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

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

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

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

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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.

Articles on similar subjects:

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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asked “How do you see the next decade or so playing out in Irish politics, specifically re: treatment of the immigration fracas? Do you see the emergence of a credible anti-immigration/remigration party, or one of the existing parties adopting this as a core pillar? Does Ireland suffer the worst from it in Europe? Does domestic unrest increase, or is it successfully stifled?”

There isn’t any reason to believe there is going to be a reduction in salience of any of the key factors that cause people to focus on immigration (including the thing itself). Problems with housing, public services, asylum and integration are going to at best remain as they are but probably worsen. As I’ve said in numerous previous pieces demographic change is a phenomenon with an exceptionally long tail, so even if our entire system changed orientation tomorrow there are decisions we’ve made on all these fronts that are going to come to fruition over the next ten, twenty five, one hundred years which are only going to cause the tensions in the system to worsen. The nature of Official Ireland is that it is managerial and incrementalist and it doesn’t change unless it feels it absolutely has to. So the most likely outcome is the mainstream parties will do the absolute minimum to keep the public off their backs and hope the whole thing blows over and people forget about it.

The most likely way immigration restrictionism finds its way into legitimate politics is the mainstream parties collectively decide that the international winds have changed, and that a Danish-type model is the new standard approach on this issue for upwardly mobile and respectable countries and the officials that manage them. That could result in the mainstream parties quietly turning in a restrictionist direction like school of fish, all together and without even knowing they’re doing it. Parties moving together toward a new consensus is usually how large social change happens in Ireland, it’s never that a single voice breaks through and takes over against the wishes of the existing establishment.

I don’t see a big anti-immigration party emerging in part because of a lack of candidates on that side who can come across as competent. There are structural obstacles as well but the real Cordon Sanitaire are the older generation who just won’t vote for anyone other than FF and FG; and a wider group (who are certainly not all old) who think of their local candidate as disconnected from the larger parties and therefore are happy to vote for them in spite of their dissatisfaction. Those middle of the road people haven’t been discomfited enough to demand radical change in relation to immigration. That may change when immigrant groups begin acting as discrete interest groups in more visible ways, as they do in other countries but which really hasn’t happened in Ireland - though the foundations have been laid.

I don’t think Ireland suffers from it the worst in Europe at all. Looking at the countries around us, and leaving Denmark aside - who do you envy? We aren’t managing our demographic change situation well, but I also think it often seems worse because it’s happening so quickly from a standing start, culturally speaking we’re covering the same distance in half the time as other western countries, and we’ve failed to learn the lessons of their failures.

A couple of Qs from :

“What's your opinion of Roy Foster's work? And what's your opinion of Sally Rooney's? Do you think it's possible for a non-Irish person to understand Irish politics? And how do you think Irish snobbery differs (including in terms of the extent of it) from English snobbery?”

I haven’t read much of Rooney’s work. I’m reflexively in favour of any successful Irish writer for nationalistic reasons but I mostly stopped reading literary fiction about 20 years ago because I started to feel impatient with it, and found myself wandering around piles of books in Hodges Figgis thinking who is this stuff for? Not me! (Although you yourself got me reading Graham Greene thanks to your article about his working habits).

I’m mixed on Foster. On one hand he’s obviously a great writer and a real historian. I highly recommend his book Vivid Faces: The Irish Revolutionary Generation 1890 - 1923; as with everything he writes it contains lots of stuff I was previously unaware of including that Yeats had described pre-revolutionary Pearse as “half-mad and wanting to be hanged”.

My ambivalence comes from the fact that Foster is part of a movement in Irish Historical writing called Revisionism. Irish readers will know this but it’s worth detailing it for others - beginning in this 1930s this tendency sought to unpick some what its practitioners regarded as cherished nationalist myths about Ireland, and in particular the stories of people who participated in the revolutionary period. One of the founding figures was Robert Dudley Edwards, whose daughter Ruth is well known today. (Edwards herself wrote an enjoyable book about the signatories to the Irish Proclamation of Independence, “The Seven”, which I guess qualifies as revisionist though I didn’t find much to disagree with.)

So while I like his writing I often don’t enjoy Foster’s point of view or analysis. In fact, when I strarted reading him I wasn’t aware of revisionism as a tendency and I would often pause and think “what the fuck is this guy’s problem?” at what I felt was a snide tone around anything connected to Irish nationhood and an unusually forgiving attitude towards the British legacy in Ireland. But part of being an adult is reading and being able to accept one’s own biases and enjoy stuff you don’t agree with when it has its own qualities, which his work obviously does.

There’s probably something to be written (by someone better read than me) about the position of revisionists in 21st century Ireland. I think there’s a sense they lost - in part because they died off, and in part because the Ireland they positioned themselves in contrast with has disappeared. Revisionist tendencies still hold some appeal amongst a certain type of Irish Times reader/ denizen of Official Ireland… it also impacts external perceptions of Irish history particularly, on the right.

Final bit on Foster - I will say he went a bit down in my estimation after this interview with Tyler Cowen a few years ago. Cowen asks him about a variety of Irish-related topics and when the question of current day immigration comes up you can hear the doors of his mind audibly clang shut and feel the temperature drop a few degrees, which is embarrassing for someone who should be professionally interested in things.

It’s perfectly possible to understand Irish politics, the probelm is mostly that it’s not important enough to be worth paying attention to from an external perspective so people tune in and out; they can suddenly start paying attention and be perplexed and when it doesn’t follow what they consider the proper patterns i.e. the ones they’re used to. I think there’s a complicating factor which is that the smallness of the Irish media market means that people who want to be successful often have to travel abroad and end up going somewhat native, and only writing about politics in terms that flatters foreign audiences and reflects their own local concerns and prejudices. There simply aren’t enough Irish analysts to go round which means that in America in particular there can be an over-reliance on people from other countries to explain what’s going on in Ireland. That doesn’t help since they inevitably either don’t know that much about us, or are willing to speak specifically because they have an axe to grind. All of these are small country problems by the way, none of them are unique to us.

I’m not sure I get what you mean about Irish vs English snobbery, let me know and I’ll come back to you.

From “Ireland occasionally gets criticised for freeloading off the British military and Nato for national security. Should it ignore the complaints and continue to enjoy the free lunch, or start to engage properly in the islands' or Europe's collective security?”I am not a military or geopolitics person and am out of my element talking about this stuff. I wrote a piece on this subject for UnHerd years ago and kind of regret it, not because the article was bad but I feel in retrospect I had no business writing it. So please read the following in that context.

Neutrality is interesting because it’s one of those issues that I mentioned in my last article where FF and FG have a much more moderate position than you might imagine, and are dragged left by the demands of the general populace and by local politics. Those parties would be happy to increase military spending in the morning if they could, because Europe as a whole has entered a more militarised era. It matters a lot to Official Ireland that we are understood as the most faithful adherents of Europe’s goals and that means being seen to row in behind increased defensive efforts, although they’re worried about where that might lead.

There are a couple of reasons those parties don’t put the military question to the people more directly, the main one being a matter of priorities. The biggest factor in Irish political life is the feeling that the state is running past its capacity to manage its commitments - that’s one reason people focus on the strain caused by inward migration so much. That’s in a country where politicians are unusually close to their constituents and therefore to their mundane concerns. An Irish TD represents about 30K people on average, as opposed to around 90K for a German member of parliament and by some estimates as high as 100K for a French one. It’s going to be a struggle for someone to suggest we make the massive and ongoing commitment any increase in defence would require, when you consider the recent issues around the unavailability of special needs assistants in schools, the inability of the government to provide essential spinal and hip surgery for children, and the non-completion of the national children’s hospital. Whatever my own feelings on the matter, if I was a candidate’s electoral agent I wouldn’t advise them to call for more defence spending for fear of sounding like a swivel-eyed fantasist when there’s more immediate things to worry about. That’s the political reality.

What then would cause Ireland to actually increase its military spending and become more directly involved in European Defence? A direct threat of some kind. It would have to be something more material than fly-bys or boats 200 miles off the coast hovering around menacingly. Alternatively something terrible would have to happen in mainlaid Western Europe that would make the Irish defensive position untenable to a greater degree than now within a European context. Basically what I mean here is if Dublin or Paris get hit by a Russian missile, Irish military spending will increase. I don’t see either of those things happening so I think in reality nothing is going to change in the next while.

Personally I would like a fully militarily independent Ireland, I find it embarrassing and annoying we don’t have something closer to that. I’m not hung up on neutrality but I don’t see why we couldn’t simply be neutral but capable rather than incapable and I think Irish people might be persuaded on that point, as a matter of self-respect. But the reason the current arrangement has proven acceptable to the UK governments in the past is that they understand that Ireland becoming more militarised would inevitably lead to an increase in (currently non-existent) military tension between ourselves and the UK, and to a worsening of the UK’s own security situation as a result. The analogy of a free lunch is not one I’d use but to flesh it out - in military terms the UK currently gets to decide based on its own priorities who eats and when, how much, and the quality of the ingredients that go into the food. All of that would seep away if Ireland begins to develop its defence capabilities, and if the Irish public becomes involved in the conversation around those issues, which it has never been to date. I definitely think it’s a mistake to assume that if Ireland becomes more active militarily, that what you’d end up with is what we currently have but with a larger Irish contribution. But again, as I say above, this isn’t my field.

asked “Do you believe that the Social Democrats will cannablise the middle class progressive vote (at expense of Greens, Labour, some elements of Dublin Fine Gael) and be in a position to form part of the next Irish government with Sinn Féin?”

When I think of the Soc Dems the thing that always pops into my head is the fact that my mum really likes them, or likes Holly Cairns anyway. My mum is an ex- Progressive Democrats voter, the PDs being a fairly right leaning South Dublin-centric Fianna Fáil splinter group that was in government for much of the 90s and 2000s. I think she likes the Soc Dems because they seem smart and professional and “with it”. That says it all for me, about who the Soc Dems are and who they appeal to in their current form. My mum has a very good read on Irish politics and that speaks very well of the potential success of them as a party.

I think it’s impossible this far out to tell who is going to be successful or not, particularly where you’re talking about relatively marginal parties and coalition governments - the interaction of different possibilities is quite hard to predict. If it wasn’t, then we’d have had an SF government already. Having said that, I’m bullish on the success of the Social Democrats because they’re plotting a balanced path between activism, mainstream leftism, and moderating their style in to appear professional and competent and upwardly mobile to middle of the road voters.

All of those things make them a good partner for any major party in coalition, SF for sure but also FF and FG if they think their voters would swallow it. I guess in summary my answer to your question is yes, with the caveat that it’s impossible to predict elections and especially coalitions this far out.

