Tag Archives: left

Defend Public Health rally this Saturday

Freedom of Choice rally this Saturday

This morning.

Ahead of two separate rallies in Dublin this Saturday.

One opposed to Covid restrictions.

The other urging more restrictions (and calling the first group far right racists).

At the core of these protests are conscious and violent far-right forces. At the ‘Health Freedom Ireland’ protest, a small group of counter protesters were subjected to a violent attack by a larger group which had come prepared with weapons such as hammers.

At the same time, these protests have also been able to draw in a broader section of people who may not even know about the nature of the forces behind the protests.

…lockdown measures have caused real psychological and social hardship which is wearing away at people more and more and this creates and opening for those who try to claim the virus is fake or exaggerated using conspiratorial thinking.

Those views are still rejected by the majority who correctly see that they attack the idea of solidarity.

In recent days, a campaign on social media has tried to promote the idea that the numbers of Covid-19 deaths is massively exaggerated because the majority of those who died had underlying health conditions – an insult to the huge numbers of people who suffer with ill health…

Nefarious peddlers of snake oil: How we can defeat the far right (Conor Payne, The Socialist Party)

Alternatively…

…At some point, the left made a choice. They chose to side with the medical establishment.

They refused to take the position that science itself is a contested field, where conflicting studies and statistical data can be weaponised to suit competing agendas for the justification and implementation of political objectives.

Of course, they only think this kind of weaponisation is happening on the “conspiracy” side of things; the “real science” relied upon to inform Government decisions is always correct.

Why did they choose to side with the ‘man’? Perhaps they desire greater legitimacy. Or, perhaps, they can’t afford to lose any more legitimacy. They have decided to lead the masses from the ignorance of conspiracy theories into the enlightened defense of “public health”.

…As time goes on, the number of people who are likely to question the Government and media’s response to the Covid-19 crisis will increase. In their eyes, the lockdown measures either don’t make sense or are actually intended for malicious purposes far beyond the curtailing of a virus.

This is a broad spectrum and no two people think exactly alike. It’s not too late for the left to consider the question: perhaps these concerns actually have some validity to them?

The Irish Left’s Problem with the Anti-Lockdown Movement (S&TL, Medium)

Earlier: Our Mask Game Is Strong

This afternoon.

Assistant Professor and Ad Astra Fellow at the School of Politics and International Relations in University College Dublin Stefan Müller tweetz:

“Yesterday, Aidan Regan noted that the compass of Irish politics has moved to the centre-left.

“I merged the Irish National Election Studies between 2002 and 2020 (The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems) with the UCD Politics and Ireland Thinks online poll. Indeed, drastic changes over the past 18 years.”

Anyone?

Aidan Regan

Noel Whelan 

Noel Whelan’s article “Far left’s high profile contrasts sharply with modest electoral reach” describes the Solidarity-PBP grouping as minnows.

The Labour Party has seven seats to Solidarity-PBP’s six. If we combine, as Mr Whelan does in his article, Solidarity-PBP’s seats with those of the Independents 4 Change grouping and other left-wing TDs, the left comfortably outnumbers Labour.

Yet Noel Whelan does not call Labour small fish or “fringe deputies”.

The thuddingly dull comparison between Donald Trump and the left, as constant in your newspaper as the Angelus, on the basis of criticism of the mainstream media, is fatuous.

It should not need to be said that the basis and method of the left’s critique of certain sections of the media differs ever so slightly from Mr Trump’s lying, egomaniacal Twitter outbursts against CNN.

Your columnist manages class snobbery and reverse class snobbery in the one paragraph, suggesting that the kind of people who vote left are not natural Irish Times readers and, heaven forbid, that some left-wing TDs have the temerity to have been born to middle-class backgrounds.

I can assure him that many supporters of the left of all classes read this newspaper, either as its de facto status as the paper of record or as a means to keep abreast of the latest fashionable delusions of the bourgeois hive-mind, of which Noel Whelan is such a stalwart proponent.

Jill Bryson,
Walthamstow,
London.

Yikes.

The Irish left and fringe deputies (The Irish Times letters page)

Related: Far left’s high profile contrasts sharply with modest electoral reach (Noel Whelan, Irish Times, July, 2017)

Rollingnews

Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin and Fine Gael leader and Taoiseach-in-waiting Leo Varadkar

This morning.

On RTÉ’s Morning Ireland.

