On the madness of the Irish, for colonialist science

Experts and statistics have found that Irish people, in Ireland and America both, have much higher rates of mental illness than most other ethnic groups.

A Google search I did pulled up some astonishingly stupid articles. If you take for granted the legitimacy of the concept of mental illness and its criteria and are only curious about why so many people of a certain group or kind fall under it, then you are doing social science in a servile and stupid way. Where is it proven that the concepts for categorizing people and their disaffections or difficulties, by having the presumptive authority of "science"-- that these concepts are disinterested and objective?

"Science" is invoked as if that were a singular thing and a mere body of facts, whose theories that make possible the finding of those facts require no substantiation other than the correspondence to the fact that the theories themselves make possible, or visible.

So there are serious academic papers discussing what must be wrong with so many Irish people and their families. (That is, with their culture).

It does not occur to these people that the dominant scientific thinking on such matters has developed within categories of modern thought and that, particularly in the case of English-language social science, are English or Anglo-American and Protestant.

It is true that the Irish, like the Jews, the Africans, the Chinese, and others were "latecomers to modernity," as is sometimes said. But excuse me, sirs and madams, lords and ladies (in a country that is medieval enough to still have them), just one thing: which "modernity," whose modernity, and is that too a given? The Irish were less modern in the "modern" period than the English because the English colonized them (and enslaved many and murdered many others) and colonialism just is modernity on the "master race's" or culture's terms. So in the end what we can conclude is this: A lot of the Irish are crazy and in ways that are dangerous and bad-- according to the English who colonized them. Because every colonized people are regarded as dangerous and bad, and primitive or crazy, by the colonizers.

Now in America there are a great many rather conservative Irish people, just like there are conservative Italians and Jews. It's a pretty conservative country, so that shouldn't surprise you. Our culture, American culture, is English by language and political tradition. Its cultural traditions, thank God, are a bit more mixed. But I can tell you that -- without affirming any stupid nationalism of any kind, which is so much of a temptation to so many people in the late modern world -- and it generally leads nowhere by way of great enthusiasms and some amount of easily coopted ways of being oppositional. There is lots of that in America today, right? Sometimes it's about race, or gender, or even religion--but much of it is a diversion from real issues. But at the same time, without going off the deep end into something stupid like looking for my own flag to wave -- I can tell you that when someone acts in a way that I am able to recognize (and affectively, this is almost automatic) as representing norms or values or notions that are oppressive and really seem to amount to little more than a way of using the system against you on the part of people who want to feel strong and empower exercising their capacities -- when I notice this and it seems oppressive, I smell the thought of an English person! Or someone who thinks like them, in the English language and in the thoroughly English traditions of legal and political thought and organization that this country adopted merely with an assertive revolutionary ethos and feeling as the wiggle in its style.

Mental illness, my ass. Give me another drink. Progressive social workers improving the world by taking care of all of us poor losers who have bad sociological influences and dispositions, as your "science" shows, -- why don't you just fuck off?

I am not against science but bad science, and bad ideas of it. Science is inquiry, it is not a set of true facts. The same science that finds people like me crazy finds black people less intelligent. It's not true, but this belief has adhered, with the aid of statistics, to the very idea of IQ, which was invented in America after the Civil War in order to legitimate the continued subjection of black people, on a more free basis that did not so manifestly stem from practices of subjection like slavery.

I studied French and European thought because France is a republic which had a revolution -- like America, or so it is said (though American conservatives think they are oppressed if the post office delivers the mail, and liberty is standing your ground with a gun) -- while England is still the most backward and reactionary culture in Europe. I could live in a less English America, but of course, we should all by culturally hybrid polyglots.

I'm not crazy, a drunk, a fool, or a dirty bastard who needs a fucking social help system. Take your stupid governmentality and fuck off. Besides, you don't even know how to think. You call me abnormal, I call you servile. (Yes, that is an insult). You obviously have the wrong normal; why don’t you get a mind?