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.

—

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.

Read more

I put out a Substack note a little while ago asking if anyone was interested in seeing a monthly Irish politics and culture round-up, since the selection of Irish content on Substack is so poor, and so sparse. That got a positive response, so this is the first one - I’ll do at least three and we’ll see how it goes.

The content this month will be mostly about the fuel protests and the fall-out around that. It will probably be more varied and hopefully less haphazard in future months - bear with me while I figure out a format.

Protests

Quick rundown: starting on the 7th of April, hauliers, farmers, and transport operators staged a series of nationwide protests in Ireland as a response to increased fuel prices - a problem they believe is exacerbated by excessive taxation. Protestors occupied a portion of Dublin City Centre with tractors and other vehicles for 6 days, rendering it inaccessible to traffic, and also blockaded critical ports and fuel infrastructure around the country. This was eventually cleared in the middle of the night by Gardaí, after which the government announced an additional half billion package of relief measures. Blockades and protests are still going on intermittently in various places.

The best summary I saw about the political meaning of this action was from :

I don’t agree with each point here, and don’t know how accurate his assessment of the support provided to date is. But he’s absolutely correct that the people conducting this protest were Fianna Fáil/ Fine Gael or crypto FF/FG Independent voters and not revolutionairies with a deeper grudge towards the system and how it operates. They are members of a consensus- and propriety-conscious, risk-averse middle that forms the Cordon Saintaire around culture war issues. Keith is absolutely correct that ideas about cost of living, taxation and the distribution of public goods are important and can be threatening to individual politicians, but they form the safe space of Irish politics, the ground everyone is most comfortable on. Despite the efforts of people on all sides to capitalise on the decentralised nature of the protests to make it about their own hobby horse, there was no secret ideological core to the protests that could serve as the start of a larger philosophical change for the country.

Outsiders

Immigration is the only current political issue that truly terrifies official Ireland, and a key part of their reaction to events like these can be explained as a desire to keep it out of conversation, and prevent the general discontent from drifting towards that issue. On the other side, large numbers of people who have been unsuccessful at forcing immigration retsriction into the political conversation sought to use the protests to do so, unsuccessfully. Not all of these latter forces originate inside Ireland. Almost the instant protests began, Justice Minister Jim O’Callaghan raised the spectre of Tommy Robinson, a reliable one-man way of discrediting any protest in the minds of the public.

The best commentary I saw on this was from :

Ezra Levant did indeed arrive in Ireland later the same day. He was not alone. Soon enough a swarm of familiar locusts was buzzing around the capital with their mics and cameras.

I’ve pooh-poohed the idea of the foreign interference meme in the past, particularly as a lazy way of discrediting protestors by linking them on a spiritual level with England. I don’t feel my comments were wrong, but I do think I underestimated how far certain boomer-brained Irish right wingers would go in appealing to non-irish audiences and movements regardless of negative impact at home, even when that involved indulging people with an innate contempt for Irish people and Irish nationhood. Tommy Robsinon really did arrive in Dublin and here he is speaking with Levant, commenting on the action as though they are talking during a break in play at an NFL game

Robinson is a self-described Loyalist, and both he and Levant are staunch and vocal supporters of Israel. It would be impossible to cook two people up in a lab better designed to repulse the average Irish voter. They themselves must surely be aware of this, so the question is why even comment? People on the Irish right sometimes speculate this is a psyop designed to discredit them; I think the truth is both sadder and more sinister. For people like this, “Ireland” doesn’t exist except as a kind of token to be traded amongst players in a larger political game, to help their audiences feel either better or worse about what’s going on in their own countries, for their own reasons. That’s facilitated by Irish content creators who prosper by speaking in the language of, and appealing to the prejudices of, an international (mostly but not exclusively american) audience, and purposely misleading them about the nature of the situation here. Much of the “Ireland is rising” type content that circulated as the protest took hold were shots of unrelated and quite different immigration riots and protests from a few months ago. As Gearóid correctly notes, all of this is an active impediment to the development of any kind of challenge to cultural consensus within Ireland.

A familiar figure in this is Conor McGregor. McGregor’s pub distributed sandwiches to the protestors but he was otherwise not central to the action, which was disconnected from anything he normally speaks about. He nevertheless appeared on various outlets wearing an Ireland pin and talking in the language of being a “god-fearing patriot” - all of which is normal in right-wing American discourse, but again, unfamiliar and off-putting to any Irish person.

Fianna Fáil

While protests hit all government parties hard the biggest losers are thought to be FF. Justice Minister Jim O’Callaghan began their downward spiral by initially suggesting that the army would be deployed to clear the protest. Throughout the crisis, FF ministers and the FF-led government continued to speak in caustic terms about a protest that had the support of the majority of Irish people, and that seemed to become more popular as it went along. The government underwent and survived a no-confidence vote; the only surprise was the resignation of independent TD, Fianna Fáil gene-pool alpha-gombeen and largest landlord in the Dáil Michael Healy Rae. The three youngest FF TDs (all of whom voted in favour of the government) released a letter suggesting that the party was at risk of losing its mandate. There were a number of frantic party meetings and the occasional fringe claims that there would be an FF leadership challenge (there wasn’t, and won’t be).

I wrote in the past about how the lack of a strong ideological perspective can become a practical problem for modern political parties. I was talking at the time about Trump, but it’s FF’s problem too. Even if they were inclined to remove their leader - doing so would depend on their being someone in their ranks with a strong sense of what the party is for, or what Ireland could be, and a plan to take the party and the country in that direction. But FF have spent the last 40 years on a self-hollowing project, discarding their old clothing of nationalism and religion to become a purely administrative, steady-as-she-goes, status quo, incrementalist party. For them, Ideological thinking is done by people in Europe or America, by activists with access to government, and by smaller coalition partners. FF are not left or right; they’re nothing. There is no “ideas wing” within the party with a long-term vision, or that is interested in institution building or developing a new philosophical outlook, and so no sub-section of the party that could generate a leader that would do things differently.

Free Speech

Once the protests had died down, Patrick O’Donovan (a Fine Gael TD and Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media) decided to re-inflame the situation by appearing on at least three radio interviews to criticise the level of air-time the protestors had been given in comparison to the government during the crisis. He stated that he would be referring the matter to Coimisiún na Meán, which is government funded but which describes itself as “Ireland’s independent regulator for broadcasting, video-on-demand, and online media, regulating traditional media, enforces safety codes on digital platforms, and promotes media diversity.” It is not his role to do this, and it corrupts the Commission’s independence to threaten to do so.

