Still Waters No Longer Running, Derp.

Sarky

I can picture him just weeping into his straggly beard at finding the comment section of his tatty ill-informed opinion pieces filled with people telling him what he writes is horsesh*t.

"Holy crap, people can talk back! We need to ban talking back!"

Mistress 69

Sarky wrote: »

I can picture him just weeping into his straggly beard at finding the comment section of his tatty ill-informed opinion pieces filled with people telling him what he writes is horsesh*t.

"Holy crap, people can talk back! We need to ban talking back!"

I found his article rather funny, even if it is slightly caustic, especially the reference to fishwives and pub bores. Not to sure about burning in oil and carcasses to the buzzards.... Well maybe!

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2012/0731/1224321157051.html

joseph brand

That is far and away the most roundabout way of saying that he hates Twitter.

If anyone could do it it had to be Waters. He is a champion of long-winded, verbose, nebulous waffle. I bet he talks to himself, but 'they' don't even get on.

PopePalpatine

Sarky wrote: »

This just in: Out-of-touch loon doesn't understand technology, decides to fear and hate it instead.

I think he would get on well with Lamar Smith.

Galvasean

Psst, I also hate Twitter.

Bannasidhe

Galvasean wrote: »

Psst, I also hate Twitter.

I've never twitted..tweeted...what ever the hell it's called I've never done it.

tawnyowl

Sarky wrote: »

This just in: Out-of-touch loon doesn't understand technology, decides to fear and hate it instead.

Back in the 1990s he was denouncing mobile phones. (I gather he now has one.)

Dades

Galvasean wrote: »

Psst, I also hate Twitter.

I have two Twitter accounts - but only to stop some chancer pretending to tweet as me when I'm famous. :pac:

robindch

John Witters wrote:

The Internet is debasing our public discourse

By any normal judgment, his comments appeared disproportionate, erratic and gratuitously offensive. [...] Personally, I would prefer if, instead of pursuing individual tweeters, the police arrested Jack Dorsey, the creator of Twitter, and closed his network down. Actually, i wish they wud burn the Twitter founder in oil leave his carcass out for the buzzards. Seriously.

Nice one, John.

Nodin

Galvasean wrote: »

Psst, I also hate Twitter.

Hail, fellow. Well met.

I took a look and failed to see the point or significance of the thing.

Blowfish

Nodin wrote: »

Hail, fellow. Well met.

I took a look and failed to see the point or significance of the thing.

It largely depends on how you use it.

Follow a bunch of idiot celebs who go into minor detail about the contents of their lunch and yes, it's a waste of time.

Find people that have interesting stuff to say about subjects you like however and it becomes quite useful.

CerebralCortex

Blowfish wrote: »

It largely depends on how you use it.

Follow a bunch of idiot celebs who go into minor detail about the contents of their lunch and yes, it's a waste of time.

Find people that have interesting stuff to say about subjects you like however and it becomes quite useful.

Same goes for Facebook. However I think Twitter is more effective, it's less cluttered.

Proxima Centauri

Well, he was spouting on Newstalk this morning saying that all Atheists are stupid. Wonder would they get away with calling Muslims/Protestants etc the same.

Anyone else notice a lot of Religious debate on Newstalk in the last couple of weeks, very one sided pieces.....

CerebralCortex

Proxima Centauri wrote: »

Well, he was spouting on Newstalk this morning saying that all Atheists are stupid. Wonder would they get away with calling Muslims/Protestants etc the same.

Anyone else notice a lot of Religious debate on Newstalk in the last couple of weeks, very one sided pieces.....

What time and which show? I find him very amusing actually, he feeds my already misanthropic nature.

Proxima Centauri

He was on just before 9 o'clock. Heard it driving into work, lovely way to start my day getting called stupid.
I'm sure you can listen to the podcast already.

transylman

Proxima Centauri wrote: »

He was on just before 9 o'clock. Heard it driving into work, lovely way to start my day getting called stupid.
I'm sure you can listen to the podcast already.

