Sanctimonious Irish Fantasies.

I was busy on the phone and not paying much attention to the customers.and it took a while for me to become aware of the hub-bub in the Irish Room.  Jolly fine staff I have though and the drink was flowing without my being on hand.

My attention was taken up by the beautiful-sounding 'Filipina' who was sorting out my electricity needs in the cave below the mountain that I shall be moving into soon. She was in Manila; me in Tasmania. My cave too.  Funny new world we live in.  And surprisingly  efficient too. Even from so far north, well the other side of Indonesia, she could identify just the right spot with no trouble.

My mind was not on Ireland until I became aware that the singing had stopped.

The Irish Room rarely has any understandable conversation.  They speak very strangely there. Diversity, doncha know. It is mostly singing, about potatoes and fighting the neighbouring 'British' and 'Northerners',  and EU subsidies and the like. Tigers occasionally get mentioned in verse. Fiddles play and loud  foot-stomping are the usual order of the day and night.  Fights sometimes break out when someone is accused of playing a bum note. Still, it is better than random bombings and shootings. But all that was silent amid the quite angry howls and guffaws as someone was relating the latest atrocity.

Someone had been accused of far worse than a bum note and all bejabbers had broken out in the 'News'

It seems the Feminist Fantasists have been at it again.

As if the University life in America and Britain had not become as dangerous for boys as the Shankill Road, now we find the ancient halls of Dublin are infected.

Brendan Walsh - or so the legend on his pot said - was speaking. He is a student at University College Dublin but going under a psuedonym so he is not defenestrated by angry hordes of Colleens.

The Real epidemic at UCD ?  – Lad bashing

A bogus ‘revenge porn’ scandal shows how nasty campus feminism has become.

The #UCD200 hashtag has become synonymous with victim feminism and lad-bashing in Ireland’s largest university. On 2 February, the College Tribune, one of two student newspapers at University College Dublin (UCD), published an article claiming that 200 male students had been sharing naked photos of their female colleagues and rating their attractiveness in a secret group.

 http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/the-real-epidemic-at-ucd-lad-bashing/18113#.VuEvmfmLTMp

These feminists cannot even come up with some new outrage but resort to old, discredited ones from elsewhere. 

The article was borne out of conjecture and hearsay, relying for evidence on the musings of bored students posting anonymously on popular social network Yik Yak.

That is the Irish version, of course, 'Yik Yak Begorrah, Bejab'. Neber heard of it? Me neither.

In the weeks following the article’s publication, numerous national news reports emerged. Outlets such as the Irish Times, the Irish independent and Journal.ie whipped up a frenzy, demonising the male student population of UCD with flimsy journalism and a distinct lack of fact-checking.

The College Tribune alleged that explicit pictures had been shared without the women’s knowledge or consent. Students of UCD’s School of Agriculture and Food Science were singled out as the worst offenders, and the instigators of ‘the most recent example of the continued prevalence of a harmful and derogatory “lad culture”’ on campus.

The alleged incident was used as an opportunity to criticise the current students’ union and its failed efforts to combat lad culture in the university. The president of the union, Marcus O’Halloran, is himself an agricultural-science student who was previously mired in controversy after he was found to be a member of a Facebook group called ‘Girls I’d shift if I was tipsy’. 

The Student Body

The backlash to the revenge-porn scandal was severe, and another blow was struck to the union’s ‘Not Asking For It’ campaign, launched to promote sexual consent. The union had been confronted prior to the Christmas break with allegations of the existence of the Facebook group, and failed to provide a conclusive answer as to whether it would investigate.

Personally, I think that saying 'Feck off and leave me to m'Guinness' is a fairly conclusive answer. 

The reaction provoked both within the university and on a national scale was astonishing; Facebook and Twitter became the battlegrounds of choice for a mass of feminists with axes to grind. Prominent feminist author Louise O’Neill featured heavily in the protests against this apparent eruption of abusive lad culture. 

Yet the accused were completely vindicated when an official UCD report, led by registrar Professor Mark Rogers, showed there was..... 

...no evidence of the group’s existence. 

The report made it clear that no victims had come forward and that the evidence provided by the sole witness, known only as Sarah, was from Yik Yak. Without any victims to substantiate the claims, the allegations collapsed. Indeed, it is highly unlikely that a 200-strong Facebook group would remain under wraps.

It was immediately assumed by campaigners that UCD was guilty of a cover-up. 

The report came as a mere inconvenience for the angry hordes who maintained that the scandal, at least, served as an important point of discussion. Those calling for the expulsion of the group’s members were the first to disregard the findings in a rather mind-boggling display of ignorance to the gravity of the allegations made. 

