Bernadette Kearns │Fiction editor

“Trans children are perfect.”

Remember: what Trump and his administration are doing is only possible because Congress and the Supreme Court have abdicated their proper constitutional functions of check and balance.

Scroll past, right?

1. Hana Dehqani, eight years old

2. Fatemeh Salari, 34 years old

3. Reza Habashian, seven years old

4. Arya Bahadori, nine years old

5. Ali Asghar Zaeri, eight years old

6. Zahra Bahrami, seven years old

7. Ahmad Soltani, eight years old

Sun headline about £500k compensation for migrants, discussing human rights, and public outcry over payouts.

Did you see this headline?

Did you feel the requisite anger and rage at asylum seekers that The Sun was asking of you?

Did you maybe blame Starmer because.... um... it was probably his fault🤷‍♀️

Would you like to know the reality behind the headline?

Course you would!😜

Let's take a look

🧵

1/25

Look, it goes without saying that all these people are dumber than rocks.

But issuing *exactly* the statement your opponent in a hot war would dream of seems a particular failure to understand how propaganda is meant to work.

When the mad king recruits with sycophancy as the only metric needed.

Hey, @micheal-martin.bsky.social, look, it's apparently this easy.

They never do. And our lot are no better, tbh.

It's so depressing when they have a chance to do right by creatives rather than compound wrongs.

People in UK publishing take note. In case you haven’t heard, your government is still at it.

And anything that hoovers up British publications is liable to get a lot of Irish ones too.

#SpeirGorm

LOL 😂

imagine if Europe was capable of condemning the US and Israel too

I was born in an Iranian prison. My parents were held in their jails. My uncles lie in their mass graves. Nothing you can tell me about the crimes of the Iranian regime that I haven't lived in blood and bone. That doesn't mean I want my people bombed, maimed, killed, their homes in ruins. If your vision of liberation comes only through the destruction of innocent lives, then it's not freedom you're after. Sahar Delijani, Iranian author

I am pro Iranian people. I stand with them against their own government’s repression AND against the imperial violence in the form of bombs dropped from the sky from Israel & the US who have already killed hundreds.

I support neither imperialism or dictatorship.

Sahar Delijani said it best:

Irish Travellers (Mincéirí) are an ethnic indigenous minority in Ireland, who experience systemic prejudice [ziganophobia]. They are central to intersectionality here. When groups here engage it’s at a grassroots level, not via leaders. It’s a powerful way; when we stand together, we stand taller

"the UK, Germany and France have condemned Iranian attacks on countries in the region, saying Iran must refrain from indiscriminate military strikes. They did not comment on US and Israeli attacks on Iran

This right here is a big part of why the world is going to shit

"Everything is politics...You don't get to make art in a fascist state"

CMAT delivering, mar is gnách. 👏

(Same goes for sport btw)

#Speirgorm

Very powerful explanation of inclusion and care (and lack of both)

Mr Bored of Peace will never get a Nobel Peace Prize now! Taoiseach Micheál Martin cannot now in good conscience hand him that bowl of shamrock - his war planes killed over 100 Iranian schoolgirls yesterday #noshamrockfortrump

Statement by Irish President Connolly following strikes on Iran.
(Alt-Text on image)

#spéirghorm
#Iran #Alt

The girls of Iran were some of the first sacrificed by a cruel regime, and now, they’re the first slaughtered under the thinnest guise of freedom and I cannot get that out of my head

Ráiteas ón Uachtarán Connolly tar éis ionsaithe a bheith déanta ar an Iaráin

president.ie/ga/ilmheain-...

Statement by President Connolly following strikes on Iran

president.ie/en/media-lib...

Pay attention.

Of course, it is unlawful.

Even the "pre-emptive" justification is half-hearted guff.

Of course, it is stupid.

Wise US politicians once realised a rules-based international order was in their interests. That is being thrown away.

And most of all, and regardless of the above, it is wrong.

A great opportunity for anyone who enjoys writing accessibly about law.

The Enshittificator Digital products and services keep getting worse. In the new report Breaking Free: Pathways to a fair technological future, the Norwegian Consumer Council has delved…

Very funny, and uncomfortably close to the truth.

#Enshittification

vimeo.com/1168468796

Britain is a rich country which has been captured by a small number of it's richest individuals over a number of decades. Its media hunts in packs, creating salience from irrelevancies, generating fears in the population unrelated to their actual problems in life and promoting the scapegoating of minorities while conducting little to no structural assessments of the real problems that the political and social worlds have inherited and intensified. It is surely of no little significance that it turns out that this model of public capture of political discourse for private gain is one which is revealed by these Epstein documents to have had been a global formula.

After today's English by-election result, a reminder;

www.thegist.ie/the-gist-uk-...

"In my decades of work at the ICCL, I've never known a time so difficult and challenging for human rights. I've never seen this level of assault to international human rights, everyday civil liberties" Ailbhe Smyth

I'm literally in tears listening to President Catherine Connolly's fierce speech about the silence about ongoing genocide, how the rule of law, humans rights, civil liberties, and freedoms are diminishing before our eyes... at the 50th anniversary of the @iccl.bsky.social