Still Waters No Longer Running, Derp.

Sarky

Was he blathering on about polls being meaningless when the census suggested a catholic majority?

Dave!

Funny comment on the JW article:

"Excellent. That was a perfect parody of one those meaning-free pieces that John Waters used to write."

Dades

jank wrote: »

I don’t like what Ronan Mullen, Eoghain Harris, Ivana Bacik and Keiran Allen among others the regular posters in the A&A forum write about, doesn’t mean I eagerly await what they write or hunt down an interview of them so that I can have something to be aggrieved at. Life is too short and out of all forums this one should really 'get' that.

Seriously. This is what you do.

Subpopulus

Is it just me or is Waters getting crazier and angrier all the time?

Turtwig

Dades wrote: »

Seriously. This is what you do.

There's interviews of A&A folk? These I simply must see.
Pretty, pretty pleaseeeeeeee.

Bannasidhe

Sarky wrote: »

Was he blathering on about polls being meaningless when the census suggested a catholic majority?

Edited that for you.

lazygal

I laughed harder than I have in a very, very long time listening to Crystal Swing on Ryan Tubridy today. It seems one J. Waters, former Eurovision songsmith, has penned the Swing's latest ditty.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSxat_qAfQ8

Enjoy.

Bannasidhe

lazygal wrote: »

I laughed harder than I have in a very, very long time listening to Crystal Swing on Ryan Tubridy today. It seems one J. Waters, former Eurovision songsmith, has penned the Swing's latest ditty.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSxat_qAfQ8

Enjoy.

I would watch it but I'm not feeling even slightly masochistic today. Maybe tomorrow

goose2005

I wonder if the poll had said that 95% of Irish people were strongly religious, would John be disputing the idea of polling?

Nodin

jank wrote: »

I wonder the same thing. It is clear that he is off a different opinion than most of the posters here. Why then go off and read something deliberately to get pissed off at. To come to A+A and share in a group "tut tut"? Solidarity?

I don’t like what Ronan Mullen, Eoghain Harris, Ivana Bacik and Keiran Allen among others write about, doesn’t mean I eagerly await what they write or hunt down an interview of them so that I can have something to be aggrieved at. Life is too short and out of all forums this one should really 'get' that.

I was wondering what made todays article significant. In future I'd appreciate it if you'd bring your own soapbox, and not use me for the purpose, thanks.

Nodin

Dave! wrote: »

.......

The more pressing question is why am I wasting my time in this job that I don't like... and now that I think of it, why did I just waste my time replying to your trolling...

You need the money - shooting fish in a barrell takes your mind off the pain.

Nodin

Subpopulus wrote: »

Is it just me or is Waters getting crazier and angrier all the time?

I heard a clip of him on the radio this morning. 'When people have destroyed the catholic church, what will there be to give hope a hundred years from now'......Arse, arse, arse. The only hope people have had in regard to the church recently was the hope that Sean Brady would resign, and look how that panned out.

Plus its the church thats destroyed itself.

Bannasidhe

Nodin wrote: »

.

Plus its the church thats destroyed itself.

Did Not.
Holy Mother Chruch was infiltrated by secularist, homosexualist, Athiests (who may also have been post-modernist and deconstructionist) and they led innocent holy anointed ones into temptation and the arms of Satan (who was wearing Satin to make him extra attractive) and...and....it's not their fault!!!!:mad:

PopePalpatine

John Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!-ters wrote:

Opinion polls are really no more than measurements of the thinking of what Pope Benedict XVI, speaking at the Bundestag in Berlin last September, characterised as the “bunker” that man has built for himself so he can pretend to have dominion over all things.

Of course, having dominion over all things is religion's job. :rolleyes:

Corkfeen

Bannasidhe wrote: »

Did Not.
Holy Mother Chruch was infiltrated by secularist, homosexualist, Athiests (who may also have been post-modernist and deconstructionist) and they led innocent holy anointed ones into temptation and the arms of Satan (who was wearing Satin to make him extra attractive) and...and....it's not their fault!!!!:mad:

I did actually hear that concept proposed by a certain poster... :eek:

Bannasidhe

Corkfeen wrote: »

I did actually hear that concept proposed by a certain poster... :eek:

*snort*


Thankfully I wasn't drinking coffee when I read that.

jank

Dave! wrote: »

It's good to challenge yourself from time to time and see do your beliefs and ideas stand up to the points made by people on the other end of the spectrum. ...

