I don’t know what this is exactly, but it made me laugh.

I’m not saying that it’s the worst place on Earth, but this morning I wrote a song about burning down most of the city based on several disagreeable encounters from last night.

Damien posted this, and I think you’ll agree that it bears reposting. It reminded me of this guy’s election poster:

For what it’s worth, I don’t think that there should be a law against blasphemy, and I believe that the existence of any such law would dull public discourse and free expression. The very possibility of prosecution would cause editors to hold back from publishing any material that some nutjob religious fundy could claim to take offence to, and so I don’t see how this law could be anything but extremely harmful. Let’s just tweak the constitution with a referendum the next time an election swings round.

Update: There’s a more learned take on the matter over at The Jackanory, and as usual Twenty Major’s perspective is well worth reading (“This is possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. It’s like saying you can be fined for libelling Santa Claus or the fucking Tooth Fairy…”).

OPINION: CONOR CASBY, the artist claiming responsibility for the notorious nude paintings of the Taoiseach hung for a “joke” in the National Gallery and RHA, has said that he wants to let the paintings “speak for themselves”, writes JOHN WATERS

He did not intimate what he thinks they might be saying. That the artist has an infantile obsession with toilet humour? That he nurtures some deep animus towards politicians?

That he cannot draw?

The only amusing thing here is Casby’s deluded belief that he has something to say. His response is typical of a public discourse almost fatally degraded by internet auto-eroticism and an obsession with what is called “comedy”. His works are crude, unfunny, vindictive, without intrinsic content and wholly lacking in artistic merit.

Waters goes on to write that politics is very serious business and should not be subject to jokes, and claims that the internet is to blame for “[reducing] public debate to the level of a drunken argument”.

Chonaic mé é (í?) ar thuras bháid timpeall seacht mbliain ó thin, nuair a bhí mé ag freastal ar cursa samhrá ar Oilean Clara. Bhí sé (sí?) go h-iontach ar fad, agus ní dheanfaidh mé dhearmead ríomh an raidharc. Tá píosa dheas air (uirthi?) san iris thar scór The Economist seo seactain.

[Tá fios agam go bhfuil mo chuid gaelige go hainnis. Bhí sé i bhfad níos fearr cúpla bhlian ó shin.]

This is one of their better ones in recent times.

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.)

I gave up really caring about Irish politics after the last election, but blatant corruption at the very highest level of government is enough to re-ignite my interest from time to time. Of course, nothing’s going to happen to Ahern; he’ll shrug this off in his usual vulgarly smarmy way and shuffle out of Irish politics in a year or so, after handing the reins of government to Biffo Cowen. However, it can be hoped that these revelations will at least rule him out contention for a plum EU post after he leaves national politics.