Couldn’t happen to a… July 30, 2017
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.trackback
…as noted by Michael Carley and others in comments Kevin Myers has run into a spot of trouble so great that… well… read on…
The Sunday Times press office has confirmed that columnist Kevin Myers will not write again for the Sunday Times Ireland after an article on gender pay gap sparked controversy.The Sunday Times apologised and said it abhors anti-Semitism after Mr Myers provoked controversy with comments on high-profile women working at the BBC.
And:
A spokesperson for The Sunday Times said: “Further to our earlier statement we can confirm that Kevin Myers will not write again for The Sunday Times Ireland. A printed apology will appear in next week’s paper.
“The Sunday Times editor Martin Ivens has also apologised personally to Claudia Winkleman and Vanessa Feltz for these unacceptable comments both to Jewish people and to women in the workplace,” added the spokesperson.
This one is a long time coming I feel.
The Cedar Lounge Revolution 
The now-pulled article was mysogynistic and antisemitic, but only the second of these was a belated cause of concern to the Times.
Will they continue to publish anti-Traveller columnists?
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Yeah, the misogyny aspect seemed to be only acknowledged in statement two doesn’t it?
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A repost I feel is relevant:
I found the text of the 2009 Kevin Myers article about the Holocaust the Irish Independent has now taken off their site:
http://archive.is/dvth4#selection-3401.0-3409.175
Reads like Spiked-Online style contrariness, coupled with a dash of Islamophobia. Plus, Myers doesn’t mention that a large number of Holocaust victims were murdered by gassing, or that
Bishop Richard Williamson claimed only 200,000-300,000 Jews were murdered by the Nazis instead of approximately 6 million.
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Absolutely Starkadder. +1
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Was Myers listed to speak at the “gentle black and tan” weekend in Cork and if so what if anything have his fellow revisionists to say about his recent outburst?
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I am fairly sure the woman to his left in this photo is Julia Neuberger. Rabbi Julia Neuberger.
https://mobile.twitter.com/westcorkhisfest/status/891623698633035777
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I see it being covered in the Irish Times. Apparently De Valera and Collins weren’t republicans but used it as a ‘brand’ in order to gain as much self-determinism as possible. Even if true isn’t that a case of same diff?
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[…] many were still left concerned, frustrated and angry at what they saw as dealing with the faith-based […]
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Meanwhile, Kevin Myers was at the West Cork History Festival, which seems like a lively affair.
‘Members of the Aubane Historical Society handed out fliers before the screening, condemning the film as “gravely incompetent history as propaganda”.’
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/irish-protestants-must-feel-free-to-talk-about-their-past-1.3171740?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
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I suppose Myers might try playing the Richard Nixon /Reverend Bailey Smith / Steve Bannon defence : “I’m not anti-Semitic because I support Israel!” He has past form spouting Likudnik garbage:
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/kevin-myers/kevin-myers-mobs-and-lies-win-when-it-comes-to-israel-26795428.html
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Tells you something that this gobshite was allowed to have a career by the nice middle class people of D4 for years (unwed mothers children are bastards, Africa = AIDS, etc), but the second he appears on the radar of the outside world (OMYGOD Geoffrey, can you believe with this Irish oink is writing?), he’s squashed like a cockroach. In hours, the pest is gone. Bet he’s wondering what’s happened.
Hello little fish, meet the big pond.
Ian O Doherty, Harris and the rest of the Indorati might want to take note. That mini-me shtick not looking so sharp now, is it lads?
Though how long before our Kevin lands a nice little sinecure somewhere in the bowels of the Motherland?
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“(OMYGOD Geoffrey, can you believe with this Irish oink is writing?)”
although he is in fact an English oink!
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When Kevin left Belfast for Dublin in the late 1970’s (see Broken Elbow for further details) he gradually took on the persona and bad habits of the Anglo-class, for want of a better term and became almost a caricature of a right-wing, south Dublin bigot, complete with a rabid Eoghan Harris hatred for the non-unionist North. It was sad to see him go that way as I had known a better person when he was happy in the North. It was a broken heart that drove him both to Dublin and the loony right, in my view. I wonder if his allies, Ruth Dudley Edwards et al have rallied to him today or is anti-semitism too toxic a charge even for them….?
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That’s a very useful insight into him. I’d heard that vaguely but good to have it more clearly put.
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And his book about his time in the North — Watching the Door — is actually a fascinating read. It also suggests that even now he’s not entirely a bovine-level reactionary of the Clarkson stripe. But, as Moloney says, there must be something very dark eating away inside him.
