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Post by loughcrew on Jul 15, 2012 11:20:02 GMT
The trouble with Gilmore and co. is that they deny their own roots in rural Catholic Ireland and bring shame to the generations who went before them, not to put too fine a point on it but they would sell their grannies if they thought it would buy them kudos with the chattering class.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 15, 2012 20:22:43 GMT
The problem is that thy're not selling it - which would imply knowledge that it possesses some value, however misunderstood. They ARE the chattering class and they are throwing away the Faith which sustained their "grannies" because they can't see its worth compared to a little fleeting pleasure: One whose hand/ Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away/Richer than all his tribe.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 10, 2013 19:27:25 GMT
The Scottish Catholic blogger Lazarus discusses how secularist calls for "freedom from religion" are potentially and to a considerable extent actually extended to complain that their rights are being infringed if they even come into contact with religion, or if the state funds any activity which has a religious aspect however incidental. The result is that state schools' Christmas celebrations dare not include anything that mentions Christ, even though this excludes the majority of classical Western choral music. Scotland is like Ireland in some respects in that they have state-funded Catholic schools and a vocal secularist commentariat demannding secularisation. (One complaint made by both Lazarus and Tom Gallagher is that some religious believers who backed the SNP because they thought it was a way of escaping from the secularist luvvies of the London Establishment are finding that the nats have their own brand of highly influential secularist luvvies who see independence as an opportunity to make Scotland modern - that is, even more secularist than England). Coming soon to Irish schools (though I suspect it has come to them to some extent already) courtesy of Ruairi Quinn and Co, and of Fine Gael and Fianna Fail who would acquiesce in the re-establishment of human sacrifice to Crom Cruach if it would get them a penny off their income tax. cumlazaro.blogspot.ie/EXTRACT ...I had a slight epiphany reading Jacques Berlinerblau's article (reblogged here by the New Oxonian): My guess, however, is that the majority of American nonbelievers are not bent on abolishing religion. Their (legitimate) gripe is only with the most power-mad and theocratically inclined forms of religion. If permitted to find their voice (and if ever approached by the media) I think they would not express a desire for religion to disappear but aspire for a much more modest goal: freedom from religion. It's probably symptomatic of my dumbness, but I hadn't thought of secularism like this before. I'd tended either to take seriously their claims that they were only interested in separating religion and the state (in which case I was very much underwhelmed by the quality of their arguments); or I assumed that 'secularism' is simply one of the public faces of New Atheism and their real aim is to make religion disappear (and although I still think this sums up most of the reality of the secularist clubs, it doesn't quite do them justice). But if you just think of your common-or-garden atheist or agnostic, they probably just don't want to be bothered with religion: they want to be free from it in the same way as I would like to be free from chuggers or 'Ted' phoning from some call centre in India to try to get me to change energy suppliers. However, there is a problem, and it's a problem which explains much of the inherent inconsistency in secularism. To say ' I wish to be free from x' can cover a seriously political point about not wanting to have my life and death determined by x, or it can cover the trivial point of never having to brush up against x. Atheists have a perfectly good point in arguing that they don't want to have their life and death determined by Christianity; they have rather a worse point in arguing that they don't want to brush up against Christianity. Take for example the 'Secular Charter' which forms part of the Constitution of Secular Scotland: f) Religion plays no role in state-funded education, whether through religious affiliation, organised worship, religious instruction, pupil selection or employment discrimination. g) The state does not engage in, fund or promote religious activities or practices. If we are to take 'no role' or 'religious activity' strictly, then most of Western classical choral music is ruled out. Now, at least some of the concerts I have (and will) attend consist pretty much of Christian material: Masses, carols etc. If we are to take the Secular Charter at its word, then none of this should be financed by the state. Now, I suspect that, for at least the less lunatic among secularists, such performances of art music, even if Christian, are not that problematic. But if they are not problematic, it isn't because of any principle, but simply because they are willing to tolerate this in a way that they apparently are not willing to tolerate the equally harmless 'time for reflection': we are at the mercy of a fairly fluid and arbitrary sensibility here rather than any firm principled distinction between 'time for reflection' and singing the Creed. One of the side effects of this deep rooted indeterminacy at the heart of 'wanting to be free from religion' is that it is my impression that non-Catholic state schools shy away from overtly Christian material in musical performance. Part of this is undoubtedly due to a general shying away from classical music in state schools. (But then that too is part of a cultural suspicion of anything written by dead white Christian men.) In any case, while voluntary choirs and private schools get to grips with the glories of the Western European musical canon -which is, with apologies to Secular Scotland, a predominantly Christian canon- non-denominational State schools are left with the occasional carol, and the fear that, when the wind blows again, some nutty secularist parent will be on the phone complaining that their precious darling is being brainwashed by having to sing about the Nativity. Perhaps in a few years time, school choirs will be reduced to singing versions of The Killers' Don't Shoot Me Santa Claus. I think that's safely secularist enough: END
