Cassandra Voices

Tag: Eamonn Kelly

  • It’s All Academic: Bad Ideas Bloom

    A few years ago, I had occasion to walk regularly past the university in Galway. My journeys took me across the Salmon Weir Bridge, which had narrow footpaths and has since been relieved by a new footbridge, and up past the cathedral and the university. Often, I found myself walking against the current of students coming from the university. The various encounters along the way were sometimes surprisingly hostile. Many of the students seemed fired up with startling aggressive intent. Their demeanour reminded me of us as kids pouring out of the cinemas having watched a Bruce Lee movie, flexing fledgling muscles, feeling ready to take on the world.

    Naturally, I wondered: is it just me or is this a thing? On one occasion, when a young black woman glared at me on sight, for no apparent reason, a paraphrase of Ali G’s line popped into my mind, “Is it cuz I’s white?” That made me smile, for a while anyway, until I realized there was likely more than a grain of truth in it.

    I had attended that university as a mature student, took an arts degree, majored in English and sociology/politics (soc ‘n’ pol) and I do recall feeling similarly fired up at the time about the injustices of capitalism and so on, leaving me inclined to glower at men in suits. Was I now the man in the suit?

    I read up on what was being disseminated in the universities that was causing students in England and across the West to tear down statues and demand reparations for slavery, among other outraged activities. Back in the 70s and 80s, this same type of young person would be forming bands or theatre troupes, annoying no one, but neighbours and critics. What has changed?

    Pilgrims Going to Church by George Henry Boughton (1867).

    The New Puritans

    I came across a very helpful book by Andrew Doyle called The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World, which pretty much laid out the entire state of play: woke ideology filling the place that religion used to occupy and becoming a pseudo-religion itself.  It seemed that I, as a “white hetero male with colonialist tendencies,” as a student might put it, was actually the new framed culprit for everything wrong with the world. A kind of latter-day elder of Zion, guilty of everything, with an innate desire to colonise as a result of an innate desire for violent expression and appropriation. In a word, I’m “bad”, and not in a good way, as in rapper “cool”. And not even salvageable. To put it religiously, I’m beyond redemption.

    This idea of the “white hetero male”, as being “violent” likely stemmed from a confusion of terms, where male competitiveness was equated with “aggression”, which then brought the word “violent” into the word family, to be used for effect in argumentative debate, because everyone responds to scare stories and everyone loves a villain to make themselves look “good” in comparison. And what is a lecture after all but a kind of performance, the students filling the lecture theatres of the western world being the audiences. From this perspective the idea of the violent white male is a kind of pulp fiction, designed to thrill, while giving the freshers something to shoot at.

    But as philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris puts it, there usually aren’t that many bad people around at any one time. Maybe only 1% or so of people are psychopaths and sadists in any one historical moment. More often there are bad ideas that good people act upon with good intentions and usually disastrous consequences.

    And it seems from what I’ve learned from Doyle’s book and other sources, that Western universities have been disseminating some very bad ideas for a long while now, among them the idea that all white men are innately violent and all their works corrupt and deserving of destruction. But they don’t call it “destruction”. They call it “dismantling”. Meaning, I suppose, polite destruction.

    “No, Marie Antoinette, we’re not chopping off your head, silly girl, we’re simply dismantling you.”

    Then as if things weren’t complicated enough, meaning itself is regarded as a “construction” to facilitate patriarchal power, and that definitions of anything you care to name are totally subjective. Meaning, everything has many meanings. As many meanings as there are people. Which means that nothing has any real meaning, only subjective interpretation. Which means that everything is meaningless and ultimately the best yarn wins.

    All these bad ideas then became cornerstones of black studies, leading to the conclusion of the increasingly discredited doctrine of Critical Race Theory, which itself is racist, and often proudly so – “Now it’s our turn!” – that “violent” white people owe people of colour big time, with, apparently, justified hell to pay. A belief system which is perhaps even inspiring the killing of white farmers in South Africa.

    Incidentally, the “Now it’s our turn” idea also comes from feminism, and was used by some feminists to justify abuses of power when they gained authority over others, conveniently failing to recognize that far from creating equality Heaven on Earth, many of them seemed instead quite determined to create the same old same old, with themselves in the seats of power. Proving, at least, that power and ambition still have very definite meanings.

