Communist: Comrade, you are oppressed!
Working man: What? No I’m not.
Communist: But you are! I am sure of this because I’ve read my political theory and you haven’t! Now stand back and I will liberate you!
Working man: Huh?
Communist: If you deny the truth, comrade, you must be a counter-revolutionary! If you’re not for us, that means you’re against us!
* * *
Earlier this week, Melancholicus linked to a poll on the RTÉ website which asked viewers whether it were time to overturn Ireland’s abortion laws. Melancholicus recommended his readers visit the site and vote No.
He had already done so himself, at which point most respondents were clearly in favour of NOT overturning this country’s prohibition on abortion—an encouraging result for anyone concerned to defend the lives of the unborn against the state-sanctioned slaughter that is legalised abortion.
Today Melancholicus was back on the RTÉ website, looking for coverage of an unrelated matter. While he was there, he noticed that the interactive poll on abortion laws had been replaced by one on property prices. Assuming the abortion poll to be now closed and interested in seeing the final result, he went to the poll archive page. There he found the results of a great many previous polls, even going back as far as March 2007, but this week’s abortion poll result was nowhere to be found.
What can we conclude, except that the final result of the poll displeased some pro-choice zealot at RTÉ and as most of those who voted were clearly in favour of maintaining Ireland’s ban on abortion, the result was quietly suppressed?
Those who run our media are all for public opinion when said opinion happens to coincide with their own, and they trumpet this agreement loudly in their newspapers, on the television and on their websites. They are all for democracy when it gives them the result they want. But when the public manifests a view that contradicts some aspect of politically-correct leftist orthodoxy, our dissent must be hushed, suppressed and swept under the carpet.
Is that what has happened in this instance?
It would be too much of a coincidence to think otherwise.
Showing posts with label new ireland. Show all posts
Showing posts with label new ireland. Show all posts
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
A side of the sex industry that is seldom reported
From RTÉ:
Report finds rise in trafficking of women
A voluntary organisation working with prostitutes says it has seen an increase in the number of foreign women who have been trafficked into Ireland to work as prostitutes.
Ruhama also asserts that the women are more vulnerable to violence and exploitation because they are hidden away in brothels. Some, it says, are being held in captivity.
It claims that some lapdancing clubs force women into prostitution and it wants the Government to clamp down on the clubs by denying them drink licences.
Ruhama also wants the gardaí to set up a dedicated nationwide vice-squad and the Government to draft legislation to make it easier to prosecute those trafficking women.
The organisation says in the last two years it has dealt with 91 foreign women who were trafficked into Ireland, some held against their will. The organisation says the figure represents the tip of the iceberg.
Ruhama also drew attention to the recent opening of Ireland’s latest lap-dancing club in Kilkenny, which they have said is indicative of the nationwide growth of the sex industry and its re-branding as a form of entertainment.
This is perhaps the worst aspect of the sex industry: slavery re-packaged as entertainment.
It might be objected by proponents of the sex industry that many who work therein do so of their own volition, with all that blather about “consenting adults” and suchlike.
But how “consenting”, truly, are many of these adults? How many are forced into selling themselves into slavery by the relentless pressure of grinding poverty, or drug addiction? How many women are lured into western Europe from poorer countries with enticing promises of jobs and salaries, only to find themselves the victims of a pimp? Never mind those who have not yet reached the age of legal consent, the exploitation of whom is carefully hidden undeground so as not to sully that face of the sex industry that the mavens of the New IrelandTM find so acceptable.
There will always be those who ply their trade in the industry because they derive erotic gratification thereby, but for the overwhelming majority, prostitution cannot be much more than distasteful if lucrative drudgery. For prostitution commands such a revenue that it can make its practitioners exceedingly wealthy. But how much of this wealth actually remains in the hands of those who do the hard work of earning it in the first instance?
In this, as in every other instance of slavery, the slave does the work; the slave-owner reaps the rewards.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Naivete and the sex industry in Ireland
If one is in favour of pornography, topless bars, lap-dancing, prostitution and the sex industry in general, one ought at least be able to provide some reasons for one’s views—reasons which, if not entirely convincing, at least furnish others with evidence that one has considered the matter in an intellectual fashion.
Here in Ireland, folk are at the moment much in a tizzy about the proposed opening of a lap-dancing club in Kilkenny. Regardless of whether one considers this to be a marvellous stride forward into maturity or a regression into juvenilia, such is the regrettable parochialism of this small nation that no one seems to be able to stop talking about it.
Today Melancholicus was testily drumming the steering wheel while delayed in the morning rush hour beyond all reasonable endurance. Anyhow, he shall resist the urge to complain about the frustrations attendant upon commuting in Dublin, because once he starts he’ll never stop. He should of course pray more for serenity while on the road, but matters are not helped by the fact that he has thus far failed four driving tests, and to exhibit a learner-plate on one’s car in Dublin seems to send a clear signal to all other traffic that the driver is a fair target for bullying.
But let us return to the point of this post.
To ease his impatience he turned over to Newstalk 106, on which Brenda Power was beginning her morning phone-in show Your Call. Among other things, the fact that Kilkenny city’s first such sex club will open its doors this coming Friday featured in the discussions (interested parties may read the relevant newspaper coverage in The Irish Times here).
What exasperates Melancholicus most of all about such events as this is the content of the ignorant and thoughtless text messages that are routinely sent to the various radio stations whenever anything to do with the sex industry is aired in this country. First prize for idiot text of the day must surely go to the clown who sent the following message in to Newstalk:
“Other modern countries have lap-dancing clubs. Ireland is now a modern country. Hopefully Catholic Ireland is dead.”