The National Union of Journalists described O’Donovan’s comments as “sinister and deeply distrubing”. O’Donovan dropped out of sight, and the government dismissed the comments by stating they were no longer a review was not necessary, which side-stepped the question on whether it should have been proposed.

The NUJ predictably couched its criticism of O’Donovan by portraying him as Trumpist, and there were comparisons to the recently defeated Viktor Orbán, whom Fine Geal have been a constant critic of. The truth is that the government has gotten used to the main troublesome protesters in Ireland being people outside IPAS centres. Over the last while both FF and FG have been able to say quite extreme and authoritarian things about those groups because they are perceived by the public as scumbags, and because they are ideological enemies of journalists. Extreme and contemptuous statements about clamping down on protestors, curtailing basic rights in various ways, and using the semi-independent organs of the state to attack their beliefs at the root were either ignored, encouraged or explained away by the press. O’Donovan himself was asked recently about the undemocratic nature of how Ireland’s speech laws were formed and more or less told the reporter to shut up and stop complaining - no one in the media cared. So what happened here is that the government forgot that they were dealing with a different group this time round and that the press would not run cover for them in the usual way.

This relates back to the comments about the brainlessness of Fianna Fáil as a structural and practical weakness. When it comes to cultural conflicts, the press-enabled mainstream attempt to circumscribe the conversation has been very effective. That means mainstream politicians have never had to think very deeply about what is at stake on these issues, never felt pressure on the weak points of their arguments, never been forced to consider what an articulate opponent of their plans might say. Their arguments never go beyond the most superficial level that anyone who has spent five minutes thinking about the issue might make. They rely (as in this most recent example) very heavily on the fact that, when push comes to shove, they can use a supine media along with the threat of the law to silence people and chill the discussion. Aside from being deeply embarrassing (imagine participating in a democracy and believing that the only chance your views have of succeeding is with the implicit threat of arrest and prosecution) the result is that Ireland’s mainstream has an exceedingly soft intellectual underbelly.

The fuel protests haven’t stopped and I’ll pick up some of these stories next month.

Other Stuff

Here are a couple of other items of ineterst from during the month:

• Protesters occupied a Mayfair bookshop owned by the Duke of Devonshire, on foot of a proposed 900% rent increase for sheep farmers on his estate in Waterford. The story had been well covered in Ireland but this was the first time it had broken internationally, to the amazement of many foreign onlookers. What amused me is it broke immediately after internet-poisoned embarrassment Simon Schama had voiced the opinion that the Republic of Ireland was established as a kind of Ultranationalist Catholic ethnostate. That’s an idea that’s become more common amongst anglo-american right-wing commentators the last year or two - I’ll leave you to speculate why that might be. Anyway, the idea of Irish sheep farmers paying rent to an English aristocrat in 2026 seems somewhat at odds with that claim. I still recall my surprise (to put it mildly) as a teen when my dad told me that my parents paid a nominal ground rent to an English landlord as part of their leasehold. For anyone interested in these issues I can semi-recommend the book “Burning The Big House” by Terence Dooley.

• The Irish Government was reported as considering ending the ban on the use of nuclear power. The ban was introduced by a Fianna Fáil government in 1999. A number of people who were involved in the ban have quietly changed position on this without admitting it, most contemptibly current MEP Billy Kelleher. I suspect investment in nuclear power would probably require investment in the military as well for security reasons, making it doubly problematic. Regardless of the ban, Ireland’s use of nuclear power will increase with the completion of the Celtic Interconnector in 2028. To quote an eternally relevant phrase, that’s what you call an Irish solution to an Irish problem.

• Tomás O'Reilly (who you should follow on twitter and elsewhere) wrote about the vote in the EU Parliament on the use of external Migrant Return Hubs. As Tomás highlights, Fine Gael’s Maria Walsh was the only member of the EPP to vote against the measure, illustrating how FG is becoming an increasingly out of touch outlier in a supposedly centrist/ conservative grouping - also an indicator of how out of touch Irish politicians are with the european mainstream on this issue, being wedded to a “Wir Schaffen Das” consensus that has evaporated elsewhere. Of the two Independent Irish MEPs elected on something like a right-populist ticket, one abstained and one wasn’t present. Shrug emoji.

• “A 24-year-old man said he stabbed a garda and set the Black Forge pub in Dublin on fire last year as a message to the Government and to the pub’s owner Conor McGregor not to insult the Prophet Muhammad.” I don’t think it’s true to say this story went under the radar as it was widely covered in Ireland and elsewhere; but some of the details were really striking and I don’t think the Irish public have fully assimilated what they mean. Khan was explicit about being inspired by ISIS; at the height of the summer travel rush this man of uncertain financial status got consecutive flights from Belfast to Valencia to Rome to Leeds/ Bradford to Dublin in the course of three days, and it’s not clear how he paid for it. But I guess if we can memory-hole the double beheading that took place in Sligo in 2022 maybe the lack of curiosity isn’t that surprising.

• My personal political highlight of the month is the 1926 Irish census was digitised, and access to it made available to the public. Ancestry records can be sparse in Ireland for economic and historical reasons, so this is a treasure trove. Author John Crotty (top Ireland defender on twitter - buy his books) noted that amongst other points that there were a total of just 430 people from outside Britain and Ireland living in the entirety of Connacht at the time.

Thanks for reading; more next month.

What are the effects of men restraining their emotions

What are the effects of women expressing their emotions

Reading that puts me in mind of the scene in Malcolm X where Denzel Washington reads the dictionary definitions of black and white. Amongst men, emotional restraint is “…a behavior often rooted in societal expectations for men to be “strong” or “stoic,” (that) can have serious and wide-ranging negative effects on their mental health, physical well-being, and relationships…” whereas on the other hand “… women expressing emotions fosters deeper connections, improves self-understanding, builds confidence, and can lead to stronger leadership, while also allowing emotional release and better stress management.”

I think this does reflect an essential bias in how we understand the relative merits of expressing versus controlling emotions, and it has some interesting implications.

The first is that even AI, if pressed, would admit that there is an element to emotional expression that is not socially determined. That makes these statements a biological judgement as well as a practical one. If women’s average tendency is to be more expressive of their emotional state, our society’s perspective is not just that that’s a good approach but that on the emotional level women are simply better than men.