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One further comment, prompted by this paragraph in the Irish Times’ digital edition:
‘An article by Myers published eight years ago in the Irish Independent about the Holocaust was also deleted by that newspaper on Sunday. The landing page says: “This article, published on March 4, 2009, does not comply with our editorial ethos and was removed on July 30, 2017”.’
Two questions: why did the IT not tell us what the article said that was so offensive, to wit Myer’s denial of the holocaust; and why did it take the Indo over eight years to realise it had published such a thing? It is not just Myers, methinks, who has a Jewish problem…….
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+1
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Both of the columns mentioned here would have been read and cleared by sub-editors, legal and other section heads before printing. How did they miss the offensive and erroneous statements therein? Or were they aware but cleared them for print regardless?
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Twenty years ago, liberal Ireland’s newspaper of record (prop. G. Kennedy) thought it acceptable to print this:
(continues ad nauseam)
https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/an-irishman-s-diary-1.87549
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It’s not Fintan’s best column, is it?
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Michael, this reminds me of how obnoxious Myers was in that column in his Diary in the Irish Times. That’s where he also spewed his revisionist, sexist and bullying disgraceful commentary with impunity.
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Some people, many of them contributors to this site, despised Myers before it was cool.
Certainly, it’s worth having a look at Myers in the Irish Times (a piece he wrote about Sonia O’Sullivan was downright disturbing) to remember that he got away with filth like this, including the antisemitism, for years in Ireland. It was only when he said it on the Sunday Times site in the age of twitter that anybody cared. The Indo only removed his 2008 piece where he said “I am a holocaust denier” yesterday.
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+1 Michael (and Alibaba). That he has been allowed the space across decades is abysmal. And when those of us raised criticism it was dismissed as PC etc.
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I fail to get what the attraction the likes of Myers are. Did they actually sell more papers because he had a column?
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Geraldine Kennedy, editor of the IT when Myers’ holocaust-denying was published, included in her apology the statement that Myers was ‘never dull’. Mmm…
It’s hard to sustain a decades-long career as a columnist: most have a few seams of opinion-ore that they mine to exhaustion, then their time is up. Myers’ are easy enough to identify: anyone who disagrees with him is part of a bien-pensant hegemony; profit-motive good/ altruism bad; sucking up to soldiers.
‘It’s his style’, a fan once told me, ‘that makes him a must-read.’ Can’t see it myself. Many of us probably remember a teacher at school: tweed-jacketed, bitter, vocabulary large enough to express contempt for the weak or the stupid. Where the essentially bullying nature of that type comes out is in their ‘humour’. Its intent is to belittle and its characteristic technique is orotundity – taking a commonly-used phrase and showing how clever you are by translating it into Latinate polysyllables.
Have I been reading his stuff, to check that all this is still true? Well, every few weeks. I thought that the greater space and time afforded to him in the Sunday Times might produce something more considered or even original. But I guess you can’t teach an old dog new tricks (or, as Myers would put it, pedagogical attempts to alter canine antics are ineffectual).
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Excellent analysis croc
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I don’t know, as someone who is constantly working with my dogs on new things I take offense at them being likened to a bigot 😉
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I fail to get what the attraction the likes of Myers are. Did they actually sell more papers because he had a column?
He’s useful because he’s absolutely prepared to say useful things that the rest of them know cannot be stood over (such as all the Cork nonsense).
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Newspaper hires columnist to insult people. He succeeds. Newspaper fires him. Trump hires ‘Mooch’ to annoy people. He succeeds. Trump sacks him.
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Richard Seymour’s take:
We live in an age in which there is a great deal of moral panic about online abuse. It isn’t moral panic because there is no such abuse, but because the focus on social media is a type of displacement and scapegoating. National newspapers have been commodifying racist, sexist and homophobic spite and bullying for years. They have created a decrepit caste of ghastly celebrities, whose fame is built entirely on who they victimise for a living. And as we are learning, the broadsheets are often no better than the tabloids—indeed, by offering a patina of legitimacy to boorish and self-serving sadists, they may be even worse.
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/kevin-myers-was-the-inevitable-result-of-a-press-culture-that-trades-on-shock
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Thanks, Starkadder. I wouldn’t disagree with much of that, except I doubt that Myers sees himself as the peer of people like Clarkson or Liddell. He goes back to the Telegraph Group of reactionaries that gathered around Peregrine Worsthorne in the 1970s- Michael Wharton, Colin Welch, Auberon Waugh et al. They opposed any and every aspect of ‘progressive’ thought and flouted political correctness before the term existed. Difference was – they could write and were funny, even if their contempt for anything that wasn’t white and English and male was very one-note. I think Myers contributed to the Telegraph – certainly to the Spectator – in those years and his laboured, junior-common-room prose is a dead giveaway.
