You need to read up on the history of the Irish in the UK and how they were treated by the English very much as a distinct race, and one that they thought it was very much OK to abuse.

Here’s a quote from the Rev. Charles Kingsley, a Victorian theologian and defender of Darwinism;

I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw [in Ireland] . . . I don’t believe they are our fault. . . . But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much. . . ."

Literally describing Irish people as subhuman. This attitude was wildly popular in England. Even in the eighties and nineties it was still common for occupation troops in Northern Ireland to refer to the Irish as “white n****rs”. This attitude, that the Irish are subhuman, justified horrific acts of racial violence that happened in my lifetime, and probably yours.

The Irish have been the targets of military occupation, police abuse, disenfranchisement and genocide, all on the basis of what the English very much considered to be their “race.”

Again, America is not the world. There are whole layers of complex interactions of identity happening out there beyond your borders.

I have no problem with cracker, because exactly as you say, it’s a reaction against institutional power, not an exercise of it.

But “Paddy” has a long history as a term of racist abuse against a deeply disenfranchised racial minority. I’m not sure if you’re even aware that it was widely used outside of the context of the phrase “Paddy wagon.” From the way you’re discussing this, it seems like you’re not.

If a black cop arrests you it’s not suddenly praxis to refer to him by racial slurs just because he’s a cop. Call him a pig or a narc or whatever anti-cop term you like, fucking go off, but excusing racism when it’s specifically against cops is just saying that it’s OK to be racist sometimes, and that’s not something I can remotely agree with.

If black people had joined police forces in large numbers for a variety of very complex historical reasons, would you be defending “N****r Wagon” as a perfectly acceptable term right now?

Also, this is exactly why dismantling USAID was such a phenomenally stupid idea.

You want more plagues? This is how you get more plagues.

But you do see how you’re very much engaging in stereotyping by saying that “They historically chose to address that by becoming cops” as if somehow a) all Irish people in America became cops, and b) the experiences of the Irish diaspora in America are somehow representative of all Irish people… Right?

Like, seriously, go ask some Irish people in Northern Ireland how they feel about cops some time. Depending on who you ask you’re guaranteed to get some wildly different answers.

Irish people were actually considered “non-white” throughout most of the history of race as a concept. They were only recently recategorized by racists when they felt their numbers dwindling and decided to expand the tent a little.

Irish people have suffered from a history of explicitly racist oppression; calling them “the oppressors” flies directly in the face of history. Their skin colour may be white, but the history of their relationship with race as a power structure is far more complex.

This does not mean that it’s impossible for Irish people to be racist themselves, or for Irish people to embrace “white” as an identity. Race is complicated; that’s exactly why trying to adopt simplistic attitudes to it never works.

I just use a DDNS updater. That’s honestly good enough for most purposes.

Alternatively, you could use a service like Zerotier, Tailscale or Netbird to create a virtual private LAN connection to a free Oracle VPS, then route the traffic from the VPN to your home network.