The wondrous adventures of Sinn Fein (part 3) Mod Notes and Threadbanned List in OP

blanch152

blanch152 wrote: »

Not trying to browbeat anyone, but if you feel the force of the logic so strongly, maybe you should reflect on what I am saying.

Theres literally no logic behind it...yous are picking and choosing which violnce is ok.based on personal whims

I never said that there was any difference in the outcome - the person ends up dead. However, I have made clear, and there is abundant evidence to support this, that the societal attitude to violence is different now to what it was 100 years ago.

Factually what is the differnce then???yous are claiming its ok based on some fuzzy ill-defined society issue....to my eyes thats nonsense and violence then is same as violence now.

No, not at all. I have said before that violent action can be justified in certain limited circumstances. Firstly, it must have democratic legitimacy at the time. Security forces come under this category. Secondly, there must be reasonable attempts to avoid the use of force. Thirdly, it should be proportionate to the circumstances, and finally, it should be subject to investigation

Looks to.me,then yous accept the legtimacy of first dail and agree with shinners as all subsequent elections are fraud as not run on 32 county basis laid out as criteria at 1st sitting......either violence.was ok 100 years ago or it wasnt,dont see need to tie oneself up in knots really

What democratic leftimacy allowed the springhill massacre occur?

What democratic legtimavy allowed killing of elected councillor john davey this week 30 odd years ago (guns killed him were traced to intelligence servicez)

Many Garda killings would come under this legitimate use of force, incidents like Bloody Sunday would not, the Gibraltar three would come under legitimate use of force given the intelligence reports. Nothing the PIRA did could be justified using these criteria.

Surely the seige of the short strand would come under justified as they repelled ruc and loyalist attempts to burn out a catholic enclave??

Would the killing of henry hogan 200 yards from his house in dunloy,come under legtimate use of force? Any democracy that allows this vs critises pira for smae or less is a fraud imo


Looks increasingly likely to.me,your happy to justify violence,once it kills republicans or people yous disagree with

hatrickpatrick

blanch152 wrote: »

I have said before that violent action can be justified in certain limited circumstances. Firstly, it must have democratic legitimacy at the time. Security forces come under this category.

You have got to be kidding me. The security forces had zero democratic legitimacy when the government they served was elected on the basis of systematic voter suppression and gerrymandering against one side in the conflict.

Your failure to acknowledge that the Troubles emerged in the context of an entire demographic being denied basic democratic rights is the reason none of your arguments hold up, and this one is a perfect example of that. The security forces did not command democratic legitimacy, because democracy in Northern Ireland didn't exist prior to the Good Friday Agreement. It didn't exist any more than it did in the United States prior to the civil rights movement, or in South Africa under the system of Apartheid.

Precisely nothing done by the British government commanded democratic legitimacy in Northern Ireland pre-GFA. That by extension includes any state agency who operated in Northern Ireland on their behalf.

FrancieBrady

blanch152 wrote: »

Q: Should Ireland have joined WW2 with the Allies? Yes
Q: Should Ireland have joined the Vietnam War? Absolutely not
Q: Should Ireland have joined the Falklands War? Absolutely not
Q: Should Ireland have invaded Iraq? Absolutely not.
Q: Was there a difference between the justifiable nature of the actions of the IRA in 1916-1921 and the actions of the PIRA in the 1970s? Absolutely yes, there was.
Q: Were the actions of the PIRA justified, even in small measure? Absolutely not.


Times change, societal responses change. History helps us understand that.

Á La Carte morals right there.

hatrickpatrick

blanch152 wrote: »

Q: Were the actions of the PIRA justified, even in small measure? Absolutely not.

Can you break down for me very specifically why you believe that an oppressive and violent armed wing of an illegitimate government shouldn't be met with violence by those it is oppressing, morally speaking? Forget about whether it's practical or whether it works, etc. You seem to be suggesting that PIRA attacks against the RUC or British Army were unjustified for the entire period 1969-1998 and that's the part that doesn't make any sense in my view.

blanch152

FrancieBrady wrote: »

Á La Carte morals right there.

Not at all, there is a strong consistent moral viewpoint that I have expanded on in other posts.