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 23, 2017 21:11:56 GMT
This is a very serious development. Human Life International Ireland were to hold a conference in a Dublin hotel, but the booking was cancelled by the hotel due to a systematic campaign to organise its disruption, involving direct threats. In other words, the Twittermob are starting to treat pro-lifers as equivalent to racists and neo-fascists. Would a similar campaign against a pro-abortion meeting have been widely covered and condemned,and treated as proof that pro-lifers are thugs? Yes Will this piece of thuggery get any significant attention from our media defenders of free speech? Don't make me laugh. www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2017/09/22/irish-hotel-cancels-pro-life-conference-after-intimidation/This is being discussed on Politics.ie with some pro-aborts engaging in remarkably dishonest suggestions that this wasn't intimidation (e.g. that HLI are lying and cancelled the conference because they couldn't get enough attendees: www.politics.ie/forum/health-social-affairs/259197-abortion-information-illegal-invoices-nhs-10.htmlHere's a really outrageous example: EXTRACT petaljam petaljam is offline petaljam's Avatar Join Date Nov 2012 Posts 21,172 Quote Originally Posted by Mushroom View Post So Iona win one censorship battle, only for the Club Retard/Foetus Killers Collective to win the next: Anti-abortion group left fuming after hotel cancels their booking over 'intimidation' - Independent.ie And so on and on and on ad nauseam. So a Union whose role is to represent all its members, not just the views of its president, choosing to censor its own information booklet which is supposed to give information is somehow the same as a hotel making a business decision not to alienate customers? Right. END OF EXTRACT The version of "logic" on display here would imply that the photo at the first link below has nothing to do with intimidation and simply shows 1930s German shopkeepers making a commercial decision to avoid alienating their neighbours. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_boycott_of_Jewish_businesses#/media/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_102-14468,_Berlin,_NS-Boykott_gegen_j%C3%BCdische_Gesch%C3%A4fte.jpg en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_boycott_of_Jewish_businessesBut the likes of Petaljam assume they are able to define truth as whatever they say it is, and they will be left unchallenged: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie
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Post by Young Ireland on Sept 28, 2017 18:46:28 GMT
This is a very serious development. Human Life International Ireland were to hold a conference in a Dublin hotel, but the booking was cancelled by the hotel due to a systematic campaign to organise its disruption, involving direct threats. In other words, the Twittermob are starting to treat pro-lifers as equivalent to racists and neo-fascists. Would a similar campaign against a pro-abortion meeting have been widely covered and condemned,and treated as proof that pro-lifers are thugs? Yes Will this piece of thuggery get any significant attention from our media defenders of free speech? Don't make me laugh. www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2017/09/22/irish-hotel-cancels-pro-life-conference-after-intimidation/This is being discussed on Politics.ie with some pro-aborts engaging in remarkably dishonest suggestions that this wasn't intimidation (e.g. that HLI are lying and cancelled the conference because they couldn't get enough attendees: www.politics.ie/forum/health-social-affairs/259197-abortion-information-illegal-invoices-nhs-10.htmlHere's a really outrageous example: EXTRACT petaljam petaljam is offline petaljam's Avatar Join Date Nov 2012 Posts 21,172 Quote Originally Posted by Mushroom View Post So Iona win one censorship battle, only for the Club Retard/Foetus Killers Collective to win the next: Anti-abortion group left fuming after hotel cancels their booking over 'intimidation' - Independent.ie And so on and on and on ad nauseam. So a Union whose role is to represent all its members, not just the views of its president, choosing to censor its own information booklet which is supposed to give information is somehow the same as a hotel making a business decision not to alienate customers? Right. END OF EXTRACT The version of "logic" on display here would imply that the photo at the first link below has nothing to do with intimidation and simply shows 1930s German shopkeepers making a commercial decision to avoid alienating their neighbours. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_boycott_of_Jewish_businesses#/media/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_102-14468,_Berlin,_NS-Boykott_gegen_j%C3%BCdische_Gesch%C3%A4fte.jpg en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_boycott_of_Jewish_businessesBut the likes of Petaljam assume they are able to define truth as whatever they say it is, and they will be left unchallenged: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lieThey've struck again: a conference by rape survivors has been forced to move to another hotel in Dublin after the hotel cancelled their booking due to fear of protests: www.lifesitenews.com/news/abortion-activists-threaten-to-protest-rape-survivors-event-hotel-cancelsI think that if a boycott was started against business refusing to patronise pro-lifers, people might think twice before turning away business. Alternatively, we could start a boycott of hotels that accommodated pro-abortion events, which would have the same effect. If the pro-aborts object, we can just say that we are being consistent and that they are doing the exact same thing, so they have no right to complain.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Sept 28, 2017 21:18:33 GMT
I'm entirely in favour of boycotts as a weapon, but I somehow doubt there is sufficient will to make one effective. It's remarkable that tens of thousands of people are willing to come out for a prolife march in Ireland, but that any other sort of concerted action, such as voting for prolife candidates, seems impossible.
