This morning.

Via Irish Times Letters:

The Taoiseach’s partner Matthew Barrett raises legitimate concerns regarding the risks inherent in empowering members of the public to surveil the behaviour of others.

I am sure he is similarly perturbed by the promotion (in 2017, by Leo Varadkar, the then minister for social protection) of a telephone line and website to enable and encourage members of the public to report on the behaviour of their contemporaries.

Photographing Varadker (Irish Times Letters)

RollingNews/Twitter

Sponsored Link

26 thoughts on “On The Nose

  1. Micko

    Hey, remember when cameras went to Dublín airport to film and shame private citizens for travelling and then put their images on the national news.

    Good times…

    1. SOQ

      It is a bit rich for Matt to be complaining about privacy when Leo’s party voted for legislation demanding proof of a ‘Gesundheits pass’ before you can set foot in a bar or restaurant?

      On your bike darlin.

      1. John

        One can only assume that your use of German here is to tangentially associate the covid vaccine passport with Nazi Germany.
        People who try and associate the covid restrictions with actual oppression should go off and find out what’s its like to really be oppressed so they can see how utterly reprehensible the association is.

        1. SOQ

          Maybe not to you but to a lot of people, CoVid-19 lockdowns are actual oppression and if you doubt that then take a look at the absolutely disgraceful police behaviour in both Canada and Australia.

          As for the wider association, fascism is well documented as being a merger of state and corporate- in particular, medical and pharmaceutical. And don’t think there were were not gay Nazis- that is also well documented.

          1. Oro

            What about that makes perfect sense about Hitler? He was a monster therefore him being gay makes sense? As for that examiner article it’s explicitly homophobic in its use of ‘peculiar’ and the framing of homosexuality as part of the psychological makeup of a monstrous person. The Nazis (while they would have had to have some homosexuals in their rank by sheer statistics) were homophobic. Go to Dachau and read about the men in pink triangles. Even if Hitler did have same sex partners that does not make him culturally ‘gay’ in that he was never ‘out’ and had gay men killed for the virtue of their being gay. This is just extremely old-fashioned association of “sexual perversion” with evil characters (not that I necessarily believe in evil but that’s for another topic).

            Hitler lived his life as a straight man. He represented himself as a straight man, married a woman, and glorified the concept of the Aryan straight man as the ultimate expression of humanity to the detriment of all others. This urge to repackage him as gay is just absolutely disgusting and offensive to gay men everywhere.

            Read the article below for some balance. And get a clue while you’re at it.

            https://www.google.com/amp/s/slate.com/human-interest/2018/08/gay-nazi-myth-why-dinesh-dsouzas-misuse-of-history-is-so-galling.amp

        2. Micko

          It might eventually be worse John

          When speaking about the pitfalls of some modern sciences, Bertrand Russel wrote;

          “ It is to be expected that advances in physiology and psychology will give governments much more control over individual mentality than they now have even in totalitarian countries.”

          But hopefully not ;-)

        3. K. Cavan

          John, anyone who doesn’t see the far from tangental connections between how Jews & other undesirables were excluded from restaurants, theatres, shops, bars, etc & the actions of elite-controlled governments in persecuting those who chose to exercise medical freedom of choice is surely wilfully blind. Either that or disingenuously lying through their teeth.
          Which are you?
          Don’t bother answering, the question is rhetorical, I know which you are.

  2. goldenbrown

    LOL

    getting fond memories of Matt Le Tissier sticking it in the top left corner from 30 yards for some reason

    1. Steph Pinker

      Obviously; yesterday he was Tániste and today he’s Taoiseach, he’ll be Tániste again tomorrow; the sad aspect of this Freudian slip is that Varadkar has regularly and wrongly been referred to as Taoiseach in MSM (radio and hard copy print, so it’s not just BS), since MM sat on the throne but not many notice it – which speaks volumes about the psyche of the publishers.

  3. SOQ

    It is a bit rich for Matt to be complaining about privacy when Leo’s party voted for legislation demanding proof of a ‘Gesundheits pass’ before you can set foot in a bar or restaurant?

  4. RuilleBuille

    After Barrett identified the female who took the snap she received so much abuse from the Blueshirts she had to leave social media.

      1. John

        On Claire Byrne last night when they had Regina Doherty (FG) on to talk about online abuse and female politicians.
        The RTE researchers obviously just did a search on her twitter stream for the word “c***” as it was in all of the examples they used and at least one was 4 or 5 years old.
        This does a disservice to the breath of abuse that women and public people in general get on social media. Very lazy from the RTE researchers.

    1. GiggidyGoo

      Matt isn’t very clever.
      I didn’t see him complain when he and Varadkar were photographed at a 6 Nations match between Ireland and France.

      1. John

        Just because you didn’t see it, doesn’t mean he didn’t complain. (I don’t know if he did or not)
        In this case the only reason anyone is talking about it is because it made it to the letters page in the times.

Comments are closed.

Sponsored Link
Broadsheet.ie