    Compulsory

    When I started in university in the early 1990s, one of the things that struck me as odd at the time was that gender studies was compulsory. The last time I’d been in “school”, Irish language was compulsory and eventually people saw that this was a bad idea because it created a system of inequality, favouring some and side-lining others. Now here I was, back in “school”, and the university, which I understood as being a place of free-thinking, had a compulsory subject. It all seemed a bit “off” to me.

    I asked some people I knew who worked in education about the oddity of having a compulsory subject in the free-thinking university, and both just looked back at me and said absolutely nothing, immovably shtum, although both exuded the vibe that this was some kind of unmentionable thing and that I would be best off saying no more about it, which I duly did, obediently attending the various compulsory gender studies lectures and seminars, to no great advantage.

    “To put it clearly, girls: white men are bad, but white women are good. We’re their first victims. And there’s hell to pay”

    Ironically, feminists also appear to have placed themselves in the role of white saviour to the Third World. Now heading up NGOs and helpfully inviting millions to “deserved better lives” in the likes of Newtownmountkennedy, they continue the task of identifying “bad” people, most of whom, oddly enough, come wrapped in white skin with male genitalia, making them easy to spot.

    “Look! A violent colonialist misogynist! Get him!”

    On top of all that, those radicalised students emerging from Western universities appear to believe that anyone who disagrees with them, on even the most trivial point, is actually evil, if not in direct league with Satan, and possibly psychically and spiritually contagious, justifying physical reprimand, as was demonstrated recently in Limerick when student Jamie O’Mahoney waved an Israeli flag during a pro-Palestine meeting. It’s little wonder then that these unfortunate students, at the receiving end of an education seemingly designed to make enemies of their fellow countrymen, now appear to have so much in common with radical Islam.

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Theory to Practise

    Well-intentioned theory, as was so strikingly demonstrated by the Nazi misreading of Nietzsche, doesn’t always bloom beautifully into reality. For instance, one of the current real-world consequences of the teachings of comfortable academics serenely creating theoretical paper models in ivy-decked tenure, is mass immigration. The thinking and moral lesson being that male white Europe owes reparations to the Third World for colonialist crimes committed in previous centuries. This idea is partly driven by another text called The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, which was a big ideas source in my university time.

    The ensuing academic-influenced invitation to the actual wretched of the Earth has resulted in, among other perplexities, the village of Dundrum in County Tipperary, with a population of 200 or so, being joined by almost 300 male strays – sans WAGs – from the Third World who no one quite knows, least of all our government, with locals being labelled criminally racist by the apostles of the global equality agenda for even questioning this more than extraordinary imposition. If there was any real social justice, those migrants would be housed in the universities. Chickens coming home to roost and all that.

    “Now girls, listen up! I want you to give a big feminist ‘Hey there’ to your new exotic boyfriends.”

    John Rawls

    The Pot is Black

    If the Humanities become selectively humane, as appears to be happening, it’s no longer the Humanities. It’s something else entirely. And the particular slant of “humanities” that is becoming evident in universities across the West seems more than a little racist and sexist, the very things it claims to be attempting to eradicate, itself apparently unwittingly succumbing to malignant Freudian projection on a grand scale.

    Referencing political philosopher John Rawls’ book A Theory of Justice, Thomas Sowell, economist and historian writes in his 2010 book “Intellectuals and Society”:

    Justice is the first virtue of institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory, however elegant and economical, must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise, laws and institutions, no matter how efficient and well-arranged, must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust.

    The way things are going, we may one day see a social movement demanding reparations from the universities.

  • Charity, Privatisation and Body Counts

    The common denominator between charities and private service providers is that they all live off public money on the basis of serving “victims” of one stripe or another, the raw material of these particular “industries”. But a victim helped and eventually “cured” is no use to this business model. To make it viable you need more “victims” coming onstream at a steady rate. But fixing the victims or the circumstances creating them is not part of the business model, since to actually fix the problems is to put yourself out of business. Raise awareness by all means, but please, don’t go fixing things. Broken is best. It’s broke, we’re fixed. It’s fixed, we’re broke.

    Private Concerns

    While it might be said, and often is, that privatisation is a “good”, promising efficiency and so on, there are of course problems. But then, there are problems with everything, life being what it is, so it wouldn’t be unusual for privatisation to also have problems.

    “In fact, it would be downright unnatural if privatisation didn’t have problems.”