That you don't like it or agree with it is your entitlement and opinion, that you sneer at it is you displaying yourself.

blanch152

hatrickpatrick wrote: »

Can you break down for me very specifically why you believe that an oppressive and violent armed wing of an illegitimate government shouldn't be met with violence by those it is oppressing, morally speaking?

That wasn't the context in Northern Ireland.

hatrickpatrick wrote: »

Forget about whether it's practical or whether it works, etc. You seem to be suggesting that PIRA attacks against the RUC or British Army were unjustified for the entire period 1969-1998 and that's the part that doesn't make any sense in my view.

Yes, they were completely unjustified. Seamus Mallon, John Hume and many many other great men of the time share or shared my view.

James Brown

The founders of FF and FG had their bloody killings fighting as terrorists against the state. They took power had a civil war with more bloody killings. Now they have their generational fat pensions. After generations of ignoring the north they have the cheek to play morals against a party and people that didn't have the same luxury, while they themselves engage in cronyism and crooked deals to fill private pockets.

hatrickpatrick

blanch152 wrote: »

That wasn't the context in Northern Ireland.

Elaborate? I feel I've set out my reasons for stating that the government in Northern Ireland was entirely illegitimate from the moment of Irish Independence up until the moment that the GFA came into operation, and thus I don't want to bore everyone by repeating myself. If you'd like me to break it down again, however, I'd be happy to.

Do you believe that an oppressed demographic of citizens have the right to respond with violence if the forces acting on behalf of an illegitimate government escalate a conflict from peaceful to violent? Or should they simply roll over and allow themselves to be brutally repressed?

blanch152

hatrickpatrick wrote: »

Elaborate? I feel I've set out my reasons for stating that the government in Northern Ireland was entirely illegitimate from the moment of Irish Independence up until the moment that the GFA came into operation, and thus I don't want to bore everyone by repeating myself. If you'd like me to break it down again, however, I'd be happy to.

Do you believe that an oppressed demographic of citizens have the right to respond with violence if the forces acting on behalf of an illegitimate government escalate a conflict from peaceful to violent? Or should they simply roll over and allow themselves to be brutally repressed?

The government in Northern Ireland ceased on 28th March 1972.

Even within your argument, there are huge logical flaws.

At best, if I was to accept your logic, violence would only pass the first test of an illegitimate government between 1922 and 28th March 1972. Tests of its oppressive and repressive nature would have to be passed as well as the proportionality of any violent response e.g. would a continuation of the peaceful protests have been enough?

P.S. I don't accept the illegitimacy argument, given that the Dail voted for the Treaty and Westminister also voted for it.

hatrickpatrick

blanch152 wrote: »

P.S. I don't accept the illegitimacy argument, given that the Dail voted for the Treaty and Westminister also voted for it.

Moving this part to the top of the post as I feel it's the root from which the rest of this debate stems. My issue is not with the Treaty nor with Partition, it's far more specific than that. The government of Northern Ireland almost immediately f*cked with the electoral system and electoral boundaries in order to ensure a Loyalist majority regardless of demographics, and this is why, in my view, the government of Northern Ireland (including direct rule by Westminster, as these discriminatory electoral boundaries remained in force for Westminster elections pre-1998) was democratically illegitimate.

To give you a modern analogy, imagine for a moment our government decided arbitrarily to award North Inner City Dublin with five seats in the Dáil and to award South Inner-City Dublin with only one. Or if you'd like a different kind of hypothetical illustrating the same point, imagine if they passed a law stating that the border between the North and South Inner-Cities would not be defined by the Liffey, but would zigzag and criss-cross through the city specifically to ensure that areas with a large pro-FF vote wouldn't manage to elect any FF TDs, because the boundaries were drawn in such a way as to ensure they would always be diluted by an FG majority even if this was a totally artificial representation of where the support for each party actually lay.

This is what was done in Northern Ireland shortly after partition, to ensure that even areas with Catholic/Republican majorities would have utterly meaningless democratic representation.

Now, on top of that, imagine for a moment if the government of Ireland passed a law which stated that only those who owned their own homes were allowed to vote, and those who rented their home were not. In Northern Ireland, up until the GFA, there were various forms of voter disenfranchisement in place, from restricting the voting rights of those who did not own property or pay property taxes, to granting extra votes to graduates from some universities but not others.