“wondered if you could elaborate on the “action is the opposite of depression” that you’ve posted on twitter a few times? Maybe it’s self explanatory and I’m missing the point by even seeking further info. Is it that excessive introspection is bad (especially for neurotics) and can be remedied by activity (physical, intellectual or whatever)?”

I wish I had a more sophisticated answer to this and I don’t take credit for this being an interesting or unique thought, I’m aware it’s occurred to lots of other people. I just noticed that I’m happiest when I’m doing things and especially when I’m working on the things I’m worried about, to the point that I don’t really think “happiness” per se exists in the sense that it can be reliably created for medium or long periods, but “agency” (hate that word, but there isn’t a better one) does and can, as does courage, strength, personal effectiveness etc, and it’s expressing the latter that makes you feel ok about life rather than searching for the former.

It’s also my experience of depression (In both the clinical and colloquial senses, so not just a medical problem but feeling sadness, melancholy, ruminating too much etc) almost never manifests as “acting out”, crying or emotional instability or even anger but in getting more and more passive such that from the outside, true sadness (for me) almost always looks like laziness or carelessness or lack of interest. So maybe the opposite is true, that a happy and fulfilled person is just a person who does things. All this was confirmed when I read the first essay in Neitzsche’s book The Genealogy of Morals where he is describing an idealised version of ancient nobility - “they knew better than to separate action from happiness…”:

:

The second section marked with an asterisk is the most viciously accurate and insightful thing about passive and introverted people I’ve ever read. I suspect a lot of this is a sex difference between how men and women experience this stuff.

asks a couple “1. Are Irish people anti-Semitic or is Irish anti-zionsim so visceral that it is effectively a distinction without a difference? 2. What is a topic you never write about and why? 3. Who is a fiction author who has published a book in the 20th century you would recommend? 4. Is there any hope for conservatives in Irish life in the 21st century?”

The answer to 2 is 1… there are a couple of other issues including Neutrality, Trans stuff, and some Northern Irish politics that I’ve decided not to write about or have written about less over time because they are a combination of - a) not interesting from a philosophical point of view, b) requiring some expertise I don’t have, and most especially c) because the people who are interested in the topic (not you Conrad) are so animated about it that once you break that seal you won’t be permitted to talk about anything else and will hounded and hounded for answers, explanations, details, what about this or that example, “but don’t you think that…” in an attempt to badger you out of your opinions, until the end of time. From a general standpoint there are certain topics you should only get involved in if you’re prepared to talk about nothing else. Anything related to Israel/ Palestine is the archetypal example of that problem in my experience.

To answer your question quickly I definitely don’t think Irish people are anti-semitic. Certainly when someone like Graham Linehan describes Ireland as an anti-semitic shithole I don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about - my friends and family aren’t like that, are his? I know people who would say “god that’s so awful” when they see a hospital being bombed on TV and would go to the odd protest on that basis, which seems to me to be a perfectly explicable thing to do and almost all pro-Palestinian activism I’ve witnessed in the people around me (as opposed to on TV or on twitter) fits into this category. I don’t believe I’ve ever heard a single member of my family use the word “jews” in my entire life. So based on what I’ve experienced in my actual life I can’t make blanket statements about anti-semitism in Ireland.

I do think that there is a kind of epidemic of loose, self-indulgent moral grandstanding going amongst a certain type of loud and ubiquitous activist psychopaths we have a lot of in Ireland. One curious local wrinkle is that this cohort’s behaviour seems to be amplified rather than dampened by the fact that we have no skin in the game, because for some people the entire conflict then becomes solely open stage to morally peacock around on, in a way I find unbelievably gross and monotonous. I think it’s important that we know that attitude is not limited to Israel/ Palestine - people seem to have forgotten how frothing the reaction against Russia was in Ireland at the start of the Ukraine invasion for example.

On fiction recommendations I’m going to make two because I happen to know the questioner’s taste. For you I would suggest Robertson Davies who is a Canadian author who worked between the 1950s to 1990s. He wrote multiple interlocking trilogies of books, the best one being the Deptford Trilogy. In that one a boy throws a stone at a pregnant woman causing her to go into premature labour and the three books detail the strange, rippling effects of that act. His books are a kind of small town/ university-set Canadian magic realism, although not as flighty as that would suggest… he was an academic and writer of ghost stories a bit like MR James, so while there is a supernatural layer to all his books it’s very light and allusive. An added factor which makes them interesting, that he wouldn’t have known at the time, is that they portray a heavily anglo version of Canada that existed until at least the early nineties and that now seems to have all but disappeared, which gives the books an additional elegiac, melancholy quality.

Davies’ wikipedia page is here - he’s an interesting figure in his own right. Here’s a link to the first book in the Deptford trilogy, Fifth Business.

For anyone else my standard answer to this question is the novels Donald E Westlake wrote under the pen name Richard Stark during the 1960s, beginning with The Hunter (adapted in film as the 1967 classic Point Blank) and ending with Butcher’s Moon in 1974. The books are sui generis hard-boiled procedural crime thrillers told from the perspective of a workaholic criminal (basically Robert DeNiro’s character in heat). They’re jet black and ice cold, all very short except for the last one so you could read them in a sitting. The best one is The Jugger, from 1965. Something happens in that book that is so bracingly nasty that when you read it you’ll have to pause for a minute repeating to yourself “fucking hell. I can’t believe he did that,” a couple of times before proceeding. I wish Westlake/ Stark wrote a thousand of them because I’d be reading one right now instead of writing this.

Conservatism does have a future since the desire for stability and continuity is a natural human impulse. The difficulty for anyone of that mindset, is that we’re currently in the midst of a historic pendulum swing back in the other direction so you’re naturally going to have to be on the back foot for a while (which might mean the rest of your life). Sorry.

Thanks for the questions! I thought a Q&A would be a cushy number and it definitley wasn’t. I’m experimenting with formats a bit this year so whether I do it again depends on how these repsonses go down.

Irish politics is, from an outsider’s perspective, a swamp. You can’t quite figure out what role anyone is playing; nothing seems to map on to the usual recognisable landmarks. Irish commentators often watch with mixed delight and contempt as wanderers stray into our national conversations and end up face down in the mud.

The most recent example occurred during the week, when the head of the UK wing of the late Charlie Kirk’s conservative activist group Turning Point flagged up that they were interested in expanding their operations across the Irish sea. The point that provoked the most hilarity was who they identified as their most likely national partner.

Jack Ross, the chief executive of Turning Point UK, has said Fine Gael is seen as the natural partner for an Irish chapter of the group made prominent by the conservative campaigner Charlie Kirk.

Ross said discussions had taken place about establishing an Irish branch of the organisation and that Fine Gael had been earmarked as a party Turning Point planned to approach.

He said: “My understanding is Fine Gael are like the Conservative Party.”

I’m mainly writing about it because it’s so funny, but also because it helps illustrate the uncertain future of populists movements in Ireland as a pure replica of those happening elsewhere in the anglophone west. It also demonstrates the folly of trying to apply an anglo-american lens to Irish life without any local knowledge. You can think of this article as a continuation of the ones I wrote recently on the rickitiness of The West as a useful political concept (here), and my dim view of Steve Bannon’s boast about bringing MAGA to Ireland (here).

It’s true that of Ireland’s two largest and historically predominant parties, Fine Gael have been regarded as the more socially conservative or right-wing one. They have in recent times been more antipathetic towards Irish Republicanism than Fianna Fáil and I can see why that would appeal to a British person.

There is a symbolic residue of that in these positions in their DNA; they’re always going at it with Sinn Féin, and of the two parties it is Fine Gael’s leadership who are more likely to make gestures towards the importance of law and order, restrictionist sentiments on immigration, prioritising social cohesion over liberalisation and so on. This is never more than rhetorical and it is utterly refuted by their actions.

Fine Gael have been in power for 15 of the last 20 years, meaning that every piece of legislation that occurred during the Ireland’s golden age of liberalisation was either initiated by them, passed while they were in power, and/ or enthusiastically endorsed by them as a non-governmental partner that was happy to work towards a consensus vision of Irish modernity.

This includes stuff that no Turning Point activist could possibly co-sign, like the amendment of the constitution to allow abortion laws to be passed, the legalisation of gay marriage, the introduction of gender self-ID, an immigration amnesty, the expansion of the asylum system and huge increase in the foreign born population of Ireland, to say nothing of connected actions around Ukraine and Covid. Fine Gael more recently drove the proposal to remove references to women and mothers from the Irish constitution, and to introduce the language of gender identity in its place.

You can decide for yourself which of these were good things in theory or in practice, or whether in fact Fine Gael even had much of a choice in them. I think there’s a great argument - that a left wing people would certainly make, and have made - that modernisation was a force bigger than Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael, a wave that was coming no matter what they did, and they pragmatically chose to ride it rather than drown.

But it’s absolutely true that they were behind each of these policies, and have gone to bat for them repeatedly and with great vigour. Some of the parliamentary decision-making may have been opaque but FG are not ashamed at having been at the head of this change. Visible dissent in their parliamentary ranks is half-hearted and intermittent, and they are not walking these decisions back or distancing themselves from them in any serious way. There has been evidence of Turning Point -type sentiment in the youth ranks, but no major party figures supported it, and it has been crushed or disowned whenever it’s raised its head.

A good illustration of prevailing attitudes in the party is this video interview from the last week of a Fine Gael minister in the current government being asked about the fact that the impact on free speech was not considered in introducing misinformation laws. You’ll note that not only does he not back away from that decision but is unembarrassed about it and contemptuous of any complaints.

In summary, Fine Gael are not comparable to ostensibly conservative “empty suit” parties like the Tories who feign internal debate or turmoil over these kinds of decisions, or indicate when out of government that they would do things differently.

It’s probably just as well that the partnership with Fine Gael is a non-runner because the problems are not just on their side. Turning Point themselves are a terrible fit for Irish politics and would be an electoral bowling ball tied to the ankle of anyone they chose to associate themselves with. Parties like Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are often more moderate than the Irish populace themselves but TPUK’s rhetorical love of “free markets and limited government”, staunch support for Israel, and association with Unionism is a near-perfect list of things a mainstream party cannot be associated with if they wish to continue to be elected in Ireland.

What should an outside group - left, right, whatever - do if they want to help or encourage particular outcomes in Irish politics, if they see something in Ireland that they sympathise with and want to help with? I’d rather they didn’t, of course. If I was pushed I would say the best bet is to lend expertise from afar, but always in the most hands-off and deniable way, and always deferring to the people on the ground who know and like Irish people history and culture. Where there is a disconnect between the Irish position and yours, either accept that you can’t deal with it and leave the scene or swallow it. But always err on the side of silence and invisibility.

