Val Cosgrave

Retired farmer; failed researcher;
looking for factual errors in the works of Bakan-Beiner-Chomsky-Elkins-Finkelstein-Hearne-Milgram-Ó Broin & Zinn-Please help

[Val Cosgrave @NewsRuby]

Appeal for facts: For the period 1923-68 the (say) 4 most important contributions, statements, appeals, resolutions, communiques, initiatives, speeches or articles by Southern Irish politicians to highlight, to address or to alleviate the democratic deficit in Northern Ireland

[Daniel Lambert @dlLambo]

As our Taoiseach tells us to shut up and play football against Israel....their army is illegally kidnapping Palestinian national team players.

#StopTheGame

[Daniel Lambert @dlLambo]

Genuine question

The Irish government has formally concluded that Israel's military actions in Gaza constitute genocide.

Yet Coimisiún na Meán still requires all broadcasters to give "balance" to position of the ones committing the worst acts known to humanity.

How is this??

[Glenn Diesen @Glenn_Diesen]

There is a strange development in which academics of international politics are expected to publicly condemn adversarial countries before they are allowed to participate in public discourse. The complexity of international politics is reduced to a moral question of good versus evil, and academics must make moral declarations before even discussing facts, history, strategy, and interpretations. Academics should explain why states behave as they do; they are not moral validators.

What value does it bring to an analysis if the analyst "condemns" one side? After Russia invaded Ukraine, the former Norwegian foreign minister actually argued that "this is not the time to understand, but to condemn". This ridiculous position is pushed on academics. However, understanding is not endorsement, explanation is not advocacy, and ignorance is not strength. I argue it is in Russia's security interest to push NATO away from its borders, it is in Iran's interest to control the Strait of Hormuz, and it is in China's interest to create a new international economic architecture. This is not advocacy, nor is it a normative position about how the world should work; rather, it is a recognition of how the world actually works.

An academic should examine interests, capabilities, and strategic calculations that produce such policies—not participate in ritualised declarations of virtue that contribute absolutely nothing. Furthermore, moralism and condemnation often lead to a lack of understanding and increased conflict. When the conclusion is always that the good guys are confronting the bad guys, then the solution is always "peace through strength", "weapons are the path to peace", and defeating the latest reincarnation of Hitler. If you want war, condemn the other side as pure evil. If you want peace, the first step is to understand the other side.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

It always astonishes me how there is virtually ZERO public debate - or even public awareness - in Europe about the decisions that will most shape ordinary people's lives.

These days, the EU is drafting a new anti-China legal framework where - quite literally - the more affordable and competitive Chinese products are, the more illegal they'd become.

You'd think EU citizens would want to be informed about such things - as it couldn't be more consequential for their prosperity.

Yet I bet virtually no EU citizen is even aware of it, beyond a vague sense that there is some sort of trade dispute going on.

So what's going on exactly? It all centers around a new legal instrument the EU is drafting called the "overcapacity instrument" (https://t.co/mNpCMudYyS).

First of all, the very notion of "overcapacity" is pretty ridiculous to begin with, especially the way it's being defined by the EU, as it basically means being competitive enough to export.

By this definition of "overcapacity," pretty much every European industry that's ever run a trade surplus - German cars, French wine, Italian fashion - has been guilty of "overcapacity."

I'm not even exaggerating: if you read this study by the EU Parliament on "Industrial overcapacities, with a focus on China" (https://t.co/TcwEBoL8mD), they define "overcapacity" as building more capacity than your domestic market can absorb. So the moment you build capacity to export abroad, you're in "overcapacity."

Utterly ridiculous.

And what this "overcapacity instrument" is about is creating a permanent legal mechanism for the EU to block Chinese competition across whole sectors of the economy, if they happen to be in "overcapacity."

In effect, this means that if China is competitive globally in a given sector in such a way that it exports a lot, that's proof of overcapacity, and legally it'd mean that the entire sector can be restricted from the EU market.

