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Showing posts with label Free inquiry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Free inquiry. Show all posts
Geraldine Green outlines the hostility directed her way on Facebook for not conforming to other people's expectations.

Since lockdowns and heightened political divisions here I’ve literally been deleted by hundreds simply for not toeing the line and going along with everything many people have been pushing on my personal posts. 

I’ve been deleted and blocked by close friends simply because I didn’t jump onto their bandwagon and buy into their sloganeering on my posts and politely explained my reasoning why I didn’t. When they kept blasting their ideology at me I gave them polite warnings to please stop and move on. These are the people who deleted and/or blocked me.

I only delete and block when someone has been increasingly rude, disrespectful, and mean to me on my posts. I never delete or block people for their political views but I have routinely been deleted and blocked for mine.

I have both Democrats and Republicans in my friends, as well as socialists, Marxists, Trotskyists, every sort of radical under the sun, and not just from the left, either. I read what they have to say so I’m informed but that in no way means I agree with them. I don’t argue with them on their posts but they tend to try and argue with me on mine. It’s annoying because I’m not interested in arguing with anyone. And I’m especially not interested in ideological dumping on my posts. I don’t buy into indoctrination of any kind and I think that’s very unsettling for some because they want me to agree with them and to take a stand. They want me to buy in to their brand of ideological indoctrination. Well, if they’d been paying attention they’d realize I take stands all the time, they’re just not the stands we all agree on!

I don’t feel any need to coerce anyone into anything in my writing or in the links I share. If you agree with things I say, great, and if you disagree with me, that’s also fine, but only commenting to me to register your disagreement and annoyance with my views and to dump your ideology on me and the other friends reading along doesn’t help anyone. That’s actually counterproductive to anything you’re saying! It would serve you much better to just scroll on by and then write your own posts expressing your opinions on your own timeline. That’s not a difficult concept to understand! Just imagine, not wasting energy on registering disagreement and annoyance and scrolling on!

But so many just want to inflict their anger online and dump and delete and block and run rather than taking a step back and considering the differing narrative, the challenging opinion. It’s like they’re out hunting for any reason to shoot anyone down who doesn’t just capitulate to them and whatever they’re pushing. It’s that pushing I can’t stand! I don’t back down. If you’re pushing I stop listening. 

Geraldine Green is a Tolerance Advocate

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Anthony McIntyre sees an anti-intellectual trend at play in the attempt to exclude alternative voices from the public discourse around measures to combat Covid-19. 

'My duty is to speak out,
 I do not want to be an accomplice' - Emile Zola

Last week, Dr Ciara Kelly challenged the Dublin government's insistence on the imposition of level 5 restrictions for a six week period as a necessary measure to curb the spread of Covid 19. While far from convinced that she has called it right, I welcomed her contribution to a discourse which seemed to be increasingly timid in the face of a regime of hush.  

A public broadcaster, Kelly, up until August, had for three years hosted Newstalk Lunchtime Live but has since taken over the Newstalk Breakfast slot from which she aired her critical views. It allowed her to reach a wide audience which is probably what infuriated some of her detractors who seemed eager to take their masks off for the purpose of spitting venom her way. 

While much of the critical commentary was robust it remained civil. At the same time there was no shortage of suggestions that Kelly, who tested positive for the virus in March, was some rabid right winger in the pay of big business, a Nazi fellow traveler, unfit to be a public broadcaster, a stooge of the ruling class, an unreconstructed Thatcherite prepared to sacrifice the vulnerable for the sake of preserving the capitalist economy, an advocate of 5000 people dying ... ad nauseum.

Much of this seemed pulled straight out of the jacksie, none of it grounded in plausible substance. Nowhere did she not advocate that citizens physically defy the government and break the law, cough and sneeze on everybody within reach or turn up with a tin hat at the next anti-masking protest waving a tricolour. Her thought crime amounted to saying: 

I think it is the fact that in 2021, 2022 and 2023 deaths will be higher as a consequence of our behaviour in 2020. No one will talk about that — We’ll lose lives from this as well. I’m not alone — There are loads of doctors who feel the exact same as we put we don’t hear them. All around the country today, there will be people in absolute despair at this news. I am very afraid that, on balance, we are getting it wrong.


‘It is about the fact that in January the cases will climb again and we will be back to square one. We will have gained nothing other than being able to party for Christmas.

While certainly a contentious opinion, that is about the worst that can be genuinely said about it. It was hardly the embryonic stage of a Mussolini-type march on Dublin.  

Kelly further alleged that the National Public Health Emergency Team was ‘flying in the face” of the World Health Organisation (WHO) by implementing more restrictions. In this she appears to be in step with WHO: 

We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus … the only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.

While, for now, at variance with Ciara Kelly on the usefulness of a lockdown, I firmly believe this is the type of discussion Irish society should be having, North and South. Dissenting doctors such as Ann McCloskey should not be on the receiving end of an email from the General Medical Council merely because she questioned the efficacy of masks. 

For some as yet inexplicable reason Ciara Kelly's twitter account is no longer live. It might be related to the impact previous abuse has had on her.

I've been accused of things that I'm not as if they are fact, and then people have told me to kill myself, told me that they wish I was dead, told me they don't know how I live with myself, how I sleep at night, that they hate me, they despise everything I stand for. People I don't know from Adam talk about me like they know me and it makes me feel sick. It makes me feel physically sick when I'm in that zone, but it is part and parcel of being a woman with a profile at the moment with the way the online world works and that's just the way it is.

Vicious. Perhaps those who seek to suffocate a diversity of opinion think society would be better off if what Professor Kathleen Lynch feared two decades ago was to become even more entrenched, a situation in which 'there has been a neutralisation of public discourse and debate. A language of sameness prevails'. 

To portray a competent dissenting voice as a Ciaronavirus that needs the vaccine of abuse and censorship to keep it suppressed is itself a malaise that is best treated by a good dose of "fuck off." As Eddie Holt wrote in 2001:

critical analysis and opposition even if unpopular in some circles, is the heart of democracy. When political representatives cannot or will not provide it, then the citizen must.

Which is what Ciara Kelly did. 

Sticking fingers in our own ears and wishing it would all go away is not going to resolve the fundamental differences of opinion that have arisen around how best to tackle the pandemic. Yet, it is better than sticking a gag in the mouths of those we would rather not hear.  Ciara Kelly, like the rest of us, should comply with the lockdown and accept the advice to wear a mask. She should not under any circumstance wear a muzzle. 

⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

Masks, Not Muzzles

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