morality

England’s World Cup Exit – Victims of Their Own Identity Crisis? – Episode 259

In this episode, Dara is scratching his head at yet another mammoth failure of the England football team. He has genuine sympathy for the players who have once again come unstuck at a crucial moment in a top tournament. And to add insult to injury, the destroyer of English dreams came in the form of their old nemesis Argentina, who turned in a schizophrenic performance of pure cynicism and fearless, fluid attack. But this defeat lies on the shores of Albion and has been years in the making…

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Do the Right Thing! Healing the Sins of the Past – Episode 258

In this episode, Dara is feeling as angry as many others about the controversy around Bessborough House, the former mother and baby home that has one of the darkest legacies of any of the institutions that had Catholic Ireland in a stranglehold for much of the twentieth century. He tries to understand the indescribable moral failure of the Irish government to do the right thing and the importance of public acts of reparation to heal psychic wounds of such generational magnitude.

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Stop Laughing, This Is Meant To Be Good For You! – Episode 117

In this episode, Dara is perplexed by the moral ending of Jennifer Lawrence’s new comedy, No Hard Feelings. What is the purpose of such moralising? Does the audience benefit from the character’s personal edification? Should we care about a dissolute character’s redemptive arc? He compares the sexual politics of that movie to Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot.

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Don’t Mind if I Do! Helping Oneself to Moral Failure – Episode 111

In this week’s episode Dara is bothered by the current controversy in Ireland’s national broadcaster, RTE. He is bothered, but not surprised by it, because it is simply another example of institutional corruption and moral complacency. He looks at why people continually fail to rein in their greed and dishonesty.

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In Pod We Trust! Trying to Find Something to Depend On in Unreliable Times – Episode 110

In this week’s episode, Dara is trying to work out who he should trust. After watching the current Arnold Schwarzenegger documentary on Netflix, he finds himself unsatisfied with the Austrian bodybuilder’s account of past indiscretions, but what would satisfy him? A little more honesty and insight would be a good place to start.

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Fractured Faith and Religion as Instrument of Terror – Episode 71

In this episode, Dara doesn’t think he’s going to talk about Mahsa Amini, the Kurdish woman who was killed in police custody in Iran in recent weeks, but that’s what he does end up doing. He questions the strength of a faith that feels it has to police itself so viciously. He argues that when religious teaching becomes dogma, it weaponises itself and betrays an inherent insecurity.

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Convince us!

“Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is so far doing a public service. We should be grateful to him for attacking most unsparingly our most cherished opinions.” – John Stuart Mill, On Liberty   Does anybody stand for anything anymore? Or more accurately, does anybody stand for something that might be

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Casting Off

“…the whole apparatus of absolution and forgiveness strikes me as positively immoral, while the concept of revealed truth degrades the concept of free intelligence by purportedly relieving us of the hard task of working out the ethical principles for ourselves.” Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian I recently went to my local cinema here

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