Podcast: Play in new window

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More

James Ker-Lindsay is Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. His research focuses on conflict, peace and security in South East Europe (Western Balkans, Greece, Turkey and Cyprus), European Union enlargement, and secession and recognition in international politics.

He has created many Youtube videos explaining his subject.

*****

The Financial Times recently made a change to their style guide. The style guide of a newspaper is a list of rules about how articles should be written, all big newspapers have them, it’s to keep the language and spelling and so on consistent across the whole publication.

So most style guides specify, for example, that numbers up to ten should be spelled out, and numbers from 11 onwards are written as digits. They also say what spelling or what grammar style to use if there is more than one version considered correct.

The change that the Financial Times made was to treat the word ‘data’ as a singular rather than as a plural. That means instead or writing ‘the data are showing’ something, they will use English the way most of us do and write ‘the data is showing’ whatever.

Podcast: Play in new window

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More

Freda Wallace is the cohost of the Gender Nebulous podcast.

Statistics of the sharp rise in the number of referrals to the Tavistock clinic, and their age distribution are here, and here.

False claims that puberty blockers, given to children to delay typical-age puberty are ‘completely reversable’ are incredibly common, and have been made by the taxpayer-funded GenderEd, authored by a TCD academic, on the website of the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, Gay Community News, the student paper Trinity News, and Noah Halpin of TENI, quoted without challenge on RTÉ.

Podcast: Play in new window

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More

Freda Wallace is the cohost of the Gender Nebulous podcast.

*****

I want to comment on a rant that was previously posted on this podcast. The rant in question was posted with episode 120 Levelling the Field and the topic was Minimum Unit Pricing for Alcohol or MUP. MUP, long-time listeners may recall, prohibits the selling of an alcoholic beverage below a price determined by the alcohol content of the beverage.

To recap, by my reading, William made three arguments. First, that the MUP policy is motivated by a desire to advantage pubs over off license competitors. Second, that demand for alcohol is inelastic and therefore this measure is unlikely to be an effective measure for reducing alcohol consumption. Third, and relatedly, that higher prices may paradoxically lead to increased consumption. Therefore, it was concluded that MUP should not be perceived as a public health measure. Supporting evidence is presented by pointing out that page 26 of the 2011 Fine Gael General election manifesto says that below cost alcohol sales will be banned to support the viability of pubs.  Further, it was noted that Ireland has both high alcohol consumption and high alcohol prices so the correlation is not there to support price increases as a preventative measure. Finally, marketing strategies from other industries, like the diamond trade, were identified as positive examples of an industry conspiring to increase the price to increase the importance of the product.

Podcast: Play in new window

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More

Graham Linehan, now back on twitter, is the creator of numerous famous TV shows including Father Ted.

*****

Podcast: Play in new window

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More

Annabel Fenwick Elliott is a British freelance journalist who previously worked for the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail.

*****

It might have been Tomorrow’s World, that science programme from the BBC from my dim and distant childhood, where they demonstrated an early chatbot, although I think it wasn’t called that. You typed in some text, and up on the suitcase-sized screen came what looked like a meaningful response. But not really. The presenter typed in Necessity is the mother of invention and the machine responded Tell me more about your family.

It was just a trick really, a set of pre-programmed vague comments, set to be output based on trigger words entered by the user.

Podcast: Play in new window

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More

Dan McClellan is a public scholar of the Bible and religion and author of the book YHWH’s Divine Images: A Cognitive Approach.

*****

I don’t much talk about Jordan Peterson, I don’t think that he is as interesting a character as the internet makes out, certainly not as interesting as he thinks he is himself.

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, he’s a Canadian clinical psychologist and university professor, who got a lot of attention for, what seemed to me, pretty basic psychological observations; I think he got that attention because he couched those observations in terms that appealed to a right-wing audience. I don’t think that it would be fair to call him alt-right, he doesn’t seem to like the extreme right, but they do seem to like him, because he was able to articulate criticisms of the left in an impressive-sounding way, and they were happy to ignore his criticisms of the right, which, to be fair, he did make.