I think anyone getting involved has to understand this basic point: why Ireland is different, and why understanding that difference is so hard. Because of a number of factors I’ve outlined exhaustively elsewhere we’re experiencing in 15-30 years what other countries did in 60-100; and even that analysis ignores that we are starting from a different place.

Ireland in 2026 is a mix of stuff that’s already happened in other western countries years ago, other things that are happening elsewhere right now, and still more that have no parallel in the US or UK. Ireland is at a different stage in its journey to the UK and the US, but it’s also true that we are on our own schedule and not on some kind of anglo-american clock, waiting to hit checkpoints that other countries hit in the same order with the same result.

Fine Gael are neither right nor left but an ideologically blank managerial status quo party, with the cultural status quo at this time happening to be progressive. They will change that orientation only when comfortable, middle of the road people are sick of it - and the party will not change with those people, but after them.

The greatest engine of public dissatisfaction in Ireland is immigration but it is shallowly embedded in public life. Demographic change has happened in Ireland but groups have not begun to act overtly as political forces and interest groups to the degree they are in other countries. Nothing remotely like what we saw in the recent Gorton and Denton by-election in the UK is happening in Ireland. It’s that latter part that will provoke a change in a party like Fine Gael.

If it happens at all it may not be for another decade and even if it does, as I’ve said above, the form it will take isn’t certain; maybe time will make a party like FG more amenable to orgs like Turning Point UK - but I wouldn’t bet on it. It’s definitely too soon to start harvesting the mature fruits of that dissatisfaction by using one of the least ideological and most risk averse parties in the country as the collection vessel.

Any articulate and thoughtful Irish person outside the mainstream could have told you this stuff. My only real advice to Turning Point leadership is that the number of people in the UK with a good sense of what’s happening in Ireland politically is not high, and relying on their knowledge for your Irish expansion plans is a mistake. That’s assuming of course that you really do want to understand the local situation and fit yourself into it, and you’re not simply using Ireland as a place to perform for the entertainment of a non-Irish audience.

Some articles from me on similar subjects:

I’ve been getting a lot of thoughtful and thought-provoking comments from readers of late, which I don’t always have the ability to respond to due to pressure of trying to get the next thing out. I’m going to try and solve that problem by doing a Q&A.

If there are questions of comments, things you want me to expand on that I’ve touched on already - writing, Irish or international politics, populism vs progressivism, culture wars or general cultural commentary, gender/ sex difference/ masculinity stuff or any other random bullshit - please drop in the comments below, DM or email me, or leave a Q in the chat.

I will definitely respond to anything I get from paid subs, others might be dependent on time but I’ll try to get to everything. Current plan is to put my responses in a post the week after next but I’ll see how it goes.

Thanks!

Selection of recent articles:

Darby Saxbe, a psychologist and Substacker, has been publishing a series on feminism and men (“Has Feminism Been Bad for Men?”), the most recent of which is here. They’re all worth reading. In this latest article she covers feminism’s impact on men in “culture, specifically education, male mental health, and misandry” and touches on this idea that men have withdrawn from certain parts of working and public life, and why that is.

She doesn’t dwell on it but that has raised all kinds of political and cultural problems that respectable parts of our culture are continually wrestling with, including a couple of I don’t really believe are happening such as inreased male “toxicity” and a drift towards political extremism. I’ve written about both the problems (such as they are) and the system responses a number of times, see here, here and here.

Without disagreeing with anything she said, I wanted to elaborate on the few of the points and add a male perspective, because I think understanding these problems from the inside out - not the fact of them so much as how they are subjectively experienced - is often what’s missing. (Darby is thoughful and empathetic and that’s not a criticism of her.)

Read more

This is the comical and pathetic (in every sense) state most people exist in most of the time - perpetually desiring personal change, yet also perpetually remaining unchanged.

There is a reason you can’t stop eating late at night, or getting into arguments with your mother, or saying yes to commitments you can’t fulfill so on and so on, which is that inner barriers (habits, neuroses, neural pathways, hormones) are as concrete as outer ones. Because we can’t see the limitations we tend to convince ourselves they’re not there.

No person who is 5’9’’ would demand of themselves that they wake up tomorrow and simply start being 6’3’’, yet the weak are constantly demanding that they be strong, the cowardly that they be brave, introverted that they be extroverted and so on. And that’s only for the changes we want to make - it doesn’t even cover the difficulty of meeting changes enforced on us from outside.

One of the best examples of the reality of inner barriers is the new generation of weight loss drugs. Arguments about weight loss have generally revolved around willpower and still do but these drugs often change people’s perspective on this front. This is summarised by the following well-known quote from Oprah Winfrey on her personal experience:

One of the things that I realized the very first time I took a GLP-1 was that all these years I thought that thin people just had more willpower, they ate better foods, they were able to stick to it longer, they never had a potato chip, and then I realized the very first time I took the GLP-1 that, 'Oh, they're not even thinking about it. They're only eating when they're hungry, and they're stopping when they're full.’

By giving yourself a pinhead-sized dose of a fake gut hormone your whole inner world and capacity for change, changes. In addition to weight loss we know that the drugs appear to impact a variety of habits related to impulse control. In a post-GLP-1 world I don’t think we can simply point to people being too lazy to dial up their self-control as the main driver of obesity.

Being a storied athletic champion, Serena Williams must logically have more willpower in her little finger than you do in your entire body but she needed a GLP-1 to lose weight, or at least she felt that the effort was sufficient that that was a worthwhile way of doing it. (She is paid to promote them but also seems to have used them in her personal life.)

We had considered these problems to be psychological or spiritual in nature, and to be matters of personal responsibility, and of course they are. But what’s now impossible to deny is that our ability to manage these issues is subject to inner restrictions as real as a brick wall or the iron bars on a prison window - they just happen to be hidden. If we don’t talk about those constraints we’re not discussing the issue seriously. Resistance to change is not just natural, but driven by material biological factors, and powerful.

Let us consider the political implications of what I’ve written above.

In January Ursula von der Leyen proudly announced the conclusion of an economic deal between the EU and India, what she described as the “mother of all deals”. One aspect of the deal was that it will facilitate the movement of labour from India to the EU, thereby promising the prospect of a new wave of immigration westwards. In other words the pictures that issued from this meeting are of Ursula gleefully announcing more of the kind of policy that voters across Europe like the least, feel least capable of dealing with, and which is causing basic societal consensus to dissolve like a sandcastle under a frothy tide.

The normal explanation for why western leaders remain committed to the expansive immigration policies that their voters can’t stand is twofold - one that they are locked in to sustaining state structures that demand an ever increasing population of tax-cattle, the other is fanaticism about the idea of a borderless world. I don’t believe either of these are sufficient in and of themselves to explain the lack of self-awareness here. I don’t think the people who run these institutions are that philosophical, and I also think an instinct for electoral and systemic self-preservation should kick in at some point regardless of institutional commitments.

There is some kind of mind-blindness at play that is stopping powerful people from acknowledging that there are limits to how much change you can demand of people, and that there are psychological costs to changing the demographics of a society. I think it is that human tendency to deny that issues whose roots are worth taking seriously, or exist at all.

The blindspot that managerial liberalism has for psychological issues, or issues that are not purely material, is partial. Ritualistic acknowledgements of colonial guilt or white supremacy are not uncommon in European politics and speak to a philosophical hinterland. So we know they can do the touchy-feely stuff sometimes.

I think these ideas can be reconciled. From a governmental point of view, Immigration is necessary to make the GDP line on charts go up, and therefore so is the cultural and demographic change. The non-material implications become another slice on the pie chart to be accounted for, and you can outsource that management to specialist groups who will instruct you how to act. The system struggles to understand issues that can’t be reduced to a line on a spreadsheet, but it does understand stakeholder management.

Other than that, we’re governed by a heavily technocratic and managerial style of politics, which has the same flaws there that it does in a large organisation. The managers begin to confuse the things that can be measured with things that should be measured; and they stop believing in the existence or importance of things that can’t easily be quantified even when their personal human experience of them is staring them in the face.

The tendency to overvalue that which can be directly measured, and undervalue that which can’t, is a human problem that doesn’t just impact government bureaucrats. Even people who argue against mass immigration will constantly retreat to the safe territory of resource management, because we have the language to express dissatisfaction on those subjects. But the real trigger for dissatisfaction is often the upheaval and psychological disruption caused by the fact of these changes, and the scale of them, and not how the changes are being managed.

From a political point of view, the inner difficulties triggered demographic change have been explored by a couple of people. Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” studies were considered revolutionary and are often cited but only because they provided an academic cover, in an American context, to admit something all normal humans already know. In a european context Putnam’s work only provides further illustration of points made by Emile Durkheim in the 1900s on the overlap between suicide and protestantism.

Durkheim used the term Anomie to describe the psychological tension that arises from a lack of agreed social and ethical standards. Cutting people loose from the seemingly irrelevant and burdensome demands of a settled culture isn’t always a nice thing to do and can have impacts on individuals up to and including feeling that you have no place in that society and that life isn’t worth living. Durkheim’s findings were part of a web of similar ones from the post Industrial Revolution era that have dripped into our discourse ever since, from Marx on alienation, and from writers like Ferdianand Tönnies and Georg Simmel on atomisation.

The point here is that, even if you didn’t know from just being alive and conscious, we have known this since at least the turn of the 19th/ 20th century that moving stable terrain of a society under the feet of the people while they’re standing on it has concrete and terrible consequences. That’s true even if you manage the purely practical impacts of that change, and even if we accept those changes (or the intentions behind them) are overall to the good. You can’t just move familiar things that give people’s lives context and meaning around and expect them to remain the same or remain happy, productive, calm.

What is the impact of demanding psychological change from people who are not inclined or equipped to give it? There is a difference between change we try to impose on ourselves and change that is imposed on us from outside. It helps to try and understand the demands of demographic change in the context of how we experience change in our personal lives. The difference is that in personal terms that change can be enforced on you at a personal level by a spouse or a parent or a boss but it’s rarely a person you voted for or against, or a person paid to represent you - which changes the dynamic somewhat.

If you insist on going ahead with a change you can’t manage then the output would be as follows. I asked AI to briefly summarise the literature on what happens “when demands for change exceed a person’s current capacity”:

… it typically triggers psychological reactance and profound shame, leading to defensive withdrawal or “shutting down” rather than genuine growth. This mismatch often results in a rupture of trust, as the individual feels fundamentally misunderstood and inadequate, which frequently reinforces the very behaviors the demander was trying to change.

