I think finding out that Hitler was inspired by how throughly Andrew Jackson committed genocide against the Natives would shatter or at least destabilize the ethos of the Founding Fathers & America for a lot of people
the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law of the United States.
Big chunks of the American legal system and history inspired the nazi’s in their organisation of the Holocaust.
Welp
At bare minimum, America was founded on two massive crimes against humanity: native genocide and slavery. To pretend that it’s some pristine shining beacon of freedom actually weakens us as a country, because we don’t deal with the demons of our past, which makes us vulnerable to continued injustice.
For people to cast realism as “hating America” is disgusting. We’re a flawed nation built on a good principle that we applied unevenly. Admitting that and trying to do better is strength, not weakness.
so a racist got utterly demolished in less than 30 seconds on the New Zealand morning news on Monday and it’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen
who knew a white guy could be capable of such an iconic response, he knows what’s up and is having none of that shit, every other white guy take notes tbh
I love that he said Pakeha
Can someone write what its being said in this?
Male co-host: We have had a whole heap of feedback regarding
Te Tai Tokerau MP Kelvin Davis’s proposal to institute a prison run on Māori
values into New Zealand. He’s looking at potentially establishing this prison
up north. It isn’t Labour policy just yet, it’s just an idea of Kelvin Davis’s.
And this has been really really divisive on our Facebook page this morning. (sarcastically)
Here I think we have the single greatest email, the single greatest message we
have ever had on breakfast.
(clears throat deliberately) “’Janice’ says: Good morning. I’m
sick of hearing that Māori need different treatment. If they don’t want to live
in our society, then maybe we should put them all on an island and leave them
to it.”
Male co-host: “Janice. That is LITERALLY what happened! That
is the history of our country. Last I checked, Māori WERE on an island, they
were left to it, and then Pākehā (Māori term for white New Zealanders) turned
up and look how that worked out. But thank you very much for that brilliant
insight. Goodness me. Unbelievable. Unbelievable, they actually-“
Female co-host: “Actually, you can’t even get angry, you
just actually need to laugh and then screw it up and put it under the desk.
Just when you thought-“
Male co-host: (mimicking letter) “’Put them all on an
island, leave them to it.’ Yeah. What a great idea that is Janice.
I really need “What a great idea that is, Janice.” to be a meme filled with those stupid complete cognitive dissonance bigoted statements.
Gaelic hasnt been lost. It’s never died or been brought back. There’s an unbroken line of native speakers going back to the beginning of the language. That doesn’t seem like a ‘lost’ language to me. Furthermore I’m not sure what ‘artificial life-support’ means in this context. Gaelic is given funding for schools because there’s still native speakers of the language. It’s no more artificial than money being given to schools for English language lessons.
If anything is ‘artificial’ its the imposition of a foreign language
(English) into a Gaelic majority zone and native speakers having to
fight for decades to be able to be taught in their own language. Native speakers being forced to learn English to exist within their own regions because a central government would not allow services to be given in a people’s own language.
But then the clock only goes back so far with people who wish that minority languages would just die. There’s nothing artificial about shooting someone but suddenly it becomes an ‘artificial’ act to maybe phone an ambulance?
“There’s nothing artificial about shooting someone but suddenly it becomes an ‘artificial’ act to maybe phone an ambulance?” — THIS RIGHT HERE
Also just gonna point out here:
In the UK, the languages Gaelige, Gaelic, Cymraeg and Kernewek (that’s Irish, Scottish, Welsh and Cornish respectively) didn’t just “die out.” There was a concerted effort by the English to kill them off.
For example, in Wales, if a child was heard speaking Welsh in a classroom, they’d be given a “Welsh Not”, a wooden plaque engraved with “WN” to hang around their neck. They’d pass it onto the next child heard speaking Welsh, and whoever had the Welsh Not at the end of the day was punished – usually with a beating.
Kernewek was revived after a long hard struggle by the Cornish folk, and is now being taught again, but a lot about it has been lost because everyone who grew up speaking it has died.
And languages are never revived “just because.” The language of a place can offer so much insight into its history, so if you’re content to let a language die then you’re content to let history die.
People talk about “dead” languages as if they dwindle away gradually, naturally coming to an end and evolving into something else, but that’s rarely the case. Languages like Cymraeg and Gaelige and especially Kernewek didn’t have the chance to die with dignity, they were literally beaten out of my parents and grandparents.
Is it any wonder every other country hate the English? We invade their country, steal their history, claim pieces of their history as ours or flat out re-write it, and kill every part of their culture that we can.
