The wit and wisdom of Irish Independent writer Kevin Myers

I don't get this guy. (I don't want to, but anyway.) Having been just introduced to his work at random via Wikipedia, he appears to be a combination of first season Saffy from Absolutely Fabulous, Rush Limbaugh, Christopher Hitchens and Dennis Perrin. I mean, anyone with a headline that reads 'Sting -- the Cliff Richard of his generation -- has launched a bag made from elephant dung' should be theoretically brilliant but then things go wrong...rapidly. Cocaine! Obama! The Catholic Church! Why, Wikipedia itself.

A sampling. I gather he hates everybody.

This is a world which regards genetically modified food as the new Black Death, even as it demands more food for Africa. And who does it blame for African countries doubling their population every 22 years? Not the lusty African swains and their comely wenches, but the Pope, even though the pontifical penis seldom leaves the Vatican. And whenever it does, its owner has never once been seen loitering libidinously anywhere near an African private part, or even furtively dogging in Kinshasa. Yet nonetheless, it was apparently not Africans who were responsible for producing scores of millions of African babies over the past 30 years, but remotely, a single Pole and a single German. What mighty men; no wonder their two countries triggered an entire world war over little Danzig. Lucky we're not all at war with Mars.

AND somewhere in this moral order of rights, and equality, and GLBTG, and polar bears, and Palestinians, and nasty Jews who are not really Jews but honorary non-Jews called Israelis, and Sir Bono and Sir Bob, and $500 a plate AIDS charity banquets, and really thick hacks grovelling before the self-worshipping Great & Good, there is the perpetually whirling figure of Sting, with his strange American accent, and his yoga, and his condoms that were hand-knitted from recycled crocodile poo, and, of course, his tantric sex, whatever the fuck that is.

So do you know what I'd like? I'd like to have a pint with those nice chaps from the 3rd Battalion, Armagh Brigade, Provisional IRA, or a friendly chat with the National Association for the Propagation of Even More Carbon Dioxide, or to munch on a few fish fingers, or even chimpanzee fingers, with a couple of the West Side Boys or three or four. What I want is not even low-esteem, no indeed: I want absolutely no self-esteem at all from those around me. Is that too much to ask?

what a treat

scores of millions of African babies

we used to have flann o'brian, now look at us ffs

really thick hacks grovelling before the self-worshipping Great & Good

he's predictably vituperative on the public sector iirc.

I think ilx may soon be ready for vincent browne, in other news

Do tell.

“Africa is giving nothing to anyone – apart from AIDS”

idk what africa gave to AIDS tho

oh-ho! once you were horny-handed sons of the soil, smokers of wee pipes, and pious as church mice, too. now look at you, abject, thin-lipped city dwellers the lot of you, with pomade in your hair, aye, and nary a bit of wisdom on your lips.

vincent browne is not vicious nor nasty, he is and has been frequently great & important- but he has somehow morphed into a gene wilder portrayal of a political analyst. I'm sure he's youtubable i'm on the phone atm tho

this guy is such an embarrassment

Missing his true calling ranting at passers-by from a park bench.

i feel like he should probably be murdered immediately

his obama column linked up there is mostly confederate revisionism? you'd have trouble getting that published outside of batshit media in the US

He sure stuck it to those Guardian readers though with that smoking gun of a single letter from 2004.

From his Obama column:

The Confederacy really didn’t want to be anyone’s enemies; the southern states simply wanted to go their own way, just as the American colonies had originally chosen to do.

The system of slavery was certainly evil, but it was also complex, and could not be ended by a simple fiat and the mass-release of a largely unlettered, culturally dependent and socially naive people.

What a dear, dear man he must be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1MqEs0c28g

vincent browne, otoh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Vo6VzQddi0

what kind of publication is the irish independent

I note that Irish and British commentators all enthusiastically lined up to back him nearly four years ago, largely because he was “black”, thereby proving to their readers that they weren’t bigots.