The other is that while the AI summary admits that an emotional style that prioritises empathy and expressiveness at all costs has its drawbacks, it admits to those drawbacks in the usual backhanded fashion. If ever-more intense emotional disclosure is bad, that’s because it’s “too perfect”; empaths are too wonderful, too admirable, and get pigeonholed as the people who can feel everything for everyone. This perception of male/ female emotional styles falls into a pattern we see when analysing political inclinations. Right-wing/ conservative/ restrictionist or just not maximally liberal approaches are bad because they’re wrong and nasty, whereas when maximally liberal/ progressive approaches are bad because they are applied insufficiently, or are too enlightened and kind for their own good, and place too heavy an emotional burden on the people who advance them. These are the kind of results you get when you mark your own homework.

One of the frame-fixing tricks for seeing men’s emotional preferences as maladaptive and morally low rent is that the idea of “Emotional Labour”, which the OED defines as “the mental activity required to manage or perform the routine tasks necessary for maintaining relationships and ensuring smooth running of a household or process, typically regarded as an unappreciated or unacknowledged burden borne disproportionately by women.”

In recent times the definition of Emotional Labour has metastasized into the related concepts of hetero-pessimism (“widespread cultural attitude of despair, irony, or disappointment regarding heterosexual relationships, particularly among women”) and Mankeeping, which dial up the moral contempt and opprobrium implicit in the original idea. The latter was defined in the New York Times, and:

… describes the work women do to meet the social and emotional needs of the men in their lives, from supporting their partners through daily challenges and inner turmoil, to encouraging them to meet up with their friends.

“What I have been seeing in my research is how women have been asked or expected to take on more work to be a central — if not the central — piece of a man’s social support system,” Dr. Ferrara said, taking care to note that the dynamic isn’t experienced by all couples.

… Many of the institutions and spaces where men used to organically make friends have eroded, he said, like houses of worship, civic groups and even the simple workplace.

“Men used to be able to put themselves in these institutional settings and it kind of happened around them,” he added. “That’s just not happening so much anymore. Men do have to do more, be more assertive. I’m finding that even in my own life.”

These ideas are reflective of a moral framework that sees expressiveness as the only type of emotional management that is helpful and worth doing, and a tendency to restrain emotions as contemptible, stupid and morally inscrutable. My mind naturally leaps to all the times that I have benefitted from men managing their emotions.

About 25 years ago, I had started working a full time job but was still living at home. One morning I noticed that people were looking strangely at me at the kitchen table as I spoke. Was it something I said? It turned out that one side of my face had collapsed and was immobile. I felt fine; my mother was very upset and worried and was having trouble not showing it. After a lot of conversation we decided going to the doctor immediately was the best thing (I can’t remember what day or time this was but I recall it was more inconvenient than usual). What I really remember was my father saying “you want to go to the doc? Ok let’s go to the doc”, and then casually strolling out to the car with me to go to A&E. My dad never calls the doctor “the doc” and was affecting a calm, still air as a counterpoint to my mother’s expressiveness and because he understood what was needed at that point was to turn the temperature down and not up. At the doctor it turned out I had Bell’s Palsy (temporary cases of which are not uncommon after a cold, and I was recovering from one). I got some steroids (I think?) and was back to normal a couple of days later.

The point is that my dad was scared, and I’m sure any loving parent would be when they see their offspring behaving strangely and suffering from what probably looked like a stroke. He made an active choice not to display it, to in fact suppress it and display the opposite of fear for the benefit of the impacted person and everyone else around. That’s not a nice feeling - to be scared and to not only not show that you are scared, but show that you are feeling not-scared. This was probably the millionth occasion in my life where a responsible adult man gathered up the scraps of other people’s fear and held them inside himself to the benefit of others, and to his own possible detriment. It’s important to note that part of this role is that you can’t later say “I was actually really scared”- you have to brush it off if someone brings it up, and can’t claim credit for it. What is that if not emotional labour?

While in advertising and in the short form video content that pollutes the internet we enjoy categorising men as shallow, stupid and simple, our culture does implicitly understand there is something worthwhile to a more typically male approach. I think it’s notable that the male figures we see in film and TV as the most admirable and worthy of imitation, and who are the hottest, (including those made for a primarily female audience) are the taciturn and powerful ones, rather than the guys who burst out crying every ten minutes. Research, such as the Czech paper described in this report, shows that men’s relative emotional stability is one of the things that women envy the most about them. Findings like these insults our sense that in the realm of emotions women are biologically superior to men, so you will note in the report that the finding has to be positioned as a symptom of male privilege rather than a simple positive difference in men’s favour. I wonder how much of the “men will do x instead of go to therapy”- style antagonism toward men on social media is just an expression of an unconscious, frustrated envy.

But that side steps the question of whether Emotional Labour and connected ideas that privilege emotionality as superior are even valid most of the time. The lie at the heart of these concepts is that most people’s emotional choices are based on their innate preferences and not because of what it will do for the people around them. Leaving concrete issues like child care aside, a great deal of the Emotional Labour people endure is self-created for their own benefit and is only justified as being other-oriented after the fact. That’s as true of emotional restraint as it is of expressiveness. When we describe a positive version of men’s emotional style we often categorise it as Stoicism. But in most cases it is really just a natural outlook of people who do not enjoy experiencing strong emotions coupled with an un-philosophical desire to feel and be in control of oneself and one’s actions.

The male/female difference is the easiest way to understand these issues and factor in their increased salience, but one can overstate it. There are a couple of explanations for how we got to the point where expression is not just privileged over restraint but where restraint is seen as a bad thing. Technology is the big one; in a heavily mediated world, social status is naturally based on your willingness to perform your inner life, and use that to position yourself worthy of sympathy and attention. Failure to do so puts you at a social disadvantage.

It’s also politically suspect. Emotional restraint and a desire for privacy aren’t the same thing but they are overlapping. Demanding emotional performance inevitably entails a demand that you expose parts of yourself you would rather keep private. That creates an underlying tension with the idea of freedom of speech, since it entails a social expectation you say things you might not believe and you suppress the things you would like to say which might otherwise get you in trouble. A world that rewards extravagant claims of Emotional Labour, empathy and so on will always be one that is comfortable policing speech that falls in the gray zone between public and private; come out here and expose yourself, expose your feelings so that I can punish you for them, and use my own to browbeat you into the correct position.