For the real thing – appalling politics, beautifully written – try Wharton’s autobiography ‘The Missing Will’.
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And here’s Slugger O’Toole for the defence:
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Just reading this from Patsy McGarry it struck me how easily some people are swayed by language if its dressed in a certain way rather than content.
“But when he is good he is very good. The pyrotechnics and gymnastic dexterity in his use of the English language can be exhilarating. As a stylist, few can compare.”
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And now this
Jewish Council in Ireland comes to defence of Kevin Myers
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/jewish-council-in-ireland-comes-to-defence-of-kevin-myers-1.3172216?mode=amp
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Yes, interesting. But a real sense of don’t look at this, look at that.
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Patsy McGarry: ‘As a stylist, few can compare’. Well, you can’t lay any claims to style, Patsy, if you can perpetrate that sentence.
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That ‘letter’ is just from the Likudnik tendency in Ireland. Can be handily ignored.
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It turns out Ruairi Quinn wrote a letter criticising Myers’ article on the Holocaust. Myers’ reply is here:
http://archive.is/76cYq
1) How amusing it is to read Myers’ claim that “so few people tackle the emerging pieties of the European Union” after both Brexit,
and a French election where at least 2 of the candidates promised a referendum on EU membership.
2) Myers doesn’t give any source for the “One Israeli estimate is that four million died” claim.
2) “The Holocaust is therefore that which happened to the Jews of Europe, between 1939-45, whatever that may have been.”
No Kevin, the Jewish community, historians and others have given
specific definitions of the Holocaust. For instance, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum states that:
“The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.”
https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005143
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I always wonder about the pedantic aspect of all this which Myers and others use to cover this sort of rhetoric about the Holocaust (and I think your point about the four million is spot on too). Looking at wiki (granted not the final word on the matter) it looks reasonable to suggest that the six million figure is reasonable. But why does Myers feel it is so terribly important that he drags in an unsourced reference to four million. If it were four rather than six it would still be a monstrous crime against humanity and against the Jewish people. And his use of the term ‘exaggerated’ is curious too. Some estimates are higher, others are lower but the higher ones seem robust and their use is not an exaggeration as such. Indeed his use of the term suggests a malign aspect to the use by others of the higher numbers which makes his later defence of his own position hugely subjective and self-focused. It’s all very curious.
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My best guess is that he’s perhaps feeling vulnerable on the Boer concentration camps front, where many thousands not by execution but by a deliberate British policy of neglect and starvation.
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“I always wonder about the pedantic aspect of all this which Myers and others use to cover this sort of rhetoric about the Holocaust (and I think your point about the four million is spot on too).”
Yeah, that piece does (on its most generous interpretation) seems to be a badly written and offensive attempt to defend free speech even for reprehensible opinions. It’s still shot through with flaws. We on the left may differ on whether the right of free speech should be recinded in the case of Holocaust denial and racism. What none of us would ever argue, as Myers does, is that denying the Holocaust is just “any old counter-factual and even offensive nonsense”.
It isn’t.
It’s an attempt to preach hate against Jewish people by saying they are lying about a catastrophic horror that befell their people.
If a journalist argued that there was no Great Famine, that only a few “thousands” of Irish died in the period instead of about a million, and that public commemoration of An Gorta Mór was a ” secular, godless religion, which becomes mandatory for all who wish to participate in public life”, we’d be within our rights to accuse the journalist of being deeply offensive about a tragedy that befell the Irish people. So why so should saying similar things about Jews be treated any differently?
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+1
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Kevin Myers, Neo-Confederate:
As for President Lincoln, I can barely write about him without shattering my keyboard in rage at both his hypocrisy over slavery and his ruthlessness, as he visited ruin and death upon his fellow Americans.
He sought union rather like the Provisional IRA did, except that he had the resources to impose an overwhelming campaign of terror upon his enemies.
The Confederacy really didn’t want to be anyone’s enemies; the southern states simply wanted to go their own way, just as the American colonies had originally chosen to do.
https://www.pressreader.com/ireland/irish-independent/20120119/283180080340030
Yes Kevin. That’s why the Confederacy launched an artillery attack on Fort Sumter after Lincoln had offered to negotiate with them.
The more you look into Myers’ writings, the less the comments about Jews and women seem like aberrations and more like expressions of a genuinely unpleasant reactionary ideology.
