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Sport and Politics

Posted in Cricket, Football, Politics with tags , , , , on May 24, 2026 by telescoper

I have found this a very disappointing weekend in many respects for sports. Two Irish rugby teams (Ulster and Leinster) both lost their cup finals against French opposition (Montpellier and Bordeaux in the Challenge Cup and Champions Cup, respectively). Glamorgan’s cricketers lost their first two Twenty20 games of the season (both narrowly). And today’s last round of matches in the English Premier League saw Newcastle lose, an outcome made worse by the fact that Sunderland won.

At least however there was an opportunity to enjoy Ireland’s greatest spectator sport (after hurling, of course): the counting of votes in an election. Friday saw two by-elections, one because of the resignation of Paschal Donohoe (FG) from his seat in Dublin Central in order to take a lucrative job at the World Bank, and the other vacated by Catherine Connolly whose seat in Galway West became vacant when she took on the role of President. Neither of these are constituencies in which I could vote, but it was fun watching the results come on.

These elections, like all elections in Ireland, were held under a system of Proportional Representation (Single Transferable Vote). The constituences return multiple members in a General Election, but in the case of a by-election only one candidate is elected. This simplifies matters a bit because the part of the process that involves transferring surplus votes from candidates who exceed quota is not needed. Voters rank the candidates in order of preference with votes progressively reallocated as the lowest-ranked candidates are eliminated. You can rank all the candidates or just some. In the system employed here one ranks the candidates in order of preference with votes progressively reallocated in various rounds until one ends up with one winner.

There was also the presence of gang leader Gerard Hutch among the candidates in Dublin Central, but in the end he didn’t put up a serious challenge.

Opinion polls gave Sinn Féin’s Janice Boylan a narrow lead on first preferences, but since SF are notoriously transfer-unfriendly, I was very confident that lead would be overturned by Daniel Ennis of the Social Democrats. As it turned out, however, Ennis actually led on first preferences which confirmed me in my opinion that he would win. This is how the transfers panned out.

Ennis won comfortably, and John Stephens of Fianna Fáil gaining the distinction of getting the lowest share of first preference votes that his party has ever recorded in an election. There are some bizarre transfers, e.g. from the left-wing PBP (People Before Profit) to Fine Gael. Other than that the outcome was as predicted.

Not long ago Sinn Féin were riding high in the polls and might have expected to win a seat here, especially since Mary Lou McDonald, the Sinn Féin leader, holds a seat in Dublin Central, but their popularity has slumped. I think that’s primarily because they have recently lurched to the right – rather like UK Labour has – and many who want a genuinely progressive alternative to the crumbling neoliberal consensus have decided that they can’t support SF which puts on the mask of a progressive party when it suits them but are quite to remove it when chasing the right-wing vote. is quoted as saying that there is ‘no confusion’ for voters about whether the party was left-wing or right-wing. I think she is correct there, but perhaps not in the way she intended…

A genuinely left-wing party of the size of Sinn Féin should be building coalitions and knocking at the door to power, but instead it has squandered its position by pandering to anti-immigrant sentiment, jumping on the bandwagon of the recent “fuel protests” and signing up to transphobic policies in Northern Ireland. I don’t understand why they have chosen this path, but it looks very foolish to me. I’m not the only one to think this. Is Morgan McSweeney now working for Sinn Féin?

As I write, the count in Galway West is still going on but it has come down to a contest between two unpalatable right-wing candidates so I’m not following it as closely. Oh, the Fine Gael candidate has won.

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Biblical Me

Posted in Biographical, Politics with tags , , on April 17, 2026 by telescoper

It seems that after Donald Trump shared an image of himself as Jesus on social media,  ridiculous pictures of oneself in biblical settings have become all the rage. In that vein here is a picture of me downloading a paper from arXiv to read on my tablet:

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A Hungarian Rhapsody

Posted in Music, Politics with tags , , , , on April 12, 2026 by telescoper

Back home to the news that Viktor Orbán has been ousted in today’s election in Hungary I thought I’d share something celebratory. Here is a classic recording of the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 in C-sharp minor by Franz Liszt played by György Cziffra. The second is by far the most famous of the 19 Hungarian Rhapsodies Liszt wrote, although it is based on Romanian rather than Hungarian tunes. Many recordings are available – I have three on CD – and this is my favourite. Cziffra was a very talented jazz musician too (here is his take on Duke Ellington’s Sophisticated Lady); Liszt himself was no mean improviser.

I’m not sure of the recording date, but it was made in Hungary (when Hungary was still behind the Iron Curtain) so it would have to be before 1956, as Cziffra escaped to Vienna then and eventually took up French citizenship.