To the extent that there is a sex difference element to how we understand the value of emotional restraint, it’s easy to take a false short-term view and forget that technology isn’t the only thing that’s changing. The difference between my emotional life and that of my father is probably greater than that between my sister and our mother. Men have happily aligned themselves to what were previously considered feminine social norms around expressing their feelings. But that only shows that if there is a residual male resistance to or discomfort with a societal demand for increased emotional expressiveness, it’s likely there’s something innate at play that won’t go away. I don’t accept the frame of “Emotional Labour”, but it would probably be better to include male preferences as valid within that, than to continue to embrace a different frame that sees men as innately inadequate, and women as saintly emotional virtuosos.

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For me, the exemplar of the old attitude was comedian Bill Hicks, who had a famous routine about how doing commercials disqualified you as an artist. This bit would have been very familiar to anyone who grew up in that era as a canonical statement of the received opinion on this matter. His rant starts off about Jay Leno, who had been a beloved comedian amongst other practitioners before he was understood to have made a move into increasingly insipid light entertainment, which they saw as a betrayal. That’s who he’s talking about here from the 2:07 mark (I’ve put the important parts in bold):

Because he’s a company man to the bitter fucking end… and it all started, folks, when he did a Dorito’s commerical… and here’s the deal, I’m drawing a line in the sand like Colonel Fannin did at the Alamo, you’re with me or you’re not. If you do a commerical you’re off the artistic roll call forever - case fucking closed. Man, doing Doritos is so sad, Jay doing Doritos… just Satan fucking him in the ass on national TV man - (whiny, lispy voice) “Hi, I’m Jay Leno! Remember when I used to be funny? I’m here for Doritos!” and Satan is just (feral sex sounds). “Here Satan, try the Nacho flavour brand!” (feral sex and eating sounds). (Demonic voice) “mmm, cool and refreshing!” (Jay Leno voice again) “tonight on the show we’ve got Joey Lawrence and Patrick Duffy!” Man if that were the guest list he’d use a fucking Uzi on himself… (mimics gun sounds)… he’d just be chewing fucking lead… (more feral sounds)… you do a commerical you’re off the artistic call forever, you’ve now got a price on your head, you’re a corporate fucking whore, just another whore at the capitalist fucking gang bang, case fucking closed, and that goes for everyone - except Willie Nelson.

(Hicks was from Texas, hence the Nelson joke.)

He did a version of this bit on the David Letterman talk show in 1993 - it was cut along with the rest of his set, leading him to fall out with Letterman (who he idolised and was sort of defending in this bit - the lore is too tiresome to get into). Hicks was unhappy about it until he died the following year, and Letterman was haunted by the decision. Letterman aired the full segment in 2009.

Hicks’s bit is the best manifesto-like statement of this attitude, but there are lots of other examples from the era, mostly from music, of people refusing to interact with or give their authenticity to the corporate world. Most of the examples revolve around commercials. When companies (Doritos again!) employed soundalike versions of Tom Waits on their ads sued them; he described having his music copied in this way as “like having a cow’s udder sewn to the side of my face, painful and humiliating.” REM declined to allow their music to be used in the Windows launch, and Microsoft went with the Rolling Stones for one of the most famous campaigns in history. In “This Note’s for You”, Neil Young (who presumably got the same offers) sang “ain’t singing for pepsi, ain’t singing for coke, ain’t singing for no one, make me feel like a joke”.

The idea that commercialism was low status and cringe didn’t just extend to ads. Anything that smacked too much of appealing to coarse or traditional mainstream tastes was included. It’s kind of become re-accepted that it’s normal for men like to see hot women and for attractive women to commodify their appearance and sexuality, but it was deeply cringe to acknowledge that in the ‘90s within any slice of popular culture that regarded itself as edgy or cool or what used to be called “Right On” (that term has vanished but was useful - it meant something similar to “woke”but even more strident and tiresome). In the UK, where the phrase was popular, that didn’t change until the lad mag revolution of the britpop era.

The anti-corporate/ anti-commercial attitude was expressed with a pompous and contemptuous tone that is very familiar from our own era, and as today there were many inconsistencies. When Nirvana appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone in 1992, Kurt Cobain wore a T-shirt that said “corporate magazines still suck” - but they still did the cover. Versions of that homemade t-shirt have occasionally been designer items which also says it all.

A good example of how sincere this attitude often was, was the 1994 battle between Ticketmaster and Pearl Jam, which you can find a summary of here. The band was outraged by Ticketmaster’s monopolistic practices and levelling of sleazy service charges, including for charity gigs. They tried to arrange a world tour outside the Ticketmaster system while also campaigning for an antitrust investigation. You can read about the ups and downs but they were comprehensively defeated, lost many millions of dollars and were forced to start using Ticketmaster-affiliated venues again in 1998. My point is that while there was a lot of pious windbagging on the subject, the anti-corporate stance was not always a performance. Ticketmaster consolidated their stranglehold on the industry by merging with Live Nation in 2010.

I think the best way of explaining why this attitude ever existed is to talk about why it disappeared. Part of that is due to a change in who we think of as both the primary audiences and creators, part of it is technological change, and the final part is that the corporate world found better ways to assimilate a Right-On stance as another kind of commercial product offered by the system.

If you imagine a simple four-quadrant chart, like a political compass, with black-white as one axis and male-female as the other, the pattern of the last 30 years has been a rapid move from one corner (more white, more male) to the opposite (more non-white, more female). This move has in terms of who the typical consumer is presumed to be, but also the archetypal creator. The anti-commercial, anti-corporate attitude was something that appealed disproportionately to white people and to men, and it died as they ceased to be culture’s presumed centre. This goes for both the performative and sincere versions of the attitude.

Between the 60s and the 2000s, the middle-class white people who formed the mainstream were well off enough that they could dream of a life outside it. Mere security or success weren’t the dream because those things were commonplace enough to be uninspiring. Being contemptuous of those things was aspirational in it’s own way - one of the historic ideals and models of artistic life in Europe and America is the aristocratic bohemian, who grew up in wealth and is familiar enough with it to be disdainful of the idea of staining your hands with money, and desperate to avoid the appearance of bourgeois success in a brainless mainstream.

As hip-hop became a more dominant form of popular music it brought with it a different attitude. The participants bragged about their success, about taking over and about making money in a way that wasn’t common in rock music. The attitude made sense, in that if you grew up poor or felt that you had been shut out of normal routes to success then prospering in the mainstream was in and of itself a personal, political and cultural victory. I don’t agree with Billy Corgan’s recent statement that the music industry purposely turned the volume down on rock music in favour of hip-hop for sinister reasons but it is true that the version of the latter that became successful is more comfortable with being commercially-oriented, and more congenial to selling stuff, than some of the strains of white popular culture at the end of the 90s.

