Category: Politics

Serious. Or apparently serious.

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Politics

France Unveils A Darker Side

Anti-Muslim and anti-women, or pro-freedom and pro-women? Or indeed, anti-Muslim and pro-women, or (here’s a combo) pro-freedom and anti-women?

It’s hard to take sides on this unusually crucial issue of French couture. I am against people hiding their faces in public, whether they choose to or are forced. I’m against Islam – and indeed religion in general.

But I am in favour of the freedom to practise whatever religion you choose, no matter how strongly I disagree with that choice, as long as you do no harm to anyone else. And I can’t really accept that hiding your face in public is harmful to others. Rude certainly, but France isn’t introducing any law against rudeness.

I will have no truck with When-in-Rome arguments. In this Rome, they do religious freedom. Or did. And it is a matter of religious freedom. There is no point claiming that the veil is not a genuinely Muslim practice. Are you really going to say to someone “Your religion is not what you think it is”? Your beliefs are what you believe they are, I think.

Does the veil oppress women? Certainly if someone is forcing a woman to veil herself that is oppression, but there is no need for a law against forcing people to do one specific thing. Indeed, it’s a very poor precedent – do we need separate laws for everything you can’t force people to do? And if she chooses it herself, then this law is oppressing her. In practice there will be winners and losers. While some may seize on this as an opportunity to unveil, it will make others prisoners in their homes. No one can say that the net effect will be liberating.

When it comes down to it, the real motivation for this law is discomfort. France is uneasy with the number of Muslims who live there, but is willing to tolerate them – as long as they aren’t too blatant about it. So they ban the practice of a small minority, basically because it’s highly visible. A country has a right to outlaw things it considers foreign to its way of life I suppose. But rather than protecting France’s revolutionary ideals, this betrays them.

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Humour Politics Technology

No Banks, Thanks

What are banks for now, anyway? A while ago you would have said they were in the business of lending money, but now they’re so in debt themselves they can’t afford to.¹ When we were innocent we were told that they were for keeping our money safe, but there was a woman on the radio this morning whose bank – ‘Permanent’ TSB – allowed someone to set up a direct debit that withdrew the maximum amount from her account each day until it was emptied. Yet they had the audacity to tell her that policing the account was not their responsibility. In other words it is up to us to protect our savings. Apparently, now from the banks themselves.

I don’t want to have an account with any of these bastards, but I am forced to – and they are forced to make money from me. Money they can then blow on unfinished luxury gated communities in Romania. They are clearly useless overfed pigs of organisations, and rationalizing them into a duopoly is hardly going to improve the situation.

You know what is going to replace banks in this country? Not NAMA, not state-run ones, not foreign banks either. Phone companies. O2 now offer a service which is essentially a debit card you can use internationally; something the banks, with their rather half-arsed Laser system, failed to provide. I can go into one of O2’s shops – probably more numerous than banks these days – and put cash onto that card instantly. (You can transfer from a bank account too, but you don’t have to.)

Meanwhile, there are other systems that allow purchases made over your phone to be added to your phone bill, and are therefore new alternatives to credit cards. As phones are becoming all-purpose electronic devices, it is pretty obvious that they are going to be our wallets. And the lovely thing about this is that our fat, useless, greedy banks will be entirely bypassed.

 

  1. The government is actually talking about turning NAMA into a lender, on the (perhaps flawed…) logic that if it does one thing our commercial banks have disastrously failed to do – manage assets – it can do the others as well.
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Humour Politics

I Finally Come To My Census

Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn (right) and Padawan O...
Twats

Still trying to fill in that damn form. My problem is that a cousin and her boyfriend were visiting, and I’m not sure if they left before or after midnight. Maybe I should compromise by putting them down as one person of indeterminate gender who is related to me by both blood and marriage, but that might give a whole wrong impression about our village.

It strikes me that as a lot of these forms will have been filled en famille, many people will have come out to their parents last night as non-Catholics. I hope that went well. Incidentally, the form is actually a handy tool to help you decide whether you’re an atheist or an agnostic¹. If you happily ticked “no religion”, you’re an atheist. If you left the question unanswered, you’re an agnostic.

If you wrote “Jedi”, you’re a twat.

Another one I hope people take care over is the Internet access question. Please, don’t put down “broadband” if the only connection you can avail of is 3G mobile. Though I love the portability of it, such an unreliable connection is in no way broadband. Could you imagine running a Web server over that? Preposterous. Don’t help the government pretend that net access in this country is anything like adequate.

 

  1. Actually I think it is logically possible to be both an agnostic and an atheist, but maybe we’ll get into that some other time.

 

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Politics

Ruin A Country, Reap Rewards

"San Francisco Speculators", illustr...
Don't worry, it only looks like a racist caricature

Brendan Howlin has soberly explained that they looked at all the options and reached the conclusion that burning the senior bondholders would not be worth the consequent costs. This is sensible.

It is not however what they promised, and it’s not why we voted for them.

If not this way, then how are we going to punish the speculators, the people who drove house prices into the idiosphere and turned a healthy growing economy into molten radioactive waste? It seems we are not going to punish these people. We are in fact going to reward them.

So who will be to blame when they do it again?

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Humour Politics

Banks Fail Stress Test, Told To Take ‘Me Time’

Brendan and his monks' ship is carried by a gi...
The blog software automatically suggests illustrations, and sometimes I just go with the most inexplicable thing it comes up with. I mean, a boat on a fish. What the hell does that have to do with bank stress testing?

So the reason they won’t burn the foreign banks that over-served the Irish industry is the hope that they’ll lend us more in the future. Isn’t that a lot like alcoholics always making sure to pay the bar tab, even as the children go hungry? Credit is what we got too much of.

