Still Waters No Longer Running, Derp.

Turtwig

Imagine if John Waters wrote a dystopian novel.

Sarky

Would it be distinguishable from the bible?

lazygal

Jernal wrote: »

Imagine if John Waters wrote a dystopian novel.

It would just be a collection of his IT columns. And no one would know the difference.

Turtwig

Sarky wrote: »

Would it be distinguishable from the bible?

Plot wise? Maybe not. Prose wise? Definitely!

PopePalpatine

Firstly, the new IT website looks fugly. The opinion section is nearly impossible to navigate, and it means I have to look at John Waters' and Breda O'Brien's faces. *retches*

Secondly...Darwin is being equated with Marx? What the **** is going on in this man's mind?! You would expect this from a slack-jawed, barely sentient creationist and not someone who is supposedly credible enough to get a column in a major national newspaper!

I think I need to lie down.

Benny_Cake

Oh my God - it's full of words!

He must drive a lot of traffic to the Irish Times website because I can't understand how any editor could look at that and think that it belonged in a serious newspaper. He seems to be getting even more bitter as the years go by, which I didn't think was possible.

Come to think of it, I'm not sure I can remember a positive article he has actually written about faith or religious belief, he mainly seems to focus on the imaginary disaster that we face as society becomes more secular.

Nodin

Benny_Cake wrote: »

Oh my God - it's full of words!

He must drive a lot of traffic to the Irish Times website because I can't understand how any editor could look at that and think that it belonged in a serious newspaper. He seems to be getting even more bitter as the years go by, which I didn't think was possible.

Come to think of it, I'm not sure I can remember a positive article he has actually written about faith or religious belief, he mainly seems to focus on the imaginary disaster that we face as society becomes more secular.

He used rant more about teh wimminz, if I recall. This at least keeps him from getting all rippery.

Hotblack Desiato

My theme was what I called the de-absolutisation of Irish society

Isn't life so much 'easier' when you have black and white, right and wrong, told what to think, and no doubt or dissent tolerated. People like JW can't have much of a religious faith. He never argues why the RC church is right (apart from going around in meaningless circles with his thesaurus), just that it IS right. He does not defend his views, he attacks others for their views. He can't discuss atheism or secularism without going off on foam-mouthed ad hominems. Deep down he's afraid that it's all a lie. He writes to convince himself. He certainly isn't going to convince anyone else.

Hotblack Desiato

PopePalpatine wrote: »

Firstly, the new IT website looks fugly. The opinion section is nearly impossible to navigate, and it means I have to look at John Waters' and Breda O'Brien's faces. *retches*

Yeah, it's dreadful. I'm reading a lot less on the site purely because of how crap it is to navigate. It doesn't look like it was tested at all, usability is terrible, it can't even display a euro symbol correctly. Old articles mixed in with new. Embarrassingly bad.

PopePalpatine

The letters page is horrid to navigate too.

Galvasean

Benny_Cake wrote: »

O
He must drive a lot of traffic to the Irish Times website because I can't understand how any editor could look at that and think that it belonged in a serious newspaper.

I'd say he gets a lot of traffic from people like us tuning in and saying, "What the...?". Hits > talent. Hence why Kim Kardashian gets half a million to mention a brand name in a Tweet. While she doesn't appear to be particularly good at anything in particular, people are watching.

fitz0

This gem appeared in today's Letters section.

Sir, – Congratulations to John Waters (Opinion, March 15th) for demonstrating, once again, the poverty of secularist thinking.

I have never before read a more trenchant and cogent critique of the de-absolutisation of Irish society. In pellucid prose he, quite appropriately, posits the primacy of the numinosity of experience, in all its variegated subjectivity, over the rationalist, functionalist, tendencies in Irish education.

If I interpret him correctly, resisting all temptations to populist thinking, he advances a symbiotic dialectic of the infinite, while also, and dialectically – a most difficult feat given the perils of linguistic antinomianism – proposing an infinite symbiosis of the mundane and the transcendent. I am sure that most perceptive readers will agree that the sustainability of society is crucially dependent on the success of the Waters project. – Yours, etc,

JOE KEHOE,
Castletown Drive,
Celbridge,
Co Kildare.

http://www.irishtimes.com/debate/letters/the-poverty-of-secularist-thinking-1.1329293

At first I laughed, reading it as a satirical imitation of Water's verbose writing style. But on a re-read, I think he's serious guys.

If JW is about absolutes in society, surely there would only be one interpretation of his witterings writings.

recedite

^^^ I'm calling Poe on that one, its a bit too clever to be a real supporter. Actually this could become a new sport. We should all send Waters-esque nonsense letters in to the Irish times, and see who gets published.

The Black Oil

They must have a few giggles over at the IT letters desk.

Obliq

The Black Oil wrote: »

They must have a few giggles over at the IT letters desk.

