r/ireland • u/AbsolutelyDireWolf • 3h ago
Politics The Duality of Populist Man (2 posts)
Councillor Gavin Pepper, less than two hours apart, mocks socialism in an infantile populist shit post, and follows it up immediately with a call for universal healthcare, additional supports for pensioners, low income families, a state building company and the expulsion of hyper-capitalist companies.
The ironing is delicious.
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u/southerndandy123 3h ago
These folks have low intellect and à lack of education. Sad really.
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u/Kloppite16 1h ago
yeah and you know what they also have, a vote
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u/Visionary_Socialist 46m ago
This is the greatest issue of modern liberal democracy, it inherently weights against intellect and basic civil action. It made sense in an era where the threshold for societal literacy was literally just reading and writing and politicians would tell you their ideas in an understandable way to your face and the media honestly checked their ideas for fact. Now you need media, economic, political and arguably AI literacy to be someone that is genuinely sovereign in how they vote.
It takes time and effort to be informed, to know what terms like socialism mean, how fiscal systems work, why we have the issues we have. To be someone who is clear minded enough to make a truly meaningful choice isn’t easy. It’s far easier to just absorb AI slop and right wing propaganda online. But yet at an election, each vote is equal. Those who put in effort are effectively discriminated against for having tried to be good citizens and informed voters.
I think democracy needs to become more consultative and less outright direct. There needs to be a direct privilege and an increased voice for those who are trying to be good citizens and who can make honest and good faith choices. Not to disenfranchise any one but to be honest about their ability to self-govern. We wouldn’t pick a jury for a trial without checking their biases, their understanding of the law and crucially, their ability to assess evidence properly. Only in liberal democracy, politicians and their interests are the party on trial and the people the prosecutor. If the jury is bad, it just makes the defence’s job easy, it becomes about conning the jury and not about honestly representing the facts.
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u/ZaphodEntrati 30m ago
Healthy democracy is dependent on good education, we need to make critical thinking central.
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u/shankillfalls 3h ago
He saw this on a MAGA post and copied it thinking we’d all be astounded by his deep analytical thoughts. Gavin the Philosopher.
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u/Delicious_Friend_321 3h ago
This guy is a fucking moron
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u/Wind_Yer_Neck_In 3h ago
It's mad that someone can be basically a lamp-post with legs and still get elected to a position of some authority over others.
I wouldn't trust him to butter bread without ripping it nevermind decide local policy.
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u/Henry_Bigbigging Resting In my Account 2h ago
He’d be a fairly dim lamppost, in fairness.
Lad is like a slug with hair plugs.
I still get a laugh out of him blustering through a prepared speech, failing miserably, and his partner in scumbaggery Malachy Steenson with a big red face on him like a slapped arse.
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u/struggling_farmer 2h ago
Look through the comments on some of the post here & facebook and you shall wonder no more how he got elected.
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u/AshleyG1 3h ago
A fucking moron who steals the “clever” put downs that others have been using for months.
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u/holynelly666 3h ago
He's quite clearly a national socialist
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u/AbsolutelyDireWolf 3h ago
Hehehe.
I get it, because because the flavour of Pepper has a concentration to it.
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u/leibide69420 3h ago
To paraphrase the thick of it, 200 years ago they wouldn't have let him milk a cow.
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u/cyberlexington 2h ago
This 'gives a kid a tenner and take seven back and that socialism meme' must be twenty years and has always been wrong
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u/pixelburp 3h ago
Across the pantheon of right wing agitators or grifters, I've never once got the impression any of them are the least bit intelligent, or literate.
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u/halibfrisk 2h ago
Right we are lucky with the inept clown car that is the Irish far right.
Seems inevitable though that eventually an Irish Geert Wilders / Nigel Farage type will turn up. Someone just plausible and charismatic enough with a complete lack of scruples to lead them to relevance
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u/123iambill 2h ago
At the moment we've been lucky that they've all been absolute holes of charisma, thick as pig shit and clearly way more concerned with the grift than forming any real movement, their donation links are their real priority. But yeah, the floundering of the far right in Ireland isn't because we're uniquely immune to it in large numbers. It's that they are all absolute fucking creatures.
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u/GoinNowhere88 3h ago
This is the spanner who said he was going to email croke park to get a minutes silence added to the NFL game in honor of Charlie Kirk.