That's the kind of utter horse sh!t practised by the government of Northern Ireland in order to democratically castrate the Catholic population. That is ultimately the root of all of the discriminatory policies which followed - jobs, housing, and education discrimination to name a few. First the Loyalists ensured that Republicans would have no representation in the government and then, once this stranglehold on government was established, they set about systematically repressing Catholics in every way they could legally get away with.

That is not democracy, it's kangaroo democracy. A sham. A lie.

If the electoral system is designed with intentionally denying representation to any demographic in mind, then that electoral system is inherently undemocratic and by extension, any government elected under it is inherently illegitimate by democratic standards. It's as simple as that. The government of Northern Ireland was democratically illegitimate for as long as gerrymandering was in place, and one person one vote was not in place.

In that context, yes, the government of Northern Ireland pre-GFA (referring to either pre or post direct rule being imposed, as the aforementioned electoral boundary bullsh!t directly affected the results of both types of election) was entirely illegitimate.

The government in Northern Ireland ceased on 28th March 1972.

Northern Ireland still had a government, just an overseas one. It, too, was subject to the aforementioned systematic voter disenfranchisement, and therefore, any action whatsoever taken by that government or anyone working for it was democratically illegitimate.

If the foundation of something is false, then everything which stems from it is also false. Democracy did not exist in Northern Ireland prior to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, and therefore one cannot discuss any state actions in that province in the context of anything other than oppression.

At best, if I was to accept your logic, violence would only pass the first test of an illegitimate government between 1922 and 28th March 1972.

Answered above, but let's leave that to one side and accept this argument for the purposes of arguing it. So that would mean that violence would be justified following the riots in 1968 and 1969, during which police beat the absolute sh!t out of peaceful protesters? Because in my view, it absolutely would. Any government agency anywhere in the world which behaves like this deserves to be removed from power by force, violent or otherwise.

Tests of its oppressive and repressive nature would have to be passed as well as the proportionality of any violent response e.g. would a continuation of the peaceful protests have been enough?

To suggest this is to suggest that civil rights protesters should have opened themselves up as sitting ducks for further policy brutality. I for one do not accept that argument. The minute the RUC decided to respond to peaceful protests with brutal violence, they became legitimate targets for any reprisals necessary to disempower them from doing so again.

I must again point out that I do not restrict this to Northern Ireland, it just happens to be what we are discussing in this particular thread. The uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia etc in the early 2010s were a direct response to police crackdowns against peaceful protesters, and my feelings towards them are the same now as they were back then - any police force which engages in violence against peaceful protesters can be legitimately regarded as a hostile enemy of the people and if the people subsequently decide to meet that violence with counter-violence, they are 100% justified in doing so.

You can point to literally any example in human history of cops using violence against peaceful protesters and my answer will be exactly the same - if they're the ones who escalate a conflict from peaceful to violent, they deserve the full force of public anger to be brought down upon them as a consequence. The minute that absolute pr!ck of an officer bludgeoned the man saying "God save us!" in the famous video of the Derry civil rights march, violence against the RUC became justified up to the point at which they committed to not behaving like this again, which in the case of NI did not occur until 1998.

Had they not engaged in such violence and instead allowed the March to carry on unimpeded, we would be having a very, very different type of conversation.

FrancieBrady

blanch152 wrote: »

Not at all, there is a strong consistent moral viewpoint that I have expanded on in other posts.

That you don't like it or agree with it is your entitlement and opinion, that you sneer at it is you displaying yourself.

A strong consistent moral viewpoint that neatly flip flops and weaves through the events and acts you don't want to criticise. I get it blanch. It is a feature of the partitionist moral code. Some would call it hypocrisy though.

atticu

FrancieBrady wrote: »

What an odd way to respond.

'Aha, you didn't use the form of words I thought you should use, therefore you are not sincere'.

McMurphy wrote: »

Where in the Collins report was she absolved for misleading her Taoiseach and the Dail?

Will I count to a million while you get me that part?

Francine, your double standards are clear for all to see.

You can’t show me where the PIRA, IRA or SF condemned the killing of innocent civilians.

FrancieBrady

atticu wrote: »

Francine, your double standards are clear for all to see.

You can’t show me where the PIRA, IRA or SF condemned the killing of innocent civilians.

