Still Waters No Longer Running, Derp.

goose2005

Sarky wrote: »

Our John Waters isn't capable of such concise, clear statements.

"Blood does more than turn me on, Mr. Vader. It makes me come. And more than the sight of it, I love the taste of it. The taste of hot, freshly killed blood...Kill everyone now! Condone first degree murder! Advocate cannibalism! Eat ****! Filth are my politics! Filth is my life! Take whatever you like."

aidan24326 wrote: »

Of course there was. RTE had 3 bloody hours of it live on two consecutive Sundays. I can't imagine the viewing figures were high. Looked like about as much fun as an appointment with an incompetent dentist.

I just don't understand how Waters still has a column in a national newspaper, even allowing for the dire state of newspapers generally. He's the ultimate strawmanner, always arguing against his own perceived grieveances and injustices which often barely exist outside of Watersworld. He seems to be implying that the most boring and pointless conference of the year should have had more than the already-generous coverage that it garnered. Really John?

The same with Myers, who discusses Churchill, 1916 and PC-gone-mad on a virtually continuous loop. There are other things you can write about, Kev.

Galvasean

goose2005 wrote: »

The same with Myers, who discusses Churchill, 1916 and PC-gone-mad on a virtually continuous loop. There are other things you can write about, Kev.

Then we have Quinn who seems to write exclusively in defense of the catholic Church and Ian O' Doherty who has a more than a bit of a hard on for "ooman rites innit" stories.

fitz0

Whatever happened to frequent IT letter writer Eric Conway? I haven't seen a letter from him in months.

Galvasean

You don't suppose the dudes in the white coats finally got him?
"Address with the editor" was his first mistake.

ironingbored

He's back!

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2012/0706/1224319502813.html

Haven't read the "article" yet but can summarise:

"Baby-boomer generation misunderstands freedom...blah...blah...blah....aggressive secularism...blah...militant atheism...blah...blah...mystery....magisterium...blah....blah...only me and Benedict understand freedom. QED."

Nodin

And lo, did he speak bollocks......

The hippies and bohemians overthrew the bourgeois conformism of Andersen’s Republican father because they came to see his values as existing largely as abstractions, devoid of a context other than social control. They missed that these apparently imposed rules and strictures were the encoded wisdom of human trial and error through the ages.

fitz0

Whatever the content (or appearance thereof) of this article, the jump from a US focused, hippies killed the world, to Ireland and then gay marriage is just plain silly.

Basically, hippies are responsible for the debt crisis and they now want gay marriage just because. John Waters, you've surpassed yourself.

gbee

fitz0 wrote: »

John Waters, you've surpassed yourself.

I guess reading his reviews on Boards has gone to his head.

Sarky

It's more "waaaah, why don't people listen to old farts like me? THEY MUST BE STUPID AND EVIL BECAUSE I'M RIGHT."

Apparently people are demanding gay marriage for reasons other than "it's the right f*cking thing to do". He's whining about hippies and counterculture saying they somehow want more equality because they're selfish, and that The Man is actually the distilled wisdom of the ages.

tl;dr-

Waters doesn't know what the f*ck is going on and he's lashing out in angsty childish frustration at people who [mod edit] don't like him [edit] ...

MOD NOTE: There are limits to what individuals using Boards can say about public figures.

aidan24326

Has Waters been influenced by postmodernist twaddle? His style of writing is uncannily similiar. Lots of complicated-sounding sentences that are syntactically coherent but actually don't really mean anything when you try to dissect them. Bullsh1tology would be the technical term for it I think.

Admittedly he hasn't as yet tried to equate the square root of minus one with the erect penis but surely a similiar mathematical insight awaits us.

recedite

I think I've found the source of his material; the Postmodernist BS Generator.
(Read the warning at the bottom of the page before getting into the text too much)

gawker

http://www.icatholic.ie/videos/iec2012-john-waters/

Possibly the most rambling and nonsensical speech I've ever seen.

gbee

gawker wrote: »

http://www.icatholic.ie/videos/iec2012-john-waters/

Possibly the most rambling and nonsensical speech I've ever seen.

To be fair, I made an effort, I watched 10 minutes and 22 seconds .............. zzzzz

Nodin

gawker wrote: »

http://www.icatholic.ie/videos/iec2012-john-waters/

Possibly the most rambling and nonsensical speech I've ever seen.

I'm a wuss and can't face it.

joseph brand

Nodin wrote: »

I'm a wuss and can't face it.

Don't be so hard on yourself.
We all know it's pointless listening to the ramblings of a mad man. So why listen to Waters?

Might as well listen to the crazy ramblings of Ken Ham for an hour.

Delirium

He essentially tells a story of longing/absense of something through his life. He turns to drink and eventually ends up in AA. He then replaces drink with God. He then ascribes the improvements in his life to God, and not to cutting drink out of his life.