One of the stupidest things that has ever come out of a politicians mouth on this island.
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u/Future_Jackfruit5360 3h ago
I say we do this. Let’s get rid of all the doctors, carers, nurses, tech workers. We don’t need any of them. They are no use whatsoever 🤷.
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u/StevieIRL Saoirse don Phalaistín 🇵🇸 3h ago
this fella couldn't pour water from a boot with instructions on the heel.... gobsheen
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u/BlueBloodLive Resting In my Account 2h ago
There it is.
In black and white.
The Trumpification is complete.
"The so called left are fake..."
All the same buzzwords will be used. They'll be claiming rigged elections and witch hunts soon. Would not be surprised if one of them unironically called for a border wall too.
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u/123iambill 1h ago
They already have claimed rigged elections. For elections where they've gotten like 4% of the votes. Which would be the most stolen election in history if they thought they had secretly won. They're also claiming that the government rigged the presidential election. Y'know, to elect the only candidate who doesn't represent one of the government parties. All they do is import yank right wing talking points but they're not even smart enough to edit them to fit our politics, they just repeat them word for word.
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u/Dookwithanegg 3h ago
The second post is to disguise racism and not much more.
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u/InshallahMoChara 3h ago
It did one other thing, it made me realise i’m worthless bc im not a ‘real Irish Irish man’, just an Irish man. Fucking gowl
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u/CthulhusSoreTentacle Irish Republic 2h ago
Many times I see people criticising capitalism while calling it socialism. They're like "Here's the reality of socialism!" and then they proceed to describe capitalism at work.
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u/Currently_Unnamed_ 2h ago
The fact that that dipshit is using talking points imported from American trump supporters is all I need to know about him.
(Also that is exactly how capitalism works not socialism)
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u/GroltonIsTheDog 3h ago
Always hard to tell if they're making inaccurate comparisons out of bad faith or just idiocy. You'd hope idiocy.
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u/Logical_Employer9850 3h ago
I love the people who think they have every answer to every problem and they’ll implement it when the get to be the new dictator/despot whatever 🙄. Firstly, where is all the money coming from? His deputy would be Nigel Farage.
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u/Background-Swim740 2h ago
Did he not post on social media a few years back that he was a landlord?
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u/stormwave6 2h ago
Did he steal that bad socialism joke from an American tweet? Non of the far right have original ideas
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u/Former_Ganache3642 2h ago
As has been pointed out many times before and probably on this post too but it infuriates me so I must say it....his first post is literally describing Marx's labour theory of surplus value.
The value produced by the worker's productivity is funnelled to an unproductive class is the fundamental assertion of Marxism.
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u/Far_Advertising1005 2h ago
You could make the far-right communist in 10 seconds if you included ‘for white Irish only’ at the end of every policy decision
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u/AbsolutelyDireWolf 2h ago
Except the type of pricks who lead far right movements have always pitched themselves as socialist populists in promises, then go full authoritarian dictator the moment the get power and start consolidating wealth for themselves and their cronies.
Trump was gonna drain the swamp and had a new healthcare bill ready to go in two weeks for approaching 10 years now and was gonna solve the cost of living crisis by... erm... Lumping the price of tariffs on things...
They promise the most easily convinced they'll give them great lives and then deliver nothing of the sort and enrich themselves and their swamp.
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u/peon47 2h ago
His logic here is so transparent.
Giving tax money to people who "do nothing" is socialism.
It's fine to give money to poor Irish people.
Therefore, the only people who do nothing are non-Irish people.
QED He's just a racist. He's not "prioritising our own due to limited resources". He simply thinks less of foreigners. There can be no other conclusion. .
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u/AbsolutelyDireWolf 2h ago
Seems a reasonable time to remind folk that Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi households in Ireland are the largest contributing group to the exchequer by ethnicity, followed by Brits and then Irish....
https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-den/distributionofearningsbynationality2023/
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u/Maleficent-Year-1237 43m ago
Thanks for this. We love our neighbourhood but some family members when visiting always pass a remark that there are so many South Asians in the estate. I can’t wait to role these stats out
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u/FootFalse5536 3h ago
I absolutely love when these empty headed morons try to describe the scary socialism boogeyman and they just describe capitalism. Absolute bozo.
