Irish political commentator John McGuirk has started a new substack and podcast with long-time collaborator Sarah Ryan, both of which can be found here. One of the first pieces, written by John rather than Sarah, is about his feeling that his initial take on the Lindsay Clancy case was wrong. Clancy (if you’re one of the few people on the planet who doesn’t know) is a mother from Massachusetts who was on trial for murdering her infant children in 2023, though the specific details of the case are so much worse than even that implies. Clancy has admitted the murders but in her defence claimed that she was driven to it by severe post-partum psychosis and bi-polar disorder, both of which she alleges were mismanaged in various ways. (She and her husband have filed malpractice claims against her medical providers.) As I write this, the judge has just declared a mistrial; it seems a single juror was refusing to vote with the others. I know nothing about the intricacies of insanity pleas or reasonable doubt in Massachusetts law, so you can read presumably more informed takes on why the case fell apart here and here.

John’s article notes that a lot of the online reaction against Clancy from the right was based on an instinctive contempt for liberal women, and amplified by the nuttiest exculpatory takes on the case, which mainly revolved around claiming that her husband was the real killer. As any good or interested commentator should, he steelman’s the case for supporting Clancy rather than attacking it at its weakest, and finds that there’s something there. He also notes what he believes is the hypocrisy of commentators who minimise the role of her medication her case, who often were people who were most critical of the role of big pharma in exploiting covid for profit. I don’t agree with all the points that he makes but they’re all worth considering and I’m grateful he gave me pause before I pressed publish on an article I had already been planning to write.

However, at the start of his article he says of the public and vocal support Clancy garnered:

… to a great many people, including me initially, this seemed obscene: There are lots of things in this world that you can spend your energy and money on, and it instinctively seems a little strange to spend it on the defence of somebody who, by her own admission, killed three toddlers. Your sympathy, I thought, should be with the dead kids who met awful deaths than with the woman who killed them.

I hope John takes this in the jovial spirit in which it’s intended but, to quote Spinal Tap, there is such a thing as way too much fucking perspective. Getting down into the specific details of this case does cause one to lose track of what’s actually important and interesting here, which is why we should ask these questions at all, since we never normally would for a crime of this type? People lose their grip on sanity and do terrible things all the time, and we can and do accept the complexities of what led to them to that point without seeking to celebrate them as loving, heroic, and wronged; we never make their defense into a pink festival of girl power as her supporters, who are not small in number, did in this case.

In general where a person has murdered their infant children or committed an equivalent crime and it’s clear they are guilty, people tend to be too self-conscious about appearing impious about a tragedy to be too supportive of the killer. It’s good and normal to be repulsed and weirded out by that breach of normal human decency, and the only interesting thing about this wretched affair is to ask why in this case that taboo was broken so widely, unashamedly and casually. It’s unfortunate that due to well known online incentives, the worst examples of very normal and mainstream people identifying with Clancy in an inappropriate way were curated by chud accounts on twitter, tiktok and other platforms, but this doesn’t make them any less true.

All this becomes clearer when you look at other, similar cases of people murdering infant children where mental health issues were at play. Two that have attracted attention online post-Clancy were those of John Battaglia and Timothy Ray Jones Jr. In the case of Battalglia (who murdered his daughters aged 6 and 9 - he was convicted and executed very quickly):

… there actually was a significant suggestion that he suffered from bipolar disorder, and it was a major pillar of his defense team’s strategy. During the punishment phase of his 2002 trial, multiple forensic psychiatrists testified that Battaglia had suffered from bipolar disorder since his mid-to-late twenties. His defense experts argued that the killings occurred while he was experiencing a “psychotic rage” or a severe manic episode. Even the state’s rebuttal psychiatrist conceded that Battaglia likely had a mild form of bipolar disorder, alongside antisocial and narcissistic personality disorders

The case of Timothy Ray Jones (who murdered five children between the ages of 1 and 8 in 2014, and is now on death row) is even more similar. In that case:

… the defense presented extensive evidence that Jones had a severe genetic predisposition to mental illness (his mother had been institutionalized for schizophrenia for decades). Experts testified he had schizoaffective disorder and was experiencing a severe manic break.

(Both the explanations above were provided by AI.)

Again - the question is not whether we should be more sympathetic to people who kill their young children, but why some would choose to do so extravagantly in the Clancy case when we didn’t do in ones such as those quoted above. One answer is that there were extenuating circumstances in the Lindsay Clancy case, and I get that, but don’t find it persuasive. Every horrific and tragic crime is horrific and tragic in its own way; by definition, (I mean this in a human sense and not legally) a person who does this is not right at some fundamental level. The fact that you can locate some important complication suggesting that someone should receive more leniency and understanding than we’re inclined to give them is not that surprising. In the Jones case described above, for example, his wife pleaded for leniency despite her children being murdered because she seemed to recognise that his underlying mental health issues had been exacerbated by his attempts to self-medicate. Many of these cases highlight why cases of mental illness are so troubling, which is that they inflame our sense (which is necessary to enable us to process the reality that such evils occur) that an identifiable individual must always be to blame, which means in turns that they can be caught, punished, made to suffer and so on. All that is fine, but again: that dilemma is present in the Clancy case it’s because it’s present in all such cases. There remains a standard that one does not wish to appear too understanding of the killer, as it implies a lack of piety or seriousness around the death of the child as the overwhelming moral consideration. That seems to have been disapplied in this case, and it’s why it repulses so many people.

The two cases I quoted above were men, and Clancy is a woman, so let’s talk about the gendered aspect of the reaction. Many videos and articles have already been made speaking to this; it’s unavoidable given how her supporters present themselves (carrying babies, dressed in pink, emphasising the commonness of negative experiences of motherhood). There are lots of cases of men providing the perpetrators of distinctly male crimes with support. If and when the recently-arrested Andrew Tate goes to jail or on trial, he will probably have his cheerleaders; Johnny Depp had plenty, so let’s steelman the idea that women are only doing something that the boys have been at for a long time. The difference is that anyone who supports Tate (for example) is/ will be a total loser, in purely factual terms. Any support he gets will be largely online and anonymous, or from disreputable grifters.

There are various reasons for that, but one of them is simply that people would be ashamed to show their support publicly for him because they are aware that it is low status, and are aware they have views that deviate so greatly from the normal structure of victimhood and sympathy that they’re only willing to speak them under cover of darkness. There are other factors at play too of course - it could be that in these cases, the personal stakes are lower, so there is less of an impetus to get together in real life and protest or to speak up under your own name. But that’s just a single factor and doesn’t overwhelm the entire point. The respectability of the people who have spoken out on behalf of Lindsay Clancy, and their unabashedness, and their sheer number is what is alarming, and needs explanation.

So I think there are a couple of things happening here. One is the relentlessness of online life, and the way it turns everything into a performance of dedication to one’s own ingroup, the more extreme the dedication to that group the better - it has it’s own incentives. This impacts in different ways on different groups. The perceived negative impact of this process on boys and men is well known; there is a whole sector of the economy dedicated to exploring that problem and addressing through often quite intrusive interventions, which are celebrated as a public good (see my article on the show Adolescence, linked below). But the fact that those think tanks exist, and that the attitudes of boys and men are such a focus of the misinformation industry (for example) is an indication that the powers that be think they know the texture of this problem as it relates to one gender, and are trying to get their arms around it.

What about women? If online toxicity causes them to behave in repugnant ways (as we know it does with everyone) - are we ready for that? Are they? In particular, are we ready for the way in which the native toxicity of the online environment interacts with women’s changing (that is to say improving) status as economic, cultural and political actors? We aren’t, and I think that most grotesque reactions to The Clancy case are morbid symptoms of that. It seems to me that Clancy’s most strident supporters are attempting to leverage an assumed entitlement to be thought well of, and to deserve sympathy, that in turn rests on an assumption of marginality and oppression that is not aligned to how the world sees them. The clash between the rising power of women as a group, the desire to leverage the cultural kudos of being powerless, and the willingness of other groups to tolerate that you doing that, presents a fluid situation. That’s why I think otherwise respectable commentators (for clarity I am not talking about John McGuirk) feel entitled to make arguments in favour of Lindsay Clancy, or to make excuses for her in a way they never would for any other child killer, because being a woman, she’s different. The dangerous unasked question is whether society at large still feels that way; because if it doesn’t, the reputational consequences will be very serious. Say what you want about men, but the toxicity of their online discourse is baked into how we see them and how they are treated by society. Unforgivable behaviour isn’t excused, it’s just already priced into their public reputation. Women on the other hand have a good name to lose by being seen to violate an existing, healthy moral hierarchy. The whole case feels to me like a tremor of a larger earthquake that has not yet hit.

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The Simpsons has a great scene in one episode where a Navy recruiter is explaining to Bart and Lisa that the service’s recruitment strategy works on three levels - subliminal, liminal, super-liminal. Subliminal is hidden messaging, liminal is direct advertising; to demonstrate “super-liminal” he leans out of a window and shouts “hey you! join the navy!” at Lenny and Carl, who are idling on the street. I always think of the idea of superliminality when it comes to Reacher, the phenomenally successful Amazon Prime series (based on a similarly successful series of novels) about a wandering army tough guy, which returned to streaming for a fourth series this month.

How popular is Reacher, exactly? Most of the stats we have are from Season 3, which was viewed by 54.6 million global viewers in its first 19 days, making Amazon’s most viewed original show. It was the first Amazon series to reach the #1 spot on Nielsen’s overall streaming charts. It consistently places in the top 10 streaming shows globally. It is notable for it’s international popularity, about half of the viewership originating outside the USA, particularly in the U.K., Germany, and Brazil. The show’s popularity in non-english-speaking territories put one in mind of the similar success of Charlie Chaplin and Mr. Bean - perhaps the only thing more universal than the hilarity of a man falling down is a man with big muscles punching the bad guy.

In any case, for anyone looking to analyse the wider meaning of this runaway hit, the lack of subtext is a kind of blessing. The show touches on so many of the most important political and social themes of our time, and the ones that are of most interest to this Substack, namely representations of men and “masculinity” in modern media and the idea of a cultural vibeshift versus the reality of it. Rather than hiding it under layers of meaning, the show’s creators kindly put this stuff right on the surface - often unbeknownst to themselves - so it would be rude not to take a look at what they’re saying.

It’s interesting to consider the show as a product of the Peak TV era because it’s a replica of a type of programme that was common at 6-8 O’clock on weekend evenings around the world between the 1960’s and 1990’s - light entertainment like Kung Fu or The Incredible Hulk. There is no reason that this couldn’t have been on any mainstream terrestrial channel at any time in the last 50 years, other than the length and number of the episodes, the expense of the production, the swearing and the violence. But none of those features are new - they are exaggerations of existing qualities that were already in these shows. As in so many other cases all these adult, prestige hallmarks do is draw attention to how throwaway the product is, rather than obscure that fact. With the exception of The Sopranos, The Wire and a couple of other shows, TV has quickly reverted to its sloppy mean except with a new range of cliches. There are still some shows out there doing interesting things or at least using the unique virtues of the medium. The Pitt and its single day seasons are a good example. It’s notable, and we’ll come back to the fact that, where those programmes have a political valence it’s the complete opposite direction to Reacher’s.

The kindest take on Reacher’s cultural import is that it represents a resurgence of an older kind of male-oriented pulp which existed in the past but which has all but disappeared 2026, something that was very action based but light on emotion. In the crime genre we can see this in the move (over multiple decades) away from hardboiled detective fiction (heavy emphasis on plot, atmosphere, ideas, language, procedural detail and technical information, and on brevity) and towards much more emotional stories, stronger on sympathy and empathy.

This lurch back in an older, nastier direction explains a lot about certain story quirks you see repeatedly in Reacher. It leans into a stylistic trope I call “everyone’s a sucker but me” - I think it originated with people like John Wayne, who always kind of a dick in his movies, which used his obnoxious to those around him as a short-cut way of indicating his toughness and independence. Reacher dunks on supporting characters in subtle and unfair ways, correcting them with his universal knowledge, making them the stooge to bounce his witty comebacks off. The best example of this was Russo on in season two as played by Dominic Lombardozzi. Russo is a cop but a hapless one, not as handsome or strong or dynamic as Reacher, and with the wrong end of the stick about the central case. The language of the show is clear that he is not the bad guy or a bad guy - he’s brave, honest, and a protector of the innocent. Yet Reacher is constantly mean to and dismissive of him, right up until the point that Russo is killed (a death Reacher is pretty directly responsible for) at which point Reacher somewhat hilariously tells everyone he kills “this is for Russo”.

This is a macro example of the key thematic thread of the show, which is a naked and slightly pathetic yearning on the part of the viewer to be identified with the guy who is not just strong but The Strongest, unbeatably strong, who knows everything and is right in every situation, to the point that the feelings and opinions of others become instruments for that central character’s achievements with no other function.

Reacher is pitched as being symbolic of The Vibeshift and that it is a right wing show, and that’s part of what makes it notable. Whether that’s true or not I think it certainly is an attraction for viewers - I do think part of the appeal to viewers of Reacher is that they believe it is implicitly anti-woke, that it represents a return to a time when men were men, a revival of the old-fashioned action hero and so on. But only someone who is half paying attention could think it meets that bill. Reacher has many of the exact features that its audience complain about in other media - an intentionally multicultural cast, “strong female characters”, and implicitly liberal politics used to communicate who is the good guy and who is bad. What does this tell us about the ideological demands, and indeed ideological consistency of the anti-woke viewer? That they are too inattentive to notice that the solution their preferred anti-woke programming is selling them is liberalism, but delivered by a white guy with big muscles who loves The Troops.

What all of this speaks to is the impermanence of the vibeshift as a cultural victory, and the hopelessness of something like Reacher as part of a cultural pushback. If we take it as true that Reacher is the Right Wing show of the late Peak TV era, what are the left-wing rivals in a qualitative and creative sense? If I pick TV shows I myself have watched recently it would be things like Furious and The Pitt. Both are also overt in appealing to a particular political sensibility and audience. The Pitt, as I wrote previously, is heavy-handed in it’s messaging, often laughably so, and Furious isn’t much better. But on the level of acting performance, scripting, visual quality (it’s sobering to compare the aesthetic richness of Furious to the “floodlit office cubicle” lighting approach of Reacher) and thematic complexity, there is simply no question that the calculatedly left-wing shows are the better ones in every sense. The only thing Reacher has going for it is the reduced emotional load; that’s not nothing, but the lib stuff has everything else. The point here about the political valence and value of the show. A true, deep vibeshift was never going to happen because the prospective right-wing audience don’t care about making something good that is also ideologically consistent, and wouldn’t even know such a thing if it was right in front of them. If you want good right wing/ conservative or non-liberal messaging or themes, you’re going to have to find it in the left-wing stuff.

Stepping back a little - what is strange and notable about Reacher, is not its political value but it’s Frictionless-ness. It’s strange to spend twelve hours in the shoes of a character who never truly loses a fight, who always knows everything, or when he doesn’t he instantly knows where to find an answer, who is never flustered or confused. In fairness to the new season they seem to have figured out that this is a problem and at least on this occasion he gets clocked in a couple of fight scenes, which hadn’t happened previously. But, that aside, why is it that people want and like something so free of ideas and dramatically inert? The first explanation is that it’s pure wish-fulfillment for people without a strong artistic impulse, who aren’t paying close attention and are consuming the show as edited fight-scene highlights on Youtube and TikTok. But I don’t think it’s just that.

Personally, I get it. For a show like Furious, its overwhelming purpose is to allow you to experience strong sympathetic emotions arising from interpersonal conflict, grief, betrayal, unfairness, victimisation, disenfranchisement, belittlement, pity, the experience of cruelty being inflicted on you, dismissal and so on. To be honest that’s also why I hate it so much - I would much rather, a hundred times more, watch someone be shot in the face close up than watch someone be publicly embarrassed. Like a lot of people who hate that stuff, it feels directly manipulative to me in a sleazy way that action isn’t; obviously action is manipulative in that it’s directing your attention and causing you to think and see particular things, but someone doing that with your sense of excitement is so much less gross than being coldly yanked around by your tear glands. As a counterpoint, for the large group of people who don’t enjoy that approach, you have Reacher, so the lack of artifice is the point. But the lack of sophistication can get exhausting, like listening to something with the volume turned way up all the time.

A good place to close is with the books, since it gives us a reference point to gauge if some level of complexity has been lost in the transition to TV. I don’t think so; like the TV show the Reacher books are all plot, all event. This is a back-handed compliment, but the kind of (to use Nabokov’s phrase) “ox-stunning fisticuffs” that both the TV show and the books are full of always works better visually rather than in writing - there’s no written version of a gunshot or a kick that could beat the filmed equivalent of those things. Qualitatively the books and the TV show suffer from a particular problem - which is not that they’re never good enough, but that they’re never quite bad enough. I’ve read the first 100 pages of five different Reacher books, always beginning with the intention of diving into a guilty pleasure and having to abandon it after an hour or two because it’s such a boring slog. The book character has all these strange character tics that are intended to make him sound wise and in control but actually sound like is a very out-of-touch but full of himself dad giving his bored adult children tips about how to live. In multiple books, he teaches side-characters that they can iron their clothes by putting them under their mattress as they sleep. In a number of others, his love interest is amazed and impressed that Reacher doesn’t wear a watch but always knows the exact time. To my knowledge Reacher never complains that if these kids just gave up the Avocado toasts they would be able to afford a house, but I’m sure the author has considered it. So in general, book-Reacher’s knowledge and capability often feels less like that of James Bond or Batman, and more like a middle-aged golf club bore leaning over the back fence and telling you about Sadolin wood-stain while eating an egg sandwich. The TV show is the same. Any flaws I point out in the show are baked into the books, including and especially the melancholy nakedness of it as a piece of wish-fulfillment for a certain type of older man. But then, they need their dreams too.

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A couple of weeks ago, late at night while I was home on my own, all the power in my street went out. Since this was in Ireland during summer, a place where true night never arrives, I wasn’t plunged into total darkness but something close to it. I had stupidly let the battery on my various devices run down (I’m bad for that) and so couldn't watch videos on my phone or laptop; I had to stay up and wait for my wife, who didn’t have her keys. Long story short, the only way I had to occupy myself for the two or so hours of the outage was lying on the couch listening to podcasts. This drew my attention to something I have become increasingly aware of over the last few months but mostly don’t focus on, which is how many podcasts are unlistenable without the accompaniment of a distracting activity.