    “Yes minister, but that isn’t the question. The question is: is privatisation better than public ownership?”

    The problem with the privatisation of services is the profit motive. It stands to reason that a private company entrusted with a service, any service, is going to rig the system to maximise profits. This means cutting and cutting and cutting, while valiantly keeping up appearances. This explains the awful food served in private prisons and direct provision, for instance, primped to appear as normal as possible for as cheap as possible while carefully managing not to descend to clear and present pig swill; while the company directors, healthy on profits, hang out in sun resorts, beaming around the beaches with great white shark’s teeth and the latest in designer shades.

    More Bodies

    I once worked in RTE and there was some kind of to-do between workers and management. Inevitably us writers got involved, because there’s none so militant as a writer, it’s almost a lifestyle thing, but management swiftly solved that small problem with a genius move: they hired more writers, lots of writers, flooding the writer’s pool with more writers than anyone could ever use, smothering the original small militant group of writers with grateful newbies. This tactic crossed my mind recently when our manifestly unpopular government kept our borders open to the entire third world and their grandmothers despite cries of dissent and distress from towns and villages far and wide.

    What do you do with disgruntled voters?

    “Get more voters! Grateful ones!”

    The problem with this short-term solution to a long-term problem is that some newbie from Mumbai or Kabul is not really going to give a damn about Fine Gael versus Fianna Fail versus the Shinners. When you dangle power like that to the hungry world don’t expect gratitude translated into neat generous voting patterns. You put power up for grabs like that and not only have you given your country away, you’ve given yourself away too, opening enticing opportunities for the thoroughly ruthless.

    Win-Win

    In 2017 a private prison company in Torrance County, New Mexico, threatened to sue the county on account of disappointing returns and close the damn prison, costing the county two hundred jobs. The private company demanded two hundred extra prisoners pronto, “Or we’ll see y’all in court!”

    Don’t you just love the symmetry of those numbers? Two hundred prisoners: Two hundred jobs.  As Paul Simon once wrote, “When times are mysterious, serious numbers will always be heard.”

    I lost track of the story after that. It was all pending. Maybe Obama sorted it out before turning out the lights, took some prisoners from elsewhere and sent them down there to Torrance to keep the private company in business and the country out of the courthouse.

    Or maybe that’s where the blind-eye to illegal immigration comes in. Just let a few hundred thousand South Americans steal over the border and impress upon your police force the urgent need for many arrests in a hurry to ward off a potential corporate suing tsunami. Keep the system oiled with more bodies.

    Business Plans

    What does a charity need most of all besides funding? It needs someone or something to be charitable towards. What’s say, a homeless charity without homeless people? Well, jobless would be one word that might spring to mind, maybe even homeless. Homeless charities and the people who work in them need homeless people. Arguably, they need homeless people far more than homeless people need them.

    Like privatisation of services, there is profit in charitable causes, which may go some way towards explaining the existence of over 30,000 NGOs in Ireland, nearly a thousand of which came into existence since 2020, according to Benefacts legacy. It’s boom time in charitable work and it’s not difficult to imagine the CEOs of charitable NGOs also hanging out in sun resorts, beaming around the beaches with great white shark’s teeth and the latest in designer shades.

    So it may be that mass immigration is little more than a few bad management plans gone awry. A result of unpopular political parties seeking grateful voters who’ll work for peanuts and act as infantry should the Russians invade, (you can never have too much cannon fodder), and poverty industry entrepreneurs spreading their nets wider to catch more “victims” to expand their businesses, based as they are on a kind of economic cannibalism. Because in the end, charity, like politics, war and orgies, all comes down to body counts. The more the merrier.

    Feature Image: U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and U.S. President Ronald Reagan in 1988.

  • Name-Calling and the Fall of the West

    The cultural commentator Konstantin Kisin said recently in a podcast that the left had destroyed language. For instance, the lazy use of the words “nazi” and “fascist” to condemn someone who holds differing views has only succeeded in draining those words of meaning. If everyone is a fascist then no one is; and what then do we call an actual fascist?

    But the distortion of language by the left goes far deeper than this and is, paradoxically, far simpler. Its roots appear to be in simple name-calling, a favourite weapon of both young girls and perhaps not surprisingly, radical feminists who gave us terms like male chauvinist “pigs”, casually de-humanising men while charging them with a “crime” of sorts. When I was a young man a favourite feminist darling of the left in Ireland was Nell McCafferty, a whiskey swigging ladette who made jokes about house-training men and so on, cheered on by her lesbian and misandrist supporters.