He also is unhappy that TV/radio doesn't speak of existence/God on a daily basis. Bits also sound like he is saying that a lack of religion removes a sense of wonder with regard to the world around us.

Did roll my eyes repeatedly when he essentially described Educate Together as something that only "trendy parents" are interested in.

I was somewhat bemused that he was so pleased that his daughter invokes "God of the gaps" when he was discussing the big bang with her.

robindch

koth wrote: »

Did roll my eyes repeatedly when he essentially discribed Educate Together as something that only "trendy parents" are interested in.

Been a while since I was last described as being "trendy". Will add it to my CV.

Calibos

Is Sineads daughter Roisin his daughter? Same one that was reprimanded by her catholic school for doing a school project on gay rights and was quite rightly moved to another school by her mum?

Level sensible head on that young girls shoulders. Regular customer at our business.

Delirium

Yeah, Roisin was the daughter he was speaking about in his video.

Dave!

John offers his unique perspective on the trouble in the Phoenix Park last weekend: too much materialism, and the loss of a "sense of the mysterious meaning of reality".

His suggested remedy: we should go back to the 50s.

We need to understand the rage in our midst

Fri, Jul 13, 2012

Last weekend’s Phoenix Park stabbings were a vivid manifestation of the rage that now defines our culture, writes JOHN WATERS

VIRTUALLY ALL the reporting and analysis of last weekend’s events in the Phoenix Park have been brought to us by unshockable crime correspondents and unreconstructed rock critics.

Predictably, then, we have heard a great deal about, on the one hand, the security and law-and-order dimensions, and, on the other, the particularities of electronic dance music and the putatively violent context of the attendant dance culture.

We need to dig deeper. About three years ago I suggested here that what we were calling the “economic crisis” was something far worse: an anthropological calamity arising from a misunderstanding of desire.

Having invested all hopes in the balloon-basket of materialism, (which had recently fallen out of the sky) we had being brought face-to-face with a confusion centred on an inability to define what we want.

What we skirt over as “materialism” denotes a core cultural misunderstanding that reduces human expectations to what is tangible and comprehensible. It is symptomatic of a culture that has lost its sense of the mysterious meaning of reality, and must therefore offer three-dimensional bait to keep the human mechanism ticking-over.

At the heart of such a culture is a hole, from which rage emanates in the manner of lava. What emerged in the Phoenix Park last Saturday was an especially vivid manifestation of the rage that now defines our culture.

We have come to think of a “stabbing” as exhibiting a narrow meaning related to the individual wielding the knife. More than 20 years ago Robert Bly wrote in Iron John about the power and meanings of knives. He recalled that, in traditional societies over many millennia, knives were used in the initiation of young men. The community elders would take the initiate into the wilderness and subject him to a regime of trial and fasting lasting several days.

Around the campfire, the boy would hear the great myths and stories that men shared only among themselves. On the third night, the elders would pass around a bowl and, one by one, would cut their arms with a knife and bleed into it. When the bowl reached the boy, he drank the elders’ blood.

Nowadays we shudder and dismiss such rituals as backward and barbarous, but neglect to take account of the barbarisms that occur in our midst because we no longer honour the natures of men. The elimination from our culture of the teaching, benign-authoritarian father has left us with generations of young men who, as Bly observed, are “numb in the region of the heart”. Because young men are never allowed to come away from their mothers, they stand on the threshold of manhood but cannot enter.

The umbilical cord has been severed, but little more. Still tied to their mothers’ apron strings, more and more of our young men carry knives to announce their manhood. With their fathers cast into silence, they are starved of the wisdoms and mythologies that might sustain a healthy male existence. In our obsession with minoritarianism, we have overlooked some of the most vital constituents of a healthy community.

Adrift in the numbness that engulfs them, many of our young men now walk with an outward appearance of normality but inwardly lurch uncontrollably – from, for example, a learned piety to intense rage – all the time seeking something to provide some illusion of feeling while simultaneously keeping the numbness at bay. Sometimes the cultural conditions cause their defences to break down and another calamity ensues.

The great pioneer sociologists believed that, when understanding social deviance, it is erroneous to focus solely on individual wrongdoing. When someone commits some act that scandalises society, they believed, he or she is, in part at least, acting out some repressed, unacknowledged sentiment of the tribe. This understanding is supported by the coherence of certain dark statistics – murder, suicide, addiction – which tend to follow unique and consistent patterns within a given society, year on year.

A century ago the French sociologist Emile Durkheim argued that communities are psychic beings, with distinctive ways of thinking and feeling. The suicidal individual’s sadness, he wrote in On Suicide, comes not from “this or that incident in his life, but from the group to which he belongs”.