That’s alarming because on a day to day basis I spend more time and (I would have said) get more enjoyment out of podcasts than I do out of any other form of entertainment/ content; as with many other people they have become a ubiquitous feature of my life in the last decade and I would have said the only pure positive development to come out of the cultural dominance of phones. How do we square the circle between how much we enjoy podcasts on the one hand, with how objectively low quality, unsatisfying, and for the world in general they are on the other. There is probably no form of content that I participate in so regularly, with which I have such a conflicted relationship, other than video games - and that’s really saying something.

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The hit Apple show Ted Lasso, which has returned for another season, is unusual in that it’s a programme about men doing a quite male thing - playing and managing in professional sports - and mostly written by men, but for women. As well as a mjority female audience, it skews towards the 35-49 age range, and is more white, coastal and highly educated than average (despite being about football it’s popularity in the UK is limited, so that’s coastal America).

So the gap between who watches the show and its frequent subject matter makes it worth studying. White, educated, younger-to-middle-aged women in cities are the practical and spiritual core of progressive politics. What do they think men’s problems are, what do they men should be, and what is the type of man they will accept?

As a main character, Ted himself is a folksy people-pleaser, emotionally attuned, gentle and encouraging. In season 4 he exists to enable the women around him; the plot is that he returns to his old club to coach the women’s team. Here is a review that accurately, I think, summarises what the season is about:

Among the most crucial is the chance to celebrate and champion women’s sports, while raising awareness of misogyny and gender gaps that athletes face in the real world. Five episodes in — in ways big and small, serious and lighthearted — writers thoughtfully address underfunding, lack of resources, pay disparities, low media attention, and other cultural biases.

You could fill two Internets with what Ted doesn’t know about coaching a second-division women’s football team, but he doesn’t doubt for a second that women are just as capable and worthy of playing the game as men. That unwavering belief, plus his relentless positivity, empathy, tenacity, and self-acknowledged “deeply ingrained white male privilege” make him an ideal coach and ally — not savior — to an underdog team with so much to prove.

These themes are of a piece with previous seasons; I went back and had a look at episode recaps of Season 2 to remind myself what it was that bothered me so much. There’s a the focus on therapy as a panacea (Ted is skeptical and uncooperative at first but the language of the show is crystal clear that therapy is universally applicable and good); the focus on social justice activism as a key motivator for the team as a whole and for individual players; the teary over-emoting and locker-room group hugs from players and male staff, for instance when one character breaks up with his on and off again girlfriend, or when another has an argument with his abusive father.

All of this is fine; if it’s written in a tone and covering subjects that women generally prefer, despite in the main being about men, then honestly who cares. But as a man, when I’ve watched the show, I constantly find myself thinking “no one would react like that, especially a hairy-arsed footballer”, and feeling that the show is referring to a moral outlook and set of priorities that is off-putting and unfamiliar to me; even as someone is at the least macho, least aggressive and most sensitive end of the normal male spectrum. Whatever the merits of the show as a piece of entertainment for its chosen audience I certainly wouldn’t recommend selling its vision of men as an idealised political programme to men themselves, and if I’d lost hold of them as a group it wouldn’t be the way to reel them back in.

I thought about Ted Lasso and my dislike of it quite a lot as I listened to Scott Galloway’s recent appearance on Ross Douthat’s podcast Interesting Times. Galloway is a businessman, investor, academic and podcaster who has lately made a role for himself as one of the chief commentators working the “Crisis of Masculinity” beat and proposing political solutions to it. Not unlike the writers of Ted Lasso this means presenting the preferred solutions of Progressive people and, being American, those of the Democratic party as applicable across the board. He presents himself as being concerned for men as a group, and while I take him at face value - there’s no reason to assume he’s being false - but he is also a party man, and all of his words have to be seen in that context. His question is never simply “how can we help men” without also being “how can we as progressives present a vision of men that fits them back into our standard policy platform and outlook”. It’s the clash of the two competing priorities, and their irreconcilable nature, that’s interesting.

In talking about how he came to the conclusion that men needed help, Galloway mentions something that you often hear from Richard Reeves, which is that he engaged with the Democratic party and found that men were the one group who were not taken seriously as a special interest, and in fact that there was active resistance toward doing so. Reeves talks about his version of this here. So Galloway mentions going to the Democratic convention and hearing people talk about every slice of society as worthy of uplift and attention except men, who must be excluded because of their historic privilege and because of Patriarchy. It’s self-evident to him that the thing to do is to slot men into the progressive moral system in the same way as other groups. He doesn’t ask what happens when someone's worldview is not not primarily based around wanting help or liking it - the idea of such a thing is nonsensical, or sinister. As a party man, his belief is never that a progressive outlook doesn’t suit men, and that it would need to change or change focus to better accommodate them. In the podcast he steers around and cannot confront the question of whether there is something that is psychologically deleterious to men to be thought of as a problematic, passive mass to be fixed or held up by a system.

Some specific examples. Around 12 minutes into the podcast he tries to define how men’s declining material fortunes as a problem that needs to be addressed. “The truth is… Beyoncé could work at Kentucky Fried chicken and marry Jay-Z, the same is not true of the equivalent man… women are judged unfairly on their aesthetics, young men are unfairly evaluated on their economic viability.” I’m certain that’s not true of Beyoncé, but let’s put that to one side for one moment. I’ve heard this argument a variety of times as an application of the Progressive outlook to men’s issues but have never heard Galloway or anyone similar ask the basic essential question - do men themselves believe it to be unfair to be judged in large part on their personal and economic achievements, and would they want it to be otherwise? I have never encountered a man who felt that way, or who felt comfortable complaining about this set up, no matter their circumstances. It’s not comparable to how women feel about being judged about their looks or femininity.

Men, in the main, think it’s fair to be judged on these things, or if they don’t think it’s fair they think it’s how the world is, and feel it’s proper and dignified to roll with it. They either want to be better at these things, or they have accepted grudgingly and perhaps with a certain amount of heartbreak that maybe they didn’t measure up to what they nonetheless feel is an objectively correct standard. This is a philosophical point, but it’s not a trivial one for Galloway or any other Progressive interlocutor. Men are happy to stick to their own moral standards, and they only object when the different standards of others, which are alienating to them, are universalised, and when they are asked to celebrate those standards as true. This may be more of a presentational problem than a structural one, but it’s important either way. I don’t feel Galloway or anyone else in his position has their arms around it.

If men think that being understood as a victim-stakeholder and passive recipient of aid is a degrading position, they don’t generally don’t protest about women’s position in a progressive system that sees them as a such a group, that because men think women are happy being thought of and treated that way; that’s women prerogative, and women’s problem if it’s wrong. Naturally most modern men also understand that there are really historic disadvantages women suffered from that still linger. What would men be like if they didn’t feel this way? Galloway protests (correctly) during the podcast about the patheticness of the incel movement (I don’t agree at all that it’s a movement - but whatever), and the way that its participants create an identity around helplessness, resentment, blaming the others for what are often your own problems. But I think he fails to acknowledge that for men at least, Inceldom and Progressive thought compliment each other perfectly and that there even may be a relationship between the two.

Men are unsatisfying subjects of a Progressive worldview, and that comes through when you look at how Galloway talks about them and women, and how differently he views the purpose of politics for each. A couple of references from the podcast. At 17:03 he notes how good it is that men have played a role in uplifting women and that “men should take pride in that and be the afterburners for our mothers and sisters and daughter’s success.” He later notes that he orients his conception of healthy manhood around Service and an idea of Surplus Value, which is that Men truly come of age when they are providing more to others than they are taking. It’s of course true that when I look at the happiest and most worthwhile and fulfilled men around me, they are people who have oriented their strength in service of others. But of course the same is true of the happiest, most fulfilled and worthwhile women I know, and we would never speak about women in these terms, or speak about women’s participation in politics as purely being about what they can provide to others. Later, Scott is careful to note that “women don’t exist to service men” - which again is true, but the contrast is interesting.

Finally, Galloway speaks of “Protectiveness” as a key characteristic that men should be encouraged to build in order to improve their lot, noting that “it’s a tragedy that that women don’t feel safe on the subway… women shouldn’t feel they need to cross the road when they see a young man, they should cross the road to get to a young man. Your job is to protect. Who breaks up fights at bars? Big strong men. Who starts fights? Insecure people who don’t like themselves.” This is all fine on one level - I hate violence and I don’t even disagree that being protective of others is a key way that men can provide value to others and thereby fulfill themselves. But again we see the occurrence of a key problem - equating strength only with protectiveness of others is a way of side-stepping the dilemma of what men want for themselves, and how progressive outlook can address that essential question.

The problem is not the idea of service and usefulness which holds a very strong appeal to men; the problem is that in a progressive world-view the purpose of politics is a therapeutic one of allowing marginal groups space to gain power, self-actualise and fulfill themselves for their own sake, not as a way of serving others. Men are still an historic oppressor group to be feared despite their recent failures, so a progressive outlook can never speak directly to their happiness, their fulfillment, their success except where it provides for women or some other group more worthy of consideration than men themselves. Even where men are targeted as a voter group it can only ever be done in a way that puts a philosophical burden on them - that burden being that political solutions tailored for them are only valid to the extent that they can be positioned as providing relief and support to other, more marginalised and historically oppressed (and therefore politically legitimate) groups.

There are a number of different places where we see this natural tension bubble to the surface - that of seeing men as both an oppressor group that progressive politics exist to liberate others from, but also as a voter group that progressive candidates can’t succeed without. Galloway keeps highlighting the biological inadequacies of men, in a way he never would with another group, and I can’t help but feel he does it with a degree of relief. So during the podcast we’re reminded that boys are less mature, have brains that develop more slowly, and are “less educationally fit” than girls. When I note he would never point out these kinds of basic biological limitations with women, it’s not a complaint - it’s just that it’s interesting and revealing. To be able to articulate men’s inadequacies comes as a relief because they allow a Progressive activist to position men as a victim class, but still one of inferior quality. Men can then be deserving of help but not in a way that is disruptive of the philosophical status quo, in which a member of an oppressor class being capable makes them dangerous.

Our modern conception of politics is that it’s about you, your success, your fulfillment - a cross between liberation, self-help, and self-love expressed through the ballot box. For the oppressed groups Progressive thought is oriented towards, it offers them support, endorsement, encouragement and nurturing and a confirmation that yes, everyone is against you, yes you deserve the world, no nothing is your fault. Everyone gets a fragment of that treatment, and it’s part of why that type of politics is successful - but men, by definition, can’t share in that. Now - no one knows better than men themselves that male strength and vitality is frightening, and that it does need to be corralled into some useful shape. Often that does come in the form of duty, self-sacrifice, obligation. And of course it’s true for most people that they find fulfillment by placing a centre outside themselves. But men are the only political group where their focus is expected to be on service alone, and I think it’s blinkered of people like Galloway (I’m less sure of Reeves) to think that men won’t notice that a double-standard is being unfavourably applied to them. The one thing that red-pill gurus and drop-shipping self-help scammers and online shitlords of various types understand is that flexing your strength (in whatever field) for its own sake is important, and can bring joy into one’s life. That’s not all there is to life, but it’s not nothing.

Galloway ends his appearance with some general blather about the need for men and women to put aside their burgeoning political differences and come together. Let’s not dwell on how we got here, where political tendencies are diverging; there’s plenty of blame to go round, and he tells us that “the genders have each done a great job of blaming each other for their own failures”. Oh really? I find this feint at evenhandedness, and treating men and women as equal political actors within a progressive framework that by definition must regard women’s political interests as more legitimate than men’s, a bit infuriating. If Scott says (or implies) with confidence that women blame men for their own failures, perhaps he can give us some examples? He can’t, of course. “Women aren’t going to flourish if men are flailing” is his final appeal as to why we need effective solutions to male-specific problems. But why should another group be your point of orientation, in a political worldview based around personal fulfillment and liberation? I’m sure Scott would agree that greater female inclusion in the political process was and still is about giving women room to self-actualise and be happy and gain their due share of power, and men’s function in the political process is to… what - help women do that? I don’t even care if it’s true, it’s just an unpersuasive message and men won’t be drawn to it. It’s a problem that is not easily solved.

Articles on Similar Subjects:

The 80th birthday party we had for my dad last week - it was wonderful and he’s in great shape, thanks for asking - has me thinking about the aging process and how my understanding of it has changed over the last few years. Watching as your parents age can be more insightful than your own subjective experience; it’s close enough for you to get a good look but distant that you don’t fully personalise it - though in the last few years I’ve gotten the fully personal side, too. One of my key takeaways of my forties is that while at a literal level I understood what old age meant and why that mattered, watching aging happen to myself and those around me has transformed and intensified my understanding in a way that I never could have predicted when I was sixteen or even twenty-six. Society does not prepare you for these transformations; in particular the process has inverted my understanding of Gerontocracy - why older people hang on to power the way they do, the ways in which our system has seemed in recent times to set youth and age against each other, and why.

The first surprise was that aging happens in a saw-tooth formation. I had thought that growing older would be smooth and regular; that you wake up every day having left a little more in the bed so to speak, that your capacities gradually shift, and to the extent you were aware of all this it would be akin to flipping through a photo album, with each picture showing you a little greyer, a little crumblier, a little softer. It’s not like that at all. Having seen it in action I realise now that you can (for example) be 60 for a few years, then retire or break a hip or lose a family member, and a year later have the mind, body and physical mannerisms of a 72 year old. This can happen more than once, and I should have guessed since it’s how aging works when you’re younger - it comes in spurts - but I didn’t. It can work in the other way too; you can be 45 and something really good can happen (a promotion, meet a new partner) and become 39 overnight. But the reality of life is these sudden jumps as a result of aging almost always happen in a negative way - piling on multiple years in an instant with a traumatic incident or change. I’m happy and healthy and have nothing to complain about, but Covid was one of those for me, as it was for many others; every plague year was worth two years or more of biological time, another item to add to the charge sheet.

Another thing that I didn’t realise about aging is how your relationship with ideas of possibility, potential, change and optionality. I never realised until I myself got older how much of a person’s self-worth and value to others was bound up in the idea that, like all young people, you are on the way to becoming something greater, bigger, better than you are. It never occurred to me that you come to a point where you simply Are, and you don’t have the excuse or lee-way or glamour of “becoming” anything. They don’t know it themselves but all younger people rely on potential as a way of getting themselves through life’s difficulties, and making the present a little more bearable. We think of the young as being preemptively dismissed but as you age you realise that people were cutting you all kinds of slack out of the respect for the sense of possibility and promise any young person naturally exudes. The idea that aging naturally closes off some paths of your life was a brand new concept to me. This isn’t simply about failure; every young person has dreams ambitions and plans that go in multiple directions at once - they can’t all be realised, in part because some of them are unrealisable, in part because they are mutually contradictory, and in finally (meeting a partner for instance) because it’s out of your hands.

Lots of the literature or media I had consumed during my life had made these points to me in one way or another, and I didn’t realise the point had gone over my head until I reflected on it later. I read Richard Price’s book Lush Life when it came out, and missed the point entirely. Price was a writer for The Wire, and also wrote Clockers and a number of other great crime thrillers with a social realist bent. Lush Life is about bourgeois-bohemian New York in the hipster era - central character Eric Cash is living as a “creative” while actually making all of his money from managing a restaurant. In the book he ruminates on this dilemma:

“So, what do you do?” Whenever people asked him, Eric Cash used to have a dozen answers. Artist, actor, screenwriter . . . But now he’s thirty-five years old and he’s still living on the Lower East Side, still in the restaurant business, still serving the people he wanted to be. What does Eric do? He manages.

That’s last part is a little joke, but at whose expense? He manages a restaurant; that’s what, in reality, he actually does and is, his pretentions to scriptwriting, acting, visual art and so on notwithstanding. The book ends with him accepting his life for what it is, which what happens to most people. This is a particular horror for content creators and artistically inclined people but you see it with everyone. Again - as a younger person you “know” that a mid-life crisis means you get half-way through your life, look around and think “is this all there is? Is this all I am?” but you don’t comprehend at all how traumatic that is, or why. You certainly don’t know that while one calls it a midlife crisis, what you experience in truth is a kind of mini-death, with certain possiblities being fully and finally closed regardless of whether they were load-bearing parts of your psychological outlook, with all that implies.

These mini-deaths are examples of another facet of aging unknown to young people, which are hard stops enforced on you by nature. The career and life-goal type ones I’ve described above are common. The Menopause is one of the most brutal examples of the other. I don’t think there’s any such precise biological transformation with men where nature permanently closes a door on you. But of course the experience of aging includes loads of these types of Finality Experiences, these mini-deaths, through illness, phsycial change, and the deaths of others around you.

Any twenty year old can tell you as part of aging “one day some people I love will be gone and I’ll miss them” but no twenty year old has processed what that means. It’s not that you miss them, it’s that they were removed from your life before you were finished. The trauma is in the introduction of the concept that there isn’t always more time, and that optionality and possibility are temporary conditions and won’t always provide an exit. Your options suddenly and permanently truncated before you’re ready, and you have to carry the burden of the sudden severing the rest of your life. The idea that it (whatever “it” is) wouldn’t happen might have been central to who you are. “He’ll reconcile with me eventually because he’ll see I was right”, or “I’ll forgive him in time because I’m a better person” - but suddenly “he” is gone, and that didn’t happen, so you have to re-evaluate who you are. That’s so much more than merely missing someone, or regretting an absence and I don’t think I could have understood before I myself began again to age.

I’ve said so many negative things about aging that I’m going to want to say one positive thing, which will seem contradictory but isn’t. One of the best things you learn as you age is that you can miss your shot, and it’s alright. One shouldn’t waste opportunities and there’s no sugar-coating a true loss, but only death is fatal. There’s such a thing as youthful pessimism - since the young see themselves as full of possibility, potential and life that can create panic and anxiety because you’re anxious to capitalise on it at every moment, and you catastrophise when things don’t go your way. One nice thing you discover is that while “I’ll never get this opportunity again” is literally true - that once a moment is gone, it’s gone - it’s substantially false because other opportunities come along in different guises, unexpected doors open up, and you learn that the thing you settled for is as good as or better than what you missed out on. I’m continually surprised and delighted by how many chances life gives people to turn things around, make amends, start again and so on. Life is full of second and third chances and no failure is ever a total disaster.

About the political implications of all this.

Thinking about old age, and how different and horrifying it is from what I thought it would be, has given me a different perspective on the problem of Gerontocracy. It is often seen as a war of age on youth, and motivated by a hatred and/or contempt of the latter by the former. It’s become common to hear talk of generational class warfare, that what has happened in the last while is a massive transfer of power and resources from young to old, and that a transfer of power than needs to happen in the other direction (here’s Jimmy Carr saying something to that effect, and Scott Galloway saying something similar).