Doubly untrue. Racially, he is half and half, namely a mulatto (not, however, a term ‘The New York Times’ has ever used about him). But on the “black” argument, they would also have backed Idi Amin, Emperor Bokassa, Robert Mugabe, Comrade Mengistu and any old Hutu with a panga.

Jesus fuck.

mor tabloid xp

wow. so is this guy the resident irritant?

what kind of publication is the irish independent

well, ilx doesn't like me to use the c word...............

Kevin Myers is one of those people who used to be leftwing but then became rightwing.

tbf dv the leftwing would do that to anyone over time

what happened?

he made a little money and reputation, who'd want change from then onwards?

xpost

Well... lots of people stay leftwing over the course of their lives, and the ones who don't do not all turn into ranting nutjobs.

I heard a radio documentary about the late 1960s wave of inoffensive student radicalism that swept University College Dublin. They interviewed Myers for it, along with three other prominent activists of the period. It was interesting that Myers was the only one who had upfrontedly moved to the right, although two of the others arguably had even if they weren't admitting it. But one of them was still indisputably a leftist (and perhaps uncoincidentally, has not been a prominent figure in Irish public life over the last decades).

If you are interested: http://www.rte.ie/radio1/doconone/gentle_it_was.html

Well... lots of people stay leftwing over the course of their lives, and the ones who don't do not all turn into ranting nutjobs.

indeed, nor some of the ones who remain!

will listen to that, thanks.

an aside - there are some great downloadable documentaries on the RTE site. I particularly recommend the one on the anti-jazz campaign of the 1930s. It was well before Myers' time, but I bet he would have supported it.

http://occupykevinmyers.wordpress.com/

"If you must read him, read him here"

Ned - I am fascinated that you would even be aware of Kevin Myers. I mean, why? It would be like me starting a thread about a Tucson Trumpet op-ed writer.

Not that I have anything against people saying bad things about Kevin Myers, who is a cockfarmer.

horny handed farmer of the cock of the soil

Ned - I am fascinated that you would even be aware of Kevin Myers. I mean, why? It would be like me starting a thread about a Tucson Trumpet op-ed writer.

I'm sure you can find something!

As muttered, I only found out about him via Wikipedia today -- there was some article going around about a band with T-shirts making fun of (I think) Gerry Ryan, about whom I also knew nothing. Thus Wikipedia and a mention about how Myers was trashing Ryan when the cocaine results emerged. So I clicked to read this article and...

ah stop stop if we bring up gerry i'll only start crying it's too soon too soon

He's just disgusting. I stopped buying the Indo because of him years ago.

Re: Kevin Myers - his latest hateful mash has been retweeted by several people I follow, none of whom are Irish.

vincent brown is so fantastically wonderful can there be thread about him instead of this racist reactionary little thug

yeah i was half consiering a thread for just i dunno great moments in political interviews

Go for it.

nobody biting, and i don't want to launch a dedicated vincent thread tbh it's parochial enough with a myers one today

i long for the mother country

that was a joke but i just realised it'll be a year tomorrow

we'll send you a tuckbox hey

only miss the crisps (which my regular spot now has), my friends, and pubs opening till midnight during the week...

that and it's hard to find a truly entertaining mass over here on a sunday, plus they all start too late in the day. miss the 8.30am badly.

i don't really care about any of the products i'm supposed to miss

i feel like this is all i've been taught about the diasporic experience

you can get kerrygold in sainsbury's

jesus, see that'd worry me badly, i wouldn't start the day rightly at all if i hadn't to spit out a tayto to ate the host by 8.15 at the very latest

i started using président recently and won't be going back to kerrygold. a watershed.

another chalk mark on the fianna fail slate ;_;

we've done all this before though.

i think i'm more annoyed in a real way by your standard ever-present boring irish writers than kevin myers, whom nobody really takes seriously. eg all the 20-year residency music writers, the lifestyle hacks, etc etc, a handful of whom now take up a more self-congratulatory presence online too.

did you ever read that thing from mongrel about not interviewing bertie ahern?

