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Post by hibernicus on Mar 30, 2020 21:55:50 GMT
In a recent issue of THE IRISH TIMES Fintan O'Toole suggested as quarantine reading THE MILLER'S TALE, one of the bawdier tales in Chaucer's CANTERBURY TALES. One of its recommendations, according to Fintan, is that "the impoverished intellectual gets the girl". This is a nice example of Fintan's selectivity, because those of us who have actually read THE MILLER'S TALE will remember that the "impoverished intellectual" winds up being branded on the rump with a red-hot iron because he is too proud of his smartness and assumes his adversary is stupider than is actually the case. Very appropriate,just not the way Fintan thinks. Meanwhile, this critique of Fintan O'Toole's exercises in amateur psychoanalysis of John Bull over Brexit, and his confident predictions that Brexit will never actually happen, will bear careful reading by those of us who have noticed him practising the same party tricks at the expense of those of us who question any part of the liberal agenda, for the benefit of pseudo-intellectual readers of his IRISH TIMES column: thecritic.co.uk/issues/march-2020/fenian-fantasist/The sight of Fintan being portrayed as an unreconstructed Provo fellow-traveller has a certain delicate charm, in view of his long career of Stickieism.
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 21, 2020 23:24:06 GMT
Have been reading Fintan O'Toole's recent book on George Bernard Shaw. Two points that strike me as self-referential are O'Toole's praise of Shaw for disbelieving in cause and effect and not caring about logic so long as he got the right result (while there is indeed such a thing as the logician who ignores the bleedin' obvious, this sounds suspiciously like "Pay no attention to structural engineering so long as the bridge gets built" which is likely to have unforeseen consequences) and his discussion of how Shaw wanted to be God and the Devil at once (come to think of it, so does the Devil). We can now see where Fintan's shoddy argumentation and emotional manipulation in his newspaper column comes from, and how he poses as the great Rebel while laying down the Law from his well=feathered pulpits in the IRISH TIMES,GUARDIAN, NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS etc. etc. The difference between the eulogist and GBS is that Fintan is absurd without being funny. Later in the same book Fintan laments GBS's being a sucker for the interwar fascist and communist dictatorships. Does it not occur to him that belief in an absurd universe which can only be made amenable to human flourishing by a vigorous exercise of the will is apt to encourage dictatorship? One thing he misses out on, BTW, is that GBS had remarkable personal generosity and was willing to take considerable time trouble and expense to help friends, acquaintances, even strangers. No doubt Fintan thinks such mere charity (as distinct from wider social reform - to be fair, he does talk about GBS's considerable labour in local government to improve the conditions of the London poor) is not worth recording, but it is what makes me think that GBS had a great deal of good in him after all. May he rest at last where Lazarus is poor no longer.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 28, 2020 18:10:35 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 18, 2020 1:52:45 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 8, 2021 0:33:06 GMT
Fintan O'Toole's column last Tuesday begins with a confident assertion that the afterlife was invented to try to reassure people that life is fair after all, since suffering and injustice in this life are balanced out in the next. Fintan O'Toole obviously knows nothing about comparative religion, because belief in an afterlife is not necessarily correlated with belief in cosmic justice. The Homeric Greeks believed that the living man was the real being and the spirit a shadow; when Odysseus meets the ghost of Achilles and observes that the other shades do him homage, Achilles replies that he would sooner be a poor man's slave among the living than a king among the voiceless dead. Some sections of the Old Testament imply that the afterlife is so shadowy that it may not actually exist. Various forms of pagan belief in an afterlife rest on the opposite idea to what O'Toole assumes; that in the afterlife a king is still a king and his slaves serve him there as they did in life. The idea of cosmic justice which O'Toole assumes is much more specifically Abrahamic/Christian than he realises, and he is a nice illustration of Tom Holland's point about Western unbelievers resting on the Christian beliefs they think they have rejected. (Hindus and Buddhists do have a sense of cosmic justice founded on the idea of karma, but it is based on the assumption that individual existence is not the solution but the problem.) Really, if anyone knew as much as Fintan O'Toole thinks he knows but doesn't, they would make King Solomon look like a dunce.