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The more you look into Myers’ writings, the less the comments about Jews and women seem like aberrations and more like expressions of a genuinely unpleasant reactionary ideology.
The remarkable thing here is the near-impunity he’s enjoyed for thirty years. The last few days have seen conservative publications, journalists, and academics (TCD and the Irish Times especially) togging out to defend him to the hilt.
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“The remarkable thing here is the near-impunity he’s enjoyed for thirty years. The last few days have seen conservative publications, journalists, and academics (TCD and the Irish Times especially) togging out to defend him to the hilt.”
There does seem to be a tendency to excuse certain journalists who espouse objectionable right-wing views as “brave”, or “daring”, because they also happen to express them in a style that appeals to the “chattering classes”.
Even after he admitted concealing police brutality in his memoir, many people who would normally condemn such actions continued to praise Conor Cruise O’Brien.
And you’ll also find people-even on the Irish Left-who still speak admiringly of the author of this piece of bigoted crap:
https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/grim-reality-of-why-the-west-s-white-race-is-now-a-dying-breed-1.933114
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That’s a piece that deserves wider distribution Starkadder, the one you quote from in regard to the Confederacy. Sheesh. Reactionary is putting it mildly.
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Interesting that at the very end of that piece by Fennel there’s reference to a book of his published by … Athol
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Virtually all who have a neo unionist position on the National question inevitably develop reactionary positions on conflicts elsewhere.The list is endless.
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Perhaps. Certainly most of the people who would be excessively
hostile to Irish Nationalism (Myers, CCO’B, Eoghan Harris, RDE Roy Foster) ended up espousing right-wing positions on most other issues as well.
That doesn’t mean someone with impeccable Irish Nationalist credentials can’t be a political reactionary (Gerry McGeough springs to mind).
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Not sure Foster is quite like the others. More of a middle-of-the-road liberal.
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Myers had now apologised to Winkleman and Feltz, saying his comments were “foolish” and saying that he is “a great admirer of Jewish people.”
https://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/myers-i-m-not-antisemitic-1.442275?highlight=%22Kevin+myers%22
It hasn’t been mentioned before, but Myers used to contribute to the infamous Breitbart website:
https://donotlink.it/gWxv
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Did not realise Myers has already been employed on that particular fascist-lite website. Good to know.
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As Myers downfall was BBC salaries related this item by Craig Murray is interesting:
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2017/08/real-problem-bbc/
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Myers had a trainwreck BBC interview today (so much for the grandiose claims about meekly taking responsibility, etc. That leopard’s not changing its spots). Not going as well as his kitten-gloves appearance on RTÉ yesterday – and one wonders who in RTÉ management arranged that.
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That interview is shocking, really shows him up. I tried to listen Sean O’Rourkes interview with Myers but had to switch off.
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The interviewer just gave him the rope, didn’t she?
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Absolutely. That interview is an exercise in Myers’s intellectual incoherent gymnastics if ever I heard one. And all in the cause of showing his beloved self as a victim whose career has been “catastrophically” destroyed. Mark you, when challenged about his controversial article in the Independent newspaper about the Holocaust, he said “the headline misrepresented me”.
Surely we should challenge the online removal of the relevant articles. How can a call be made without reading them and holding him to account? I am conscious that the removal wouldn’t happen elsewhere, particularly America. Not sure why the left hasn’t requested this here.
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Also, what about holding to account the newspapers and editors who published this despicable material?
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I can’t help but feel – and that interview really points this up – that he’s hoist by his own rhetoric. There’s a grating sort of condescension to his descriptions of Jewish people which, however well intentioned (kind of sort of) sounds remarkably similar to anti-semitism because to suggest one group of humans excels is in a way not functionally different to saying another fails. And because he has done the former rather unthinkingly probably for years (though also bizarrely played games over the terminology of the holocaust which to some eyes would appear acting in bad faith) he’s now caught by that rhetoric.
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It’s notable that his admirers and defenders in RTÉ just extracted a tiny clip of his ‘apology’ to Feltz and the other woman – and passed over the rest in silence. If you hadn’t heard the original interview, you’d have no idea what a disaster it was for him.
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A wee thought experiment: Late last Saturday afternoon on overworked sub-editor at The Sunday Times in London is struggling through Myers’s latest screed. Half-way down the article, she says to herself: “Hang on, what the hell is this about money-grubbing Jews?”
A discussion ensues with the opinion editor, Phil Space, who agrees that actually, we can’t be having that kind of thing in our family newspaper. A call goes out to Myers, but since he’s turned off his phone and retreated to his man bunker to re-watch the whole of The World at War uninterrupted, there’s no reply.