It’s a miracle that any of the Celtic languages survived, so even if you don’t see the point in keeping them alive, the actual natives of each country we’ve fucked over are clinging onto what heritage they have left through the only thing they can: their language.
Hey OP, póg mo thóin!
*snerk* xD
I would like to point all of these “just let it die” assholes directly at Hebrew.
The language was effectively dead. It had been murdered and forced-assimilated away.
But there was this dude named Ben Yehuda.
And he said “no.”
“The language of my people for four thousand years or more,” he said, “should not stop existing because of a bunch of assholes.” (Okay, this is a dramatic retelling. He probably didn’t actually say assholes.)
So he started an official movement to recreate Hebrew as closely as possible to how it had been spoken about a thousand years prior.
Today, ancient Hebrew is spoken by millions of Jews around the world weekly in our prayers and Torah readings, and modern Hebrew is the official language of eight and a half million people–many of them having been born speaking it as a first language. Many people in the first group also speak at least some modern Hebrew–and it’s possible you do, too! A lot of loan words from Hebrew and Yiddish have made their way into English (like klutz, mensch, and kibitz).
That’s hardly “on life support.” Hebrew is growing, living, and thriving because of the Enlightenment efforts of the 1800s. The same COULD be done for languages like Welsh, Navajo, and Basque if the larger powers that be said “this is important” rather than forcing a giant bastion of culture–the language in which a people lived, loved, thought, told stories, and explained their world–to die.
Never trust anyone who wants to diminish the methods in which meaning is conveyed.
A language is only dead, if life transcends its power to remain eloquent.
I mean for fucks sake, we still teach Latin in school. I don’t see why we shouldn’t teach other “dead or dying” languages, in fact there should be more of an emphasis on these languages specifically because many people still speak them and different languages can have great cultural significance from region to region.
People should check out the Wampanoag Language Reclamation Project – the language had been wiped out, but they’re working on piecing it back together and relearning it. There’s at least one native speaker now, the first in generations.
“The name Hitler does not offend a black South African because Hitler is not the worst thing a black South African can imagine. Every country thinks their history is the most important, and that’s especially true in the West. But if black South Africans could go back in time and kill one person, Cecil Rhodes would come up before Hitler. If people in the Congo could go back in time and kill one person, Belgium’s King Leopold would come way before Hitler. If Native Americans could go back in time and kill one person, it would probably be Christopher Columbus or Andrew Jackson. I often meet people in the West who insist that the Holocaust was the worst atrocity in human history, without question. Yes, it was horrific. But I often wonder, with African atrocities like in the Congo, how horrific were they? The thing Africans don’t have that Jewish people do have is documentation. The Nazis kept meticulous records, took pictures, made films. And that’s really what it comes down to. Holocaust victims count because Hitler counted them. Six million people killed. We can all look at that number and be rightly horrified. But when you read through the history of atrocities against Africans, there are no numbers, only guesses. It’s harder to be horrified by a guess. When Portugal and Belgium were plundering Angola and the Congo, they weren’t counting the black people they slaughtered. How many black people died harvesting rubber in the Congo? In the gold and diamond mines of the Transvaal? So in Europe and America, yes, Hitler is the Greatest Madman in History. In Africa he’s just another strongman from the history books.”
— Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (via christymtidwell)
Anyone who thinks this is anti-Semitic is wilfully misreading the text. The discussion is about how Euroamerican history is elevated and used to humanize the cost of white bodies over that of the Global South under Euroamerican colonialism.
No one is saying Holocaust deniers don’t exist. But almost everyone in the world learns about it, of who Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini were. The rest of us are just erased or shrugged off like our dead don’t matter. It’s not because Jewish people are privileged in Europe and America, it’s because Jewish people are PART of Euroamerican history and the Holocaust serves the narrative of British-American war heroism.
Anti-Semitism exists and is no less a problem than racism. But you can’t use that to silence PoC struggles or to police our words.
There are white folks who come to see our war monuments (1983 – 2009, hundreds of thousands dead) and scoff that the Holocaust was way worse. Let that sink in.
Jewish descendants have passing privilege, which is this awful in-between where they get to be “white” when people question why they’re being targeted to make it seem less racist, but get to be “not” when armed Nazis are circling their temples again.
The US’ Holocaust obsession isn’t about “these guys are paler than the other ones, cool!”
It is about reputation guarding against the fact that the US was the admitted inspiration for Hitler’s level of horrors.
We’d go back in time to kill Columbus because that might have stopped that specific wave.