The other thing that diminished the popularity of an anti-corporate attitude was the increased power of women in music. The (usually phony) older idea of carving out your own space where you could be wild on your own terms, including being antagonistic towards the Powers That Be is a macho and territorial way of looking at the world that energises men more than it does women. Women are both more conscious of their vulnerability and happier to build an identity around it, which often means banding together in safety with others and the safest place to band together is inside the mainstream. You don’t antagonise against it in principle because it offers the safety of the largest numbers, and the protections of legitimacy.

For better or worse, one of the key differences between women and men at every age is that the latter are bigger consumers, and see consumption as a bigger part of their identity. Women and their patterns of consumption have always been key drivers of popular culture (see the screaming Beatlemaniacs of the 1960s) and that has accelerated since the ‘90s as their spending power has increased and, in music, men and the music they like have receded from the charts. Their ascendancy of a group that likes consuming and consumerism is natually at odds with a performative “fuck the mainstream” attitude.

The third thing is the change in technology. All art/ pop-cultural life (and human life generally) now happens on, and is dependent on, technological platforms that are fully corporate owned and corporate controlled. Since the power of any given platform (no matter what you want to do with it) is determined by the number of people who use it, that makes the idea of a powerful non-mainstream platform a kind of contradiction in terms. The very nature of an online life means that we are adapted to a corporate/ commercialised environment in a way that our predecessors weren’t, and that goes for creators too. We are immersed at all times in an ocean of promotional content and over time it’s natural to go native.

The idea of not selling out only seemed valid as long as you could envision a world where you could create with one foot outside the corporate structure, or in which you could be out of its line of sight from time to time. It might have been possible to do that as a musician in the 90s where your only “in” to the mainstream life was the record label and MTV and the occasional magazine interview. Other than that you jumped in a van and toured around and were allowed to just exist in your own little world, sustaining yourself and in direct and immediate contact with the public. Because the nature of building a career on a platform owned by someone else and integrated into a commercial super-structure means that you are always subject to the oversight and whims of the system, can be punished very easily if you say the wrong thing or express yourself poorly. Online life elicits visible compliance with the system at all times through the spectre of transnational online content laws, moderation and censorship (misinformation) policies.

The ubiquity of social media platforms and the sheer amount of content we all both consume and expect to be able to consume means that in order to distinguish yourself is to commodify multiple aspects of your existence. Every successful modern creator is to some extent a multipurpose influencer - there are very few people who just talk about one thing. You’re not a writer or musician but a content creator, an influencer; and being an “influencer” means being willing to adapt yourself quickly to changing trends, follow where the audience leads while appearing to stay ahead of them, and so is indistinguishable from selling out.

The final factor is that, if you think the anti- “sell out” culture existed up until the end of the ‘90s as being a descendent of the hippy culture of the ‘60s, the problem is that the hippies won. On every level except the economic, their preferences became law and their opinions were acknowledged by the mainstream as the objectively correct ones, with very few exceptions. What does selling out mean when (for example) an american soldier might learn about critical race theory about West Point, when Raytheon has mandatory anti-racism training, or when every corporation changes their logo to the rainbow colours during pride month?

This is sometimes thought of as being a cynical trick pulled by the Powers That Be in order to defang the cultural left, and perhaps that was part of it - but in reality it mostly happened because over time the people who held those Right On values raised their kids to respect them, joined boards and became shareholders and voted for politicians who supported those values. For someone inclined that way, there is no one powerful who disagrees with you enough that an act of selling out to them would be worthy of the name.

This isn’t a bitchfest about how awful it is that we see and hear more from non-white people and women in popular culture - the actual proportion of creators who compromise their ideals for money hasn’t really changed much over the years, and with some brief exceptions popular culture is now what it has always been, an engine of conformity that succeeds by appearing to be an engine of rebellion. To the extent there is a negative difference between how things were in the ‘90s and how they are today, it can almost entirely be explained by changes made unavoidable by changes in technology. Nevertheless I do think something’s missing from that era. It’s good and healthy to allow a sense of having the space to push back against and step away from the dominant power, because it helps at least give audiences the feeling of owned space and of agency they need to be at peace with society and themselves - even if it’s just an illusion. I’m sure women have their own issues with the current format of popular culture, but I think men miss that illusion most of all. All that tension has to go somewhere, and I don’t think it’s crazy to suggest many of the calculatedly repellent spaces men have created for themselves online in the last decade or so are one place that this displaced pressure is venting itself.

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If that scenario is true, that single event would represent one of the most brazen acts of corruption in the history of American life on a dollar per minute basis. In terms of its political implications it almost doesn’t matter if it’s true, because the news was met with a shrug and then everyone moved on. From a pro-Trump perspective if this is corruption it’s tolerated; there may be innocent explanations but I haven’t heard anyone even try to come up with any, which is indicative.

The corruption of the existing establishment was something you heard a great deal about throughout the Trump era; think of all the noise that people made over the years (deservedly) about Nancy Pelosi’s wealth and where it came from. For Trump supporters who saw him as the “honest liar” she was symbolic of how systemic corruption and liberal hypocrisy went hand in hand.

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Fat Acceptance as an idea is not something that never would have taken root in a world where men’s preferences were paramount. Men’s self-help tends to be aspirational in an obvious way, which we see at its most basic in the imagery of cars, steaks and cigars for which the manosphere is known.

Even where it blames external forces, male self-help it always comes down to the importance of the subject sucking it up, accepting their own inadequacy as intolerable, and saving yourself because no one is going to do it. This plays on men’s innate sense that the default attitude of the world toward them is one of uselessness, contempt, and disposability and that making yourself admirable and essential through personal achievement is the only way to change that.

But I don’t think it’s remarked on enough that men actually enjoy being told what useless pieces of shit they are (mostly not in so many words). It’s not just that that’s the only way they’ll hear a self-improvement message: they like it. They are energised and thrilled by the implication that they are alone against a cruel world with one or two other comrades, backs against the wall.

So men’s attitudes toward male fatness has always been one of shame except in instances where it could be associated with physical strength. In the old, male-oriented media, fat people were buffoons, de-sexualised sidekicks, archetypes of greed, or some combination of all three (still often the case, but less so). Of course, men constantly fail to live up to the version of themselves idealised messaging aimed at them, but the ideal is there nonetheless and indicative of a particular value system.