Podcast: Play in new window

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More

Graham Neary is a financial commentator who has been a fund manager and analyst in the London financial markets.

*****

The transport minister, Eamon Ryan who is also leader of the Green Party, it has been announced will set up an inter-departmental group to make sure the transport sector meets its emissions reduction targets.

Related to this, The National Transport Authority has published what’s called modelling on transport climate targets, which basically means having an educated guess about the effect of various possible policy choices. This basically means they have a go at understanding what would happen if they increased bus fares, kept them the same, or reduced them, and then the same for a variety of combinations of other policy levers that the government could pull, or push, or not change at all.

Podcast: Play in new window

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More

Dafydd Iwan is the former president of Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party.

*****

Bertie Ahern, we are told, had been readmitted, to Fianna Fáil. It might be better to use the term rehabilitated. Fianna Fáil activists gave him a standing ovation at an event recently, it was to mark the 25^th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, obviously chosen to focus attention on the one positive part of his time as Taoiseach.

It’s worth remembering that he resigned from Fianna Fáil more than 10 years ago, ahead of a motion to expel him for lying to the Moriarty Tribunal.

It’s the little things that trip you up, as his predecessor said. He had already brazened out the ludicrous lie that when he was finance minister, he didn’t have a single bank account himself. The fact that he was going through a messy separation from his wife at the time, who would have been entitled to look at any accounts to determine appropriate support and child support payments, is not irrelevant. That’s also a good explanation as to why he owned his house under a false name.

Podcast: Play in new window

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More

John Rentoul is the chief political commentator for the Independent.

*****

I’m pessimistic.

I’m not naturally a pessimistic person, but I’m pessimistic. Maybe I’m getting older, maybe I’m entering the ‘the whole world is going to hell’ phase of my life, maybe I’m right to be pessimistic, maybe I’m not paying attention to the right things, but I’m pessimistic.

Podcast: Play in new window

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More

Jesse Spafford is a research fellow at Trinity College Dublin working on the project REAL – Rights and Egalitarianism. His research is focused on ethics and political philosophy with particular attention paid to debates between libertarians, socialists, and anarchists over the moral status of the market and the state.

*****

I was talking to someone last night. I won’t say who, but someone fairly well known, known for taking part in public debate, robust, intense debate, debates where people are strongly committed to their side of the argument, and aren’t afraid to let you know that.

They’d been listening to the podcasts that I did a while back on trans rights and the associated issues with Aoife Gallagher, and they said to me that although they had talked publicly about a number of thorny political topics, they had steered away from what is called the trans debate. I don’t think that’s a very good name for it, but I don’t have  a better one, so I’ll go with that. They had steered away from what is called the trans debate, not because they don’t have opinions on it, not because they don’t think it’s interesting, but purely because they were afraid of the potential backlash if they said the wrong thing, and they didn’t really believe the ‘right’ thing, so they said nothing.

Podcast: Play in new window

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More

Brooks Newmark was a British Conservative Party MP for the constituency of Braintree and is now a PhD candidate at the University of Oxford.

*****

I’ve got a proposal for tax reform. The idea is to make tax easier and simpler to understand, simpler for the government to collect, thereby lower costs which would lower the tax burden overall.

Podcast: Play in new window

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More

Brendan is the Labour Party TD for Wexford, and former party leader.

*****

So, we’re talking about a war.

We’re talking about a war where a huge, nuclear-armed superpower, attacks a territory to its south that this formerly-communist superpower views not as a real country, it views but as an integral part of its own country, and the superpower’s nationalist leadership is still pretty sore about how this territory got to be independent in the first place.

To rub salt in the wound, this territory is doing much better, and is certainly much more democratic than the superpower; and another point of aggravation, this territory is politically much closer to the west, the United States in particular, and is receiving a huge amount of military aid from the west, and even though it is said to be exclusively for defensive use, the superpower sees that aid as a direct threat to its own security.