No doubt another conqueror’s death farther back (or even at the same time as Columbus) would have disrupted his methods, too.
I agree with most of the above mentioned – I’m just cautious of any grounds that reminds me of the “Jewish folk are white” rhetoric that occasionally goes around.
@ people who were not born in Ireland and particularly Americans
– It is not Patty’s Day, it is Paddy’s Day. Patty is short for Patricia, Paddy is short for Pádraig which has been anglicised to Patrick.
– It is not Gaelic, it is Irish. In Irish, the language is called Gaelige but that’s pronounced Gwayl-geh.
– Literally no one in Ireland has ever eaten corned beef and cabbage
– We have also never said top of the morning
– If you pinch an Irish person for not wearing green on Paddy’s Day they’re likely to slap you.
– Why do you dye your drinks green?
– It is not “North Ireland” it is “Northern Ireland”. It is not “South Ireland” it is “The Republic of Ireland” or just “Ireland”.
– No, I do not know the Dohertys of Mayo.
– Please, if you must, do things for the craic and not the crack. Cocaine is not a great habit lads.
– Drinks like the “Irish car bomb” and the “black & tan” are incredibly offensive (you wouldn’t drink a “9/11”)
However
– Wearing green is grand
– Having a few drinks is also grand, they don’t even need to be Irish (I drink a Swedish cider most of the time)
– Aye sure queue up some Irish music on youtube it’s great.
– If you want one Irish word to use throughout the day a good one is Sláinte (pronounced slawn-sha) – it’s the equivalent of saying “cheers” before you drink!
Please be respectful on Holidays like this! It’s great to join in and show your respect & appreciation for other cultures celebrations, but remember to actually do that! Have fun, but stay respectful to the culture and religion. 😊
Fun history of corned beef and cabbage.
Beef is cheap in America (lots of land, lots of cows, so there’s such a thing as cheap cuts). So a lot of immigrants who could never afford beef in their home country now had access to beef.
(Example spaghetti and meatballs is an Italian-American invention).
Now Americans hated immigrants (plenty stilldo sadly) and hated anyone who wasn’t Protestant so you had segregation. So in New York the Irish Catholic area was next to the Jewish area. There was solidarity between American Irish and American Jewish immigrants. So Irish-Immigrants bought corned-beef from Jewish butchers.
(In Ireland, you may eat bacon or lamb for St Patrick’s Day, but lamb was (and is) expensive in America, and Irish Immigrants got their meat from Kosher butchers – no bacon).
Brisket is a cut of meat from the front of the cow. It’s a very tough cut of meat. The salting process (it’s like soaked in salt for over a week) and cooking for hours and hours (it’s an all day stew) makes it tender.
So corned beef and cabbage is a dish that evolved out of affordable ingredients (tough cut of beef, cabbage and carrots and potatoes are dirt cheap) and proximity to Jewish immigrants.
St. Patrick’s Day Celebrations as we know them now (parades and the like) were started in America by Irish-American immigrants. Because WASP Americans (white, Anglo Saxon, Protestants) hated Catholics and hated the Irish.
And for all immigrants there was a big push to assimilate (give kids English sounding names, forget your language, become Protestant). But people don’t give up religion easily, names and language maybe, but not God.
So still today you have Irish Catholics, Italian Catholics, Mexican Catholics, etc and even Americans who aren’t practicing Catholic or aren’t religious may view being raised Catholic as part of a cultural identity linked to their heretage (the same way someone who doesn’t practice Judaism is still Jewish, some difference since Judaism is a hereditary religion, but for immigrants in a country that hates Catholics, being Catholic, having that tradition was and is part of being an outsider to American, part of an identity those in power hated and tried to erase).
So holding giant Irish pride parade celebrating the Catholic patron Saint of Ireland was sort of a “fuck you” to anti-Catholic anti-Irish sentiment. A “fuck you” to the idea that being an American meant erasing your traditions and history and pretending to be a White Anglo Saxon Protestant.
Look at us being proudly Irish and still Catholic. Obnoxiously, visibly Catholic and acting ways that the puritanical Protestants hate.
So what was a family religious Holiday became a big, visible celebration of heretage and homeland (a shared identity). And since it’s a celebration immigrants splurged by buying a big cut of beef (beef is cheaper in America, but immigrants did not have a lot of money and meat is still more than vegetables, so any cut of beef was still a special occasion thing) and supported their Jewish neighbors who ran the butcher’s shop.
