The ClearOut

In this episode Dara thought he was going to keep it light and stay firmly in the positive psychology territory of inspirational quotes and personal motivation, but he ended up being led by the recent mass shooting in Buffalo to look at the ideologies of hate and division that are currently enjoying a disturbing level of popularity amongst certain demographics.

After looking at a couple of interesting quotes from the composer Arthur Sullivan and the French cleric Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire, Dara begins to see some connective tissue between their advocacy of self-determination and the radicalisation of unhappy young men.

Digging deeper, he discusses White Replacement Theory, an insidious ideology of racial hatred that can be traced back to Hitler's Mein Kampf. WRT has become a central tenet of radicalised and hyper-violent white men who commit mass shootings in the name of white pride. It has also gained traction in some areas of mainstream media.

Critical Race Theory is looked at as a rebuttal to the very idea of race and racism, and Dara finds himself needing very little encouragement to endorse it. He talks about his own relationship to and understanding of racism through the lens of American movies and the civil rights movement, Irish history and political cartoons.

Throughout it all, the chickens at Hashtag Blessed keep crowing!

This week's links:

The ClearOut Episode 27 - https://shows.acast.com/theclearout/episodes/acting-out-in-the-extreme-or-when-private-pain-becomes-publi

On White Replacement Theory and mass shooting: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/15/buffalo-shooting-white-replacement-theory-inspires-mass

On the legalisation of fascism in USA: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/22/america-fascism-legal-phase

On Critical Race Theory: https://theconversation.com/why-does-critical-race-theory-make-people-so-uncomfortable-176125

Emma Dabiri on Blindboy podcast: https://play.acast.com/s/blindboy/thereturnofemmadabiri

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In this episode Dara is thrust back to his childhood by a concert of John Williams music, and specifically the music of the Star Wars films. That event, and his recent watching of Matt Reeves's The Batman, gets him thinking about fictional heroes and what role they fulfil in our lives, and why in his late forties he is still happy to consume these heroic tales.

Spurred by his daughter being disappointed by the end of a playdate, Dara recalls similar feelings of 'micro-grief' when he was a child, and asks if fictional heroes don't in some way act as a compensation for the disappointments of real life. He dismisses the idea of adults having conventional hero figures in real life and posits that heroism can be located in much more mundane things like survival and positivity and resilience.

There is also time to expound on joined-up thinking, killable roosters, uncanny valleys, and one of Dara's all-time favourite comic book characters - The Fantastic Four's Ben Grimm, also known as The Thing, whose orange-bricked exterior concealed the tenderest of hearts.

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Episode 50 is here and we're going long! It is an absolute whopper of big ideas and small confessions. Dara informs on himself and his lifelong relationship to sugar and how a recent flashpoint with his daughter raised for him ideas relating to addiction and puritanism and the absurdity of righteousness.

He looks at the imposition of rules and regulations on children and questions the value of the performance of gatekeeping order and standards in a teaching context. Aren't we all in on the joke of the chaos and uncontainability of life?

Dara shares a story about a prison conversation with one of his brothers and begins to understand it in a new light. He wonders if he might be a puritan, and the embodiment of pious self-seriousness.

He discusses at length Arthur Miller's The Crucible and what it has to say about moral panic and the hypocrisy of those who pass down judgement on others, all the while suppressing their own venality and human impulses. Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds is also considered in the context of persecution and collaboration and the cost to one's conscience.

Dip-Dabs, Sherbet Fountains, Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud also feature - where else would you get it!

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In this mental health-focused episode, Dara reflects on a recent spell of bad form and speaks openly about some of the personal trickiness he has faced over the last couple of years. He talks about his marriage and his skirmishes with depression and presents an argument for being okay with a range of emotions and perceptions that are conventionally considered to be negative.

He argues for perspective-shifting as a tool of detachment and re-setting. Rising out of ourselves and above our predicaments can facilitate a clearer reading of where we're at. Dara also advocates a deeper form of listening and looking that helps us contact a more informative internal base state. He names this base state the Deep Respondent Self, and he believes by becoming better acquainted with it we can launch ourselves into improved areas of self-protection and personal evolution.

Time is also found to look at chi exercises, steaming knobs, personal approval ratings, and facing our fears.

2017 piece on listening from theClearOut.com: https://theclearout.com/2017/03/05/listen/

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In this episode Dara is prompted by a recent homophobic hate crime in Ireland to examine tolerance in a social context. He wonders whether the moral good of tolerance is as effective as the moral good of intolerance. He asks if the dogmatisation of the good can succumb to conspiracies of silence, and looks back at Ireland when it was in the grip of Catholic authoritarianism.

He shares his own beliefs about homophobia and refers to the work of English liberal philosophers John Locke and John Stuart Mill to reflect on personal freedoms, moral responsibilities, and social cohesion.

Dara also looks at Irish politics and governance, and reveals his contribution to the time capsule in Ireland's recent census. He further discusses media mono-narratives and argues that cancel culture is a juvenile form of intolerance.

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In this episode Dara has a good look at the bestselling 1997 New Age text, The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz, the Mexican spiritualist and New Age thinker. The four agreements in question relate to how we speak or use language; how we receive the actions of others; the limitations of what we can know about anybody else; and the commitment to always trying to use the best of ourselves. Easier said than done, but Dara tries to examine them in a context of personal responsibility and everyday behaviour, and recognises how they can be applied in his own life.

