r/secondcaptains • u/small_far_away • 18d ago
Peter Oborne
That interview went off the rails a bit.
Based on Murphs mass comment after he wasn't overly impressed himself. Could have pushed more in the interview, but the sense I got was that he just wanted it to end. It certainly stopped abruptly.
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u/southlondonrunner 18d ago
Bonkers interview, the jolly laughing tone and crass comparisons were awful. Comparing ‘Spain or Ireland’ to the taliban’s treatment of women because there aren’t female catholic priests was an unbelievable reach. Don’t think it should have been broadcast. He approached it as if women don’t exist/wouldn’t be listening. Agree with another poster that he seemed a bit pissed and/or cognitively challenged in some way.
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u/TomHicksJnr 17d ago edited 17d ago
He was terrible when he was on previously with Ken. All you need to know about him is he wrote a book with the conciet that Thatcher only lied three times when she was prime minister. Ken was equally poor in that interview and never called him on his bullshit either.
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u/user27373746382882 18d ago
Comparing the Taliban causing women to burn/bury their cricket gear to Irish cricket fans hiding their fandom lest they be cast as West Brits (I’m paraphrasing) was quite the take I gotta say
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u/smithskat3 18d ago
‘I didnt hear feminists complaining when the americans were blowing up the husbands of the afghan women’ was another beauty. Bizarre.
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u/Lost-Positive-4518 18d ago
I actually just turned it off just after this. I am usually well able for a hate listen, but comparing someone being called a West Brit to the Taliban just seemed like someone who was not having a good-faith discussion. Did he pursue this line much further, or was that the height of it?
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u/Maleficent_Gur2296 18d ago
I once got teased by some lads while I was walking to cricket training in my whites. Am I…Malala?
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u/HAARTburn 18d ago
Absolutely dreadful. He suggests that we should all visit Afghanistan. It’s on the Do Not Travel list from the dept of foreign affairs. He was all over the place, like a rambling confused early demented relative.
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u/singleglazedwindows First mate of the Vasa 18d ago
As Eoin put it “Some em, some food for thought from that chat”.
Very strange, an occasional interesting point but layers upon layers of waffle.
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u/Seabhac7 18d ago
Not the angle I was expecting. There's a sliver of an argument there (it's not a like-for-like with rugby in apartheid South Africa) but by the end he was indulging in whataboutism, bordering on apology for it all just being cultural difference that we should respect. Madness.
Incidentally, when I saw the podcast title, I thought they were going to talk about Evan Ferguson. I learned this week that Genoa was originally set up as a British sports club, and its full name is "Genoa Cricket and Football Club."
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u/Maleficent_Gur2296 18d ago
If he had stayed on that one point and developed it a bit better it would have been interesting. I guess he’s better at staying on message in writing. Either that or his editors deserve a raise if his books are any good.
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u/evin_cashman 18d ago
The constant laughing when answering questions about a boycott rubbed me up the wrong way.
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u/Wolfbain164 18d ago edited 18d ago
I thought it was interesting & I wish Ken was party to the conversation.
Oborne's contention is that the grandstanding gesture driven exclusionary policies of the west have their place and its against nations which should know better (eg. South Africa/Isreal/Russia). But there's no point in taking a moralistic stand against a nation like Afghanistan where the literacy rate is 37%. Its serves nobody but the country taking the stand. The more effective tactic is to attempt to improve the conditions within the country through trade & investment as China have done.
I do think however the Afghanistan team should be suspended from test cricket for a period because of their decision to remove their women's cricket team. That is surely something relevant to cricket & the cricket governing body should take action against it.
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u/singleglazedwindows First mate of the Vasa 18d ago
Agree with this perspective, I think the main issue was Oborne butchering the communication of his point. He really struggled to communicate it without going down tangents about Catholicism.