    By the way, the word “misandrist” is one that gets downplayed a lot in the culture. I once had a windows spell-checker that didn’t recognize the word. For those unfamiliar with the term, a misandrist is a woman who despises men, the dark sister of misogynist. A prime example was that loon Valerie Solanas who shot Andy Warhol, she a CEO for the Society for Cutting Up Men or SCUM. We don’t hear a whole lot about her in the culture, and yet, there she is, as large as life, living proof that even feminists can be toxic.

    Andy Warhol and his dachshund Archie Warhol, 1973.

    SCUM

    It was Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist and recipient of oodles of leftist insult and yet still standing, though admittedly prone to bursting into tears every now and then, who explained the difference between male and female aggression and how it is expressed. Feminist propagandists have gone a long way in persuading the culture that the female is devoid of aggression, that violence is strictly a male preserve, except for the occasional regrettable anomaly like the CEO of SCUM, who, feminists would argue, was so hurt by men that she was kind of infected by their innate violence, and so, the shooting of Andy Warhol and all violence of women against men is actually men’s fault, the women in question being “victims” of male violence responding in like for like form, the only language men understand.

    Jordan Peterson explained that while male aggression is generally expressed overtly, female aggression is more indirect, expressing itself in the form of relational aggression: speaking badly of someone, destroying their social links, setting out to inflict reputational damage and destruction, achieved for the most part through simple name-calling.

    “If you don’t vote me on to the board I’ll tell everyone you’re a nazi.”

    “Okay, I’ll vote for you, but just this once. And please, tell everyone I’m ‘nice’.”

    “I might. If you pretend really hard to be nice. You being an aggressive man an’ all.”

    King’s College London graduands with VivienneWestwood-designed academic dress.

    Homo Placidus

    There tends to be a more placid kind of man occupying the faculties of universities and they were a pushover for the aggressive feminists seeking power in the academy, the very workshop of language and thought. We all know what happened next, they took lots of seats of power in the academy and in publishing and in the media and, with postmodernism, succeeding in drenching reality in endless question marks: did it even exist, or is it just something some selfish man made to please himself? Which brings us more or less to today… except, that is, for one important factor which is often overlooked. Because in faraway places, people with an interest in taking power in the west noted that name-calling worked as a weapon for seizing power. It was a peculiar, almost comical Achilles heel of the western male. He could be toppled by calling him a pejorative name. How very interesting…

    The late Christoper Hitchens was probably the first to notice the danger. In 2011 he warned of a term that had been deliberately created to take advantage of this western weakness. A term that would have the effect of silencing dissent while delivering power to gleeful enemies of the west. The term was “Islamophobia”, a brilliant construction with in-built gaslighting. “There’s nothing wrong with Islam, you simply have a phobia.”

    Christopher Hitchens.

    Barbarians

    Hitchens said at the time “…this is very urgent business ladies and gentlemen. I beseech you, resist it while you still can, before the right to complain is taken away from you, which will be the next thing. You will be told you can’t complain because you’re Islamophobic. The term is already being introduced into the culture as if it was an accusation of race hatred or bigotry, whereas it’s only the objection to the preachings of a very extreme and absolutist religion …”

    Hitchens went on to show how the use of the term will open the way to power by silencing objections. And it works like a charm. But even so, it still needs help, and this help comes from those already holding cultural power and influence. Hitchens, finishing with a plea, describes how the power of the west will be taken:

    “…the barbarians never take a city till someone holds the gates open for them and it’s your own preachers who will do it for you and your own multicultural authorities who will do it for you. Resist. Resist it while you can.”

    It’s difficult not to believe sometimes now, especially when some girl is raped or some man gets his head lopped off, that our own elites and the liberal left, as well-intentioned as they may be, have inadvertently fallen into the role of gate-openers for the barbarian hordes, to put our current civilisational situation in a Romanesque context.

    What an ironic historical twist this could turn out to be. That the men of the west, helpfully agreeable in the feminist cause, inadvertently created the conditions for the takeover of the west by men whose main power gesture is the subjugation of women.