Podcast: Play in new window

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More

Eoin Ó Murchú was the political editor for Raidió na Gaeltachta.

*****

Podcast: Play in new window

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More

Aoife Gallagher is a research analyst for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and author.

Podcast: Play in new window

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More

Aoife Gallagher is a research analyst for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and author.

*****

Podcast: Play in new window

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More

Kellie Armstrong an Alliance party MLA for the Strangford constituency.

*****

I saw a load of comments from commentators online, from talking heads on radio and TV, from people on Twitter, that the mobilisation ordered by Putin last week to try to shore up his invasion of Ukraine was stupid. It was stupid to try to mobilise people with no military experience, it was stupid to think they could have any effect against high-precision, long-range weapons that the Ukrainians are now getting.

It was stupid not to consider that they would have no experienced officers, it was stupid to not understand that this lack of leadership is a key reason why Russia is losing, it was stupid not to consider the destabilising effect that this order would have in the population in Russia, it was stupid to have all the skilled young men fleeing over the closest border, it was stupid, stupid, stupid.

I’m not convinced.

This made me think of Elon Musk’s Hyperloop. In case you don’t know, Elon Musk, the boss of Tesla, who is listed as the world’s richest man, has proposed and apparently started working on a high-speed mass transport system that would involve a sort of train inside a vacuum tube. With all the air evacuated from the tube and no wind resistance, people could be transported at over a thousand km per hour, as fast a jet liner. This has gained him huge publicity, and quite a bit of political traction.

Podcast: Play in new window

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More

It’s Q&A time! Thank you to everyone who sent in a question!

Podcast: Play in new window

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More

Joel Keys is a Belfast Loyalist activist and prolific tweeter.

*****

I discovered a big discrepancy. Well, I didn’t so much discover it as notice it. And it isn’t really isn’t a big discrepancy, it is an enormous discrepancy. A gigantic discrepancy. A sort of a so-big-you-could-see-it-from-space. discrepancy

This is the discrepancy. Have a look at Daft.ie any given day, on the front page you can choose to browse by section, and go to Rental properties. No filters, look at the whole country, any type of residence. Much has been made of this. These days, you will normally get less than 800 properties.

Of course, some properties that go up for rent don’t go on Daft, they are rented by word of mouth, via social media contacts or a postcard in the window of a local shop, but Daft on their website say that 90 per cent of property sales in Ireland are on their site, so it’s a good guess that daft have the bulk of rentals, and movements up and down in their number of listings match the market pretty closely.

Podcast: Play in new window

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More

Marc Coleman is a business consultant, former broadcaster and journalist. He is currently working on a book on the persistence of western democracy.

*****

‘Magical thinking’ is a great phrase that I learnt years ago, it’s a concept that’s useful to understand someone’s thought processes, maybe even your own. If you know what it is, skip forward about two minutes; if you don’t, it’s important to understand that it’s not a positive thing, in fact it’s very negative.

The concept of magical thinking is often used by therapists, psychologists and so on, to classify a particular thought process, and to help their patients to get over it. You see it at a comical level sometimes in kids, don’t step on the cracks in the pavements or the monster will get you. That’s basically the core of it, believing that one thing can affect another thing where two seconds of rational thought by an adult will tell you that it can’t.

People with mental health problems frequently exhibit magical thinking. A very famous example would be John Hinckley, Jr, the guy who shot Ronald Reagan in 1981, did it because he thought it would impress the actress Jodie Foster and make her fall in love with him.

Podcast: Play in new window

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More

Jessica Berlin is a commentator at Deutsche Welle News, and she has worked for 15 years working with in security policy, transatlantic affairs, sustainable business and technology, and aid industry reform across Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North America. She founded the Berlin-based strategy consultancy CoStruct, she holds an MSc in Political Economy of Emerging Markets from King’s College London, and a BA in International Relations from Tufts University.

She responds to the call from many prominent Germans, including Professor Julian Nida-Rümelin from Tuesday’s podcast, published in Die Zeit newspaper under the headline Ceasefire Now.