I am sorry but that is bull ****. Listening to a few minutes of Michael Graham is NOT challenging yourself, it is utterly lazy and in fact just an excuse to re-afrim your own already made up opinions and beliefs. Sounds religious doesnt it!

jank

Nodin wrote: »

I was wondering what made todays article significant. In future I'd appreciate it if you'd bring your own soapbox, and not use me for the purpose, thanks.

You mean I am not allowed to quote you in future?

Dave!

jank wrote: »

I am sorry but that is bull ****. Listening to a few minutes of Michael Graham is NOT challenging yourself, it is utterly lazy and in fact just an excuse to re-afrim your own already made up opinions and beliefs. Sounds religious doesnt it!

Well you've asserted that, so it must be the case! Listening to alternative points of view does challenge you, and I've been persuaded or pushed back towards uncertainty on certain issues by so doing.

Why do you waste your time trolling in this forum? Isn't life too short?

CerebralCortex

lazygal wrote: »

I laughed harder than I have in a very, very long time listening to Crystal Swing on Ryan Tubridy today. It seems one J. Waters, former Eurovision songsmith, has penned the Swing's latest ditty.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSxat_qAfQ8

Enjoy.

Is that serious?

Turtwig

CerebralCortex wrote: »

Is that serious?

Well with Mr Waters, it's impossible to tell if he's a Poe or not. The optimist in me is hoping that on his deathbed he'll tell us all that his articles were just one big joke.

CerebralCortex

Bannasidhe wrote: »

I would watch it but I'm not feeling even slightly masochistic today. Maybe tomorrow

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ex-8bLAQIrI

A hedonists alternative.

goose2005

even better parody

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqNHyB7WDOg

Galvasean

Never paid much attention to Crystal Swing, but now I have come to realise that the two kids look the spitting image of two people I went to college with! :eek:

Dave!

Katie Taylor's faith makes media throw in the towel

JOHN WATERS

Fri, Aug 17, 2012

The boxer’s faith makes interviewers squirm but is intrinsic to her world view, her personality and her right hook

THE OLYMPIC victory and homecoming of Katie Taylor has been one of the most telling episodes of Irish public reality in quite a while. Before our eyes, Katie became the centre of a drama in which our culture’s developing understanding of human life and possibility became briefly visible.

Were the implications less serious, it would have been entertaining to observe the squirming of sports presenters and journalists confronted by Katie’s matter-of-fact understanding of the centrality of God in her life, their discomfiture as she expressed her gratitude for the contribution to her success of the prayers of other believers.

Each time, it was as though she had not spoken or had said something else – as though she had been talking about her training regime or wittering about the thrill of winning a medal. Her interlocutor would jump upon some smaller dimension of what she had just said, as though terrified that the “religious” dimension of Katie Taylor might cause the medal to melt.

If, instead of referring repeatedly to Jesus, Katie had referenced her aunt Margaret, or Richard Dawkins, we can be certain that there would have been lots of follow-up questions, and that the newspapers next day would have provided chapter and verse of the life, times and perspectives of the credited mentor.

But it was as if Jesus had never been mentioned, as if each of us who had heard Katie Taylor speak His name had been suffering from some odd tic of hearing that had made some other word (perhaps “busier” or “easier”) seem to come out as “Jesus”.

They tell us that Katie is a “simple” and “humble” girl. Allow me to translate: “Katie is a great girl when it comes to the boxing. We wish she were more like us and did not have her head stuffed with this simple-minded stuff about Jesus, but in the circumstances we are prepared to overlook this eccentricity.

“Normally we would insist she keep her religious beliefs to herself, but we are tolerant people and, since she is the most successful Irish sportswoman for aeons, will not make an issue of it. Please understand, though, that in our endorsement of her there is no approval of the delusions which she, in her simplicity, insists upon purveying.”

When I look at and listen to Katie, I do not detect simplicity, nor is “humble” a word that springs to mind, anymore than it might in respect of Muhammad Ali. The word that occurs is “grace”, followed shortly by “centred”, and “whole”. I see a woman inspired by a singular, irreducible idea, who as a consequence shines more brightly than gold.