Personally, I think a better strategy is to fling these incidents in the face of pro-abortion speakers in EVERY debate.
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Post by annie on Sept 28, 2017 22:30:45 GMT
Know your enemy - Alinsky tactics summarised:
Rules for Radicals
In 1971, Saul Alinsky wrote an entertaining classic on grassroots organizing titled Rules for Radicals. Those who prefer cooperative tactics describe the book as out-of-date. Nevertheless, it provides some of the best advice on confrontational tactics. Alinsky begins this way: What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away. His “rules” derive from many successful campaigns where he helped poor people fighting power and privilege
For Alinsky, organizing is the process of highlighting what is wrong and convincing people they can actually do something about it. The two are linked. If people feel they don’t have the power to change a bad situation, they stop thinking about it.
According to Alinsky, the organizer — especially a paid organizer from outside — must first overcome suspicion and establish credibility. Next the organizer must begin the task of agitating: rubbing resentments, fanning hostilities, and searching out controversy. This is necessary to get people to participate. An organizer has to attack apathy and disturb the prevailing patterns of complacent community life where people have simply come to accept a bad situation. Alinsky would say, “The first step in community organization is community disorganization.”
Through a process combining hope and resentment, the organizer tries to create a “mass army” that brings in as many recruits as possible from local organizations, churches, services groups, labor unions, corner gangs, and individuals.
Alinsky provides a collection of rules to guide the process. But he emphasizes these rules must be translated into real-life tactics that are fluid and responsive to the situation at hand.
Rule 1: Power is not only what you have, but what an opponent thinks you have. If your organization is small, hide your numbers in the dark and raise a din that will make everyone think you have many more people than you do.
Rule 2: Never go outside the experience of your people. The result is confusion, fear, and retreat.
Rule 3: Whenever possible, go outside the experience of an opponent. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.
Rule 4: Make opponents live up to their own book of rules. “You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”
Rule 5: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It’s hard to counterattack ridicule, and it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage.
Rule 6: A good tactic is one your people enjoy. “If your people aren’t having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.”
Rule 7: A tactic that drags on for too long becomes a drag. Commitment may become ritualistic as people turn to other issues.
Rule 8: Keep the pressure on. Use different tactics and actions and use all events of the period for your purpose. “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. It is this that will cause the opposition to react to your advantage.”
Rule 9: The threat is more terrifying than the thing itself. When Alinsky leaked word that large numbers of poor people were going to tie up the washrooms of O’Hare Airport, Chicago city authorities quickly agreed to act on a longstanding commitment to a ghetto organization. They imagined the mayhem as thousands of passengers poured off airplanes to discover every washroom occupied. Then they imagined the international embarrassment and the damage to the city’s reputation.
Rule 10: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. Avoid being trapped by an opponent or an interviewer who says, “Okay, what would you do?”
Rule 11: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Don’t try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies. Identify a responsible individual. Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame.
According to Alinsky, the main job of the organizer is to bait an opponent into reacting. “The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength.”
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 29, 2017 21:36:29 GMT
Very appropriate. The point about the Alinsky rules is the demonisation and isolation of the opponent, so that they are seen as beyond the pale of decency and most people will not even ask whether they have a case. This is part of the PEnal Days comparison. Another point is that they are much better organised on social media and have Big Media more or less in the bag. (Note how the INDO headline about the HLI cancellation went "Prolifers fuming as.." in other words, it was being treated as a laugh; but if pro-lifers forced the cancellation of a pro-choice event, it would be something about fascist intimidation.)
