A lot of free speech absolutist are being awfully quiet about this sort of thing.

My cartoon in today's @irishexaminer.bsky.social.

How brilliant do you have to be to do crimes, if the police are actively protecting you, cheering you on in everything you do and battering fuck out of anyone who says “Officer, that weird little ginger dork is stealing things”

Kind of feels like a big deal that a Reform/Brexit Party former MEP has been convicted of taking bribes to promote Russian interests in Ukraine, and it feels like a bigger deal that this isn’t being treated as the major scandal that it clearly is.

ChatGPT Edu is built for conning education executives into subsidising and edu-washing planet-burning slop machines via non-consensual access to young people’s creativity AND DATA while attacking their ability to learn. At a university.

There was a time when every 6 months or so Banville would say something mischievous and Irish twitter would melt down. For a guy whose whole thing is being a man out of time who can’t open PDF, he’s an engagement farming machine.

We stan a legend

There is this delusion that Maria Steen is this widely embraced public figure, when in reality she is a fringe candidate whose polling was no stronger than McGregor's, and whose views on social issues are massively at odds with most of Irish society. m.independent.ie/irish-news/p...

If I wasn't burying my auntie I would have accepted that interview request from Irish Times about the links between the Guinness dynasty and colonialism. www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...

A helpful thing about being left wing and antiwar is, I don’t have to name search to find lots of people hate me and think I am an asshole: I can pick up a random newspaper or turn on a TV or radio for an endless parade of people getting very angry about me being an extremist and a shithead all day.

Disgusting. Are they naive or stupid enough to think that the appetite for punishment can be sated by measures like this, and won't simply be stoked?

If I was a tutoring company and I wanted to convince you that I could teach your kids maths, I would probably not have an advert that said “3=2” on it! That’s just me though.

Just a thought, perhaps we should look more broadly at the ties between Russia and reform before they take over the country. You know, to avoid a Trump 2016 situation? www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Famous American citizen Wernher von Braun.

not true

For the purpose of balance Jim Gavin's designer has swung entirely the opposite way, slathering ol Jim in primer, polishing his choppers and rendering him practically unrecognizable #Aras25 Only thing missing really is a Steve Silvermint star filter

Well, two episodes into House of Guinness and I can tell you that accents aren't even in the top ten worst things about it.

This ID 'card' nonsense. It won't be a card, it will be on your smartphone except it will also be in some form that doesn't need a smartphone. It will only be required for showing your right to work here, so that means that no one too young, too old or too unwell to work will have to have one.

I hate starmer and labour as much as everyone else but could we please remember how abjectly the lib dems embarrassed themselves when they had a chance at power

Lrp: cannot stress enough to people outside the UK how entirely out of left field this digital ID crap was. Nothing in manifestos. Not anywhere near the normal discourse. A case of- Nobody Literally nobody UK Labour : yo, you're having compulsory ID cards before the next election, kthxbai.

The phrase "on a technicality" is better used when a procedural flaw prevents what would otherwise be a finding of liability. But this was a jurisdictional error - it prevented the court even having jurisdiction to decide the case one way or the other. Pretty basic stuff.

This about sums it up, yeah. My issue is not with IDs being available. My issue is with “why the fuck is Labour trying to do this, this way, right now”

A mate of mine occasionally wonders why Soviet generals in command of tank regiments meekly handed themselves in when Stalin's men turned up to round them up for the purges.

this most "this could have been an email" thing i've ever heard

Damn, how did we end up in this situation where it’s a hair’s breadth gap between one of the world’s oldest political party of labour and social democracy versus a neophyte right-wing party whose councils have collapsed into farce in months and are mostly staffed by gormless 19-year olds? Any ideas?

Imagine being a seventeen star ice chewing sociopath with a necklace of ears so long you can use it as a duvet, and your drunkard idiot boss summons you and all your colleagues home from whatever war crime you're about, just to lecture you with lines he lifted from Punisher comics and Facebook.

If the overall Emerald Island Classic ticket package included a purchased ticket to a hurling match the day before or the day after, I'd be less opposed to it. Why not let them see a real match when they're here? And sure maybe they'll tell their friends about it.

More management-led chaos @ Cardiff Uni. “They like to think of themselves as ‘disruptive innovators’ like that’s a good thing, but this is yet another major management fuck up that’s all disruption and no innovation.” nation.cymru/news/senior-...

Those Protestants, up to no good as usual

Yes. Politicians' and academics' ignorance of real-world capitalism can lead to excessive cynicism as well as excessive naivete.

At least two recent Gradgrindian university VCs made their names as Marxist geographers

Having once worked for Verso/New Left Books I can say that this isn't quite right: the worst boss is a Marxist acting how (in this case) he things a hard-nosed capitalist would.

With science falling under increasing attack, this medical historian is here to remind people of the power of #vaccines. THREAD🧵 Hard-hitting polio advert from 1958. In the first half of the 20th century, polio was the leading cause of death in children and young adults. 1/7

All of the world's viagra is made in Ireland so a lot of angry old dudes who voted for Trump are about to get an unpleasant surprise

The biggest news of the decade is the massive u-turn of an empire, but it's not the one across the Atlantic from us. China's shift to solar is literally world transforming

Describing the UK Government's new digital ID as a 'BritCard' is the surest way to get the policy off to a bad start in Wales, Plaid Cymru has warned

The Coast Guard redacting the name of this person they interviewed for the Oceangate documents but leaving this almost impossible to decipher breadcrumb as a clue

Charges dropped against Liam Óg O'Hannaidh of @kneecapceol.bsky.social it seems, what a lot of noise and fuss the British government has made to achieve nothing except embarrass themselves.

Yesterday I heard a radio presenter say that Sarkozy's sentence was the most severe sanction ever imposed on a French head of state ...

'You just earned your brit card' to become biggest insult in Ireland

Yeah yeah brit card I know them it's when you're looking for one for mother's day and they all say mum

Not wholly surprising that a political project clearly created by Peter Mandelson and funded by his mates is going to collapse with its leaders being *extremely* pissed off at being denounced for corruption by the same journos who cheered on their obviously bent behaviour, every step of the way.

Oh look, right under the "Starmer to force digital ID on everyone" is "Names, pictures, and addresses of 8,000 children stolen in nursery chain hack". I am about to go live in the woods and knit hats for squirrels.

Starmer will go and one of the easiest ways for his successor to distance himself will be to ditch ID cards.

If you support Digital ID you support Nigel Farage being able to cancel all Healthcare for non-British Citizens Nigel Farage being able to say, you haven't worked in the last 2 years, no Healthcare for you Nigel Farage saying, you are constantly at hospital, you should pay

It's not the cards. It's the database behind the cards. And that's going to be a prime target for hostile cyber attacks. And if we give the gig to Palantir (inked-in already) Palantir itself will be the prime vulnerability.

I don't need to read this story. Because the author has already told me about herself. And it's not good.

Even worse than when I got an email from NHS Blood Service inviting me to bleed for England...

Okay, not the main issue, but imagine being an Irish person living quietly in the UK, and then one day they're like, "okay, here's your Brit Card." www.rte.ie/news/world/2...