So the impression you could get is that, in value terms, you have the olds on one side and the youth on the other side; that we centre old age and place little emphasis on youth. But of course the exact opposite is true.

The purpose of gerontocracy is to use power to extend the privileges of youth - the dynamism, vitality, energy, possibility - into old age. This includes “fight the man” style political stances, which are so often dominated by older people spiritually throwing their voices as young people; just look at the sea of grey and bald heads at No Kings protests, or at the counter-protests in response to anti-immigration riots in Belfast. I’m not saying that all left wing political activity by older people is pathological, some of it is entirely justified. But the motivation behind it is not purely benign. Not only do we regard the attitudes of youth as all-important but every part of how society is arranged facilitates the maintenance of them into old age. Longevity discourse, and the disembodied magic mirror of the internet and ubiquitous screen time all sit alongside each other and result in a maximal focus on preserving youth, a maximal ability to trick yourself that you haven’t lost it, and the maximal paranoia that you really have. The result is a culture that sees no purpose in old age other than using the resources and power during life to imitate and preserve youth and its privileges, by taking those things away from young people if necessary.

There are lots of structural reasons for gerontocracy, including that people who accumulate wealth and power don’t like letting it go. But philosophically, Gerontocracy is the logical conclusion of a society that regards youth as all-important, the qualities of youth as the central ideal in all thought and action, and regards old age as worthless, humiliating and terrifying. It is symptomatic of a society that has done nothing to prepare itself, psychologically, for the shadow of death entering its field of vision.

My dad on the other hand, luckily for both of us, has aged well. At his birthday we spent a long period reminiscing about the songs he played on guitar when we were growing up - like Irish men of every age, he was and is a great one for a sing-song and has a fine voice. My brother and I were recalling not just the early childhood classics of the Wheels on the Bus and We’re All Going to the Zoo Tomorrow but also a Hard Day’s Night and the Wild Rover. Yeah, my aunt chipped in, and added her recollection how he used to bang out The Boxer by Simon and Garfunkel, and really lean into “a come in from the whores on 7th avenue” line (to my grandfather’s consternation, apparently). And, she said, let’s not forget Leonard Cohen - Sisters of Mercy and So Long, Marianne - those ones were the definitive ones in his playlist. Now: I have never in my life heard my father sing a Leonard Cohen song. I didn’t know he knew any, and moody songs of that type aren’t what I associate with him. So we learned in this conversation that he had this whole range of songs he would play when he was younger, and he put those aside and developed another as he aged. In other words he did both the most interesting and hardest thing that a human being can do. He changed. Life! It can be done!

Other articles from me:

A link to the last Ireland update is here.

Mayo won the All Ireland Football Championship for the first time in 75 years in July, and yes, before you quibble, this absolutely was a seismic event and the biggest thing that happened in Ireland in the last few months. This isn’t a sports blog or even really a news one, but I’m going to talk about the game because there are few events that have occurred in the last decade that tie together so many strands about Ireland’s cultural/ demographic past, present and future in such a complex knot. The story was the top one on the Irish news for the two days after the match, and the alarming depth of feeling about the match in Ireland was a reflection of something elemental having been stirred in the Irish psyche. This joy and fascination was accompanied by an unarticulated, melancholy sense that this may have been the last gasp of an essential Irish monoculture.

Part of what gained the story international recognition is the idea that the team was suffering from a curse; legend had it the previous winning team of 1951 disturbed a funeral on their return home and would not win another championship until the last member of that team had died. This RTE story summarises why the curse history is phoney - the evidence being that no one mentioned it until the 1990s, no one who was present amongst the 1951 team was able to recall the events described, and various other verifiable factors that make it practically impossible (there were no funerals in the area during the relevant period; the team didn’t arrive home until late at night, long after any funerals would be over, etc etc). If the existence of the curse myth is testament to anything it is that Mayo’s run of losses in the final was so inexplicable, and an All Ireland victory so deeply longed for, that a supernatural explanation was demanded. I keep thinking about the fact that there’s a guy out there who cooked the story up; in order to perpetrate the bit effectively, his name and identity have been lost to time and he’s had no presence in the celebrations this week. Even if he revealed himself, who would believe him? Anyway: here’s to him.

The victory gained an unusual amount of international coverage, driven by the depth of feeling about it, some wild local radio commentary (“the curse is dead, press the nuclear button”), the lurid nature of the myth, and an unfamiliar sport suddenly pumped into people’s timelines. A lot of the external commentary got basic things wrong (I kept seeing people mis-state the number in attendance, what the sport actually was, the compensation offered to the players and so on). Here is coverage from The New York Times, German tabloid Bild, Australian TV station 7 News Sydney, as well as commentary from Joe Biden and Mark Carney.

The dilemma the game and the reaction secretly highlighted is that the GAA is the kind of essential and unique institution that modern Ireland desperately needs but cannot build, and is by default gradually dismantling. It was founded as an explicitly nationalist project (“Irishmen must choose between Irish and foreign laws” said founder Micheal Cusack). Over time it has removed or watered down some of it’s most overtly exclusionary tendencies - those include rule 27 which forbade members from playing or watching of foreign games, and the extant but sometimes suspended rule 42, which prohibits GAA infrastructure being used to host foreign games. The latter includes Croke Park, where the recent final was held. But this ethos - that the games represent something that is specific to Ireland that needs to be protected, prioritised and maintained - is still embedded in the organisation and is key to the public appreciation of it.

It can be hard to relate to an outsider the extent to which the 2200 GAA clubs, the billions of euros of value they generate, and the cradle-to-grave participation they represent forms a ubiquitous and essential part of Irish life. It is one of the key things that gives Irish life an essential texture, context and meaning. The ubiquity of GAA jerseys everywhere from Tronoto to Sydney to Koh Samui indicate that it’s the thing that Irish people take with them when they go abroad, and most keen on introducing foreigners to. Something that is understood but rarely articulated is that on a national level the GAA serves as essential proof of the reality of Irish national independence, a continuous reminder that Irish people dedicated their efforts to creating something that was unique to us, and purely ours, that was entirely uncompromised to the interests of outsiders which not only survived but became a national and historical success. This emotional attachment is regularly reflected in surveys in which the GAA appears near the top of the list of things people are proudest about in Ireland and that gives them the greatest sense of national pride.

Since the GAA and the sport it controls are so cherished and deeply woven into Irish life, and we live in a time of intense demographic change that demands stable pan-national institutions to serve as fixed points of identity - why not create more institutions like this? The dilemma the Mayo victory and its rapturous reception have highlighted is that we need the social cohesion that such institutions represent, and pay tribute to it, but would be repelled by anyone who proposed such a culturally specific and implicitly exclusionary project or organisation today. The official antipathy towards unique symbols of nationhood has become a recurring theme in the last few years; it includes Micheál Martin’s statement that the government “want nothing to do with a backward-looking idea of sovreignty” (as opposed to a multicultural conception of the same thing), the massive rise of Irish exemptions in education, and the panic at the reemergence of the tricolour as an nationalist symbol. Everyone understands that on the one hand, keeping the country stable and functioning as it changes requires GAA-type institutions, but on the other that the people who oversee that change are fearful and contemptuous of the feelings those institutions rely upon.

The reality of the GAA and cultural change in Ireland is that the latter has mostly been bad for the former, and presents an unresolved challenge to its existence. The press routinely report on forced club closures and mergers in small towns; this is at odds with the fact that we are in the middle of a population boom and is explained by the fact that, with notable exceptions like the Ó hAilpín’s, Lee Chin and Jason Sherlock, people from what are called non-traditional backgrounds are mostly not taking up hurling and football - despite the best efforts of the GAA itself. And realistically - it’s logical that an Irish nationalist sporting project would have limited appeal to people with shallower ancestral connections to the country. The other side is that the people who traditionally play these games are disappearing through internal and external emigration. That’s bad news for the institution itself, but also for a country that more than ever needs popular fixed points of common identity to hold on to as it changes.

To get back to the Mayo game for a moment. A thought kept occuring to me as I watched the international coverage, and that thought was this: “Ireland is real”. Despite the ongoing quest (sometimes from within, sometime from without) to deny the existence of Ireland as a historic nation, we are real, our culture is concrete, organic and vital and you weren’t crazy to think that it was. That rankles some people; one of the things that people highlighted in the aftermath was the England vs Argentina world cup match got higher ratings than the All Ireland final by a couple of thousand. While that seems to be true, I think that only someone not living in the country who didn’t witness the outpouring of emotion and the way it seemed to come up from some deep pit to envelope every part of national life, could think that meant the two events were remotely similar in their significance. One of the most exasperating things I saw was the tweet below, of some reacting with scorn now-famous footage of the man crying and collapsing to his knees at the final whistle.

This one example - there were a few like this. It is a familiar right-wing complaint about Sportsball and how participation in it represents a deracinated, anesthetising modernity, and a way to compensate or distract from the decline of meaningful identity and connection. This is a very basic misunderstanding. The GAA is probably the most powerful, vibrant, and beloved unique institution in Irish life. It *is* the Irish culture you’re talking about, in sporting form. If other country’s national games are run by oil billionaires from oriental tyrannies, if the bureaucracy of their sports have been taken over by psychopathic eurocrat conmen, if the people who play for their local teams have no interest in the locality, no connection to it, no love for it - that’s a You problem, as an Irish person I absolutely cannot relate. I’m sorry the connection between love of place, love of local culture, and sport has been disconnected in your country. It hasn’t in mine: not yet anyway. That’s not to say the GAA is in rude health: the idea that this was the last gasp of it is in the air, and that’s very sad. The crisis of Ireland is that we seem to have decided to change some very basic things about our country, and in order to do that we are burning through a millennium of accumulated cultural capital - the replacement of which is not only not happening, but at an official level the idea of doing so kind of scorned and looked down upon. The inevitable loss this will lead to is not going to go unnoticed, or unfelt.

Other news stories that caught my eye this month:

Seems like someone (“someone”) tried to cook and eat a dog in Ballymun.

A gang of teens (“teens”) rampaged over the Dublin seaside town of Skerries; an american woman living in Ireland was murdered in Kerry, and her killer fled to Jordan. On foot of the latter incident, the Taoiseach, with his trademark silver tongue and keen ear for the public mood, noted that the statistics on the murder of women in Ireland are “not going in the right direction”. These events were amongst the ones that prompted me to write this article during the month, which highlights (in spite if the taoiseach’s words) the grand, empty statements governments make about ending violence against women, while in fact doing everything they can to not only tolerate but encourage every type of social disorder with their policy decisions.

NAMA, the government agency established to dispose of property repossessed from developers during the crash, was finally wound up.

Oscar-winning singer-songwriter and mainstay of the Irish music scene Glen Hansard died in a motorcycle crash at 56 years old. His death was mourned by the usual Irish figures like Christy Moore and Bono, but also by international ones like Bruce Springsteeen and Barack Obama. I can’t say I was a fan of his music; his death resonated with me because he first came to prominence in Ireland playing the role of Outspan in the 1991 movie The Commitments (“Outspan” was a brand of orange, so that was a joke about his hair). As I commented previously about its sequel The Snapper, The Commitments was made 35 years ago but feels like it’s from 60 years ago, and to watch it is to experience a kind of melancholy cultural vertigo about the pace of irreversible change in Ireland in every area in that period.

Excavations continue at the mother and baby home in Tuam, Galway. I can’t help but compare the ongoing focus on this matter with the ongoing total disinterest in the current problem of children missing from care, and the fact that we know adults are lying about being children and placed in care alongside vulnerable kids. Is there something about Irish society that trends towards institutional abuse, cover up and societal denial, that the church (at its worst) was an extreme example of rather than a cause of? I think there is, but no one else seems to care, the people who are critical of the legacy of catholicism least of all.

More great work from Tomás O’Reilly this month, with this story noting that at least 35% people availing of the “Help to Buy” housing scheme are from outside Ireland. The significance of these statistics are that the government has continually adopted the contradictory positions that the impact of migration on areas such as housing and crime is not worth worrying about, but also that there’s no effect, and that data on it is not being gathered. This proves at the very least that the latter part is an intentional falsehood, which is being perpetrated because of how bad it looks, and because of what the government would be asked to do if they acknowledged the truth.

Articles on similar topics

Christopher Nolan’s movies are about fathers and sons. In Batman Begins, Christian Bale is driven to live up to the example of his father and tortured by the idea he has failed to do so; he’s kept on track by surrogate father Alfred who reinforces the moral lesson of his dead dad, and pulled off track by false mentor Liam Neeson. In Inception, Cobb’s central motivation is to get back to his kids - the story clearly comes from the mind of someone whose dad was away on business a lot when he was young, and who is also guilty that he’s spending all his time on location worrying about lens choices and not driving Sebastian to school (I have no idea what Nolan’s kids are called or what age they are). Don’t get me started on Interstellar - the key scene is literally a parent who ascended to the heavens watching from above as his most beloved child grows up without him. Jessica Chastain plays a daughter but it’s an established fact that it was written as a son and could be very easily gender swapped back and lose nothing, which says a lot, I think.

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For whatever reason all of my recent experiences with public disorder have revolved around the Luas, which is Dublin’s tram system. About 18 months ago the gate into St. Stephen’s Green immediately by the Luas stop became a locus for drug-taking and drug-dealing; standing at the stop you would occasionally see a mattress in the bushes. I noted at the time the gate and stop itself suddenly had a rotating cast of eight to ten addicts in situ at all times, hanging around waiting for someone, passing things between their hands, arguing with each other. At about the same time one of them attacked me at the stop - I was at the stop fishing around in my wallet for my travel card when he shoulder-charged me into my back, hard, and then screamed in my face for a few seconds before moving off. I had my earphones in (won’t make that mistake again) so I’ve no idea what he said - my main memory of the incident is that, as he screamed at me I could see through my peripheral vision the tourists at the stop suddenly and silently move away from us like a school of fish, or as though pushed by an invisible forcefield. Funny the things you remember.

And then the most recent one: about a week ago I was coming home from work on the tram at rush hour (heatwave - bumper to bumper in a metal petri dish, seething with sweat). A drunk middle-eastern guy was having a monotonous conversation on speakerphone at full volume. A local (gristly, hair in corn rows, grey skin) got on and began bertaing him in a manner that started at talking volume but then rapidly escalated in volume and nastiness, and spent about 20 minutes not quite screaming his head off but almost, telling the foreign guy he was scaring and annoying people, to fuck off back to his own country, you’re not wanted, we speak english here or Irish here, do you even know what Irish is, no one wants to hear it etc etc etc.

It’s not limited to the Luas - every trip into Dublin city centre that I’ve taken in the last 5 years has at least one incident like this, you are constantly surrounded by marginal people who appear to be on the verge of an explosion of violence, or by people whose behaviour edges into the personal space of those around them in a careless, irritating and intimidating way designed to provoke confrontation. If I was to characterise the vibe of the city it would be an air of simmering menace, and all this is wreathed in dope smoke, the stink of which has become ubiquitous in all public places in the capital in the last few years.

Dublin has its own particular problems but every major city in the world I’ve been to in the last few years is the same. One feels there’s a continuum that starts with people playing music through their phone on the train, moves through being visibly high by a playground, and ends with a stabbing. Every link on that chain has loosened. Public disorder and interpersonal violence feel as though they have skyrocketed in all countries post-Covid; governments either don’t know how to get to grips with it, or aren’t capable of doing so, or don’t care.

So it’s worth noting the areas where governments, activists and media are willing to use the kind of law and order rhetoric that the public like, and yearn for, and that used to be more common in a less touchy-feely political era. There are a couple, but the most obvious is how politicians talk about violence against women. The death of an American woman at the hands of her boyfriend in Killarney has brought this topic back in the news but it hasn’t been far from the headlines. The murder of Ashling Murphy in particular seems to be an inflection point. Starting from then, it has become routine for politicians to employ totalising and utopian rhetoric that is absent from all other public order discussions - suggesting violence against women is something we can and should hope to eradicate entirely, and that that is a realistic policy goal.

At the time of Murphy’s murder the then Minister for Justice Helen McEntee, launching the Third National Strategy on Domestic, Sexual and Gender-Based Violence (2022–2026) was titled “Zero Tolerance”, explicitly called for a “radical cultural shift (to) eliminate violence against women in all its forms…. Our North Star – zero tolerance – can only be achieved if we all work towards it.” At the same time her Government partner, green party Justice Spokesperson Patrick Costello called on the men of Ireland to “reflect on our own behaviour and to make the necessary changes in our lives to put an end to misogyny and violence against women in Ireland.” (Murphy’s killer was not Irish, by the way.) At the time it became a trope in Irish politics to refer to Murphy’s murder as as a “watershed” - not in the sense that we would redouble our efforts on this topic generally but that the move to fully end violence against women would begin here.

A war on violence against a vulnerable group is a valid political goal, and it’s sometimes important to speak as though the total solution of a particular problem is within reach, because to speak otherwise would seem to accept something unacceptable. What interests me is not the justice of a war to protect women, but how willing the government is to make utopian promises of one type of public disorder while ignoring, dismissing, and in fact through policy encouraging every other type.

It’s worth remembering therefore how the above contrasts with what happened during covid and after, which is that there has been a general increase in non-criminal social disorder in western cities since covid. Much of this contrasts with the reported statistics which state that violent crime is falling everywhere, but there is an increase in daily public incivility and social disorder that has changed how people experience Western cities since the pandemic. It starts at a very low level: nearly half of U.S. adults (47%) say the way people behave in public these days is ruder than before the COVID-19 pandemic. That includes 20% who say behavior today is a lot ruder. Commentators like Charles Fain Lehman have tried to parse the difference between what the figures say and how it feels by showing how a constant thrum of public disorder (which he defines as “the domination of public stress for public purposes”) creates psychological distress and feelings of a lack of safety amongst the public. He notes that Gallup found that 77 percent of Americans said they believed that crime was increasing. As in the US, so in Ireland; the general response to concerns about safety from politicians is that things are better than they used to be and you’re just wrong.

It’s especially hard to square the Hanging Judge tough talk from politicians about misogyny when so many of their positions seem to conflict directly with that talk, or undermine it. Obvious recent examples include the ongoing drive (with very uncertain support) to legalise drugs in Ireland; another would be this article in the Irish Times around the time of the Parnell Square stabbing, which sought to excuse the actions of the attacker as historically normal. Another obvious example: whether or not violence and disorder (including against women) are driven by immigration or not, it is simply true that a large amount of migration into Ireland is from countries with verifiably terrible cultures of violence against women, and no mainstream politician or commentator seems to particularly care. A clash of the list of Countries with Highest Lifetime Intimate Partner Violence with irish immigration and asylum statistics reveals that many nationalities listed appear in the most common groups of asylum seekers, immigrants or work visas issued in Ireland, reveals that countries who rank high on the first list (India, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Uganda and DR Congo) also rank very high on the second.

