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Post by hibernicus on Mar 28, 2022 23:49:36 GMT
Graham Linehan describes how his criticism of transgender ideology has caused him to be harassed by a Twittermob, his career has been wrecked and his marriage has broken up. The story includes examples of tweets gloating over his misfortunes and proclaiming that he deserves no pity because he is part of a 'cult" that persecutes transgenders. (Presumably the "cult" is a reference to Terfs, so-called Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists.) www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10648259/Father-Ted-creator-Graham-Linehan-breaks-tears-trans-attacks.html I remember how disgracefully Mr Linehan behaved in the campaign to repeal the `Pro-Life Amendment, and how in many ways he is characteristic of the smug atheist - but he still deserves our sympathy here, because he is being persecuted for telling the truth - namely that not only is the Emperor wearing no clothes, but that the Emperor is not in fact the Empress. Which would be obvious if he's not wearing any clothes. Exactly my point.
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 30, 2022 22:50:21 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 18, 2023 19:51:01 GMT
Christopher Caldwell's column in the current SPECTATOR remarks that where St Patrick's Day was one a working-class Lenten indulgence in US cities with large Irish/Catholic populations "it now represents what Ireland stands for in the modern consciousness - abortion and corporate tax avoidance". 'Tis true, and pity 'tis 'tis true.
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Post by hibernicus on May 13, 2023 0:37:42 GMT
An interesting analysis of the Irish political classes, and the wider public, both in relation to the dominant view that modernity must be embraced at any cost ('La Revolution est un bloc' as Clemenceau said when arguing that it was not possible to renounce the Terror without also renouncing the Revolution) and the self-sealing alliance of media, politicians/administrators and NGOs. What he misses out on is the generational difference - there were two waves of 'modernisation' one beginning in the 60s and the other in the 90s. The first wave was somewhat more ambivalent about modernity but those who were critical of it couldn't come up with a coherent alternative (or thought it was more malleable than has turned out to be the case). The writer is describing the second generation, which came onstage as the last of the 50s generation retired. thecritic.co.uk/the-irish-experiment/
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on May 16, 2023 9:27:41 GMT
An interesting analysis of the Irish political classes, and the wider public, both in relation to the dominant view that modernity must be embraced at any cost ('La Revolution est un bloc' as Clemenceau said when arguing that it was not possible to renounce the Terror without also renouncing the Revolution) and the self-sealing alliance of media, politicians/administrators and NGOs. What he misses out on is the generational difference - there were two waves of 'modernisation' one beginning in the 60s and the other in the 90s. The first wave was somewhat more ambivalent about modernity but those who were critical of it couldn't come up with a coherent alternative (or thought it was more malleable than has turned out to be the case). The writer is describing the second generation, which came onstage as the last of the 50s generation retired. thecritic.co.uk/the-irish-experiment/There really seems to be a "here's to us, wha's like us?" attitude in this country. We are aiming to be a model blue state, without allowing any reflection or self-criticism and without in the self-awareness that we are replicating the same mentality that allegedly prevailed in hyper-Catholic Ireland from another point of view. My own pet conspiracy theory. The governing classes only give lip service to the European movement free movement of labour (premise). I can't prove this, but as exhibit A, I say: no great effort is made to actually teach European languages at school - to learn one is obliged either to continue them to third level or live in a European country shortly after Leaving Cert. I doubt the basics are imparted, and this is despite having a head start among the English-speaking world by having near universal teaching of a second language through primary school (which is much more successful at imparting English on Irish speakers than vice versa, but necessity rather than teaching methods is the driver here). Can't prove it as I said, but I can at least say this isn't given the seriousness it deserves and I don't believe there is any desire to see highly trained young professionals move to continental Europe with ease.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 1, 2023 20:42:41 GMT
The British and the Americans are also notoriously weak on learning languages, which may suggest it reflects English-language dominance of international pop culture. The numbers of young professionals who move to the Anglosphere might also tell against Benedict's theory (though such factors have entered into government policy in the past - in the 60s and 70s universities were pressurised to limit the numbers of medical graduates because of their propensity to emigrate.)