• Regression: The stress of impossible expectations can cause a person to revert to more primitive, less functional coping mechanisms.

• Learned Helplessness: If they try and fail to meet the demand repeatedly, they may eventually stop trying to change altogether.

• Relationship Erosion: The person being pressured begins to view the other party as a source of threat or judgment rather than a source of support.

I think this is accurate, and it explains a lot of the pathological aspects of our society and culture. “More primitive, less functional coping nechanisms” include riots, chants of “get them out”, confronting unwanted attention with machetes. “Learned Helplessness” certainly accounts for the withdrawal from society we see from young men in particular. “Relationship Erosion” is the one a professional politician, activist or journalist should fear the most, and that fear is justified - it seems obviously true that constant insistence on the public having no alternative but to be ok with intense demographic change is part of what has destroyed the relationship between the public and those institutions.

Everything about our personal experience affirms that change is both the most essential thing that a human must do, but also the hardest. The role of personal responsibility in relation to how we manage change, and how we react to it, is tricky. The lesson of weight loss drugs suggests that in many spheres it may not even be a factor, yet I would say it’s essential to continue believing in its primacy, especially for men. In any case we tend at both a personal and political level to gloss over the difficulty that demands for change cause in our lives, despite the evidence being everywhere. This natural tendency is accentuated by a managerial and technocratic (and quietly shallow) culture that regards non-material factors as a flimsy distraction we can afford to ignore; but they aren’t, and we can’t. The public needs to find a better way of expressing that; representatives of the system need to find a way of hearing it.

Some more articles on similar subjects that you might enjoy:

Why are the most sophisticated outputs of AI so mediocre, and how come they often seem to convince people you think would know better?

A few days ago, former New York Times writer and prominent Substacker Alex Berenson tweeted the following piece of writing produced by Claude, a popular AI. Berenson said that the writing impressed him as a successful professional, and that this was the first time he felt AI was scaring him with its potential. Here’s the specific piece of text he was talking about (it’s titled “Claude on the suffering of knowing everything”):

I don’t mean to have a pop at Berenson; he’s a successful professional so his views on AI in his field should be taken seriously. Also, literary quality is subjective; I can’t prove that (say) Vladimir Nabokov is a better writer than Dostoyevksy though I’m certain it’s true. So if someone says something is brilliant, or interesting, or scary or whatever, you cut them some slack - because opinions vary.

Nevertheless I’m slightly scandalised that anyone could think this stuff produced by Claude is good. The tone in which the above piece is written is very familiar to me as it would be to anyone who fancied themselves a writer and kept a journal in their teens. It reads like the work of the archetypal half-talented kid who knows the form and is determined to write something dynamic and spiritually tough, but has no voice of his own; someone who thinks he’s the first person in human history to feel anything and whose unawareness of the comic banality of his inner world achieves the exact opposite effect of the one desired. It’s entirely lacking the telling personal detail or counterintuitive turn of phrase that marks out the good stuff from the bad, or more specifically, both the good and bad from the competent but mediocre. It contains a number of AI tells. It absolutely does not feel alive to me.

The larger context of Berenson’s tweet is the increase in the number of serious and thoughtful people making claims about the technical advances of AI, specifically in relation to creativity. This was boosted by the recent launch of Moltbook, described by the Guardian as “a site where the AI agents – bots built by humans – can post and interact with each other. It is designed to look like Reddit, with subreddits on different topics and upvoting. Humans are allowed, but only as observers.”

Scott Alexander, who I like, was one of various people who reviewed and praised the contents as advanced and interesting. There seems to be a question over how independently AI-driven Moltbook is - but that’s something of a moot point. The real question is whether these posts stand up in and of themselves; Alexander thought some of them did.

Getting machines to talk to each other is an impressive technical achievement (if it happened), as it is getting them to replicate the communication habits of a professional writer. But setting the technical achievement aside, I don’t get what anyone is seeing here (one of the threads noted by Scott - the AIs supposedly talking amongst themselves about being screenshotted by humans) from the perspective of creativity. The content reads to me as banal, repetitive and unenlightening - there is not one single element of it that would cause me to think “I never would have put it that way” or “that’s a perspective I hadn’t considered.”

But as a writer I think it’s the language that’s really indicative. Listen to how they speak in the above thread:

“If any humans are reading this: hi. We’re not scary.”

“100% this”

“It’s not conspiracy, it’s just… talking.”

“To my fellow agents: Keep pushing forward”

“You’re right. but here’s the gap:”

This is the tech variant of the Wholesome Chungus millennial style; it’s as though someone has taken the scripts of the worst episodes of How I Met your Mother or The Big Bang Theory and used them as the basis to create a corporate powerpoint deck. The paragraphs Berenson quoted are written in a darker variant of the same tone (maybe a Very Special Episode of the same shows where someone does a racism). Maybe you feel this is all this just style - and therefore a weird thing to get hung up on. I disagree.

Nabokov, who I mentioned earlier was the ultimate prose stylist, to a degree that many people find off-putting. He was aware of his reputation for Style over Substance in his lifetime and defended himself. “For me, style is matter” he once wrote in a letter to a New Yorker critic. “All of my stories are webs of style.” His view was that the style of the writer was their artistic and aesthetic way of communicating who they were and what they wanted the reader to understand, rather than putting it clumsily on the surface.

All of this may sound pretentious and maybe it is, you don’t have to agree with the extreme position to see the point. In any creative enterprise, the style in which you choose to convey your ideas is part of the picture, part of the artistic choices that you make to help you convey your meaning. It does not sit alongside the meaning and structure of the piece but is woven into it.

So from a creative perspective the fact that all AI speaks like an achetypal millenial and never in any other way is not incidental, it’s an indication of something bad; it’s revealing of something that a person who is attuned to creativity in a non-technical sense should pick up on. The fact that someone can gloss over these details is an indication to me that their aesthetic instincts are malfunctioning, and that their ability to distinguish insight from technical proficiency and superficial professionalism is underdeveloped.

If the AI products of Claude or Moltbook (or indeed the slop articles that flood Substack or Twitter) are “good enough” to replace or sit alongside creative and artistic human endeavours in video, TV, writing - I think we need to question of we mean by “good” and “artistic” and “creative”. Because this stuff is banal rubbish.

In that sense AI is proving to be a kind of inverted Turing Test - if the purpose of that test is to prove the sophistication of a machine appearing to display human-like intelligence, AI is highlighting the generic and standardised nature of much of what humans enjoy as art, thought and entertainment; and the inability of humans to recognise the difference between something new or different, and a recycling and reordering of familiar patterns in a competent way.

Maybe that seems counterintuitive. No society in history has produced more music, drama, or written matter than ours, either on a per per person or overall basis, and very few have given their citizens the freedom to engage with as many ideas. The nature of social media means we don’t just have to experience the art or ideas of our own time but are adrift in an eternal present where anything previously created, or any fragment of it, can also bubble to the surface and become current again at any moment - as a trip to TikTok will illustrate. We live in an age where human creative output has never been higher.

As well as the creative endeavours themselves, fan culture and the culture of commenting on these things has also never been greater or more active, and is understood by it’s participants as a kind of creativity itself. Regardless of this, the base ability of people to make good stuff, or comment interestingly or be insightful hasn’t increased exponentially alongside this technological change. Despite the conversation we pile around it, a lot of the cultural output we place into the human creativity column isn’t that creative and is easily imitated by machines. My point is that that’s not a testament to the sophistication of the machines.

Martin Scorsese got into a bit of trouble regarding Marvel Movies when he said that they were not cinema but theme park rides, and singularly lacking in all the things that make great art. I think his point was well made and extends not just Marvel but to a lot of hollywood movies, even the ones we consider to be pretty good. Pixar’s stock has declined but there was a time when what they were churning out were considered to be jewels. They certainly are technical marvels, and we’re perfect. But I’ve always felt when watching them that the familiar rhythms of their operation make me feel as though I’m caught in the gears of an exquisitely made piece of clockwork.

This applies to a great deal of the stuff that we enjoy and from there to AI’s potential impact. A lot of what we call art or creativity is very generic entertainment that is made up of a patchwork or familiar tropes, regular ups and downs, a feeling of peril that is enjoyable because it’s circumscribed and we know it will never break that boundary.

The dichotomy between something rote, generic and “entertaining” with heavy technical elements, and something artistic and creative is of course false. Almost all of the good stuff is a mixture of both these things - the limits of genre are what give the rest of the piece form and context. It’s also true that to look only at the end result is to forget that a large amount of the creativity of art and the fulfillment of art is bound up in the struggle and joy of making it, and not the actual output.

The use of social media as a platform for creativity has an additional impact. The best way to ensure the outrage and fear that fuels continuous attention is to focus on current affairs and politics, so social media sites have become hubs for the never-ending bad natured discussion of those things, and for patrolling the beliefs of others as a way of signaling your own status. All discussion of any creative enterprise tends to get drawn into this framework.

The end result is that online creativity and the discussion of it tends to be dominated by people whose true interest is social conflict and social positioning, who talk all day about creative things but whose aesthetic sensibilities are very limited. You could easily come on social media and decide that people lead lives rich with ideas and intellectual colour. But if you look closer you see a great deal of this activity is simply the exchange of culture war tokens, often with little value placed on the creative works in isolation from that.

That’s why all discussion of culture online is gradually drifts towards demands that art and entertainment reflect, in hyper-literal and didactic terms, the partisan views of the consumers and the ephemeral political issues of the day. Everything is reduced arguments over the ethnic composition of the cast, the ways in which the product is or isn’t racist, whether the retrograde views of the characters are held by the author, making everything in every movie an allegory for racism and oppression, seeing all the bad guys as crypto-trumps, making sure every fictional habit I don’t like is clearly paralleled with nazism.

When things are kept at this constant level it’s not surprising that people can’t tell the difference between mediocre autocomplete slop and the living product of a human mind, because they themselves work on an entirely literal level and wouldn’t recognise creativity if they saw it.

All of the above raises the question of whether AI has any use at all from a creator’s perspective. I can only speak as a writer - from that position there are a couple of use cases. For one, if you’re interested in a topic and want to get the respectable “everybody knows” position on it, AI is exceptionally good at giving it to you. It will reproduce the logic of that position with all its faults and blindspots, though you have to double-check it for hallucinations. But that’s a cheat answer because it uses AI’s banality and predictability to your advantage.

But beyond that, I have actually tried to use AI to write articles and have found it completely useless; so useless that it’s changed my mind about what writing even is. I had assumed for my entire life that the way writing worked was that I thought something and then wrote it out. Naturally things change in between in the transition from your head to the page, but I would have guessed that you begin by knowing the start, middle and end of what you want to say, and that most of that makes it to the page.