It’s therefore hard to square a generally how violence against women and the utopian rhetoric that has come to surround it, and that has become the default way of speaking about it, conflicts with the progressive goal of a criminal justice system which in all other areas regards seeking to understand and reform rather than punish as the morally superior stance, and one that generally regards harsh sentencing an oppressive tactic and seek structural answers to questions rather than reducing them to good and evil.

One of the interesting facets of all this is that it’s not clear that women are more lenient in law and order terms than men are. So while we might be tempted to make this about a gender war, and women’s increased power in the political sphere, it’s not as simple as that. It may be that women are in favour of harsher sentencing for violence against women and that the utopian talk is therefore meeting a direct political demand; but polling shows women feel the same way about other kinds of public disorder too. Polling in both the US and Canada has found that women are more likely than men to state that the courts are “not harsh enough”, with the main the main difference being that women are generally more supportive of rehabilitation as part of sentencing and much less supportive of the death penalty than men are.

I think it’s easy to make an elision between intimate partner violence (which is the type that women specifically suffer from more often and is most dangerous to them, and which does require specific solutions) and general disorder and stranger violence and women’s fear about that. The first thing to say is that a number of the cases (in fact most) of the ones in Ireland that have prompted the zero tolerance talk, such as the murders of Urantsetseg Tserendorj or Aisling Murphy, have been instances of stranger violence. The second point is that discussion by the most stringent advocates for extreme moves on women’s safety always couch their concerns in terms of public disorder and stranger violence. An example of this is May Lou McDonald’s speech to the Dail after Ashling Murphy’s murder where she identified key challenges women faced as incivilities such as “mansplaining”, and dealt with the psychological toll on women as a lack of safety in public such as a feeling that

“I have played by societal rules even when I knew they were not fair and placed a disproportionate burden of responsibility on me, as a woman, because from the time we are young girls, we are conditioned to develop an awareness that young men and boys are not.”

She then listed the “everyday mental checklist women are forced to run through just to exist safely” in public spaces such as not wearing revealing clothes, not exercising with earphones in, and putting €20 in a bra on a night out in case of being mugged.

We’ll leave aside for a moment her idea (which I have spoken about previously) that men are not aware of violence and don’t worry about it because it doesn’t affect them, which is an insane lie utterly at variance with the facts and reality, and so false it almost qualifies as a kind of gendered blood libel. Her speech is representative of the general political reaction to violence against women, which is that it places it in the context of public disorder, and that they understand in large part as a subset of that issue.

Outsourcing the development of policy to specialist, representative expert groups who a centre (emotionally and morally) a progressive approach means law and order and disorder issues become solely a function of identity. There is no group for the average member of the public against disorder, and especially not men and the issue can only be dealt with in those terms since the Oppressor/ Oppressed model is the only legitimate one to understand any policy issue. Public debate about disorder - the decline in civility, the decline in safety, the absence of visible policing, the sense that violence is always poised to erupt - tends to focus on the problem generally but it can only become the focus of politicians when it can be placed in an identitarian category, and as a response to the civic society groups who represent those categories. That’s why street violence in dublin is almost always framed around the safety of immigrants, women or gay people, which directly creates this sense of a rising neo-fascist threat inspired by online toxicity, as opposed to a general degeneration of civic life that impacts everyone (men in particular, if we’re looking to pick a single group) but that only a few get to complain about and be heard.

This affects not just who we listen to, but the explanations we find acceptable. Violence against women is seen as an ideological problem rather than a law and order one - so for instance many Irish politicians such as Simon Harris and Paul Murphy have sought to blame the manosphere for violence against women in Ireland. In recent days we had Harris talking about “algorithms of hate” and remarking that:

We have to ask ourselves where this hatred comes from. It is being cultivated online, in dark corners of the internet, and by self-styled influencers who preach a gospel of misogyny. This is not just ‘online talk’ anymore—it has real, lethal consequences on our streets.”

Micheál Martin has also spoken about how:

There is a pipeline from the online manosphere, which normalizes the degradation of women, to the physical violence we are seeing in our communities. We are seeing a radicalization of young men online, and it is manifesting in the most horrific way possible.

After Aisling Murphy’s murder all members of the Irish political landscape sought to blame factors such as overbearing mammies and single sex schooling as reasons why Irish men had become such beasts. Again - the killer was not Irish, had not been through the Irish school system and did not have an Irish mother; there is no evidence that the manosphere has played any role in any recent Irish crime. But this is representative of the kind of explanation you reach for in any system that applies the Oppressor/ Oppressed framework, and it shows why such a framework finds public disorder in particular so tricky. If the majority of victims of (for example) murder are men, as they are in Ireland and everywhere else, that fact has no place in such a structure and has to be passed over for a more appealing victim group.

Just to be crystal clear: treating intimate partner violence against women as a particular problem seems totally reasonable to me and I would guess it is to most other people. The same goes for women’s feelings of vulnerability when out in public. If anyone wants to introduce strict policing and sentencing measures to address those, I’d vote for them - I’m here, waiting. I would not propose dealing with violence against men in the targeted way; in part because men themselves wouldn’t appreciate that so there is neither a benefit to the public nor benefit to politicians. But aside from that, there seems to me to be this basic lie at the heart of the “zero tolerance for violence against women” rhetoric which is that we can be tolerant of all types of public disorder and the collapse of civility and self-restraint, and ignore and encourage them through policy and inaction, and but then turn around and say one particular type of public disorder is unacceptable and must be crushed. In fairness to the public themselves I think they know this is a lie. I think politicians know that too but they don’t know of any easy way to address that within the Oppressor/ Oppressed system. The end result is that all the energy that goes into public safety has been pulled out of the places it used to be and concentrated in the rhetoric around “vulnerable” identity groups, with women being the key one. What you’re left with is a state of nature for 90% of people where anything goes, and preposterous rhetorical overreach in favour of identifable vulnerable groups, which in truth comes to nothing because it’s a false summary of the problem.

Articles from me on similar subjects:

The release during June of a UK report entitled “Loneliness, isolation and social connection among boys and young men” gives us yet another opportunity to think about that topic of eternal media interest, the “Male Loneliness Epidemic”. This report focuses on the idea of stigma, in particular that “because boys and young men face severe social stigma around admitting they are lonely, the actual scope of the problem is vastly underestimated in official health data.” I don’t question its conclusions; but the quote above repeats some familiar ideas and assumptions about men’s relationship to ideas of loneliness, isolation, and solitude that crop up every time the issue is discussed and that never sit right with me.

One of the characteristics of “Male Loneliness Epidemic” talk is that men almost never bring up the subject unprompted themselves. There are a couple of reasons for that; one is the general one that men don’t find talking about their problems to be fulfilling - that’s a whole separate discussion. On the specific side, while making friends and maintaining relationships does seem to be harder than it used to be, my personal experience is that men enjoy long extended periods on their own. I can’t help but wonder if men’s problem with loneliness is that they need it, like it and that it suits them a little too much - and like all psychological and spiritually fulfilling things that means it can become a crutch. It’s a perspective one doesn’t often hear - that men have a skill and a taste for isolation, and need it in a way women don’t, to a degree that can cause them difficulty.

The conversation about male loneliness is often driven (and seemingly solely driven) by women and their concerns for men; that perspective colours the conversation in ways that can obscure the men’s feelings about the problem. The obvious place to start is therefore with what research says about men and women’s differing average desire for time apart from others.

I was very surprised when I started looking into the science that the accepted position is that women have deeper need for it than men do. Summary of some representative studies here:

• This National Institutes of Health study reported significantly higher affinity for solitude than men, and experienced higher levels of “aloneliness” (the subjective distress of not getting enough time to oneself) compared to men.

• The University of Toronto Department of Psychology study of 6,000 single adults found that single women are significantly happier being single, possess higher life satisfaction, and have a much lower desire for a partner than single men, in part due to their greater comfort with living alone.

• This meta-study in Psychology Today concluded that in every study where a statistically significant gender difference appeared, women appreciated their time alone more, were less likely to try to avoid it, and were more likely to report a deficit in getting enough time to themselves.

As well as an innate preference for time alone, the research often frames the preference as a structural matter, arising from carrying a heavier load in domestic life (including planning, scheduling and managing households) and exhaustion from being the default support in the lives of children, husbands and boyfriends, even parents. In the research the constant demand that women be emotionally accessible is what drives their need for isolation. The studies also reflect that the desire for time alone is not unfocused or unlimited but for time to self-actualise and engage in fulfillment through hobbies and purposeful self-reflection.

I don’t doubt the research says what it says, that women have a strong drive for personal time that is normal in all humans, nor do I underrate the reality of some structural factors here - I genuinely have no idea how mothers, even ones with very considerate and collaborative partners, cope at all. But a lot of this flies in the face of everything I have seen and experienced in my own life, when it comes to both men and women.

My personal observation has been that women if left to their own devices for an extended period of time quickly get itch to be around other people, whereas I think quite a lot of men can stare off into space on their own and be happy for an almost indefinite period of time and not only enjoy that but find it to be a relief. If you think of a teenager who won’t come out their room, or of a person of whom you’d say they need a couple or hours a day by themselves in order to function - the person I envision is a man, and I don’t think it’s just that I’m a man, and I’m like that. Regardless of whether, say, they need an hour of quiet in the evenings to decompress while they eat their dinner, every woman I know is essentially a sunflower, brightly bending towards the light of human interaction and nourished by it. That’s not true of the men I know.

I think it’s important that the research relates that women desire time alone for something and always buttressed by social interaction. Time apart is always held in place at either end by time with other people; I think for women those book-ends are the thing that gives personal time its shape, and without it, it’s meaningless. I think men like isolation and time alone for it’s own sake. The difference is between someone who drinks a single glass of wine at the end of the day as signal that now it’s time to relax for an hour, and a person who is tempted at all times to smuggle a bottle of scotch in the toilet and guzzle it all because they like the way alcohol makes them feel. Women have less of an affinity for isolation for its own sake, which means they can pick it up and use it in a measured way, but then put it down and go back to life.

Where men do have a desire for time alone, how does the research explain it? You can probably guess. Social research has trouble understanding men as social actors with their own impulses and tends to regard them as psychologically malformed women, or as being misshapen by the undeserved privilege they are handed by patriarchy. Where there is a different perspective or tendency between sexes, the female one is presumed to be the morally and practically correct one, and the difference is always explained as an innate deficiency on the male side combined with the negative effects of a social structure that uniformly favours men. That’s the case here, with the general sense being that men enjoy being in places where they are not required to express emotion (because society has not taught them how to do that); also that they use isolation as a way of hiding vulnerability by not exposing themselves to social interaction, and of way of indulging a lone wolf fantasy of the “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” type.

I’ll admit there’s something to this, though I’d frame it in a less pejorative way. I think that men are drawn to isolation because they like the idea of owned space, and isolation is an easy way of creating that; manufacturing a place where everything within reach belongs to you and nothing external is expected of you, and nothing is going to enter into your sphere as a challenge that you are forced to meet and overcome. Men are aware that their value and social status is determined by usefulness, accomplishment and strength, and while most fundamentally feel that structure is correct and wish to prosper within it rather than protest it, it’s hard. Isolation is a way of gaining relief from that and creating a space where strength, security, and adequacy are guaranteed. That reflects that the male need for boundary maintenance and psychological “owned space” is one of the deepest and most fundamental ones that men have.

In relation to the discussion about men and loneliness, my personal difficulty is that I don’t recognise myself in it. My preference for long periods of isolation from other people is one of the definitive characteristics of my personality, I draw a lot of satisfaction from it and I feel the need for it all the time; by the time it ends I always feel that I could take more of it. I thought in my teens and twenties that it was inherently maladaptive and that I was running away from something, but as I’ve gotten older and more comfortable with myself and the world, the desire for almost unlimited amounts of what the research terms “autonomous solitude” hasn’t really subsided as much as I thought it would. I am at a very extreme end of need for this, but I think most men are at least a little like me but I think relatively few women are.

I don’t think my preference for being alone is interesting or deep, or endearing, and I often find it exhausting and irritating. One of the things I need from those closest to me is a willingness to leave me alone all the time, which is infuriatingly contradictory. Again, without having research to hand I think “I need a lot of distance, space and time apart even in a loving relationship” is a sentiment that’s much more common in men than in women.

Even if you don’t accept that there is a male loneliness crisis per se, there’s a wider lesson we can learn about the relative draw that isolation has for each sex, and why men might sometimes get stuck on it like quicksand. Men and women are energised by different things and if a political programme seems to lean too heavily on the sorts of emotional and social connections that women prefer, the risk is not only that it won’t appeal to men but may repel them. One of these key things that men like and need boundary maintenance and owned space. Any socio-political approach that revolves around dissolving emotional boundaries is going to seem inherently weird and off-putting to men. It is going to cause men to retreat to a space where that is not demanded of them, since that’s the easiest thing to do and it is also facilitated by technology and an atomised society. It is going to provoke the exact withdrawal and boundary-drawing that you are trying to prevent.

The data on whether there is actually a Loneliness Crisis even happening with men is uncertain. This study from the American Institute for Boys and Men from last year convincingly argues that if such a crisis does exist, the fault line is class not sex. But it’s one thing to say that fears about a male loneliness epidemic are overblown; and another to say (which I think is true) that the modern world creates some problems and dangers related to isolation that pose a particular type of threat to men, because of some innate qualities and preferences they have.

In particular it’s important to understand the differing impacts of technology. The case against phones may be overstated but clearly there is something about, say, image-based platforms like Instagram, that latches on to powerful tendencies in women’s psychological make-up and steroidally charges them until they metastasize. Perhaps the same is true of men and isolation: that they like it so much, that the ability of technology to provide and facilitate it can turn it into a trap that it’s very easy to get stuck in. It’s not only that technology can provide a kind of enveloping shroud that you can cosy up in, but that it does so while also addressing the specific male need for accomplishment and recognition, by providing a phony facsimile of those things that prevent you from seeking out the real thing (gaming is a particular threat in that regard). In order to combat those things I think you need to understand why they would be superficially fulfilling in the first place, which in turn requires understanding something about men’s psychology.

Articles on similar topics

I try to keep the Irish stuff to my monthly updates (last one is here!), but you’re going to have to bear with me this week. I keep finding myself lying awake at night thinking about the horrific injuries suffered by the children attacked by Riad Bouchaker in Dublin’s Parnell Square in 2023, and I need to get it out of my head. Bouchaker’s trial for the knife attack on three children and a childcare worker wrapped up this week. He did not mount a defence and was found guilty of all charges, including attempted murder.

This is how RTE, Ireland’s national broadcaster, covered the worst details of the damage inflicted during the attack. It’s upsetting. We begin with a doctor giving expert testimony (forgive the long quote).

Dr Baker described how surgeons tried to stop the bleeding from the girl’s heart and had to open up her entire chest wall, close the stab wound and massage the heart to get it beating again.

However, she said the little girl developed seizures within 24 hours of the surgery, and scans showed her entire brain had suffered dramatically.

She said there was extensive injury to every part of her brain, with the worst affected area being her “deep grey matter”.

She said when the little girl woke up, she had severe dystonia - which meant her muscles went into spasm and led to extremely painful abnormal movements.

She said the girl needed multiple medications at very high levels. She said the dystonia was also internal, meaning she had huge problems with her gut and had to be admitted to ICU on two further occasions to deal with the pain and distress caused by trying to get nutrition into her.

Dr Baker said the girl has no control over her hands, arms and legs as her brain is sending the wrong message to her muscles. She said this was distressing for her and for her family. She has to be fed through a tube as she can’t swallow safely.

She was in Temple Street for nine months and has also spent time in the National Rehabilitation Hospital. Her family has moved to new accommodation to allow her to be near a team to manage her disability, and Dr Baker said she needs multiple mobility aids, a hoist and a wheelchair. The doctor said she would need a huge amount of equipment going forward.

Dr Baker told prosecuting counsel, Karl Finnegan, the little girl has a life-long, life-limiting disability. She will need a wheelchair for the rest of her life, she will also need splints to stretch her muscles and was at huge risk of painful contractures of her muscles and of scoliosis.

She said she is nonverbal and can’t communicate her wants and needs. The doctor said she was going to have a learning disability and would need 24-hour care and would have no independence for the rest of her life.

She said the little girl could blink for yes and no, and they were working on eye technology to help her communication. But she said this was very slow, and they were not sure how successful it would be.

She said the little girl, who is now seven, reacted and understood different things, and she described how her eyes would light up and smile if she was referring to something “fun” in the room. But she said she did not understand more complex questions.

Bouchaker was born in Algeria and came to Ireland about 25 years ago as an asylum seeker. At some point he was naturalised, presumably on the basis of residency (the details are not public). He’s sometimes referred to as an Irish citizen and while it is true that he has a passport, it is not true in any larger sense, as his relationship with the country that gave him shelter has been purely predatory, extractive, and resentful. The picture that emerges from this summary (also RTE) of his life is of a pathetic figure and, as it relates to the time of the incident itself, a repellent one - every part of the story enforces this.

The stabbing was precipitated when he was asked to provide additional information in order to benefit from more social welfare payments (which he interpreted as a refusal); he was noted prior to the attack psyching himself up muttering “shit Irish, shit fucking Irish.” It was noted at the trial (though he denied this) that he sought out a school with the youngest children he could find, and that on the day he waited for larger children to pass before attacking. He had numerous outbursts during the trial, laughing at inappropriate moments and specifically leaning into his resentment of the country and people that had harboured him -

On one occasion, he came into court shouting "kill yourself, Irish shit", pointing at the scar on his head and shouting "see what happened in your country", “three years, no payment nothing. I am Islam. Your country is shit".

He had been in the country for a quarter of a century but needed translation services because his english wasn’t at a sufficient level to understand the trial. The article notes both that he suffered head injuries when he was stopped from murdering the children, and also that he had a tumor removed at some point in his life so a part of his skull was missing so a portion of his brain was permanently exposed. However…

… Judge Tony Hunt ruled that Bouchaker was fit to stand trial and said he preferred the evidence of the prosecution expert, who said that, despite his difficulties, Bouchaker was able to weigh matters up, understood what was going on, and could go through the trial process with appropriate accommodations.

I’m going to leave you to ponder on your own time that, if this person had been a character in Citizen Vigilante he would have been seen as the product of a right-wing fever dream, and yet here he is, in the flesh. This isn’t about immigration but my own feelings of alienation from the justice system - what it is and what it’s for - and also my own feelings on what constitutes true kindness and cruelty, both of which I often find are at complete odds with the public perception of those things. I suspect a lot of people feel this way.

