little Ray, the harder he tried the more he failed…
“One of Ray D’Arcy’s researchers said to me before an interview ‘if Ray asks you if you are the new Eddie Hobbs what will you say?”
“Tell him to ask me on air,” said McGee. But the researcher insisted on knowing the intended response: “Well if he asks me that I’ll ask him if he is the new Ryan Tubridy.”
“Ray never asked the question,” he laughs. McGee has done corporate events and loves the buzz of a live audience.
Not racist as such, we’d have a good scatter of colours and nationalities, loads of travellers etc and there’s no hassle that way,
But lots of kids that I teach are very anti immigrant in the current climate,
Tricky thing to deal with because they’re bringing it from home generally and it’s a difficult situation if you find yourself contradicting the parents, it’s a tightrope
That never happened.
I have noticed a very disturbing change in the opinions of 20 to 40 year olds around my homeplace (there are not many of them in truth).
They are viciously anti immigrant. They won’t listen to any discussion on it and would seem to have happily burned down Citywest a few weeks ago.
Like @Arthur said, there wasn’t a hint of that ten years ago even though we had many immigrants then. Our local club had many Polish lads playing and there wasn’t a hint of hassle.
It comes from social media. ALL of it. Nothing else. Not real life experience. Online only.
I keep saying it but however bad people think the effect of the INTERNET is on other people’s brains, it’s way, way worse than that.
I went to school with folk from foreign backgrounds and there was never even a hint of trouble. In fact one lad was extremely popular and would have been seen as being in the cool gang.
That seems to have changed. And it is terribly sad and disturbing.
Perhaps people’s experience of migration is different to 20 years ago. ? There were plenty of houses available. I rented a four bed house for 550 a month back then there was nobody homeless. Immigrants were mainly from Eastern Europe too with no questionable customs.
We live in a bubble where we have jobs, childminders and own a house .
Very different outlook if I was 20 years younger
But that’s not the immigrants fault.
You can complain about government policy - justifiably.
But there seems to be a sizeable cohort of people who would inflict violence on international protection people, immigrants etc. This includes burning down IPAS centres - burning down buildings with people inside it!! Fuck me .
It’s very disturbing. I recall about 18 months ago at the start of those fascist demonstrations in Coolock and seeing a video of how young children were in amongst it all and the hatred spewing out of their mouths was something else.
I’ve long maintained that ordinary people are the victims of a top down waging of information warfare by the pig rich which is designed to turn ordinary people against each other. That is what tabloid media is. It’s what the INTERNET is. Social media and the INTERNET in general is The Sun under Kelvin Mackenzie on anabolic steroids.
Ultimately that information warfare has been a spectacular success for the ruling class. It has created a credulous lumpenproletariat whose sense of identity has been reduced to being based on consumer products, proud ignorance, hatred and nihilism which leads to the belief that there must be an all powerful dictator figure from the ruling class.
This is more visible in other countries than here but it is spreading like Japanese knotweet here.
The head bangers believe everything they read on social media.
I would maintain that the Troubles in the North was a war instigated by others and carried out by the ordinary people on both sides, the same people who had far more in common with themselves regardless of religion that with the likes of Paisley and the utter scum with the snouts in the trough.
But hey - it worked. Hatred on both sides, kept them quiet for a while and kept the lads on he Shankill focused on Taigs instead of the squalor that they lived in.
In poor areas of Dublin heroin and its legacy shapes everything.
That left people there to be fodder for the modern social catastrophes the INTERNET has produced - isolation, online gambling, porn on tap, greater access to drugs, and conspiracy theories. And, addiction to other people’s attention while having no attention span of your own.
It all adds up to irrational hatred and nihilism becoming the central defining binding factor in a lot of places.
This isn’t confined to areas which are lower on the socio-economic scale, it’s everywhere, as everybody is on the INTERNET now, but these areas are by far the worst hit.
Pied Pipers. Pied Pipers never lead to anything good. We live in a golden era of Pied Pipers now.
The hatred you see in the South against immigrants now is merely a different flavour of the hatred Catholics in the North suffered.
It’s no wonder those stirring up the hatred down here are in cahoots with Loyalists. The same coin.
That’s what the billionaires want now.
You also have to add the absolutely crazy situation we have with the current US President.
Just a flavour of what he is about. He threatened to pull federal funding from New York State if Mamdani won. Imagine a President doing such a thing.
He doesn’t care.
And nobody cares to challenge him.
In the most powerful country in the world. The so called beacon of democracy.
We are used to Trump being there now but it doesn’t diminish his utter poison.
Trump is a product of social media. He owes everything to social media. It’s how he became a viable contender and it’s how he maintains his power. Most of the traditional media has essentially succumbed to social media in its modus operandi.
There’s no room for non-hysterical opinion nowadays. Almost nobody is interested any more. They want WAAAA WAAAA WAAAAA. This is mostly right wing WAAAA WAAAA WAAAA but left wing wing WAAAAA WAAAAA WAAAAAA very much exists too.
But the reality of the situation is justified cause for opinion sounding the alarm of the situation, which may sound hysterical but unfortunately is true. And nobody actually wants to listen to that.
I think the BBC story is instructive. Social media is agog with right wing headbangers shrieking for the BBC to be shut down.
Then you get left wing headbangers agreeing with the right wing headbangers that the BBC should be shut down, but for different reasons.
None of them are interested in the reality of the story, the context of it and what['s really going on.
And of course these same headbangers wouldn’t be averse to their own brand of selective reporting in their tweets, posts etc.
A lot of it pro-Russian.
I was listening to a podcast with the football journalist Simon Kuper recently and he said something that I’m probably going to mangle but he was on about how there’s a very INTERNET-driven strain of self styled “anti-imperialist, left-wing” ideology that in practice is extremely pro-imperial, pro-authoritarian and anti-human rights. He brought it up in the context of a discussion about attending the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.
It holds that because western European countries and the USA have got up to all sorts of horrific stuff over the course of history between either directly perpetrating or enabling or supporting colonisation and slavery and coups and massacres and genocide and all that stuff, that NOBODY in the “west” now has any right to speak up for the human rights of anybody in the “global south”.
It basically holds that if anybody in the west tries to highlight any nasty business being perpetrated by, say, China or India or Russia or an African country, that the western person should simply be told to fuck off because they’re a HYPOCRITE. It basically holds that regimes in the global south should be allowed commit horrific human rights abuses in the name of building growth and power and influence.
It has no other guiding principle than this.
Obviously a lot of these same people also rail against western enabling and support for Israel’s genocide, and that’s hypocrisy on their part, because they’re picking and choosing when they care about human rights, but that’s allowed because it doesn’t have to make sense because it’s a shambolic and bankrupt ideology.
The irony is that there are people in the “west” that believe this stuff. We have at least one such person on this forum, who speaks exclusively in riddles intelligible only to himself, and we used have two.
Was wondering what has happened this lad saw pictures of him recently and thought he looked v different to when he was on telly
He’s had a tough last couple of years personally too. Eoin is an alright sort - was in school with my brother. He’s done fairly well for himself.