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Double Standards and Ireland’s “Fuel Protests”

Posted in Biographical, Politics with tags , , on April 10, 2026 by telescoper

I suppose I should comment on the ongoing disruption to road transport in Ireland as a result of “fuel protests”. I put that in quotes because from what I’ve seen many of the protestors are the usual far-right anti-everything troublemakers who have latched onto the fact that some hauliers and farmers are struggling with the increased fuel prices arising from Donald Trump’s stupid-headed war agains Iran.

The first thing to say is that I haven’t been directly affected by any of this yet. Although the roads in Dublin have been gridlocked for four days, I don’t live there and don’t have to commute. If and when I do have to go into Dublin from Maynooth, I usually take the train and then walk. Moreover, if I did plan to travel somewhere else – purely hypothetically, you understand – to spend a couple of days away at the end of the Easter break, perhaps with another person, then there are alternatives to flying from Dublin Airport…

I say I haven’t been directly affected by any of this, but in due course there may be shortages in the shops owing to disruption to deliveries. More importantly the congestion is causing difficulties for the emergency services too. All this is reminiscent of the fuel protests in the UK in 2000, which I remember very well because they happened when we were trying to organize the annual summer school for new PhD students at Nottingham, which we almost had to abandon because of interruptions to food supplies.

I’ll just make a couple of comments on these protests before going out for dinner at an unspecified location.

One is that the Road Traffic Act 1961 states:

98.—(1) A person shall not do any act (whether of commission or omission) which causes or is likely to cause traffic through any public place to be obstructed.

(2) A person who contravenes subsection (1) of this section shall be guilty of an offence.

Parking on a motorway in Ireland is also serious offence under the Road Traffic (Traffic and Parking) Regulations 1997.

Here is a trailer with a scaffold with a posting containing an incitement to murder (from here):

Picture Credit: Dean Buckley

(I’m reliably informed that “globalist” means Jewish to these people.)

There have been four days of obvious offences like these being continually committed and the Gardaí haven’t once even tried to enforce the law of the land. They come down like a ton of bricks on, e.g., climate change protestors, but the far-right are always treated with kid gloves. Double standards or what?

I can think of two possibilities: (i) that the Gardaí are sympathetic to the Far Right or (ii) that they are scared of them. Both could be true. Either way, it is very disappointing to us ordinary law-abiding folk to find that the rules applied to the fash are not the same as those applied to the rest of us.

I’ll end with a comment about one of the ringleaders of the unlawful roadhogs. James Geoghegan is a “farm contractor” who passes himself off as an upstanding fellow but it turns out he has numerous judgements against him for non-payment of tax and cruelty to animals. He chose to put himself forward as the “PRO” of the protestors, which doesn’t seem very wise given that it was inevitable his substantial sack of dirty laundry would get a very public airing. I saw him on TV last night in an interview in which he gave every appearance of being a complete idiot, which is at least consistent.

I don’t want to tar all farmers with the same brush, but Mr Geoghegan is of an identifiable type: he hates the idea of paying his tax but is simultaneously more than happy to accept state subsidies paid for people who pay theirs. He probably hates VAT and excise duty because he can’t avoind paying them. He claims to be among the downtrodden poor but owns a fleet of vehicles. His performance in the role of victim is not exactly convincing.   If he’s looking for sympathy then he’ll find it in a dictionary.

Farming is obviously an important part of Ireland’s economy and social infrastructure, but so are many other activities.

Anyway the “protestors” say that they will stay in Dublin for “up to a month”. They must be pretty well off if they can afford to take such long holidays!

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Hopeful news about the STFC Crisis

Posted in Science Politics, Politics with tags , , , , on March 12, 2026 by telescoper

I’ve just got time this evening to pass on news that the Chair of the Parliamentary Select Committee looking at he current STFC debacle (see this account), Chi Onwurah, has responded to the events in extremely frank terms. Here is an excerpt:

The full response – which is definitely well worth reading because it doesn’t pull any punches – can be found here:

documentsDownload

Such documents are not usually so forthright!

This isn’t by any means the end of the story of this fiasco, but it is certainly a positive sign that it is being taken very seriously in political circles. Credit is due not only to all those who attended and gave evidence to the Committee – Catherine Heymans, Jon Butterworth et al – but also to those who lobbied behind the scenes.

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Tony Benn in 1998

Posted in History, Politics with tags , , on March 8, 2026 by telescoper

This powerful contribution by Tony Benn to a debate in the House of Commons ahead of the bombing of Iraq in 1998 is, sadly, just as relevant to the bombing of Iran in 2026.

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Iran, a graveyard

Posted in Politics with tags , , , on March 4, 2026 by telescoper
Graves being prepared for the children and teachers killed in the bombing of a school in Minab, Iran on Saturday. Picture credit: Middle East Observer

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A Gulf in the Airspace

Posted in Biographical, Politics with tags , , , , , on March 2, 2026 by telescoper

So Operation Epstein Furore is in full swing, and already US and Israeli forces have scored some notable successes in the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians – the attack on a school in southern Iran that killed over 150 people, many of them children, stands out so far although it is certain that many more Iranian citizens will be similarly “liberated” (i.e. blown to bits). Trump’s plan is obviously to set the Middle East on fire in order to distract attention from his problems at home.

