Link - https://twitter.com/ClareDalyMEP/status/1747323130060697682
They already Community Noted her - Clare Daly is a highly controversial Irish politician who was accused of nepotism, support for dictators like Putin and Assad, causing divide in European parliamentary left, and arguably doesn’t represent not just dead Irish ancestors but also majority of living Irish.
When you ask the average Joe on the street what “western” means, they think “the countries where rich white people are”, it’s really that simple, nobody is out there talking about hemispheres or gps coordinates, any other definition is ad hoc, uncommon, and personalized
That sentence literally just describes the entire world
Let’s clock how ad hoc this kind of logic is by using a country I’m familiar with; Morocco or the Maghreb: name literally means “the west”, close links with America and Western Europe historically, politically, and even culturally; by the definitions used in this thread, it’s a western country
See what happens when you don’t stick with the obvious conclusion that even your average Long Islander figures out intuitively
your imaginary Long Island schlub exhibits the base layer of ‘the West’ being, in many cases a simple “us vs. them”. but the writers and politicians who made the thing up have had to justify it in more detail, and they’ve always introduced contradictions. working from the ‘intellectual’ justifications & calling out the inconsistencies is an important step toward undermining the vulgar team mentality of the schlub
although idk why we’re arguing about it here as if we’re vested, when we should all agree ‘the west’ is a liberal term and we have our own terms [core/periphery, imperial/colonial etc]