    Feature Image: Ipanemah Corella

  • Unmasking the Tawdry Yarns

    In the essential Boomer text, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance one of the chief ideas was the difficulty of defining what we mean by “quality”. Almost everyone knows what quality is and can easily spot the presence or lack of it in something. But the word itself, the concept, the thing of it, is difficult to describe. So, in the absence of a clear definition, the presence of quality can become a claim by a person selling a thing which, their patter maintains, possesses the elusive attribute.

    So even though everyone knows what quality is, it is possible, with a good enough story, to convince someone that something which may not actually possess quality, does possess quality. The key is the story. With a good enough story, anything is anything. You can even sow doubt in a person’s mind, making them believe that they actually lack the ability to discern quality, but that luckily, you are there to help them; for a small fee.

    The old story of the emperor’s new clothes is an illustration of what happens when a lie reaches critical mass to leave an entire herd deluded. If everyone claims to be able to discern the quality of the invisible garment, it takes balls to go against the herd, and, herds being what they are, the balls to differ is rare. So, an attribute which is difficult to define, leaves wriggle room for the unscrupulous and the potential danger of delusion for the naïve. You can almost hear Arthur Daly or Dell Boy spin it, “Look at that! That’s quali’y that is.”

    Value

    This is where Mariana Mazzucato starts out from in her book on economics, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. In Mazzucato’s thesis the word “value” is in many ways a synonym for “quality”, and she shows how some clever-clever salespeople have sold a pup to the entire world with a fancy story that somehow has the effect of equating value with price: if a thing is expensive it must be good, right? “Look at that! Now that’s quali’y.”

    Mazzucato shows how this simple con has allowed the Arthur Dalys of big finance to enrich themselves and their friends by extracting value from goods created by the wider working community. They do this primarily by blurring the distinction between value creation and value extraction. This is the Making and Taking aspect of the book.

    We see it all the time in the arts. Irish musicians and actors will be more than familiar with the publican who asks them to work for nothing because, unlike him, they “enjoy” their work. Therefore, so his thinking goes, that is reward enough and the publican can extract the economic value from the skills of the artistes. The story the publican spins in this transaction is the implicit suggestion that the arts are actually worthless.

    Mariana Mazzucato 2016.

    The Con

    Everyone can see the con when it’s that glaring, but in the wider world of high finance it’s all a bit faster and meaner: worker’s wages stagnate while shareholders extract fat bonuses. Energy company shareholders holiday in the sun while families decide between food and heat. Mazzucato’s book is a reveal of the stories and patter and understandings used and exploited by corporations and swallowed by the public and by governments, that results in wealth being sucked to the top while wages stagnate and inequality increases.

    Mazzucato’s goal is to unmask the tawdry yarns of modern capitalism’s snake-oil salesmen who profess to be the high priests of identifying value: the bankers and corporations essentially claiming welfare in the form of tax breaks while creaming from the top of community-created wealth to transfer to their shareholders, all with the connivance of a bought-out political class, many of whom are corporate shareholders themselves. She writes:

    “If the assumption that value is in the eye of the beholder is not questioned, some activities will be deemed to be value creating and others will not, simply because someone – usually someone with a vested interest – says so, perhaps more eloquently than others… If bankers, estate agents and bookmakers claim to create value rather than extract it, mainstream economics offers no basis on which to challenge them, even though the public might view their claims with scepticism.”

    Side Street in Dignity Village, Portland, Oregon.

    Fake Stories

    Derelict American cities are a living example of wealth extraction, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake while the top 1% live the high life. It is in untangling these stories, these modern myths of economics, that Mazzucato hopes to bring clarity in the necessary project to somehow reimagine capitalism, so that it works once more for the benefit of all, creating a thriving world rather than a dying one.

    At the centre of this entanglement of fake stories, spun by the elite like so many spider-webs, she shows that what is afoot is nothing more than a cheap con being perpetrated by groups of people with stories so shoddy that as soon as you see the move and the angle you can’t unsee it. Theirs is a strategy that depends essentially on the manipulation of one human weakness: convincing people that they are solely to blame for their own condition. Not the system. But their own character defects.

    And people buy it, every time. It’s not unlike the original sin the church used to so successfully sell. In the end, they claim, it’s all your own fault. So, while the poor sit self-tortured in self-flagellation for their own condition, which is almost always an outcome of social and economic inequality, the sales shaman steals away with the pensions and anything else he can manage to capture.