http://www.eoinbutler.com/interviews/%E2%80%9Cmary-harney-is-a-total-geebag%E2%80%9D/

think i read that years ago. i had a big row with the bloke from mongrel online circa 2006 which entrenched my negative feelings about the mag.

tales from the irish blogosphere

mongrel is this thing that i think most ppl my age feel prematurely nostalgic for

never heard of

i just hated the music reviews, mainly. three word negative reviews of anything that wasn't indie.

the slate was a lot better than mongrel for me.

they usually hated indie things and reviewed rap really positively

my impression was quite different to that but it was a long time ago.

the only stuff that i remember them really hating was jason mraz and manic street preachers

The Irish Independant also has weekly columns from David Quinn. I haven't read any in quite a while, but the last one I did basically amounted to "Catholics will outnumber atheists in future Ireland because we have more children, bwa ha ha".

i was taking the train to dublin a week or two after katie fffrench died and all i could get was the weekend independent and dear god

i always thought it was, y'know, a newspaper up til then

the sunday life supplement is clearly the dregs. b o' connor, that weird woman who did the makeup, irish models...

i remember we used to buy the sunday tribune and the sunday independent every week and i dont remember the exact point when somebody realised the independent was such trash. i don't know what my parents buy now, is there any decent sunday paper?

business post i guess

why does it have a section just called "WOMAN"
like, news, sports , WOMAN

And the thing is if the only reason you hire a guy or a gap is because they are a cunt who gains attention then you can't just fire the cunt you and all who rooved them thus far should also get the fucking chop because you and all who sail in you are the problem because guess what the world isn't running out of cunts with cunts opinions.

Wading through the turgid sentences and fact-checking what passed for fact in My Arse’s strange world was bad enough. But what was worse was having to spend more than an hour with this repulsive person. Of course, like all bullies, megalomaniacs and narcissists, My Arse was more than precious about his copy. We were under strict instruction to change nothing – even the misplaced commas, colons and semi-colons from the “great man” were considered sacrosanct.

One of his ex sub-editors who refers to him by his old nickname My Arse, is quite happy about his proffesional demise.

would go as far as to say that the newspaper is the problem here, not the windbag it employed

That seems to be identical to darraghmac's sentiment, but you ised a comma

Sweet sweet vindication in tombot typo

i think what happened here is i read deems' post half an hour ago, agreed wholeheartedly, then dozily opened the thread again now and regurgitated it without thinking. perhaps i am the problem. hey though i was at a wedding yesterday, by way of explanation

Marry, fool

dost thou bandy posts with me etc

Under the headline “Sorry ladies, equal pay has to be earned”, Myers wrote: “I note that two of the best-paid women presenters in the BBC – Claudia Winkleman and Vanessa Feltz, with whose, no doubt, sterling work I am tragically unacquainted – are Jewish. Good for them.

“Jews are not generally noted for their insistence on selling their talent for the lowest possible price, which is the most useful measure there is of inveterate, lost-with-all-hands stupidity. I wonder, who are their agents? If they’re the same ones that negotiated the pay for the women on the lower scales, then maybe the latter have found their true value in the marketplace.”

Myers has previously written, in the Irish Independent: “There was no holocaust (or Holocaust, as my computer software insists) and six million Jews were not murdered by the Third Reich. These two statements of mine are irrefutable truths.”

i never knew about the holocaust article. i can't fucking believe the indo printed that.

firebrand

most tabloid newspapers are terrorist organisations tbh

Mordy to thread, a fella with no truck for banned sentiments

Because I think, think mind, that I can live with this kind of statement in professional print if it's going to be followed with a coherent, interesting, provocative and open to provocation explanation.

Now we won't agree today if such arguments exist. I doubt that any will even concede that they might be possible. But can we argue for a gap in the continuum where they should be allowed to try, even if the success of such an attempt means our core beliefs and arguments themselves fail? Dunno.

