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Mario Rosenstock is a comedian and impressionist, and creator of TodayFM’s Gift Grub.

*****

Here’s something about the Chinese economy.

China’s ‘investment’ in real estate makes Ireland’s property obsession seem breezy and carefree. Just before our crash, 12 per cent of our economy was house-building.

Even if Chinese GDP figures are true, then their reliance on homebuilding is double our peak. (If their GDP is overstated, it’s worse.)

If China crashes, it will shake the world. China holds trillions in dollar and euro reserves, and US sovereign debt. China is not a democracy, but its leaders are sensitive to public opinion, and deeply paranoid about preventing unrest.

If threatened, the Communist Party is likely to pull investment from anywhere it needs to, to keep their internal economy going, and keep their population working, not protesting. But with ghost cities, and one quarter of the economy building more of them, something has to give. But when?

~ read more ~

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Ben Habib is one of the deputy leaders of Reform UK, the new name for The Brexit Party founded by Nigel Farage.

I misspoke during the interview, I wrongly said that Reginald Dyer, the butcher of Amritsar, was Jewish. I should have said that Edwin Montagu, the Liberal MP and Secretary for India, who did not support Dyre, was Jewish, and the resulting campaign against him by Conservative MPs (in support of Dyre) had a strong and explicit antisemitic element.

Ben’s claim that the then Brexit Party, for which he was an MEP, provided a majority of the non-white or ethnic minority members of the 2019 European Parliament doesn’t seem to be correct; a Reform Party spokesperson clarified that they meant that all British MEPs provided a majority of ethnic minority members of the EP. The EP told us that they don’t collect this information, but reporting here and here indicates that isn’t the case, and the Brexit Party had the lowest proportion of ethnic minorities among its MEPs, of all Britain-wide parties although that isn’t a really valid comparison given the small numbers involved.

Notwithstanding all that, I think Ben’s wider point is valid, that while it is imperfect like any country, the UK has a relatively good record on race relations compared to many continental European countries.

*****

John will be 40 next April, or he would be, if he lived. But he didn’t.

He died.

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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.

*****

Donald Trump is going to jail.

That’s a whole big story in itself, the reason why Donald Trump is going to go to jail, I’ll talk about that a bit in a moment, but that’s not really the point. The real point is that Donald Trump is going to jail. And he’s going to jail soon.

That’s audio of the crowd at a Trump rally when he was running against Hillary Clinton shouting ‘lock her up’, one of dozens, probably hundreds of times that it happened. I don’t think that any but the most deluded of the people shouting really believed there was any chance that Hilary Clinton would actually be going to jail; someone once said that Trump’s detractors took him literally but not seriously, while his supporters took him seriously but not literally.

It might be because there’s been so much insincere talk about sending people to jail that I think people aren’t really taking seriously two things that are going to happen; I haven’t seen any commentator give a reasonable analysis of what I think are two important likely outcomes.

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Janie Lazar is the chair of End of Life Ireland.

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Some people have said some things about my level of political insight, thanks to them, even if I don’t
really think it’s that impressive most of the time. Actually, whatever level of insight that I do have, I
think is just down to two habits. One is, when you’re discussing any topic, to clearly define what is
the actual problem that you are trying to solve. The second is, if you think of, or hear of a solution,
you consider if it’s implemented, ‘what happens next?’ or ‘then what?’. Basically try to anticipate the
second-next step, as well as the next one.
Debates on politics and social issues often take the form of saying X is a problem, we should do Y to
solve it. What some people maybe miss out on is, if you solve problem X, or if you take action Y, if
that happens what will happen as a result of that?
I suppose the average person isn’t really required to think out their position on the West Lothian
question or the Congress of Vienna, but there are some topics that are very common in popular
discussion, debated from bar stools and office microwaves up and down country, where people
don’t seem to do that, which is fair enough, but sometimes it seems that our politicians, our
journalists, the people who are actually paid to do this, their debate isn’t of a much better quality.
I was thinking of this listening to Mark O’Halloran on the Mario Rosenstock Podcast a while back, I
mentioned this interview a couple of podcasts ago, it’s worth hearing what he had to say.

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Josie Appleton is the director of the Manifesto Club.