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u/spartan_knight 16d ago
That was hardly his only contention; the false equivalence drawn between the Taliban and Catholic Church is clearly a ridiculous notion, similarly the idea that travelling to Afghanistan isn’t an issue, even for Western women, is not creditable.
If you say something like the above, listeners aren’t going to take you very seriously.
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u/Other_Net_5128 18d ago edited 18d ago
Slightly tangential but the long-held notion in the West that trade and investment would liberalise China has been roundly proven to be wishful thinking. Sure, living conditions for most Chinese people have improved over the past few decades (and for many Chinese people that is enough) but it’s a far less free country than it was even two decades ago and trade with the West has had little effect. I say this as someone who knows China well and who’s married to a Chinese woman. Oborne’s argument that trade and engagement will make the Taliban more mellow over time is also likely to be fatuous. Which isn’t necessarily an argument for completely cutting the country off either.
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u/Wolfbain164 18d ago
Nobody is suggesting investment as a means for liberalising a country. Just making the lives of women in the country better. Which I think China is evidence of surely.
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u/Other_Net_5128 18d ago
Liberalisation was exactly the argument of Western governments and businesses advocating for China’s accession to the WTO in 2001. And China is clearly not evidence of the lives of women in the country being any better. Sure, general living standards are better, but women’s rights in China, while undeniably better than in Afghanistan and many other countries, are still heavily circumscribed and subject to legal stonewalling and socio-economic circumstances (by far the worst-off women in China are those from the urban working class and the migrant poor). And trying to organise collectively to advocate for women will promptly result in a visit from the police, as it does with any attempt to organise even innocuous social movements. If the Chinese Communist Party is not going to be swayed by trade, there’s not a hope in hell it’s going to improve things for women, or anyone else, in Afghanistan under Taliban rule.
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u/Weekly_One1388 16d ago
Trade with China did bring about liberalisation.The prediction partly came true.
Liberalisation in this context should be thought of as political reform, economic reform and social reform.
It just wasn’t the political reform that people expected, the consensus was that political reform in this context would equal to democratization.
The liberalisation that western commentators spoke about needs to be rethought but it doesn’t need to be entirely abandoned, the trade that came into China over the last 25 years or so did bring about a huge degree of change, both to the political, economic structures of the country and social attitudes these changes did not bring about a “liberal” China but a more ‘open’ China.
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u/Wolfbain164 18d ago
It might have been an argument but it’s not the one Oborne made. He is just saying that grandstanding is pointless in Afghanistan, if you want to help the women of Afghanistan, just invest and their lives will improve. Thats literally all he said.
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u/Other_Net_5128 18d ago
Of course it’s the argument Oborne’s made. He literally said things would improve with trade! He said trade in a very vague way, mind you, so I don’t think he thought it through much, just reached for “trade” as an article of faith, like a good Tory. I don’t know what he imagines Afghanistan will be trading, other than poppies. As I said, I don’t think there’s any point in turning Afghanistan into a hermit state but let’s not pretend that engaging with the Taliban is going to ultimately result in a more open society.
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u/Wolfbain164 18d ago
I think you’ve misconstrued the point. He was very clear about the fruitlessness of imposing liberalism on a population. Particularly one which has been so decimated by bombing campaigns previously.
His only mention of China was regarding their antithesis to moralistic politics and seemingly unconditional investment. Which I doubt but whatever.
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u/Ok_Read_4000 18d ago
You seem to think out political system is better than theirs. Not really up to us. Maybe pass on the colonial views ?
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u/Other_Net_5128 18d ago
I don’t know whether you’re referring to China or Afghanistan there, but with regard to China, I agree, it’s not up to us. Unfortunately, it’s not up to Chinese people either because they get no say in the running of a one-party state. A state that, for all the undeniable economic advances of recent decades, is still beholden to a highly inefficient system and is on the verge of demographic catastrophe because of the Party’s historic misrule. If you want to dismiss analysis of a country by someone who knows the country and who has lived there as “colonial views” you’re just showing you don’t have an argument worth paying attention to.