There is nothing simple here: such certainty about reality requires long reflection, contemplation and asking. Humility? Perhaps – if you have in mind the idea of a human creature contemplating her place amid the dizzying firmament and understanding what power really means.

Katie Taylor understands her own heart. In her I see an intensely lived humanity of a kind being rendered atypical by the crudity and stupidity of contemporary culture. Katie is totally at ease in the world because she has come to understand reality as coherent and positive. This understanding is not an extraneous, add-on element of her personality but intrinsic to it, generating her smile, her ease, her right hook.

When she refers to Jesus there is no hint of piety or preaching. Her tone doesn’t change or shift gears. There is always the sense that she is speaking about something obvious. And when she thanks her supporters for their prayers it is as though she has never contemplated the possibility that she could have won without them. The whole thing is a seamless exposition of an understanding of reality in which boxing is just one element – and by no means the most important one.

Occasionally nowadays, the culturally imposed banality and meaninglessness of Irish public reality is punctuated by some famous sporting achievement, provoking a massive expression of vicarious triumphalism.

In the disproportionate commotion of the occasion it escapes mention that such moments increasingly serve as a destination point for the collective imagination, generating a feeling that, with the addition of injudicious quantities of alcohol, seems vaguely to pass for a “reward” for the attrition of the quotidian grind.

An Olympic medal, or a creditable appearance by an Irish team in the finals of some international competition, is proposed as something fundamental, rather than a mere passing cause for celebration. This enhanced sense of meaning can be detected not just in the intensity of the partying but in the repeated invocation of the concept of “hope”, which the sporting victory is deemed to have delivered.

And it is indeed as if such successes occur to provide a kind of hope by proxy for the entire population, for whom more enduring forms of hope are nowadays culturally inaccessible. Sport, in this schema, stands as a shield against the nothingness that is the logical end of the collective thought process, a fragile, short-lived distraction that usually ends in drunken tears.

But here’s the news, folks: the medal belongs to nobody but Katie, who alone seems to know that it’s but a token of the embrace that enfolds her.

© 2012 The Irish Times

.

what the fcuk is his problem
they all witter on about being humble for jesus and now that someone backs it up he's on about another flipping conspiracy theory
how is he given ANY air or print time, seriously

Katie Taylor understands her own heart. In her I see an intensely lived humanity of a kind being rendered atypical by the crudity and stupidity of contemporary culture. Katie is totally at ease in the world because she has come to understand reality as coherent and positive. This understanding is not an extraneous, add-on element of her personality but intrinsic to it, generating her smile, her ease, her right hook.

do you know her? no? then fcuk off

Delirium

what did he expect from a sports journalist? For them to ask Katie to tell us the story of Christ? They were interviewing her about her boxing, if she mentions her faith as something that helps her get motivated to train/win, fair enough.

A sports reporter is writing for a specific audience, i.e. generally folk who want to read about sports. Why would a reporter use up valuable column inches with discussion on Christianity when they should be writing about sports?

Turtwig

Isn't Waters teaching a diploma course in journalism at City Colleges? Anybody want to enrol?

Handsome Bob

I wouldn't hold it against a sports journalist for not asking her about her faith, he or she would be going into territory that they are not trained to deal with and thus, they would probably end up embarrassing themselves AND Katie.

That being said, he made one fair point which was this:

Allow me to translate: “Katie is a great girl when it comes to the boxing. We wish she were more like us and did not have her head stuffed with this simple-minded stuff about Jesus, but in the circumstances we are prepared to overlook this eccentricity.

There is a strong whiff of this attitude going around, especially online.

Dave!

meh, if we're going the way of the UK, where a strong religious belief is considered a bit weird, then that's not a bad thing IMO. Everyone's free to have their beliefs, but some beliefs are weird, pretending otherwise is a bit disingenuous.

The person shouldn't be treated differently, but it's pretty understandable that someone might consider them eccentric for having a strong faith.

goose2005

Were the implications less serious, it would have been entertaining to observe the squirming of sports presenters and journalists confronted by Katie’s matter-of-fact understanding of the centrality of God in her life, their discomfiture as she expressed her gratitude for the contribution to her success of the prayers of other believers.

Each time, it was as though she had not spoken or had said something else – as though she had been talking about her training regime or wittering about the thrill of winning a medal. Her interlocutor would jump upon some smaller dimension of what she had just said, as though terrified that the “religious” dimension of Katie Taylor might cause the medal to melt.

