Ah, wizard money I presume.

It gets lost in all of this nonsense every time, but it is worth pointing out that it's not illegal to use any toilet you like. Toilets aren't legally restricted places and never have been, for very obvious reasons. This whole thing is based on an absurd fiction about who can and can't go where.

But we all know it does this. It's not suddenly going to stop doing this. Either they thought it wouldn't make mistakes or they thought people wouldn't care. Pick one, they are both dumb.

It only took ten years for a dedicated bunch of well-connected weirdoes to get the entire UK elite to unite against a tiny minority of the population that they previously barely noticed. The few to resist, like Robin Ince, deserve our lasting gratitude and respect.

If you're like me and you're always getting the co-founders of Palantir mixed up, this is the one who wants to bring back public hangings, not the one who has great difficulty sitting still.

On Nas's new album, he refers to himself as "Mr. Cryptocurrency Scarface" and this is yet another reason why we have to keep AI out of music, so that we can understand how authentically embarrassing some of our favorite artists have gotten.

One has to wonder who exactly Fine Gael is trying to appeal to with this talk about securing our children's future they've been churning out over the last few days. When doing research for this slogan did they come across these words accompanied by any other words, perhaps? We shall never know.

it's not just appropriating someone's artwork (important as that is!); it's also reframing these incredibly sheltered comemierdas, who shift all the risk and consequences from their decisions onto others while hoarding the profits, into this position of casual, almost heroic precarity.

Who could possibly have expected this to happen?

This is the same technology that even the UK Home Office (and the Telegraph) is now admitting has serious issues with accuracy and human rights interference. www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/202...

imagine taking advice to take *fewer* precautions against acquiring a respiratory virus during the winter season. imagine *giving* advice to take fewer precautions.

These are the lads whose lobbyists appear to have a firm grasp of the ear of the Irish Minister for Culture, Communications and Sport. www.thegist.ie/the-gist-wav...

A serious indictment of our politics and media that CETA, which has been adjudged to be unconstitutional by the Irish Supreme Court (Costello vs the Irish Govt), was passed overnight by the Government and there’s barely a ripple of curiosity, let alone rigorous questioning.

There's just not enough inhuman or degrading treatment going on these days to suit Big Jim. More inhuman or degrading treatment please says Big Jim.

Cause they know over the next generations there will be a true "mass migration" of humans trying to escape the effects of climate collapse and capitalist resource wars and want to normalise dishing out utter brutality against those people now instead of actually fixing anything.

These two stories are somehow connected. Apparently, if you lobby tirelessly for more pollution & ecological wreckage, that’s exactly what you get.

Obligatory mention of this story whenever Patrick O'Donovan tries to do a technology: The time when he advocated for the ban of all open source browsers to stop the drug and pornography trade, just like the Americans were doing, apparently. www.limerickpost.ie/2014/01/24/o...

As the Minister with Responsibility for Shouting About Limerick wades into this area we shouldn't forget the time in 2019 when his party and cabinet colleague proposed the entire country's PPSNs and passport numbers be given to Mark Zuckerberg. www.independent.ie/news/governm...

Ireland appointing a Meta official to the Data Protection position is, as my father would have said, very Irish.

Does anyone know what time the Helen Lovejoy dancers are scheduled to appear on the stream at?

Self-declared Free Speech Capital of the World Deeply Concerned about European Censorship proposes pre-screening tweets for wrongthink as part of the ESTA application process. Cool. Cool cool cool.

Never going to happen but I'd be interested in reading about where and in whose company this chancer first made the acquaintance of Very Normal Senator Sharon Keogan.

they've decided that stopping climate disaster isn't possible so they're jus no longer gonna report on it. it's basically how they 'dealt' with covid. just stop talking about it. pretend it doesn't exist.

Mr O’Donovan said the Public Services Card “floundered because some interest groups outside of the House, interested more in privacy than other issues, got their way”. Funny way to characterise something which the independent regulator found illegal, imposing a €550,000 fine on the state.