The editor decides to delete the offending sentence anyway and the presses roll. Then everyone goes home and forgets about the whole thing. And Colonel Mad lives to fight another day, even though he’s done nothing differently to what he actually did.
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I had to laugh at your line… ” to re-watch the whole of The World at War uninterrupted”… brilliant.
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Surely it would be “Triumph of the Will” he’d be watching?
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As proof that he respects women when they do a good job.
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Another wee thought experiment (and bearing in mind that Kevin Myers got a phone call on Sunday morning from an editor at The Sunday Times in London): the Editor thought “Hang on, who the hell is the plonker who commissioned this article by a well known controversial columnist and who saw it through in the Irish edition of our paper despite the fact that it was loaded with problematic material? I will go directly over their heads and let Myers and the public know that he will never write for this paper again. It’s a win/win for us, given all the publicity it generates and because Myers as a columnist was in his quarter to midnight days anyway”.
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‘Sir, – Now that the hoo-ha about Kevin Myers’s lapse of judgment is beginning to subside, perhaps it is time to reflect on the absurdly hyperbolic nature of the reaction. A sense of proportion and, dare I say it, a sense of humour might help lighten the burden of some of the critics. – Yours, etc,
LIAM KENNEDY,
Belfast.’
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Kevin Myers, advocate of violence against women:
I WISH I HAD KICKED SUSAN SONTAG
If ever a single person was living proof that intelligence is a meaningless quality without modest common sense, it was Susan Sontag who died last week……If memory serves – and possibly it doesn’t, no doubt clouded by guilt that I failed to put the wretched woman over my knee and give her a sound spanking – she had each of Beckett’s characters played by a Bosnian Muslim, a Bosnian Serb, and a Bosnian Croat…My real mistake was not radioing her co-ordinates to the Serb artillery, reporting that they marked the location of Bosnian heavy armour.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3613939/I-wish-I-had-kicked-Susan-Sontag.html
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WTF! And that was published! Could anyone get a comment like that published about a rightish/centrist public figure?
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Its unbelievable, the one Kathy Sheridan mentioned in the IT yesterday likewise.
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We were actually given an English handout in secondary school (c. 1993) that, inter alia, praised Kevin Myers’ journalism (the bulk of the article was about Irish journalism in general).
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Hadley Freeman good on this in the Guardian. The whole business of ascribing characteristics to races is problematic – even when it’s meant as a ‘compliment’. ‘Can’t take a compliment’ is what sexist boors always say when someone takes exception to unlooked-for remarks on their appearance.
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Would that be the Liam Kennedy who decided to “take on” Gerry Adams in west Belfast. Adams polled 25k and Liam the magnificent total of 147 votes!
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I presume he at least had a ‘sense of humour’ to console him on his humiliating loss, Roddy!
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So where are you all now, you Not In My Names? Freedom is spreading across Iraq, and what have you NIMNs to say? Will you write contrite letters to this newspaper admitting that you were wrong, and that you apologise? Or will you find some excuse, yet again, to rail at the US, which is what you NIMNs do the entire time?…
Kevin Myers on the Iraq War.
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:e15hRzkyzKwJ:https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/an-irishman-s-diary-1.355418+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ie
Complete with a Myers quote for the Famous Last Words Department: 😉
So no rejoicing from them that freedom has come to the people of Iraq, courtesy of the greatest democracies in the world.
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Hilarious. He wrote it in ’03, probably just after W’s dress-up fighter-pilot routine aboard some aircraft carrier.
I had almost forgotten how smug the supporters of the Iraq War, and the various other misadventures, were at the time.
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I believe that the Phoenix (and the subject of the next cover is closed to betting, I’d say 😉 has comprehensively documented Myers’ many flip-flops on the Iraq invasion over that period.
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Kevin goes with the “I don’t believe in the Christian God but Christianity should be supported because people are too thick to follow any other source of morals” Guff:
PC is just one corner of a politico-moral triangle – its other apices being dogmatic secularism and cultural authoritarianism – which is taking the place of religion….Most of the greatest genocidal monsters in the world – Hitler, Mao, Stalin – were professed atheists.
http://www.pressreader.com/ireland/irish-independent/20120224/296893910961145
You could play a drinking game with all the hoary old cliches (PC, “Dogmatic secularism”, “Hitler was an atheist” ) Myers spouts. Wiser editors would have confined him to the bottom of the letters page, not repeatedly promoted his breathtaking lazy and shoddy writing.
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