Quite unexpectedly, I’ve been asked to be on the panel for the Leviathan 3rd anniversary /Christmas special on next Thursday.
As the topic is Ireland in 2016: The Pope’s Revenge it’s likely that the discussion may travel to some unexpected places.
However, as all but one of the other panelists are journalists (some of whom may have read the Paper Round) it could just be an elaborate trap. I’ll keep my eyes open, don’t you worry.
If you’re there on the night, come up and say hello.
6 Comments
Nicely done!
It is a blantant trap man run.
Weird debate title. Is the pope set to unleash an army of cloned SS soldiers on us in 2016?
The problem with these peering into the future type events is that most people restrict themselves to very general regurgitation of their political ideology dressed up as predictions. Any concrete predictions almost always turn out to be wrong. For example, try to find any technological prediction looking more than a couple of years ahead which wasn’t completely and utterly wrong.
It’s a legitimate discussion at a time when the country should take stock and consider what it wants to look like in ten years time and what it needs to do if it isn’t to be thrust back into the dire economic straits we all grew up with.
I’m not arguing that it isn’t a legitimate discussion, just that the contributions are unlikely to be attempts to divine the future and more likely to be ideological critiques / justifications of current society.
“If we don’t change policy now, we will face an appalling vista in 10 years” versus “we are on the right track and if we keep it up, we will be even better in 10 years time.”
The fact is that we are staring quite a few major threats to the survival of civilization in the face. Global warming, peak oil, rising global population and the related resource conflicts and so on are the sorts of things that very well might render any and all discussion based upon current issues to be well and truly irrelevant by 2016. These things are so unpredictable and their outcomes are so unceratin that it’s difficult to say anything much about them.
That and the robots. We’ve just got to have cool robots by 2016 😉
I should add that I don’t think there’s anything at all wrong with “ideological critiques / justifications of current society” and the device of peering into the future is probably not a bad one for focusing on the long term effects of current policies and trends.
Still, it would be amusing to depart from the above and have a go at some good old fashioned futurology:
“there will be flying robots which will do all the drudge work and we’ll live in floating pods designed to suck the nutrients out of the great midland sea in order to feed our genetically engineered brains”.
Or you could go for some old-fashioned socialist millenarianism.
“The revolution of easter 1916 will be a bloody affair. The glorious new millenium of scientific socialism will be ushered in with the spectacle of hundreds of economists, bankers, journalists, priests and capitalists dangling from lamp-posts.”
Would make a nice contrast to the GDP projections anyway.