Sunday Independent Stupid Statement of the Week October 7, 2012
Posted by Garibaldy in Sunday Independent Stupid Statement of the Week.trackback
As per usual, the cuts are all the trade unions’ fault if you believe Eilis O’Hanlon.
That it was a bad call by the Government to target the old and sick instead does not absolve unions for culpability in this scandal.
The most vulnerable are to be deprived of essential services solely in order that a few pampered Lords and Ladies Fauntleroy who already enjoy guaranteed jobs and pensions can carry on being in receipt of such frivolities as an underwear allowance for female soldiers, or allowances for changing photocopier toner and franking the post.
Next week, how the trade unions and their aristocratic members are responsible for the bank bailout.
Marc Coleman is pursuing his vendetta against academia (which won him the inaugural Sunday Independent Stupid Statement of the Year for this gem: “Academia must also change. The obsession with producing only PhDs is the main reason the crisis happened”) today.
The taxpayers subsidising this person will never benefit from or understand the contents of the paper, but is forced against his/her will to fund it.
So apparently the taxpayer opposes the funding of universities. In a country where much is made of the education system, and higher education has undergone huge expansion in recent decades, we might ask where is the evidence for the suggestion that the taxpayer is forced to fund universities against his or her will. Of course, there isn’t any. We might then conclude that, Devalera-like, Coleman need only look into his own heart to see what the rest of us are thinking. Or that he’s talking complete nonsense.
Speaking of academia, the late Eric Hobsbawm did a fairly good job convincing a hell of a lot of people worldwide that he didn’t like nationalism very much. However, if you want to discover how his remarks on Daniel O’Connell prove that in fact he was really an Irish nationalist of the Daniel Corkery type, then read here.
Just on Hobsbawm one of the things that seemed to me to come through was that despite being positioned de facto as a critic of the Soviet experience (though with an emotional attachment to it that on the individual level is not entirely unsurprising given his history and environment) it simply wasn’t enough for some. Not enough to renounce Stalinism (for the most part), but one suspects that only renouncing the very concepts underpinning Marxism and communism would be sufficient.
I was having this argument with people on facebook during the week; given that Hobsbawm’s main political enthusiasms since the 1980s were Neil Kinnock, Mikhail Gorbachev and Lionel Jospin, describing him as a ‘lifelong Communist’ or an ‘unrepentant Communist’, as if he was still holding up Stalinism as a model to follow, is just absurd, but it didn’t stop people saying it; when what they really meant was that he had never abandoned Marxism as an intellectual tradition, which is apparently an unforgivable sin.
I would rather cut off my thumbs than read what J.P McCarthy has to say about Hobsbawm; I think we can safely say that he has learnt absolutely nothing from his work, whereas a talented revisionist historian like Roy Foster who has more than a few brain cells to rub together wouldn’t hesitate to describe Hobsbawm as the greatest historian of the last century.
But I did come across something which Eoghan H’s chief disciple wrote about Christopher Hitchens after he died; he said that he had been at a dinner party with Hitchens once, and Hitchens said that Conor Cruise O’Brien’s take on Irish nationalism always reminded him of what Hobsbawm had to say on similar topics. Now Hitchens was pretty much on the money there (if you’re talking about the 70s era O’Brien, not the madman of his latter-day Sindo columns); if you read what Hobsbawm had to say about the nationalism of small nations, including Ireland, it had a lot in common with the more intelligent end of revisionist historiography (which he explicitly praised; I think he interviewed Foster for his first job at Birkbeck).
But McCarthy gormlessly told this story to show that he knew more than Hitchens did, for as a Marxist, Hobsbawm couldn’t possibly have had anything in common with O’Brien. I would humbly suggest that instead of reading his copy of ‘The Irish Industrial Revolution’ for the nth time, McCarthy get his hands on a copy of ‘Industry and Empire’ and learn the difference between a real historian and a hack.
