God help me, readers but I have an addiction.
It’s reading the letters pages in the Irish Times. There’s AMADAIN ANONYMOUS and OINSIGH WITH OVARIES, a Birdbrain from Canary Wharf parroting nonsense – I suspect he’s what the Cockneys call a Merchant Banker, and a small core of contributors who analyse questions before venturing their opinions.
The IRISH TIMES, in its air-head, arse-about-face way, has a section headed Opinion and Analysis.
You’d imagine that intelligent adults would realise that when people want to do evil to other people they dress up their intentions in fancy words. To be told that the workforce is to be “downsized” does not reassure members of that force. To be told by a foreign power that you are being “liberated” while it is raining bombs on you, your family, home, friends, crops and livestock is no comfort, nor that you and they will leave no trace, except as some atom of “collateral damage.”
But when charlatans, not normally learned in Greek and Latin, use words from those languages like fusillades of tracer bullets from Vickers machine guns, you need to worry.
There’s been a lot of rot about “fatal foetal abnormalities” in the IRISH TIMES of late. Life itself is a fatal condition. There’s no getting away from it. Benjamin Franklin claimed that the only certain things in life were death and taxes. Since then smart-arse lawyers and accountants may have removed the certainty from taxes, but death will come to us all.
And what is a human “foetus” or “fetus” but a small human individual (baby) in its mother’s womb?. There is no such condition agreed upon by any responsible medical authority as “Fatal Foetal Abnormality.” At least according to those writing in THE IRISH TIMES who present their Analyses before venturing their Opinions.
My father once quoted with admiration a neighbour who spoke of a certain lady bursting in on some gatheing “with a fanfare of f**ks”. The IRISH TIMES and its followers in its abortion crusade seek to stampede the public with fusillades of “f” words.
Is resistance really futile?
Why doesn’t PF himself write a review?
The IRISH TIMES doesn’t tell you about its admiration for Hitler and the way he made omlettes. I believe I do the public a service by telling them.
Fine Gael doesn’r remind you about its boast that as the Blackshirts took power in Italy
and the “Hitler-Shirts” took power In Germany so too would the Blueshirts in Ireland.
By mentioning these facts I do a service that professional historians would prefer
I didn’t . Perhaps PF is a professional historian?
I may not have the gracious prose style of a Roy Foster or a Maurice Manning , the learning of an Eoghan Harris or a Ruth Dudley Edwards. Nor can I conduct interviews
with the dead as Peter Hart did with the Kilmichael veteran.
But no reviewer could support an allegation that I am a moral coward or a damnable liar.
yes,resistance is usually futile in cases of denying women civil rights in 2016.
Donal do not demean your writings by even mentioning those persons such as Ruth DudleyEdwards, Eoghan Harris
Good on you, a Dhómhnaill
Ach, Donal, houl on til yer drawers a minute. I am neither “professional historian” nor do I require “gracious prose”, and as I noted to Jude on the other thread the comment about “peer reviews” was a turn of phrase.
My concern was twofold:
(1) References to Hitler and the Nazis on blogs have become so cliched as to serve little or no purpose.
But (2), if you want to take that line, then my point is this – whatever the stated support for Nazi Germany, they were not the only ones in Ireland to take this line. (Although that did come from a professional historian – I hear academics provide the odd useful service to society.)
And for the sake of clarity (because the internet is a web of all sorts of confusion), I mentioned neither moral cowardice nor damnable lies.
Donal
PF seems to have struck a raw nerve with you!There is however a cure for your “addiction”–stop buying the Irish Times!
The IRISH TIMES poses as a liberal paper
It is not now. It was not in 1920 nor in the 1930s.
It publishes articles by Blueshirts suggesting that De Valera had Fascist sympathies.
The Blueshirts aped the continental Fascists, who aped Carson’s Unionists.
The British facilitated Mussolini’s rape of Abyssinia and facilitated it by letting his troops and supplies thru the Suez Canal. Churchill approved of that rape. The British were happy for the
Japanese seizure of Manchuria. At the League of Nations De Valera called for united action
to stop those violations of its Charter. An MI6 Officer, Hugh Pollard ,flew General Franco from the Canaries to Morocco so that he could launch his attack on Spanish Democracy.
Fine Gael and the Catholic Hierarchy backed Franco. De Valera did not.
Civil rights are to do with voting. and representation There’s no right to kill innocent defenceless humans. And advocacy of that “right” is not Chivalry.
And newspapers have no right to tell lies.
Donal
You seem to have a continuous obsession with the Irish Times.As I said before,if it displeases you so much ,stop buying it.Other papers are available ,though not the perfect one you seek!!