(also, since it’s a St’s Feast, Lent restrictions on meat and drinking alcohol didn’t count, so eat a lot of meat and drink).
St Patrick’s Day in the US has its own history, heretage and ties to religion (and persecution for that religion). Traditions are tied to that history. So Corned Beef and Cabbage may not be a thing in Ireland but it’s a part of Irish-American tradition, history and culture.
In later centuries, when the cattle raids were long done, the majority of Irish people still didn’t eat very much beef – because it was still much too expensive. Those who did eat beef, tended to eat it fresh: corned beef again surfaces in writings of the late 1600’s as a specialty, a costly delicacy (expensive because of the salt) made to be eaten at Easter, and sometimes at Hallowe’en. – Then other factors, tragic ones, made beef even rarer in the Irish diet. It often astounds people to discover that, during the worst years of the Great Famine, among much other food, Irish tenant farmers were still exporting hundreds of thousands of barrels of salt beef (“corned” beef, it then came to be called, because of the grain or “corn”-sized chunks of salt used in the preserving process) to Britain and Canada. But that was beef that the farmers were raising on behalf of the landlords who owned the land on which they lived and worked: they couldn’t touch it themselves, and couldn’t possibly afford what little fresh beef came on the market in their areas.
Many Irish people, during that period, got their first taste of beef when they emigrated to America or Canada – where both salt and meat were cheaper. There, when they got beef, the emigrants tended to treat it the same way they would have treated a “bacon joint” at home in Ireland.
In all the interactions, whenever ‘rape’ is brought up, it does not feel like an honest question posed, or a problem that people yearn to discuss. It is not asked. Rather, it is stated to me. The people involved then feel like an interview panel, where one interviewer hurls a complex topic at you, saying, “discuss!” and the others just watch. As I begin to answer, I notice people’s eyes on me. Eyes thirsting to see how I tackle the question, so they can either get their answers about rapes in India or note how Indian women talk about rapes in India.
The thing that I hate about atheism as a movement is that it doesn’t just want to critique the hegemony of Western Christianity, it wants to kill spirituality. There is no joy, there is nothing about it that isn’t founded in a pessimism that sees itself as so self-important that it cannot exist outside of destruction. The face of atheism is a white male disgruntled ex-Christian who decided that if he can’t find joy in religion, then nobody else can. There’s a leftover missionary sensibility to “enlighten” people to atheism that exposes itself as racist, antisemitic, and islamophobic, that’s ultimately not unlike the dominance exerted through colonial Christianity
A reminder that it’s illegal in the USA to collect or sell the feathers of wild birds (and their eggs, bodies, and nests) even if you find them lying on the ground, unless you have a permit to do so. As in, actually illegal, not “outdated law everyone has forgotten about and is no longer enforced”. Eagle parts are extra illegal.
How about bones?? Not like bird specifically just animal bones in general. Also why is it illegal?? There so many birds ergo so many feathers no ones gonna miss em
The specifics depend on your state, the situation, and whether the species is a game animal, but usually, it’s illegal unless you are licensed (ex for educational purposes).
There really aren’t “so many birds”. The populations of many species are rapidly declining due to habitat loss and pollution. I’ve seen birds of prey autopsied and their insides are often coated in plastics. Pesticides and rodenticides wipe out truly horrifying numbers of larger birds – please only ever use mechanical traps for mice and rats, not poisons.
The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 was passed four years after the last passenger pigeon died. It discourages the personal and commercial collection of bird parts for very good reason.
Oh, Ship! Tag me in on this one, I’m ready!
So, the history of Wildlife law in the United States goes way back, actually, to the history of wildlife law in Great Britain.
See, in Ye Olden Days, the King was in charge of deciding who was and wasn’t legally allowed to hunt. This was a Big Deal, because many people needed to hunt to feed and clothe themselves and their families. If the King said “you can’t hunt anywhere near where you live because those are My Deer,” you were, well, fucked.
Eventually, this power of wildlife ownership was technically redelegated to parliment, but hunting often remained super inaccessible to anyone but the wealthy, privileged few.
So when people started coming here from there, it was a total free-for-all. You could hunt anywhere, anything! There were things to shoot in the US that had been extinct in the British aisles for centuries, even!
So not only were people hunting for food, clothing, to drive out unwanted animals (see: wolves), but also for the hell of it because they were allowed!
For a while though, hunting was still very much an “I need to eat” business. Can’t fault ‘em for eating, ya know?
But once Europeans became really established here, with cities and leisure time and fashion, things got way out of hand.