(if you’re talking about the 70s era O’Brien, not the madman of his latter-day Sindo columns)
This is the same ’70s that O’Brien wanted to impose a Stalinist thought-police on the media and education system, and the same ’70s that the Heavy Gang operated in and the Dublin and Monaghan Bombings went unanswered.
Yes, the same, I know all that. McCarthy was talking about his books, as was I: there was a big shift between his ideas as set out in ‘States of Ireland’, which is an interesting book although one that massages the facts to suit his argument at many points, caricatures republicanism and lets the British state off the hook for too many things, and the swivel-eyed madness of his later columns, when he liked to claim that the peace process would inevitably lead to war between Ireland and Britain (and much more besides). A bit like the difference between Roy Foster and J.P McCarthy.
The best latterday CCOB proposal was a federal united Ireland with Northern Ireland under majority rule and the RUC intact in order to preserve Unionist rights.
For this particular work of genius (which entertainingly was almost a twist on the old Éire Nua line of PSF in the 1970s) IIRC he was ejected from the UKUP.
Isn’t McCarthy’s piece really just a coded way of saying “Look at me. I read an obituary in German. Amn’t I clever?”, a stance somewhat undermined by his admission that he’s unable to read Hobsbawn’s books (which are hardly difficult)?
Foster and others on Hobsbawm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/01/eric-hobsbawm-historian
And Marc Mulholland on him in jacobinmag
http://jacobinmag.com/2012/10/eric-hobsbawm-1917-2012/
Again on Hobsbawm, The IT’s obit yesterday was an edited version of Martin Kettle’s obituary from the Guardian earlier in the week (but not credited as such).
Interestingly, in relation to Hobsbawm and Blair, the original Guardian obit had the following passage:
“By 1983, when Neil Kinnock became the leader of the Labour party at the depth of its electoral fortunes, Hobsbawm’s influence had begun to extend far beyond the CP and deep into Labour itself. Kinnock publicly acknowledged his debt to Hobsbawm and allowed himself to be interviewed by the man he described as as “my favourite Marxist”. Though he strongly disapproved of much of what later took shape as “New Labour”, which he saw, among other things, as historically cowardly, he was without question the single most influential intellectual forerunner of Labour’s increasingly iconoclastic 1990s revisionism.
His status was underlined in 1998, when Tony Blair made him a Companion of Honour, a few months after Hobsbawm celebrated his 80th birthday. In its citation, Downing Street said Hobsbawm continued to publish works that “address problems in history and politics that have re-emerged to disturb the complacency of Europe”.
However, the IT version left out the phrase
“Kinnock publicly acknowledged his debt to Hobsbawm and allowed himself to be interviewed by the man he described as as “my favourite Marxist”. Though he strongly disapproved of much of what later took shape as “New Labour”, which he saw, among other things, as historically cowardly”
Which completely changes the meaning of the piece.
At best, seriously sloppy from the IT.
I found these two things about Hobsbawm very interesting, especially the stuff about Brazil in the first one.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/hay-festival/9586557/Eric-Hobsbawm-turned-history-into-an-art.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/06/eric-hobsbawm-tribute-david-feldman
Interesting observation from Christopher Caldwell, of all people:
No matter how loudly Hobsbawm proclaimed the communist dogma, his cast of mind was independent. It was too independent for the Soviet Union, which translated none of his sweeping narratives on nationalism, industrialism, imperialism and globalism.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/465e2dc0-0e1c-11e2-8d92-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz28ePCL1c6
Can that be true? No translations into Russian?
Could be. Got to say there’s something in what Caldwell says.
Yeah, that’s right – well there might be some Russian translations now, but while the Soviet Union lasted, none of his works were published there, they were considered ‘un-Marxist’ (which tells you a lot about the official version of ‘Marxism’).
[...] “… Marc Coleman is pursuing his vendetta against academia (which won him the inaugural Sunday Independent Stupid Statement of the Year for this gem: ‘Academia must also change. The obsession with producing only PhDs is the main reason the crisis happened’) today …” (more) [...]