Just as men are motivated by fear of their own disposability, women are often motivated by their own sense of vulnerability. So any messaging aimed at women, but especially self-help, self-improvement and aspirational stuff, often implicitly celebrates the idea of banding together with other vulnerable people as a protective measure, buoying each other up by presenting that vulnerability as a positive good and a uniting factor.

The incompatibility (in concentrated form) of these two perspectives wouldn’t matter except for the misunderstood problem of online and social media bubbles. We know that our online lives throw us into digital environments with similar people in a way that tends to concentrate and harden existing tendencies, reward extreme in-group dedication and shut out dissenting voices. What’s less remarked on is that this really becomes a problem because we can still see what is happening in everyone else’s bubble and become enraged by rubbing up against a concentrated dose of a foreign moral outlook.

So fat acceptance was developed by women for women and that’s fine, but it has intruded into the public sphere as something for everyone. Many men are too afraid of seeming gauche to complain about this tension, but this Joe Rogan video is a good example of what men think about normalising and tolerating fatness, and how it legitimises people’s bad decision making and looks to make a basic betrayal of normal human health into a lifestyle.

Obviously one of the criticisms here is that this is a veiled attempt at the usual policing of women’s bodies, expressing visceral disgust at women being obese, and voicing the implicit perspective that women’s function in the public sphere is to be pretty and that pretuiness itself is synonymous with usefulness, goodness, human worth and so on. I’m sure there probably is an element of that.

But I think it’s clear in that video, and other iterations where people push back on these concepts, that having had this messaging pumped at him from a variety of media sources means he thinks these concepts are intended to apply to people like him as well. He’s right to be confused; if you look up “body positivity” online here are the first five definitions you get:

Body positivity is a social movement and personal philosophy advocating that all individuals deserve to have a positive body image, regardless of societal ideals of size, shape, skin tone, or ability. It promotes self-love, acceptance of physical diversity, and challenges unrealistic beauty standards, often rooting itself in fat liberation. (National Institutes of Health)

Body positivity is a movement to accept bodies of all sizes and types, rather than those that conform to societal ideals of beauty. (Psychology Today)

Body positivity is a social movement that promotes a positive view of all bodies, regardless of size, shape, skin tone, gender, and physical abilities. Proponents focus on the appreciation of the functionality and health of the human body instead of its physical appearance. This is related to the concept of body neutrality, which posits that a person’s bodily appearance should have the least possible effect on their experience of life. (Wikipedia)

Body positivity refers to the assertion that all people deserve a positive body image, regardless of how society and popular culture view ideal shape, size, and appearance. It involves loving your body and feeling good about how it looks. Keep reading to learn more about body positivity, including what it means, its goals, how it turned into a movement, its benefits, and criticisms. We also share how to feel more positive about your body, which helps support a healthy body image. (Very Well Mind)

In today’s society, the concept of body positivity has gained significant traction, championing the acceptance and celebration of diverse body shapes, sizes, and appearances. Rooted in the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), body positivity strives to create a culture that fosters self-love, acceptance, and respect for all bodies. (The Oxford Review)

If you do an image search of the same concept here is what you get (first 3 pages):

So the definitions are universal, but the output only features and speaks to women.

Two things have happened to cause this dissonance. The first is that in the period of what I suppose I have to call Wokeness (2011-2020) it became impossible to categorise Body Positivity and related topics as women’s issues because it was considered trans-exclusionary. Since the whole point of these movements was maximal inclusivity and to display care for the downtrodden and marginalised, trans-inclusivity was an essential change. The second is simply that women have become a more powerful and agentic interest group in society and as consumers which means that, as with men in the past, there are many situations where the perspective that is adopted as correct and respectable is the one that appeals to their moral priors - not those held by men. Both of these impulses must co-exist, which means that for Body Positivity to continue to appeal to its audience it must be understood as universal, even though it’s really just for women.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that this has political consequences. A lot of the pushback against the progressive element of popular culture from the populist right has focused on traditional standards of beauty, both in people and in the built world. Online Dissent Right figures online like BAP have sought to turn female-centred universalism of Body Positivity on its head by promoting propagandistic and homoerotic imagery of glistening half-naked male athletes alongside right-wing political takes

.Looksmaxxers could be understood as a distinctively male reaction to the same focus on physical appearances that created the demand for body positivity on the female side, but also a reaction to the promotion of female-centric Body Positivity as a universal standard. Instead of defending how you look on the basis of inclusivity you become hyper-competitive, hierarchical and obsessed with technical detail of how best to transform one’s body.

At a more philosophical level some have taken the objection to the sentiments behind Body Positivity to their logical conclusion, which is in part how you get people Tucker Carlson talking about the beauty of the physical world being an important feature in people’s well-being, and the Trump administration’s executive orders on “Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again” and “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture”. These ideas mingle all kinds of impulses about nationality, ethnicity, religion and the body all together in one mush of reactionary concepts.

You can of course overplay or overemphasise how racidalising any of this is, just as you can question the chain of causation. I don’t think a normally Liberal person will see an ad with a plus-size model in it and immediately drop everything to attend an anti-immigration rally. But I do think that being presented with an idea as universally applicable and good when it is morally alien to you - that does have an effect, even if that is only a sense of inner withdrawal away from the source of your discomfort. Many such cases!

Women have historically lived in men’s worlds and had to put up with their standards being pumped at them as a universal being male ones. Those include that women who are not physically perfect are to be dismissed as though not fully human - so I’m sure many of them would feel that men’s dissonance about Body Positivity is tough shit. That’s fair enough. I’d add to that that there’s an ambient cruelty associated with the old (male) attitude towards health that isn’t nice; I think men forget how nice it is to live in a slightly more progressive world which is to say (and I mean this in a positive way) a more female-influenced one where you have the option to indulge the benign hypocrisy of being a little bit accepting difference and imperfection even if you don’t always feel it.

