Irish Political News

There has been some debate in the Irish media about a proposal to name the port tunnel after our recently deceased gangster-in-chief taoiseach. Why does nobody ever think of the bereaved women folk? Would somebody please think of the grieving women! It would be much more appropriate to remember the dearly departed CJ through the name of his lover.

* gets coat *

Fine Gael introduced a bill to the Dail trying to facilitate greater violence by homeowners against burglars. This bill has been in the offing for a while and is more or less a direct response to the Nally case last year, where a homeowner, Padraig Nally, was jailed for manslaughter for shooting a wounded traveller in the head at close range after he'd already shot him.

The bill itself was typical of the stupid crap that politicians get up to in the Dail:

1. It only dealt with acts inside the home, the 'intruder' in the Nally case never entered the house, he was just trespassing on Nally's land.
   
2. It would have made effectively no difference since the current law already gives homeowners the right to self-defence in their home. In general, the law mandates that victims should "retreat" wherever possible rather than "having a go", but one is not considered to be able to retreat from one's own home.
3. There are no known cases of householders who have been prosecuted for using reasonable force against burglars (shooting somebody and pursuing them to shoot them again and kill them is not generally considred a reasonable response to trespass).
   
4. The bill was never intended to pass and sure enough it was voted down by the government. It was simple law-and-order willy-waving for the benefit of the tabloids.
   

But what is even stupider than the whole sorry charade of this ridiculous bill were the claims made by Michael McDowell and Inda Kenny in the debate. Inda claimed that he had fought off two knife wielding muggers, while McDowell had defended his father's house with a poker from two burglars.

As I commented over on indymedia Ireland:

These stories are ridiculously implausible. Enda is an effeminate toff. McDowell is a rich-boy nerd who couldn't even make it onto the rugby team in a small school that is crap at rugby (although you can bet he wanted to, he fancies himself as "manly").

These stories are on the same level as Royston's "my dad was kidnapped by the UDA" and Kevin Myers's "I have received many death threats from the IRA" yarns.

Enda's story is particularly stupid. Anybody who "has a go" at two knife wielding desperadoes is an absolute idiot. The first thing that you learn in most martial arts is "if you encounter a stranger with a knife - no matter how good you are - give them what they want or run away". It is an indication of the pretentious, secondary school, slagging-match atmosphere that permeates the Dail that these idiots are swapping Rambo brags to compete about who's the toughest.

Now it seems that Enda had a Royston moment when he realised that some mischevious journalists were going to fact check this, look for garda reports and so on. He desperately changed his story to claim that the mugging took place in 1994 in Kenya. And how this had reference to Irish law is left unexplained. Also interesting to note that he has never mentioned this mugging in the intervening 12 years, for example in this debate about mugging from 1995, when he was minister for tourism, he names several of the most dangerous countries for mugging, but Kenya doesn't get a name check.

Badman thinks that the bad men are telling pork pies! Can we just cut to the chase and liven up the whole sorry excuse for an election campaign that we'll face for the next year. Inda gets a knife, McDowell gets a poker, all other TDs get molotovs. The floor of the dail is the fighting pit. Let's get it on and settle this like real men!

If you think that badman is a dubious type of dude with a suspicious proclivity to denounce others, you'd be right. On the other hand, a quick look at this brand new Irish Republican Self-Scrutiny blog should be enough to tell you that there are far shadier forces at play in the evolving and uncontrolled world of blogging.

Must try harder.

Although badman is an avid reader of the Irish blogosphere, he can't escape the fact that the vast majority of political / current affairs blogs are just unbelievably shit. The problem seems to be that everybody attempts to ape the snore-inducingly bland style of the mainstream media as soon as they get to blog (even right wing bloggers ape the mind-numbingly stupid outpourings of prejudice that passes as mainstream US news).