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 15, 2017 20:14:47 GMT
An interesting article about the ways in which secularism is increasingly understandable as a rival, intolerant religion centred on the sexual revolution. (I should caution, though, that Mary Eberstadt is a campaigner whose central theme is the family and who attributes secularisation to the decline of family relationships, so she probably underestimates other factors which have created this situation.) Nevertheless, she has picked up on something important. It is noteworthy, for anyone who recalls the 70s and 80s, how social attitudes and popular culture have moved from the view that we should be less harsh and intolerant to fornicators (and we were too harsh and intolerant - anyone who denies that is morally blind deaf and dumb) to the view that promiscuity is and should be the norm, that anyone who disagrees is a hypocrite or a monster (probably both; the clerical abuse scandals have greatly reinforced this attitude, one of the many ways in which our teeth are set on edge from our predecessors' misdeeds) and that if killing babies is necessary for sexual freedom, then the babies must be killed. www.firstthings.com/article/2018/01/the-zealous-faith-of-secularism Part of this development is that certain questions can't be asked. For example, the IRISH TIMES had the story below on their front page, but will they stop jeering at those social conservatives who warned of opening the floodgates long enough to consider the possibility that some of the family-undermining measures the IRISH TIMES has promoted over the decades had something to do with this situation? (Note: I am NOT saying that everything in the garden was rosy and that family breakdown and homelessness didn't 'exist back in the day - only that when the IT publishes articles about people who leave their spouses not because they have done them any harm but because they want to "find themselves", they spread attitudes which make people less willing to stick it out and live up to their responsibilities.) www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/relationship-breakdown-top-cause-of-family-homelessness-1.3327947 They are stepped so far in blood that should they wade no more, return would be as tedious as go o'er.
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Post by Young Ireland on Dec 15, 2017 20:26:28 GMT
An interesting article about the ways in which secularism is increasingly understandable as a rival, intolerant religion centred on the sexual revolution. (I should caution, though, that Mary Eberstadt is a campaigner whose central theme is the family and who attributes secularisation to the decline of family relationships, so she probably underestimates other factors which have created this situation.) Nevertheless, she has picked up on something important. It is noteworthy, for anyone who recalls the 70s and 80s, how social attitudes and popular culture have moved from the view that we should be less harsh and intolerant to fornicators (and we were too harsh and intolerant - anyone who denies that is morally blind deaf and dumb) to the view that promiscuity is and should be the norm, that anyone who disagrees is a hypocrite or a monster (probably both; the clerical abuse scandals have greatly reinforced this attitude, one of the many ways in which our teeth are set on edge from our predecessors' misdeeds) and that if killing babies is necessary for sexual freedom, then the babies must be killed. www.firstthings.com/article/2018/01/the-zealous-faith-of-secularism Part of this development is that certain questions can't be asked. For example, the IRISH TIMES had the story below on their front page, but will they stop jeering at those social conservatives who warned of opening the floodgates long enough to consider the possibility that some of the family-undermining measures the IRISH TIMES has promoted over the decades had something to do with this situation? (Note: I am NOT saying that everything in the garden was rosy and that family breakdown and homelessness didn't 'exist back in the day - only that when the IT publishes articles about people who leave their spouses not because they have done them any harm but because they want to "find themselves", they spread attitudes which make people less willing to stick it out and live up to their responsibilities.) www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/relationship-breakdown-top-cause-of-family-homelessness-1.3327947 They are stepped so far in blood that should they wade no more, return would be as tedious as go o'er. They would probably deny, in the usual fashion, that there is any correlation at all and that anyone who does make such a link is simply being hysterical.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 15, 2017 22:57:11 GMT
If they were a bit more honest they might say that even if there is a connection, self-realisation is an absolute value which must never be compromised; or they might say that the suffering involved in family breakdown is less than that involved in unhappy marriages. (The second is really identical with the first, because there's no way of measuring and comparing the two.) But they generally don't face up to the fact that there is a choice involved, because that would imply someone might legitimately make the other choice.
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Post by annie on Dec 17, 2017 10:47:19 GMT
An interesting article about the ways in which secularism is increasingly understandable as a rival, intolerant religion centred on the sexual revolution. (I should caution, though, that Mary Eberstadt is a campaigner whose central theme is the family and who attributes secularisation to the decline of family relationships, so she probably underestimates other factors which have created this situation.) Nevertheless, she has picked up on something important. It is noteworthy, for anyone who recalls the 70s and 80s, how social attitudes and popular culture have moved from the view that we should be less harsh and intolerant to fornicators (and we were too harsh and intolerant - anyone who denies that is morally blind deaf and dumb) to the view that promiscuity is and should be the norm, that anyone who disagrees is a hypocrite or a monster.
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Post by annie on Dec 17, 2017 10:50:19 GMT
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Post by assisi on Dec 20, 2017 19:31:07 GMT
It is sad that these women choose to live like this. It effectively means that 50% of people they interact with in daily life (i.e. males) are the enemy or potential enemy, from boy to man. Such a life would be almost unsustainable, no wonder so many fell apart in later life.
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Post by annie on Dec 21, 2017 18:12:56 GMT
It is sad that these women choose to live like this. It effectively means that 50% of people they interact with in daily life (i.e. males) are the enemy or potential enemy, from boy to man. Such a life would be almost unsustainable, no wonder so many fell apart in later life. The opposite of an error is often the opposite error but sanity may yet prevail... www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2017/12/the-sexual-crisis-is-a-crisis-of-character
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