Some of this was brought out during the incident itself. After he had tried to kill the kids and was being beaten to the ground, a number of women formed a protective wall around him to prevent him being assaulted further, with one of them shouting “we are not savages, this is not how we do things”. RTE seems to have found this cry to be especially resonant, since it titled its summary of the case “‘We’re not savages’ - the full story of Parnell Square attack”. I thought this had only been noted at the trial but I see this week that Joe Brolly, a well-known public figure in Ireland who had witnessed the attack, mentioned it in the media shortly after, in what seems to me to be a wistful and laudatory way, as a celebration of multiculturalism in Dublin:

Whenever he’d been incapacitated, three women took it upon themselves to protect him (Brolly shakes his head in wonderment) and probably saved him because there was great anger at that stage, people were seeing the child, you know there’s huge crowds around there’s all the time, this very multiracial place, “he’s attacked a child”, so people were going for him, and these three women stoutly (defending him)…”

I don’t know how I would act in the moment of an incident like that, or how I would think about it immediately afterwards. It could be that it would haunt me forever and cause me to do and say and think all kinds of mad things - if it did, that would ultimately be the fault of the person who created that situation, i.e. the attacker. I have a lot of sympathy for the lady who said “we’re not savages” because I think that’s true, and important to remember that incidents like these stabbings are noteworthy in part because they don’t (or used not to) happen here. I get it. The same goes for Joe, who I don’t particularly like or ever agree with, but he saw what happened and I didn’t.

But Brolly describes a moral landscape that isn’t familiar to me - not least the way he seems to draw a moral equivalence comparison between people who wanted to attack a would-be murderer of children with a gang of racist thugs making an unprompted attack on an innocent. A similar problem arises in a piece that appeared in the Irish Times in the last few days, entitled “There was nothing ‘un-Irish’ about the violence on Parnell Square. Or the heroism” which argues that attacks of this type are historically normal in Ireland, which they are not. Again, it seems totally repellent and bizarre to me to seek to indirectly make excuses for a failed child murderer in this way.

These kinds of weird lenient responses and excuse-making are often understood as kindness, empathy, forgiveness and so on run amok, with the implicit criticism being that maybe sometimes a more hard-headed approach is appropriate. I disagree and I’m saying the attitude floating around in various places - in particular in the above Irish Times piece - is itself a sort of cruelty, and not kindness or empathy or anything like it.

The absence of discussion of Bouchaker’s punishment and whether it’s sufficient, and the emphasis instead on the idea of protecting him, isn’t ubiquitous but it’s common enough to be worthy of note. The people making these arguments strike a pose of empathy and care. But what do they say, morally, about our society’s priorities? A serious moral event requires a serious response. I don’t agree, and I think a lot of people don’t agree, that the justice system is solely about reform, mere restitution or facilitating forgiveness. Failure to make an accounting, through punishment, for the harm that was done is the society saying to itself it doesn’t know what the decent moral order is, and/ or doesn’t care, and that’s poison to people’s lives.

If someone does the kind of thing that happened here it is barbaric and cruel to celebrate that he was not punished in the moment, and then have a “there’s no point crying over spilt milk” view in the aftermath - as though the only option we are left with is to remove the perpetrator from the scene for a period of time and move on. I think many of the reactions here are delivered in an emotive tone but in practice evince an easy contempt for human life, vulnerability, and the reality of violence. A caring, loving society, one that centres kindness and empathy and so on as sacred principles, would regard trespass against those things (and giving comfort to those who trespass against them) as the highest crimes, and would seek to punish accordingly. On the other hand only a callous, shallow society that does not truly value empathy, or softness, or protecting the vulnerable would adopt the attitude we have.

I have mixed feelings about Forgiveness as an overarching moral principle but none of what I’ve said above is changed by the question of whether (say) the parents of the child forgive their perpetrator. It’s their prerogative to take any perspective on the crime they wish, even though I don’t fully understand it, and we’ve seen recent cases such as Austin Metcalf and Henry Nowak. Crimes of this type are societal, structural matters of interest to everyone, and reckoning with the impact of them is not owned by one person. One can forgive and still seek redress - the two don’t cancel each other out. It is in fact better and more meaningful to forgive from the other side of a just punishment, since forgiveness is meaningless (and when offered too quickly, callous and degrading) when tossed at someone who has given no sign of wanting it, as it seems in the Bouchaker case.

I note in passing that if the parents of the children in this case had demanded Bouchaker be stoned to death, there would be no rush to carry out their wishes. It’s only ever desirable to follow the demands of a victim’s parent when it requires less punishment of an inconvenient offender, not more, so the morality around that particular question is totally phony and repulsive. Again: I think we are too willing to describe this kind of attitude (leniency, a rush to unearned forgiveness) as excessive empathy, or misguided kindness. Seeking to forgive and move on before a proper accounting has been made, or seeking to use forgiveness as a pressure point to forestall such an accounting, isn’t cruel because it’s a misapplication of empathy. It’s just cruel.

This event is only a reminder of the centrality of a certain type of cruelty to our cultural life. Once you start looking for it you see it everywhere. To pick a random example, during July The Lancet published a study outlining how…

… USAID funding has significantly contributed to the reduction in adult and child mortality across low-income and middle-income countries over the past two decades. Our estimates show that, unless the abrupt funding cuts announced and implemented in the first half of 2025 are reversed, a staggering number of avoidable deaths could occur by 2030.

I am Elon Musk’s number one hater and am sympathetic to the idea that USAID was doing a lot of good, and that in many cases again ending it in a careless way has harmed people. But again - an analysis on the basis of cruelty is only applied to certain types of decisions. Was it cruel to inseparably mix practical essential medical aid with partisan political goals and boutique cultural projects that had no popular support, knowing that meant the aid would be massively rolled back at some point? I think it was, and it’s not an incidental cruelty either - I believe that this is an intentional political tactic, to entangle different types of political action so completely that unwinding them is reputationally impossible by anyone but a careless reprobate - who will come along in time. This approach is cynical instrumentalisation of people’s lives in order to indulge your own political instincts, is in itself incredibly cruel and careless. In this as in so many other cases people who attack impossible decisions as cruel are often people who have thrown you an unpinned hand grenade and then complain about the reckless way you’ve disposed of it.

My summary is that in general we’re too quick to accede to claims of cruelty, and definitely too quick to take claims to empathy, kindness, forgiveness and so on at face value. The worst thing you can do, and a trap I see people falling into all the time, is to say we place too much value on those things. I disagree, and I think doing that is ceding ground unnecessarily. All of those are positive and essential human characteristics but they come in a variety of flavours and it seems we’ve developed a sweet tooth for just one kind. We need to reassert the existence of others. So: unmanaged 2nd and 3rd order effects are cruel. Emotional self-indulgence at the expense of the safety and happiness of others is cruel. Creating an environment where predatory people are given moral cover to protect themselves from the consequences of what they’ve done is cruel. Creating an unsolvable problem and then passing it off to someone else to address and take the hit on is cruel. The list goes on. I’ve never forgotten that, but I am making a promise to remember it, and foreground it, in future.

Recent articles on similar topics

Sometimes, while wearily sorting through the latest crop of “Masculinity in Crisis” articles, a thought will occur to me. It’s true that “Masculinity” as a term is both bullshit and cringe; but it’s also true there is something about being a man that is linked to men’s feeling of alienation from politics and culture. What is that though? With complicated issues like this, rather than looking at the problem directly, it can often be more helpful to start by applying the disputed frame to a different issue. So we’ll begin this question: why do we never hear about a crisis of femininity?

After all, there’s lots of evidence for it in every direction, for anyone inclined to count. If we consider a move toward the political extremes to be evidence of a crisis - which we do with men - women are drifting left with no end in sight, far more so than men are to the right. Alongside that, we often seem men’s failure to reach particular life milestones as a sign of crisis but women too are failing to meet many of the key milestones of adulthood, marriage being one example.

Women are way more anxious than they used to be, to the point that medication for anxiety is through the roof. Separate to anxiety, women’s overall happiness has steadily declined relative to men’s since the 1970s, and they’ve experienced an associated rise in addiction, alcoholism in particular.

An obvious objection here is that these changes are not directly connected to ideas of womanliness or femininity per se … but there’s plenty in that direction too. In the past 20 years Gender Identity has been adopted as the correct way of understanding sex differences (correct in the sense of being the one endorsed by academia, the state, the press, activists and so on). Lots of women - particularly younger and more educated ones - are not just comfortable with this but happy about it, and supportive of it, but plenty aren’t to one degree or another, and the decision to separate female experience from a concrete biological reality must surely have had some crisis-inducing impacts for some number of women.

Finally at the lowest level there’s evidence of crisis in the decline of relations between men and women on social media - in particular the great deal of online antipathy expressed towards men; if we regard dehumanising and contemptuous rhetoric directed from one sex towards the other as a sign of crisis (as we do when it goes in the other direction) then there’s another one. Some of the frustration expressed in this talk is rooted in men’s seeming withdrawal from women; anyone who has spent any period of time online in the last few years will have seen the trend of women reporting that they are no longer approached in public by men, and how depressing and mysterious they feel that is. Perhaps we could take that as an indication of crisis from without rather than within - it’s generally felt the decline is due to men scared off by #metoo, but it’s also possible they simply like what they see less than they used to.

My point is not that there is a Crisis of Femininity and I don’t believe there is one, any more than there is one of masculinity. My only purpose here is to show how easy it is to construct a sex-based crisis story, and to show how comfortable we are doing that with men but not with women. It highlights that there’s something cosy and self-serving about using the frame of Masculinity to talk about men and politics, something that conceals as much as it reveals.

Another easy way to spot this is to listen to this widely referenced New York Times podcast episode on the subject, which was critiqued so extensively by here. They give the game away in the first five minutes, with references to white supremacy, racism and patriarchy. Have you ever met a man who enjoys using these terms or encounters them with anything other than an eyeroll? And not just because people dislike being made the villain of the story (though of course - it’s under-remarked - why shouldn’t someone dislike that) but also because the point of view these terms represent is from a man’s perspective either false or incomplete, and is in any case one they don’t recognise. The safest path for liberal and progressive commentators is to keep all conversation and analysis in the zone of oppressed and oppressor, and never to ask if there is something to the very frame itself that limits understanding or drives the crisis.

This frame is the exact reason that you could never have an equivalent Femininity in Crisis debate in the manner I described above; because for an oppressed identity class the source of a crisis is never mysterious - it is always an external oppressor. To allow yourself to think otherwise would be to make those groups partly responsible and accountable for their fate, which in a progressive outlook is a category error, a contradiction in terms.

So these conversations are fundamentally talking about men in a foreign frame rather than trying to relate to men on their own terms; and are about finding pat answers that you’re comfortable with rather than challenging whether there something basic disconnect between men and the progressive worldview, something that you might have to change to reach or include them that you might have to challenge.

These podcasts will often talk about finding a positive version of masculinity, but that never seems to be more than men behaving (and most importantly voting) as women do, while still accepting group culpability as an oppressor class. The use of the term Masculinity itself is a way of side-stepping the question of whether men and women are different on average, and if so, how that needs to be accommodated in a progressive worldview.

I apologise in advance for getting all “dear diary” but the easiest way to understand how limiting a perspective Masculinity is, is to to take my own inner life as an example. I do not recognise myself in any of these conversations about this subject; I’m not aggressive or competitive, I have no real interest in technology, I think steaks are kind of overrated, I’m emotional and anxious, I’m mediocre with numbers and I love language and art and ideas. I have never felt any internal conflict about any of this.

But I think I’m a good example of how a traditional idea of masculinity is an unhelpful and inaccurate dividing line to draw between men and women. I was really interested in music when I was in my teenage years up to maybe my mid-20’s - theoretically that’s a gender neutral hobby, but if I told you absent of my sex that I often sorted my record collection by spine colour, genre, or date of purchase, I think you could guess I whether I was male or female with 90% accuracy. I played Warhammer and Dungeons and Dragons during that period as well, again certainly not something anyone would note as hyper-masculine - yet if you walked into a gaming convention in the mid-90s and took a deep breath through the nose you would be crystal clear that those hobbies skewed very strongly male and not female. All I’m trying to illustrate is this; there is lots of behaviour that we understand is very male, but not at all masculine.

The second point to go alongside that is that a lot of that “very male but not very masculine” behaviour is often an expression of the same root impulses as masculinity, just not in manner oriented outwards toward dominance or social status. It took me years to understand that my writing was driven by a desire (that I think is quite male) to systematise and categorise the world in order make it more intelligible for myself and others. I was never sure why issues around freedom of speech bothered me quite as much as they did until I realised that I thought of my imagination and intellect as a kind of territory that belonged to me, and attempts to limit my expression were intrusions on it by external forces, that had to be repelled in part because not to do so made me feel weak and preyed upon and I hated that. Part of the purpose of writing was a desire to prove that I was useful to others, and making a difference as a necessary part of the world. Naturally this is all only part of the story, but it’s a significant part.

The more I thought about my motivations and the things that made me the way I was the more I could see that they were often distinctly male-flavoured and that had a root cause that was the same as more classically masculine behaviour. Whatever those things were, they were essential and not socially constructed. Typically male traits and a characteristically male outlook aren’t found in the nerdy or the shy any less than in any other type of man. The masculinity that is spoken about in Podcasts is like an overcooked meal that you make out of the ingredients of maleness, but it’s not the ingredients themselves. That’s important because the ingredients drive the difference.

This has additional political complications. It means that men aren’t necessarily drawn to people who announce their masculinity (quite the opposite, since that’s so cringe) but it does mean that men are repulsed by people who undermine or seem to reject those pre-masculine traits. I’m not a strong observer of British politics but I can’t help noticing how recently deposed Prime Minister Keir Starmer he was at his most appealing when he was telling Donald Trump to fuck off (in his own tremulous way) in relation to war in Iran, and for attacking the memory dead British troops who had served in Afghanisatan and Iraq. On the other side his tendency to shrink from attacking his enemies, or defend himself when attacked, and his tendency to regard rules and procedure as a goods in and of themselves, were unappealing in a way that seems to have led to his downfall. It’s interesting to compare his response to an internal party leadership challenge to that of John Major when he was put in the same position; instead of meekly receding into the background with a tear in his eye, Major challenged his rivals with “put up or shut up”. God knows Major wasn’t a swaggering man of action anymore than Starmer was, but in that moment he was brave, and I’m sure that did reveal an appealing part of his character.

That’s a mixture of good news and bad for a progressive person concerned about men’s relationship to their coalition. You don’t need hyper-masculine candidates or advocates and in fact it’s better that you don’t have them, since that would be embarrassing. But Masculinity and “male” aren’t the same, so that’s not the end of the matter. Male voters don’t need candidates who are belligerent or aggressive but the absence of physical or spiritual courage is really repulsive, as is the tendency to see that absence as admirable or superior. They don’t need someone who ignores structural societal issues, but they do need someone who attempts to master or overcome those forces rather than complain about them. They don’t need someone to be stoic or hard, but emotional incontinence isn’t good, and again - making a celebration of emotional incontinence is really, really bad. They can be empathetic, but behaving as though emotional empathy is the master value of humans and the only legitimate way of experiencing the world is gross and weird.

But that’s difficult; it’s much easier to explain that men are internally broken and have to be entirely rebuilt outside of their toxic frame than to say “we know men don’t like this stuff so we will have to leave them to understand their own problems in their own ways,” or even to admit the most basic principle of a liberal society, which is “to each his own”, with all that implies. I would like to end this on a more highbrow reference but there is one quote I cannot stop thinking about in this regard which was from British male model David Gandy (of all people) who said that “We say we need men to talk, but don’t say anything that will offend us and don’t say anything we don’t agree with. So what do you end up doing? You don’t end up talking.” I think that summarises the point perfectly. If men and women see the world a bit differently on average, and those average difference are deep-rooted and essential, a sincere attempt to relate to men begins by seeing things entirely from their perspective, not someone else’s, and by accepting that it is entirely valid. I don’t guarantee that the natural tenions that such a step can provoke can be resolved but they are a consequence of attempting to have a difficult conversation, rather than enacting the performance of one.

Recent Articles on Similar Subjects

This is the third of three promised round-ups/ updates on the Irish political and cultural scene. This will mainly focus on the anti-immigration riots that swept Belfast at the start of the month.

Previous updates are here and here.

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On Monday the 8th of June, a Sudanese migrant who had come to Belfast via Ireland and Britain attempted to cut someone’s head off in the street; the incident was filmed and some footage made it online despite the best efforts of police and media. Protests kicked off immediately in loyalist areas, with black-masked young men setting fire to cars and public transport, and going door to door in order to intimidate immigrants out of their homes. Dozens of people were reported as being displaced; riot police, dogs and water cannons were deployed, travel was suspended and businesses were forced to close.

I’ve written before about the process of what I call Culture War tokenisation, meaning the way in which events in Ireland become disconnected from their local context and are misrepresented and misunderstood so they can be traded in a game being waged by different online factions for their own political, commercial and/or emotional purposes, regardless of what’s happening on the ground. This instrumentalisation of events is certainly not unique to Ireland - I see it happen with politics and culture of other European countries all the time - but the more distant from the imperial American core you are, and the smaller your population and your media market the more pronounced the effect. Whatever the reality of the situation in Belfast, this was a continuation of that trend.

The initial reports from outside Ireland on the riots failed to account for local differences in the north and placed these riots alongside recent ones in England and Dublin both in style and motivation. This was particularly pronounced on the online right. We see in the initial commentary on this from right wing American commentators like Megyn Kelly and Buckely Carlson here, pretty obviously not understanding (and not really caring) that these incidents were happening in loyalist areas, and unaware of how local pressures and historical context make these riots different from anti-immigrant activity that have been ongoing in Dublin.

Once commentators became aware that there riots were happening on the island of Ireland but that the rioters largely did not identify as Irish, the discussion somehow got even worse, as it then became part of the larger stream of anti-Irish content from the right that’s become endemic on Twitter in particular in the last two years. The key word in this fresh perspective was a misapplication of the term “Ulster” which many American commentators seem to believe means the same thing as “Northern Ireland” and “loyalist/ unionist/ protestant”. One recurring theme in commentary of this type was an ignorance about the relationship between paramilitary organisations and the state, and how paramilitaries might be influenced to act in situations such as these for material reasons that have nothing to do with immigration.