This means that bloggers are, as often as not, falling over themselves to be balanced, sensible and to sound moderate. That's a recipe for an awfully shit blog. It's only really when you get to the comments that there is much of interest in most blogs. There are, of course some honourable exceptions, but that's because they authors don't spend their time trying to sound as if they were a professional hack. Remember, bloggers, mainstream journalism is mostly reheated shite sandwiches.

Richard Waghorne has demanded that the Irish Times, the BBC, CNN and the rest of the "communist" media issue an apology for spreading disinformation. Speaking to Badman Anthem yesterday, Richard argued that: "for nearly 40 years now the pinko-leftie media have been reporting that the Apollo mission landed on the moon. We now discover that this was a hoax and it was all filmed on a film set in Hollywood".

Richard's revelation followed a friend sending him a link to a website. "There's a guy on this website, called moonmovie.com who has a video which proves everything" Waghorne explained "and he says he's won several industry awards".

In other news, Waghorne is also demanding a "correction" for media reports about the deaths of a group of Palestinian civilians on a Gaza beach. However, experts have dismissed his claims pointing out that "the website which he got this information from is far less credible than the moonmovie.com one, which for all of its problems has at least had some money spent on it. The israelnewsagency.com site, where Richard found this story looks like it has been put together by a 15 year old on speed. Plus, the moonmovie guy is offering to sell you his video, while the israeli video is apparently so "top secret" that nobody will ever see it. You'd have to be some moonbat to fall for that one."

Update Human rights watch finds Israeli shell shrapnel in the blast crater

"Human Rights Watch researchers have visited the site to examine the fatal crater and have interviewed victims, witnesses, security and medical staff. “There has been much speculation about the cause of the beach killings, but the evidence we have gathered strongly suggests Israeli artillery fire was to blame,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, director of the Middle East and Africa division at Human Rights Watch."

Update 2: Waghorne claims that the never-to-be seen top secret video also contains footage of islamo-fascist lizards planting shrapnel.

The BBC is reporting the deployment of 40,000 coalition troops on the streets of Baghdad. It is rumoured that their mission is to distribute sweets among the cheering, stars and stripes waving, freedom-loving populace. Or maybe that was just the fantasy version put about by the neo-cons?

* checks self into guantanamo for re-education *

In an astonishingly hypocritical sequence of posts Richard Waghorne calls for a "decent measure of respect" with regards to the dead crook charlie haughey. Immediately below this he repeats a long list of unproven accusations against the Gitmo suicides as fact. Not even the word "alleged" is used to indicate that the dead men have not been convicted of anything. In this case, not only have they not been convicted of any crimes, there does not appear to be sufficent evidence to even try them on any charges. But sure they're Ay-Rab terrorists anyway.

Respect the dead if they're white, rich and powerful.

Mark Humphrys is a computer scientist who lectures at DCU. He is also a right-wing fruitloop who has been slowly building a crazed web presence over the last few years.

His webpage is a series of incredibly long pages which list the various things he likes (freedom, the right, imperialism...) and the things he doesn't like (islam, the left, commies) according to his own exceedingly simple-minded taxonomy. Many, many things are "anti-west" and "anti-freedom" and all you have to do is look at North Korea to know it. Other things such as Guantanamo bay are apparently pro-freedom. Funny that.

His pages are conveniently written in the style of a stream of consciousness with little or no attempt to move beyond the simple-minded rant. This gives one the impression of one of those US based talk-show hosts whose ravings are of such intensity that they can barely pause for breath in between their denunciations.

The picture on the left and the quote below are probably sufficently typical examples of his style to allow one to get a good idea of his "child with a crayon" approach to political debate.

Pro-free private life: Atheist. Pro-science. Pro-reason. Pro-free speech. Pro-liberal democracy.
Pro-free economic life: Pro-capitalist. Pro-West.
Pro-interventionist: Anti-isolationist. End tyranny everywhere. End communism. End Islamic law.

It all goes to show that being a complete fruitcake is no barrier to getting an academic job. It is, however, a genuine advantage when competing for the Freedom Fries Institute's blog awards.