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Jun 7, 2023 16:22:29 GMT
During the holidays I have been looking back through some recent issues of MOLOCH'S HERALD and found myself suffering from IRISH TIMES poisoning. A typical detail - one of their entertainment columnists was referencing a TV showing of THE SOUND OF MUSIC and commented "This is a film about singing Austrian refugees from Nazism. In this alternative universe the Catholic Church actually helps them". These may not be the exact words, but it's the gist of them - in particular, the innuendo that in "real life" the catholic Church would have been on the side of the Nazis. Now anyone familiar with the real-life story of the Von Trapps, or with the story of the "church struggle" and the numerous Catholics martyred by the Nazis will know how far from the truth this was. It is certainly the case, and we should never forget it, that the Church's record under the Third Reich was not perfect, that there were Catholics of all stations who sided with the Nazis or who compromised with them to varying degrees - but this sneer is a denial of the historic record pure and simple. Just thought I would requote this post as an example of ignorance among journalists.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 9, 2023 22:30:21 GMT
The depressing thing is that a sizable proportion of the readership will regard this as simple common sense. That's what Gramsci meant by "hegemony".
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 11, 2023 22:47:31 GMT
The latest issue of HISTORY IRELAND has an interesting article by Henry Jeffries arguing that Silken Thomas's Rebellion was genuinely religiously motivated rather than being a hamfisted political manoeuvre. One interesting detail which I hadn't known - Silken Thomas's wife was a daughter of Blessed Adrian Fortescue, an English Knight of Malta martyred under Henry VIII.
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Jul 14, 2023 9:22:08 GMT
The latest issue of HISTORY IRELAND has an interesting article by Henry Jeffries arguing that Silken Thomas's Rebellion was genuinely religiously motivated rather than being a hamfisted political manoeuvre. One interesting detail which I hadn't known - Silken Thomas's wife was a daughter of Blessed Adrian Fortescue, an English Knight of Malta martyred under Henry VIII. This is fascinating - I have lived with the image of Silken Thomas flinging the sword of state into the table in St Mary's Abbey in fury. Didn't his supporters kill the then Archbishop of Dublin (Allen, I think), who was going along with Henry's schism (this would have been George Browne's immediate predecessor). One tragedy of the rebellion was the suppression of St Mary's College, Maynooth, founded in 1518 by the Geraldines, which was the most successful third level institution from the point of view of longevity before the reformation. Other attempts came to nothing.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 26, 2023 22:34:33 GMT
Last week Michael McDowell had a column criticising the highly prescriptive curriculum on personal development/RSE/social matters which the government is concocting, on the "liberal" grounds that the state should not react against former church indoctrination in schools by imposing an indoctrination of its own. Since this will be unpopular in certain quarters Senator McDowell deserves credit for saying it. There are two noticeable flaws in his argument, however: (1) He seems to believe that a school, or by extension a society, can get by without any overall ethos. This is fallacious, and his mistake reflects the liberal belief that society can be run on procedural grounds without any substantive doctrine (in the broadest sense) - a doctrine will be implicit in the procedures chosen. (2) He states - and I suspect he is right, that nominally Catholic schools in practice don't teach certain doctrines which he dislikes. He says he doesn't think that a single school in the country teaches that contraception is wrong even in marriage, and that he knows of only one instance of a (lay) teacher trying to teach pupils that homosexual activities are wrong - the students refused to listen. This raises the awkward question of how McDowell would react to schools which did teach these doctrines. To be fair to him, I don't think he is trying to deceive - he is simply saying this is unlikely to arise, and so it does not occur to him to address the question of principle about what would happen if it did arise.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 22, 2023 19:38:38 GMT
Yesterday (Monday 21st) the sociologist Tom Inglis had a column in the IRISH TIMES. After reminiscing about how he was brought up to believe in a literal devil, which he now regards as a form of social control associated with sexual guilt, and surmising that few Irish people nowadays believe in a personal devil, he concludes by suggesting that instead of thinking of God as transcendent and a Person, we should see Him as imminent in, and equated with, the natural world, and see the human race as the devil which is destroying the natural world just as we were formerly told that by succumbing to the devil's temptations we were contributing to Jesus's sufferings. A few thoughts: (1) At least Pontius Pilate wondered what truth was - the concept seems completely irrelevant to Dr Inglis. (2) We are often told that old-time Irish Catholicism was Jansenist. Even Jansenists never maintained that the human race IS the devil. (3) Religions which regard the natural world as an immanent deity of which humanity is part and to which it must make sacrifices have historically tended to have... interesting features: www.goodreads.com/quotes/913625-this-is-the-mighty-and-branching-tree-called-mythology-whichCertainly the pagan does not disbelieve like an atheist, any more than he believes like a Christian. He feels the presence