http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/books-feature/8770721/a-deeply-stricken-country/

The above is a lamentably inept 'analysis' from Paul Johnson, demonstrating, if little else, that he knows next to nothing about Ireland mid-19th c. What's worse, he can't even be bothered double checking to his own satisfaction the state of knowledge on the most elementary statistic of them all, the numbers who died and emigrated.

He writes;

"Tim Pat Coogan’s The Famine...

It is then not a web
nor yet a gulf
stream of daily
sensory input shoots
between that shanty-dwelling
urchin

Combing garbage heaps
a dollar in scrap metal
will procure
the protein of a tin of beans
to the languid backswing
of the hacienda dweller

- nouveau conquistador -
who, just upwind
away from the stench,
curses his luck
that his elegantly struck
dimpled spheroid ...

To this end we need to acquaint ourselves fully with the notion of today’s postulated postmodern ego or ‘I’ embedded in a variety of social structures, discursive formations and necessary material relations of productivity. For the first set of explanations given to our patient are packaged and produced by the grand narrative of the psycho-pharmaceutical complex. What we need to adopt in respect to this narrative emanating from a very particular locus of power is the scepticism of the postmodern...

Psychiatry participates in a grotesque erasure of an individual's personhood. There is an almost palpable denial of active volition and self-conscious agency on the part of the ‘experient’ and an almost wilful ignorance of the immediate social circumstances in which s/he is a participant that have contributed to the formation of the ‘symptoms’. The seemingly impeccable credentials of the biological reductionist argument (the touchstone of psychiatry) are vaunted disproportionately because of the...

Now, as we have said, it is easy to derive from Szasz the impression that not only does he not agree with the designation of ‘functional nervous illnesses’ for those who behave as though they had an organic nervous illness when in fact no lesion or abnormality can be found but also that he doesn’t believe in the reality of the ‘symptoms’ underlying the phenomena regardless of what label is applied to them. This is because, as we have suggested, he doesn’t believe that they should be regarded as...