So, according to the perverse logic of this texter, the level at which the sex industry has proliferated in this country is to be taken as the index of how modern and sophisticated Ireland has become! But that is not all. The “modern Ireland” of lap-dancing and suchlike is contrasted with “Catholic Ireland”, which lacked such progressive institutions as lap-dancing. The texter clearly has an animus against “Catholic Ireland”, seemingly because the sex industry was not promoted by the latter. Or perhaps he/she (probably he) was simply grabbing the opportunity to claim his fifteen minutes of fame by having his Catholic-bashing text read out on air.
What Melancholicus finds most irritating is the implicit notion that opposition to the sex industry stems only from traditional religious beliefs, and that if there were no religion the sex industry would be something fine and dandy that everyone would approve of. He has encountered this unthinking and uncritical attitude on more than one occasion. The only arguments he has ever heard advanced in favour of the sex industry in this country are those hackneyed slogans which celebrate “liberation” from the “repression” of “Catholic Ireland”. On the occasion of the opening of the first lap-dancing club in Ireland in 1999/2000, the aptly-named Declan Moroney, a journalist for the now defunct tabloid paper Ireland On Sunday waxed lyrical in his praise for the establishment, and declared that the only people who could possibly be opposed to such a great stride forward were those he derisively dismissed as “the rosary bead brigade”. But no convincing argument is ever offered to persuade us that we should view the sex industry as a good in itself; it is all based upon a knee-jerk reaction against Catholic moral teaching, and some specious blather about “adults” and “maturity”. In the meantime the sex industry itself gets away with murder (sometimes literally) and continues to exploit its slaves and dependants while thriving on the propaganda of its anti-Catholic and opinionated useful idiots in the media and in society generally.
It is boasted by the champions of the new Ireland that we Irish are now finally grown up, that we have become adults, etc. etc. etc. Melancholicus is far from convinced. If anything, Irish society has become even more adolescent and immature than at any time in the past. The Irish are increasingly a race of arrogant, lustful, avaricious and greedy souls, with a bad temper and a proclivity for profanity. Melancholicus invites his overseas readers to seek out a few Irish blogs (particularly those for whom the new Ireland is a good thing); just peruse the contents and see if you don’t agree with this assessment.
Here in Ireland, folk are at the moment much in a tizzy about the proposed opening of a lap-dancing club in Kilkenny. Regardless of whether one considers this to be a marvellous stride forward into maturity or a regression into juvenilia, such is the regrettable parochialism of this small nation that no one seems to be able to stop talking about it.
Today Melancholicus was testily drumming the steering wheel while delayed in the morning rush hour beyond all reasonable endurance. Anyhow, he shall resist the urge to complain about the frustrations attendant upon commuting in Dublin, because once he starts he’ll never stop. He should of course pray more for serenity while on the road, but matters are not helped by the fact that he has thus far failed four driving tests, and to exhibit a learner-plate on one’s car in Dublin seems to send a clear signal to all other traffic that the driver is a fair target for bullying.
But let us return to the point of this post.
To ease his impatience he turned over to Newstalk 106, on which Brenda Power was beginning her morning phone-in show Your Call. Among other things, the fact that Kilkenny city’s first such sex club will open its doors this coming Friday featured in the discussions (interested parties may read the relevant newspaper coverage in The Irish Times here).
What exasperates Melancholicus most of all about such events as this is the content of the ignorant and thoughtless text messages that are routinely sent to the various radio stations whenever anything to do with the sex industry is aired in this country. First prize for idiot text of the day must surely go to the clown who sent the following message in to Newstalk:
“Other modern countries have lap-dancing clubs. Ireland is now a modern country. Hopefully Catholic Ireland is dead.”
So, according to the perverse logic of this texter, the level at which the sex industry has proliferated in this country is to be taken as the index of how modern and sophisticated Ireland has become! But that is not all. The “modern Ireland” of lap-dancing and suchlike is contrasted with “Catholic Ireland”, which lacked such progressive institutions as lap-dancing. The texter clearly has an animus against “Catholic Ireland”, seemingly because the sex industry was not promoted by the latter. Or perhaps he/she (probably he) was simply grabbing the opportunity to claim his fifteen minutes of fame by having his Catholic-bashing text read out on air.
What Melancholicus finds most irritating is the implicit notion that opposition to the sex industry stems only from traditional religious beliefs, and that if there were no religion the sex industry would be something fine and dandy that everyone would approve of. He has encountered this unthinking and uncritical attitude on more than one occasion. The only arguments he has ever heard advanced in favour of the sex industry in this country are those hackneyed slogans which celebrate “liberation” from the “repression” of “Catholic Ireland”. On the occasion of the opening of the first lap-dancing club in Ireland in 1999/2000, the aptly-named Declan Moroney, a journalist for the now defunct tabloid paper Ireland On Sunday waxed lyrical in his praise for the establishment, and declared that the only people who could possibly be opposed to such a great stride forward were those he derisively dismissed as “the rosary bead brigade”. But no convincing argument is ever offered to persuade us that we should view the sex industry as a good in itself; it is all based upon a knee-jerk reaction against Catholic moral teaching, and some specious blather about “adults” and “maturity”. In the meantime the sex industry itself gets away with murder (sometimes literally) and continues to exploit its slaves and dependants while thriving on the propaganda of its anti-Catholic and opinionated useful idiots in the media and in society generally.
It is boasted by the champions of the new Ireland that we Irish are now finally grown up, that we have become adults, etc. etc. etc. Melancholicus is far from convinced. If anything, Irish society has become even more adolescent and immature than at any time in the past. The Irish are increasingly a race of arrogant, lustful, avaricious and greedy souls, with a bad temper and a proclivity for profanity. Melancholicus invites his overseas readers to seek out a few Irish blogs (particularly those for whom the new Ireland is a good thing); just peruse the contents and see if you don’t agree with this assessment.
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