of powers about which he guesses and invents. St. Paul said that the Greeks had one altar to an unknown god. But in truth all their gods were unknown gods. And the real break in history did come when St. Paul declared to them whom they had worshipped. The substance of all such paganism may be summarized thus. It is an attempt to reach the divine reality through the imagination alone; in its own field reason does not restrain it at all..... There is nothing in Paganism whereby one may check his own exaggerations.... The only objection to Natural Religion is that somehow it always becomes unnatural. A man loves Nature in the morning for her innocence and amiability, and at nightfall, if he is loving her still, it is for her darkness and her cruelty. He washes at dawn in clear water as did the Wise Man of the Stoics, yet, somehow at the dark end of the day, he is bathing in hot bull’s blood, as did Julian the Apostate.” ― G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
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Post by assisi on Aug 31, 2023 10:57:42 GMT
Yesterday (Monday 21st) the sociologist Tom Inglis had a column in the IRISH TIMES. After reminiscing about how he was brought up to believe in a literal devil, which he now regards as a form of social control associated with sexual guilt, and surmising that few Irish people nowadays believe in a personal devil, he concludes by suggesting that instead of thinking of God as transcendent and a Person, we should see Him as imminent in, and equated with, the natural world, and see the human race as the devil which is destroying the natural world just as we were formerly told that by succumbing to the devil's temptations we were contributing to Jesus's sufferings. A few thoughts: (1) At least Pontius Pilate wondered what truth was - the concept seems completely irrelevant to Dr Inglis. (2) We are often told that old-time Irish Catholicism was Jansenist. Even Jansenists never maintained that the human race IS the devil. (3) Religions which regard the natural world as an immanent deity of which humanity is part and to which it must make sacrifices have historically tended to have... interesting features: www.goodreads.com/quotes/913625-this-is-the-mighty-and-branching-tree-called-mythology-whichCertainly the pagan does not disbelieve like an atheist, any more than he believes like a Christian. He feels the presence of powers about which he guesses and invents. St. Paul said that the Greeks had one altar to an unknown god. But in truth all their gods were unknown gods. And the real break in history did come when St. Paul declared to them whom they had worshipped. The substance of all such paganism may be summarized thus. It is an attempt to reach the divine reality through the imagination alone; in its own field reason does not restrain it at all..... There is nothing in Paganism whereby one may check his own exaggerations.... The only objection to Natural Religion is that somehow it always becomes unnatural. A man loves Nature in the morning for her innocence and amiability, and at nightfall, if he is loving her still, it is for her darkness and her cruelty. He washes at dawn in clear water as did the Wise Man of the Stoics, yet, somehow at the dark end of the day, he is bathing in hot bull’s blood, as did Julian the Apostate.” ― G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man I no longer buy into the trope used by many liberal and atheist types that they were terrified by the idea of the Devil and scuttled away from Christianity because of this. I recently heard a similar claim from a popular young online atheist Alex O'Connor (Cosmic Skeptic) that a fire and brimstone devil scared him off Christianity and it was cruel to him to have to hear such things. Now O'Connor is in his early twenties and one wonders where he would have heard such things growing up in modern England. My take is that these atheist use this as a way to justify their atheism and lack of belief by using emotional reasons. They simply don't want to believe and the scary devil bit allows them an 'out' that blames someone or something else. There is also an implicit contradiction in Inglis ideas. In some ways he is actually recreating the devil as humanity and seems to be saying that there is good and there is evil, concepts that you would think he would not support. As for sexual guilt, I'm afraid that Inglis will suffer this whether he believes in the devil or not. It is part of the natural law, a function of the conscience. Guilt is a necessity, so that if we do something immoral, our conscience tells us that it is bad and we ought not to repeat it.
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Sept 13, 2023 12:53:13 GMT
Well, if many atheists actually worship a god with a striking resemblance to themselves, they also have a talent for inventing devils. Somewhere in the Brothers Karamazov a character answers the charge that the devil is made by man with the retort that if that is so, it's made in man's own image and likeness. Inglis, is generalising, but is aiming at the human race.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 14, 2023 23:13:35 GMT
To be fair to Inglis, he is quite old and has written elsewhere about the conservative Catholic upbringing which he received, so he may not be in the same boat as the younger posers mentioned above. What is striking is that he does not see that he is advocating exactly the sort of moral blackmail he speaks of elsewhere, but sees no problem with it when it's for a cause he favours. He is also a striking example of the genetic fallacy, which assumes that you have disproved a belief/practice by describing its social function. ("The WARNING - DON'T GO INTO THE CRATER sign was designed to scare people away from the volcano - therefore it is just fine to climb down into the crater.")
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