I do know that ceding the space for such an attempt to a spoilt brat hack ears closed fuckdog like Myers and his ilk is a waste of a challop though

about 10 years ago i was working nights in this out-of-hours call centre which people phoned to get a doctor to visit them when their gp's office was closed. the place had its own team of drivers who were usually former taxi men, and there was one, pat, who was really grizzled and a fairly rough character.

so one night about 4 or 5am i'm bleary-eyed and doing my best to stay awake when pat comes in, there are no calls so he's got some time to kill, he's drinking coffee and chatting away about different things. i mention the documentary i'm watching, it was vaguely connected to ww2 and so he begins telling me how his grandfather fought in the war, but for the germans.

"a lot of irish fought on the german side too," he says. "not a lot of people know that."

"right"

"but ronan the thing i wonder about right - the jews held a global event in dublin, in 1932, and they done a census. and in that census they said there were 5 million jews living in europe."

and i'm wondering, very tired, barely able to deflect this or divert the conversation, hold on. is he about to... surely not? as he's speaking a car pulls up outside, another driver, terry, is coming in.

"so if they said there were 5 million jews in 1932, how are we supposed to believe there were 6 million killed a few years later?"

shit, he really is saying that, don't know what to say. terry opens the door.

"howaya pat. pat! are you denying the holocaust?"

A terrible man

dunno if it comes across in text but just the way he said it, so matter of factly, i couldn't stop laughing for about 20 minutes. like as if he was saying "howaya pat, will we have a cup of coffee"

that is just 'i hear you're a racist now father' but real

that was probably real too tbf

yeah p much. tho v much dubliners rather than the more country-accented father ted characters.

Frank Fitzgibbon, editor of the Sunday Times Ireland, said he took "full responsibility", adding: "This newspaper abhors anti-Semitism and did not intend to cause offence to Jewish people."

If you take "full responsibility" you must resign. But then we'd have to get Tony Gallagher to resign for the Ross Barkley thing too which..no yeah that'd be grand cheers.

I am now an echo of Ronan's laugh. It did come across in prose. Good job with the word picture.

Enjoyed a comment I saw that notes a significant pay gap between today and yesterday for the cunt

A Talk Radio/LBC graveyard shift surely beckons.

LZBC studio would be a podcast I'd catch

too easy, which minority shall we libel first?

Can u libel an entire minority he wondered not entirely idly

well yeah you could say "every single REDACTED that was ever born is a REDACTED REDACTED and they like to REDACTED"

working on my pitch for an Independent column

I like yr energy kid you're someone I think we can work with

Mordy to thread, a fella with no truck for banned sentiments

btw i read that original holocaust article and it's kinda insane? i don't mean insane in the sense that holocaust deniers are but in a weirder semantic sense. he basically argues that because the majority of victims of the holocaust were not killed in death camps but rather through shootings, burnt down homes, starvation, rampant disease, massive graves in the middle of forests, etc, (which is correct on the facts) the "holocaust" didn't happen bc i guess in his mind the "holocaust" only means the camps.

Moreover, there certainly was no holocaust. For if the word is to have any literal validity at all, it must be related to its actual meaning, which comes from the Greek words holos, 'whole', and caust, 'fire'. Most Jewish victims of the Third Reich were not burnt in the ovens in Auschwitz. They were shot by the hundreds of thousands in the Lebensraum of the east, or were worked or starved to death in a hundred other camps, across the Reich.

This programme was begun informally by Nazi armies in 1941, and only took organised form after the Wannsee conference in January 1942. Thus was born one of the most satanic operations in world history, in which millions of Jews were murdered. To be sure, you can use the term holocaust to describe these events, but only as a metaphor.

and

I'm a holocaust denier; but I also believe that the Nazis planned the extermination of the Jewish people, as far as their evil hands could reach.

so maybe he's a holocaust denier as he insists but he's a peculiar kind

He liked the idea of denying the Holocaust so found a way to do so.

That he figured this was a fair ground upon which to exercise his particular brand of baiting pedantry tells you more about whether he is a total prick as opposed to antisemite, which he clearly isn't.