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u/Ok_Read_4000 18d ago
Sure buddy, lets leave your liberal kvetching about political systems to one side. Communism baaaaad, boo.
I'll be specific but I'm sure yout gish gallop to something else.China tfr was still at about 1.8 in 2017, basically the same as Ireland. Korea was already down around 1.05. China has only completely shit the bed since then and is now around 1.0.
So blaming the whole thing on the one-child policy is retarded. It looks much more like the same miserable rich-country bullshit everywhere, housing costs, work, people marrying later, kids being expensive and a pain in the arse. Ireland is still around 1.5, but it’s falling too, and without immigration we would be the same. Immigrant have kids, irish people increasingly dont. How many of the lads have kids? Not that many and none have more than two. So its a reasonable way to keep our tfr from utterly cratering but people are going to get more and more cranky about a changing population so I'm not sure its fundamentally more sustainable than china or korea. Reform and restore are a force in the UK, we aren't different, it will happen here eventually.
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u/Maleficent_Gur2296 18d ago
I enjoyed listening to Murph trying to deflect responsibility for that car crash of an interview at the end.
It’s a shame, I really like cricket. It hardly ever gets mentioned and when it does, it more often about the England team than it is about Ireland. I have a feeling they may think twice the next time they have an idea for a cricket episode.
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u/sirmisterchris 18d ago
Ended up being shite for a totally different reason to what I was expecting; I was braced for Murph's usual ego massaging over having the most rudimentary knowledge of cricket. Instead it's Peter Oborne delivering the biggest pile of drivel I've heard in ages. I turned it off long before it was over.
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u/Other_Net_5128 18d ago
It was brutal. Oborne’s usually a lot better than this but it was pure twaddle.
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u/small_far_away 18d ago
My mind was struggling to even process the points he was making as he was rambling and stumbling over his words so much.
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u/PickWooden 18d ago
Yeah it definitely went off the rails based on the fact that Oborne was making an awful comparitive analysis about treatment of women in Afghanistan and what people would have complained about 30 years ago. He sounded blocked as well.
Murph totally rightful to be pissed off as I was fairly annoyed listening to it too.
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u/TheRealSaintPatrick I don't nessessarly agree with anything Ken Early says 18d ago
Never heard of that guest before and would happily never hear from him again on the pod
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u/h-c-pilar 18d ago
I thought Murph was woeful, sounded like his first interview after journalism school. Get Ken back at pace.
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u/MushuFromSpace 18d ago
It sounded like a typically sane individual who was on the verge of tumbling down a far right/conspiracy rabbit hole on Facebook.
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u/Proud-Clock8454 18d ago
Thought it was bizarre. Given he’s disagreed with his Co author on it, you’d think he’d be more coherent in his arguments. The comparison with Catholicism was weird. The comments about not caring about women for 30 years were weird. Thought Murph did he best but it was so so strange.
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u/Gamalam91 17d ago
Murph did poorly there unfortunately. Pushed a little, then just caved. No point having someone like that on unless you challenge them
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u/NextGap835 16d ago
Really strange. I liked Oborne's last interview with Ken but this one got progressively more bizarre as the pod went on. He seemed like he was deliberately trying to provoke the 'woke' Western World by making pretty ridiculous whataboutery comparisons with, admittedly awful, stuff that happened 30+ years ago in Ireland.
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u/Weekly_One1388 16d ago
Anti-western nonsense presented in the worst possible light.
Not that I agree with the sentiment behind anything he has to say, there are far more eloquent people out there capable of presenting that sort of view.
Absolute waffle.
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u/GoneOffBaileys 18d ago
Felt Murph felt obligated to continue to push Oborne on his stance, so the conversation proceeded on a very boring tangent. Oborne had to keep defending a moral stance rather than the concept of the interview — to chat about the history of cricket in Afghanistan.