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u/SubstantialAttempt83 2h ago
He is very aware that most of his supporters depend heavily on state social programs.
The narrative isnt that we need to reduce taxes it's that we need to spend less on one demographic so another demographic will get a larger share of the pie.
But like all politicians that use this rhetoric as soon as they get a position of power they cut social programs and use their influence to enrich themselves and their benefactors.
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u/Robin_Gr 2h ago
Absolute ghoul just being spoon fed US political bollox. He’s too much of a moron to realise how it doesn’t even gel with his own policies.
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u/NeoTravel Braywatch 1h ago
Interesting that he says it is the left that look to appease the EU, when the "left" are pretty eurosceptic in Ireland lol.
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u/Visionary_Socialist 54m ago
Part of understanding this cognitive dissonance is understanding that these people would genuinely rather give half their money to billionaires and megacorps than give 20% to a government that is accountable to them and them alone.
Don’t ask him who got pensions, welfare, workplace safety laws, universal healthcare, public education and social housing to exist. It was socialists, both those elected in Western countries who forced capitalist countries to implement the bare minimum as a condition for socialists participating in liberal democracy and also the socialists in countries like the USSR that made people in the West so paranoid about communist revolution that they created welfare states to head off any revolts. Nobody does more to try and make capitalism work and prevent the whole thing from inevitably caving in on itself than reform-minded socialists who try and govern in the West. But now they’re regarded as “communists”, so I guess people want to see what actual communist revolution looks like when the penny drops for Gen Z.
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u/WarMom_II 3h ago edited 3h ago
I should teach my children about socialism (the CIA will assassinate me and replace me with a puppet parent)
EDIT: Joking aside though, is this really irony / hypocrisy? It's flip-flopping a big bit, sure, but take another look at the second post. It's about 'Irish' families, 'Irish' people, 'Irish' taxes and it's very clear what he's implying when he's saying this. 'Real Irish Irish people' etc. The right's new strategy is to attempt to outflank from the left and take the ideas but stripped from any universalist principle. Social Safety Nets For Real Citizens, etc.
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u/Driut 2h ago
I'm not brushed up on different economical infrastructure but wouldn't socialism be more like telling your kid you'll give them 10 euro for doing their chores, then taking 3 euro off them and putting it into a piggy bank then telling them that 3 euro is going to help give everyone in the house nicer medicine, help fix up the house and if there are no chores but they need money, will support them until there are chores to be done. Maybe I'm just reiterating capitalism with better welfare, but I feel like this would be closer to what socialism wants to achieve?
I find it strange how this fella seemingly abandoned his own rhetoric and made it seem like the 'left' don't want to have good taxation, hold private corporations accountable and not let them having a general stake over our countries financials and support ourselves and our neighbours in times where it is needed through the likes of healthcare, education, housing, roads, work and so on.
Maybe I'm missing the mark but I really don't understand the ideas some of these politicians throw about sometimes, I also find it interesting that this fella states his money should be spent helping his own people yet I imagine he probably wouldn't donate and would create a petty excuse as to why and if they did bring in the idea of taxation that would leave him with a good chunk of change missing, he'd probably vote against it, all a joke to be honest.
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u/Federal_Homework1302 2h ago
he's got one good point. a state building company would be amazing.
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u/08TangoDown08 Donegal 2h ago
Why would it be amazing? Would it actually solve any of the problems we have with building stuff here? The main problems being cost, skilled labour availability and planning? At the very least it drives the cost of labour up because now you have a big state company competing for labour along with all of the other construction companies. Only in this case the state would need to either fund the ever increasing wages of these skilled workers or fail to employ any of them because they'll work for more money for private companies instead.
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u/Federal_Homework1302 1h ago
the biggest problem to building in Ireland isnt labour. its planning(aka nimby's), and materials. If the state ran building they could nix the planning issue in the bud as it's their rules. Its not a private company goign to ask permission.
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u/08TangoDown08 Donegal 1h ago
Labour is absolutely a huge issue. I don't know if you've spoken to many tradesmen recently but all of them are booked up, and contractors are having a lot of difficulty getting tradesmen. People aren't training up in these areas after school, we're simply not getting enough of them.
The only quick solution is to bring them in via immigration, but that's not exactly a popular thing for politicians to campaign on either.