They apologised for the deaths of innocents. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to work out that they apologised because it was wrong.

atticu

FrancieBrady wrote: »

They apologised for the deaths of innocents. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to work out that they apologised because it was wrong.

They apologised, they did not condemn!

I am happy that you have admitted that you were wrong.

Thank you.

a

FrancieBrady

atticu wrote: »

They apologised, they did not condemn!

I am happy that you have admitted that you were wrong.

Thank you.

a

What was I 'wrong' about?

What is the point you are trying to make? Do you think they were lying about it? Do you think they might start randomly killing children?
What is your concern here exactly?

CrazyFather1

I see Huff&puff are going to solve the insurance issues.
They have launched an online petition on Facebook.
That is going to show the insurance companies

FrancieBrady

CrazyFather1 wrote: »

I see Huff&puff are going to solve the insurance issues.
They have launched an online petition on Facebook.
That is going to show the insurance companies

Link?

I went looking for it, to sign it, following your tip off.
But I can't find one.

CrazyFather1

FrancieBrady wrote: »

Link?

I went looking for it, to sign it, following your tip off.
But I can't find one.

Link www.facebook.com

Seemingly they are going to "END THE INSURANCE RIP-OFF" this week, so anyone buying any insurance HOLD OFF. Pearse will have it sorted for you next week.

FrancieBrady

CrazyFather1 wrote: »

Link www.facebook.com

Seemingly they are going to "END THE INSURANCE RIP-OFF" this week, so anyone buying any insurance HOLD OFF. Pearse will have it sorted for you next week.

So no petition. Ok, thanks.

McMurphy

FrancieBrady wrote: »

So no petition. Ok, thanks.

Was probably some other group or political party, crazy has awful problems with logos remember

blanch152

hatrickpatrick wrote: »

Moving this part to the top of the post as I feel it's the root from which the rest of this debate stems. My issue is not with the Treaty nor with Partition, it's far more specific than that. The government of Northern Ireland almost immediately f*cked with the electoral system and electoral boundaries in order to ensure a Loyalist majority regardless of demographics, and this is why, in my view, the government of Northern Ireland (including direct rule by Westminster, as these discriminatory electoral boundaries remained in force for Westminster elections pre-1998) was democratically illegitimate.

To give you a modern analogy, imagine for a moment our government decided arbitrarily to award North Inner City Dublin with five seats in the Dáil and to award South Inner-City Dublin with only one. Or if you'd like a different kind of hypothetical illustrating the same point, imagine if they passed a law stating that the border between the North and South Inner-Cities would not be defined by the Liffey, but would zigzag and criss-cross through the city specifically to ensure that areas with a large pro-FF vote wouldn't manage to elect any FF TDs, because the boundaries were drawn in such a way as to ensure they would always be diluted by an FG majority even if this was a totally artificial representation of where the support for each party actually lay.

This is what was done in Northern Ireland shortly after partition, to ensure that even areas with Catholic/Republican majorities would have utterly meaningless democratic representation.

Now, on top of that, imagine for a moment if the government of Ireland passed a law which stated that only those who owned their own homes were allowed to vote, and those who rented their home were not. In Northern Ireland, up until the GFA, there were various forms of voter disenfranchisement in place, from restricting the voting rights of those who did not own property or pay property taxes, to granting extra votes to graduates from some universities but not others.

That's the kind of utter horse sh!t practised by the government of Northern Ireland in order to democratically castrate the Catholic population. That is ultimately the root of all of the discriminatory policies which followed - jobs, housing, and education discrimination to name a few. First the Loyalists ensured that Republicans would have no representation in the government and then, once this stranglehold on government was established, they set about systematically repressing Catholics in every way they could legally get away with.

That is not democracy, it's kangaroo democracy. A sham. A lie.

If the electoral system is designed with intentionally denying representation to any demographic in mind, then that electoral system is inherently undemocratic and by extension, any government elected under it is inherently illegitimate by democratic standards. It's as simple as that. The government of Northern Ireland was democratically illegitimate for as long as gerrymandering was in place, and one person one vote was not in place.

In that context, yes, the government of Northern Ireland pre-GFA (referring to either pre or post direct rule being imposed, as the aforementioned electoral boundary bullsh!t directly affected the results of both types of election) was entirely illegitimate.