Which means it really, factually, is a legal framework where the more affordable and competitive your products are, the more illegal they become.

Which is a CRAZY economic concept! 🤦‍♂️

Please note that it's different from the anti-subsidy legal instrument, which the EU has already put in place in 2023 (the "Foreign Subsidies Regulation": https://t.co/SvPKFyN0zo).

This "overcapacity instrument" would be above and beyond this: it wouldn't even matter if a particular sector was subsidized by the Chinese government or not, the mere fact of its competitiveness in exports would be grounds for restrictions in the EU.

It doesn't take a genius to understand how badly this could impact everyday people: this is European consumers being forced to pay more for worse products by law, so that uncompetitive European firms don't have to improve.

Politicians frame it as avoiding a "China shock 2.0" but really this is choosing an even steeper self-inflicted decline than is already the case, where EU citizens would subsidize mediocre EU companies that would have even less pressure to catch up. It's a hidden tax: subsidies for uncompetitive firms paid by consumers instead of governments, which in turn makes them less incentivized to become competitive.

The first "China shock" did de-industrialize Europe somewhat, but at least it made things cheaper for European consumers. If this becomes Europe's response to a second "China shock" not only it'd make everything more expensive but it'd do nothing for EU industry: you don't become competitive by banning the competition...

Look at China itself: the way it industrialized was NOT by banning Western firms but on the contrary by welcoming them strategically and learning from them. You learn to compete by... competing, duh!

What I find most shocking in all of this isn't even the policy itself - you can make arguments for and against protectionism, and reasonable people can disagree.

What's shocking is that virtually no European media outlet is explaining any of this to the public. This is unarguably one of the single most consequential economic decisions the EU will make this decade, affecting the price of everything, and it's being drafted in near-total silence.

No newspaper is running the headline "EU plans to make Chinese goods illegal if they're too affordable" - even though that's essentially what's happening.

But that's what you call a "democracy" with "freedom of expression" these days apparently...

[Daniel Lambert @dlLambo]

Most remarkable thing about #StopTheGame Campaign is how it's simply about right & wrong.

One side: Majority of Irish football community/public who see brutal apartheid & rules breaches.

The other: FIFA, UEFA, Irish Govt & Zionists who tell us to turn a blind eye & play a game

[Daniel Lambert @dlLambo]

@AnMailleach That you actually teach students is terrifying.

[Nury Vittachi @NuryVittachi]

EU COMMISSIONERS WILL MEET in Brussels later today (Friday 29 May) to find ways to stop their citizens buying affordable Chinese goods.

The plan: slap quotas on imports from China to force long-suffering residents of Europe to go back to paying high prices for local goods.

Leaders are angry that Europeans have been happily paying up to 40 per cent less for a range of Chinese goods, from machine components to medicines, cars to clothing, and so on.

This is, of course, precisely how capitalism works, with competition forcing businesses to become more efficient.

But capitalism is bad when China does it, so the EU is leaning towards quotas, or even Trumpian tariffs, since they worked so well in the United States (sarcasm alert).

.

EXPORTS = OVERCAPACITY

To achieve this, EU commissioners are taking another page from the US handbook. Goods the west makes for export are “exports”, which sounds fine, while the goods China makes for export are “over-production” or “over-capacity”, which sounds bad.

Each of the 27 member states will today bring examples of popular Chinese goods in their nations, to be dubbed “over-production” and fought with new quota rules.

The plan is to make an aligned plan which will then be submitted to the EU Summit on June 18.

.

REAL PROBLEM IS ELSEWHERE

In reality, of course, Europe’s problem is that it never had any kind of firewall to enable it to grow its own next-generation companies, lazily relying on US firms, which now dominate the tech scene, and is infecting most other businesses.

At the same time, European businesses started importing goods from China (and making items there), because Chinese factories were in the sweet spot for price and quality.

