John Mortell’s blog

Shortly after Enda Kenny took office, an old man approached Leinster House from the park in Merrion Square where he’d been sitting on a park bench. He spoke to the Garda standing guard and said, “I would like to go in and meet with Mr Ahern.”

The Garda looked at the man and said, “Sir, Mr Ahern is no longer Taoiseach and no longer works here.” The old man said, “Okay,” and walked away.

The following day, the same man approached Leinster House and said to the same Garda, “I would like to go in and meet with Mr Ahern.” The Garda again told the man, “Sir, Mr Ahern is no longer Taoiseach and no longer here.” The man thanked him and, again, just walked away.

The third day, the same man approached Leinster House and spoke to the very same Garda, saying, “I would like to go in and meet with Mr Ahern.”

The Garda, understandably agitated at this point, looked at the man and said, “Sir, this is the third day in a row you have been here asking to speak to Mr Ahern; I’ve told you already that Mr Ahern is no longer the Taoiseach and no longer works here. Don’t you understand?”

The old man looked at the Garda and said, “Oh, I understand. I just love hearing it!!!”

As part of my exams I’m reading for American government. This is somewhat tangential but interesting;

”More Americans were killed by other Americans during the 20th century than died in the Spanish-American war (11,000 “deaths in service”), World War I (116,000 “deaths in service”), World War II (406,000 “deaths in service”), the Korean police action (55,000 “deaths in service”), and the Vietnam War (109,000 “deaths in service”) combined. (“Deaths in Service” statistics are greater than combat deaths and were used here to make the contrast between war and civilian interpersonal violence rates even clearer.)”

I forgot to title this the first time around. Ooops.

Translated that means ‘I will give you 40.000 blowjobs’…. The main page has a much better version of this picture… Haven’t a clue if its serious or not and I don’t really care… Very tempted to sign up though…

So, prompted somewhat by seeing too much of those atrocious TV ads featuring celebrities that I don’t recognise and the fact that I know waaayyy to many people involved in the whole ‘Rock the Vote’ thing I decided to look at the site run by these people. I appreciate what many of the people involved are trying to do but to be honest are they going to change anything? Doubtful I’d say…

Warning: Even by my standards this is going to be a rambly and disjointed post. Also its very negative.

The idea behind RockTheVote.ie is that come election day – which is just over a week away now, young people will go out and vote because its a good idea, or something. You see, while there was lots of talk about how ‘the children are the future’ and ‘young people’s voices need to be heard’ there is no really good reason this site can give as to why you should vote.

There are two major points at which this site falls down before it even starts. Firstly – its message seems to be that ‘all young people are retarded’; even the use of the words ‘young people’ is insulting. The design of the site and those TV ads seem to be more aimed towards selling sweets to small fat 8 year-olds than convincing new voters on the registrar and those who may not have put themselves onto it yet to vote. Ads that treat you like your a vapid moron are really going to work lads. Secondly – the money spent and the politicians taking the photo-ops that have been offered can’t hide one thing; Thursday voting. The simple fact is as the RockTheVote team themselves acknowledge, if its not weekend voting you lose an awful lot of the youth vote. Bertie simply ignores it in his blog (which to be honest I doubt he even wrote) while the opposition leaders use it as a handily-provided stick to say how bad Bertie is. Apparently, RockTheVote can’t campaign for Saturday voting (something to do with the way they are set up) and with that being the case – what’s the point of them being there? You might as well pray for cancer patients as try to convince young people to vote, it’ll have the same effect in the real world.

The same can be said for the blogs on offer. The leaders blogs are so vapid and lack any useful info they seem to be just ‘copy and pasted’ from pre-prepared statements from the parties. While there are some bits and pieces that are interesting you have to go looking for them and the sheer paucity of posts from the parties shows how they are not really that interested in the ‘young people’.

The ‘young people’s blogs’ are somewhat more interesting, in that they at least have some original thought and style. But again, there’s not a whole lot posted there and some of the posts are just ‘Sure, I don’t know anything about politics, why would I vote?’ with the always inspiring reply to that being ‘becuase its your right… or something’. They do hit it on the head though when they acknowledge that for many things like taxes and stamp duty and whether Bertie did do anything wrong don’t interest the majority of young voters. The lack of focus on issues that do effect young people is something that has (again) made the RockTheVote campaign rather pointless.

The whole thing also lacks any useful method of giving people information. It simply encourages you to vote but does not provide you with any real information (or even a method of finding information) with regards to the parties. In this case, whats the point? Is the idea that you go to the station and ask the person at the polling booth which person you should vote for? Compare it to the recent French elections where the youth vote knew why they preferred particular candidates – there was at least some vision, choice and most importantly difference on offer. RockTheVote offers none of these things, not the appearance of it or the means of finding out if there is diference.

There are things that do effect and would interest younger voters. These are things like poor facilities for socialising other than the pub, poor cancer care (not exclusively a ‘youth issue’ but ‘our’ generation are going to know a lot of people that will suffer it if the numbers keep growing – to the best of my memory, I’m on person number 10), drugs and suicide/depression are all issues that would mobilise young voters but the politicians have no interest in tapping into these groups.

Well, that’s not exclusively true. My own personal bet is that come election day the vast majority of those under 25 who vote will vote Sinn Fein and that’s because they do target and mobilise more youth than any other party that I have seen. Personally I don’t like that possibility but in the meantime, most young people won’t vote and if this is their introduction to voting I don’t know why they’d bother….