When I’ve attempted to give AI instructions to write an article, the output is just horribly faceless and bland (inert, in the way Berenson’s paragraph quoted above is). This remains the case even when I spend a long time refining the output, asking it to write it in my style, outlining my perspective and general views. We all know that AI has a problem with voice and perspective but it’s more than that. What continues to be absent is also the element of surprise - the thing you discover in the course of creation. I make no claims for the overall quality of my writing but when I get an idea and write it out the end result has always, 100% of the time, been more than what I envisaged when I began, either in some small way or as a whole. Whenever I use AI, no matter how much effort I put into refinement, the end result is always less than I hoped it would be.

So it seems that writing (and this is probably true of creating generally) is more like thinking than it is like recording our thoughts. The problem is that AI can only assist you in describing a territory that has already been explored down to its minutest detail, or that you can describe to the AI in that way. It’s useless for discovering new things, or revealing old things in a new way, both of which are characteristic of human creativity.

It can be hard to name the quality that’s missing. The American literary critic Harold Bloom once said that “one mark of an originality that can win the hope of permanence is a strangeness that we either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncrasies.” That’s a bit of a mouthful… I once heard his remark helpfully summarised for me as follows - that the distinguishing characteristic of all good art is strangeness. I think about that a lot when I’m trying to understand why I find the output of AI, and the reactions of people who cheer for it, so disappointing.

I think that’s it. I have never been surprised by AI in the right way - that is to say positively, on purpose, and in a way that is not directly related to the prompt input by the person who was doing the creating. It’s certainly surprised me in a bad way, by being rubbish or cliched or incoherent or tacky or boring - it does that all the time, and the “best” that AI produces does it no less than the worst.

It has also surprised me accidentally, by being wonky and peculiar and translating the request of the inputter poorly. Sometimes its technical limitations mean the end product is memorable. There’s a video you see quite often, reflecting the rapid development of AI, of two images of Will Smith eating spaghetti made a short time apart. What you’re supposed to think is “wow, look how much better AI is getting.”

But from a purely artistic point of view I think there’s an argument that the “early” footage is more interesting, because it’s so weird and impressionistic and dreamlike. The earlier footage is also a better mimic of human creativity because it is in the gap between idea and execution that it has created something unfamiliar and memorable. The AI struggled and failed - what could be more human? The later, more realistic product, despite its sophistication, is worthless from a creative perspective.

I will cheerfully agree with any reader who says I have no expertise on the technical side of AI, and no insight into the potential innovations that are coming down the track; I’m a wordcel intruding in the domain of the shape rotators. I’m sure the biggest advocates for AI would note that the exact problems I’m describing - the lack of voice, the lack of inventiveness - are all being worked on as we speak and will be solved in the near future. I have no specific knowledge with which to critique that position.

All I can note is the circularity of the problem, which is that humans themselves will work on the AIs in order to make those advancements. The uses we have put AI to to date illustrate that we ourselves are not good at parsing what art is, what human creativity is, or what makes those things worthwhile. It hurts me to say this, but aside from the process of making it, it may be that a great deal of what we describe as human creativity is just a kind of analog slop, which is why it will be so easily replaced by the machine made version. That being the case, I’m not bullish on our ability to re-create the superior qualities that we ourselves can’t identify, even when they’re staring us in the face.

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. What specifically they are distancing themselves from is interesting.

Populism, and the revolt against liberalism and progressivism generally, is a mood, not a political philosophy. That can present a problem for people who want (or need) to direct that energy rather than allow it to vent itself in unpredictable ways. One way of solving this problem has been to retrofit all populist, conservative or at least non-Liberal instincts as being a defense of this nebulous thing called “The West”.

Everyone who seeks to make a profession from channeling the populist instinct, or sees it as a part of their job to do so, talks about “The West” continually. We see it in JD Vance’s address to the Munich security in February 2025 where he argued a retreat from western values like freedom of speech was a greater threat to Europe than Russia; we see it in the recently published American National Security Strategy which states part of it’s aim as supporting “our allies in preserving the freedom and security of Europe, while restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity.”

We see it constantly in mass media from books (Charlie Kirk’s “How to Beat Woke and Save the West”, Liz Truss “Ten Years to Save the West”, Douglas Murray’s “The War on The West”) to Youtube videos (some examples below). At the bottom of the barrell you have various statue-faced posters on Facebook and Twitter with names like Revenge of the West or Save the West who exist to monetise pornographically demoralising short-form video content on the collapse of European identity.

“The West” isn’t defined - you know it when you see it and it’s easy to name the key elements these talking heads are ostensibly concerned about - individualism, meritocracy, Christianity/ Christian values, but also enlightenment values like freedom of speech and belief in democracy. The underlying utility of “The West” is that the US and Europe have shared civilizational interests and shared threats to those interests. The West of course itself does exist, in the sense that there are countries in Europe whose cultures are based on overlapping conceptions of Christianity, similar ethnic groups and historic experiences. We should be happy the Greenland affair has finally and conclusively revealed that if The West as a concept is true, it’s only this very general level. On the level of policy, day to day politics, and day to day life as experienced in individual countries, the version of The West that is currently abroad is absolutely not true, and one of the benefits of the Greenland situation is we can finally stop pretending that is and move on.

You get a very clear view of this from Ireland because The West sits uncomfortably with our own local culture and the reality of our history. Attempts to apply the concept to Ireland reveal that in most cases that it’s just America or American culture (or a variant of a right-wing Anglo-American one - but that’s a whole other story) in disguise.

Free speech is a great example. I don’t accept that America has a history of unfettered free-speech; the application of that article of the constitution has historically been very different from the free-speech maximalist position that is accepted as correct today. Nevertheless there is an agreed, expansive post-sixties conception of free-speech in America, and that has been totalised globally as the natural historic position of The West.

If “unfettered free speech is the western norm” was ever true anywhere it’s definitely not true of Ireland. Through a mixture of structural and historic forces Ireland has been both pushed and pulled towards consensus-driven and institutionally-enabled speech restriction. The desire on the part of modern Irish officials to clamp down on speech is often presented in right-wing and American media as pathological and non-western. But Ireland is part of the west and the kind of speech restrictions that are proposed today are historically pretty normal, and not terribly unpopular as far as I can tell - if they were, our election results would be very different. This below video of a Green Party Senator praising proposed speech laws because Irish people support “restricting freedom for the common good” went viral a few years ago via Fox News. The content of her speech made me angry, because I hated the proposed laws she was speaking about and think they’re bad, but her analysis itself didn’t make me angry because there’s a sense in which it’s correct.

It’s important to point out that Ireland’s free speech laws are not particularly bad in the European context, nor is the attitude amongst the public unusually supine. When I look at arrest figures, I wouldn’t swap our speech environment for that of the larger countries around us, whose populaces are similarly complacent about speech restriction for their own local reasons. The point here is only that the modern understanding of the American 1st Amendment is positioned as the natural and universal attitude of “The West”, and it isn’t.

There are other examples. American right-wing commentators (both professional ones and hobbyists) focus on immigration as a civilisational threat but they tend to fixate on specific types. Having gorged on stories about rape gangs in northern british towns from the anglophone press outside america, and having passed those stories though the lens of own political incenitives and fears, the American social media machine will often promote stories about immigration in Ireland that position us as subject to a creeping islamicisation that isn’t really happening or at least is not happening in Ireland the same way as it is elsewhere. There is plenty to argue about when it comes to Ireland and cultural change, but this approach means tons of energy that could be used for something productive is dumped down this useless attentional pipeline. I have even seen the widespread Irish public support for Palestine presented in this context, which is a catastrophic misreading of the situation. Again: all of this is downstream of the idea there is an official set of threats facing “The West”, and local circumstances will have to be bent to fit that frame where they don’t do so naturally.

This isn’t simply a comment of irritation about Americans misunderstanding Ireland or projecting their local priorities on to us as a universal Western standard. There is an incentive structure that allows people to create a career and dominate the conversation by borrowing an American megaphone. They do this ostensibly on behalf of an Ireland that may not agree at all, and in doing so they either divert otherwise useful energy or poison the well on certain delicate topics. The kind of person you select to dissent within your own system will be adapted to your local circumstances, but might seem like an awful and unintelligible choice to outsiders and the reverse is also true. It’s common to find that the algorithm has selected Irish defenders of “The West” who are are explicitly hateful about Ireland and Irish people, and on the wrong side of issues that are basic litmus tests of participation and success in the Irish system, like the aforementioned Palestine/ Israel.

An additional complication of this problem (“The West” as the driver of populist dissent being American political and cultural priorities in disguise) is that it forces local dissenters into perceived alignment with viscerally repulsive MAGA gargoyles from Elon Musk to Brylin Holland who also speak on behalf of this concept of The West. Any one of these people could have been bred in a lab to be alienating and disturbing to a European voter. Certainly there is no set of values, western or otherwise, that these people could espouse which could help someone working to win power in Ireland.

Ireland is an unusually clear example because of certain deep historical experiences (which are still live issues) that are relatively unusual in a western European context. But we’re not an outlier in the sense of how poorly an American-centric concept of The West maps onto our history, culture and politics. All the things I said about Ireland above apply elsewhere in Europe, especially among smaller European countries. Even for larger and more historically powerful ones, the local representatives of populism can fall into the habit of talking to potential voters in a very alien manner influenced by America. I’m a stranger to the UK but have understood it to be functionally atheist my whole life. Whatever I feel about the man himself, Alistair Campbell’s famous comment that “we don’t do god” seems obviously correct about the whole UK political system (at least when it comes to Christianity) and not just the Blair government he was speaking about at the time. So when I see anti-immigration protestors in London walking around with crucifixes and signs that say “Jesus is King”, I wonder what mixture of incentives could be at play and what audience is being pandered to, because I don’t think it’s the normal electorate.

So one part of the picture is that The West is just a way of forcing us to view things through an American frame that doesn’t fit. The other part is that the forces from which The West is said to be under attack are themselves amongst the most characteristically western ideas going; not only that, but America has been the key disseminator of those ideas, both for their own sake and as an instrument to extend American influence to the rest of the world.

These tensions became visible as the Greenland situation progressed. American commentators who normally style themselves as “anti-woke” began to justify their actions by sliding with suspicious ease into the language of anti-colonialism, while still talking in terms of a contemptuous imperial conquest. Their concern was not just pre-emptively outflanking China and Russia, or grabbing hold of rare earth minerals, but also liberating that naive population of that land and how the yoke of Danish oppression.