    Quality

    Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance spent a book trying to get a grasp on the meaning of the term “quality”, an attribute whose presence or absence is clear to everyone. That was the mystery he was trying to pin down. How is it everyone knows when something has quality but can’t quite describe it?

    In the same way, you don’t need a PhD in economics to see that the attribute of quality is severely lacking in today’s capitalism. You have only to look at the manner in which business is being conducted that it is delivering neither quality nor value, just endless bonuses to a select few and endless grinding poverty to the many, no matter how hard they might work.

    Marianna Mazzucato has unmasked the shoddy yarn driving this fountain-pen theft of communal wealth, in a book so timely and revealing that it simultaneously exudes the twin attributes of quality and value while providing much-needed insights into the vexing question: why is capitalism only really working for a select few? The answer is simple: the herd has been deluded by clever economic patter: “That’s quali’y, tha’ is.”

  • Privatisation is the Enemy

    When writing about JobPath in 2016 I attempted to articulate something disturbing I had seen when the DSP appeared to collude with private companies to deceive welfare recipients into entering into contracts with the private companies, contracted by the DSP to deliver the JobPath “service”.

    I never quite articulated the more general problem of privatisation, and ended up ghettoised really in arguments about welfare and “willingness to work”, exactly as the propaganda of the time was designed to frame the problem. Interestingly, Ken Loach’s film ‘I, Daniel Blake’, which is concerned with the same anomalies in the employment activation system, also ended up similarly ghettoised in the welfare question.

    Corner-Cutting for Profit

    But during my research I noticed something even more sinister than state collusion with private entities duping the citizenry: for instance, certain private prisons in the United States – which were run by the same companies who ran JobPath – were shut down by the Obama administration when it was discovered that prisoners were suffering malnutrition and dying: due primarily to severe cost-cutting for profit on the part of the private companies.

    Similar scandals have emerged here with regard to the Direct Provision service, where services to the “clients” are cost-cut to boost company profits. As I write, a similar scandal is emerging with reports from Ukrainian refugees of inedible food in a migrant centre somewhere in the south of the country.

    Similarly, the cervical smear scandal is essentially also a result of cost-cutting as a result of privatisation, cost-cutting that has cost some people their lives, most recently Vicky Phelan, whose final message to us was to always ask questions, the very thing our mainstream media often fail to do.

    Privatised Armies

    Meanwhile, it has come to light that the Russian state is using private military companies to conduct the war in Ukraine. The arrangement is similar to all other privatisation deals, where a private company inserts itself between public money and the people in return for providing a “service”, depleting the quality of the original service to siphon off as much as it can for its share-holders.

    The difference in Russia is that the “clients” – in this case conscripts – are being used as cannon fodder. The US of course has labelled one of these companies, Wagner, a transnational criminal entity. But in a world of transnational corporate bodies that’s just the pot calling the kettle black.

    In the YouTube video by Johnny Harris, ‘Who got rich off the war in Afghanistan’, Harris reveals a system of military privatisation in the US that becomes a free-for-all of public-money-siphoning, under the pretext of war, for a plethora of private government contractors, with members of Congress even holding shares in some of the companies receiving the contracts.

    And as is often the case with such things, all the shady dealing is hidden and obscured behind innocent-seeming terminology. Like the old song, you say tomayto and I say tomato, it’s a case of you say security and I say mercenary.

    Harris’s video shows most clearly the manner in which corporate privatisation of state services is often little more than a system by which private entities, in collusion with rogue government representatives, conspire to basically ransack tax-payer generated public funds for the benefit of private investors.

    Put simply, why should millions of poor people have education, health and welfare benefits when a small gang of wealthy people could just as easily have all that money for their yachts, private planes and nose jobs? Hm? Makes sense to me.

    Pardoned to Death

    In Russia, to find recruits for the war in Ukraine the Russian government offered pardons to prisoners in the prison system who were then contracted as soldiers to the private military company Wagner, becoming the very essence of cannon fodder.

    For instance, it is a routine tactic on the front, according to captured Russian soldiers, for commanders to deploy troops of conscripted convicts into conflict areas in order to identify gun emplacements and other targets for their artillery. They achieve this by the simple expedient of allowing the conscripts to be gunned down, giving the commanders the opportunity to see where the gun emplacements are and relaying this information to their artillery.