Did he supply any actual examples of this? Did he bother to ask any sport journalists what they thought - they're probably only a few yards away in the office? I suppose if JW wants to know how the Irish think, he need only look up his own arse.

And I wish he had illustrated the article with this wonderfully creepy painting

Bannasidhe

goose2005 wrote: »

Did he supply any actual examples of this? Did he bother to ask any sport journalists what they thought - they're probably only a few yards away in the office? I suppose if JW wants to know how the Irish think, he need only look up his own arse.

And I wish he had illustrated the article with this wonderfully creepy painting

Jesus looks like a butch Bee-Gee.

Sarky

Waters somehow gets crazier every time he opens his gob. Lots of bitterness shining through in this latest rant.

PopePalpatine

Jernal wrote: »

Isn't Waters teaching a diploma course in journalism at City Colleges? Anybody want to enrol?

That would be like studying biology at Oral Roberts University. :pac:

fitz0

Today's article essentially boils down to 'Everything is meaningless and all that you enjoy is just a shallow attempt at meaning. There is no meaning with out Jesus and the sports media should recognise this. Boxing is good.'

See,if JW can reinterpret things to mean whatever he likes I can too.

gbee

\ wrote:

just a shallow attempt at meaning. There is no meaning with out Jesus and the sports media should recognise this. Boxing is good.'

I liked Katie Taylor until she said "god did it"
what an effin insult, now she can put that Gold where the .........

fisgon

" And when she thanks her supporters for their prayers it is as though she has never contemplated the possibility that she could have won without them. The whole thing is a seamless exposition of an understanding of reality in which boxing is just one element – and by no means the most important one."

This, of course, is where Waters, and Katie Taylor, are most deluded. The idea that people's prayers contributed to the gold medal. If that was the case, why train, why all those hours of sparring, why all those years of sacrifice? If a boxing match is going to be decided by who has the most people praying for them it becomes like a glorified celestial X-Factor, trying to get as many people as possible to send in their prayers to find the winner. Are we asked to believe that Taylor won her gold medal because the Russian Orthodox Church couldn't mobilise enough people in time to pray for her opponent? (obviously they were too busy persecuting an all-girl punk band)

magicbastarder

has this been posted before?

https://twitter.com/johnwatersit

fisgon

magicbastarder wrote: »

has this been posted before?

https://twitter.com/johnwatersit

I wasn't sure if this was real or not until I saw at the top of the page...www.thisisaparodyaccount.com
Though it seems so real....:)

Turtwig

magicbastarder wrote: »

has this been posted before?

https://twitter.com/johnwatersit

That is brilliant.:D

lazygal

Is John trying to LOOK like Jesus with the hair and beard and whatnot?

Dades

magicbastarder wrote: »

has this been posted before?

https://twitter.com/johnwatersit

They say there's no such thing as bad publicity, but I suspect posting that link here isn't going to end well for him.

PopePalpatine

I actually want to know how an English teacher would grade John Waters' articles. Maybe someone could find an English teacher on these forums to find out?

Newaglish

PopePalpatine wrote: »

I actually want to know how an English teacher would grade John Waters' articles. Maybe someone could find an English teacher on these forums to find out?

Given the standard of written communication used by some English teachers on these forums, I'm not sure how much I would trust their analysis.

Sulla Felix

magicbastarder wrote: »

has this been posted before?

https://twitter.com/johnwatersit

403. Feckin atheists broke Twitter.

Dave!

Reading..

Liberals trying to skew debate over abortion

JOHN WATERS

Fri, Aug 31, 2012

Irish culture has been painstakingly manipulated by people trying to further their case

A STRIKING aspect of the culture we are industriously constructing is the automatic assumption that individual claims regarding “rights” must trump more established concepts of societal organisation and human self-reflection.

By a process of purposeful osmosis, Irish culture has of late been painstakingly manipulated to make one set of understandings appear outmoded and pernicious, and the other axiomatic and benign. And because this arriviste thinking clicks into a superstructure of logic which supports it to the disadvantage of prior or contrary ideas, it becomes easy to caricature different ways of seeing things as outmoded, obscurantist or Neanderthal.

The caricature in relation to abortion was given eloquent expression by Fintan O’Toole in this newspaper last Tuesday.