That system basically worked until the US worked with UK and EU leaders to do their usual fearmongering thing—“The Russians plan to invade Europe and the Chinese want to take over the world! Sanction them! De-couple! De-risk!”

This was blatantly false gaslighting, but leaders of all 27 EU nations, plus the UK, immediately started diverting public cash to militarization, and started issuing sanctions at competitors of the US.

.

LONG-TERM PLAN

The not-very-secret US Department of War (formerly Defense) plan, now more than a decade old, has been for the US to physically attack Venezuela and Iran and China and Cuba, while Europe attacks Russia with sanctions and economic weapons.

In all cases, words like “deter” and “contain” are used to blame the victims.

A clearly better option would be to work towards peace, rather than war. But in today’s western world, that choice is never on the menu.

[☀️👀 @zei_squirrel]

John Mearsheimer: "It's not just Israeli leaders who support the genocide. You don't see any protest among the Israeli public. It's shocking. It's sickening. You have to file all this under the Nazification of Israel. They are like the Germans under Hitler."

[Niamh Ní Cheallaigh 🕊🇵🇸🌻🇮🇪♿️ @CheallaighNiamh]

How many Western journalists does it take to change a light bulb?

We don't know because Israel and the US haven't told them yet.

[Double Down News @DoubleDownNews]

BREAKING: Israel dismisses IDF top lawyer Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi for leaking video of Israeli soldiers raping Palestinian.

Minister of Defense of Israel Israel Katz threatens her with 'imprisonment for many years" & calls her actions "a grave blood libel against heroic IDF fighters."

Rape victim suffered ruptured intestine, severe injury to anus, lungs & broken ribs.

Israelis rioted for the right to rape, ministers defended rapists and one rapist became a TV celebrity. All charges were dropped.

This is Israel

[Mats Nilsson @mazzenilsson]

Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt's 1948 letter to the New York Times: They saw the creation of a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine at the expense of its indigenous Muslim and Christian population as a profound injustice and moral catastrophe.

Einstein and the other signatories explicitly compared Begin’s Herut (Freedom Party), born from the Irgun, to Nazis and Fascists, warning that their ideology of racial superiority and violent ethnic nationalism posed a grave danger to the moral and political future of the new state.

- - -
Full text of Einstein and Hannah Arendt's letter to the New York Times:
TO THE EDITOR OF THE NEW YORK TIMES
December 2, 1948
Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our time is the emergence in the newly created State of Israel of the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.
The current visit of Menachem Begin, leader of this party, to the United States is obviously calculated to give the impression of American support for his party in the coming Israeli elections and to cement political ties with Zionist elements in the United States. Several Americans of national repute have lent their names to welcome his visit. It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the world could condone, even by silence, the appearance of such a party in Israel.
Within the Jewish community they have preached an admixture of ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority. Like other fascist parties, they have been used to break strikes, and they have encouraged demoralization among labor. In their actions they have been marked by cruelty and contempt for human life.
During the recent past, they have systematically terrorized the Arab population, attacked Jewish settlements, and sabotaged the rescue of displaced Jews from Europe.
A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. This village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands, had taken no part in the war and had even fought off Arab bands that wanted to use it as their base. On April 9 (1948), terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants — 240 men, women, and children — and kept a few of them alive to parade through the streets of Jerusalem.
Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed, and the Jewish Agency sent an apology to King Abdullah of Transjordan. But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of it, widely publicized it, and invited foreign correspondents to view the corpses and the ravaged village.
The Deir Yassin incident exemplifies the character and actions of the Freedom Party. Within the Jewish community they have attempted to institute a reign of terror, have beaten up Jews who opposed them, and have, by gangster methods, terrorized the population.
It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the world could condone, even by silence, the appearance of such a party in Israel.
The undersigned therefore take this means of publicly presenting a warning to the American people concerning a danger to be found in the Freedom Party in Israel, a danger to which the leadership of Menachem Begin gives the greatest emphasis.
(Signed):
Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook, Rabbi Jessurun Cardozo, Irma Lindheim, and 22 other Jewish scholars, writers, and public figures.
(Published December 4, 1948, in The New York Times.)