Presenter Audrey Carville, in an interview with Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin, asked him about the front page story in today’s Irish Independent, headlined: “FF deal with Leo will quieten Left parties in Dáil’.

In the story, Kevin Doyle reports:

Fianna Fáil is pushing to have the allocation of speaking in the Dáil dramatically restructured to favour larger parties.

In a shift away from so-called ‘new politics’, Michéal Martin wants to team up with incoming Taoiseach Leo Varadkar to rebalance power in the Dáil to reflect the number of TDs in a party.

….During his meeting with Mr Varadkar, the Fianna Fáil leader argued that the d’Hondt system should be used for deciding speaking time. This would see time allocated based on the size of a party’s representation.

“I think Leo understood where I was coming from very strongly on that,” he said.

Further to this.

From Morning Ireland earlier…

Audrey Carville: “Let me ask about the front page story in the Irish Independent this morning. That you, along with Leo Varadkar, are planning to restructure Dáil speaking time, away from left-wing parties. Is that true? Are they getting too much?”

Micheál Martin: “No, I’ve been saying this for quite some time. This is not news in the sense that my, or our, position is that we should have the d’Hondt mechanism which basically means that people get the time that reflects their parliamentary strength. The majority of our TDs are not getting the time, fair time in the Dáil and it’s the same for the Fine Gael party and, indeed the Sinn Féin party…”

Carville:Are you feeling threatened by the quality of their contributions?

Martin:No, no it’s just that we want fairness. I think nobody an argue that if you 45 TDs you should get a proportion of the amount of time that reflects that. We’re simply saying that the current situation is not fair and a lot of deputies are getting squeezed out and excluded from having the opportunity to participate in Dáil debates so I think it’s only fair that the amount of time we get should reflect our strength in the Dáil.”

Later, when asked if he’ll miss Enda Kenny:

Martin: “On a personal level, we got on very well and I wish himself and Fionnuala the very, very best. I think, fundamentally, he was a courageous politician, he took over when Fine Gael was at a very low ebb. I think he’s probably smiling a bit today that there are many people who are out there declaring that he was the greatest leader since Brian Boru even though they were looking for journalists to brief a short time ago against him, that’s the nature of politics. So I think he’s probably enjoying the moment that he’s enjoyed the last number of weeks. But I wish him well and I think he worked on behalf of the country, extremely enthusiastic, he was a patriot and he was a courageous leader.

Previously: ‘They’re Loud And They’re Growing’

‘This Hard-Left, Conspiratorial View’

Listen back in full here

UPDATE:

Social Democrat TD Catherine Murphy (above) has released a statement, saying:

“Fianna Fail want the best of both worlds, they already have the benefit of having one foot in Government and one foot in opposition and now they want to effectively silence those of us who actually present real opposition to what is essentially a cosy Fianna Fail and Fine Gael arrangement in the House.”

While Fianna Fáil may, in name only, be the main opposition party, their deal to support the Fine Gael minority Government ensures that they do not offer a credible opposition. In such a scenario the rest of the opposition become vital at holding the Minority government and its supporters to account.”

“For Fianna Fáil to try and dilute that opposition is yet another breathtakingly arrogant move by a party who seem to be confused about whether they are in Government or Opposition.”

Listrade

 

I’d like to thank you all for nothin’ at all.

By you I mean you generally. Not you, them. I don’t know exactly who they are, but it isn’t you and we can all agree they’re the problem and why we’re doomed.

It’s now clear that Fine Gael think that they are the hard left.

It’s not enough to be left, you have to be hard. We’ve ditched ‘far’ as a tag. The far right are now Alt.Like some emerging music scene, kinda pleasant and revolutionary, you crazy kids.

The left are hard. An unmoveable force hell-bent on giving stuff away for free.

We’ve ditched the ‘far’ because it implies a distant, small fractional wing. People aren’t scared of small groups of extremists.

It’s easy to pretend that this is a new thing, but it isn’t. Politicians have always led us down a path of division. There has always been a them that we must fear or hate.

It doesn’t matter if it is terrorists, immigrants, travellers, social welfare claimants, feminists, literal Nazis, alt right, neoliberals, bankers or elites.

It is a them, someone else. I don’t need to provide an answer or a solution. I can give you a bogeyperson of non-specific gender identity to be scared of. It’s better than trying to stand over bad policy.

Both political sides have always created a them and then pointed to the extreme idiots to prove the point. On the left we use the rich capitalists as our them. Tax dodgers, party donors, sometimes criminals.