Northern Ireland still had a government, just an overseas one. It, too, was subject to the aforementioned systematic voter disenfranchisement, and therefore, any action whatsoever taken by that government or anyone working for it was democratically illegitimate.

If the foundation of something is false, then everything which stems from it is also false. Democracy did not exist in Northern Ireland prior to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, and therefore one cannot discuss any state actions in that province in the context of anything other than oppression.



Answered above, but let's leave that to one side and accept this argument for the purposes of arguing it. So that would mean that violence would be justified following the riots in 1968 and 1969, during which police beat the absolute sh!t out of peaceful protesters? Because in my view, it absolutely would. Any government agency anywhere in the world which behaves like this deserves to be removed from power by force, violent or otherwise.



To suggest this is to suggest that civil rights protesters should have opened themselves up as sitting ducks for further policy brutality. I for one do not accept that argument. The minute the RUC decided to respond to peaceful protests with brutal violence, they became legitimate targets for any reprisals necessary to disempower them from doing so again.

I must again point out that I do not restrict this to Northern Ireland, it just happens to be what we are discussing in this particular thread. The uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia etc in the early 2010s were a direct response to police crackdowns against peaceful protesters, and my feelings towards them are the same now as they were back then - any police force which engages in violence against peaceful protesters can be legitimately regarded as a hostile enemy of the people and if the people subsequently decide to meet that violence with counter-violence, they are 100% justified in doing so.

You can point to literally any example in human history of cops using violence against peaceful protesters and my answer will be exactly the same - if they're the ones who escalate a conflict from peaceful to violent, they deserve the full force of public anger to be brought down upon them as a consequence. The minute that absolute pr!ck of an officer bludgeoned the man saying "God save us!" in the famous video of the Derry civil rights march, violence against the RUC became justified up to the point at which they committed to not behaving like this again, which in the case of NI did not occur until 1998.

Had they not engaged in such violence and instead allowed the March to carry on unimpeded, we would be having a very, very different type of conversation.

I presume you do not accept the Irish government elected after the Tullymander process?

P.S. I do not accept any of the premises in your post bourne as they are of a 2020s lookback at events that happened during my lifetime.

blanch152

CrazyFather1 wrote: »

I see Huff&puff are going to solve the insurance issues.
They have launched an online petition on Facebook.
That is going to show the insurance companies

Woohoo, free car insurance for everyone, brilliant, thanks Pearse.

hatrickpatrick

blanch152 wrote: »

I presume you do not accept the Irish government elected after the Tullymander process?

Absolutely. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, or disenfranchisement with the intention to skew an election result, in literally any form whatsoever, automatically invalidates any claim that an election was democratic and fundamentally nullifies the legitimacy of any resulting government. End of story. No ifs, no buts. People would have had every right to protest about this, and the Gardaí would have absolutely no right to hamper those protests. Such action would have been justified until the law was repealed. Had such protests been met with violence from state actors, protesters and/or their supporters would have been more than justified in returning fire.

P.S. I do not accept any of the premises in your post bourne as they are of a 2020s lookback at events that happened during my lifetime.

Implying what, exactly? Sh!tting all over democracy was socially acceptable a few decades ago so we're not allowed to look back at the individuals who engaged in it and call them fascists who deserved to be overthrown?

Is this the same argument people use about brutal corporal punishment meted out to children in industrial schools when they say "you have to look at these things by the standard of the time"? No. You don't. There's right, and there's wrong. Anyone who engaged in that sh!t was a fundamentally bad person who wasn't worth the air they breathed. The same applies to any individual who intentionally fiddled with the democratic process in order to prejudice the end result, and even more so if that was further used to then deny a large demographic group access to housing, healthcare, education, or employment.

The government of Northern Ireland which presided over a quasi-official policy of discrimination and segregation arising out of this intentional tampering with the democratic process was an illegitimate government. As is and was any government anywhere in the world, at any point in the history of democracy, which employed such tactics. Ergo, the police force which was backing up that government was an illegitimate police force, because the state from which that police force drew its official power was an illegitimate state.

And you haven't addressed my second point, either. What is your response to my position that any police force which escalates a non violent protest into a violent confrontation for the sole purpose of suppressing that protest, deserves to be met with any and all forms of resistance, violent or otherwise, available to those being oppressed?