[Anadolu English @anadoluagency]

Global Sumud Flotilla activist Dr. Margaret Conolly condemns Israeli interception of aid ship and calls for sanctions on Israel

➖ ‘What we experienced in the last three days was barbaric, cruel, ugly and violent. I never saw such ugly, ugly control by an army’

➖ ‘They are locked, 2.3 million, into an open concentration camp’

[Des Topia @LeftistDad]

On the Six One News Minister McEntee spoke about being horrified at the treatment of Irish citizens and called for sanctions on Israel.
Two hours later she voted against sanctions on Israel.
Enough said.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

Kaja Kallas who - I kid you not - is supposed to be the EU's top diplomat, just described China as a "disease," specifically "cancer." 🤦‍♂️

Just as the entire rest of the world - including Trump's US - are deciding to re-engage with China, the EU prefers to insult them.

Why would China be "cancer"? Because, in Kallas' own description, their companies are more competitive and this forces what she describes as a binary choice for the EU: "morphine" - subsidize EU companies - or "chemo", become more hostile to Chinese companies.

Or maybe, just maybe, it's not binary, and if there's any cancer eating away at Europe's future, it's precisely Kallas' mindset - the reflex to call "disease" what is simply someone else doing a better job.

[Daniel Lambert @dlLambo]

The outrage shown by world leaders towards the treatment of the flotilla activists is right and proper.

What is unforgivable is their total lack of any actions/words on the unimaginably brutal treatment of the thousands of Palestinian men women & children taken hostage by Israel

[Daniel Lambert @dlLambo]

Seán Farrell @trocaire CEO - Irish Times.

Gaza is gone from the news, but Palestinians are still being slaughtered, kids left in tents full of rats & disease.

Trócaire is state funded.

Still our leaders say we must play Israel.

We must not and should not.

#StopTheGame

[BUCHANAN: Dublin Time Machine @RobLooseCannon]

With former Taoiseach and professional parasite Bertie Ahern back on the grift again trying to capitalise on public concern about immigration and the housing crisis, let's remember exactly what this chancer did to our country. And unlike Bertie, the Dublin Time Machine has all the receipts!

The Mahon Tribunal, the Moriarty Tribunal, the Philip Sheedy affair each exposed Berties brown envelopes. As Minister for Finance in the early 1990s, he received IR£39,000 from a circle of businessmen. He described these as "dig-outs" from friends during a messy separation.

When the payments surfaced publicly in 2006, Ahern was dragged into the Mahon Tribunal, set up to investigate corrupt payments in planning. Over years of questioning, the tribunal discovered lodgements of IR£165,000 into accounts linked to Ahern and his associates. His explanations, horse-race winnings, generous landlords, even foreign exchange quirks, were dismissed as "untrue," "bizarre," and in many cases simply impossible.

He claimed he operated in cash during his years as Minister for Finance, using a building society account rather than a standard bank account. Our Minister for Finance! Imagine the level of contempt for Irish citizens you need to have to say that with a straight face under oath.
The Tribunal stopped short of branding him corrupt. But in March 2012, its final report concluded that Bertie failed, on 22 separate occasions, to truthfully account for the origins of his money.

He resigned as Taoiseach in May 2008, and 4 years later quit Fianna Fáil before they could expel him. But this was only one layer of slime. When the Moriarty Tribunal examined Charlie Haughey's finances, Ahern's name surfaced too. He admitted as party treasurer he signed blank cheques for Haughey "for administrative convenience."

If the money scandals painted Ahern as evasive, the Sheedy affair made him look utterly compromised. In 1998, Ahern contacted a judge about the case of Philip Sheedy, a businessman convicted of dangerous driving causing death. Sheedy, a friend of Ahern's circle, was granted early release under murky circumstances, and two judges subsequently resigned over the affair.