Eoghan Harris serves as the wafer-thin layer of pseudo-intellectuality that lies on top of the Sindo's mission to provide comfort and praise to the powerful while attacking the powerless and voiceless. Naturally enough, this frequently requires him to engage in some rather liberal use of logic and facts. His modus operandi is to hide the manifest stupidity of his arguments behind a lot of huff and puff about how smart he is and the depth of his political experience.

His most recent article provides a good demonstration of his style:

"Most major Irish political stories have some connection, no matter how slight, with the national question. As I shall now demonstrate by taking the two top political and cultural stories of the past week - the Mr 'A' rape case and the Ken Loach film, The Wind that Shakes the Barley ."

It is written in the style of a proper academic paper, where one's claims are clearly set out in advance and the body of the work is devoted to demonstrating the correctness of the claims. At this stage, we should point out that the Mr A rape case has absolutely nothing to do with the national question (child sexual abuse != national question) while the Ken Loach film (Irish war of independence) is so bloody obviously about the national question that only an idiot would feel the need to "demonstrate" it in order to show their wisdom. Harris is that idiot.

Claim 1: The Mr. A rape case was connected to the national question

Harris starts in the only way he could, by dismissing the facts: "We need not dwell on the details of the Mr 'A' case." Considering the nature of his claim, one could only agree with him that the facts would surely be unhelpful to his case.

Instead, he sets out his stall to defend the minister: "It is ridiculous to regard it as a resigning matter". Why is this opinion ridiculous? He doesn't say. Maybe because there is no such thing as a resigning offence in Irish politics? Maybe because it is Harris's job to defend PD ministers regardless of what they do? Who knows.

But where are the provos? They eventually arrive via Fine Gael and Frank Connolly. Harris implies that the whole thing was some sort of excuse to get at McDowell over his treatment of Connolly:

"Behind the media mob, gangs of greenies were trying to settle scores with the minister who flushed out Frank Connolly. So it was surprising to find Jim O'Keeffe of Fine Gael coming to Connolly's defence. Frank is no friend of Fine Gael."

Aha. QED, I think not.

Claim 2: Ken Loach's film is connected to the national question

"The Wind that Shakes the Barley has more legs. Behind the hype lies the huge hinterland of the national question. "

It's a film about the war of independence and the subsequent partition of Ireland and civil war. Of course it's about the "national question" you moron.

Once again, in making his astonishingly obvious point, Harris characteristically lets us know that he's going to be ignoring the facts: "a film I have not seen"

Then he gets to his point, he doesn't like lefties and Loach is a leftie. However, Loach is also English, so this english leftie making a film about Ireland is neo-colonialism.

"Ignoring Ireland's real interests in order to promote a leftist line in British politics is neocolonialism by any name."

No it's not Eoghan. It's nothing at all like neo-colonialism. It's making a film with a particular point of view about a historical event. How Harris can possibly think this is equivalent to exercising political control over an ex-colonial nation is beyond me (without copious drugs to enable the Harris-like nether regions of consciousness). The claim is so stupid that you can't even really argue against it since the two acts - making a film and controlling a foreign country politically - are so ridiculously dissimilar that you don't even know what to compare. Head bangingly stupid.

Finally, one last piece of top-drawer idiocy:

"Finally, can I beg the barley shakers to stop calling Loach's film "controversial"? How can it be "controversial" when everybody in the Irish establishment is ecstatic about it."

The ridiculous thing about this is that in our media-dominated world, controversy is created by media-pundits, and as the Sindo's resident pseudo-intellectual, Harris is pretty much top of the punditocracy establishment. His assertion thus has two clear factual contradictions within it. It becomes even wronger still (and considerably more stupid too) when you realise that in the very same edition there is an article about the controversy - showing how UK tabloids had carried entirely different takes on it in their Irish and English editions. What's more, Harris's fellow resident of the punditocracy establishment, Ruth Dudley Edwards, had denounced the film the previous day.

How can he be so stupid?