John Waters is a Stupid Luddite
Posted on January 12, 2008 - Filed Under Blogging, Ireland |
I saw him speak/ramble incoherently about religion at the Philosoph, I’ve seldom found his articles to be worth reading (a good 60% of them seem to be given over to tired attacks feminism), and by all accounts he made an ass of himself when he participated in the Eurovision Song Contest, but despite all this I never actually disliked John Waters until I heard him criticise the internet in general (all pornography and satanism, apparently) and blogs (”appalling stuff”) in particular.
Waters’ complaints about blogs, that “they’re all stupid” and composed of “‘I think this’ - ‘No, I think that’” content (in other words, discussion) is particularly ironic coming from a regular contributor to the Irish Times op-ed pages. While it is of course a very arbitrary matter to class something as “stupid” (see this post’s title, for example), on any given week there are plenty of letters published in the Times from people who could quite fairly be classified as stupid (there’s one priest in particular who seems to have his anachronistic views on social matters published far more often than they deserve, and a good deal of letters about the Israel-Palestine conflict are written by either die-hard Zionists or unrepentant anti-Semites).
Further to this, the standard of some of the opinion pieces published in these pages is not exactly first-rate. You can tell almost exactly, word for word, what most of the journalists are going to write in a column once you know the topic under discussion, given the ideological straight-jackets most of them are trapped in. While I’ll grant you that red Fintan or Vinnie Brown can occasionally pen a decent article, I find that more often than not I simply avoid the column on the left-hand of the op-ed pages, because more often than not I’ll have read almost the exact same article before (for example, Breda O’Brien {I think that’s her name - youngish woman, red hair} always seems to write about social issues from a traditional, Catholic perspective, and so there’s no point in reading her articles because you know exactly what she’s going to write {maybe if I agreed with her I’d be more inclined to suffer them}). Of course, the fact that this column is also Johnny Water’s regular stomping ground explains a lot of my aversion to it.
Also, Water’s comparison between the internet and a newspaper is pointless. A more accurate (but still far from perfect) subject for comparison would be something like a satellite/cable television provider. Yes, there is porn on the internet, but that porn does not affect the rest of the internet. I can watch Ze Frank or read a political blog online without some pop-up window springing up and showing me furry porn, just as I can watch Euronews on Sky without the channel suddenly switching to Playboy TV. The internet is a medium unto itself, just like television or newspapers. Waters might as well advocate not reading magazines, since some magazines are pornographic.
(Unrelatedly, the blog linked to above is well worth checking out if you’re not already familiar with it. It’s usually very funny.)
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Wow…what a fucking asshat.