Sunday and other stupid media statements of this week

guestposter

Jul 3

The caption to this photograph from yesterday's Independent raised a smile.

In the SBP Lucinda Creighton offers this formulation about neutrality.

We live in a new security environment whether we like it or not, and last week's summit was critically important in helping to shape the response of western democracies to this new reality. We are not neutral when it comes to our own security nor can we expect others, be it the United States or other European countries, to do all of the heavy lifting.

Speaking of the SNP Newton Emerson argues:

Unionists in Northern Ireland, who have had little to cheer for some time, suddenly have a significant consolation: the intellectual collapse of the Scottish National Party. There may still be no sign of an electoral collapse but after 15 years in power, the SNP is exhausted and failing in office, undermining the independence cause it has made its own.

A tipping point occurred in February, when Nicola Sturgeon's party claimed London would have to continue paying an independent Scotland's state pension – a claim so preposterous it was widely seen as conceding independence is out of reach. In place of serious planning, the SNP has retreated to shoring up its base with fairy tales and manufactured grievances.

This would be the same SNP whose polling remains at or where it was at the 2021 Scottish Parliament Election?

Finn MacRedmond in the course of defending arts degrees offers this:

...adopting the idea that education's primary function is to help us be economically productive is shortsighted. In Not For Profit, political theorist Martha Nussbaum argues that it has severely compromised our ability to criticise authority and has compromised our competence when it comes to dealing with complicated real life problems. This, she concludes, is dangerous to the stability of democracy itself.

This became overwhelmingly evident in the pandemic. The scientists who discovered the vaccines, and the mathematicians who worked on the modelling were vital. So of course were any doctors and nurses on the frontline. They deserve the adulation.

But we learnt that the way to navigate such a profoundly complicated terrain was not solely by heeding the "expert" advice, or blindly "following the science". We learnt that the science can be wrong, that it is liable to change, that the only way forward was to balance competing interests, and that perhaps a combination of doctors, mathematicians, philosophers, and perhaps even French literature enthusiasts would always make a better team than one with no divergent interests at all. The Covid-19 crisis was as much about creativity, lateral thinking, and history as it was about numbers and statistics.

Uh-huh?

Covid? Mark Paul talks about tourism and...

The last few weeks of the unbridled chaos that has ripped through all elements of the travel and tourism industries comes on top of more than two years of dire strategic thinking about the sector during the pandemic. These things are interlinked. One has led in large part to the other.

Yet he can, somehow, with a straight face write "During Covid apparently we needed a Minister for Testing at one point, and then a Minister for Vaccines" and "during the pandemic..." and "Martin seems a reasonably competent politician and she was on to a winner during the pandemic when all she had to do was throw around public money as compensation for Covid closures" while the paper he writes in notes that Aer Lingus flights (and bus services) are being cancelled on a daily basis because of a spike in Covid cases amongst aircrews and drivers. Top marks for ignoring the obvious.

Speaking of spikes, or Spiked, what to make of this analysis in the SBP from John Walsh talking about Mick Lynch and second generation Irish in the UK who support Brexit?

In fact, he is just one of several prominent second generation Irish people in Britain who campaigned to leave the EU. On the sixth anniversary of the Brexit vote a couple of weeks ago, Dr Gerard Lyons, a high-profile city economist, was one of the sole voices on British media claiming that Brexit was not responsible for Britain's flagging economy. Lyons, who grew up in Kilburn and is the son of Irish emigrants from Kerry, has most recently been a Brexit adviser to the British government.

Ardent Brexiters with Irish heritage include Liam Halligan, the former Channel Four economics correspondent, and journalists Brendan O'Neill and Ella Whelan, who identify on the hard left and left, are also enthusiastic supporters of Britain's new found "sovereignty".

Is Brendan O'Neill really hard left?

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