The public backlash was immediate, feeding the sense that connections mattered more than justice in Ahern's Ireland.
If Bertie's personal finances were shaky, his stewardship of the nation's finances proved catastrophic. Under his watch, tax breaks for developers and light-touch regulation allowed a property bubble to balloon. When it burst in 2008, the Irish economy collapsed, dragging an entire generation into debt and unemployment.

Ahern later admitted that his decision to create a Single Regulatory Authority in 2003 was a mistake. In his own words: "If I had a chance again I wouldn't do it." It was a staggering confession, given that the collapse of Ireland's banking sector was rooted in precisely that structure.

Then there was the pension. Having once promised to forego part of his estimated €150,000 annual pension during the crash years, Bertie quietly took it back!

Incidentally, this "man of the people" is making a fortune on the international speaking circuit selling lectures. He has been listed with agencies such as Thinking Heads, with fees for private international engagements advertised in the range of $30,000 to $40,000 per appearance. Whether those are confirmed rates or agency wishful thinking is another matter. I have no idea if or what he charges for his "lessons of the Good Friday Agreement" ones.

So when you see him trying to rehabilitate his image remember him in that pathetic 2010 advert for the News of the World, crouched inside a kitchen press with tea and biscuits. A shameless shill willing to whore out the dignity of the office of Taoiseach for a few more shekels to add to his already substantial fortune. An embarrassment to our nation, a greedy chancer without a shred of integrity or ounce of respect for the Irish people!

SOURCES FOR ALL IN COMMENTS

[Val Cosgrave @NewsRuby]

Interesting thread & very much worth a read

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

Every year, this has to be the one report I look forward to the most: the Democracy Perception Index, compiled by the Alliance of Democracies Foundation (in partnership with Nita Data).

In fact, my yearly thread on the report is apparently such a tradition that, this year, its lead researcher personally sent me the report with this message: "every year, I look forward to your thread about it!". That's how you start wondering whether you tweet too much 😅

Why do I like this report so much? A few reasons:

1) The Alliance of Democracies Foundation, the organization behind the report, cannot even remotely be suspected of being some sort of anti-West outlet: it was started by an ex-NATO Secretary General (Anders Fogh Rasmussen) and its stated purpose is "to unite world democracies"

2) It's surprisingly honest and the methodology is actually democratic. Unlike other reports on democracy the scoring isn't done by the report's authors (like the report by Freedom House or The Economist's "Democracy Index"). It simply asks people what they think and, when it comes to democracy, that's kind of the point 🤷‍♂️

3) I love the expression "perception is reality" because, like it or not, what people believe about their system is what determines its legitimacy. A democracy that nobody actually experiences as one can't credibly claim to be one. And conversely, a so-called "autocracy" that its people overwhelmingly believe is actually a democracy might... actually be a democracy.

Anyhow, this year's edition did not disappoint. The data is absolutely fascinating and frankly, a little terrifying. So here you go: my thread on the 2026 Democracy Perception Index 🧵

[Dr Harold News @DrHaroldNews]

Micheál Martin says early estimates suggest that constructing a nuclear power plant in Ireland would cost roughly the same as building two bike sheds.

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

IN PRAISE OF FRANCESCA ALBANESE

There is a question that visits me in the small hours, when sleep will not come and the mind turns over old stones. The question is this: “What would I have done in the 1930s, on the morning after Kristallnacht?"

Not what I say I would have done. Not what I hope I would have done. But what would I actually have done—when the trains began to run, when the neighbours grew quiet, when the cost of decency became the loss of everything?

Most of us, I think, would have done little. Not from malice. From fear. From the soft, creeping conviction that someone else will speak, that the situation is complex, that we must be 'reasonable'. Lest we forget, the ordinary is the extraordinary's alibi. And how we have clung to that alibi! How we still cling to it!