Anyway, I suddenly realized that it is just about two years to the day since I flew back to Dublin from Sydney where I spent a month during my sabbatical. It was actually 3rd March, not 2nd March, that I boarded the plan bound for Abu Dhabi, but one day is neither here not there (especially when you’re jetlagged). It seems that Iran has been firing drones and missiles at airports around the Gulf so there are no flights in the airspace right now:

Screengrab from FlightRadar24

I flew via Etihad, which has suspended commercial flights entirely. Abu Dhabi airport was struck by drones over the weekend, but I don’t think anyone was hurt. I suppose anyone wanting to fly from Sydney to Dublin these days will have to go via Singapore or just stay put. I’ve heard there are around 20,000 Irish people in the Gulf States right now. I hope they stay safe, and the same goes for all civilians caught up in the conflict.

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Concerning Muskopedia

Posted in Politics with tags , , , , on November 16, 2025 by telescoper

A colleague sent me this arXiv paper. The abstract reads:

Elon Musk released Grokipedia on 27 October 2025 to provide an alternative to Wikipedia, the crowdsourced online encyclopedia. In this paper, we provide the first comprehensive analysis of Grokipedia and compare it to a dump of Wikipedia, with a focus on article similarity and citation practices. Although Grokipedia articles are much longer than their corresponding English Wikipedia articles, we find that much of Grokipedia’s content (including both articles with and without Creative Commons licenses) is highly derivative of Wikipedia. Nevertheless, citation practices between the sites differ greatly, with Grokipedia citing many more sources deemed “generally unreliable” or “blacklisted” by the English Wikipedia community and low quality by external scholars, including dozens of citations to sites like Stormfront and Infowars. We then analyze article subsets: one about elected officials, one about controversial topics, and one random subset for which we derive article quality and topic. We find that the elected official and controversial article subsets showed less similarity between their Wikipedia version and Grokipedia version than other pages. The random subset illustrates that Grokipedia focused rewriting the highest quality articles on Wikipedia, with a bias towards biographies, politics, society, and history. Finally, we publicly release our nearly-full scrape of Grokipedia, as well as embeddings of the entire Grokipedia corpus.

It’s an interesting paper which shows that much of Muskopedia Grokipedia is just scraped from Wikipedia but some articles have been rewritten to reflect Elon Musk’s fascist attitudes.

Incidentally, the name is derived from Grok, an AI bot for spreading far-right propaganda on Twitter. “Grot” would have been a better name. I have no experience of Grok as I no longer use Twitter and have no intention of looking at Grokipedia either. I imagine it’s probably like Conservapedia, although considerably less (unintentionally) funny.

I remember that I should have posted a reaction to the spineless behaviour of the Royal Society, of which Mr Musk is a Fellow. At the “Unite the Kingdom” march organized by career criminal and racist thug Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson), Elon Musk made a (remote) contributuion that used violent rhetoric to promote narratives of division and polarisation. This is what his sort will always do. The Royal Society’s response was to issue a lame public statement but take no further action. Musk’s continued presence is a terrible stain on the reputation of the Royal Society.

In the interest of full disclosure I should mention that I do have a Wikipedia page. I’m told I don’t get a mention on Muskopedia. I am grateful for that. Anyway, this paper reminded me to make another donation to Wikipedia. I encourage you to do likewise.

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Ireland has a new President

Posted in Politics with tags , , on November 11, 2025 by telescoper
Catherine Connolly (centre), at her inauguration as President of Ireland. Picture from the Irish Times.

Earlier today, in Dublin Castle, Catherine Connolly was sworn in as the new President of Ireland. Her inauguration was the 14th to the office of Uachtarán na hÉireann and she is the 10th person to have that title. The ceremony was the first of its kind I have seen and I was impressed by its combination of simplicity and dignity. The previous president, Michael D. Higgins, looked rather emotional as he handed over the reins. I wish him all the best in his retirement. I think he’ll be a hard act to follow, and I wish Catherine Connolly all the best in the role for the next 7 years.

Incidentally, the oath of office reads:

I láthair Dia na nUilechumhacht, táimse, [ainm*], á ghealladh agus á dhearbhú go sollúnta is go fírinneach bheith i mo thaca agus i mo dhídin do Bhunreacht Éireann, agus a dlíthe a chaomhnú, mo dhualgais a chomhlíonadh go dílis coinsiasach de réir an Bhunreachta is an dlí, agus mo lándícheall a dhéanamh ar son leasa is fónaimh mhuintir na hÉireann. Dia do mo stiúradh agus do mo chumhdach

*This “ainm” is the Irish word for “name”; the President-Elect inserts their name here. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the student to translate the rest of the oath into English.

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