*****

You might think that you’re not familiar with the CE symbol, but you probably are, I’m sure you’ve seen it thousands of times. I can’t show you a picture of it in audio format, but the symbol is two semi-circles, the first one making a C, the second with an extra line to make the capital E, and CE stands for, conformité européenne meaning conformity with European standards, and you’ve seen and ignored that symbol on a thousand different products, electronics, toys, basically any manufactured consumer product.

I mentioned cycle helmets on the podcast a few weeks back, that they are designed to protect a cyclist from a fall to the ground, but not from being hit by the driver of a car. Those design standards are codified in the conformité européenne system, and you’re not allowed to make, import or sell any products in the EU that don’t meet those standards.

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Pauline O’Reilly is the Green Party spokesperson on Education and Higher Education and Senator and the cathaoirleach of the Green Party.

*****

I heard Mark O’Halloran on an old episode the Mario Rosenstock Podcast recently, he talked very articulately about how the housing crisis affects him, how he as a man in his 50s has to ask someone’s permission to get a pet cat. I totally sympathise with his position, sometimes it’s small things like that which capture so well the dysfunction created by the housing crisis.

I’m sure some left-wing party is writing up a bill as I speak called something like the Tenant’s Right to Pets and Animal Companionship Act 2023. In fact, Sinn Féin is actually proposing a bill to make it illegal to ask for sex in return for a tenancy. That sounds horrific, I’m not convinced how widespread a problem it is, but if it even happens once, that’s obviously unacceptable.

But consider this – do we have a problem of supermarket workers demanding sex in return for groceries? Is that even conceivable? In Ireland, it’s not, but in recent years, there have been scandals of aid workers in both Somalia and Haiti, in the midst of famine, demanding sex for food. The conclusion is obvious. That can only happen where people are so desperate – be it for food or housing – where people are so desperate that they are vulnerable to sexual exploitation.

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Repeats on podcasts don’t always make a lot of sense, but if you are subscribed, you’ll know that I put up a podcast from 2019 into the feed again last week; the podcast was an investigation into RTÉ and their relationship with the AA which supplied them with AA Roadwatch, the erstwhile traffic news segments.

The issue that I focussed on was that the supply of staff and studios for RTÉ quite clearly met RTÉ’s definition of a sponsored programme, and quite clearly breached RTÉ’s rules against accepting sponsorship from political lobbyists, and against accepting sponsorship from businesses with an interest in the content of the sponsored programme, and against allowing the sponsor to have any say in the content of the sponsored programme.

In that podcast I said that the response of RTÉ to my questioning was basically stonewalling. I asked them about breaching sponsorship rules, they said that it wasn’t a sponsored programme. I pointed them to their own criteria of what counted as a sponsored programme, and that AA Roadwatch clearly met those criteria, and at various stages they promised to get back to me with answers, they promised to tell me what exactly AA Roadwatch was if it wasn’t a sponsored programme, I sent many reminders over months, but they never did.

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I think that it’s about time to hear this edition of the podcast from 2019 again.

Dr Michael Foley is professor emeritus at the school of media at TU Dublin – formerly DIT – also a member of the NUJ’s Ethics Council, and has been invited by the International federation of Journalists and UNESCO to write a syllabus on journalism safety and ethics.

*****

Because of the detailed nature of the podcast, I sent a rough cut of the show to Neil O’Gorman of RTÉ in advance for his comments a couple of days before publication, and invited his comments. Below is Neil’s response, with interjections in italics from myself.

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Uki Goñi is a historian, journalist and author who has lived in the United States, Ireland, and Argentina.

*****

Sometimes it helps to draw a parallel between two events in the news, but two big recent stories – in Ireland, the scandal of RTÉ lying about Ryan Tubridy’s salary, and internationally the over-before-it-began apparent coup attempt by Yevgeny Prigozhin, those two might seem like they exist on two totally different planes, never to intersect.

But I think that there might be a parallel. To deal with RTÉ, I think that far too little attention was paid to an anonymous article written in the Sunday Independent by someone that Sindo editors assure us they know the identity of, and who is a senior Irish media ad agency figure. It tells some very important details about how the advertising world works.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

*****

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.