This led to some absurd tweets about the relative level of acceptance and encouragement of immigration amongst catholics and in the south. Ironically this is one area where the international online right and the respectable Irish in the Republic are as one. In the past five years the Republic of Ireland (and really, Dublin) has developed one of the most aggressive and coordinated street-level anti-immigration movements in Western Europe; the pace of development and organisation has been frightening. If anything, in tone, energy and tactics, the flow of influence has been from Dublin outward and to the surrounding territories and not vice versa. The Irish media are always keen to obfuscate that point and are determined to see Britain and England as a key source of anti-immigration rhetoric in Ireland. Both external right-wing observers and the Irish establishment continually seek to reinforce their comfortable but ahistorical sense that Irish nationalist movements are inherently left-wing and uniquely impervious to anti-immigration politics. At either end of the horseshoe, both conspire to create this false sense of where immigration sits politically in Ireland, and where street-level anti-immigration action in Ireland sits in an international context.

Aris Roussinos, writing in UnHerd, touched on the possibility that nationalist and loyalists could come together in the medium term on immigration as a topic.

in the aftermath of the North Belfast atrocity, there has for the very first time begun, though certainly not an alliance, then the first glimmerings of a tentative and distrustful rapprochement. The nightmare scenario for Sinn Féin would have been Catholics rioting against immigrants. That did not happen: instead, working-class Catholics merely turned out to watch their Protestant neighbors riot with an anthropological detachment newly devoid of open contempt.

I like Aris and don’t disagree with anything he’s written here but I think it’s too easy for people who have no familiarity with NI or Irish life or history to posit comings together without noting the roadblocks (in fairness to Aris he does do this, his article is filled with caveats on that point). When catholics and nationalists think about people in NI being intimidated out of their homes, they think of themselves, and reservations over immigration doesn’t overwrite that feeling. As Gerry Lynch, also in UnHerd noted:

Nationalists are still intermittently intimidated out of Loyalist areas, not just in North Belfast but across Northern Ireland — something almost entirely ignored outside the region… Northern Ireland Nationalists are also acutely aware that the Right-wing British figures expressing concern after a barbaric attack by a Muslim asylum seeker in one of their neighbourhoods are usually hostile to them, and rarely express any concern on the many occasions when the people attacking them are white Britons.

That’s just in NI - in terms of the idea that there could be a long term, all-island anti-immigration movement that sees loyalists and nationalists coming together feels to me like something that could only be proposed either by a person who has never lived in Ireland and is entirely ignorant of its history, or by a southern Irish person whose mind is fully internet poisoned, transgressing as this does some of the most basic red lines of electability that exist here. People who are on the immigration-restictionist side of the spectrum are so desperate to see signs of victory somewhere that they often fall into the trap of seeing them where there aren’t any. The riots were celebrated by some as an expression of justified popular discontent with immigration policy but I think very few voters or members of the public saw them that way. Most people work and live alongside immigrants who they like and who could easily have been on the wrong side of these riots. As such most will find the violence repulsive, threatening and politically illegitimate. The extent to which these riots represent an energy that could be incorporated into mainstream politics in a way that actually impacts immigration policy seems to me to be zero.

The press reaction in Ireland mainly centred on the way in which social media was perceived to have whipped up the situation. The Social Democrats are the rising force in Irish politics and TD Sinead Gibney appeared on multiple programmes to advocate for bans and fines; she said “if people can organise online and tell people where to go to disrupt society, those platforms need to be held to account as publishers”.

Fergus Finlay, a prominent member of the Irish Labour Party also appeared on TV, to note that people online were:

fomenting hatred day in, day out… one or two of them have tried to get a mandate and haven’t been able even in local elections but it doesn’t stop them… I find it hard to understand how they are allowed on social media, how they are facilitated by social media because… if you were to analyse the problem in terms of 90% of the fomenting of racism happens on one platform, but on social media generally… why sovreign and democratcially elected governments can’t put a stop to that boggles my mind. I don’t understand why X, for example, is allowed in Ireland.

IHREC, a government funded group, issued an open letter urging governments to turn off recommendation based algorithms, and both the Irish Times and Irish Examiner ran editorials agitating for social media bans. All of this was happening parallel to the proposed social media ban for under 16s in the UK. The two issues blended together, with the Irish government stating they admire the UK’s approach. The Irish Labour Party and the Irish government have appealed to the EU to help get a similar ban going, so they can piggyback on it.

As with many other culture war issues, people tend to look at social media bans as affecting their country or only driven by their local politics, when in fact similar discussions are happening everywhere as part of an opaque cross-country effort to exert control on the internet discourse that has disrupted every aspect of political Business as Usual. Having said that, there is a particular local flavour to the push against free expression within Ireland. This comes from an attitude you could call Consensus Illiberalism, a small-time horror about what the neighbours will think, and visceral hatred of boat-rockers and troublemakers. It rears its head as a sense of mortification whenever something controversial or unseemly happens in the vicinity of the Irish state, accompanied by a desire to throw a blanket over the controversy as soon as it’s happened, and before you even understand what it is. In real terms, it’s personified by purse-lipped curtain-twitchers like Fine Gael’s Patrick O’Donovan, who are very common in Irish life, always have been and probably always will be.

Something that characterised these discussions about the responsibility of social media was a total lack of reflection to why grisly videos even circulate online in the first place - that was, after all, what kicked off the whole affair. Part of the interest in these videos is simple prurience. But it is also a response to the Consensus Illiberalism which is so deeply embedded in the media and which, in relation to certain stories, causes journalism in Ireland often functions as a kind of anti-journalism - the role of people in the press is to not ask questions, to not draw conclusions, to terminate conversation when it looks like it’s going in an unseemly direction, to talk over your interviewees if it looks like their answer is going to be too close to the bone. It makes sense that in that environment the public will seek out the raw footage themselves to understand what is happening. The Gibney/ Finlay type desire to tamp down divisiveness is the thing that causes these videos to catch fire amongst the general public - who may not riot, and who really do hate racism and ethnicity-based violence, but are who are nonetheless interested in why things are the way they are, and where the country they live in is going.

The final question with a lot of this activity is where it leaves Sinn Féin as an all-Ireland party, and how it should react to these riots. Keith Woods wrote a good, long piece about how SF got to the position where it is identified as being synonymous with left-wing politics, and how that is going to be a difficult cul de sac to back out of if voter demands make it necessary to do so. And there are challenges to SF in its immigration policy long-term that are not voter-driven. As Pangur Bán pointed out, the immigrant groups arriving in Northern Ireland are much more likely to arrive with a British-only identity than an Irish-only one; understandably they have no historic connection to the idea of Irishness.

I have never seen any SF-associated nationalist grapple with the implications of these trends for the prospect of a united Ireland, which is theoretically it’s guiding principle. It’s easy enough to orient yourself in favour of immigration when the anti- side is so clearly thuggish and hate-filled, but the implications of demographic change won’t always be so easy to side-step.

As a final thought: migration and demographic change aren’t subjects of unlimited interest; I’ve tended to write them in the past because I’m interested in ideas and these trends have seemed over the last few years to be connected to the biggest and most important ideas, that were also being spoken about the least. I’ve noticed as I’ve gone on with these updates they’ve tended to flow in the direction of immigration. Maybe I’m just fixated? It could be - but I asked AI what the five biggest stories in Ireland during June were, its view was the riots in Belfast, the passage of the International protection act were two of them.

So I think the increasing convergence of Irish politics on immigration and demographic change as the core drivers of crisis is not just my conclusion. In a way that makes sense, and shouldn’t surprise us. After all everything that happens in Ireland (including the very existence of Northern Ireland itself) is downstream of a relatively small demographic change that happened almost a thousand years ago. A thousand years! There is a tendency in respectable politics to believe that if we could simply turn off the internet all this would blow over. I think that’s a denial both of how long the tail of demographic change tends to be, and how deep and fundamental the change of recent years is. Every aspect of the recent events in Belfast reinforces that for me. The people who think this stuff can be managed over a couple of years or even a couple of decades by massaging the conversation are as grotesque, reckless and reprehensible in their own way as the rioters are.

Other stories

• A plant in Aughinish, Limerick hit the headlines when it came to light that it is a key source of Alumina for the use of Russia in their war effort against Ukraine. The plant is Russian owned and the material is exempt from sanctions. Lots of people took this as evidence that Ireland is uniquely and sinisterly pro-Russian in its orientation (“a russian colony in plain sight”).

  Regardless of how one feels about the operation of the plant (which seems pretty bad to me) it’s worth pausing for a moment to consider what a flagrant and insane distortion of this truth this is. In response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ireland immediately took in so many Ukrainian refugees that they currently constitute about 2% of our population. The speed with which the housing system was changed to accomodate Ukranians in comparison to the sluggish response to Irish people’s ongoing housing difficulties was so so over the top that it was central in precipitating the anti-immigration riots that flared up soon afterwards. It’s not untrue to state that the response of the Irish state was so extreme in a pro-Ukrainian direction that it has helped to permanently deform the Irish political landscape in a way it won’t recover from for multiple decades.

  For his part Volodymyr Zelenskyy gave an order of merit to the content creator who mainstreamed the issue in the British and American right-wing press, but who had not actually done the real underlying reporting (that was done several months ago - and ignored outside Ireland - by the Irish Times and RTE, who got nothing). I think that says a lot about the Ukrainian leader in terms of where he gets his information, and the audience his public messaging is for.

• The Irish government is introducing rules that a person must prove they are legally and habitually resident in the state before they can avail of social housing. The announcement of the change, which has been coming a while, set off a slightly strange and frantic reaction, with people claiming that on the one had such a change is not necessary because the numbers of non-nationals availing of housing are so low; but also that the negative impacts would be too great. The IHREC wrote to the government expressing concerns about the initiative, and questions were raised in the Dáil Éireann indicating that such a change would increase homelessness. The obvious way of settling some of the questions this has provoked would be to release granular data regarding housing and nationality, which the government has refused to do while simultaneously stating that speculation about the subject constitutes misinformation.

  

• The trial of Riad Bouchaker, the Algerian man who stabbed a number of children in Dublin city centre in 2023, precipitating widespread rioting, began during the month. Many of the details that have come to light during the opening days are excruciatingly horrible and revealing; this includes the life-changing nature of the injuries suffered by the little girls assaulted, and Bouchaker’s alleged anti-Irish rantings moments before he carried out the attack. Thanks to AEIOU for pointing out that we also heard testimony of a recurrence of my favourite trend, that of people intervening to protect a violent aggressor with a cry of “leave him alone”. The note that “we are not savages” makes me feel very slightly sympathetic towards those who did it, though only slightly.

• After the unremitting darkness of the above I wanted to try and include something if not positive then at least interesting in a non-negative way. This article notes how Beamish and Murphys, two popular brands of stout, are trying to chip away at Guinness’s dominance in the UK. I can’t speak for that market but I did note that on St. Patrick’s day here, every single one of my mutuals who posted a picture of themselves enjoying a drink did so with one of those brands, and not Guinness. Guinness have linked themselves in with a lot of the most overbearing elements of our current mini gaelic revival, and have adopted a relentless marketing approach that often relies on an unspoken assumption that have a sort proprietary relationship with Irishness, in a way that is not really appropriate for multinational which is not actually Irish at the end of the day, regardless of where it’s brewed. Their marketing annoys me sufficiently that I stopped drinking it a while ago. I’m getting a sense that others feel the same way and I think their popularity may decline slightly in the next few years though I admit that’s a hope with very little hard evidence to support it at the moment. Good luck to the other brands.

Thanks for reading, more next month.

In Steven Spielberg’s new movie Disclosure Day, an analyst (played by Josh O’Connor) working for a shadowy quasi-governmental agency learns that highly intelligent extraterrestrials exist; the agency has been keeping this knowledge secret for decades, torturing and experimenting on the aliens and misusing their technology. He decides to expose this conspiracy and goes on the run with a bagful of evidence with a plan to bring it to the public via the main TV networks. This is one of many touching boomerisms contained in the movie - I guess he really wants to get this information to a microscopic audience of 80 year olds who have fallen asleep in front of their TVs.

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I’m on holidays for this week (Italy, much too hot, thanks for asking), so please enjoy this classic article, in which I tried pin down what it is about Pride that sometimes doesn’t sit right with me. As with anything more than three months old, I disagree here and there with both the article and how it’s worded but the core argument is still strong. Enjoy, normal service resumed next Monday.

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Is there something about our culture that is anti-privacy, anti-intimacy, and opposed to the idea of an inner life that belongs to you alone? What is it?

The question occurred to me over the last month as I watched the summer Pride celebrations. Over time the concept of the festival has expanded and one can no longer say that it’s simply a recognition of the validity of marginal lives by marginalised people. The expansion of who celebrates Pride, and what it covers, threw up some startling moments.

The most obvious one was this Washington Post editorial about exposing children to Kink during pride. This got lots of attention and mockery - mainly because of the idea that we should seek to expose children to adult horniness.

There’s another angle to the story that didn’t get quite as much play. It’s a continuation of a trend - that over time it is increasingly expected to make private sexual impulses public so that they can be celebrated, and so that where they are marginal we can get kudos for them; and the tension that creates with with sexuality as a source of intimacy, because it makes our desires a matter of public interest and allows them to be commodified.

The obvious retort is that you can celebrate whatever you like and choose to keep whatever you like about your life private; in this case some people have simply chosen disclosure. I don’t actually think that’s entirely true though, and I think it’s less true every day. There *is* a part of our culture that regards privacy as not just dispensable, but as a bad thing, and wants to push us down a path that erodes it. Pride often seems to epitomise that. How did we get here?

The goals of Liberalism have been achieved and then some, but the scope of the ideology continues to grow in an uncontrolled manner, turning on itself. Every liberal principle is followed to and past its logical conclusion and into black absurdity. You could call our current system Metastasized Liberalism.

So instead of preserving individual rights in the face of a collective, our culture promotes and prioritises ever more microscopic substrains of individualism, preferably in a way which creates tension with existing communities and bonds which are oppressive and tyrannical.

In liberalism freedom of choice is maximised; metastasized liberalism seeks to obliterate everything but freedom of choice by reducing all human activity to the level of performed public transaction. Every act has value only as a currency, and every place value only as a marketplace.

There is no room in this system for something precious that you keep to yourself alone, or that is shared only with those most intimate to you. Such ideas are unnecessary, and as the system metastasises further, illegitimate because they can neither be worn as tokens of identity, nor sold.

This would be less of a problem if there was some countervailing force in public life that looked past the material, but sadly that force is greatly depleted, in part because of its own flaws, and in part because liberalism metastasized all over it. So here we are.

“Pride” is in tension with intimacy because it makes your preferences a matter of public interest. It assumes the only reason you would want to conceal or shield some aspect of your life from public view is that you’re ashamed, or that society is ashamed of you. That is certainly one reason to enjoy Pride, and I understand the wish to act in the face of that, and to say I’m ok with who I am. Celebrate away.

But the other reason is that in order to be intimate with a person there has to be a part of yourself that you share with them and with no one else, or at least few other people. There's a reason we close the bedroom when we enter with someone. As well as intimate life you only share with those closest to you, you need a private inner life that will be forever unrevealed, to preserve your sense of self and self-ownership against external forces.

I’m using Pride as shorthand here. There are plenty of other symptoms of this you could name, from OnlyFans to dating apps to the ubiquity of porn. I’m sure if you go back fifty years and looked at critiques of social liberalisation from reactionaries of that time they included an erosion of intimacy. In that way they join the list of a number of other things we’re discovering where the reactionaries had a point.

The final thing to say is that this culture should hold a special horror for the writer, the artist and the thinker. You need a lab you can retreat to, to tease out your ideas and develop your thoughts in a way that recognises no limits but your own imagination, and is free from scrutiny and ridicule. That’s why it is especially depressing to see artists become the most dogmatic enforcers of the current status quo; although it at least explains how in an era of maximal freedom, creativity is at a low ebb, and philistinism is at the wheel.

The NYT just published this guest essay a few days critiquing the idea of “Heteropessimism”, a term previously popularised by the Times (though it originated elsewhere) and describing the increased negativity of straight women towards relationships with men - really, towards men in general. Heteropessimism is the genteel face of an often not very genteel an internet-led increase in content about the awfulness of men which I described previously:

… in the last decade or so, expressions of contempt and disgust towards men have become an endemic feature of mainstream popular culture (in a way they weren’t previously). This is especially true of social media content aimed at young people but certainly not exclusive to it; a "Men Are Trash" aesthetic and attitude has become so common on sites such as Tik Tok that we don’t notice it anymore. It's also become more common in considered spaces (see "Mankeeping" and "The Burden of Wanting Men"). The central theme is female heterosexuality as a kind of horrible and embarrassing burden because of the association with men that it necessitates, thus the term "heterofatalism".

The NYT article itself is fine, but as is often the case when I see this issue discussed what I consider the most obvious and consequential factor driving the trend isn’t referenced so I want to linger on it here.

Denials to the contrary notwithstanding, the most powerful force in human affairs is not love or kindness but social status. Desiring it, hoarding it, making it, displaying it, obsessing about it - that’s what life is all about. If you notice a sudden increase in a particular cultural habit or tic it is almost certainly the case that social status considerations are what’s driving it, and so it is here.

Women show a pronounced in-group bias, about 4 to 5 times stronger than men’s; there is a documented effect across societies that both sexes tend to ascribe more positive traits to women than to men, though this fades as societies modernise it doesn’t fade as much for women. The explanations for both the phenomenon and it’s resilience are obvious enough, and rational - including that women are more likely to have developed praiseworthy interpersonal soft skills than men, that they have a stronger sense of their own vulnerability and seek to bond with each other as a protective measure and so on.

In any case what it means is that liking, praising and valorising women is a way for women to gain and keep in-group social status. We then feed this habit through the mincer of social media culture in which 1) there is profit in performing the desired values for their own social group to the utmost and at all times and 2) happiness writes white - go on twitter or any other platform and see how many of the top posts are about hatred, negativity, anger, bitterness, fear and so on and so forth. I love social media because it’s enabled me to get my writing out there but it’s addictive and “always on” qualities make it relentless, and it runs on our most instinctive and visceral emotions, which are not the light or conciliatory ones. The sum of all that is that there is a surprising amount of social capital to be made online by talking about what pieces of shit men are. What happens online is just the tip of the iceberg, and we see little fragments of the same impulse across society working in less direct, less explicit ways. It’s certainly one way of explaining, for example, the large number of women identifying as queer, non-binary or not fully straight who nevertheless only ever have straight relationships. (I don’t suggest in-group social status is the only factor at play here.)

