The cause of any amount of carnage and destruction in Northern Ireland and other parts because demographic areas have changed and they insist on "marching" through places they are not welcome and cause offence.....Can you imagine a KKK rally walking through a predominantly black area in the US?
I left Scotland one day as I was sitting in the house, listening to the sounds of the flutes and drums and thought fuck this man. Life is too short. I hate those cunts,,,,,,
Respect are Culture? Not on the internet
Newton Emerson
The Sunday Times,
1st September 2013
It is hardly as serious as the Arab Spring but the chaos of the past year in Northern Ireland has also been an internet phenomenon. The first flag protests last December were organised online, without initial involvement from political parties or paramilitaries. Some of those early organisers have since faced charges for incitement. Others are forging careers in what passes for loyalist politics.
While the police dithered, the first reaction against the protests also coalesced online. A Twitter hashtag, #flegs, appeared almost at once, its misspelling a mockery of the protestors' accents and education. Commuters, business owners and the public used Twitter to pour out their frustration at the road-blocking mobs.
By early January, the social-media network was being used to organise a more positive fightback. The hashtags #backinbelfast and #takebackthecity were created by Belfast residents and adopted by Belfast city council in a campaign to support shops, restaurants and bars. The hashtags were emblazed across official leaflets and television ads, and were printed on the back of bar-staff uniforms.
Ultimately it was a courageous but shallow gesture. Attempts to organise counter-demonstrations via the hashtags received huge media coverage but attracted only miniscule crowds, revealing the internet's tendency to group people into echo chambers. In this case, Belfast's journalists did not realise they had been over-connected to a small group of liberals exactly like themselves.
The same cannot be said for the real online wonder of the year. Loyalists Against Democracy (LAD), a satirical Facebook page, took its name from an infamous loyalist banner at the first flag protest, which read "Democracy doesn't work". Scarcely a week passes without something from the site going viral. One of LAD's spoof music videos was viewed 100,000 times within days, which is remarkable in a region of 1.8m people.
The mainstay of the site is ridicule of loyalist online activity. Bigoted, inane and illiterate loyalist rantings are dredged up and dissected. The emerging loyalist victim mentality is forensically debunked, with stories on loyalist websites shown to be false or deliberately faked. LAD's parody of the loyalist writing style is now a running joke, with "respect are culture" a particularly cutting example.
There is evidence that loyalists are stung as a result. Journalists have begun to notice loyalist leaders complaining bitterly about the laughter they and "their people" are enduring. The journalists themselves might reasonably ask if Northern Ireland's real public discourse is passing them by. LAD is real-time, multi-media, interactive and uniquely adapted to this internet era. Producing it requires a core team of six, plus hundreds more supplying jokes and Photoshopped pictures, or just surfing in search of egregious loyalist postings. No-one is paid, and the site could never earn its creators an income.
Under a barrage of loyalist complaints, Facebook occasionally takes the page down, only for it to reappear under another "respect are culture" misspelling, such as Loyalists Against Demacracy. So even this mighty new media corporation has lost its gatekeeper function.
LAD pillories loyalists for their stupidity, drunkenness, appearance and general underclass lifestyles in a way that is considered socially unacceptable. LAD makes this caricature all the more problematic by proving it to be true and of fundamental importance. It matters that those causing disorder over "culture" are uncultured, reflexively violent and seething with gormless hatred. However, to say so commits the terrible crime of snobbery which, ever since the Good Friday agreement, seems to be the only crime you can commit in Northern Ireland.
There is a centre-left abhorrence in the media against anything that smacks of laughing at the poor, although it takes a special kind of middle-class idiot to equate flag protestors with everyone on less than the living wage. Before LAD, only the broadcaster Stephen Nolan had put its targets before a general audience, but he has always been careful to accord them balance and respect. What if they plainly deserve neither? Ironically, this centre-left squeamishness can best be seen in nationalism's response to what is, by default, a nationalist-leaning website. There is a perceptible nationalist unease about LAD, or at least a guilt about enjoying it, and this runs deeper than the fear of being seen as a snob. Nationalism subscribes to a trite class analysis of loyalism epitomised by the late David Ervine, leader of the UVFlinked Progressive Unionist party. His tale of working-class Protestants exploited by unionist grandees and British securocrats got loyalists off the hook by flattering the nationalist narrative. Far from being fellow-victims across the divide, loyalists stand exposed as vicious instigators of mayhem from the grassroots up, leading unionism and the authorities by the nose.
LAD is pro-police, and PSNI officers of my acquaintance are amused by it, which speaks volumes about how perceptions of authority in Northern Ireland are shifting. That shift is confounding unionist "leaders" as they play the old game of tagging spinelessly along behind the angriest elements in their community.
A new awareness of what loyalism is has seeped into public consciousness, just as unionist politicians line up behind it. To the extent that LAD can claim credit, it is the most intriguing use of satire in Northern Ireland's history."
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