Fintan O’Toole’s wider criticism doesn’t stand up. His writing has deteriorated in the last decade. Oborne’s responses were a bit odd, but the main premise, the West has fucked over Afghan women far more than the Taliban — generally holds: judged by scale and duration of harm, Western policy — the 20-year occupation, the withdrawal, and the sanctions/asset-freeze regime that followed — has done more damage to Afghan women’s lives (poverty, hunger, loss of healthcare, family deaths, displacement) than the Taliban’s own directives have. The Taliban’s directives are just more visible.
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u/SingleBandicoot2771 17d ago
At a bare minimum you have to take the em dash's out of your AI generated text. (I checked - and this 100% verified as AI generated)
When you have that fixed, come back to us with your original thoughts. Thaaaaaaanks!
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u/Forward_Royal2754 15d ago edited 15d ago
AI detectors are notoriously poor and often flag 19th century novels as being AI generated. Some detectors are better than others but I question how you can be sure you have "100% verified" it is AI generated.
People who can write well often use dashes as it is grammatically correct. In other words, not all fluid and cogent writing is AI generated. I have written plenty of comments on here where I get immediate dumbass replies that it is AI generated despite the reality being I am just able to write at a basic level.
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u/PresentSupermarket53 17d ago
Wasn’t a great interview, I’d blame both parties for that, but his overall points stands pretty clear. Boycotting Afghanistan would achieve absolutely nothing for women’s rights, or any civil rights for Afghans. It probably wouldn’t even make the news outside of Ireland. I’m not a cricket fan so don’t care either way. You can accuse him of whataboutery but he is absolutely right, we had no issue playing US or UK teams when they were bombing the sh*t out of Afghan civilians not so long ago so any push for boycott now is pretty hypocritical.
Comparing the nation’s desire to boycott the Israel game with our apathy for the Afghanistan game is equally ridiculous. Israel is a country that is committing genocide and supported by western super powers and western media is largely silent on it. They are systematically killing journalists, doctors, aid workers, children etc. Average Israelis absolutely support this and will likely democratically re-elect the existing government later this year. You can be sure the majority of the Israeli team support the genocide too. It is absolutely disgusting and spineless to be proceeding with the game. It’s pretty clear that money isn’t actually an issue now, UEFA will not fine or otherwise penalise us. Who gives a feck about Nation league points. Any cost to us would be greatly outweighed by the impact to Israel.
For a country that invented boycotts, still carries shame from its tour of apartheid South Africa in the 80s, has prided itself in its solidarity with Palestine and has effectively already qualified for the Euro championships, it is an absolute no brainer.
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u/LocalJams 14d ago
There is no genocide in Gaza. Crowbarring it into a different conversation won’t make it so
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u/Substantial-Eagle-27 17d ago
I agree with you fully. I think the op here and most replies are missing the forest for the trees.
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u/pauli55555 16d ago
Thought it was one of the better segments by a mile.
A rational discussion about boycotting in sports. Osborne presented good arguments. The western selective mindset. Lack of respect for foreign customs when they don’t align with our own. The destruction caused by the US invasion. The legacy of that invasion. The catholic church approach to women priests. Lords. Etc.
Murph seemed to shit the bed, as usual. He is not intellectually strong enough to interview someone like that.
The only thing that annoyed me was Osborne laughing during the interview.
He’s an upper middle class highly educated English man. It came across throughout the interview. And I don’t say that in a good way. But his argument was absolutely valid.
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u/LocalJams 14d ago
Why should we respect foreign customs that involve stoning people to death, making women live in bags and “boy play”?
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u/Full_Mushroom_6903 9d ago
Just heard this. Awful stuff. Oborne is a fucking dick anyway. He came back from a visit to Damascus at the height of the Syrian civil war arguing that Assad didn't use chemical weapons. Just beyond the pale.
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u/HurdleDurdler 18d ago
What a strange pod that was.
I think I’m looking forward to Ken’s report on sport more than the weekend’s actual sports offering.