Ideas like Fat Acceptance and Body Positivity used to puzzle and annoy me until I realised that it wasn’t intended to apply to me or people like me - it was women talking to each other about themselves and their own problems, dressed in the language of universalism. Great, go nuts. But the irritation was real and not everyone makes this realisation. Understanding poor health as a personal failing to fight and a problem to be worked on, and that stealth-celebrating as acceptable is cruel to oneself - that is the male version of body positivity. The tension between those two perspectives is certainly not the most serious issue we face but there is something here that encapsulates a particular cultural barrier we keep running into. Men and women can have very different moral outlooks; we seem to be lapsing more often into seeing the female oriented one as obviously correct and superior. We keep poking men with that sharpened point and acting surprised when they don’t like it. There is something that has caused men’s moral perspectives to become indigestible to Liberalism, and we should try to figure out what it is, and what to do about it, soon.

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A confession: I don’t like Louis Theroux’s work. That’s not because it’s always bad (although his new Netflix documentary “Inside the Manopshere” is tired stuff, working over ground that’s been farmed to the point of infertility by other commentators and by Louis himself) but because his stock in trade is embarrassment - the awkward pause, the lingering implication, the humiliating backtrack. Like a lot of people, I would 100% rather watch footage of a real person being shot in the head than see the same person suffer prolonged public embarrassment - even if they are bad people, and even if they aren’t aware they are embarrassing themselves.

In this one he has tapped into a particularly rich vein of oblivious cringe, and I had to watch as though I was a contestant on Hot Ones - small tentative bites, huffing, puffing and grimacing, tears in my eyes, occasionally tapping out to stop from throwing up. I will never do it again and it was not worth it.

The reception to the documentary has been mixed. Some of that criticism has focused on the fact that it’s just a bit boring, while some has focused on Louis’s perceived failure to properly nail the participants given the seriousness of the threat they are understood to represent. On the other side there is also some praise for having done just that. It probably won’t surprise you to find I think all that stuff is totally overblown and that the documentary misses multiple points: why this world exists, how the content it produces is consumed, and the creators’ symbiotic relationship with a wider Progressive culture and a respectable media that advocates for Progressive values.

I guess I should start with the ways in which the documentary is good. It does correctly highlight that these are horrible, stupid people and consumed in large chunks their product is shit for morons. Everything about the creators justifies the prejudicial ideas you had about them going in; that they dress like parodies of 1980s wide-boy estate agents you’d once have met outside a regional nightclub called Tracers or Chasers; waistcoats, pointy shoes, shiny suits that are always a size too small. Even the ones that dress like they’re going to the gym still have a bewildering reverence for the tacky totems of masculine luxury: sports cars the colour of highlighter pens, cigars, boats. The yearning for the latter is particularly strange to me. It seems that being on a boat, being near where the boats are, owning a boat, getting some girls on a boat - there’s a belief life simply could not get better than that. In summary my feeling is yes these people are horrible but the main thing is, God it’s all so embarrassing.

One piece of analysis Theroux does that I think is helpful and insightful (while not being new), is on the absence of fathers in the lives of the content creators featured. I agree - although the documentary never puts it this way - that if anything what these men are suffering from is a chronic lack of traditional patriarchy in their lives. All of their “I’m the boss” stuff - the demand for “one-sided monogamy”, the reductiveness about women’s motivations, the purposeful cruelty towards any perceived indication of weakness - comes across in each case as the tantrum of a disempowered loser and all the more vicious for that. It’s precisely because maleness is so downwardly mobile, marginal and contemptible, that explicit assertions of it have to be so nasty.

This also explains the repetitive mansophere imagery of the steaks, the cigars, the cars, the boats (the boats!). I kept thinking as I watched of the clichéd but accurate description of Manosphere-adjacent influencer Clavicular, and similar looksmaxxers, as a “male to male transexuals” - that is, people who reduce every aspect of maleness to an exaggerated physical performance increasingly removed from its original purpose and intent.

The same is true here. The participants in the documentary made me think of the clowns of Commedia dell’arte, a style of 17th century performance extant today which per wikipedia is “characterized by masked “types” (and) standardised archetypal characters shared across all productions and identified via their names, costumes, and functions in the comedy”, but where the original meaning of each of the types have been long forgotten leaving only the gaudy costumes and exaggerated gestures behind - because no one living has seen the thing that the performance is based on.

If the Manosphere in the documentary represents anything it is not traditional patriarchy reasserting itself in the face of a Progressive takeover; it is testament to the totality of Progressive cultural victory. These people behave like this, and cleave to these symbols, precisely because they have never experienced anything like a male-centric society.

This idea that Manosphere as portrayed in the documentary is not an enemy of Progressive culture but an inevitable feature of it kept recurring to me as I watched. When Louis meets Sneako, he notes that the popularity of the latter is in spite of having been banned by all major platforms. These are presented as contradictory facts - being banned on one hand yet remaining popular on the other - but of course one fact is true because the other is true. The internet is endless, and without resorting to a level of centralised control over adult discourse that would be counter-productive even if it was possible, content will always find expression somewhere. Bans remain inconvenient and personally damaging to the banned, but for creators who can power through, they function as a badges of authenticity, unfakeable identifiers of the most hardcore and rebellious content creators - the exact ones that a healthily transgressive person (most young men fit in this category) would want to seek out.

It takes a true spiritual schoolmarm to miss this point, but Louis does; when he describes the denizens of the Manosphere as dwelling “in the unregulated new media landscape they share their unfiltered views….” the conclusion we are supposed to reach is clear, that regulation and “filtering” would put a stop to all this when they are in fact powering it, necessitating it - at least in part.

One of the most curious overlaps between Theroux’s Progressive worldview and that of the Manopsherists, relates to the position of the female content creators who are shadowy presence throughout the documentary. The key point of connection here is the OnlyFans platform. OF enriches many women who willingly use it; its very existence is in itself a logical extension of Progressive goal of female empowerment and OF creators often express what they do in those terms. If the Manopsheric involvement with OF is sleazy, exploitative and hypocritical (Louis thinks it is) then surely all participants in the business of that platform share in those characteristics. What seems to really bother Louis is that male creators are profiting off OnlyFans while decrying it, but the role of the women who profit from the platform is a kind of moral blank space in his mind.

I get that the documentary is about men and not women but the elision still matters. Louis describes the mansophere as “a strange new world (the creators) embody, using extreme content with global reach to sell products”, but that description applies to all viral content aimed at both sexes, and is certainly true of OF content created by women without male involvement. The men in this documentary might be irritated at being judged, but would find much to agree with his implicit assessment that women’s role in OnlyFans and cooperation with Manosphere creators is neither here nor there, because we inhabit a world that is good or bad only because of men’s success or failure in meeting their responsibilities.