I think in calling people with viewpoints he disagrees with stupid, John is engaging in something called psychological projection.

Psychological projection or projection bias is a psychological defense mechanism where a person subconsciously denies his or her own attributes, thoughts, and emotions, which are then ascribed to the outside world, usually to other people.

I have heard him admit in interviews that he doesn't have much going on in his head. After listening to his utterances this morning I would tend to agree with that.

Dades

Just listened there now. (I heard he was coming on this morning in the car but didn't have the will to listen then :pac:).

Pretty harmless rambling for the most part, with the exception of his scarily bizzare statements about stupid atheists. Insecure, at all, John?

He's right insofar as the poll was worded badly - something which is obvious when the results are looked at in conjunction with that other badly worded poll that was the census.

However, then we get the usual nonsense about what's going to replace religion (hope!) when the church is forgotten. Well, that's just it. Some of us don't require a comforting myth to get through the day, and even if we did it wouldn't make it any less ridiculous to believe in.

Skrynesaver

John Waters framing a thought in 160 characters would require wit and brevity, as a result his disdain of the medium is very understandable.

Botany Bay

I don't know about everyone else, but anytime I see John Waters, I can't help but picture him copulating with Sinead O'Connor. So, anything he says or does, or writes, beyond that; has to be some sort of improvement. It just has to be!

This post probably now counts as a debasement of public discourse!

robindch

Nodin wrote: »

I took a look and failed to see the point or significance of the thing.

PopePalpatine

^ Careful now. Facebook is probably a notch above Twitter in Waters' opinion. :rolleyes:

Dave!

I await with bated breath (:p) John's column tomorrow... Should be a treat

Nodin

Dave! wrote: »

I await with bated breath (:p) John's column tomorrow... Should be a treat

Why..?

jank

Nodin wrote: »

Why..?

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.

Enkidu

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.

The reason is because what he writes is silly and funny, I even think this about his non-religious writings. He had an article a while back where he said that stabbings happen because young men feel emasculated and the knives were a replacement for their manhood. Come on, that's ridiculous.

Look at his column today:
But an opinion poll is almost by definition incapable of addressing
such a question, because opinion polling belongs to the three-
dimensional, man-made construct of reality in which most of us
nowadays live most of the time, whereas “religion”, properly
understood, belongs to the greatest possible understanding of human
possibility.

Most of us only live in three-dimensions? What? People find him funny because he's ridiculous, nothing to wonder about. He's usually not as bad though when giving public talks.

fitz0

Surveying religious conviction is meaningless

JOHN WATERS

DESPITE THEIR trumpeting by a media determined to jump on anything to “prove” its God-is- dead, long-live-the-media thesis, the findings of this week’s so-called religiosity index poll are all but entirely devoid of meaning.

A Red C press release summarising the results of the WIN-Gallup “global index of religions and atheism” announced on Wednesday that Ireland now rates as one of the world’s “least religious countries”, with fewer than half of us describing ourselves as “religious”.

But what does this mean? The main question of the poll, asked of 51,927 people in 57 countries, was: “Irrespective of whether you attend a place of worship or not, would you say you are a religious person, not a religious person, or a convinced atheist?”

The only vaguely reliable element of these findings as far as Ireland is concerned is that referring to “convinced atheists”, a category that has shown a three-point rise, from 10 per cent to 13 per cent, since the last such poll in 2005. Even this finding is ambiguous, since atheism Irish-style clearly embraces a wide spectrum of people, from existentialists to lazy-minded anti-Catholic bigots.

The core problem with the poll, then, has to do with terminology.

What does the word “religious” actually mean? What, indeed, does “religion” mean? How can anyone ask a question about “religion” with any confidence about finding consistency of understanding as to the meaning of the word? Religion is really the science of the total meaning of things, the word “science” having the same roots as the word “knowledge”. Religion is an attempt by man to fill himself with a knowledge of everything.

