Category: John Waters

Herr Waters suggests final solution for welfare recipients?

You would imagine that somebody like John Waters who makes such a racket about the infinite love and care his particular god has for his subjects would be sympathetic to those who have fallen on hard times.

You would, however, be wrong to imagine any such thing.

Writing in today’s Mail on Sunday Waters displays a disturbing attitude towards his fellow citizens who are struggling to exist on social welfare.

There should be no question, in a free and fair society, of the forced redistribution of earned income to assist those who are, for whatever reason, negative contributors to the common good.

And Waters is not just talking about the tiny minority of social welfare recipients who abuse the system, he’s talking about everybody including the vulnerable who, he suggests, should be strangled.

It’s worth reproducing the final paragraphs of his article

Imagine how you would feel if, instead of having to subsidise your work-free neighbour, you had to accept direct responsibility for his existence by taking him into your home and catering to all his needs.

How long would you tolerate him lounging around your sitting room, eating your cornflakes and flicking around your Sky package?

In a short time, you would strangle him and bury him under the patio.

And those who prate about our ‘duty’ to support without question anyone our dysfunctional State deems to be ‘vulnerable’ would do the same.

A friend offers a solution.

He proposes that each working person might be obliged adopt an unemployed person or family and become responsible for them.

The upside is, you would have the right to kick the idle individual’s backside and force him out to work or, if you prefer, to mentor and encourage him to stop being a burden on his fellow citizens.

In the end, if you managed to return your man to a useful existence, you would be free of any obligation to be ‘compassionate’ for the rest of your life.

Now that’s what I call a ‘social welfare’ system.

Hitler would be proud.

Copy to:
John Waters

John Waters' new book

John Waters has published a new book ‘Was it for this?’ Why Ireland lost the plot.

I came across the following critique on Amazon.

This is only the second book I have ever put down half through, deciding that life is too short to waste on it.

It is poorly written, poorly organised and incoherent in argument structure.

“PS I Love You” was my first experience of being unable to finish a read.

Where as that was complete drivel, Waters book is a psuedo intellectual rant that manages to be both boring and drivel.

John Waters and chimpanzee secularists

Religious fanatic John Waters wrote a deeply insulting article in last Friday’s Irish Times in which he referred to those who would challenge his particular god as chimpanzees who make bogus claims on reason.

If children are not indoctrinated into the ways of his particular god Waters claims they will be taught (by their chimpanzee parents) that they are:

The accidental offspring of the pointless oozing of primordial slime, units of meat and bone.

I wonder if this fanatic would have the courage to repeat such insults in the presence of the parents he targets. Somehow, I doubt it.

Recently, I asked:

Is John Waters becoming an embarrassment to the Irish Times.

My question was prompted after reading an editorial that described Waters’ religious views as overblown rhetoric bordering on the comical.

In his article on Friday Waters hit back by describing two recent editorials on religion as:

An unstudied doublethink, a lazy, unthinking flip-flopping between two diametrically incompatible positions.

It will be interesting to see if the editor responds

I include below responses by Irish Times readers to Waters’ insulting and intolerant article.

The letter by Geraldine Moorkens Byrne is of particular note.

Sir,

John Waters (Opinion, April 13th) is entitled to his personal beliefs, but making offensive judgments about a form of education received by thousands of Irish children and the choices made by their parents is an abuse of his position as a columnist.

I write as a mother of two thriving young adults whose very different personalities and beliefs were encouraged to grow in a secular education setting.

The parents of 14,000 children are currently choosing Educate Together schools.

Thankfully the measured tone of the article by Paul Rowe of Educate Together (Opinion, April 12th) offers us a buffer against the harshness and intolerance behind John Waters’s references to “functionaries rather than mature beings animated with affection and curiosity” and terms such as “primordial slime” and “units of meat and bone”.

Attitudes like those of John Waters are exactly what we are trying to save our offspring from.

Yours, etc,

Maureen Rowan,

Northbrook Avenue,

Ranelagh, Dublin 6.

Sir,

Congratulations to The Irish Times for publishing and to John Waters for writing this article.

It is important, pertinent and timely.

Furthermore, it is absolutely superb.

Yours, etc,

James Dundon, MD

Bushy Park Road, Terenure,

Dublin 6.

Sir,

John Waters paints a bleak picture of our society should religious education be removed from our schools (Opinion, April 13th) A very bleak picture indeed.

Luckily it’s merely the product of his overheated imagination rather than any prediction grounded in reality.

Considering the track record of abuse in this country, perpetrated by religious orders, in the name of religion, John Waters has no business criticising atheists.

Many of the greatest humanitarians, free thinkers, social campaigners and all round decent people are atheists.

However he also overlooks a simple fact – removing religion from schools has nothing to do with removing religion from society.

If you believe in your religion, whatever that might be, you don’t need the school system or society to back you up.

His Christ must indeed be dying if he needs the schools to ensure his continued presence.

Here’s an idea. Let parents take charge of religious education and leave the school system open to all, regardless of their faith, or lack thereof.

Let parents take their children to their place of worship, prepare them for their rituals and rites of passage and generally encourage them in their path.

And let schools teach them facts, figures, and how to be citizens of a State where everyone is equal, and no one religion oppresses another.

And where not believing in a mysterious sky fairy doesn’t automatically mean you see yourself as primordial slime.

Yours, etc,

Geraldine Moorkens Byrne,

Brookfield, Dublin 12.

Sir,

Surely John Waters’s extraordinary article on religious instruction in schools (Opinion, April 13th) is one of the most compelling reasons yet for speeding up the complete separation of schooling and religious instruction.

This would allow those of all persuasions freedom to have their children develop in an open manner which would help in developing their curiosity, ethics and principles.

I find it rather scary that John Waters would categorise anyone as a fusion of meat and bone emanating from the primordial slime, and therefore I can only wish Ruairí Quinn the very best in his endeavours to democratise the educational process.

This will also establish the right to religious instruction for those who desire it without inflicting their beliefs on those who differ in faith, logic and curiosity of their existence!

Yours, etc,

Bernard Delaney

Doolin, Co Clare.

John Waters: Becoming more bizarre by the day

Irish Times journalist John Waters was on The Saturday Night Show recently (March 17) dispensing his usual bizarre ‘wisdom’.

Here’s some of what he had to say.

On the Internet:

The Internet is a cesspit, a sewer populated by extremely nasty people. It’s a place where people, hiding behind masks of anonymity, write foul articles.

Those who are not anonymous are also nasty people because it’s a kill or be killed environment. Everybody becomes extremely nasty once they log on.

Presumably this includes all Waters’ fellow journalists and the millions of his fellow Catholics from all over the world who regularly write on the Internet including many in the Vatican.

And what, I wonder, would David Quinn, his fellow militant Catholic, think of being called a nasty, foul blogger?

The Internet will be a desert in about ten to fifteen years because people will become bored by it.

This is like someone predicting, a hundred years after the invention of the printing press, when books were widely read, that eventually people would become bored with reading.

On his weekly column in the Irish Times:

I write a column every week in the Irish Times and there are posts at the end of it. I never read them, people tell me I shouldn’t read them, they’re just foul.

We can see here the distain that Waters has for his readers and, indeed, for the Irish Times editors who pass the comments for publication.

Other people read the comments and report back to him perhaps to protect his sensitivities.

From time to time I read the posts in response to his articles. Some are for; some are against, none are foul.

Obviously, Waters doesn’t believe in the positive benefits that can accrue from reader feedback. This, I suspect, is because he believes he’s the fountain of all wisdom or perhaps the idea of comments at the end of his articles is a tad too close to how the hated bloggers operate.

On letter writers to the Irish Times:

The funny thing is when you read the letters to the Times they’re kind of vaguely intelligent and the names and addresses are on them so you can go and find the guy if he says something really nasty.

Vaguely intelligent? I suppose that’s a sort of compliment coming from the Great One.

On Fianna Fail (Waters delivered a morale boosting speech to the faithful at the recent Ard Fheis):

I have a deep affection for Fianna Fail. When I became a journalist I noticed all this stuff about Fianna Fail in articles and analysis and thought; this is all mad stuff, even I could see it was mad so I started to hang around with them a bit and found that I quite like them.

Do you not blame them for everything that has gone on, he was asked.

No, I don’t. I gave them a metaphor at the Ard Fheis when I was speaking.

The plane crashed and you were driving the plane, the plane was off course but the plane was also struck by lightning.

You have to apologise for being in the wrong place and for being a little bit over the limit but you cant really keep apologising for the lightning because the lightning is the point and we were struck by lightning.

Presumably the lightning here is Lehman Brothers.

Brendan O’Connor drew great laughter from the audience when he said:

If I was on a plane and it was going to be struck by lightning I wouldn’t fancy Brian Cowen being the pilot, would you?

Waters, however, was not laughing. He was not pleased by this insult to his vast wisdom.

It was clear that, in his mind, he was consigning O’Connor, RTE and the entire audience to that foul cesspit where all the nasty bloggers work their evil deeds.