The general consensus reached was that the facts of the matter were irrelevant – the universal shaming of the lads required little to no factual basis. The College Tribune has also refused to print a retraction or even a simple apology.

The events surrounding the #UCD200 allegations are rife with injustice: not the laddish perversion and misogyny recorded in blog after blog, 

but the prevailing attitude that false allegations made against innocent lads should be welcomed as a conversation starter. 

There has been a distinct lack of empathy for the accused, who have been greeted online by the judgement and condemnation of perfect strangers. Justice, in the eyes of the advocates of consent classes, means that a post on Yik Yak holds more authority than an official report carried out by the UCD administration, and that false allegations are justified if they serve to ‘raise awareness’. 

It is a shame that the damage done to the reputations of these young men can be shrugged off so nonchalantly.

Where have we heard more of the same before. One could cite a hundred cases.  It would be funny were it not so horrendous for the boys and young men who are villified and ostracised by the harridans who care nothing for anyone but themselves. The 'lack of empathy' noted is by the wimmin, of course, who claim empathy and nurtuting to be their very own special female qualities, but apparantly so valuable that the are kept hidden away. 

Not that any funniness of the sort would pass the lips of comedians. Or would it?

Micael Jensen had a view about the state of comedians in Oz, and I can see where he is coming from. For them, PC which used to be an obstacle to fun has been accepted holus bolus. 

When did all the comedians become sanctimonious televangelists?

If you turn on the television to get a laugh, you'll probably find yourself getting scolded by a self-righteous prophet of liberal pieties instead.

Is it just me, or have the comics of Australia turned into preachers, moralisers, and puritanical do-gooders, whose mission in life is not to make us laugh but to tell us what to think?

 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-11/jensen-comedians-have-become-sanctimonious-televangelists/7239764

Now, at one level, this is exactly what good comedy does. It exposes folly, and helps us to see with moral clarity what is right and what is wrong.

But when it comes with a veneer of hip - from a dude in torn jeans and dreads, or from a guy in a natty suit on a yoof program sponsored by the government - then it feels like a bait-and-switch tactic.

Turn on, tune in for a laugh, and find yourself laughing at those with whom you disagree because, apparently, they are scum. They aren't cool, like us. You know, you and me, who just know so much better. Ha ha.

Exhibit A is Tim Minchin. Minchin is fancied by his fans as a latter-day William Gilbert. But doggerel sung to piano by a man trying to look like a waif is still doggerel. Rhyming it and singing it doesn't make it true, or even witty. He picks an easy target - Cardinal Pell - and heaps invective on him.

Well, maybe it was deserved,[No it was not] but it was scarcely courageous, or radical, or outlandish, and it was as strong a piece of sanctimony as heard from any pulpit.

Exhibit B is Charlie Pickering. Pickering has recently moved from hosting Ten's newsfotainment show The Project to hosting his own ABC show The Weekly, from which he pontificates, well, weekly. [Weakly too]

In this recent piece on marriage redefinition, he moralised his way through six minutes of self-righteous sermonising, with an adoring studio audience bah-hahing at his every sly dig against those idiots who disagree with him.

This is Pickering's stock in trade. Let's not pretend he's doing anything less than scolding us, and preaching to us. 

He's a self-appointed prophet of liberal pieties.

Exhibit C is Adam Hills. Adam Hills has gone to England to make it big with his show The Last Leg. The Last Leg is more preachy than a televangelist's early morning show. The more moralistic it is, the less amusing it is.

The funniest thing Hills does is to call people with whom he disagrees 'dicks'. In fact, he seems to have given up on comedy altogether, and to have made his show a crash course in sweetly pious soft-liberal values. 

Want to know what to think, and how not to be a dick? Hills has got a half hour just for you. 

It is about as funny as a government pamphlet.

What's the problem with this moralising? The issue is not the piety per se, but the pretence that that's not what's going on. 

Why don't they all call themselves 'Reverend' and be done with? 

At least that would be honest. The pose of being an iconoclast, which adds to the comic an aura of authenticity, simply isn't convincing. These three aren't naughty boys, they are would-be messiahs.

They are actually deeply conservative, with a strong sense of universal and objective right and wrong, and a feeling of deep injustice when this sense is offended. They do not challenge the establishment and its values; they work for it, and preach them.

Only, it is not cool to own that out loud. You have to cover that with an ironic veneer if you want to be popular. 

Dr Michael Jensen is the rector at St Mark's Anglican Church, Darling Point, NSW.

Not much fun in the bars tonight then unless you laught AT the comedians and the feminists both.

But it can drive you to drink. !!

So drink up.

A Pox on them and Pax for you