accent, drank Jameson or Maker's Mark, bragged about my fame with Irish good-bye's, etc. I am in no way Irish in the slightest, and I don't think anyone would even think that. Not one Irish person seemed offended. If anything, they welcomed it and found it entertaining at the least. I think that if I did that with any other ethnicity, people would at least be offended if not angry and retaliatory.

    Anyone else experience this? If so, any insight on why this may be?

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [+] -7 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Wasn't the potato famine a natural disaster though?

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 32 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    The potato blight was a natural disaster.
    The famine was caused by the British exporting the same amount of potatoes out of Ireland as before.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 6 child comments
    •
  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Also, monoculture, but yeah. Points at Cavendish bananas.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    The Irish at the time also grew wheat and meat and everything else that was grown on the British Isles back then. The problem was the colonising English owned all the land and exported all the food

    Potatoes were the emergency food, the only thing Irish could grow and eat

    When Irish were dying of starvation the farms they were forced to work were growing plenty of wheat and sheep

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago

    Not entirely. Yes there was blight affecting crops but there was more to it than that.

    Huge volumes of unaffected produce were exported to England for profit - the decreased yields only impacting the market for locals. Previous famines has seen the British ban exports to ensure the local population had access to food (which also decreased the prices) but not this time around.

    English landlords of Irish property were evicting their tenants who weren’t able to pay (since the blight impacted many people’s ability to work) with zero notice or rights for the tenants. Absentee landlords were extracting huge amounts of capital out of the Irish economy, owning vast swathes of the entire country.

    The Irish were widely dependent on the potato as a primary form of sustenance but it was due to the potato being high in calories, cheap and easy to grow, and high density yields from relatively small plots of land (landlords dividing up the land into incredibly small divisions whilst simultaneously extracting the highest rent possible for the land).

    The Irish were, in essence, forced to eat potatoes due to the extreme economic exploitation they were subject to.

    Yet there was no aid from England; she simply sat by reaping profit and leaving things up to the divine - “the market will provide”. There had been efforts to change tariffs and laws but the contention in the governing party about providing aid caused the Prime Minister to resign and the subsequent government threw out all efforts (except those such as offering relief to those without land which forced many Irish to sell what land they had to gain relief and aid).

    A Prime Minister at the time launched a commission to investigate and it was found that the absentee landlord system was abhorrent and principally responsible for the famine.

    Sadly 1/4 of the population perished, and another 1/4 simply left the country. In some ways, Ireland never recovered.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent