Messages

They don't even go to the games.

Maybe there is an opportunity to convert a few Tyrone fans with time on their hands and a long period of introspection ahead into Cork supporters just for bored/board purposes. The only meaningful activity they have at the moment is counting their 3 all irelands.

Not really worth arguing about Seafoid - my beef on the thread was with people belittling the Holocaust, which certainly wasn't you, IMHO.

Still, and all, i do think you have a fairly Hobbesian, depressing view of the world. My own view is that, just as the Nazis choose to do the evil things that they did, mankind, as a whole, can choose not to, and take a different path. And if you look around at the evidence, wars are down, life expectancy up, inequality between countries and continents actually decreasing (which may well have benefical population consequences) - in general there has never been a better time to be alive.

It is a great time to be alive but I think tail risk is a huge weakness and I don't see anyone doing anything about it.
I think that is why the global economy is such a mess. We need a different system that takes these things into account.
Maybe it will happen.

Wars are edging up as well. Not in Europe.

I don't think climate change is glib, I think your assumption that genocide is unavoidable because of it is.

I think it is too easy to blame geopolitical or increasingly climatic factors whilst ignoring very human and at times, evil choices. I'm not religious by any means, but I do recognise man's capacity to do evil, quite apart from any external factors. Which is why I think it is hugely important that the holocaust is not down played or forgotten - because, climate change etc not withstanding, every human has a choice to participate or not participate in horrors such as the Shoah. Remembering it is a way of preventing it.

I wasn;t talking about the causes of the war - I was talking about the causes of the Holocaust, which are two very different things. For instance, if the Allies had not taken up arms after Poland's invasion, I think the Holocaust would still have occurred.

The reasons I differ with you on the oil question is 1 - it wasn't the cause of the Hitler's downfall, in fact if you were going to pinpoint economic reasons for their loss, you'd be far more likely to pinpoint the destruction of Germany's capacity to manufacture armaments by the Allied bombing campaign. Stalingrad was lost because of over reach and a fatal tendency by Hitler to meddle - even up to the end he was refusing Paulus permission to break out, which was still possible.

2 - there is tendency to link back in history to reinforce modern viewpoints - eg WW2 was lost because of oil, Nazis were evil. American forces invaded Iraq for oil, American's are evil. Not saying that you are doing that, but the tendency to say that every war is the same is not valid in my opinion. And in saying that we risk dooming ourselves to accepting that war will always be with us, when, in fact, the world is a far, far more peaceful place than it has ever been.

I think food security is taken as a given and it shouldn't be. We are a very shortsighted species. Look at Asian population growth post ww2.
There were 300m people in the Raj when Mountbatten took down the flag in 1948. Now between Pak, India and Bangla it's close to 2bn.
 
It doesn't matter how things are now - it's about what sort of risk is building up in the system and what happens when the models break down.
Surely that is the Irish lesson from 2008.

150m people in India depend for food on an aquifer that is running down.

And limiting the damage to that assumes climate is stable.
Climate change is going to change the flow of water into the Ganges. What sort of planning in India doing to manage this? None.

Iraq and Syria are also about climate change and resource allocation.

http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/jul/06/water-supplies-shrinking-threat-to-food
Today some 18 countries, containing half the world's people, are overpumping their aquifers. Among these are the big three grain producers – China, India and the US – and several other populous countries, including Iran, Pakistan and Mexico.


They way Dalits are treated in India- do you think they'll be looked after when the shit hits the fan ?
Genocide is always possible under the right conditions.   

Disagree strongly Seafoid. Wall Street/ International finance angle does not cover the atrocities meted out to poverty stricken Jewish communities - although Hitler's anti semitism was well rooted and exposed from Mein Kampf onward, there is little to suggest that he actually believed the conflation of Jew with Communism (as witnessed by the pragmatism of the pre war pact with Stalin, no fan of the Jewish people themselves). It was a visceral hatred, based in the prejudices and myths of Mittel Europe.  As the Jewish combat leaders in Warsaw expressed in messages to prominent Jews in America - you will have no one left to lead. The extermination of the Jewish population of Europe was an end in itself - the weakening of any international finance/ communist plot a happy byproduct for the Nazis.

The climate change comment, i find to be a bit glib, especially from someone who claims that Israel is currently engaged in a genocide against Palestinians. To attribute actions such as the Holocaust and other genocides to what seems to be a Marxist reading of history, completely ignores Man's capacity to pervert ideologies of whatever bent to satisfy more primal urges.

Lack of oil did not do for the Nazis - what did for them was an inability to resupply their own lines at Stalingrad, caused by Hitler's increasing need to micro manage the front from Germany. They had taken a lot of the oil fields in southern Russia by the time they turned to stalingrad - ironically this fuel allowed them travel far ahead of their own supply lines across the steppes ( a lot of the provisioning had to be done by pack animals because roads were so bad). if Hitler had not been so fixated in taking a city bearing Stalin's name the advance across the steppes would have been slower and more successful.

Lack of oil is putting a post modern read on a conflict that does not bear the supposition. Unlike Iraq, WW2 was not fought for oil, though it's acquisition became a strategic imperative. But it was not a cause of the war.

The Nazis were unique, because of the way they were able to incriminate an entire nation - the German industrialists Krups and Siemens actually opened factories in Auschwitz in 1942. Never before or since has a nation committed such awful crimes with the acquiescence or tacit support of the vast majority of its citizens, very different from any other genocidal examples given in this thread.

The cause of the war was the economic breakdown post 1929 that came out of ww1.
The Germans thought they could dominate with a different economic model that enslaved the slavs. They were insane.

Climate change isn't glib, either. How do you think India is going to feed 2 billion people ?
And China ? With desertification and seasons unreliable from one year to the next .
The Nazis were not and will not be seen as sui generis.

I think oil was one of the main reasons they lost but feel free to differ.
They didn't get any and once they lost Stalingrad the Soviets turned the tide. They didn't have the resources to
beat the Soviets. They had the best military machine but it wasn't enough. By 1944 they were doing stuff with coal but the war was lost.

We are very lucky to live in a very stable period of economic history but others will not be so lucky.
The mechanisms to kill large numbers of people industrially exist and they will be used again.

http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poem/item/9297/auto/A-DISUSED-SHED-IN-CO-WEXFORD

The good thing about the National league d4 is that it only has 8 teams and 2 go up every year so it's possible to escape much more easily  than it is from the lower confines of English soccer. 

[It is very difficult to conceive of any regime as blatantly as the Nazis legitimising mass murder ever again]

I think you're missing the point Seafoid. Hitler's campaign against Jews was pointless - they weren't blocking lebensraum economically it cost the Reich huge amounts of treasure and foreign currency to actually organise the extermination (the Nazis weren't sitting on hoards of Jewish gold - on the contrary, the property and valuables of the Jews were meant to pay for the expense of theirr own deaths), they weren't in political control of any countries, economically their influence was far overstated by the Nazis. So unlike presentday Israel/Palestine which is essentially a struggle for territory and the control of it's inhabitants, or Rwanda which was a Civil war fought on ethnic lines, or Cambodia, which was spurred on by American aggression in the region and a twisted communist ideology in the jungles, or Mao and Stalins horrible modernisation and collectivisation programmes, the holocaust is probably the purest example of focused evil projected against a people, and probably the catastrophe that comes closest to fitting the definition of genocide - in that the destruction of the entirety of a people is the purpose, rather than a consequence of other actions.

Ask a Palestinian in Gaza today why what is happening to them, is happening and they would have a ready answer for you. The same with the Kulaks in 30s Soviet Russia, the same with the middle class in Year One Cambodia, the same with the Tutsi governing class in Rwanda.

The shocking thing about the Holocaust, besides the incredible planning and technological advances that it spurred, was the lack of reason, and the consequences that had for Jewish populations. They could not believe themselves that such terror would be levelled agaisnt them for no reason, which undoubtedly led to Jewish populations being easier to transport. The scale of the horror was such that in the Czech Family camp in Auschwitz, despite being told by other inmates who had seen the orders for their death be gassing within 48 hours, they could not believe the SS would kill the children that they had built a school for, and missed their chance to revolt. that was within Auschwitz itself - even in the centre of the vortex they could not understand the scale.

Externally, it also made it very difficult to convince the Allied powers that anything was going on - the stories were too outlandish. Even today, if you heard that Israel were shipping Palestinians by train to specially constructed factories, deliberately designed to slaughter them, after stripping them of any valuables and any bodily features construed as having value, despite everything we know of human nature, we would find it very difficult to believe. It is very difficult to conceive of any regime as blatantly as the Nazis legitimising mass murder ever again. there are of course different weapons, such as famine, deliberate neglect etc, yet i would argue that the world has not yet plumbed the moral depths that Nazi Germany did, despite the other genocides that have occurred since.

It wasn't pointless or lacking reason. The Nazis identified Jews in Wall St and in the Soviet Union government as their enemies.
They were a reaction to the austerity imposed on Germany in the 1930s.  Fascism was all about trauma and death and existential dread.
It was run by sociopaths who could channel the fear of their people.

The Nazis wanted to impose a different economic model that wasn't run out of Wall St. 
http://www.amazon.com/Wages-Destruction-Making-Breaking-Economy/dp/0143113208

Most of the German industrialists were with the Nazis.
Every war is the same. There was nothing unique about the Nazis.
What eventually defeated them was the lack of oil.

It is very difficult to conceive of any regime as blatantly as the Nazis legitimising mass murder ever again
Climate change means it's pretty inevitable

the logic of war is fairly grotesque. This is from the FT 

http://ftalphaville.ft.com//2012/07/10/1078071/the-negative-fear-bubble/

"Capital must be destroyed in order for liquidity to be usefully deployed once again — especially if it is to deliver investment returns.Hence, why wars are so hugely useful for dealing with economic depressions. They permanently and effectively destroy capacity. Not just the surplus capacity that plagues the system, but core capacity, which serves a genuine economic need. Indeed, it's the need for the capacity to be reinstalled that in many ways justifies a return on investment again.
The foundation of Friedman's corrupting principle is that the investor (money to be more precise) has no duty, obligation or covenant to anyone or anything."

And when the war is over reconstruction is great for business.

Bring back Banty.

It's all Mickey Harte's fault . He hasn't changed tactics since 2010 and is channeling Sean Boylan
somewhere different in the time/space continuum

Poor loss to Limerick - it seemed like we played well in patches but not consistent.

Brian curran sent off in the second half when we were 3 points up, turning point of the game, apparently it was a second yellow - both apparently for very little (at least in Tommy Clark and Breheny's opinion).

It could be a long year for us....

Agree. A man said to me yesterday that we are in transition. I'd say we have been in transition for 3 or 4 years. Is transition a nice word for "sh*te"?

It is a fancy way of saying purgatory

[but look, it's our first day out," said Walsh.]

http://www.irishtimes.com/sport/gaelic-games/gaelic-football/danny-cummins-leads-way-for-galway-as-kevin-walsh-gets-off-on-right-foot-1.2087408

"Manager Kevin Walsh was happy to win his first national league game in charge of his native county. "Yes, it is important to win the home games but it's important also to have a performance whether we're winners or not," said Walsh.
"I don't think we went down at any stage which was important and Meath did come back at us, we kicked on again.
"I know we shipped maybe four points and a goal and a point at the end. I suppose the ruthless teams wouldn't allow that to happen, but look, it's our first day out," said Walsh.

Cummins' goal in the 14th minute gave the Tribesmen a 1-5 to 0-1 advantage and it was the least their slick play deserved. Meath fought back to only trail by four at the break, thanks largely to the dead ball exploits of Newman and goalkeeper Paddy O'Rourke.
Stephen Bray came to the fore as Meath went about dragging themselves back into contention, but manager Mick O'Dowd was infuriated by his side's overall display as they were blitzed by the Tribesmen.
"It was a shocking performance. We went 20 minutes without scoring after scoring a free in the first minute. That's not acceptable," he said."


I bet he said lookit.

And Meath need to have a good hard lookit  that bare patch of 20 minutes without scoring.   

Galway 2-13
Meath 1-12

Any Royalist comment?

Defending very cavalier apparently

The lesson of the holocaust is that the veneer of civilisation is very thin. The Millman experiment corroborates that view.

Just as the Germans committed atrocities because they could get away with it, it's no surprise that the Israelis as a state oppress the Palestinians for the same reason. A scorpion stings you because he can. What we need to understand is that any nation (our own included) or group of people has it in them to perpetrate unspeakable atrocities if they figure they can get away with it.

That's why the criminalisation of holocaust denial is justifiable, even at the expense of the right to free speech. We must never forget, never mind deny. Eternal vigilance is not just the price of freedom. It is a necessity for civilisation.

Well said - the more recent conflicts in Palestine and indeed the Balkans bear this out, sadly.

Rwanda...

Please explain the relevance of  ........    any sense of this statement   
"the Germans committed atrocities because they could get away with it, it's no surprise that the Israelis as a state oppress the Palestinians for the same reason"

Would that be similar to,
'the Germans committed atrocities because they could get away with it, it's no surprise that the ( insert a name)   suppress the (insert a name) for the same reason'?

Considering that Stalin, Soviet communism, Pol Pot, Mao tse Tung, along with fascism in general, but Nazi fascism in particular, all are candidates for 'scum of the earth' (thank you arthur koestler), just how does the function of the Israeli state equate to the antics and atrocities of the scum of the earth?

I  think you've managed to find the wrong end of the stick. I was taking lawnseed to task for suggesting that the modern day crimes of the Israeli state were somehow a retrospective justification for the Nazi massacre of Jews. That is the only reason I mentioned the Israelis as the example to quote to illustrate that the intrinsic propensity to commit evil is a human, not a national trait – a fact that should be the first lesson of the holocaust.

As for your request to explain how the "function" of the Israeli state, "equates" to the antics and atrocities of any group, I'm afraid I can't help, as I have no idea where you found such a suggestion.

The point is that the holocaust should teach us that victimisation of groups and categories of people comes easily to the human race - all of us as an intrinsic trait in our nature, as proven by psychological research - and can even extend to justifying their organised extermination, as long as we think we can get away with it.

"The point is that the holocaust should teach us that victimisation of groups and categories of people comes easily to the human race - all of us as an intrinsic trait in our nature, as proven by psychological research - "

It is more or less guaranteed by war.
See the Yazidis in Iraq for example.


"Members of the Yazidi community, an ancient monotheistic religion rooted in Zoroastrianism, say they can never forgive those who helped Isis.
"They killed our men. If we could, we would kill theirs in return," says Ali Khalaf Qassem, a 70-year-old man with cracked feet and drooping eyebrows. He walked for days with his family to flee their village in Sinjar province.
They have joined 48 families that have taken over an unfinished building in the Kurdish city of Dohuk, hanging sheets along its concrete skeleton to create the illusion of separate rooms.
"We aren't safe anywhere. Iraq is like a fire. Now after the peshmerga fled, how do we know Kurdistan will protect us?," Mr Qassem asked. "We have to get to Europe."
For older Yazidis such as Mr Qassem, this was not their first expulsion. In the 1970s, under former ruler Saddam Hussein's "Arabisation" policy, minorities such as the Yazidis were moved across the country or rounded up into contained communities.
"I want to cry again for leaving behind our villages and holy places on the mountain," says Suleiman Kutti, a squat man with bushy white hair. "Without an international force here to protect us, we will keep facing this."
Iraq's Christians feel the same. "Iraq will be divided and our areas will become part of Kurdistan, which is fine. But if the world cannot protect us, it must help us leave," says Amira, a woman living with eight other families in a tiny classroom at the Mar Youkhana Church."

We need to teach kids about how awful war is.
Focusing on the Holocaust misses the point. WW2 was just an example of the system.

But it would be too hard to explain to them how our need for petrol outweighs other considerations. 

I'd say Tyronies would prefer crap floodlights and a functioning team. 

Very nice to have a bit of sport to talk about again.

Decent win for Westmeath yesterday, considering we were missing Duffy, didn't really make use of the wind in the 1st half and lost McCormack and Heslin to black cards before half time. Referee very inconsistent with black cards yesterday, home support none too happy with him although he wasn't too bad otherwise I thought. Wasn't much in this match until Laois lost their discipline, they were playing a physical game from the start and lost a man to a yellow/black midway through the second half, which was closely followed by a straight red and they were unable to stem the tide that followed. They look a side heading towards the trap door already.

Midfield a problem area for Westmeath, both starters were substituted although Sharry did well there in the second half. Kevin Maguire led from pillar to post and is right up there with the best full backs in the country. Kieran Martin and Ger Egan very good as well. We play a nice crisp short passing game but need to work on deliveries into the ff line. Great to get a league win, its been a long couple of years...

Great to see the other maroon team winning their first match since 2013. Jesus, 2014 was some write off.

Sad really when instead of being happily discussing their own teams' good results we have Seaf and the Rhus obsessing over the Ros result.

It's all a big circus.


Lookit.

An encouraging win for Galway. Meath have been a bugbear for the last few years in the new mediocrity and it's good to put them back in their box. We had a bad shtart last year losing 3 on the trot so this win is good and hopefully we can build on it.

None of the teams in D2 are world beaters so it's all about trying to get a bit of consistency. Winning 4 home matches and one away could be enough to go up but Galway haven't been consistent for a long time.   

And who are the 20 people who chose Ros to win the division  ?