James Connolly, born on this day in 1868, was an Irish socialist revolutionary, founder of the Irish Citizen Army (ICA), and leader of the Easter Rising rebellion, for which he was executed by the British government.

Connolly was born in a poor Edinburgh neighborhood and spoke with a Scottish accent. He joined the British Army at age 14 to escape poverty and developed a hatred for the institution from firsthand experience. He deserted when his regiment was set to deploy to India.

He was also member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and founder of the Irish Socialist Republican Party. With labor radical James Larkin, he was centrally involved in the Dublin lock-out of 1913, after which the two men formed the Irish Citizen Army (ICA) the same year.

Connolly was opposed to British rule in Ireland and played a leading role in the Easter Rising of 1916, signing the “Proclamation of the Irish Republic” and serving as Commandant of the Dublin Brigade, the regiment that played the most substantial role in the Rising. Connolly was executed by firing squad following the Rising’s defeat.

“If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organization of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.”

James Connolly

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  • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.net
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    5 months ago

    It’s borderline embarrassing how long it took humans to discover germ theory, like compared to counterintuitive nonsense like miasma, humors, or spontaneous generation, little bugs you can’t see good is not exactly high concept, talk about a collective L for the species

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      5 months ago

      Miasa wasn’t that far off. They understood airborne transmission but had the mechanisms wrong. They understood quarantine and isolation.

      It only seems obvious in retrospect.

    • StalinStan [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      5 months ago

      The presence of animolequles is entirely counterintuitive. It must have seemed like cosmic horror to the first generation to get a microscope and realize there are entire universes living on their skin.

      • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.net
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        5 months ago

        Sure it’s shocking but not any more horrifying than “a demon has taken over your body”, and considering how much of human existence has been rural you’d think people would’ve figured out a thing or two just by observing insects of all sizes in their natural environments, I mean ancient people learned how to make complex dyes from bugs, that’s hardly intuitive

        It’s wild to me how simple folk wisdom like “little bugs can get inside you and make you sick” never seemed to have developed anywhere, even tho plenty of ancient and medieval scholars figured it out on their own, but the fact their ideas never entered the canon in my view speaks to a frustrating kind of obtuseness that’s still alive and well even to this day

        • StalinStan [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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          5 months ago

          We knew about parasites. Several cultures had traditions of parasites that turned out to be not real. Tooth worms for example. Alot of elf stuff from north Europe tracks as paracites as well.

          It is just the scope of the microcosmose is impossible to intuit. Even today we largely don’t nderstand or appreicate the real ramifications of biology and just kinda wing it. We generally have a strong bias against anything we can’t see. Even allowing for that, there is no way to intuit from any natural method that the green stuff on bread is made infinite yeast cells that were likely there before it was baked and have hyphated through the substrate. The spore part they got close with miasma.

        • buckykat [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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          5 months ago

          Wait til you realize how long it took people to realize that small creatures like bugs and even mice actually have life cycles and don’t just spontaneously pop up when there’s enough rotting meat or grain.

          • StalinStan [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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            5 months ago

            You would have to be real bored to not around and watch flies fuck and they were kinda busy trying to not starve to death. Even then, if you watch flies fuck there is no particularly sensible way to watch flies lay eggs that turn into maggots. That then pupate to flies. The metamorphosis is kinda wild if you really think about it. Like, if you were gonna break that down into observable events to draw a flip book you couldn’t do it without lots of explanation you know.

            • buckykat [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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              5 months ago

              They thought migratory birds came from mud until they found one with an African arrow still in it.

              Also, the experiment that proved flies don’t just spontaneously generate from rotting meat was literally just letting meat rot in a jar with a cloth over it.

              • Commiejones [comrade/them, he/him]@hexbear.net
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                5 months ago

                They fucking had chickens there is no way the believed that other birds came form mud. Some ignorant fucks that never touched grass thought that birds came from mud but everyone else knew what was up.

                  • StalinStan [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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                    5 months ago

                    If they laid eggs you would be able to find them someplace. People were created from dirt, birds fly close to heaven, they appear after the winter thay when the mud is exposed. It is equally as reasonable to a person who couldn’t imagine a world as large as the range those birds migrate.

                    The scientific method hasn’t been invented yet.

    • FungiDebord [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      5 months ago

      Hey bro, you’re sick because of invisible bugs bro. And the tide is being influenced by the moon bro, just like the horoscope readers say, trust.

      Literally sounds like rubbish.