"Ministers are planning to make online child safety a key theme of its upcoming presidency of the council of the EU next year." You might think you've seen grifting before but the carnival of grifters descending on Dublin next year will quite likely be unprecedented in scale.

We gotta do something about metaphors

This is a good read. "With each passing day, the European denial is getting harder to maintain. In the meantime we are left asking: how many times do Europeans have to be slapped across the face and humiliated by Trump before they might start to think about standing up for themselves?"

Again, I don't know why this is so clear to American expats and not European leaders, but the US is ready to eat the EU's lunch - and dinner - and we're paying them for the privilege by buying all our tech from them.

then, the transphobes , feeling victorious at how many people they have made unhappy and despairing in the previous week, move on to anything else that has a spectrum and the possibility of more colours than they can conceive - such hateful people - they cannot understand anything that is not THEM

it is now explicit US policy to interfere in European politics to the benefit of the anti-immigrant right, something that would be causing continent-wide paroxysms of outrage if it was Putin's regime saying it and not Trump's

So much this: I’m not an immigrant, but my grandparents were, the reason I was born and raised in London wasn’t because they abandoned late-colonial Cyprus for the imperial metropole on account of the food or weather, believe me.

Yesterday the Irish Times's politics editor, in his regular whinge about the triple lock, exhorted his readers to rhetorically "Ask the Germans" what they thought. I suspected as I read the piece that he hadn't asked any Germans himself. Anyway, someone did ask the Germans ...

Blatant anti-landlord discrimination. If everyone else is allowed sell drugs outside schools then why not landlords too?

Is it *TWO* ID cards rather than just one?

?????????

120m is no deterrent to X. Musk will moan in public - in private, he will be doing cartwheels. Tech compliance theatre won't cut it anymore. Europeans want enforcement with teeth - up to revoking access to the Single Market for the worst actors. And Musk + X are the slop merchants par excellence.

The truth? The Irish public doesn't WANT their national rivers and lakes turned into stinking, dying, cesspools for profit by a particular commercial sector, that also happens to be very heavily subsidised by people's taxes. Yet that's what this government continues to push for.

I think we MAY gotta hand it to Jennifer Carroll Macneill on this one and this one only.

If I had failed a responsibility to deliver housing and infrastructure for decades, I too might try to build a narrative blaming my failure on third parties (courts, lawyers, citizens, The Goblin Prince Under The Mountain). But I see no reason, bar abject power worship, for anyone to repeat it.

This is what the billionaires bought the news orgs to do.

They’re calling him the world’s most sober man:

It’s good that this is finally being reported. Successive governments, including ones with a Green component, have been complicit with big business (agribusiness, packaging industry, big tech) in a 3 Card Monty to conceal our catastrophic environmental performance from the public.

Good to know some people in DPER apparently think the machine which tells you exactly what you want to hear would be better at assessing risk than any living breathing humans.

we all know that fascists are just deeply insecure losers but him trying to look like a big boy serious academic in his library of comics is too much

I've said before that Ireland is simply catching up with the rest of the Europe when it comes to the far right, and this "they're all adults, actually" is one of their talking-points from 10-15 years ago. In Sweden they were called "skäggbarn" (beard-children). None of this is in good faith.

For non-Brits: nobody can afford to get sued by revved-up wingnuts and crackpots armed with JK Rowling’s money, and nobody wants to be the next organisation protested by the far right and monstered into the heart of the earth by the world’s most poisonous media outlets. So they are folding.

NYT: Is the President tired? Ms. Leavitt: Would a weary President be able to deliver a racist rant like that one?

Joanne will never run out of money because people keep buying her stuff, and so this will keep happening. SLAPP after SLAPP until trans people are completely drummed out of public existence and nobody will do a thing about it

It's amazing how much mileage the Irish state gets out of pretending it doesn't know that EU law applies in Ireland, an EU member state. It's *already* the state's job to be aware of legislative changes and to correctly transpose EU legislation. From assets.gov.ie/static/docum...