Villager

August/September 20225Crick you brickOne inspiring perspective on politics, relevant to the abortion debate, came from Bernard Crick, a British political theorist who died in 2008. He wrote that politics, is a marketplace where irrec–oncilable interests come to resolve their difer–ences through compromise in order that people can devote their passions to the really important things in life.X, Why?Flashbacks to Ireland’s X case 30 years ago in Ohio which passed a law in 2019 that made abor–tion illegal around six weeks, when a foetal heart–beat can be detected. Hours after the Supreme Court overturned Roe, the Ohio law took efect. A ten-year-old girl, who had been raped, and was six weeks and three days pregnant,was forced to travel across the state line to Indiana to undergo an abortion. Formerly of course the Supreme Court had required all states to provide abortion services on the basis that the right to abortion de–rived from the Constitution.#ElonGateVillager loathes Elon Musk primarily because he seems to feel he is worth listening to when in fact all he is good at it making money, a capacity which in Villager’s mind is not a correlative of per–cipience. And inept quasi-wife-stealing. Anyway Nominative DeterminismWith the demise of Boris Johnson go a genera–tion of politicians with good, English, meaningful names. Mike Freer, resigned as the equalities minister, giving him more time to devote to freedom, the political inverse of equality. Robin Walker, a stalwart of a series of ministe–rial jobs under Johnson, moved on following the scandal raging about Chris Pincher’s pinchings. And Laura Trott…just left. According to Sky News: “Robert Halfon, the MP for Harlow, withdrew his support for Boris Johnson saying he had given the “beneft of the doubt” to Mr Johnson before, but recent events were “un–acceptable”. ‘Irishwoman’ Penny Mordaunt lost the Tories’ leadership election as she needed to daunt more. James Cleverley became education minister for a few minutes and, according to the Sunday Times, Conor Burns, a Mad Dog loyalist, is fuming that he didn’t promote him. Johnson’s former Security Minister James Brokenshire, who died last year, is now the subject of an annual lec–ture on “public service and restoring faith in poli–tics” at the Institute of Government.A crimeWell, Varadkar is not to be prosecuted for his breaches of the Ofcial Secrets Act (OSA) and perhaps the Corruption Act. Time was up for the OSA which has a six-month time-limit when, as it would have been here, it is prosecuted summar–ily. He’s had a hard enough time over the whole afair and he should be let get back to business though ideally with a little less deference to unfet–tered global capitalism, refex anti-environmen–talism and unedifying insistence on attacking those who made the complaints against him at every opportunity on TV3 and Virgin.News MiscellanyVillagerhe’s gratifyingly bungled his purchase of spammy Twitter, for $44bn, though it is now worth more than a quarter less than that. He is trying to extract himself — showing that he certainly is no gentle–man. Villager hopes he’s stuck with the inefable thing, which generates $6 per US user monthly in ad revenue, but has only one seventh the number of users (230,000) and one fourteenth the proft ($3.2bn in 2021) of Facebook, while its share price is roughly what it was when it foated nine years ago. Tik-Tok takeTikTok on the other hand is down with the kids — Twitter for adolescents — and makes creating flms easy. It has done for video-editing what In–stagram (whatever that is) did for photo-editing a decade ago, allowing amateurs to turn wobbly recordings into slick-looking flms.And whereas young audiences are now luke–warm about Facebook, TikTok has them hooked. Some 44% of its American users are under 25, compared with 16% of Facebook’s. According to the Guardian, which implausibly argues that “news fnds us in the best possible way and al–ways has”, it’s where we talk about Love Island. After 25 you’re fnished, Elon.Out of the toilet into the cold houseDavid Trimble, who has just died, was a cold man in the now luke-warm house. On the one hand he walked Vicky, his lesbian daughter, down the Laura TrottOhio goes back to basics, thirty years from 1992 6August/September 2022 aisle and later voted against his party’s line by supporting gay marriage in 2019 in the House of Lords when it was pushed on the North, though he had once opposed it in the Assembly. On the other hand Trimble’s daughter said he had been “taken aback” and “put his head in his hands” when she told him in 2013 that she was gay. “A lot of parents have a much worse reaction to their child coming out”, she noted plaintively. Vicky’s wife Ros said she frst met her future father-in-law while she was wrapped in a duvet and coming out of the bathroom of his London fat, where Vicky was liv–ing at the time. “I came out of the toilet and said to him that I wasn’t expecting anyone and he re–plied: ‘Neither was I’”, she recalled. “He’s always been really lovely and has become a father fgure to me”. Less endearingly, the awkward Lord told peers: “I have found myself taking a particular po–sition with regard to same-sex marriage which was forced upon me when my elder daughter got mar–ried to her girlfriend. I cannot change that, and I cannot now go around saying that I am opposed to it because I acquiesced to it. There we are”. Vicky told theBelfast Telegraph she had been “a little surprised” by her father’s comments. Book FestivalA really convenient short-cut every time the word Dalkey appears in the media is to just substitute the word money and see if that makes things clearer.The Dalkey Book Festival is the Marks and Spencer haberdashery department, the Magill Summer School, the Irish Times, the Kelly’s Hotel, of literary outings.Agog at agriIreland’s 135,000 farms produce 37 per cent of national emissions. The biggest agricultural pol–luters are intensive dairy farms. According to Pro–fessor John Sweeney, Teagasc estimates that the average dairy farm income last