He recalls when he worked in the book industry in the early to mid-90s and how New Age literature, audio product and advocacy seemed to be booming and how at the time he was quite sceptical about it. Thirty years later, he thinks he understands why New Age thinking, positive living, and non-theistic spiritual practice is more appealing at a later stage in life.

There's also octogenarian coughing, endless rollies, an apology to Dara's daughter, and a new poem about understanding that giving doesn't necessarily cost as much as we think.

A Lesson from the Winter Solstice at Newgrange - a new poem up on theClearOut.com now: https://theclearout.com/2022/04/11/a-lesson-from-the-winter-solstice-at-newgrange/

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In this episode Dara reflects on a recent conversation he had about where and in what way the self should feature in the pursuit of happiness. One argument emphasises total immersion in self as a mode of psychic excavation and rebuilding, whereas an alternative, more Eastern approach, is a wilful eradication of self as the pathway to radical acceptance of what is. Neither is easily achieved, but the discussion is worth having.

Regardless of philosophical and psychological musings on self, Dara argues that we love to consume accounts of individual selves in the arts and history - we're wired to seek the human experience reflected back at us via the lives of others. In this context, he discusses the last three movies he just watched, which were brilliant examples of stories built around fascinating individual characters: a sociopath from 70s New York, a beguiling aristocrat from 18th Century France, and a desperate and loving brother from contemporary New York.

And for the chicken-fanciers, an account of why the rooster at Hashtag Blessed is so sinister...

Pauline Kael on Taxi Driver: https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/movies/taxi-driver-underground-man-review-pauline-kael/

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In this episode, Dara lets the topic be led by the Will Smith slapping incident at last Sunday's Academy Awards ceremony. He unpacks some of the possible lines of analysis in the current climate of identity politics and culture wars. He also looks at his own history of being slapped and breaks down the gendered implications of the open-hand slap, particularly when it is called a 'bi**h-slap', looking at how it can be used as a tool of emasculation.

Dara discusses the idea of being one's own diagnostic tool in the pursuit of wellness and contentment. He argues that we can only attempt to diagnose our needs in the world with which we are familiar. He uses that idea to contextualise Smith's slap and how it was arguably linked to a public persona that Smith has cultivated over a lifetime in showbusiness and being subject to the exposure pressure cooker that is Hollywood.

Time is also found to reiterate the mission statement of the podcast, to explain why the chickens at Hashtag Blessed are currently so noisy, and to own up to some recent forgetfulness.

Hadley Freeman on Hollywood omerta after the slap: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/mar/28/dont-mention-that-slap-why-no-one-was-talking-about-will-smith-and-chris-rock-at-the-oscars-after-party

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In this week's episode, Dara is set off by a tweet from a female account that first explicitly requests pictures of beautiful men - 'rides' is the term of desire used - and then disclaims accusations of objectification. Is objectification of men by women better, or less loaded, than objectification of women by men? Dara isn't sure...

He reflects on the nature of attraction and thinks back to how he viewed his own body and how that played out in his early romantic relationships. He feels lucky in that he came to a reasonably healthy conclusion and allowed his insecurities to roam in non-physical realms.

On the back of a recent bout of depression, Dara discusses a theory he has about where we locate our victories. He posits it as a counter to capitalist-influenced frames of success and winning that are typically equated with accumulation and material gain. He offers something more akin to a Zen decluttering which draws attention to what we have removed from our lives to allow us easier access to accommodation and acceptance and yes, happiness. In other words, what isn't present could well be an indicator of where we have won on our journey to the present moment.

Before any of that is touched though, Dara wonders if we shouldn't talk to each other like babies. And he has time to race down the track on a train of thought about some mysterious soap in his household. Where did it come from? And how on earth did it get in that bottle?

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In this episode Dara presents his thesis that all sports fans are embroiled in a philosophical engagement with the team or sportsperson that they love. Namely, the relationship of our desire and emotional investment to a higher aspiration - the symbiotic realisation of sporting perfection. Dara argues that this desire is in essence a Platonic impulse to contemplate not only the ideal sporting moment, the physical and psychological expression of something exquisite that elevates fan and player alike, but also to be part of the collective good character of a club. When realised, therein lies the possibility of a moral edification.

As his case studies for the best and worst of this, Dara discusses Marcelo Bielsa, the recently sacked Leeds Utd manager, as well as three other English Premier League Teams - his own team, Tottenham Hotspur, and Chelsea and Newcastle Utd. To round out the analysis of sporting magic, he looks at the late Shane Warne, the mesmerising Australian cricketer who passed away last week at the age of 52.

There is also time to bid farewell to the actor William Hurt and to look at some provocative comments made by Jane Campion, the director of the Oscar-tipped The Power of the Dog.

Original Guardian article on Shane Warne's 'Ball of the Century' - https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/mar/04/from-the-archive-the-guardians-report-on-shane-warnes-ball-of-the-century

Article on Marcelo Bielsa's integrity - https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/jan/17/marceo-bielsa-spygate-powerpoint-leeds-united

Article on football's double standards - https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/mar/11/shouldnt-someone-in-football-also-care-about-the-war-in-yemen-just-a-little

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