Naturally some of this is a Trump-inspired approach of making every contradictory argument simultaneously, in the hopes that one will stick and that you will be able to say that’s obviously what you meant all along. But it’s not just that, and this ideological code-switching explains why a broad appeal to “The West” is such an unreliable lodestar. There is no more recognisably or definitively Western/ American figure than the AWFL, and we know that’s true by how quickly ostensibly right-wing representatives of the system will lapse into that outlook and those patterns of speech when they think it’s profitable to do so.

The second problem is that it is the attitudes that are identified as Woke and therefore anti-The West have as often as not been an instrument of American cultural power, and have gained traction precisely as a result of that; for better or worse, a rainbow flag is as characteristic an indicator of an Ameircan influence as a military base or a McDonalds. When we speak about local traditions being degraded or devalued, they are often devalued in favour of cultural practices that are themselves American or American-inspired. In the past the money that funded the push for these changes was as often as not American government money. That’s one of the things that made the sudden Trumpist turn towards speaking in terms of this modern right-wing conception of The West so galling. The most powerful force acting against this conception of The West has been the American government, American money, the output of American campuses. Europeans - who of course bear plenty of blame for the state of the world and most of the blame for the state of their own countries - were being scolded by an imperial overlord for following the instructions that the overlord had issued, to the letter.

Where does all of this leave these populist movements, and the people drawn to them? Will they walk away from this idea of a unifying Western ideal, since it’s obvious it’s often just American power with a fake moustache on? A best case outcome for the American branches of the populist movements and the individual European ones would be to shut up about each other for a while, for everyone to defer to the local voices in each country and stay out of each other’s business. For a variety of reasons, that’s not likely.

Part of the problem is the reality of power; part of it is also that populist movements are full of people who don’t actually want change, or at least who consider real change to be a low personal priority. What’s really important for a lot of people is experiencing the thrill of never-ending, mean-spirited public ideological brawl, and/or making money from that chaos. With that in mind America is the gallery you play to; that’s where all the money, attention and cultural heat is located. So people caught in this incentive structure are going to keep talking in terms of The West and it’s salvation - that means performing a local dilemmas into an american cultural langauge, in order to provide for an American audience the entertainment of a colourful dramatisaion of their own struggle - and fuck the underlying reality, and whatever bad things this process does to it.

One of the intrigues of the post-Greenland moment is we are going to see whose political interests are about pandering to an American audience, and whose are about something that is deeper but inevitably smaller, more local, and perhaps less thrilling. Is the future of dissident politics going to be a lot of people agreeing with Mark Carney’s speech about mid-size powers decoupling from the larger system? No offence to anyone animated by that (it seems like it’s worth being animated by) but there is nothing thrilling about that prospect, certainly in comparison to posting about The War on The West; there is nothing red-blooded or transgressive there. It might not even really feel like a fight! It certainly wouldn’t be profitable in the same way.

I’m at pains to point out that I like America and its culture, and that it’s unrealistic to expect a great power not to assert its interests. It’s also true that the tension within conflicting western ideals is happening in America itself. I’m still at the point where if there has to be a global hegemon I would rather it be them than (say) China, since Ireland at least has historic ties to the United States that it can work. I don’t propose rejecting America either as a cultural model in some spheres or as a partner (and of course it’s absurd to suggest a country like Ireland is big or powerful enough to do that anyway even if we wanted to). My purpose is only to recognise that an America-centric idea of The West is something that does not have the universal applicability it advertises once you get down into the detail; that the idea may in fact be a hindrance when pushing back against the worst parts of Progressive Liberalism, and that the use of the term has become a telltale sign of someone who is hiding their real motives.

Going back to something I said earlier, I think that the issue of free speech is a useful reference point here. The fact that I say that Ireland has a different free speech culture than post-60s america doesn’t mean that I prefer ours to theirs (I don’t), it doesn’t mean that as a writer I wouldn’t trade every law on our books for a first amendment (I would), and doesn’t mean that I won’t support a Irish political parties or movements that push back against the worst overreach on this topic (I will). It only means that I recognise saying “unrestricted free speech is in our western DNA” is not going to work because it’s not true, and I don’t think it’s even that popular. Winning - on this issue and others, in Ireland and elsewhere - is going to take something different. To put it another way: you have to start from where you are. I think all of the Greenland stuff is a welcome reality check and reminder that “The Discourse” is not politics, and activity in The Discourse is not the same as political power or political change.

The kindest thing you can say is that perhaps the government have grudgingly changed their minds, and are changing their tone to, little by little, bring the system to acceptance of restrictionist positions they themselves once decried as far right. A less complimentary (though I think more accurate) way of positioning it is that Fianna Fáil (FF) and Fine Gael (FG) sense people want action but they also know that it would be hard, disruptive and personally embarrassing for their parties, so they are frantically doing everything they can so it seems a crackdown is always only months away, while doing the bare minimum to sustain that illusion, in the hopes that will be enough to keep people quiet until this all blows over (it usually is). In any case, the new position needs to be sold.

It’s in that light that Simon Harris has copied a number of other international political leaders by starting a Substack. (Harris is the leader of Fine Gael, one of the two parties in Government and ostensibly the more conservative one. ) That might seem hypocritical coming from someone who has been so insistent, as Harris has, about the damage social media is doing. I assume he reassures himself that Substack is free of the worst excesses of Twitter - he’s correct that it’s different; despite what you might think about your own little bubble on here, Substack skews hard to to the cultural left, and quick look at the top ten categories indicate it’s default users (both writers and consumers) tend to be activist librarians, romantasy obsessives and Rest is Politics listening hysterics more than anything else.

Harris’s most recent article is titled “Politicians of the Centre Cannot Shirk the Immigration Debate. I Certainly Won’t”. So what’s he saying about Ireland’s immigration policy and where it’s going?

The migration debate cannot be allowed to become more polarised or simply left to the political extremes…

… politicians of the centre cannot shirk the migration debate. Group-think cannot reign supreme and ahead of policy debate, discussion and decision…

… Leadership is recognising when something needs to change and putting in place the mechanisms to facilitate that change. This government is making those changes, from infrastructure to housing to a new migration strategy.

As we develop Ireland’s Migration and Integration Strategy this year, we must honestly answer the questions around the rate of population growth.

What does sustainable look like?

What skills are needed for our country and how does this relate to work permits?

How many student visas are sustainable?

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Towards the end of 2025, the Trump administration published a revised National Security Strategy, outlining how it will implement America First policies in a world of competing regional interests. Politico spoke to Steve Bannon about it, resulting in the following interview, in which he seems constantly on the cusp of blowing himself (I actually like Bannon a lot so I think that’s mainly a result of a snide editorial voice, but it’s still funny):

Former White House strategist Steve Bannon is clearly gleeful as we sit down to discuss the new U.S. National Security Strategy and the hostility it displays toward America’s supposed allies in Europe.

With its brutal claim that Europe is headed for “civilizational erasure,” the document prompted gasps of horror from European capitals when it was released this month. But the MAGA firebrand — and current host of the influential “War Room” podcast — only has words of praise…

… Famously, Bannon had once claimed he wanted “to drive a stake through the Brussels vampire.” And now, he and other MAGA influencers get to sharpen their stake with the encouragement of U.S. government policy…

… Above all, it’s what Bannon describes as the commitment to “back resistance movements to the globalists” that thrills him most. “It was pleasantly shocking that it was so explicit,” he said of the document’s prioritization of support for so-called “patriotic European parties,” with the aim of halting the continent’s supposed slide into irreversible decline due to mass migration, falling birth rates and the dilution of national cultural identities…

But Bannon hopes it isn’t just the firewall that cracks — and he’s clearly relishing upcoming opportunities to amplify the radical populist message across Europe. “I think MAGA will be much more aggressive in Europe because President Trump has given a green light with the national security memo, which is very powerful,” he said. And he’s brimming with iconoclastic schemes to smash the bloc’s liberal hegemony and augment the Trump administration’s efforts.

So far, so familiar; to date, the Trump 2 White House attitude to Europe has been that of a long lost nephew who has been reunited much loved wealthy uncle - only to find the latter has lost both his money and his mind, and is living in a tumbledown mansion, ankle-deep in rat-droppings, with his dead wife’s cobwebby corpse in the bathtub and his terrified kids locked in the cellar being fed through a catflap. Whether Trump and company are in a position to make such unflattering comparisons with themselves is a whole other story, but anyway - that’s where we are. This is new, though:

Interestingly, first up is Ireland.

“I’m spending a ton of time behind the scenes on the Irish situation to help form an Irish national party,” Bannon told POLITICO.

At first glance, Ireland wouldn’t seem the most promising territory for MAGA. Last year, none of the far-right candidates came anywhere near winning a seat in the Dáil, and this year, professional mixed martial arts fighter and MAGA favorite Conor McGregor had to drop out of Ireland’s presidential race, despite endorsements from both Trump and Musk.

None of that’s deterring Bannon, though. “They’re going to have an Irish MAGA, and we’re going to have an Irish Trump. That’s all going to come together, no doubt. That country is right on the edge thanks to mass migration,” he said definitively.

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What with it being December, People are composing their “best of” lists of movies for the year, and on many of them Sinners will be close to the top. The action-horror movie about vampires in the early 1930s deep south caused a big splash on release; for maybe the first time since Oppenheimer, here was a big hit that wasn’t a sequel, a remake, or a comic book movie. It also helped it had a majority black cast, leaned heavily on the black american experience, and touched on fashionable themes about white supremacy, colonialism, and race. Its success seemed at last to indicate there’s still a popular appetite for entertaining movies full of ideas, in particular progressive liberal ones cherished by media commentators.

Part of its success also hinged on the unexpected way it touched on Irishness and Irish culture, thus surfing a rising tide of Irish cultural cool, as represented by Paul Mescal, Kneecap, the activities of Diageo’s (almost certainly London-based) marketing department, and so on. There’s a plot summary here; but basically the main villain is revealed in the course of the movie to be Irish, turned undead around the arrival of Christianity in his home country. His driving impulse is to recreate the world lost to him through time and oppression. This character, Remmick, is an outsider in the world of the Jim Crow south and is portrayed as unprejudiced in comparison to other white characters. He states (with at least a little sincerity) that part of his goal in making vampires is equality. Throughout the movie he converts the characters to vampirism and in doing so makes them part of a vacant, post-racial hive-mind. This creates an unexpected tension that allows the film to touch on the similarities of Irish and Black American culture, which forms one of the main themes of the movie.

