A €9 meal? An attempt to stop people going to more than one pub during an outing during the semi lockdown period. The compulsory meal was designed to make it more likely that people would go to one pub for two hours or so and then go home. The nudge theory idea was that paying another €9 for a meal would make heading on to another pub significantly less attractive – in a manner paying €4 for a bowl of soup would not. On the basis that certain pubs could not serve food, certain pubs therefore could not reopen in this schema. Not a difficult aspect to grasp, truth told.
You can agree or disagree with the compulsory meal idea. Fair enough. But the idea in itself was not silly or irrational. The €9 meal emphasis derived from an observation that €9 was high enough to put off people paying it a second time for the privilege of going elsewhere but not so high as to put off people going out in the first place. The logic is obvious, for anyone not blinkered by preconceptions and/or crypto religious mania and/or right wing shite about ‘liberty’ and/or childishness.
The fact that people are still going on about this stuff three years later only affirms my point about certain people being in the grip of psychic disturbance about Covid and related matters.
I agree with that but I’ve managed to set aside my usual opinion of the headbangers to see that a lot of the COVID restrictions eg opening windows in school classrooms and training for kids in pods of 6 and sanitising sliotars were a load of badger shit and wouldn’t happen again.
No, I do not. I have made mincemeat of you on these issues many times.
If nothing else, you are at nothing debating these issues because you are completely irrational on that front. Remember: you are the person, not long ago, who was getting all het up about ‘the feminization of The West’ and contending that a nice bit of war would sort out the decadence of 21st century youngsters. For whatever reason, you have a guiding belief that the world is in a terrible decline and needs sharp corrective measures from anti liberal and authoritarian directions.
Which is utter bullshit. There have been people for thousands of years who believed, due to their temperament, the world is in a terrible decline. Because of that conviction, Diogenes lived in a barrel. One of my favourite books is William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, one of the wisest books ever written. James notes that temperament dictates perspective. Further: not all temperaments are equal. Nothing about Covid anti vaxxers would have surprised William James.
All of this anti liberal and authoritarian stuff remains bullshit, of course. You would do nothing in such regards if it came down to it. Like me, you live in a cushy Western democracy, with decent standards of living and free speech and lack of interference. You just need/enjoy recreational paranoia, due to your temperament. No harm there, except when you want to take on risk on others’ behalf in the context of a pandemic.
The worst part about it was it was so open to abuse and easy to ridicule that it ended up devaluing all the other restrictions and became the poster boy for pointless rules
So say you. But I have just explained the (coherent) rationale behind compulsory meals in plain terms.
The fact that people behave like apes, in Dingle or elsewhere, is a perennial problem and was there long before Covid and will be there in eternity. Human nature will not change.
Not even in the febrile shiveringss of your own delusions, and there’s not a lofty allusion to some poorly read and half understood tome that could convince either of us otherwise
He did, this is one of the great things about TFK, and human nature in general, that one thing leads to another in a conversation, but we haven’t strayed too far, referring to Tony Houlihan as an ‘alco’ was a low blow
You are addicted to passive aggressive nonsense – do you want me to give you a disquisition on The Varieties of Religious Experience to prove I have read that tome, many times? – as well as to recreational paranoia.
You believe the world is run by a conspiracy of illuminati. This conviction makes you feel, paradoxically, in control. But you end up, even more paradoxically, a devotee of grifting idiots such as Ivor Cummins. I would consider that stance, most charitably put, undignified.
I do not have any such belief. I believe the world is run/dominated by human avarice and stupidity and folly and greed. And always will be.