Political polarisation is important in the increase in tension between men and women as social groups. The article itself touches on this when it states

Women are getting more and more liberal; men, increasingly conservative. That mismatch is indeed something broader than an awkward first date, a gap widening among the younger generation…

Of course that’s not quite true, since polling shows that the movement is more on women’s side than men’s. Either way, politics here is a proxy for social status. There are plenty of Progressive men, but there is something about Progressivism in it’s current form that is alienating and foreign to men on a gut level. That’s a problem, because Progressivism is the upwardly mobile ideology of our time in terms of the relationship of its adherents to educational attainment, career progress, income, class, and social capital - and women on the whole do find it to be a congenial outlook.

Men are more likely to be associated with downwardly mobile political ideas such as Conservatism or Populism - or at least with weaker commitment to upwardly mobile Progressive beliefs. Progressivism itself applies a lens of emotional empathy to all issues, making it difficult for people who subsrcibe to it to sympathise with or even understand one’s opponents. The side effects of all these factors together are well-known, polling data that shows up to 50% of single women report being less inclined to date someone with opposing views; and also that men therefore either pretend to agree or disguise disagreement in order to get along with women. What is at issue is status, not policy outcomes. The nature of the social media panopticon and the continuous performance of values it entails, means it is socially costly for women to be associated with men in a way that is not true in the opposite direction. When you view things in this way it makes sense that “Having a Boyfriend Feels Republican”.

The article presents online gender wars and “heteropessimism” as a two-sided problem - a male and female side, with each contributing in their own way.

Heteropessimism isn’t just for women. Men like the white nationalist Nick Fuentes and the Tate brothers — influencers who are accused of human trafficking and rape — also promote a form of heteropessimism. Their basic argument is that women are not worth the time or are something to dominate and discard, that there is something wrong with them and men are better off alone. These manosphere figures are far less thoughtful and far more hateful in their wording than feminist heteropessimists, but their argument is functionally equivalent. Both groups argue that the other half is just bad. Give up, they tell us. Both are willing to let the cycle of loneliness and atomization continue.

Some of that’s true, but also kind of not true. The internet is a magic mirror that exaggerates the worst characteristics of all groups that peer into it. Certainly it underlines the existing negative associations we have with men; that they are mean, violent, unempathetic, crude, bullying and misogynistic and so on. The worst incel stuff (which the author notes is not very popular anyway) is an intensification of the most negative tendencies we already saw in men.

But the negative social signalling it is coaxing out of women is kind of new, and constant visibility of it is a new and different problem. We all already agree that men are irredeemably awful. As I noted above and have also said else where - being an incel, or someone who hates women or is resentful towards them, is a low status belief; no one wants to be around a person who acts like that. Such people still exist but that provides a natural limiting factor to that belief system or perspective - because people don’t want to be losers. No such limiting factor exists on the other side, so the female contribution to the Heteropessimism is a lot more uncertain and destabilising in it’s effect on women and how they are seen than the male one is on men.

I’m very lucky in that all of this dating market stuff is entirely theoretical to me; I met my wife 20 years, right as the age of internet dating was beginning, and when I reflect on the state of things today I often feel like I feel like a guy who got the last chopper out of Vietnam, hanging on to the skids, legs dangling in the air as the city collapses below me. My interest here is an anthropological one of understanding the cultural changes that have become so visible across my various social feeds the last couple of years, which is the changed tone in which men are spoken about.

But it’s important to say that it’s easy to confuse the conversation with the thing that the conversation is about, and it’s easy to confuse cultural representations of life with life itself. Focus on the discourse creates the illusion that people in the dating market are forced to confront every structural dilemma, and bear every burden of that market simultaneously and at all times. My recollection of my feelings during dating life were not anything structural but only how lonely I was and what a relief it was to finally find the right someone, so I could step out of this world forever and not think about it again. My perspective at the end of my dating years was (I mean this jokingly) that of a world war one soldier, immersed in the mud, blood and smoke, rather than that of world war one general who is surveying the whole battlefield and the whole war at once. I feel sorry that in 2026 the meta nature of the discourse means we ask all of the participants in the dating world to be both the general and the soldier at once, and to broadcast their feelings about it at all times, and it’s not a surprise that many of them buckle. It’s good to return to the core truth, which the article does get right, that relationships are good and make you happy, and you just need to be lucky once. The performance demanded by social media, and the resentment and hopelessness that engenders, shouldn’t fool us into forgetting that.

Other articles on similar topics

This is the second of three monthly updates I promised to do on noteworthy events in Ireland. Link to the previous update is here. This month is going to focus on the discussion about immigration and demographic change triggered by recent remarks from Bertie Ahern, and brought into sharp focus by the differing reaction to two deaths in Dublin.

Bertie Ahern

Finance Minister Paschal O’Donoghue resigned his seat in Dublin Central in November 2025 to take up a role at the World Bank; a by-election was underway throughout May to fill his seat. 74 year old former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern was secretly recorded on a doorstep while campaigning for the Fianna Fáil candidate, giving what constitutes some (in an Irish context) unusually blunt remarks about immigration from a mainstream politician.

… I think there’s too many coming in. We have to take some in. I’ve no problem with the Ukranians because in fairness Russia moved in and war in their country. A lot of the Ukranians are going back now, we still have a lot of Poles here. The ones I’m worried about are the africans… I agree with you on the Africans. We can’t be taking in people from the Congo, all these places. I think there’s too many from those places. I don’t worry about this generation of Muslims. The next generation, when the kids start growing up… that’s what I think the problem will be. I said this to (current Justice Minister) Jim O’Callaghan… (cough… sorry… me lungs) that’s where the problem comes…

When the video was leaked people immediately distanced themselves from Ahern and his remarks, including from within his own party such as the current Taoiseach and grandees such as MEP Cynthia Ní Mhurchú. The condemnation was stronger from left-wing parties and from the state-aligned activist groups. The Social Democrats termed them "absolutely vile," the Green Party called them "harmful and untrue," and Labour candidates accused Ahern of a shameful instance of "punching down on migrants".

There was an unusual level of pushback in support of Ahern in the way there wouldn’t have been in the past, a panelist here parsing Ahern’s remarks in a forgiving way (as usual, avoiding the key cultural and demographic questions that Ahern was really alluding to, and retreating to the safe space of resource allocation and stretched services). Here is the former Lord Mayor of Dublin noting that is his experience “to a man, people were saying fair play Bertie”.

Ahern himself was bullish in defending his position, apologising for singling out individual groups but not for his general remarks. He said he did not understand why his comments had been criticised. Micheál Martin amusingly stated that “we can’t physically stop Bertie Ahern from canvasing” which really summarises the decline of Fianna Fáil as a vital force in Irish politics.

FF once received about 47% of first preference votes in Dublin Central and look to have recieved about 4% in this most recent election, which ranks amongst their worst ever electoral results. As I have noted on many occasions the party and it’s candidates were once not just known for, but defined by, their electoral cunning and ruthless populist instincts. While the Social Democrats have won the open seat, anti-immigration vote (in the form of two independent two candidates, Gerry Hutch and Malachy Steenson) will end up comprising close to 20% of first preferences. That’s about the proportion the winning candidate will get, though of course in a transferable vote system victory is nowhere near that straightforward. In any case, it’s hard not to believe that the FF of the past would have found a way to peel off some of those voters and perhaps that would have been healthier for everyone.

As with the deaths later in the month (more on that below) the Ahern incident did show a strange disconnect between the media and activist class, how normal people see this incident and on the actual facts on the ground. What is the immigration stance of the government; how do the people feel about it; what is the political opportunity on the issue? Declan Lynch in the Irish Independent was typical in noting his view that Fianna Fáil risked tuning into an Irish version of Reform because of it’s drift towards a restrictive immigration policy; and that they should adopt a more apologetic and enthsiastic open-borders policy - that that was the untapped opportunity in Irish politics. This to me reads as a good summary of Respectable opinion on the subject but as a purely factual matter this is an almost total inversion of the truth.

In terms of Fianna Fáil having a right-wing stance on immigration, Séamus Mac an Bháird (consistently a great resource for data and analysis) notes that Ireland granted seven times more citizenship than Denmark (a country with an actually restrictive immigration policy) in 2025. The Irish times noted this week that migrant workers accounted for 61% of jobs growth between 2019 and 2024. The same report notes that one third of the workforce was from outside the state by that date. Other commentators noted that the number of non-nationals working in Ireland grew by 50% between 2019 and 2024, the number of people from India in Ireland working in Ireland quadrupled during that period and the number of people from Brazil doubled. That doesn’t account for people moving outside the official system.

Polling has consistently shown that around three quarters of the Irish public are unhappy with the level of immigration and would like it reduced, and immigration is a top three issue of concern at all times. The only time it has ever been put directly to the public (via the 2004 referendum) mass immigration was decisively rejected. In practical terms a system close to birthright citizenship remains in effect in Ireland through asylum laws, a porous northern border, unenforced deportations orders and amnesties, along with a decision by all mainstream parties (and quite a lot of fringe minor ones) not to discuss the issue critically unless it can’t be avoided.

Tomás O’Reilly noted that in its relatively forgiving nature, and in the belief that demographic changes are sort of like the weather in they just happen and we have to live with them, the government parties are totally out of step with the wider European trend.

Let’s bring this back to the constituency in question. It contains both very deprived areas (including East Wall, epicentre of anti-immigration protests) leafy suburbs (Drumcondra, one of the prettiest parts of Dublin) as well as rapidly gentrifying mixed zones (Stoneybatter, our Brooklyn/ Hoxton variant). Parts of the constituency have experienced or seen vertiginous ethnic change in a few years, discomfort with which has found no democratic outlet.

I can’t find the provenance of this chart but the numbers appear to be correct based on other reporting.

Even if you believe this every single change mentioned above is good and essential, it seems crazy not to note that this is a sudden and radical break with the past with externalities that need to be considered, that the government does not have a restrictive immigration policy - quite the opposite- and rhetoric aside shows no signs of developing one, and that there is evidence that lots of people are unhappy with this mixture and would like that addressed. Ireland currently has no integration policy; it lapsed in 2021 and has not been properly replaced. The record high levels of exemptions for the compulsory subject of Irish (which were almost unknown when I was in school - how I would have killed for one!) indicate things aren’t going well on that front. When you consider all of the above Bertie’s fumbling remarks start to look less like an unbalanced rant, and more like another exit ramp our system is in the process of blithely driving past.

Yves Sakila and Alex Coughlan

A couple of days after Bertie Ahern made his remarks, a Congolese man died outside of Arnotts, after being removed and restrained by 5 security guards. Arnotts is a well-known department store, located in the Dublin Central constituency. Footage of the incident circulated widely on social media threatening to transform it into a George Floyd type incident, and in fact one could feel a vast apparatus of activism activating for that purpose almost immediately. Arnotts was soon surrounded by protestors, and a larger demonstration (numbers vary but around 200 people seems to be the consensus) took place outside the Leinster House.

The incident caught the attention of the international media (Corbynist outlet Novara media here, Reuters here, Channel 4 in the UK here) who sought to portray Dublin as enraged and aflame with racial tension in a way that, to this writer’s eye, is simply not the case. It has become common for this kind of thing to happen in the other partisan direction - as I noted in my last update, foreign right-wingers misrepresenting what is happening in Ireland for their own ends, and Ireland being traded as a culture war token distinct from the facts of the matter, is an established pattern. This is one of the first times I’ve seen it happen in the other direction. As I write, there is not a single story about this event on the front pages of either the Irish Times or RTE news websites.

George Floyd’s death happened during Covid and caught the Irish imagination, leading to some very strange protests here and one absurd incident where some statues were removed from outside a famous Dublin hotel because they were perceived to celebrate slavery (they didn’t, and were soon replaced). Despite the best efforts of the activist class, the death of Sakila hasn’t caught fire in the same way. Even on relatively left-wing leaning platforms like Tik Tok the response has not been sympathetic, with people emphasising Sakila’s immigration status, his previous interactions with police and the reports (confirmed by Gardaí) that an older Irish man, a bystander, had been knocked down and injured during the incident.

This whole chain of events was thrown into relief by a similar case that seemed to unfold simultaneously. In the Dublin suburb of Blanchardstown, a man named Alex Coughlan was

… filmed on his knees, crying and pleading with his teenage attackers before he was fatally assaulted, it is alleged. Two 16-year-olds are accused of carrying out a violent, unprovoked assault on the “defenceless” man as he pleaded for help. A court heard the Alex died from his injuries in hospital following an assault and robbery in west Dublin on Sunday.

As with Sakila’s death, the footage circulated widely online. There was speculation on foot of the video about the migration status and ethnic backgrounds of the attackers.

Despite the similarity of the incidents, it seemed only one was to be allowed to have political utility. No semi-state apparatus clicked into place to make a political tool of Coughlan’s death. There seemed to be an expectation that the public would draw racial and cultural conclusions from one case and put them into action immediately, but a parallel expectation that they would not ask similar questions in relation to another. This cognitive dissonance didn’t make the papers, but people have noticed, and it coloured the online reaction.

Between the two incidents, there probably hasn’t been a better example of how Ireland has created an activist layer of national life on culture war issues, with participants who often seem to have a direct line to local press and international media, who can summon protestors and activists at a moments notice, and can expect to have their voices heard and listened to on every platform, and at every point in government. This isn’t new: there are certain issues (I suggest Savita Halappanavar’s death) where the sudden mobilisation of activists and media is broadly aligned to some underlying public sentiment (in that case a desire to see abortion legalised and legislated for), and follows a parallel track. But on other issues the movements of this layer seem to be totally distinct from and bear no relation to what the public want or and what they think. On these occasions, reading and watching the official reaction, and then looking around you, can feel as though there’s a verison of Ireland that exists only in the media and has a political life entirely distinct from the one we actually live in day to day. If only they remained distinct, but of course the public square one can often impose it’s will on the real one, and may still do so in this case.

Other Stories

• An attempt by the Social Democrats to remove the mandatory waiting period for someone to avail of an Abortion failed. This gives us an interesting checkpoint to see where abortion, for so long a a fraught issue in Irish politics, sits in 2026. With the exception of Aontú, who were formed as an anti-abortion splinter party from Sinn Féin and have two TDs, there is no indication that reducing abortion rights is a key voting issue for any party. Many participants in the system seem to believe that reigniting a dormant culture war issue by changing the status quo when there’s no strong public demand to do so either way can only result in a loss for them. The government allowed a free vote on the subject and there were 36 abstentions, which is a lot.

• The latest edition of the Reporters Without Borders world press freedom rankings placed Ireland at 7 out of 180 countries, which is actually a drop of 6 places but leaves them inside the top ten. The drop is attributable to concerns about future funding for the Irish media. The placing certainly doesn’t seem to account for the issues I highlighted last month involving the implicit weaponisation of an independent press regulator to try and silence anti-government criticism during national fuel protests. Left-wing outlet The Ditch did some follow up reporting on that issue during the month, and discovered the problem was worse than initially thought.

• Another item I mentioned last month was in relation to Nuclear Power, the use of which is currently prohibited by law in Ireland. There had been some loose talk about changing that - I thought it was fanciful but a bill has indeed been introduced to change the existing law. Some members of government including the taoiseach have welcomed the discussion. I’m still suspicious; I think the long time horizon associated with the development of nuclear power provides the opportunity for the government to look like they’re doing something on energy while actually doing nothing, so I still don’t think this is very likely to come to fruition, but the shift in tone is interesting.

Thanks for reading - more next month.

In Season 2, Episode 8 of Hospital drama The Pitt, the Emergency Room doctors stitch up a party girl who has bitten a chunk off her own tongue while drunk. Even as they sew she dips in and out of consciousness, but she is aware enough to confirm she’s an everyday drinker. As we watched at home, my wife and I speculated how this would play out in an Irish hospital… with an exhortation to cop yourself on and stop being an idiot, some grudging admiration for being such a character, maybe a lament from the doctor that they haven’t had time for a pint recently themselves. We were certain it wouldn’t end with the girl being referred to rehab, which is what happens in the show - an hilariously American reaction. These little cultural quirks and tics of The Pitt are one of the things that keep you watching; but attitudes to alcohol are not the biggest or strangest of it’s blindspots, not by a long shot.

The Pitt is very popular. It uses the virtues of peak TV to tell its story in a different way from ER, its closest equivalent, a ‘90s megahit with which it shares key cast member Noah Wyle. Over a 15 episode season each hour in the Emergency Room (A&E to you and me) unfolds as a single episode set in real time. TV ratings aren’t as easy to parse as they were in the past, but the season 2 finale got 9.7 million viewers in one weekend and averaged 15.4 million viewers per episode. That puts it in an elite category of the 5-10 most watched online shows.

Sometimes putting a show like this - which is ultimately a soap opera - under the microscope can be a little much; not every show can stand up to it. The Pitt demands closer examination, however. It has consciously adopted a “ripped from the headlines” strategy where the storylines from the news and current affairs, various other social crises, form the backbone of each episode and season. In The Pitt’s case the headline it’s ripped from is that of a Salon Article, or maybe a Pod Save America episode. It’s explicit purpose is to advocate for progressive stances on political and cultural issues.

Trump’s 2nd electoral victory was unexpected and total, and seemed to speak to some final turn in popular culture. The term Vibe Shift was coined to explain this wider sense that overt Progressivism had lost whatever popular legitimacy it ever had, and become sort of uncool. The sense that there had been a shift wasn’t wrong; there were plenty of concrete examples of it including tribune of the boomers Steven Colbert having his show taken away, various Pixar movies being cancelled or rewritten totally to leave out progressive story elements, athletes doing Trump dances to celebrate touchdowns. But these have to be seen in context as World War One style victories - the right (or really just the not-dedicatedly-progressive side) marched it’s troops into the guns, and after a months of bloody battle gained piece of ground of no strategic importance equivalent to a couple of square feet. Popular culture has almost entirely bounced back to its previous position, and nothing embodies the centrality or resilience of progressive political messaging than The Pitt.

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The movement by respectable politics against a free and open internet where the public can speculate in an ill-informed manner about whatever they choose, circulate any video, or organise on any political issue has become such a monotonous thrum that it’s easy to forget that it’s going on even as it intensifies. As a reminder, here’s how norm-cherishing Very Serious People have been speaking of the masses in just the last couple of weeks.

At the end of April, besieged German Chancellor Friedrich Merz opined in a speech on Social Media Regulation that “on social networks, anyone can say what they think. I find that regrettable.” (I’m struggling to find the exact date for this - it may have been in February.)

At the end of March, British MP Max Wilkinson gave a talk in which he noted that Twitter was “a massive problem” because it allowed critics of mass immigration to “have their voices heard in a way they wouldn’t in the past”. Wilkinson is a member of The Liberal Democrat Party.