Anybody read Dan O’Brien during the week pretty much flat out calling for an Irish Tea Party or at least a local chapter of the Taxpayers Alliance?
I saw that. The correct counter, I think, is to point out that the s-called Taxpayers Alliances are actually astroturf groups for the likes of out IBEC.
I always think that when you have FG there’s no need for a separate ‘taxpayers alliance’.
Maybe its time to take marc coleman out of this section. It really seems likely that he is in fact mad rather than stupid.
That could well disqualify more than him however. It is a fine line quite often.
The taxpayers subsidising this person will never benefit from or understand the contents of the paper, but is forced against his/her will to fund it.
The stupidity, it burns. Just where does Marc think the vast majority of the technology we enjoy today comes from, if not scientific research that the average person cannot understand? (and private ‘enterprise’, focused on short-term profit, will never ever fund on their own behalf)
I see James Reilly has decided that he wants to take the Fine Gael leadership down with him:
http://www.independent.ie/national-news/kenny-and-gilmore-in-the-loop-on-health-centre-plan-reilly-3251561.html
Does Coleman even merit the attention here? He is more the victim of obsession then a journalist
To be fair, if that excluded someone for consideration for the Sunday Independent Stupid Statement of the Week, there would be very little to talk about.
Ha! Nice one . I rather like Drennans description of Hogan though .
He knows nothing about pizza, and seems to believe that it has improved over time, due to market forces. He seems not to know that `those who package, freeze, warehouse and transport it to your supermarket’ are using technologies developed, or at least improved, in universities and research institutions.
`pizza-making will for many be a first essential step to doing other wonderful things like being a gourmet chef or making millions starting a pizza delivery business.’ Yeah right.
His view that producing research papers (would he prefer that we write nothing?) draws resources away from teaching seems to mean that universities would be better as teaching only institutions.
` there is no evidence whatsoever that tax funding of general research — unlike medical, industrial and scientific research — does anything for the economy.’ Where does he think most of the funding goes? The state prioritizes spending those areas, like most states, in part for `economic’ reasons, and in part because research in those areas is more expensive. Even then, does he think that JP McCarthy shouldn’t have been paid to read Corkery and write papers nobody will read?
Coleman also claims to have taken what he is pleased to call inspiration from `I, pencil’, which can’t touch the seminal `The Pencil’, by Henry Petroski.
Gamma minus.
From the Sunday Times – Michael ‘BigShort’ Lewis on the Irish:
“They seem inclined to put up with anything. They almost enjoy the pain. If you go to an Irish party, the person who holds the floor is the one who has suffered the most lately “
Elsewhere, Senator Mr Lucinda Creighton has a go at RTÉ for its “pro-Democrat” bias. (If anything, I’d have thought Robert Shortt has bent over backwards to be even-handed.)
What Lucinda and her hubby will think of RTÉ’s coverage of the Presidential visit to Chile and the shocking failure to leave an official bouquet on Augusto Pinochet’s grave one can only guess.
This is a sort of obsession in some parts of FG. How very interesting.
Not to side with Creighton here, but I do think there is a slight tendency to favour the democrats in the irish media, which is very strange when you see the same media constantly push ideology that is much more in tune with the republicans.
On the same basis I’ve never met an Irish person who wouldn’t at least casually side with the democrats, and yet so many here vote FG.
I think it stems from the fact that people are actually instinctively in favour of fairness and equality, which is (loosely) the angle from which the democrats pitch themselves. Its only when their fears are worked on by the media and their prejudices gently prodded at every turn that they can be persuaded to vote for inequality and unfairness.
I think it stems from the fact that people are actually instinctively in favour of fairness and equality
Well, you could also argue that it stems from widespread ignorance of the historical context from which the two formations emerged, and at most only a superficial understanding of the coalitions they represent today.