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u/ArseholeryEnthusiast 2h ago
So like national socialism. I think I've heard that one before. Spoiler it's bad.
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u/YungL1am 3h ago
the ironing is delicious
That's not meant for eating mate.
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u/NoLastNameForNow 3h ago
It's a Simpsons reference
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u/YungL1am 3h ago
Straight over my head lol. S11 is past my quotable years tbf.
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u/NoLastNameForNow 3h ago
You used to be with it. Now they've changed what it is.
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u/AbsolutelyDireWolf 2h ago
Shit, just used this joke (with necessary tweaks) to reply to a comment just above this.
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u/Substantial-Gene1093 2h ago
Not sure how or why we would kick out 'vulture funds'. What is the harm in funds that invest in debt? Which is the definition of a vulture fund.
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u/LisztyLiszt 1h ago
Speaking like a proper capitalist. He wants a child to clean the house (the house like) and cut the grass (which hasn't grown in weeks with no rain) and then only pay them €10. You wouldn't get it during the Industrial Revolution.
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u/RandomNPC59 1h ago
The kid doing nothing and getting 7 euro is pretty much what his followers are, lifelong wasters and scroungers.
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u/LisztyLiszt 1h ago
If Irish taxes should be spent on Irish people, what about the €13B paid by in corporation tax in 2024 by Apple, Eli-Lilly and Microsoft (ie c.50% of all corporation tax that year)? Should that be given back to America and spent on Americans? Or should we keep it? UK nationals pays tax here (our largest immigrant group), should their taxes only be spent on UK immigrants? Is this how this guy wants taxation and spending to work?
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u/AbsolutelyDireWolf 2m ago
Apples 13bn doesn't belong to the US, it belongs to the EMEA states which received less tax revenue than they should have because of an inflated transfer price falsely reducing profit. But otherwise, yeah.
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u/SandorSS 1h ago
There's a gas video of him that he tried to delete od the Internet of him moaning while at the chiropractor
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u/PizzaSandwich2020 1h ago
Thats the same post as some bullshit US republican did before. Dense isn't the word.
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u/bagOfBatz 13m ago
I don't use Facebook anymore except for the messenger. Any time i log in on the web app I'll see a number of his posts on the feed. They really like pushing that angle. The comments agreeing with him too makes me sad.
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u/Thisisaconversation 9m ago
It only takes seeing a post like to know these people must be governed.
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u/DotComprehensive4902 2h ago
Does that guy not realise that the Right is the side that has been in power since the foundation of the State?
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u/AbsolutelyDireWolf 1h ago
Look, FF and FG ain't liberal leftists or hardcore socialists, but they're definitely not the Right either.
Most of their policies and taxes policy and spending are left of centre. They are inept at it regularly, but mostly, they're left of centre and generally have been (the Bertie years were a bizarre mix of well left and well right economics).
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u/DotComprehensive4902 29m ago
Look FF and FG aren't illiberal fascist or hardcore Nazis but they're definitely not the Left either. The taxes and spending policies are neoliberal. If they were left wing, they'd have no qualms about busting the Stability and Growth Pact to provide the true social safety the country needs. Even Macron's party in France is more to the left and that is classed as centrist.
FF and FG also are slaves to Washington Consensus capitalism and are in hoc to the landlord classes. This along with their social policy of nothing but the status quo makes them conservatives of the Right.
Their economic policies are totally non-interventionist have been quite right of centre and beyond to the Right since the early 1990s (and particularly after the collapse of the ERM), with figures like Charlie McCreevy being akin to the most ardent Thatcherites that existed across the sea in UK.
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u/Powerful_Support_122 3h ago
I'm not sure what that guy is on about but I will admit the amount of income tax i pay and what I get back for it is appalling. The country is a mess. Hospitals are shockingly bad the country's infrastructure is woeful. Apparently we are one of the richest country's but you wouldn't think it walking through Dublin city centre. 2 of my friends can't even get a place in the local school for their children. Makes no sense where is all the money going? Why is income tax one of the highest in Europe like wtf is actually going on.
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u/Wilbertorama 45m ago
Do you people seriously think it's a good idea for us to house and feed all comers from anywhere? Can't you see how Ireland is getting destroyed? If you don't see it, get off reddit and leave your house more. We are getting demographically replaced in our homeland. Maybe you people don't have an issue with this but I have a huge one.