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Post by assisi on Jan 9, 2021 13:14:28 GMT
Fintan O'Toole's column last Tuesday begins with a confident assertion that the afterlife was invented to try to reassure people that life is fair after all, since suffering and injustice in this life are balanced out in the next. Fintan O'Toole obviously knows nothing about comparative religion, because belief in an afterlife is not necessarily correlated with belief in cosmic justice. The Homeric Greeks believed that the living man was the real being and the spirit a shadow; when Odysseus meets the ghost of Achilles and observes that the other shades do him homage, Achilles replies that he would sooner be a poor man's slave among the living than a king among the voiceless dead. Some sections of the Old Testament imply that the afterlife is so shadowy that it may not actually exist. Various forms of pagan belief in an afterlife rest on the opposite idea to what O'Toole assumes; that in the afterlife a king is still a king and his slaves serve him there as they did in life. The idea of cosmic justice which O'Toole assumes is much more specifically Abrahamic/Christian than he realises, and he is a nice illustration of Tom Holland's point about Western unbelievers resting on the Christian beliefs they think they have rejected. (Hindus and Buddhists do have a sense of cosmic justice founded on the idea of karma, but it is based on the assumption that individual existence is not the solution but the problem.) Really, if anyone knew as much as Fintan O'Toole thinks he knows but doesn't, they would make King Solomon look like a dunce. It is almost as if Fintan fears the existence of an afterlife, surely not...
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 9, 2021 17:54:20 GMT
I don't think O'Toole fears the afterlife; it's that he is smug and complacent about his belief that it can't exist because it Isn't Cool. He's a bargain-basement version of the New Atheists, who pretend to employ reason when they are really using rhetoric as a substitute for analysis, to convince the gullible. Think of him as QAnon for Left-Liberals.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 9, 2021 18:03:15 GMT
Speaking of which, BTW, I think O'Toole got Brexiteers and Trumpists exactly backwards. He sees Brexiteers as fantasists, but they have actually succeeded in taking Britain out of the EU. They probably won't like the consequences when they set in, but the Brexiteers unquestionably aimed at a political objective and managed to achieve it. On the other hand, O'Toole sees Trumpists as revolutionaries, coup plotters and theocrats when in fact they are fantasists. Trump is mainly interested in magnifying his self-image and in his grift. (The latter BTW is what keeps him from being a full-blown sociopath; an all-out sociopath will choose self-destruction rather than face defeat, Trump just looks for a scapegoat so he can convince himself, and the gullible, that he "really" wins every time.) The unfortunate gullibles who stormed the Capitol came across as more like tourists than real revolutionaries. What sort of revolutionary posts pictures and messages about their actions on social media so law enforcement can find them? What sort of revolutionary declares they are fighting against a vast totalitarian conspiracy and invades government buildings, and is then surprised to be tear-gassed and shot at?