There were pretty much No laws dictating how many animals a person could take, or when and from where they could take them.
What’s more is, suddenly, it wasn’t just for food, it was for MASS PRODUCTION! You know what women REALLY wanted? Hats With Feathers. Lots Of Feathers.
People were already killing Many Birds, but not Enough. “We need to kill WAY MORE BIRDS and FASTER,” they said. So they made These Big Guns.
They were made for mounting on boats, and who gave a damn about ammo? ANYTHING that could presumably maim a duck was a go. They loaded them with pieces of tin, metal, shards of broken glass, ya know. The usual.
Then, at night, during Mating season, they’d go out onto the water, shine a light so that all the ducks raised their heads to investigate, fire the gun, and instantly decapitate hundreds of ducks a shot. It was wild.
So this was happening
And the REASON this was happening was there was a demand for these ducks, feathers, mainly. Meat second.
The demand is what’s imperative here. It didn’t matter if you had the means to kill 100 or 1000 birds in a night. If you shot ‘em, someone would pay for ‘em.
You can see where this started going wrong, however. Eventually, there were like, uh, no birds left to shoot.
So now everyone’s starting to say, “well, what the hell…it seems that shooting All Of The Birds At Once has somehow wiped them out. Maybe we should do something about this.”
NOW, that was NOT a popular move. People were really loving the whole “I can kill anything any time I want” thing going on. They argued that limiting their take would violate their rights and freedoms (never mind the hypocrisy of claiming any rights to the wildlife of this land that had been taken from the indigenous peoples they’d killed and driven out).
But responsible hunters knew that wildlife and hunting laws were imperative to the continued existence of wildlife.
This wasn’t a new concept, mind you. Responsible Wildlife laws are even in the damn Old Testament:
“If you come across a bird’s nest in any tree or on the ground, with young ones or eggs and the mother sitting on the young or on the eggs, you shall not take the mother with the young.” Deuteronomy 22:6
Makes sense, right? Eat the eggs but make sure the mother remains to lay more.
And more than a century before, John Quincey Adams is quoted in reference to the issue:
“I went with my gun down upon the marshes, but had no sport. Game laws are said to be directly opposed to the liberties of the subject; I am well persuaded that they may be carried to far, and that they really are in most parts of Europe. But it is equally certain that where there are none, there is never any game; so that the difference between the country where laws of this kind exist and …where they are unknown must be that in the former very few individuals will enjoy the privilege of hunting and eating venison, and in the latter this privilege will be enjoyed by nobody.”
ANYWAY. Point was, people were realizing that if things didn’t change fast, there’d be nothing left to hunt, to eat, or to use for Fancy Hats.
So we got the Lacey Act of 1900, the first federal wildlife law.
“I have always been a lover of birds, and I always been a hunter as well, for today there is no friend that the birds have like a sportsman-the man who enjoys legitimate sport. He protects them out of season; he kills them with moderation in season.” John Lacey.
It limited market-hunting and commercial wildlife trafficking. People with Super Duck Guns were especially unhappy about this. However, if ducks understood federal laws, they would’ve been thrilled.
The problem was, there was still a HUGE demand for feathers, for meat, and absurdly, for specimen for people’s private collections. “I don’t CARE if that’s the last known living Auk. I want it.”
So they had it.
What we needed to do was to destroy the demand for bird products. And to destroy the demand, we had to stop products from being made. If no one is walking down the street wearing a Fancy Bird Hat, no one else is going to say “oh! I want one too,” and no one is going to pay a Fancy Hat Maker to pay a Big Duck Gun owner to shoot 1,000 birds.
So we got the Migratory Bird Treat of 1918, which made it almost totally across the board illegal to own Any bird parts (excluding legal game birds, but laws about when and how many you could hunt were forming to protect them).
There is a misnomer that taking something off the legal market will increase demand because people love what they can’t have. That’s proven untrue in this case. Very few people are actually willing to break Actual Federal Law in order to own a hat they can’t wear in public. The issue was larger society and for the most part law-abiding citizens who wore this stuff while it was legal but moved on once it wasn’t.
The reason it still exists is to keep the demand for bird parts non-existent, and it’s WHY you can’t legally collect feathers even when they fall off a bird naturally.
Because hey, YOU may live in an area with a healthy golden eagle population. Or a Blue Jay population. Or Red headed woodpeckers. YOU find their feathers all the time! They just fall off, no harm done.
So you pick them up, make them into cool jewelry and art, and post them on your etsy and pinterest.
They’re super popular! People love them!