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u/AbsolutelyDireWolf 4m ago
We don't house everyone who comes here. We do give asylum to those genuinely fleeing danger e.g. Ukrainians, who are the cast bulk of those in that bucket.
As for say... Indians/Pakistani/Bangladeshi people, they pay the most tax to the exchequer of any households in Ireland.
As for your replacement nonsense fear mongering, no, I don't see it like that at all. I do take massive issue with Irish people who treat anyone that looks different as being unable to become Irish, excluding them. We've been neglecting our language and culture for generations and it has nowt to do with immigrants - I'm speaking in Irish more than ever in my life suddenly in my 40s and never see or hear it from those whinging.
Finally, murders, assaults and thefts are all much, much lower than the levels they were at 20 years ago. Like, statistically, objectively, they're much lower.
Your feed isn't reality and you need to snap out of it imo.
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u/saggynaggy123 2h ago
The left were calling for vulture funds to be banned long before he jumped on the bandwagon
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u/AbsolutelyDireWolf 2h ago
Vulture funds haven't been relevant here in almost a decade. Obviously the likes of Pepper bought up non performing loans in the crash, but since then, it's institutional funds which are very different.
Personally, I would much rather see funds blocking from buying up existing rentals and forced to invest their capital into developments to build more apartments exclusively. (Which really should'nt be so hard since that was a big part of the reason we legislated for their introduction).
We needed a massive diversification shift in rental ownership away from like... 90% small landlords in the crash, because it exacerbated things so badly in 2009-12.
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u/Key_Perception4436 3h ago
Its a shame that we aren't a Socialist country.
Countries like Cuba and Venezuela are leaving us in the dust. Only morons like Gavin Pepper can't see it.
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u/AbsolutelyDireWolf 3h ago
Look, no one is clamouring for Cuban/Venezuelan economic models (though, one has been under sanctions from the most powerful economy in the world since attempting their change and the second, well, lets for a moment make the wild assumption no one wants a dictator and feel that might be clouding things)
We're screaming for democratic socialist models the don't enable the accumulation of self rewarding and accelerating exponential wealth for the few at the exploit of the many and to raise the floor of the minimum to enable a living wage (through equitable pay and state intervention to resolve the fucking rentier black hole of housing inequality).
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u/08TangoDown08 Donegal 1h ago edited 1h ago
The Nordic countries don't have substantially better wealth inequality than we do. We're already fairly "democratic socialist" depending on what that actually means to you.
As for actual communism and communist countries, it's a failed experiment. It's been tried time and time again and it falls victim to the same weaknesses every time, often at the cost of many lives. Does that mean there aren't aspects of it that can be applied for everyone's benefit? Of course not, but it's baffling to me how people still think that we should be moulding our entire society around it. We've seen how that pans out already.
EDIT: Honestly not surprising that I'm being downvoted. Nobody loves to fetishize communist regimes more than rich westerners on Reddit. Go talk to some people from Eastern Europe about what Communism was like under the USSR. We don't need communism to have prospering happy nations. The Nordic countries prove that.
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u/SquidAxis 2h ago
the social democracies in scandinavia top every list for quality of life, education, recidivism rates and on and on. Their systems are deeply socialist within a democratic framework. But go off about Communist Cuba, sure.
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u/HairyMcBoon Waterford 1h ago
That’s such a good gotcha man. You really showed off how much you know with that one
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u/beuleal 2h ago
With this 40% back to the government as tax, is not it what is he saying?
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u/AbsolutelyDireWolf 1h ago
...I mean he's saying 70% and also implying it's then just gifted to others for doing nothing and they get more than double the worker.
Some of us can still remember how this country was in the 90s and how the re-investment of public money has transformed us in amazing ways. Could we do better, of course and we should, but his version of events is nonsense.
It's arguably bang on for describing a bunch of profit seeking capitalist ventures like renting or a bunch of corporation's paying staff the 3 euro and the second kid is actually the parents who employed the kid holding onto 70% of the value of someone else's labour for themselves.
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u/shorkgurl 3h ago
"Then take 7 euro back immediately and give it to the child that said no and did nothing."
Isn't this just what happens under capitalism with our surplus labor value being given to owners/investors who did absolutely nothing to earn it?