This is what the US has always done – and yet they need some oriental metaphor to truly understand it

Have to show off this bookmark my 8 year old daughter made for me as a Christmas present. Amn’t I lucky?

A thing I have noticed about parenting: When my daughter asks how much/many of something she can have, I usually say, well just take how much/many you think is appropriate for you. And she almost never takes more than I would have decided myself. A lot of control/conflict is counterproductive.

They think you’re dumb enough to believe houses are decommissioned when sold

Recovering from a flu and watching Four Weddings and a Funeral , the most 1990s thing ever to have existed, bemused that we are almost as far from 1994 as 1994 was from the Cuban missile crisis

Capital is sovereign; that’s literally the tweet

Sigh. Even if genAI chatbots were effective at this, how does it overcome the ethical issues like theft of intellectual property, power use, water use, labor abuses, or other environmental effects on communities with the data centers?

Hard to make this one up; AI boom causes increased carbon emissions, former Irish Green Party minister celebrates AI boom based on a fantasy counter factual where it was fuelled only by renewables and harnessed to public good www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2025...

My head is always too big for these things. I’m happy, really- my face is just like that

No anticipation of Santa in our house this year as the 8 year old is precociously rationalistic and the 6 year old has an intellectual disability precluding her from understanding it (kind of). Although *insofar* as she does somewhat understand Christmas, she studiously refuses to give a shite the

I’m actually lost. I actually do not understand the politics of this?

annual struggle with the shortcrust pastry on behalf of my (she says) very fussy vegetarian wife. Proud that I’ve worked 227g (1 lb for reactionaries) of kerrygold butter into a 9 inch (20cm) diameter tin for savoury pumpkin pie. Keeping structural integrity with that fat % is [mansplaining noises]

A tedious academic phenomenon of the next 1/4 century will be a torrent of ‘human rights’ responses to AI, studiously missing the wood for the trees, clinging to a depoliticising rights-discourse & ignoring the obvious: that AI is redeemable only under democratic ownership, I.e socialism

Micheál Martin is reaching the latter stages of his career as Taoiseach and obviously feels less bothered to repress that underlying schoolmaster persona that yearns to lecture and patronise the public about how they’re wrong

The 8 year old got her hands on a labelling machine and has been putting it to wholesome use (product placement unintentional)

Good article on AI www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Watching the Netflix documentary about the Australian mushroom murders - not very noble or edifying of me - but am bowled over by the opening fact that only an estimated 2% of global fungi species are documented

‘Hitting the gym hard, eh?’, [GUFFAWING] says the doctor entering the cubicle and that is a bedside manner I actually approve of

How did western elites over a half century go from something like ‘we must avoid direct conflict with ussr because of M.A.D.’ to ‘war with Russia is inevitable and we might as well talk as if it’s already happening ‘

Tried to jump onto a 75cm box about .8 metres away, missed it by a couple cm, knocked the box backwards and fell onto my arse, necessitating a wait for x ray now. Did you record it, my sympathetic friend asked

The AI generated suggestions (whatever they’re called) on MS word are dogshit. AI generally is dogshit, shoved down our throats.

Does anybody even *aim* for the ‘perfect’ Christmas dinner? I look at Christmas Day the way some people – including me, to an extent - look at political theory – it’s about about avoiding great harms or catastrophes, not attaining perfection or bliss

I am sorry that I overlooked your email because I prioritised other things

It’s reached that tipping point of the year where I want to stop pretending to give a shite and drink chateauneuf du pape by the stove *yes I am old and bourgie enough to have a specific wine in mind

Hello, I’m Keir Starmer and I’m a former human rights lawyer, so you can trust me when I tell you human rights are bad and need to be eradicated

What living in the west of Ireland is like:

‘Replying All’ to acknowledge receipt of a zoom link: the mind boggles

Have decided to start calling them ‘woke weather warnings’ because a) I am now technically a middle aged man and b) they give me absolutely no pretext to skive off work

Daughter set a ‘trap’ for the ‘elf on the shelf’ … and it worked! So we properly f*cked up the surveillance/quantification/responsibilisation complex… or something like that

What a weird slant and headline. ‘Europe’ is not ‘defending’ its Amazon frontier, France is. French Guyana is in South America, not Europe; it’s a remnant of the French colonial legacy and ‘Europe’ has no role ‘defending’ it

Did my biweekly grocery shop in the Polish supermarket for a change and so many (not all) of the products are better or more interesting: can I say, as a country our groceries game is way off, we are nowhere near the Olympic qualifying standard for groceries

Obviously commenting as a bystander, but my wife breastfed both of ours over several years & honestly it was brutally difficult, especially after her returning to work. Explain evidence of the benefits, fine, but I think public health measures cajoling or bullying ppl into it are kind of revolting.

This is an ethnic cleansing campaign

What if we said ‘linguistic prediction tools’ instead of ‘AI’

*to the tune of the Mariah Carey song* 🎶All I want for Christmas is 🎶 ... one of those gift packs containing two bottles of a very strong Belgian ale first made 700 years ago and including the novelty branded glass bearing the image of a monk who is jolly and/or inebriated.

Reminds me of former Taoiseach Garrett Fitzgerald allegedly saying ‘it works in practice, but does it work in theory?’ (Apocryphal?)

The idea everything begins and ends with Brexit is this faith-based politics; the trajectory of decline began with the austerity implemented under the liberal Democrat Conservative coalition but it would be awkward for some people to face up to that

Probably about the most dissident thing you could say in a university is that you didn’t have much on, or were a bit idle

Makes u think

Academics telling each other how busy they are is so lame. Let’s tell each other we’re feeling indolent, or have ennui.

Not now, arctic air mass

Somehow both very Guardian-coded and Telegraph-coded at the same time www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

My article about Catherine Connolly’s inauguration speech, the symbolic power of the presidency, and its limits www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2025...

‘Given our history, the normalisation of war and genocide has never been and will never be acceptable to us.’ - From the inauguration speech of the tenth president of Ireland. president.ie/en/media-lib...

Dinner with a view. This is just where she likes to hang out

What’s your favourite low-effort costume? I wanted to go as a geography lecturer, though the 8 year old made me dress as the Mad Hatter match her Queen of Hearts

Ireland has a new president, who happens to be one of my local deputies (we have multi seat constituencies). I just published the short article about the office of President in Ireland. theconversation.com/catherine-co...

Maybe I am simple minded but I think a populist for whom the Other is the foreigner is ‘bad’, and a populist for whom it is say, oligarchs is at least potentially ‘good’. ‘Populism’ is a political style and strategy that can be put to different uses.

Have to show off my fussy precious little stuffed pasta

This is the context in which I and all my colleagues are being told that we must bring in a minimum of £25k in external funding per year. We get 100 hours of research time per year. The bid-writing process will take up most of it.