Again, not exclusive to Northern Ireland. The minute the police began brutalising protesters in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011, overthrowing them using violence became a legitimate action. For the record, I applied exactly the same paradigm to the United States police during the Occupy movement. Were the Gardai to go out and baton charge a peaceful protest because the government didn't like the protesters, I would 100% support an uprising against that as well.

To summarise:

Governments elected in elections which were not free and fair, deserve to be otherthrown. Violently if necessary.

Police forces which attack peaceful protesters with violence and without provocation, deserve to be retaliated against. Again, violently if necessary.

It's a very black and white issue in my opinion. Corrupt state, undemocratic state, brutal state = violent resistance being entirely justified from those being oppressed. Again, no ifs, no buts. No qualification. A government which exists without the democratic backing of open and free elections is a government which deserves every protest, every assault, every shot fired in its direction. And the same applies to police forces which use violence to suppress democratic protests.

I personally have absolutely no exceptions to this principle whatsoever. Any democratically illegitimate government in any circumstances whatsoever is a government that the citizens have a moral right to overthrow by any means necessary. And that includes any apparatus of that government, be it civil, police, military, etc.

CrazyFather1

blanch152 wrote: »

Woohoo, free car insurance for everyone, brilliant, thanks Pearse.

I know, the car insurance is up soon. Perfect timing. I always wanted free insurance. Sinn Fein to the rescue

CrazyFather1

McMurphy wrote: »

Was probably some other group or political party, crazy has awful problems with logos remember

FrancieBrady wrote: »

So no petition. Ok, thanks.

Ok I know it is difficult to use the internet. I will try to help
Open a web browser and type
www.facebook.com
Now on the left side, not the right side, the left side of the page you will see a box with "Search Facebook"
Click into it. Doesn't matter how many times. Just click into it and type out
"Sinn Fein" got that? am I going too fast. Not hit enter
Now you will have right at the top. Really easy the first item called "Sinn Fein Ireland"
Go ahead now and click on that. You get that done ok?
Now right at the top, yes the very top of the page is the video
Scroll down and you see another video, some bulls**t about putting money into workers pockets
Below that you have the next video.
That ok?

CrazyFather1

Deleted User wrote: »

An ecexptionally well worded and taught out post,serious high quality standred

The fact theres people,who to this day can justify,what the ruc were about and justify way ni was run pre troubles,is grim

Nobody is justifying the RUC on any post I read.
The request is for Sinn Fein and the PIRA to apologise, not some half assed thing with 101 well sorry but xyzzy
How is that such an issue? why would anyone not think that is very reasonable?

FrancieBrady

CrazyFather1 wrote: »

Ok I know it is difficult to use the internet. I will try to help
Open a web browser and type
www.facebook.com
Now on the left side, not the right side, the left side of the page you will see a box with "Search Facebook"
Click into it. Doesn't matter how many times. Just click into it and type out
"Sinn Fein" got that? am I going too fast. Not hit enter
Now you will have right at the top. Really easy the first item called "Sinn Fein Ireland"
Go ahead now and click on that. You get that done ok?
Now right at the top, yes the very top of the page is the video
Scroll down and you see another video, some bulls**t about putting money into workers pockets
Below that you have the next video.
That ok?

Yeh, ok. I got there the first time.

So where is this petition you spoke of?

https://www.facebook.com/sinnfein (< that is how you link directly to a Facebook page)

Brendan Bendar

Fake apologies would be a waste of time.


Time to move on, you don’t have to scratch the veneer too hard to expose the real feeling.

Useless exercise.

FrancieBrady

Brendan Bendar wrote: »

Fake apologies would be a waste of time.


Time to move on, you don’t have to scratch the veneer too hard to expose the real feeling.

Useless exercise.

Not sure how others were received but I think the people of Derry welcomed the one from the British government at the time. Even though it has soured a bit since.

blanch152

Brendan Bendar wrote: »

Fake apologies would be a waste of time.


Time to move on, you don’t have to scratch the veneer too hard to expose the real feeling.

Useless exercise.

Any apology from Sinn Fein wouldn't be genuine.

Just look at the crony appointments of terrorists in the North.