He also diagnosed a condition he called “anomie”, resulting from circumstances whereby the normative regulation of societal relationships by rules and values has collapsed and caused individual feelings of despair, isolation and meaninglessness to erupt as individual pathologies and civic disorders. He defined the underlying collective condition as “the malady of infinite aspiration” – wanting more and more of what has already failed to satisfy.

In due course, those responsible for the Phoenix Park stabbings will be paraded before us on their way into court. We will shake our heads and arrive at some narrow moralistic conclusion, in accordance with which the culprits will be sentenced.

But if, as a society, we fail to see that it is we who made these young men what they are, we will have lost another opportunity to understand what has been happening to us. It is at least as mindless as what happened last weekend to talk of “testosterone-fuelled thugs” gone mad in the park.

magicbastarder

i'm curious about his assertion that young men are tied to their mother's apron strings without actually wanting to hear his justification for it.

Corkfeen

Has he been reading Camus this week? His anecdotes are unique to say the least.

Dave!

We have come to think of a “stabbing” as exhibiting a narrow meaning related to the individual wielding the knife. More than 20 years ago Robert Bly wrote in Iron John about the power and meanings of knives. He recalled that, in traditional societies over many millennia, knives were used in the initiation of young men. The community elders would take the initiate into the wilderness and subject him to a regime of trial and fasting lasting several days.

Around the campfire, the boy would hear the great myths and stories that men shared only among themselves. On the third night, the elders would pass around a bowl and, one by one, would cut their arms with a knife and bleed into it. When the bowl reached the boy, he drank the elders’ blood.

Nowadays we shudder and dismiss such rituals as backward and barbarous, but neglect to take account of the barbarisms that occur in our midst because we no longer honour the natures of men. The elimination from our culture of the teaching, benign-authoritarian father has left us with generations of young men who, as Bly observed, are “numb in the region of the heart”. Because young men are never allowed to come away from their mothers, they stand on the threshold of manhood but cannot enter.

seamus

As has been mentioned a number of times in various media, there were riots at Bob Dylan in 1984, no doubt when John Waters was at the height of his rebellious youth.

The fact that he seems to think that society is worse then is used to be, just goes to show that he has become another predictable, "God be with the days" commentator, incapable of removing the rose-tinted glasses.

What's sadder is that he thinks he's being cerebral when he comes up with some pop-psychology nonsense to justify his erroneous conclusions of the fall of society.

I wonder is there a name for the cognitive biaise where people innately think that things are all worse now than they were before. It seems to be a natural human phenomenom, evident in all narratives since human prehistory.

gbee

seamus wrote: »

I wonder is there a name for the cognitive biaise where people innately think that things are all worse now than they were before. It seems to be a natural human phenomenom, evident in all narratives since human prehistory.

This is a worthy topic for a new thread IMO.

fitz0

Its Friday again, so I suppose its time to ask, again, why is this twaddle still published?

Also, what's an unreconstructed rock critic?

coffee_cake

Last weekend’s Phoenix Park stabbings were a vivid manifestation of the rage that now defines our culture, writes JOHN WATERS

the only rage i have is when i read more of your sh!te, mr waters

seamus

fitz0 wrote: »

Its Friday again, so I suppose its time to ask, again, why is this twaddle still published?

Because John Waters is old school meedja who regularly dines and drinks with all other old school media who control what gets published and broadcast.
He was no doubt cutting edge and righteously wordy when all these people were young and hip up-and-comers, so they're more than happy to let Waters ramble on unedited without considering whether his writing even contributes any substance to the publication.

If someone in control dared tell him to go off and write something comprehensible, no doubt Waters would mock them for their puny language skills, and if they still wouldn't budge he'd run to a buddy in RTE demanding a slot on the Late Late to air his grievances.

robindch

seamus wrote: »

I wonder is there a name for the cognitive biaise where people innately think that things are all worse now than they were before. It seems to be a natural human phenomenom, evident in all narratives since human prehistory.

Plato said something to that effect too, though I don't have time to find the exact quote.

But the general term is nostalgia -- the longing for a distant, poorly-remembered past, filled with warm evenings, youth, hope, a belief in the wisdom and generosity of a benign authority. What Witters is suffering from is the cold realization that the benign authority doesn't exist now, probably didn't exist then, and that the authorities that do exist are fallible human beings with their own interests and limitations and who are, in some cases, perhaps even dumber than he.

mikhail

seamus wrote: »

I wonder is there a name for the cognitive biaise where people innately think that things are all worse now than they were before. It seems to be a natural human phenomenom, evident in all narratives since human prehistory.

It's called the Golden Age Fallacy.

robindch wrote: »

Plato said something to that effect too, though I don't have time to find the exact quote.

I don't know the Plato quote you mean, but I like to quote Cicero:
"Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book."
I think it's from about 55 B.C.E.