I have a bit of a rant to make about the ‘RockTheVote’ campaign but I’ll do that later…. In the meantime,this video covers my feelings pretty well

Went to see this last night, for those of ye who don’t know it’s the sequel to the film ’28 days later’ that came out a few years back. Overall I have to say I enjoyed the film, even though it was a bit short. So, a quick review…

If you liked the first film this is definitely a film you’ll enjoy, the film takes a fairly clever take on what happened after following on from some of the ideas and facts that were in the film the first time around (the main one being that the virus only hit Britain). It also plays quite well with the ‘they’re zombies but they’re not’ element by having them all die by starvation! The biggest problem I had with the film is that it strains credibility a few times too many – starting with the ‘family reunion’ that takes place about a half hour in (which is when the film really begins). That’s not to say that that all these people would end up back together is impossible – as we all know, the more ridiculous the odds are of something happening the more likely it will happen it seems at times and similar things have been known to happen after wars so…

But that’s not my main problem with this film. My main problem with the film is its portrayal of the military characters and its organisational skills. The explanation for how the virus survives for example is clever and just-about plausible. But that that method would be left unattended with no guards posted outside so anyone with a card (not even military clearance,just a door card) can enter? The same happens with how the infection spreads to the populace – the ‘safe room’ has no guards outside it, has no emergency lighting and has a back entrance? Again, it just strains believability that bit too much. The same holds for the ending – while I understand the reasoning on it can someone please tell me, given what we’re told about how the virus spreads the second time round how that last scene is possible?

I don’t mean for this to sound like a completely negative review – the film is actually quite good, has some very good actors (credit has to go to the two child actors – they’re believable and perfectly cast for their roles) and the plot points I complain about are all explainable away, even if sometimes the explanation is ”people are extremely fucking stupid” or ”the military can be very dumb when organising shit” (which given the fact that most of the soldiers in Iraq went without half the equipment or info they needed may not be that far-fetched). The action scenes are very good, though the camera work in them can be kind of distracting while the ‘helicopter’ scene is one of the most impressive I’ve seen in an action movie in a while (fairly gross though). The film is too short (about an hour forty-five I think) but the music is astonishing (again a little bit too good as at times I found myself being distracted by listening to the song rather than watching the film but…) and as a final bitching note – what is it with Cork people talking every time a film goes quiet? Not even just whispering to the person beside them but talking aloud? Fecksake.

On the ‘John watches too many movies and thinks about them too much scale’ – ’28 Weeks Later’ gets a respectable 8 out of 10..

Been reading this (in)famous essay by Samuel P. Huntington as part of my course on U.S foreign Policy. It’s interesting stuff, the edition I have is this little blue book only sixty-seven pages long holding within its pages Huntington’s original essay, several of the responses to it and Huntington’s response to the responses.

It makes for interesting reading becuase in many ways the ideas discussed in the articles have become somewhat of a fait accompli – I doubt that most of you reading this will not have already heard the phrase ‘clash of civilisations’ before and the rhetoric he used in the essays are now being used by many of the current member’s of the U.S administration. But are the ideas he presents really accurate or usable?

Personally, I have to agree with the general consensus given by most academics and well-read people on the topic; Not really. His ideas are vaguely racist (‘possible‘ African civilisation being the worst) and reductionist – he maintains that the Vietnamese and Chinese will coalesce into a single civilisation despite the fact that they’ve been fighting on and off for, oh a thousand or so years.

He also seems to have no real appreciation for the fact that many of these ‘civilisations’ have massive internal divisions – he dismisses this by saying that ‘when push comes to shove these people (whoever they are) will join with their ‘brothers’ and identify with them’, meaning I suppose that I will ‘naturally’ feel more connection with American/European/English-speaking/White tragedies in the world than I will with Pakistani/Indian/Buddhist/Chinese/Non-white/Etc. tragedies. Which is somewhat true – but thats mostly owing to shared lifestyles/beliefs/history and global proximity than ‘civilisation’ I suspect. He makes no real attempt to explain how the majority of the world’s conflict is intra-civilisational rather than between groups on borders of civilisations.

The dangerous thing about Huntington’s argument is that reading my last paragraph I have agreed with him somewhat, and that when one looks at the current conflict between the ‘West’ and ‘Islamism’ its hard not to think that he is somewhat correct. And thats the problem. Huntington’s argument is at its most reduced correct. The forces of the ‘West’ – broadly speaking democracy, free markets and human rights are in conflict with the forces of ‘Islamism’ – broadly speaking Allah, Muhammad and Sharia Law. But as that sentence shows you that means nothing. Are Russia, America and India – who are all democracies, the same with democracy, free markets and human rights? Of course not. The same applies to the ‘Islamist’s’ – the only way you can describe them is by using extremely vague terms – becuase most of the groups that make up Al-Qaeda are not even in agreement with each other!

In the end, it is worth reading the articles (the ISBN for the old edition is 0-87609-164-8) simply for the fact that it deals with many issues of relevance today – but it is definitely a shame and a problem that the best defense for Huntington’s arguments is one he came up with himself ‘If not civilisations, What?’. The fact that he has been able to develop a simplistic, reductionist theory that appeals to the worst in many is not something to be proud of but is the case at the moment becuase the alternative explanations are ‘too complex’ and don’t make for easy soundbytes on TV for many people…

Though the clips used are from the remade ‘Dawn of the Dead’ and not ‘Night of the Living Dead’ but its clever anyway

From what appear to be the guys who brought you the books ‘Zombie survival guide’ and ‘World War Z’ – a short film on how to survive a zombie attack…

‘Wake Up’