In this poll, however, it is clear that the question has a subtext relating to what we used to describe as “‘atin’ the altar rails”. This is reinforced by the inclusion in the poll findings of a “religiosity index” of countries worldwide, as well as liberal references to concepts such as “religiosity among the poor”.

But the word “religiosity” does not mean what the compilers of this poll appear to assume. “Religiosity” relates not to the concept “religious” but to “religiose” – the condition of being “excessively” religious.

This is not a semantic objection. It is obvious that the WIN-Gallup/Red C poll was conducted and published with a certain ideological agenda in mind. This is clear from the published details but would most likely have been clear also to many of the people surveyed, as they answered the questions.

This ideological context (detectable in statements such as “the richer you get, the less religious you define yourself”) can be summarised as follows: “Religion, being about fear and superstition, is a symptom of poor, uneducated societies.” This assumption drips from virtually every finding and turn of phrase in the published poll documents.

Asking people if they are religious is bound, as a matter of course, to ignite highly personalised meanings. Some people think of religion as referring to membership of a certain club or tribe, adherence to particular sets of rules, or simply to a belief, or “faith”, in something called “God”. But what is “God”? What is “faith”? The poll assumes these meanings are fixed and commonly agreed but they are anything but.

Unsurprisingly, then, there are many internal contradictions in the findings – for example, this grammatically rather challenged but just about comprehensible statement: “Most of the shift is not drifting from their faith but claiming to be ‘non-religious’ while remaining within their faith.”

This wording appears to assume that “faith” refers to membership of a denomination, but is this not also one possible definition of “being religious”?

Judging from media reports of the poll, it is clear the findings have been interpreted as having concrete meanings to do with a shift in Irish society away from transcendental understandings, in the direction of “rationalism”. This has been the subtext of every report or discussion on the subject I have encountered.

But an opinion poll is almost by definition incapable of addressing such a question, because opinion polling belongs to the three- dimensional, man-made construct of reality in which most of us nowadays live most of the time, whereas “religion”, properly understood, belongs to the greatest possible understanding of human possibility.

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.

A poll is not a naturalistic measure of the essential outlooks of human beings but of the conditioned responses arising from the imposition of bunker culture. Mass-media culture increasingly primes humankind with a constructed understanding of reality, and the “success” of this project is the only element that opinion polls can reliably assess.

These conditions, rather than objective reality, render plausible the conceit that we can divine the understandings of three-quarters of humankind (as this poll claims for itself) by speaking to a number equivalent to the population of Limerick.

Religion, understood with an open mind, transcends the bunker to an extent that defies measurement or understanding through media as limited and limiting as words and numbers.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2012/0810/1224321890481.html

There's irony in JW talking about a lack of meaning.

I actually find myself in partial agreement with him this week :O The terminology if the poll is quite vague. Aside from that though, the article is Waters' usual 'What is God? What is faith?' rhetorical tripe. Maybe one of these days, The good John will actually answer his own questions.

Dave!

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.

It's a guilty pleasure, sometimes I like to expose myself to nutty opinions and people with ideas that I don't agree with. I also listen to Michael Graham (loud and obnoxious conservative political commentator in the U.S.; very rarely has anything to say about religion) in his weekly segment on the Right Hook on Newstalk.

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. Life is too short to over-analyze your every action; I think I can spare 5 minutes on a Friday morning in work to read John's column, or 10 minutes during my commute to listen to him on the radio.

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...

coffee_cake

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?

It's clear you're of a different opinion than most posters here. Why do you keep coming in here and reading things to deliberately get worked up about?

Penn

bluewolf wrote: »

It's clear you're of a different opinion than most posters here. Why do you keep coming in here and reading things to deliberately get worked up about?

seamus

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.

And not a hint of irony.

Though I love how he states the idea that 3-dimensional reality is "constructed" by man is some kind of well-trodden fact.

Reality is reality. As best we can interpret reality, there are four dimensions.

Any dimensions outside of that are theoretical men-made constructs which for all practical purposes, don't actually exist.

Also, Religion is the "Science" of meaning? Isn't "meaning" just a man-made construct, John?