Now I want in on that business!
But there aren’t many golden eagles, blue jays, or woodpeckers around me, so I don’t find their feathers often. But you know what’s way easier than looking for one, fallen feather? Shooting a bird and getting a lot at once.
And thus an innocent market has once again created an unsustainable demand that will threaten bird populations.
And that’s why it’s just flat out against Federal US law to own, collect, or sell almost any wild bird parts!
And MAKE NO MISTAKE! This law is Very Enforced. Wildlife officers Do pay attention to people talking about collected bird parts, and they Will throw the book at you. The fines are wild. Don’t risk it.
THANKS FOR READING THIS LONG-ASS EXPLANATION!
This is a beautiful history of why wildlife protection laws matter. This is why I’m so stringent about people adhering to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
This this this! I have people all the time asking me for feathers from my bird. I’m sorry but the birds I fly are protected by the MBTA. I can keep my bird’s feathers for imping, or trade with another falconer for imping, but I cannot just give them out to anyone who asks. I can also donate them to a registry that collects for Native Americans. But that is all.
Those videos looking at 18th century English women’s clothing–and my continuing horror at the idea of regularly having to wear that many layers including stays to do any kind of work–reminded me of one period journal that just about choked me to death laughing when I ran across it several years ago.
It’s not just me imagining that pretty much all my folks were naked savages by certain standards, by that point.
(As an Anglican missionary, dealing with people who were mostly not English and not at all interested in the still-official colonial Church of England.)
Here I found a vast Body of People assembled—Such a Medley! such a mixed Multitude of all Classes and Complexions I never saw…I was a Great Curiosity to them—And they were as great Oddities to me. After Service they went to Revelling Drinking Singing Dancing and Whoring—and most of the Company were drunk before I quitted the Spot—They were as rude in their Manners as the Common Savages, and hardly a degree removed from them. Their Dresses almost as loose and Naked as the Indians, and differing in Nothing save Complexion—I could not conceive from whence this vast Body could swarm—But this Country contains ten times the Number of Persons beyond my Apprehension.
Swarming aroud busily engaged in Revelling Drinking Singing Dancing and Whoring, while next to naked. Sounds like quite an experience for Charles!
Withal there is such a Republican Spirit still left, so much of the Old Leaven of Lord Shaftsbury and other the 1st principal Settlers still remains, that they seem not at all disposed to promote the Interest of the Church of England—Hence it is that above 30,000£ Sterling have lately been expended to bring over 5 or 6000 Ignorant, mean, worthless, beggarly Irish Presbyterians, the Scum of the Earth, and Refuse of Mankind, and this, solely to ballance the Emigrations of People from Virginia, who are all of the Established Church.
Tell us what you really think, Charles! (OK, I was intending to stick to the horrible nakedness. But that describes a decent chunk of the scum he was trying to convert. Also, the Virginia he mentions didn’t include the “frontier”. Filled with the exact same refuse of Mankind.)
Anyway, back to the horrible nakedness.
It would be (as I once observ’d before) a Great Novelty to a Londoner to see one of these Congregations—The Men with only I a thin Shirt and pair of Breeches or Trousers on—barelegged and barefooted—The Women bareheaded, barelegged and barefoot with only a thin Shift and under Petticoat—Yet I cannot break [them?] of this—for the heat of the Weather admits not of any [but] thin Cloathing—I can hardly bear the Weight of my Whig and Gown, during Service. The Young Women have a most uncommon Practise, which I cannot break them off. They draw their Shift as tight as possible to the Body, and pin it close, to shew the roundness of their Breasts, and slender Waists (for they are generally finely shaped) and draw their Petticoat close to their Hips to shew the fineness of their Limbs—so that they might as well be in Puri Naturalibus—Indeed Nakedness is not censurable or indecent here, and they expose themselves often quite Naked, without Ceremony—Rubbing themselves and their Hair with Bears Oil and tying it up behind in a Bunch like the Indians—being hardly one degree removed from them—In few Years, I hope to bring about a Reformation, as I already have done in several Parts of the Country.
That seems to have worked out for him about as well as one might expect.
And of course old Charles wasn’t looking at those fine limbs at all, as he sweltered in his proper wig and gown. Never mind the probable outrage at just how often that one degree of separation broke down. (With all the Revelling and Whoring! And not so sexualized nakedness going on, apparently! 😨)
I can only imagine that the man would have gone down almost as big a treat dealing with working Londoners up close.
But, definitely some pretty big differences in historical dress norms, depending on where and who you were.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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