And then, every once in a terrible while, someone appears who does not cling. Someone who steps forward when others step back. Someone who speaks the name of the thing when everyone else is busy naming something else.

Francesca Albanese is that someone.

She stands before the world—alone, unarmed, armed only with law and language and a rare courage—and she says what the centrists will not say, what the foreign ministries will not say, what the editorial boards will not say. She says: "This is a genocide. And we are watching it happen."

Do not tell me that is hyperbole. Do not tell me the term is contested. She has not used it lightly. She has used it as a physician arrives scientifically at a diagnosis—not to wound, but to warn. Not to inflame, but to name.

And for that, they have come for her. Oh, how they have come for her. Smears. Investigations. Vicious editorials. Frozen bank accounts. Dispossession of the only apartment she had ever owned. The machinery of the respectable turned to crush her. Because the respectable cannot abide what she represents: a mirror held up to their complicity.

Let us, once again, travel back to the 1930s. Back to the few who stood up when the trains began to run laden with Jewish people.

There was Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese consul in Bordeaux. He defied his own government. He signed thousands of visas, by hand, for hours, until his fingers bled. He saved more lives than Schindler. And he died penniless, disgraced, erased.

There was a German officer in Warsaw named Wilm Hosenfeld. He hid a Jewish pianist in the rubble. He did not save thousands. He saved one. But that one—Władysław Szpilman—carried the memory. And memory is "the only haven from which we cannot be expelled."

There was Raoul Wallenberg. There were the villagers of Le Chambon. There were the anonymous, the quiet, the furious few who said: “Not on my watch.”

Francesca Albanese is their heir. Not because she carries a gun. Not because she hides refugees in her basement. But because she does something equally dangerous in a world that has perfected the art of not seeing. She sees. And she speaks.

She does not speak as a diplomat. Thank Goodness she doesn't! Diplomats have given us the language of "there are arguments on both sides" and "restraint" and "proportionality." Diplomatic language is the perfumed grave of moral clarity. No, she speaks as a jurist. As a human being. As a woman who has looked into the abyss and refused to call it a "complex geopolitical landscape".

Edna O'Brien once described a character who "had the recklessness of those who have already lost everything worth losing." Francesca Albanese has not lost everything. She has her dignity, her office, her voice, her family. But she has calculated the cost of speaking truth to power. And she has decided that that cost is infinitely less than the cost of silence.

What is that cost? Let us name it. She has been called antisemitic—she, who stands on the ground of international law forged in the ashes of Auschwitz and the fires of Nuremberg. She has been called a conspiracy theorist—she, who cites every source, every footnote, every UN resolution. She has been called naive—she, who understands better than most the machinery of realpolitik.

These accusations are not arguments. They are the spittle of the threatened. Because Francesca Albanese threatens something very precious to the powerful: the right to commit atrocity without being named.

Friends, the 1930s did not arrive with jackboots and pogroms on day one. They arrived in small increments. With "reasonable" restrictions. With "proportional" measures. With the silence of the respectable.

We tell ourselves that we would have been different. That we would have been Sousa Mendes. That we would have been Wallenberg. But most of us, I fear, would have been the neighbours who later said, "I didn't know."

Francesca Albanese knows. And she refuses to pretend otherwise.

So let us praise her. Not with statues or awards she does not seek. But with something harder: with our own refusal to look away. With our own voices, raised in places that are safe for us but dangerous for her. With our own bodies, if it comes to that.

A brave woman, who was injured while demonstrating outside a US nuclear military base in 1982, the infamous Greenham Common, had told me that "the heart is a hunter for what it cannot have." But I say the heart is a hunter for what it will not lose. And what we will not lose is the memory of those who stood up when standing up cost everything.

Francesca Albanese is standing up now. In our time. In our name. Under our indifferent sky.

Let us stand with her.

Not tomorrow. Not when it is safe. Now.

[Extract from a speech in Athens on Sunday 3rd May 2026]