    The point is, like the prisoners in the US private prison system, or the migrants wasting away in Direct Provision, or the people on trolleys in hospital corridors,  or the sincere young men pedalling furiously through traffic as delivery “companies” to make a buck that won’t even pay a rent, while the parent company grows fat and rich; the Russian prisoners on the Ukraine front, having made a pact with the devil in the hope of amnesty, are nothing and no one in the greater game of profit and loss. A great game being conducted by governments and those private interests, often the buddies of government officials, insinuating themselves between public expenditure and the people this expenditure was intended for.

    Privatised News

    Politics has moved far beyond the old simplicities of left and right, and is now firmly established as corporation versus the individual. This is perhaps why mainstream media in general seems so oblivious to the insidious creeping nature of privatisation into all corners of the culture, since big media is itself corporate.

    This is why privatisation is the enemy, because the traditional protector of democratic freedoms, the so-called serious mainstream media, is itself already corporate and privatised. Even when it emerged that the private companies contracted to deliver JobPath were slyly attempting to blur the lines between welfare and criminality, it was reported only by one rag tabloid, while the serious media looked away.

    Surrender and Conform

    Like that old movie ‘The Invasion of the Body-Snatchers’, privatisation invites you to surrender and conform, softly crooning that it’s the end of all anxiety and worry to simply give up on yourself and just get in line with the company’s needs.

    As Barbara Ehrenreich showed in her book Smile or Die, How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World corporate propaganda designed to disarm workers is knowingly implanted by the use of positive thinking and the concept of team-work. In work situations where precarity is the reality the worker is advised to be upbeat at all times.

    This insanity-inducing expectation has the effect of controlling potential worker dissatisfaction at source, saving the company the problem of individual grumbling that might lead to unionisation. This allows companies to lay-off workers by the thousand for profit, depending on market fluctuations, without any blowback. Such a culture sends workers the message that they are worthless.

    The only way out of this is to find a company to surrender to and hope that you get lucky enough to be kept, a situation that ultimately devours the human qualities of independence that make a culture healthy and productive and generous, the workers under the privatisation cosh of corporations becoming resentful of those dependent on welfare.

    In this way the systems of privatisation consume all the good in society and in people. All the virtues that created the society becoming little more than the raw materials the corporations feed off.

    Feature Image: Direct Provision centre at Lissywollen, Athlone, in 2013.

  • A Few Good Men and Women

    In the wake of the murder by a police officer of the unfortunate Sarah Everard, and the ensuing justified anger, many media people were calling for “good” men to act more visibly in opposing violence against women. While I back 100% the calls made for “good” men to speak up, I am also concerned that the more general ideas of social equality are fast becoming reduced to a gender-specific proposition, having the potential knock-on effect of splitting the Left.

    This is not to diminish the seriousness of violence against women, but only to attempt to bring to light how the focus on gender equality may be impacting our perception of more general inequality, and how this apparent narrowing of focus risks being manipulated by those whose interests are not necessarily best served by social equality.

    While many women are exploited by many men, in the wider culture there are those still looking to keep wages low; rents and the cost of living high, while reneging on any social housing provision, who will look to spin the fact of female exploitation in order to capture the female vote to the service of their own particular brand of social exploitation.

    Spin

    In a recent tweet, Una Mullally, responding to Josepha Madigan’s dig at the Kerryman newspaper, suggesting the paper be renamed the Kerryperson, called this out for the cynical political ploy it was. Referencing her own Irish Times article of March 8th which predicted this type of play, Mullally described Madigan’s move as an awkward Fine Gael grab for the female vote, which, as things stand, may decide the next government, as it decided the referendum in 2015.

    But the main talking point in the past week has not been Fine Gael attempts to capture the female vote, but the more immediate mystery as to why “good” men don’t speak out against violence against women.

    Fintan O’Toole, writing in the Irish Times on March 16th said that in order for men to make a more overt stand against violence against women they must first learn to be shocked by that violence. At the moment, he argues, such violence all seems routine to most men. I wonder about that, since it seems to suggest that silence equals complacency equals broad approval.

    When you remove the particular instance O’Toole is referring to, that is, the emotive and highly charged question of violence against women, and replace it with say, general social inequality; you immediately already have an answer as to why “good” men appear to do nothing in the face of violence against women. The truth is, the majority of good men, and good women too, tend to remain strategically schtum on a wide range of problematical social issues until they see which way the political winds are blowing.