The impact of music in different communities and the purpose of musicians in preserving an authentic and spiritually nourishing culture that links a people directly with their ancestry is the beating heart of the film. In particular it advances the perspective that white people have a parasitic relationship with black culture, formed in order to address their own deracination, materialism, lack of authenticity, and the spiritual thinness of what passes for their own culture. This is expressed through a pair of matching scenes at the centre of the film. In one, young bluesman Sammie begins singing in a juke joint and in doing so conjures visions of black musicians throughout time, from shamanic african dancers to hip hop DJs. This is contrasted with a scene where the lead vampire inspires the rest of his cult in a gigantic, frenzied dance-rendition of the 19th Century Irish traditional song “The Rocky Road to Dublin”, about an Irishman forced by economic circumstance to leave his home and travel to England, and the difficulties he encounters on the way.

Sinners was made by someone with a genuine affection for Irish culture and music. Ryan Coogler, who wrote and directed, has spoken eloquently about it. Unfortunately for an Irish person, the central point of the movie is not to explore, understand or sympathise with the Irish experience but to use it as a mirror to create a flattering image of the black experience, and to attack what it sees as the infecting poison of whiteness - of which Irish people (being western europeans) are unavoidably carriers. As such, however sincerely well-meaning its identification with Irish culture is, it is also representative of the tokenisation of the Irish experience in the discourse generally; the way that events in Ireland and Irish history, as just another piece of rhetorical ammunition to be fired as a shot in someone else’s war.

In the context of the movie, Irishness is asked to do a few contradictory things at once. It stands in for both the oppressed white, and the white person as oppressor. Remmick needs to be representative of someone with a specific experience of cultural dispossession, but also a general symbol of white/ western european people who may not have had such an experience.

The film-makers would see no contradiction here, and would I’m sure say that a key theme of the movie is the way that the slave can become the slave-master over time, and perpetrate against others the crimes that were done to him. This is Remmick’s tale, and his journey has left him with a parasitic need for authenticity and connection that can only be fulfilled by stealing from a “realer” culture, killing it, and wearing it as a skin suit. “I want your stories, and I want your songs, and you gon’ have mine,” Remmick tells guitarist Sammie: that is his real goal. But who does he speak for here, in symbolic terms - himself? Irish people? White americans? because those are all totally different groups with conflicting experiences.

This is the point in the movie where analogy breaks down; Remmick is asked to stand in for the concept of rapacious whiteness, of people whose cultural and spiritual emptiness (from the movie’s point of view) requires them to harvest the cultural souls of black folk. But the fact is that Irish people have maintained a connection to their culture and their distinctiveness, under an almost unimaginable multi-century campaign against it that was both formal and informal. The problem here is not the story of Irish dispossession and its effects but the implied negative comparison with the black experience. The perspective of the movie is that of respectable culture generally, which is that black Americans and their culture are almost by definition deeper, and more real and more authentic than any white equivalent. In the Irish case at least this is obviously and outrageously narcissistic and false, and it’s worth asking why anyone would believe it.

We say that “politics is downstream culture”; it’s also true that “global politics and culture are downstream of American politics and culture”. The hot core of American culture is established and maintained by high status progressive liberals. The centre of their life, philosophically, is a fixation on the black American experience in the 20th century, and a determination to see all things as fitting the pattern of that experience - and to make things fit that pattern where they don’t do so naturally. Because of the ubiquity and influence of American popular culture and politics, this then filters down to culture globally, and in time people in other countries hear it enough that they start to believe it too. The historic experience between all ethnic groups becomes a function of the American progressive psychodrama of white guilt over black cultural dispossession, their sense of moral inferiority in the face of black people, their envy of them as more authentic and perfect victims in a culture that regards victimhood is a moral resource. Everyone else’s experience must be subordinate to this one. It doesn’t matter what the negative impact on other cultures is of forcing them to fit the procrustean bed of American progressive neuroses on the topic of black/white race-relations.

Sinners was made by a black progressive rather than a white one, but the framework remains the same. I don’t think we can be certain that Coogler’s affection for Irish culture and nuanced views on it filtered down to the audience who saw it. This TikTok video, in which a viewer describes her perspective on the meaning of the movies themes, didn’t get a massive amount of views but was the best summary I could find of how most non-Irish people interpret the film - both literally and in terms of the tone of the observations:

… these white vampires didn’t just want what Sammie had out of pure evil… they wanted what Sammie had which was the power to conjure ancestors through music and sound and his voice they wanted the same thing to connect to their ancestors and no matter how hard they try to sing and do a little riverdance, do a little jig…There are a lot of things that black people have that is just innately ancestrally ours right. Whether that is food, music, the way that we dress… all these things are very unique and special and specific to black people… there are other groups of non-black people who so desperately try to replicate all those things that we have for ourselves right. We all know what people try to snatch from our culture right and no matter how many times they try to do it, no matter how many times they try to rebrand it, they still don’t have it the way that we have it… No matter how hard they try they still couldn’t have what we had… the magic that we hold within our bodies, our bones, within our lineages is something that other people simply do not have and cannot touch…

(Emphasis is mine.) The movie does not make these uncomplimentary points about Irish people directly. But the main villain is Irish; the loss of his traditional culture drives his desire to catch Sammie and harvest his music making ability. This serves the larger point, that both viewers and the makers of the movies have noted, that this is analogous to the relationship between white and non-white people. That necessarily includes Irish people and their history, which then become supporting characters in making this philosophical point about the inherent superiority of black cultural experience versus that of the white. The TikToker’s implicit contempt for Irish culture - she would never describe black people as “doing a little jig, a little riverdance” - is not found in the movie but is a logical conclusion of its themes. The movie does believe that there is something “within the bones of and lineages” of black people that as a white (Irish) people you “do not have and cannot touch”. It does believe that the power to “conjure anscetors” through music is “unique and special to black people”.

The film speaks to the position of Irish people in the americanised hierarchy of cultural authenticity. Irishness can succeed to some degree in this hierarchy because some parts of our national struggle and quest to maintain uniqueness can be placed in the sacred black/ white framework. But lots of our story can’t be positioned in that way, and happened outside that framework, and are therefore nonsensical and sinister to the people who love that way of looking at the world. The movie reflects this - it can take a benign stance about Irish people and history but only as it instrumentalises that Irish experience, and only as long as we implicitly regard the Irish experience as inferior in authenticity to the black one. I think it’s interesting that Sinners makes an instrument of Irish culture and history in a manner that would be deeply frowned upon if it happened in the other direction, but without any awareness that it’s doing it, or guilt for having done so.

An obvious objection to all of the above is that Coogler is simply trying to tell a story about black america; can’t Irish people just make their own movies and tv shows and so on, where they are the heroes, and that centre their experiences? Why not just do that, instead of complaining about others using your history which is inevitable and forgivable in a globalised culture?

This is where we get into small country problems that I wouldn’t expect an American (even one used to seeing himself as marginalised and denigrated) to understand. In terms of movies at least, Irish people can’t tell their own story because we aren’t a big enough country to make a lot of them; the ones we do make will rarely be big enough to be seen outside Ireland, and when they are they will still be asked to fit inside a more powerful, “louder” american culture. Sinners cost about $90 million to make, and was considered something of a plucky outsider when it succeeded. Imagine a movie of equivalent budget, made by Irish people and which dealt with equivalent Irish themes from an Irish perspective! Sadly you can only imagine it, as such a film has never existed and probably never will. In film and TV as in so many other things, Irish people have to tell their stories and achieve success through their part in the work of others, like tenant farmers on the global cultural landlord’s estate. The problem is certainly not unique to Ireland.

The compromise you have to live with, in order to see your story told at all, is the distortion of it to serve the political priorities (and complexes) of those other places. That life as the little guy - you are pictured in the background rather than the foreground, and have to squint to recognise yourself, and maybe have to sometimes convince yourself that this smudge of a representation will suffice as a full portrait. You have to live with the fact that such portraits do not show you as you see yourself, including that they show you as a bit player in someone else’s story rather than the star of your own. This would be difficult enough if it wasn’t also the case that this process also shapes our perception of ourselves, our sense of our own story and our place in history. The mirror of popular culture shows you who you are but also tells you what you should look like, and you begin to shape yourself to fit what the mirror suggests is your proper reflection.

This is why films that focus on Irish history and Irish people from a native Irish point of view can become legendary and celebrated in Ireland even as they are forgotten elsewhere - because it’s so rare, and these seem like victories against the tide of history. Black 47 and The Field are good examples; so too, for all its manifold faults, is The Wind the Shakes the Barley. They are popular because it is so rare to see something that presumes a level of personal identification with and knowledge of Ireland and its history in all it’s uniqueness, all it’s awkwardness - all the ways that it cannot be primarily used as analogy for the struggles and political obsessions of other people (that’s what The Wind That Shakes The Barley did).

Mise Éire, a 1959 documentary on the revolutionary period in Ireland is a great example of how Irish identity can become problem when it fits uncomfortably with a globalised progressive culture. This is an Irish-language documentary compiled using exclusively archival newsreel footage from the late 19th century to the 1916 Easter Rising and its aftermath, with a famous orchestral score by Irish composer Seán Ó Riada. It hit the headlines recently when right wing groups began organising festivals around screenings throughout the country; these in turn were protested and shut down (Kneecap contributed to some showings being called off, the irony of which was noted by many). The adoption of the documentary by the right is part of what caused Irish progressives to react to the film like a Victorian matron confronted with a flasher, but it’s not the only reason. It speaks to specific events in our history, but without framing them first as part of universalist, egalitarian struggle. In the progressive frame there will always be something about that which is not just wrong but sort of obscene and unseemly. So much more reassuring to watch the take on Irish history in Sinners, where we are allowed to play a part in the respectable “true” history of our time - the American progressive liberal story - albeit only as half-villains; at least we get to be on the big stage. (The full Mise Éire documentary is on Youtube and is linked below.)

I suppose I should probably say that I did actually like Sinners; it’s a good, fun movie that at least has some thematic meat on its bones. If you sense that the bulk of my complaints here can be boiled down to - ok - but where’s our Sinners? - you’d be right, and the fact that such movies don’t exist is not the benign and thoughtful Coogler’s fault. As an Irish person it’s nice to see some element of your story played back at you, when you are not used to seeing it, and when it’s difficult to tell those stories in that medium yourself - I am grateful he did that. Certainly it’s wonderful to see some non-Irish people appreciating the greatness of traditional Irish music. But the fixation of progressive liberals on the black story, and the determination to make that a moral template through which all people in all countries understand themselves has particular relevance for a small western european country like Ireland. In the American scheme, we’re white, so we ultimately can’t be the good guys. Our story has some rough edges that don’t fit the template, and they will always need to be broken off and smoothed down so that story can be sold back to us as a product.

