Technology

Misinformation, disinformation, and plain ole lies

By Jeannette Boyne 15/02/2021 Politics, Snow, Technology, World

Social media algorithms created separate information tunnels leading to echo-chambers fed not with information but with affirmation of what their readers had already liked. Each tunnel built up ‘truths’ that appeared incontrovertible: anything that offered a different perspective had been sent down a different tunnel.

History’s Response to Covid 19

By Owen Connolly 02/10/2020 Entertainment, Politics, Snow, Technology

Owen Connolly interviews Liam O’Sullivan of Trasna na Tíre – Ireland’s online history lecture series, adapted to work with the restrictions of the lockdown. ‘We bring in experts from outside our locality to explain aspects of our history to us.’

Let’s Cooperate! Stevie Nolan of Belfast Trademark

By Owen Connolly 01/10/2020 Entertainment, Politics, Snow, Technology

Owen Connolly talks to Stevie Nolan of Trademark Belfast, the anti-sectarian unit of the Irish Labour movement. ‘Our role for the last 25 years has been in the peace process. In particular, we deal with sectarian conflicts in the workplace.’

Equal Access to Healthcare

Healthcare can no longer be an expensive privilege in the private tier and a catch-as-catch-can system of firefighting in the public tier, where patients present at ever later stages of their illness costing both lives and resources that could have been saved with timely access. 5 minute read.
THE ESSENCE OF HUMANITY

Drunken, brawling, criminal, lazy, as thick as two short planks nailed together, and not wanted over here—that’s what ‘everybody knew’ about the average Mick when I was growing up in England. Creating a racist stereotype doesn’t need any basis in fact, just an ugly image repeated often enough. (10 minute read.)
Misinformation, disinformation, and plain ole lies

Social media algorithms created separate information tunnels leading to echo-chambers fed not with information but with affirmation of what their readers had already liked. Each tunnel built up ‘truths’ that appeared incontrovertible: anything that offered a different perspective had been sent down a different tunnel.
Eddie Comes Home (Fiction)

The first words she’d ever said to him were that her father had warned her not to be in this dance hall because it attracted a very low crowd. She’d had a blonde bubble-cut then, just like Kim Novak’s, and she was the best-dressed girl in the hall.
Equal Access to a Home

The only possible conclusion is that current housing policy is designed to make landlords, developers, and investors rich on our tax money. Keep shovelling the money upwards and, to paraphrase Trump, ‘one day the homeless will just disappear, like a miracle.’
“And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda” by Eric Bogle – a new interpretation

Written by Scottish-born folk singer Eric Bogle, the song describes the futility and horror of war through the personal experiences of the song's character. In stripping away melody the words alone are left to convey the bleak vistas and raw emotion of the story.
Angry Commoners

The pandemic has drawn a sharp divide between those who could lose their houses, jobs, or lives, and those who are calculating how to foreclose on newly ‘distressed’ mortgages, or who will use job losses to depress wages, or who talk about the death rate among older citizens reducing the cost of pensions.
A Very Irish Coup

Albert Einstein said that we can’t solve problems with the same thinking we used to create them. Swinging endlessly between two parties from a socially conservative, right centrist, and redundant tradition of party politics got us to the mess we’re in. But take Einstein’s word for it, it’s not going to get us out of it. (10 minute read)

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