EU walkies

If you have a dog you will know that the rattle of the lead in the hall and the magic word walkies makes Fido’s ears shoot up like a Disney cartoon. Fido is a good dog and can on a quiet path be let off his lead and be relied upon to come to heel on your whistle. Ireland is a good dog. Hungary is a bad dog and for its own sake should be kept on a choke chain until it learns manners. So the Irish Times editorial thinks - 23/4/18:




If, as with Greece during the debt and financial crises, orthodoxy can be imposed in budgetary matters, should it not also be imposed when, as in Hungary, fundamental matters of political liberty and democratic standards are at stake? That is the logic of political convergence on values. To demand it be applied here is merely to ask the EU to uphold the political decency it has always claimed to represent.

Though far apart in training Ireland and Hungary have the ministrations of George Soros in common. Soros has got himself involved via his Open Society Foundation in the campaign to repeal the Eight Amendment. It’s his firm purpose to break it and contra to rules governing foreign donations that have to do with Irish politics he has donated €137,000 to Irish Amnesty International who are campaigning for repeal. The story is here in the Irish Times by no means a friend of retention of the Eight.
amnesty challenge
The head of the Amnesty outfit Colm O’Gorman refuses to give the money back. Another repeal group who got a large donation from abroad has returned their money. However government ministers are not shy about appearing with O’Gorman at the launch of Amnesty’s campaign. ‘My enemy’s enemy....’ .

The referendum vote will be on the 25th. of May and no matter what the outcome that will not be the end of the matter. State sponsored abortion is an issue like slavery that can only be resolved when its full horror is realised.

William Hazlitt on Public Opinion (and a little Kitty the Hare story_

Not only is it spurious and hollow in the way that Mr. Locke points out, by one man’s taking up at second hand the opinion of another, but worse than this, one man takes up what he believes another will think, and which the latter professes only because he believes it held by the first! All, therefore, that is necessary to control public opinion, is to gain possession of some organ loud and lofty enough to make yourself heard, that has power and interest on its side; and then, no sooner do you blow a blast in this trump of ill-fame, like the horn hung up on an old castle-wall, than you are answered, echoed, and accredited on all sides: the gates are thrown open to receive you, and you are admitted into the very heart of the fortress of public opinion, and can assail from the ramparts with every engine of abuse, and with privileged impunity, all those who may come forward to vindicate the truth, or to rescue their good name from the unprincipled keeping of authority, servility, sophistry, and venal falsehood!
...... and drop into an English reading-room hard by: what are you the better? You see a dozen or score of your countrymen with their faces fixed, and their eyes glued to a newspaper, a magazine, a review—reading, swallowing, profoundly ruminating on the lie, the cant, the sophism of the day! Why? It saves them the trouble of thinking; it gratifies their ill-humour, and keeps off ennui! Does a gleam of doubt, an air of ridicule, or a glance of impatience pass across their features at the shallow and monstrous things they find? No, it is all passive faith and dull security; they cannot take their eyes from the page, they cannot live without it. They believe in their adopted oracle (you see it in their faces) as implicitly as in Sir John Barleycorn, as in a sirloin of beef, as in quarter-day—as they hope to receive their rents, or to see Old England again!

When Kitty Holland of the Irish Times in the interests of Ethos, Pathos and a little light Logos told the world about her two abortions offers a story about how in a nailed down liberal vote bank like Dublin South there is uncertainty about repeal of the Eight Amendment:
kitty holland
I find that I too am shocked by such an obvious fable. Remembering Holland’s coverage of the Savita case which has been disputed as to its veracity I wonder what is the point? Are pro-life canvassers being misdirected to where their efforts will be in vain away from the working class areas where there are undecided voters? What was also being promoted by Pat Leahy a senior political correspondent in the same paper this morning was the plea for respectful disagreement. Ah the soothing muzak of political liberalism. Sweet reason and compromise must prevail.

Philosophers will, by reducing this intractable conflict to a discussion of personhood etc miss the point completely. The issue is not a matter of definition or what can be teased out and agreed on. It’s instinctive or a gut feeling about what is at the bottom of the abortionist’s bucket.