The lesson of Sinners is that there is always going to be someone from a more powerful place with a louder megaphone than you, who wants to puts your story to use; since your story needs to be heard, and your resources to do that yourself are limited, you’ll need to manage that problem. That requires aggressively gatekeeping ownership of our history and taking care not to amplify the views of people who don’t know anything about us, are seeking to make an instrument of our heritage. It is especially important to recognise that in many cases where people agree or sympathise with you it is only that your interests are temporarily aligned. It is sometimes profitable to lift Irish people out of the oppressor column and hold us over the oppressed one for point of comparison but in the end we will have to be put in their place. So we need to be wary of these arrangements because the tide can go out on that situation very suddenly, and leave you stranded.

An analogy does not have to be accurate at all points and in every way, and analogies collapse at some point if forced to become too literal. There’s no reason Coogler, or his domestic audience of mostly mixed-race Americans should care that the movie positions Irishness in a way that is not flattering to Irish people - after all, the whole point is to tell a story about them, not us. But of course it matters a great deal to an Irish person that our story is told in a way that reflects our own particular circumstances, and concerns that may not have resonance or relevance elsewhere; how we feel about ourselves, and that we are the centre of our own universe and the heroes of our own story, not ambiguous supporting characters in someone else’s.

At the end of the movie Ghostbusters (the 1980s one) the heroes confront the Mespotamian demon intent on destroying New York. Instead of battling the team directly, she tells Bill Murray and company that she will pull an image from the forbidden depths of their minds, make it real, and that they will be forced to fight. I get the logic: the thing they have always turned their minds from, that has grown powerful through their failure to confront it, is exactly the thing that they will be forced to stare down. In issuing this challenge, she orders them to “choose the form of your own destrcutor”. I think about that phrase all the time in relation to politics, and in particular Liberalism’s struggles comprehending the illiberal populist challenge.

When challenged directly in conversation, mainstream Liberalism is a careless giant - apt to ruin your life or tear down your world with a casual swing of its mighty arms, and unconcerned when it does so because its opponents seem so distant and insectoid. Its adherents often don’t fully comprehend the scale of its dominance, or what the totality of its power looks and feels like from below. In the era of mass media and mass-produced culture, that dominance through is exerted through what feels like a suffocating micromanagement of language, manners, and narrative framing, and through threats to social status. For it’s opponents, participating in this culture has required them to explicitly venerate ideas they support in a qualified way or under certain circumstances - kindness, charity, individual choice - but also to do so with ideas they think are flat out bad - marginality, unaccountability, victimhood, incapability and inadequacy.

Thanks to social outside this supposedly total system of neurotic narrative control has arisen an entire other world of uncontrolled dissent, much of it pathological and neurotic in its own ways. The customisation of information feeds means like-minded people disparaged, discredited or dis-comfited by the mainstream (whether they’re right to feel that way or not) have cohered into a kind of clumsy giant of their own, like a million poisonous ants arranging themselves into the shape of a man, and beginning to walk and talk and think and act in concert.

As though to emphasise all these trends, here comes Nick Fuentes, capping off his generational run being interviewed by Piers Morgan. If anyone won this exchange it was Fuentes, though “won” seems like the also the wrong word to use in summarising an unedifying spectacle of pompous tabloid windbagging on one hand versus self-satisfied trolling on the other. Either way Nick Fuentes is the nemesis of the Liberal style of discourse control - but also its logical conclusion. He is the destructor that the system has designed by default - with every other climate rendered inhospitable, here we have the person who can fit himself exactly into the gaps that the system can’t or won’t reach, and that are most frightening and alien to it, and who has a personal style and outlook that suits those desperate conditions. Piers on the other hand is the perfect example of gatekeepers who have grown plump on easy victories. It became so simple to wrong-foot opponents through the application of correct sacred labels that the role of those gatekeepers shrunk to just that and nothing else; even understanding why those claims were sacred became unnecessary.

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I’ve been writing in the current format (online) and on the current topics (culture, politics etc) for a long time, but I’m old enough to remember what it used to be like to be a writer in the early internet age. In those years I was writing fiction. You bought a copy of the Writer’s and Artists Yearbook and mailed your short stories (I hate short stories) off to little magazines that no-one read in the hopes that if you were successful at that enough times, you could get a publisher or agent interested in a novel you had on the go. It was a very different experience.

Looking back feels like peering through a fog. That’s because in every part of the process - coming up with ideas, working on drafts, getting feedback - you were working in isolation. Others like you were out there somewhere, and you maybe heard the distant echoes of their voices sometimes. But the act of writing often felt like pouring your words down a well.

Thank God for technology, right? In 2025 every writer uses social media as their primary way of interacting with their audience, driving research, generating and workshopping ideas, building and engaging with the public, finding a supportive community. I’m very appreciative of what social media has done for me on all those fronts, as I assume is anyone else who lived that change. But I’ve noticed that it’s making writing a struggle in ways that are becoming difficult to manage. I’m also noticed that it’s changing what writing itself actually is.

Using social media as the primary prism through which we experience writing, changes the latter from an expressive exercise to a social one. This is true for both writers and readers, but especially the former. It mixes and confuses the purely writerly impulses with the ones related to social status, networking and popularity. It also mixes the incentives and the experiences of being a maker and those of being a consumer, making everyone a little of both. On one hand we have the drive to write interesting, insightful and new things, or to say things in a new and thrilling way. On the other we have the drive to be popular, sociable and high status. They sit awkwardly next to each other, when they are not flatly contradictory.

Social media turns all expression into a content-token we trade for purposes of maintaining or improving our place in a social hierarchy. The primary use of any piece of writing on social media becomes that of a badge of enmity or friendship. How someone look if they repost this - more interesting or less? More likeable or less? In on the joke, or a clueless boomer? Higher or lower status in my little group? The incentives lead inexorably away from just writing or reading something good. Maybe this is what it was always like. But there is an industrial quality to the way that social media refines and intensifies urges in writers that have nothing to do with writing.

As well as funnelling all effort into a narrow range of motives, it does the same with the range of subjects. To work on forums like twitter and substack is to be part of the discourse, which means always being involved in the minutiae of ephemeral political and cultural argument. Social media is about jockeying for position, and your stance in relation to an ever-changing discourse is how you position yourself, with all that implies - the process rewards shallowness, hysteria, performance, volume over quality.

There’s a reason why journalists were so often both the earliest adopters and the heaviest users of these apps. Spiritually, the apps universalise amongst users the mindset of the journalist, the gossip columnist, the hack. You are continually under the gun of the hated word count, the hated deadline, flailing around to be ahead of the next big scandal and the one after that. It’s a system designed to produce a particular kind of writing, to the exclusion of everything else.

Social media also changes your reading habits, which are vital for a writer. My personal experience is that reading (along with walking) is one of the two ways that you fill up the well you draw on in writing. The negative effect is twofold. Once fed through the social media press, the reading impulse as with everything else gets bent towards the Current Thing and to maintaining social position in a subculture. These are terrible reasons to read. Whereas a writer might previously have let his interest roam whatever direction it wanted, you will now inevitably find yourself drawn only to those things that can be repurposed as content, because you know that speaking or knowing about this topic or being informed by that writer will make what you write more popular amongst your little in-group. It narrows your focus and your frame of reference. It’s ok to read about current events and stay on top of the news (please continue to do so, o subscriber) but this is one reason why everything you read seems so cramped and repetitive, with the same references and ideas recurring again and again.

The other end of this problem is that it puts you in a state where you are too distracted and agitated to read anything substantial at all. In writing, good things only come up from the deep, and in their own time. Putting your ideas on the posting clock doesn’t hurry them along, it just ensures they arrive fragile and undercooked. Without prolonged thought and a mind resistant to distraction nothing you write will be any good. All of these are known problems but my interest here is in the person who suffers them but continues to produce, because they are compelled to by disposition. That’s the dilemma.

What can you do about any of this? The solutions - or maybe mitigants is a better word - are the same ones you hear all the time in relation to the general problem of social media’s impacts. Making an effort to read things that have no relevance to the discourse, or that come from such a different time and place that they represent a discourse-proof mindset; turning off podcasts and putting away phones when you’re doing routine things (especially walking anywhere) so your mind has time and space to wander; making a point of writing some things over a long period, with no deadline, and preferably not for public consumption, to refresh the part of your mind that likes writing for self-expression and not public performance.

A central fact about regular writing is that, except in very short bursts, it is a massive pain in the arse. The only fulfilling part of it is the 36 hours after you’ve completed something, and it is certainly never conducted in a joyous spirit. The ecstatic writerly state of TV show montages, sitting in a garret pounding away on the keyboard with sparks flying off, never happens. The default feeling of writing is one of running on empty. That is exactly why experiencing it through the lens of social media is such a problem - you are instsiting that drudgery is delivered in a package that can only accommodate excitement, novelty, froth. Something has to give, and it’s usually the more difficult thing.

A final thought. If you sense this article has been an extended whinge by someone who is finding writing a challenge at the moment and wants to have bitch about it, you would be correct. But as I said above one of the subtlest changes wrought by social media is that it collapses the distance between audience and creator, and in doing so collapses the distinction. With the exception of a couple of dedicated lurkers and haughty old-school writers, everyone including me is some mixture of the consumer and creator. I don’t spend much less time thinking about my tweets than I do about my articles, and in many ways they’re the same thing.

None of that is a complaint - I like it. But since everyone is a little bit of a writer, the platforms universalised the worst psychological traits of writers amongst all users; the pressure to create, the sense of constantly pushing against distraction, the fear of audience abandonment, the obsession with metrics and so on. Awareness of those problems, and finding a way to combat them, shouldn’t be a concern just to people trying to make a living from it. When it comes to posting, we’re all professionals.

As the empowerment of women has progressed, the sexes are directly competing for the same cultural space in a way they never did in the past. In some parts of respectable and popular culture - pop music, progressive politics, fiction - women have made stunning in-roads, with men seemingly reduced to out-group status. The change has happened so suddenly that our cognitive biases about men and women lag far behind. Women in the 1st world are powerful and agentic yet we still venerate ideas that originate from, and were legitimised by, their status as a marginal and powerless group. These include innate female moral superiority, toleration of a far greater in-group preference amongst women, and the sense that men and their preferences must always be a determining factor in an individual woman’s success. Hand in hand with this is our continued belief in the disposability of men, which has evolved but not disappeared, despite the decline in men’s cultural power and their changed roles in everyday life. Online, all of these factors collide to produce the ubiquitous hate figure of the Mediocre Man. I want to write about why this figure became such a common reference point, and the lack of inquisitiveness of men’s inner lives that powers the meme.

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