Quite aside from OF, as I have noted previously there is a thick layer of female-oriented content on sites like TikTok and Instagram designed around or featuring the expression of deep contempt towards men. Like Manosphere content, much of this is innocuous in isolation but the cumulative effect is the dehumanisation of men, the othering of them (to use Progressive terminology) within popular culture, and legitimisation of their disenfranchisement. There is a great deal of evidence that to the extent young people are becoming more politically polarised, the movement is primarily happening on the female rather than the male side (see the chart below).

People can of course make and consume whatever content they like - I believe that even if Louis doesn’t. But an implicit part of this documentary and all moral panics about the Manosphere is the question of why men do this, what the incentives are, and what effect it has on their male audience. To gloss over the fact that everyone has a role is to miss something very important and I wonder if the point is also to purposely misunderstand the problem in order to find the right kind of villain.

One of the central differences is that the female content aimed at othering and hating men is an essential part of the mainstream, and is at home in respectable spaces where it often finds defenders and celebrators. The point here is not to excuse the unique awfulness of Manosphere content, or to enable male cries of “they’re doing it too!”. It’s only to note firstly that young men see all this, and the hypocritical stance as to which edgy or hate-filled content is acceptable and which isn’t probably doesn’t hurt the popularity of the Manosphere. It’s also to note that if the internet generates a lot of socially poisonous content with bad political implications that doesn’t just happen amongst men side and it misrepresents something essential about the nature of the problem to pretend it does.

A Progressive outlook can be a burden in coming to grips with this point, because it can stop observers from understanding content tailored to male preferences as legitimate. When he meets the fans of one particular creator, they describe the important lessons he has imparted to them to improve their lives. “As a man you’re born without value,” one of them says. “The lesson is to never give up… you have to build that value… nothing in the world is given to you… you have to work for every penny.”

They go on to elaborate on these views and come to some zany conclusions but I think in essence this is a perspective that 1) obviously true to some degree, 2) appealing to a lot of men and delivered directly to a male audience, and 3) that many men would find it inspiring and helpful. It’s easy for Louis to say (as he has in subsequent interviews) that even if such advice is useful, men could get it from other sources outside the Manosphere. But in a world that constantly boosts therapy culture as the only legitimate path to personal improvement, where else will this message come from?

For me the giveaway here, and probably the key part of the documentary that sums it all up, is Louis’s reaction to this advice - which is to say “but don’t you think women have it hard?” There it is! This comment provides us with the roundabout answer to the question “why can’t we have a Progressive Joe Rogan?”, or similar plaintive cries that we should replace existing male-oritened content with a version of the same thing which advances a Progressive perspective. If you regard men as emotionally malfunctioning women, and as members of an oppressor class, then of course any attempt to talk about their own problems in their own way is by definition a sinister and insidious political development to be opposed. But in taking that opposing stance you are unintentionally insisting that Manosphere or something like must exist.

If the documentary is a catalogue of blindspot, one of the most basic is the assumption that the guys featured are influential, and that their influence manifests in the radicalisation of men away from Progressive ideas and towards conservative and far right ones, and into violence. But the material success of the subjects of the documentary is uncertain, and Louis seems to want to have his cake and eat it on this topic. If this whole thing is a scam, then these people can’t be making that much money; but then that also would logically mean that their appeal is smaller than they pretend, and so too is their influence. They can’t be selling fake success but also be incredibly successful. (As an example, here is HSTikkyTokky admitting his lifestyle is fake.)

But the biggest and most interesting blindspot is the way the Manosphere as featured seems to exist as the logical extension and conclusion of a society with a dominant Progressive culture. Just look at the creators: they are multi-ethnic and often minority religious. They often seem to have been raised by women and expressly schooled in the values of egalitarianism, an appreciation of diversity and pluralism, and opposition to the standard list of unProgressive phobias.

They share many of the same priors as Progressive thought and society in relation to women and their role in the world. The manospherists make money off of, and exist as an adjunct to, a society that centres sexual liberation and the technological methods we have developed to allow people (including women) to monetise that liberation. Despite coming at it from different angles both the Manosphere and Progressive culture essentially agree that only men have moral agency, since agency implies sole responsibility for some part of the world around you, and in turn a blame that can’t be pawned off on other social structures, groups or individuals. Both believe that the world is only as good as men make it and women are along for the ride.

They are the perfection of Progressive cultural rule even if they do not perceive themselves that way. Every single thing they do is either an unavoidable and impotent reaction to Progressive cultural dominance, or something that makes sense within the context of that dominance. Louis’s prescription for this problem, I’m sure, would be the usual one of a further application of Progressive thought. Think about that.

The final thing I will comment on is the audience for this stuff - who they are and the way that they consume it. I think this is the key absence at the heart of the documentary and also the most important thing it gets wrong. If our concern is the impact this content has on men, and the driver of men’s demand for it, then we need to look at this problem from the other end of the telescope.

What were you like when you were 12 to 15 years old? I was a Marvel comics reading, Dungeons and Dragons playing, Star Wars watching dork. Later in my teenage years I continued to be all those things but also read Camus and watched David Lynch movies and tried to be a writer (a different kind of dork). That kind of life, where you are exposed to and seek out and value ideas and sensitivity and creativity is alien to the world featured here. The subjects of the documentary were my philosophical and natural enemies. I hated them and their world and they hated me, and I would have avoided even being in the same spaces as them at all costs.

But no one is any one thing and even timid nerds have the same transgressive, prurient impulses as any other member of their peer group. And the point about internet content is that the level of consumption of any content is self-directed. Had this content been out there in the early to mid 90s I probably would have watched it because it’s titillating and grotesque and vivid, as I did with whatever the equivalent content was at that time. Yet I still would have been the same Sensitive Young Man. You don’t have to live with both feet in that world and I would guess most young men don’t.

Reflecting in this way on how people really live undermines the radicalisation thesis. Louis is an old media figure and is thinking about this stuff from the old media position. The output of a single content creator is not a tv show that you sit down on your couch to watch, with a mug of tea and a packet of digestives to sit through from beginning to end. No one consumes content in that way anymore. The people featured here aren’t channels, they are one fleck of froth on a titanic wave of content, and I would bet that the portion of their audience that only “lives” in the Manosphere is not large. Embedding yourself with them for a couple of days makes for a good story but is not a good way of replicating influence or viewer experience, which is what is really at issue. Only a boomer - or someone seeking to make some exploitative and misleading content of their own - would think that it is.

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