As I noted in my monthly round-up, during the April fuel protests in Ireland Culture Minister Patrick O’Donovan publicly and repeatedly threatened to use the power of an independent Media Commission against radio stations who had platformed too many critics of the government. A few days ago O’Donovan noted in the Dáil that Ireland would “go it alone” on internet restrictions for the U16s if the European Union cannot reach an agreement soon.

The Under-16s restrictions sound innocuous (maybe even good) but need to be viewed in the context of, and the entry point for normalising, the new and suddenly ubiquitous transnational war on internet anonymity; efforts that are pretty obviously driven by a desire to stamp down on political agitation and dissent rather than any concerns about children. Just as the easiest way to justify an aggressive war is to say we’re about to be bombed by a rogue state, the easiest way to initiate free speech restrictions with a cry of “won’t someone think of the children”.

The various comments quoted above are selected more or less at random - any three month period in the last ten years would have yielded a similar bumper crop, and the crop gets more bumper with each passing month. It’s easy to look at these comments as the balancing yin to the yang of ascendant populism; the question of how ascendant populism is in structural terms seems an open question.

If a global populist movement existed Trump was its leader, but destroyed his position on that with his agitation on Greenland - as I said at the time:

This episode has shown the hard philosophical limits of the revolt against liberalism, and the internal tensions that will undo that revolt in time. Trump did the one thing that mainstream parties and their ideological counterparts in the media, academia and activism have been trying to do but couldn’t - position themselves as the defenders of a traditional idea of national sovereignty and national dignity. This had the accidental (and for those parties, welcome) side effect of positioning the local European representatives of populism as allies of a hateful and contemptuous globalising force.

The impact came quickly; in Denmark, the polling indicated an immediate benefit to parties of the centre and left. Nigel Farage took the unusual step of mildly critiquing the decision, as did Meloni in Italy, though she’s a slightly less outsider-ish figure than she used to be. So too did Alice Weidel the AFD, who have already learned the hard way the electoral consequences of being too close to Trumpist personalities. The leader of the National Rally in France spoke in terms of resisting American vassalage. (There’s a good summary of the general reaction here.) All of these actors recognised that the problem was not merely a bad application of the Art of The Deal, but something deeper and more serious; and that for them, uncomplicated association with the US on this point was an extinction-level event that required the kind of distancing that had not been needed in the past.

I don’t credit myself with any particular insight there, though it’s interesting that it was European commentators who understood how devastating the Greenland episode was for the right internationally and not American ones.

If the prospect of a coordinated and coherent international populist movement was shot in the head by the Greenland controversy then the Iran war was like someone drone-striking its corpse into a million pieces. Being linked to Trumpism is now directly associated with a universally loathed Israeli government, soaring fuel prices, collapsing economies and cancelled summer holidays. (You laugh, but the latter really counts.)

Victories contnue to stack up regardless. Reform was one of the key winners in last week’s UK local elections; based on polling in Germany it seems inevitable that the AFD will win power there as soon as they become big enough to transcend the cordon sanitaire that’s been placed around them. But if the Trump administrations have shown anything it’s that electoral success isn’t the same as power. America is the one western country where populism has gained the power it needed to execute its agenda and it’s been a mixed experience. Trump’s lesson in his first term was that picking people from within the system (even the ones who declare for you) will only result in system outcomes. To address that, in his second term he has relied on people for whom personal loyalty is their only qualifying criteria. That makes a lot of sense but it’s had a number of negative impacts. A lot of people in change (including Trump himself) haven’t thought very deeply about, or worked very hard at bringing about, long term structural change within the system. They often simply aim at, and have to settle for, a highly visible dramatisation of the change they want rather than the change itself.

These are problems with Trumpism but likely endemic to populism itself, and when populist groups (like Reform, or AfD) take power, the same issues of being outmatched by an entrenched system will emerge. It’s possible despite its supposed ascendancy, that Populism has entered a kind of morbid phase where the frustrations of the electorate - mostly but not entirely based around immigration - are going to keep getting politicians from populist parties and backgrounds making promises, getting elected, forming governments. But they won’t have the administrative expertise or experience, or really even the temperament to make the long term structural changes their voters want - and in any case the system won’t let them. For all it’s faults the system is reliant on and was built by people who care about the details of things work and why, and who have spent a long time planning, organising, and thinking about how to achieve their desired outcomes using that system, in a way that populist candidates haven’t and maybe can’t.

The only solution one could have hoped for in these circumstances is that the respectable Powers That Be, and their colleagues in activism, the media, and within institutions, would look at populism and think “we don’t want to implement the style or the temperament but simply in order to survive and prosper we need to change some of our policies and our orientation - to deliver enough populist outcomes in a non-populist way that we keep the electorate off our backs”. Some people have described the theoretical style that could result as “pantsuit nationalism”; a way of scratching the populist policy itch, in a respectable centrist style, and with respectable centrist competence and knowledge of the system.

That is part of what is so disturbing and discouraging about the ongoing trend for speech restrictions, and the desire to manage public dissatisfaction as though it is solely a communication or narrative problem - rather than as a symptom of a material democratic deficit, and an outcome of long-term policy choices. One would like to think if we could press a button and immediately find ourselves back in 2015 watching Trump descend on his escalator, that the party of respectability would think - ah - we’ve been given a chance to do things differently - let’s use our accumulated knowledge and insight of what is to come to change course. The intervening ten years would have given us (the people who run the system and take it as their natural position to do so) greater insights into what drove the rupture between the elites and the people.

But it demonstrably hasn’t, and I think that’s weird. After any populist eruption, from Brexit to Trump’s first election, there was a wave of think pieces about what had happened. It’s Economic Anxiety; it’s because we’re not listening to men; because we’re not listening to white people; because we’re not listening to the working class; because we’ve been too overbearing in forcing our boutique value systems on to an uninterested public; you can add to this list that the various autopsies that have been carried out by the mainstream political parties after failed election bids that plunged them into existential crises, see Biden 2020.

But the point of the stages of grief is that you’re supposed to move through them to eventually land on understanding and acceptance. For all the upheavals of the 21st century, no firm conclusions have been reached from inside the system as to how we got where we are, other a kind “bitches be crazy” attitude about the public and what the internet did to them. The decision seems to have been (perhaps unconsciously) made that there is nothing to change or learn from the past other than you have to stop people from saying and thinking terrible things online and if you can hold that line hard enough then maybe the problem will go away by itself (it won’t). The system is stuck in the denial stage of the grief process.

This is damaging for a number of reasons not least because it has revealed that the people who regard themselves as being primarily as wardens of basic democratic accountability really dislike the dirty essentials of democratic life, and believe that if their ideas are given a fair hearing in the public alongside rival ideas that theirs simply cannot win on their own merits. From Merz to Wilkinson to O’Connor they have no faith at all that if they put their position to the public they will win the argument. We need urgently to get to the bottom of what drives that belief. My guess is it’s another kind of internet psychosis in itself - that exposure to a particular kind of populist has convinced the sensible centrist that those people are irredeemable so the feeling is not only “why even bother”, but to engage is to lose.

It’s also a testament to the fact that, in the past, the upper ranks of politics, culture and society would have been formed of people with all kinds of temperaments and all kinds of experience (from the military, industry, from churches…). It’s relatively recent that we developed a ruling class made up only of risk-averse academic strivers and administrators who only mix with people of the same type. This is the logical outcome of a process of sorting that has been described on a personal level by Charles Murray and as a conscious political programme by Peter Mair. By temperament they (as with progressives and liberals generally) tend uniformly to be neurotic, avoidant and sensitive in a way that was not the case for the rulers of yesteryear. I’m not judging - I’m like that too, and I recognise my people. But we have selected people to run the show whose first choice when faced with an argument is a neurotically-driven desire to silence your opponent rather than face and beat them, or even better to be beaten and take on some part of the winning argument.

To summarise the problem: Populists (or whatever you want to call them - normal people, fascists, the new right, the unWoke, National Conservatives, etc etc etc - we all know who I mean) don’t have the skills or the personality types necessary to change the system in the way their voters want. Any current or impending success they are having at the ballot box is kind of illusory because the system will try to stop them and it will win. I think they will try to plug that gap between what they have promised and what they can do, and vent their frustration at it, by performing an extreme version of the desired change rather than actually enacting it. That is what has happened in America and it is likely to happen elsewhere. This impasse is self-reinforcing - voters will keep selecting populists, because the fact populists can’t make the changes the voters want (especially around immigration) is proof that the populists are right, and necessary. System insiders have the ability and the expertise to make some of these changes and have them stick, but they simply won’t do it under any circumstances which seems insane to me. We need them to accpet defeat and change, or it seems likely that we’re in for ten or fifteen years of gridlock until some new and as yet unknown equilibrium is reached. It’s not just all going to blow over, and it’s not simply a matter of who wins an election.

Articles from me on similar subjects

I posted the note above a couple of weeks ago: what happened was, my wife and I had walked to a local shopping centre for some reason - can’t remember. This was at about 8 at night, the schools were out at the time so there were rowdy kids everywhere, attracted by the McDonalds and the cinema and the unsupervised open spaces on which to perform.

As we got close, there was one group of boys blocking the steps up to the only entrance. 10-15 boys, ranging in age from 12 to maybe 16, tracksuits, shouting, vaping etc. They were being what an English person would call “lairy”, standing in a knot in front of the steps, pushing, pulling and dragging each other, shouting at each other over the heads of people coming up the steps, putting one another in headlocks etc.

This was the only access point at this edge of the shopping centre, and without being direct about it they were stopping people from getting up the steps, by suddenly pushing one another into the path of pedestrians, stumbling backwards into them half on purpose, running around in a way that caused people to have to suddenly pause or shift course to avoid a collision, or get into an argument by physically shove one of these kids out of the way. So it wasn’t threatening behaviour but it also wasn’t non-threatening strictly speaking, because they were behaving in such a way that is guaranteed to provoke a conflict or an altercation, and (in my opinion) you could see as you got closer - too late to do anything about it - they were looking to do that. They knew exactly what they were doing, everyone did, because we’ve all despaired of that behaviour but also because we’ve all behaved like that as kids or teenagers.

I was walking slightly ahead of my wife and I was unconsciously thinking, as normal - I’m going up these steps and they’ll just have to move out of the way. I started walking up the steps just as two of them started swinging off each other directly into my path. I gently (maybe not so gently) elbowed them out of the way as they backed into me, and I probably also said “here” or “watch it lads” or “careful there” as I passed.

As we got to the top of the steps and away from the crowd she said to me in a slightly scandalised way “did you shove that kid out of the way?” I explained to her from my perspective that I was coming through as normal and wasn’t going to walk around or get out of the way of someone who saw me approach and was intentionally creating a nuisance in part for the enjoyment of doing that but also in some small part to provoke a confrontation.

This was an innocuous and forgettable incident and I would have left it aside totally had it been recorded as a note on Substack above. The fact that it did got me thinking of all the times in my life where I have been in a situation where someone has created the possibility of conflict, by invading personal space or being otherwise publicly obnoxious in a way that is designed to create conflict or provoke it. I’ve had this conversation with my wife a couple of times and it always interests me that we seem to be speaking a totally different moral language and contemplating a totally different decision tree when it comes to these incidents. (Her view is completely rational and reasonable.)

It’s happened on a couple of instances with homeless people in Dublin who suddenly turn aggressive, she will often note that I extricate myself from these situations at a leisurely pace rather than basically running or speed-walking away, which is what she does. My perspective is that I have been caught in those situations in the past and learned that, while you want to get yourself out of it, I also know that as a man too readily indiciating my willingness to placate an aggressor can have the effect of inflaming something predatory in them and confirming that you’re the target they had been looking for. This isn’t every time, and you have to develop a radar for it.

For clarity I’m not saying her behaviour or perception of these situations is wrong, it’s completely correct for her own circumstances. She’s a thoughful and sensitive person and never tells me my point of view is wrong, but when we first spoke about this it always came as a surprise to her. So my observation is only that the difference between how men and women understand stranger violence, or the threat of it, and the calculus they go through in reacting to it, is important, interesting and under-explored.

When I posted that note most people seemed to agree but there was some dissent, mainly on the theme of the necessity of avoiding conflict, the importance of taking the heat out of a situation, and de-escalation. One person noted that Rob Henderson has covered the irrational and egotistical tendency of men to escalate conflict in his description of the “Male Monkey Dance of Aggression” here. I agree with all that, and of course think it’s incumbent on people within reason to try and avoid conflict. I too have seen plenty of situations where two or more men butt heads, each of them unwilling to give up any space or concede any ground, and if one of them had only done so then a pointless ride in an ambulance/ cop car could have been avoided for one or all participants.

The difference in my mind (and perhaps I didn’t articulate this as well as I might) is what to do when a situation has already begun and you are caught in it, and/ or one party is engaging in an act of predatory victim-seeking for its own sake. This is a common (I would guess the most common) cause of male on male stranger violence. In these circumstances the type of person the aggressor is looking for is very specific. It has to be someone who could fight back and be a threat under other circumstances - so for example a woman or a child is no use; it has to be another man. But it also has to be a man who indicates through their demeanour that they are willing to be a victim of violence, who hopes that their well-signalled harmlessness provides them with a route out of conflict, and that they won’t be engaged in the unfamiliar and in it’s own way dangerous act of physically defending themselves or even just standing their ground/ not panicking.

I think being someone who was bullied or picked on at school, or is a naturally reserved or unintimidating person really helps understand the dynamic of these situations. It conditions you to understand that there are people out there who have a strong hierarchical/ predatory instinct towards weakness that manifests as public aggression and that you are the kind of person they are looking for. Of course, it also prompts you to avoid situations where violence might arise - you look down the street and see a knot of lads harassing pedestrians outside the corner shop, they haven’t noticed you yet, so you decide to turn down a side street and add 30 seconds to your journey home rather than get into it. Every woman has done that but so has every man, and it’s a rational thing to do. But every man has also been in a situation where they’ve thought to themselves - I’ve caught the eye of a predatory person who is looking for someone to show that they are willing to be a victim, and it’s too late to exit the situation easily - what do I do?

The truth is that even the neediest, lamest and most milk and water man has an outlook centred around strength, and they recognise that all other men have an outlook that functions in the same way. That’s true in both a positive and negative way. The positive side is it creates a desire for self-reliance, stoicism, usefulness, the drive to excel or to develop expertise and be admired for the strength of your skills. The negative side of it can be an instinctive and intense hatred of weakness (gentleness, meekness, shyness, ineffectuality, reticence, etc) and determination to prove yourself to others by punishing those qualities in other men. All of this creates in men an innate sense understanding of aggression, how people use it to purposely intrude into the lives of others, and what they get out of it.

This is part of something that I have noticed very frequently which is the disconnect between how badly women are worried about interpersonal violence from strangers vs how aware they are in practice of the possibility of it around them. I think it’s a universal male experience (straight men anyway) to shepherd a girlfriend or wife to the other side of a street (“actually, let’s go this way”) because you’ve spotted something or someone up ahead that presents a threat of violence, and there is still time to get out of the situation before you’re in it; and then to wonder to yourself afterwards - for a person who feels so vulnerable, how could it be that she didn’t notice that? Women are more open about being afraid of violence (for the entirely rational reason they are physically smaller) but it’s actually men who think about it constantly in practical terms and have an almost innate sixth sense, established from an early age, for when it is about to come at them.

Something that is true and important but never acknowledged is that men, particularly in their teens and twenties when they are most likely to be assaulted, are aware of and worry about the threat of violence and aggression from other men constantly; it dips in later years but never totally goes away. It’s a mental load that they carry with them at all times and that colours their worldview. You can extrapolate all kinds of political and social implications from this that help explain why men are the way they are and have the outlook they do, and why it differs from womens. Building an identity around visible vulnerability is dangerous and bad; even though you’re a good guy, a lot of people like you are malign and predatory; secure “owned” personal and psychological space is not just good and but essential. It also reinforces that people will take lee-way and sympathy given to them as a prompt to engage in the thrill of dominating or dispossessing others, and it’s therefore important to formulate your behaviour with an understanding of how it will be exploited by predatory people, and to always be on the lookout for that. I think of the well-documented “leave him alone” phenomenon and how infuriating that is.

Men have this dilemma, which is that feeling strong (whatever it means) is very important for their self-esteem but also for their personal safety which means they rationally decide not to undermine that by being too open about feelings of weakness or vulnerability. Women often use their own sense of vulnerability as a point of bonding and common interest and are more open about it. This forms part of an informational imbalance - despite what we tell each other, the result is that men have a much greater appreciation of how scared women are of public violence, and how it informs their view of the world, than women do of men. The truth is particularly between the ages of say 16-27 mens awareness of violence when they are on the street is through the roof and infects their every decision and later on how they see the world. It influences their every move, and it intrudes upon peace of mind at all times. I think it’s strange that I’ve never seen it acknowledged how much mental energy and mental space awareness of violence takes up in men’s heads during those years and how formative that experience is. If that informational imbalance is on anyone, it’s on men for not being more open but in any case has political consequences.

It makes complete sense that women have a different mode of threat perception from men because they are working with different circumstances and don’t have the same personal insight into men’s bullshit status games, and ego, malign intent, and sometimes negative relationship with the idea of strength. And of course as I said above men don’t tell women about the fear they have of violence from strangers (to be clear - male strangers) so why would any woman know about that. I do think that a greater understanding of the difference in how men and women think about these things would help, in particular because it allows for a greater understanding of our different moral decision-making, which after all stems from their differing capacities and blind spots, and is the driver of so much political strife.

Articles from me on similar topics

In April the UK’s New Statesman published an article entitled Angry Young Women, which uses new polling to

… explore a growing ideological divide, detailing a shift among young British women toward the populist left and heightened economic pessimism. The report highlights that women aged 18–30 are increasingly progressive, disillusioned with capitalism, and in some cases, rejecting traditional dating and family structures.

That’s how AI summarised it for me - in reality the article is eye-catching because it is based on polling that describes a powerful and pervasive internet-driven dislike of men which is distinctive amongst this generation and worse the more educated, white and well-off they are. The key finding is that young women have a far more negative view of men than vice versa. The article is paywalled but the video above summarises the main issues.

The polling, article and video caught attention because they provide a counterpoint to the well-trodden ground of the online radicalisation of young men. Many people (including me) commenting on that phenomenon have noted that data shows that if any group in society is showing signs of diverging from the political mainstream it is young women not young men. This is another chunk of data to support that, and the New Statesman’s work is also a great checkpoint to both consider the differences in how men and women are driven to extremes, why it happens, and what it means for each of them.

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