Addendum (24th.Nov. 2021):

When reading this essay be aware that the ironist in Hazlitt is driving.  The man who cared little for the opinion of the world because his friends had his back is the antithesis of the writer’s own experience.  His erstwhile friends were busily stabbing that back and reviving his escapade in the Lake District which his biographer Duncan Wu describes:

"These tensions were broken by an event no one could have foreseen. Hazlitt had taken to visiting the local tavern, eager to escape Greta Hall, and one evening found himself in close quarters with a girl who teased him with promises of sex. When he responded in what he thought the appropriate manner, she slapped him down with the taunt: ‘You’re a black-faced rascal, sir!’ The entire tavern burst into laughter, ribald remarks shot across the room, and Hazlitt was made ‘the laughing-stock of the village’. His reaction was characteristic. He threw her over his knee, lifted her petticoats, and spanked her on the bottom.

The peasantry of the Lakes, then as now, was tight-knit: they were unlikely to tolerate any such action by an outsider. Hazlitt was lucky to get out of the building, and probably subjected to physical violence in the process. He ran the half mile to Greta Hall, where he explained what had happened to Coleridge and Southey. To him it was hardly worth bothering about, but Coleridge took a different view: a gang had already formed to give Hazlitt a ducking, soon to arrive at their door. He would arrange to get him out of harm’s way. There was no time to pack, and Hazlitt left his possessions, including his painting materials and the portraits. Coleridge later claimed to have given him ‘all the money I had in the world, and the very Shoes off my feet, to enable him to escape over the mountains’.  (from ‘William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man’ by Duncan Wu)

Coleridge and Wordsworth kept this story alive long after the event and he generally came to be painted by his Tory enemies as a disreputable character.  Add to this his Liber Amoris imbroglio with Sarah Walker and her family  and you have a pre-facebook shaming which a tut tutting posse could embellish with the inventions of scurrility.  His own irascibility which spawned enemies on every side wrought to the uttermost by acerbic portraits of his opponents such as Laureate Southey made ‘cancellation’ his permanent hazard.  Publishers balked, books failed, poverty resulted and his advances from publishers and tapping of supporters made him an expensive friend.

As he himself writes of himself:

“There is nothing in which all the world agree but in running down some obnoxious individual. It may be supposed that this is not for nothing, and that they have good reasons for what they do. On the contrary, I will undertake to say, that so far from there being invariably just grounds for such an universal outcry, the universality of the outcry is often the only ground of the opinion; and that it is purposely raised upon this principle, that all other proof or evidence against the person meant to be run down is wanting.”

His defiance of public opinion as a Jacobin radical and admirer of Napoleon the saviour of the revolution as he took him to be was bound to affront the Tories.  He didn’t care and his last words were “Well, I’ve had a happy life”.

Irish Noh Drama:The Eight Amendment.

Discussing abortion with its supporters is I feel like going into the ‘gloom’ in the Night Watch movie; I’m invisible because the entities there don’t recognise my presence but there is a price to be paid - my life is drained. (The N.W. is a Gnostic masterpiece by the way)
Writing, by hand, notes as I was reading
young mahon
James Edwin Mahon’s paper I felt the biro going like a polygraph as I claimed ‘I am a Saturnian’ - really. For this annotation I required a power tool, ancient technology that is not susceptible to malign vibrations. Out of its insulating case I bring the brushed aluminium and dimpled leather look body, Olivetti Lettera DL (de luxe). Big ju-ju.

Does that sound mad? Does it sound madder that putting Judith Thomson’s violinist front and centre in the war on life? Of course she, J.T., doesn’t want to be taken as a bad person so she asks – Would someone who decide to abort at 7 months because it interfered with holiday plans be not a decent human being? Really. Mahon asks why should there be any negative assessment of the probity of her action if the foetus viable though it be still had no right to the use of her body? Kinda gotcha, sort of. Get outa that one.

Bergson would say that the analysis of concepts and the virtual hypostasis of analysands is the problem. This is what gives Ethics as above its pettifogging and trifling trolleyist cast. Break up the continuous flow of life into point instants, pausing it at your command, generates the paradox that what is an inalienable right at month 2 becomes questionable at month 7. The intuition about a right to life has become undeniable at that point even if was unrecognised due to lack of imagination at the earlier point.

I must get out the gloom now. Young Mahon says Ould Mahon has moved on; in the right direction one hopes. The Only Philosopher of the Western World may miss the packed jury of the Citizen’s Assembly on the question set up by the dismal Half Taoiseach Kenny, tenant at will of Fianna Fail. In Ireland we do Noh Drama not Kabuki. It’s an ancient tradition.