But to cheer us up, we are to get two ‘universal pillar’ banks. I do like that; we should have more financial institutions that sound like they’re out of pre-Christian mythology. A Department of the Great Sky Serpent, maybe a Unicorn Interest Rate. In fact it sounds a lot better than the names we have for them now, BoI and ABBoI. The new banks should actually be called Universal Pillar 1 and Universal Pillar 2. No wait, Alpha and Omega. “I save with Universal Pillar Omega.” Surely that will restore confidence in the Irish banking sector.

But I don’t really get the idea behind stress-testing the banks. They are already dysfunctional, loss-making, unable to keep their doors open without State and ECB constantly pumping in raw cash. In what way exactly could that get worse?

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Politics

Can We Arrest Property Speculators Now Please?

Quality and Cost of Services Concerns
Investors to sue Financial Regulator for recklessly letting them do whatever they wanted to do.

“An organisation representing property investors and developers is to take a class action in the High Court against the Government, the Financial Regulator and the banks over their roles in the collapse of the property market.” ~ The Times again.

I’d be all for suing the banks. If we weren’t all liable for their debts now, making it just a little self-defeating. But how do property investors get to sue them? These were the ones trying to make money out of house prices magically going up forever. The only people they should have a right to sue are their parents, for breeding them too stupid to breathe and tie their shoes at the same time.

Ah, because the banks lent recklessly. True – though this does overlook the fact that the people they were lending recklessly too were the property investors who were borrowing recklessly. It’s the alcoholic’s justification: they didn’t drink too much. They were over-served.

Having destroyed our economy with their bare-bollocked, dribble-soaked avarice, property speculators have decided that they were the real victims here. So once we’ve finished selling our hospitals to pay off foreign banks, they want whatever’s left.

At what point does it become legal to hunt these people down with dogs?

Categories
Politics

Libyan Rebels ‘Undemocratic’

History of Fine Gael

Mayo Fine Gael TD Michelle Mulherin thinks that the rebels in Libya should not be supported because, as quoted in the Times, they “did not follow democratic means. They took up arms against their leader.”

I will allow you a moment to take that in.

The rebels against Gaddafi should not be supported because they… are rebels.

Fine Gael, the party of obedience.

I wonder what democratic means she supposes are open to the inhabitants of a dictatorship – other than the one of mass protest, which I think we can safely say was exhausted when he started shooting them.

There are many clear reasons to be against intervention in the Libyan uprising, and they must be weighed against the good it might possibly do. I outlined what I think is the most important one days ago. There are even reasons why it might be wrong to rise up against Gaddafi. But his being the legally constituted dictator for life according to the constitution which he wrote personally, that is not one of them.

You idiot.

Categories
Politics

Save The Senate

This is a photograph of the Seanad chamber, Le...
What our Senate might look like with the useless scum removed

There could be no better image of all that’s wrong with the Senate than Ivor Calelly contemptuously abusing the house to save his own political career. No wonder the public has no respect for it when so many of its denizens were dumped there, in what the parties seem to think of as long-stay parking.

This is a great shame. Though as presently constituted the Seanad is, let’s face it, a pustule, what we need in this country is more oversight of the executive, not less. It may be little better at this than the rubber-stamping Dáil, but it is a little.

The Senate has some great strengths. You can get into it without really being a career politician, without being slave to the party whips. We could use more of that, you know. The Senate has – or had – people like Shane Ross and David Norris.

Want a simple way to reform the Seanad? End the Taoiseach‘s right to stuff it with useless lackeys. Skim off the political pond scum.

Categories
Politics

Save The Senate

This is a photograph of the Seanad chamber, Le...
What our Senate might look like with the useless scum removed

There could be no better image of all that’s wrong with the Senate than Ivor Calelly contemptuously abusing the house to save his own political career. No wonder the public has no respect for it when so many of its denizens were dumped there, in what the parties seem to think of as long-stay parking.

This is a great shame. Though as presently constituted the Seanad is, let’s face it, a pustule, what we need in this country is more oversight of the executive, not less. It may be little better at this than the rubber-stamping Dáil, but it is a little.

The Senate has some great strengths. You can get into it without really being a career politician, without being slave to the party whips. We could use more of that, you know. The Senate has – or had – people like Shane Ross and David Norris.

Want a simple way to reform the Seanad? End the Taoiseach‘s right to stuff it with useless lackeys. Skim off the political pond scum.

Categories
Politics

The Right To Employ People

Differences in national income equality around...
Inequality - Apparently There's Not Enough Of It

I just heard someone called Jackie Lavin on the Pat Kenny radio show say that unemployment benefits interfere with “the employer’s right to employ people”. That’s an interesting concept, isn’t it? I remember when right-wing lunatics used to just call social welfare an interference in the sacred free market. Now it’s an abrogation of their rights. They are actually being oppressed by social welfare.

I hadn’t known that the wealthy had any special rights – at least not officially – but according to her, one of them is to have other people be poorer so that they’re more affordable. That’s kind of mind-blowing, isn’t it? The rich have a right to poor people. It makes a strange Zen-like sense.

This Jackie Lavin is on the radio because she’s a “Business Personality”, best known for appearing in the Irish version of The Apprentice as mentor to her real-world business and life partner Bill Cullen. Also, for appearing in and writing for glossy Hello!-style magazines, like the one owned by Bill Cullen. He’s an entrepreneur, Fianna Fáil donor and I suppose our nearest equivalent to Donald Trump. These are important people then.

Why not apply this entertainment paradigm to the country as a whole? If the unemployed don’t shape up, we can fire them from their homes – from the whole country indeed. ‘Firing’ is much sexier than that dated emigration idea.

I mean. Fuck this.