I reckon it got in on the basis of the first line being unambiguously pro-J.W., whatever about the rest. Hinting that JW might have difficulty with "the perils of linguistic antinomianism" is very good, as is "dialectically.... proposing an infinite symbiosis of the mundane and the transcendent".

Brilliant stuff! I love the "If I interpret him correctly" as well. Can make no sense of last line though. I think this Joe Kehoe really deserves a reply. Any English professors in the house??

The Black Oil

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lF7WaHCQyso

Is that his younger, bearded twin in the audience? :eek:

The Black Oil

Nodin wrote: »

Because of escalating cultural hostility towards Catholicism, we are becoming blinded to the fact the specificity of the Christian faith is a necessarily particular code upon which Irish society depends for many quantities essential to human functioning. What is taught as religion is in effect a history of superstition. “Here”, the teacher tells our children on our behalf, “is what these people – or those people – or your antecedents – believe(d). Isn’t it fascinating / quaint / absurd!”


Warning, he's gone mental with the thesaurus here.....
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/religion-and-beliefs/religion-should-not-be-taught-in-schools-as-a-history-of-superstition-1.1326349

Sir,

John Waters, March 14th, 2013, gave, as he sees it, a thorough account of Religious Detachment in the Public Square Disorder. I, for one, am glad of Mr. Waters' diagnostic skills, but I fear that like many patients leaving the doctor's surgery, I can not make head nor tail of the writing underlying his suggested course of treatment.

Yours, etc.

PopePalpatine

Godsdammit, I was just about to post Kehoe's letter.

goose2005

recedite wrote: »

^^^ I'm calling Poe on that one, its a bit too clever to be a real supporter. Actually this could become a new sport. We should all send Waters-esque nonsense letters in to the Irish times, and see who gets published.

I'm penning an affronted reply to Joe Kehoe as we speak.

fisgon

fitz0 wrote: »

This gem appeared in today's Letters section.



At first I laughed, reading it as a satirical imitation of Water's verbose writing style. But on a re-read, I think he's serious guys.

If JW is about absolutes in society, surely there would only be one interpretation of his witterings writings.

There's no way that this is authentic, is there? Surely a piss-take, and a masterful one at that. If he is being sincere, then be very afraid, it looks like Waters has some acolytes out there.

TwoShedsJackson

We just need Eric Conway of Navan to weigh in now.

robindch

Disgusted in Sandymount writes in:

Rodney Devitt wrote:

Sir, – Surely Joe Kehoe can’t be serious when he suggests that linguistic autinomianism might be perilous (Letters, March 18th), particularly as he had just dexterously deconstructed John Waters’s grandiloquent and pretentious disquisition on numinosity (Opinion, March 16th), and shown up his fallaciously erroneous hypothesis, albeit inadvertently.

Rather, his symbiotic dialectic of the infinite, which juxtaposes such contradictory and opposing conjectures, and which Mr Kehoe apparently finds so attractive, simply fails to work through the logical stages of thesis, antithesis and synthesis in accord with Hegel’s logic. If a critique is to be trenchant and cogent, then let it at least bear a modicum of plausible verisimilitude. – Yours, etc,

RODNEY DEVITT,
Tritonville Lane,
Sandymount,
Dublin 4.

The Black Oil

Time for a JW drinking game.

Pick up an article by Waters. Take a drink when:

JW mentions religion – a sip of beer
JW blames the media, liberals, feminists, etc – one shot
JW blames blogs and social media – two shots
A JW article generates a satirical response – three shots

Galvasean

Looks like a battle of thesaurian proportions on the letters page

lazygal

Galvasean wrote: »

Looks like a battle of thesaurian proportions on the letters page

Maybe we'll finally get some answers on the mysteriousness of reality.

Galvasean

That'd spoil the mystery!

lazygal

Galvasean wrote: »

That'd spoil the mystery!

You're right. Sure if we know what reality is then all we'd be left with is the secularist desert, the perilous state of 'knowing' to which modern Ireland has flown, little thought given to the age old search for truth which is inextricably part of man's search for meaning.

goose2005

lazygal wrote: »

You're right. Sure if we know what reality is then all we'd be left with is the secularist desert, the perilous state of 'knowing' to which modern Ireland has flown, little thought given to the age old search for truth which is inextricably part of man's search for meaning.

If only we'd listened to Pope Benedict's missive on the centrality of hermeneutic experience for modern man, we wouldn't be trapped in the iron cage of secularism neo-atheistic pseudo-Descartian irrationality

Sarky

Indeed. bollocks, eh?

TwoShedsJackson

The Black Oil wrote: »

Time for a JW drinking game.

Pick up an article by Waters. Take a drink when:

JW mentions religion – a sip of beer
JW blames the media, liberals, feminists, etc – one shot
JW blames blogs and social media – two shots
A JW article generates a satirical response – three shots

Fine, except anyone would be dead of alcohol poisoning after four paragraphs.