We don’t use the lower-middle class right wing voters as our them or the working classes that vote for right wing leaning parties. Instead we label them as “lacking formal qualifications”.

You know, stupid. But we can’t say stupid, so we pretend that a generation that never had the opportunity to go to college to get a degree in golf course management is stupid. It’s even better if we can call them racist.

The change has been in who they are. It’s no longer a small group of extremists or elitists; it’s become anyone who disagrees with you. Think that promising to build 2000 social houses and then questioning the government’s record when it only builds 650 is reasonable? Then get your application in to become a member of the Hard Left.

Oh you also think that the government shouldn’t provide State Aid to corporations, like…umm…EU Law says they shouldn’t? You’re Hard and a Bolshevik. See it’s not welfare when it’s in the name of the Free Market and its rich people accepting the aid. It’s only scrounging when poor people do it.

OK, some were always prone to painting everyone who showed dissent to their opinions as being a them, but they were mocked for it, like Rick in The Young Ones. Now everyone is something and usually something negative and we stopped laughing at the people who did it.

The Brexit campaign was one of fear, lies and overt xenophobia (a term we use when we don’t want to say racist). But not all votes for Brexit were because people were against immigration or because they were racist.

For years, leaving the EU and the dangers of the EU (a capitalist, free market stalwart) has been a big issue on the left. Not the hard or far left, just the left. The left that isn’t moderate and didn’t go willingly with Blair. The New Statesman made the left case back in 2015, a year before the referendum.

Now, you’re just a bigot if you support or even offer the slightest hint of being pro-Brexit, even if you’ve opposed the EU on left-based principles for decades.

The swing towards the bigotedthem is so significant that we celebrate Macron’s election as progressive, just because he defeated Le Pen. Even though we lament Varadkar’s election, despite being Macron’s political doppelganger. And we do so without a sense of irony or hypocrisy.

You don’t need a them if you have good policy or an actual injustice. You only need to create one when your argument doesn’t work. Where facts or logic don’t back up your view to the full extent, you need to create a shadowy cabal that is behind the opposition or nefariously supporting the injustice.

It isn’t enough that you overheard one guy being a arsehole, it has to be an example of why the patriarchy are evil. If I countered that with examples of role reversal…well, I’d be part of the same evil patriarchy.

And rightly so. It isn’t enough that you failed on your own promises to build social houses, you have to say criticism of the failure is down to the Hard Left.

There is one thing that unites all humans and it is that we’re predominantly stupid creatures. But in a nice way. It isn’t our fault that we are driven by pattern recognition and confirmation bias. They kept us safe and allowed us to evolve to what we are. It’s still a weakness in our judgement though.

No one is the popular fictional character driven only by logic and reason. We like to think we are and like to think it’s everyone else who is led by their more primitive instincts, but we are all apes looking for tigers in the Savana, jumping at shadows.

That’s why we need to create a them because most times facts, logic and reason only work when it is something we agree with. Facts that are against our views are dismissed as being something the shadowy them would say. We use the counter argument, no matter how reasonable, to prove our proposition of a them.

When links are posted to counter an argument, it’d be fascinating to see what the google search was to get those links. Was it a simple “evidence of X” and then the individual reviewed all the facts or was it “why X is wrong” and then posting the first counter argument we come across?

But using evidence does work, eventually, sort of. Policy on climate change became more effective when the NGOs and advocates moved away from their Fossil Fuel Industry bogeyman to evidence. Eventually, the weight of evidence was in the favour of action.

For any doubters out there, you don’t convince emerging industrial countries that rely on cheap fuel to action unless there is convincing evidence hand-in-hand with suitable alternatives. Does it really matter if the science is a bit off if India is self-sufficient in renewable energy?

Try it. Try looking in a non-partisan way at arguments or a discussion point; see how many rely on an intangible them. Take out the them and then see how the argument stacks up.

Sometimes you’ll be surprised and the argument still has weight. Sometimes, you’ll see it for the irrational rambling it is. Elections, referendums, debates, discussions, we’re swamped with imaginary groups that probably don’t exist beyond a few very small ineffectual people.

It’s a pity that they will never see how they are misleading them.

Now considered a Content Creator due to a few contributions to this site, Listrade is looking to expand his empire of condescension into new markets and sponsorships areas due to the poor quality of tea in the Broadsheet offices. He is planning on launching his Youtube channel, “Badly in need of an editor”, at some point when he gets around to it.