O’Toole sketched, in effect, a community – the Catholic community – that believes things because it is told to – indeed that believes several mutually contradictory things at once and plays “silly linguistic games” to effect symbolic sleights-of-hand.

He advanced a superficially plausible profile of Irish anti-abortion campaigners failing to take their logic to its ultimate conclusion.

“If they really believe what they purport to believe – that a fertilised ovum is a human being in exactly the same sense as Nelson Mandela or Lady Gaga or the pope”, he declared, “they are disgracefully moderate” in the face of – in effect – the obliteration of the equivalent of the population of Limerick over the past decade.

Anti-abortion protesters have many times been roundly condemned from the ranks of O’Toole’s liberal fellow travellers for – to give one example – marching with posters with placards bearing photographs of dead foetuses.

Now, they are condemned for being insufficiently “extreme”.

Yet again, a liberal offers opponents of industrial abortion a Hobson’s choice: be the fascists who endanger women’s lives or the vexatious cranks who cling to vacuous symbols.

Thus, liberal culture constructs its double-binds to trap those voicing contrary perspectives.

The cultural conditions by which “pro-choice” logic has come to dominate our public thought processes renders the pro-life position increasingly disabled by persistent insinuations of blind fanaticism.

To see how this works, we need but thumb along to Fintan’s next paragraph, in which the term “lunatic fringe” is used to dismiss anyone who expresses an “absolutist” position on abortion.

To further their case, liberals demolish the ethical subtlety informing the Catholic position, and then accuse their opponents of denying complexities.

There is nothing inconsistent in the Catholic position that abortion, to begin with, amounts to the killing of a human life, but that this may in certain circumstances be unavoidable and therefore permissible as the lesser of evils.

The idea that an abortion to save the life of the mother is on the same moral plane as one obtained to avoid the inconvenience of a baby is as fatuous as the suggestion that there is no distinction between an accidental death arising from self-defence and a premeditated murder.

The ethical distinction arises from the context, and is not obliterated (as O’Toole implied) because the word “abortion” happens to be used for both. Catholics may require a broader range of words to overcome such semantic trickery.

The prejudice that anti-abortion positions are adopted “for religious reasons” fails fundamentally to understand either religion or abhorrence of abortion. Catholics are people who understand reality in a particular way, not people who have been given a list of things they must believe in. The Catholic position on abortion arises from a moral perspective centred on the dignity of the human person.

Catholicism is the expression of this perspective, not its motivation.

There is no possibility of reconciling the liberal and Catholic worldviews, not because one is enlightened and the other obscurantist, but because they see the human condition in two utterly divergent ways. One sees man as flawed, fragile but redeemable, the other sees a species perfectible by its own endeavours, for which all things are possible through the imposition of individual “rights”.

Catholicism seeks to optimise the conditions of the greatest number in the common good, whereas liberalism sees only one context at a time and is blind, in each instance, to the wider ecology. Catholics tend to set out from, yes, absolutist core principles that can be mediated in exceptional circumstances on the basis of compassion, necessity, reason, mercy and forgiveness; liberals come from the opposite direction, latching on to exceptions and peripheral case studies to create a useful confusion.

The liberal approach is to break down absolutes by pitting one set of rights against another, a kind of relativist draughts game out of which the most convincing victim emerges triumphant. Ultimately anybody’s rights can be obliterated by the superior claim of another’s. This is why liberals talk incessantly about rape victims, even though this arises in the tiniest minority of cases.

What frightens liberals about the prospect of a resurgence of Catholic involvement in the abortion debate is not so much that gullible and petrified politicians will be told by bishops what to think, but rather that, if Catholics begin to understand the trick that has been played, they may still be capable of overcoming the skewed and inhospitable conditions which the liberal hosts have established to nobble their opponent’s case before it is made.

© 2012 The Irish Times

lazygal

"Catholicism seeks to optimise the conditions of the greatest number in the common good"


Really John? Really? It hasn't been doing a stellar job so far.

Wait a minute....is that.......COMMUNISM he's talking about?

Genghiz Cohen

.. I don't want to start reading that.
It's too early!

Bannasidhe

Genghiz Cohen wrote: »

.. I don't want to start reading that.
It's too early!

I hear ya. I need more coffee before I can even contemplate a world that contains Mr W - never mind read his latest drivel.

Sarky

"Abortion is evil" says man who deserted his girlfriend when she got pregnant.