    Good Men

    Edmund Burke is reputed to have said that ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.‘

    Burke wrote the line in a letter in 1770, which is more than a little while ago. The point being, the good men idea is far from being new. In fact, Burke’s quote needs updating, since at the time of his writing the realization of women’s suffrage was a long way in the future. An updated version would read: ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men and good women to do nothing.‘’

    So instead of posing the question, Why do good men do nothing, in such a way as to refer to a specific issue – in this case male violence against women – it is perhaps clearer to ask why do good people, regardless of gender, not raise their voices in say, situations where right-wing policy creates homelessness and subsequent deaths from exposure; or privatisation results in poor services and deaths due to cut corners and profit-conscious oversights? Why do good people not raise their voices en masse on these issues too?

    By the strict criteria of the “good” men concept as framed by Edmund Burke and others, we are all responsible, good men and good women alike, for homeless deaths, for direct provision deaths, for deaths caused as a result of medical privatisation, for domestic violence in all its guises and so on. Since this is a democracy, we all, strictly speaking, bear equal responsibility for the failings of democracy to deliver equal treatment to all. But these are difficult questions when applied to the real world.

    For instance, if you were an arts practitioner cosying up to Josepha Madigan when she was Minister for Arts, with a view to gaining favour and financial support for some project you had planned, are you complicit in Madigan’s rallying support to oppose Traveller accommodation? Or are the two issues compartmentalised? One being her political position and the other being her apparent social and class intolerance. Do you sacrifice your project to make a point, or do you compromise?

    Herds

    Along with such moral quandaries you also have the problem of the behaviour of crowds, which tend to behave like herds. Even politicians don’t really lead, they too follow the herd in the form of the public mood glimpsed in polls. Most people are spectators, going with the flow of the herd. We stand and watch the game until some critical mass is reached and then we raise our voices in support of whatever new majority appears to be on the rise. This works for every growing gang, from commies to fascists. A critical mass is reached and the herd follows. History shows that the herd will follow any old idea once this critical mass is achieved.

    Søren Kierkegaard, writing on this phenomenon, noted that an individual is worth more than a crowd of individuals, because an individual has personal agency, whereas a crowd tends to go with the flow of the herd. As a result, Kierkegaard comes to the conclusion that truth always belongs to the minority, since the majority tend towards unthinking obedience to the movement of the herd.

    It could be that now is the time where the issue of violence against women is to be embraced by the herd as an issue whose time has come. An issue for which good men are expected to speak up. But the point is, that apart from the particular issue, the question as to why do good people do nothing might be more properly considered in relation to a wider sense of social equality, encompassing all issues of social inequality.

    This applies equally to the politician allowing the market to decide the fates of those seeking housing, as it does to the person turning a blind eye to white collar corruption, or a man turning a blind eye to violence against women.

    Good Men and Good Women

    In this regard, for Fintan O’Toole to suggest that the evil of violence against women is exacerbated by good men doing nothing, is disingenuous at best, or is simply more political gamesmanship.

    Because the Irish Times also plays politics with notions of equality, quietly supporting right-wing Fine Gael policy through the manner in which it shapes and pitches stories, while always being first up with the property supplements when the market shifts, eager supporters of the housing Ponzi scheme, where the wealthy business class figuratively eat our young by selling them over-priced houses, while their political cronies refuse to enter into any believable form of social housing policy.

    Which begs the question, that when Fintan O’Toole is calling on “good” men to be more vociferous in condemning violence against women, is he referring to the same “good” men who remain silent in the face of social inequality on a more general level, keeping strategically schtum on a range of social equality issues, in order to ensure the perpetuation of a neoliberal status quo that is giving rise to social inequality in the first place?

    Conclusion

    All of this is not to suggest that the call for “good” men to raise their voices on the subject of violence against women is a wasted exercise; but only to point out that such a call to “good” men is not new; and furthermore, that by repackaging that call as an issue-specific moral imperative, while ignoring the same demand across a more general range of social equality issues, is to have the effect, whether knowingly or not, of splitting the Left by narrowing the imperative of social equality to a divisive gender issue, in such a way as to assist the project of the establishment parties and the elite they appear to represent.

    This will doubtless remain the situation until such time as good men and good women of all classes speak out against social inequality in all its guises.