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Post by assisi on Jan 11, 2021 18:15:37 GMT
Speaking of which, BTW, I think O'Toole got Brexiteers and Trumpists exactly backwards. He sees Brexiteers as fantasists, but they have actually succeeded in taking Britain out of the EU. They probably won't like the consequences when they set in, but the Brexiteers unquestionably aimed at a political objective and managed to achieve it. On the other hand, O'Toole sees Trumpists as revolutionaries, coup plotters and theocrats when in fact they are fantasists. Trump is mainly interested in magnifying his self-image and in his grift. (The latter BTW is what keeps him from being a full-blown sociopath; an all-out sociopath will choose self-destruction rather than face defeat, Trump just looks for a scapegoat so he can convince himself, and the gullible, that he "really" wins every time.) The unfortunate gullibles who stormed the Capitol came across as more like tourists than real revolutionaries. What sort of revolutionary posts pictures and messages about their actions on social media so law enforcement can find them? What sort of revolutionary declares they are fighting against a vast totalitarian conspiracy and invades government buildings, and is then surprised to be tear-gassed and shot at? If anything Trump supporters are the opposite of revolutionaries. They see themselves as mostly God fearing patriots who like to think of themselves as independent, hard working and standing for law and order. I don't think they are fantasists. They simply see the rise of liberal madness which seeks to destroy their way of life and values and they react. Of course some of them have raised Trump to icon status, which is wrong, but it is completely understandable since they are a beleaguered set of people, under attack from all sides. And in a way, only a larger than life character like Trump could have even challenged the establishment - any other mainstream Republican would have failed in 2016. And in a way they have been proved right. We see now that big Tech and the mainstream media control the political and cultural narrative, and most mainstream political parties are nothing more than glorified puppets dancing to a corporate tune.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 14, 2021 2:54:29 GMT
I may continue this at more length on the "America" thread which is better suited for the subject, but I'll make a brief response here. My comment was not meant to refer to all Trump supporters and there were many reasons why people supported Trump (as the lesser of two evils, as someone who claimed to address such problems as the deindustrialisation of the American heartland, as someone who would avoid or play down foreign entanglements and who would face up to Chinese power). I would have voted third party in 2016 if I was American - I would probably have voted for him as a calculated risk in 2020, because he had to some extent helped the prolife movement (purely transactionally IMHO), because the Democrats are committed to promoting abortion and other evils as a positive good not only in the US but around the world, and because of revulsion at how the mainstream media openly abandoned even their usual pretence at being informative and openly campaigned against Trump and suppressed material that might help him. (I'm thinking of the Hunter Biden laptop, though I should also note that Trump and his family are accused of much worse corruption than that of which the Bidens are accused.) For Trump as a person I have never had anything but contempt since I became aware of him in the Clinton years. He always struck me as someone who sees his relations with other people purely in terms of power and self-glorification. This is particularly visible in his dealings with women, but the way he set up Mike Pence as a scapegoat for his loss on January 6 by blaming Pence for not refusing certification, which Pence had no power to do any more than returning officers in our Dail constituencies are entitled to refuse unilaterally to certify the returns, is characteristic of the man. Fintan O'Toole's coverage of Trumpism is full of bugaboos but he was not wrong in saying that part of Trump's persona is deliberate cruelty as an assertion of strength and dominance. Part of Trump's appeal is that he poses as an infallible leader who can never admit defeat or weakness, and this combined with America's cultural divides and social problems helped to create a classic cult situation, where the led want to believe in an infallible leader who will answer all their problems and give them hope, while the leader uses their devotion to reinforce his own sense of power and infallibility, and to silence or demonise internal dissent. This takes both secular forms - Trump as the strongman of the QAnon Cult, which is clearly run by grifters piggybacking on Trump's appeal and on wider suspicions of the elite (not all of which are imaginary) - or the widespread view among evangelicals and some trad Catholics that Trump is a Cyrus (the heathen ruler who was God's instrument to overthrow Babylon and return the Jews to the Promised Land) or even a Constantine enjoying divine favour and prophetic guidance. This mindset - like all forms of idolatry - inevitably leads to delusion, despair and self-destruction. One reason why the rioters who invaded the Capitol did not do more damage apparently was that they expected to be spectators of Trump's triumph, or at the least for him to tell them what to do instead of whipping them up and then going home to watch cable TV, so they found themselves at a loss. Apparently Trump support fora are currently full of bickering between Trump is a traitor" and "it's all part of his genius plan". Meanwhile the Democrats and establishment Republicans are using the fiasco to mount a purge going far beyond the cultists, while simultaneously promoting the cult of Saint Joe the Uniter (if only everyone would do what he recycled to tell them). www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmuAB5MqP0Y By the way, anyone who needed Trump to explain to them that big tech and the mainstream media control the narrative and most mainstream parties dance to a corporate tune must have been sleeping longer and more soundly than Rip Van Winkle.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Jan 14, 2021 9:50:03 GMT
By the way, anyone who needed Trump to explain to them that big tech and the mainstream media control the narrative and most mainstream parties dance to a corporate tune must have been sleeping longer and more soundly than Rip Van Winkle. But the point is that Trump will push against it like nobody else in a prominent position does. The very fact that he made Twitter ban him and called out mainstream media so openly, calling them fake news in press conferences etc., gives him a unique position and credibility here. Just by refusing to back down even one iota he makes it abundantly clear how near-totalitarian they are, and he encourages others. Just think how heartening it must be to millions of Americans to see the Trump rallies and realize that the media gas-lighting is just that, and that plenty of other people feel totally disenfranchised in the corporate-globalist-secular dispensation. In all honesty, I feel personally vindicated by a lot of what is happening in the world right now, especially with the internet purges that we are seeing. Anyone who goes through the archives of this forum, especially the threads on political correctness, the Alt Right (of which I am not a supporter but whose freedom of speech I absolutely support), and the thread on antisemitism and misogyny etc., will see me insisting on the paramount danger of political correctness and the need to push against it with as much force as possible-- that it would be Milo Yiannapolous in 2016 but the rest of us very soon. I encountered considerable resistance, scepticism and whataboutery. I think Trump is the greatest political figure of my lifetime. I would not vote for him reluctantly but with enormous enthusiasm. Sometimes I find his ruthlessness towards former allies excessive (I'm thinking of Steve Bannon rather than Pence, who I won't shed any tears for), but you have to remember the whole premise of his administration: Drain the swamp. He wasn't going to be deterred by personalities or cliques, and he wasn't. And let's not exaggerate matters. This is not 1930's Russia and he was not having former allies executed, or anything like it. I think Trump is the world's greatest hope to defend freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, religious freedoms, the sovereignty of the nation state, and so forth-- whether it's in a second Presidential term or simply as a political force in the background. I hope what Donald Trump Jr. said is true and the Republicans are Trump's party now. I'm praying they don't slide back to a Tea Party, globalist, make-the-world-safe-for-McDonald's outlook. I'm praying Trumpism becomes the American equivalent of Gaullism and the legacy outlives the man.
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Post by Young Ireland on Jan 14, 2021 22:21:49 GMT
By the way, anyone who needed Trump to explain to them that big tech and the mainstream media control the narrative and most mainstream parties dance to a corporate tune must have been sleeping longer and more soundly than Rip Van Winkle. But the point is that Trump will push against it like nobody else in a prominent position does. The very fact that he made Twitter ban him and called out mainstream media so openly, calling them fake news in press conferences etc., gives him a unique position and credibility here. Just by refusing to back down even one iota he makes it abundantly clear how near-totalitarian they are, and he encourages others. Just think how heartening it must be to millions of Americans to see the Trump rallies and realize that the media gas-lighting is just that, and that plenty of other people feel totally disenfranchised in the corporate-globalist-secular dispensation. That does not justify his recklessness though. Two wrongs do not make a right. (FWIW, I think an outright ban was rather harsh in Trump's case, though not entriely undeserved.)In all honesty, I feel personally vindicated by a lot of what is happening in the world right now, especially with the internet purges that we are seeing. Anyone who goes through the archives of this forum, especially the threads on political correctness, the Alt Right (of which I am not a supporter but whose freedom of speech I absolutely support), and the thread on antisemitism and misogyny etc., will see me insisting on the paramount danger of political correctness and the need to push against it with as much force as possible-- that it would be Milo Yiannapolous in 2016 but the rest of us very soon. I encountered considerable resistance, scepticism and whataboutery. To be honest, some of my fears about your attitude back then (that it would lead to a "my enemy's enemy is my friend" attitude) appear to be well-founded in retrospect.I think Trump is the greatest political figure of my lifetime. Greater than Reagan? Walesa? Thatcher? Seriously? I would not vote for him reluctantly but with enormous enthusiasm. Sometimes I find his ruthlessness towards former allies excessive (I'm thinking of Steve Bannon rather than Pence, who I won't shed any tears for) It should be remembered that it was Pence who was the impetus behind much of the outgoing administration pro-life and religious freedom policies, while Bannon's focus was mainly on immigration and isolationism., but you have to remember the whole premise of his administration: Drain the swamp. He wasn't going to be deterred by personalities or cliques, and he wasn't. Except his own personality cult, that is. And let's not exaggerate matters. This is not 1930's Russia and he was not having former allies executed, or anything like it. No, just setting mobs on them calling for them to be hanged. I think Trump is the world's greatest hope to defend freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, religious freedoms, the sovereignty of the nation state, and so forth-- whether it's in a second Presidential term or simply as a political force in the background. Even after he incited a mob to storm the Capitol? If so, rather than anticipating Trump's relection, we ought to brace ourselves for decades of Democrat Presidents, with all that entails, since Trumpism is as of last week a dead duck. I hope what Donald Trump Jr. said is true and the Republicans are Trump's party now. Given the way he threw Pence under the bus, and Mitch McConnell's flotation of the possibility of him voting to convict Trump, that really hasn't aged well. I'm praying they don't slide back to a Tea Party, globalist, make-the-world-safe-for-McDonald's outlook. Better for America to be a major player on the world stage for all its faults rather than leave a gap that will inevitably be plugged by the Chinese and the Russians. I'm praying Trumpism becomes the American equivalent of Gaullism and the legacy outlives the man.
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 18, 2021 22:33:31 GMT
Kevin Myers discusses Fintan O'Toole's habit of caricaturing people he disagrees with, as exemplified by a recent O'Toole column on the demise of Prince Philip. Whatever you think of Myers or Prince Philip, pro-lifers and conservative Catholics will recognise the O'Toole style. kevinmyers.ie/2021/04/14/sanctimonious-otoole-in-the-gutter-again/
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 19, 2021 21:06:43 GMT
I will keep an eye out for second-hand copies of Fintan O'Toole's current volume - a personal history of Ireland since 1958 - with the aim of reviewing it in due course. One claim that caught my eye is that Charlie Haughey presented himself as a conservative Catholic politician by attending John Charles McQuaid's funeral. Does he not know that Irish politicians notoriously will attend any funeral going if they see a chance of picking up a few votes?
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 1, 2023 0:57:25 GMT
Earlier this week Fintan O'Toole published an IRISH TIMES column noting the death of the former Intel chairman Gordon Moore (of Moore's Law - that computer chips double in power every 18 months - fame). Fintan recalls the arrival of Intel in Ireland in the late 80s, which he presents as a dark time of Magdalen asylums and mother and baby homes, as a welcome sign of modernity. He draws a series of elaborately blasphemous contrasts between Leixlip and Maynooth, between the Catholic advocacy of what he sees as an inhuman image of purity with the extreme cleanliness and controlled environment required for chip manufacture, between the Communion wafer and the microchip, and celebrates the triumph of modernity. Now there is some truth in these criticisms of 80s Ireland, though the changes he celebrates go back to the 60s and Intel might not have come to Ireland without, for example, the post-1960 expansion of education provision. At the same time, it is odd for someone who declares himself a socialist as persistently as Fintan to hail multinational capitalism as our personal saviour with such fervour, and methinks he assumes too easily that correlation equals causation. The same logic might suggest, for example, that the International Financial Services centre, established around the same time as Intel came to Ireland, should be unreservedly welcomed, whereas Fintan - with a good deal of reason - regularly criticises it as a glorified casino and stops just short of calling for it to be shut down.
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