During the week the below ad was released in Ireland, to much international commentary/ hilarity/ mockery, but then a subsequent backlash. It’s the work of Cuan, a government agency established to address gender-based violence, and was jointly produced with the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre. The stated purpose of the ad is to teach about consent, which it does by encouraging grandparents not to pre-emptively hug their kids and kids to feel empowered to reject unwanted grandparental advances. The initial derision was so strong that the government disowned it and the ad has now been taken down from their official accounts. A full breakdown of the incident is here.

The core of the criticism from people who hated it - aside from the idea that it was bizarre for a government to try and regulate this behaviour - was that the ad constituted an instance of wokeness gone mad, and also that it’s part of a continuing attempt to delegitimise normal Irish family life. This response became so over the top that it inspired a backlash to the backlash, with a smaller group of people defending the ad on the basis that while it made it’s point clumsily that it addressed something real, and in any case the controversy around it was cynical and disproportionate.

From my own point of view, before I watched it through I had assumed the ad would use the idea of unwanted hugs as a metaphor for bodily consent in a wider sense. My main feeling upon watching it was surprise and confusion that it really doesn’t do that - it really is just a public health infomercial about innocent but overbearing touchy-feely relatives; while it’s not the biggest deal in the world that is quite strange, and I can see why it irritates people. The presence of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre logo in the final frame implies the government itself was drawing a linkage between this behaviour and actual rape/ assault, which is not helfpul. But I think everyone is a little bit right and a little wrong about this. The ad is innocuous in and of itself while still being representative of a larger issue I haven’t seen anyone put their finger on. To me it’s an inconsequential symptom of a consequential problem, like a skin rash that just happens to be the side effect of a degenerative neurological illness.

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The most important factor in human affairs is social status, so whatever its other qualities it’s no surprise that one of the key uses we’ve found for the technological marvel of the internet is the enforcement of norms, the monitoring of behaviour and to elicit acts of submission to our ideals of respectability. People still fly under the radar; but if you live a lot of your life online you exist surrounded by social landmines - say the wrong thing to the wrong audience it will be seen and punished. Even if it doesn’t cause a stir at the time, it can be remembered and held against you later. This is life in our gossipy little village, but the impact of this environment on the village residents does not always unfold as expected.

In the case of men, I wrote this month about how it creates a dynamic of extreme withdrawal and passivity on the one side, but by perverse necessity a current of intense recklessness on the other; because it concentrates all the recklessness in one place and says to the people inclined to be that way that you’re in for a penny, in for a pound. Intense oversight of what people say and think and how they express themselves also has the counterintuitive effect in certain circumstances of making not caring what people think a kind of superpower. Of course, caring what people think is good, normal and important so if this is a superpower it’s a volatile one, and one that comes with a price attached, for the user and for everyone else - I’ll get to that. First I want to talk about some of the key human examples of this phenomenon.

Trump is the logical place to begin because he set the template for all of this - that of a person whose willingness to be disreputable in a time of intense social scrutiny is a source of power. Since he first came down the escalator you’ve had people wondering how someone so wilfully awful could also be so appealing, and how it is that he has not collapsed under the weight of his own shamelessness. This question is posed in different ways by different groups. Middle of the road right-wing and conservative people have wondered why they can’t get what they consider the good parts of Trump - his determination, his indifference to what people think, his issue selection, all that stuff - without the coarseness, the cruelty, the taboo-breaking, the carelessness.

It’s depressing to think that the end of the second Trump term is in sight and people still haven’t realised that the defining feature of his awfulness is that it’s an inevitable and essential part of the whole package. It’s true in any environment but in particular in the internet panopticon that if you’re going to raise taboo issues you can’t be sensitive or protective of your own social status amongst respectable people - to some extent you have to position yourself in opposition to those things. Those concepts are code words for decency and propriety, and the people who exercise the greatest level of control over what passes for propriety are the exact people who don’t want you talking about the things you’re talking about. If you accept you can only raise a given point where it doesn’t inflame decency then you have begun by conceding power to the people who determine and enforce what constitutes decency, and you accept that their priorities will always be beyond criticism. You are also ignoring the reality of social media as a tool of control, used to punish people by monitoring their behaviour and coordinating condemnation of those who step outside of consensus. If you begin by accepting the primacy of decency and propriety as considerations, by making those things your red lines, then it’s already over.

With Trump you could look at this from the other direction. His indecency was a source of his appeal because it proved to his audience that he couldn’t be sidelined by playing on his fear about social status, or with claims that he is at risk of violating sacred norms and would be thought poorly of as a result. This had been a recurring concern (and actually still is) with more mainstream and less populist right-wing politicians everywhere - that they cave when they see themselves being accused of racism in the New York Times (or local equivalent) opinion page, or when it looked like such a thing was on the horizon. It was a selling point for Trump that he didn’t cave to that stuff, and he could do that because he was already an unhip and disgusting piece of shit - you can’t cast out an outcast. His general indecency was a signal of vitality and security - even if his voters didn’t agree about the specific issue he was being indecent about, it shows them that he instinctively understood that monitoring and enforcing accusations of impropriety to limit the conversation was a key tactic for narrative control.

Calling someone a nazi, or a transphobe, or a misogynist works very well as a rhetorical tactic and will kill most people’s willingness to talk about certain things where such an accusation can be a risk - though it doesn’t kill their interest in talking about them. What you are also doing here is incentivising the social importance of people who don’t care about being accused of indecency, who will proceed in spite of those accusations, or who (for whatever reason) kind of like it. Those people also become more important because they’re the only ones who can function under a system that weaponsies social opprobrium on an industrial scale, facilitated by technology. A complicating factor is that those people are of course more likely (though not certain) to actually be bad things they’re accused of because it’s not normal to constantly risk or revel in disrespectability, and the personality that lacks sensitivity about that issue is often also missing other things. But that doesn’t diminish their utility.

Something similar can be said of Nick Fuentes: I’ve written before that viewers like his more extreme statements because the reputational cost of those statments is the guarantee that he’s the real deal, even if they can see he’s purposely exaggerating a point or directly contradicting something he’s said already; expressing himself in the most confrontational, outrageous or vulgar way possible has a value for his audience that is not connected to the literal truth (or not) of what he’s saying. I haven’t done a survey of his audience but would guess as men who have grown up online that they feel their opinions (and lives) are policed and patrolled to an intense degree so when a person who speaks in a way that upset the patrollers, that’s not just funny but is the exact thing that guarantees the speaker can be trusted and is worth listening to.

You will often see videos of Nick going viral and accompanied by text from presumably left-leaning people saying “remember - you don’t agree with him, he agrees with us” or “I hate that he’s so right”, something Fuentes himself often acknowledges and speaks to. This is a variant of the Trump phenomenon of people saying “he’s got the right instincts in some areas, can we not get a version of him that doesn’t say all those awful things!??” Again the answer is no, in part for the reasons stated above. But even aside from that, when Fuentes says unforgiveable or forbidden things, he is acting on the checklist of topics that he has been given by the enemy, who have told him through long engagement that these are the tools, ideas, red-lines and so on that they use - in the form of decency - to police you out of the discourse. The controversial things he says are some mixture of sincere, humorous, and calculatedly nasty/ obnoxious. But he’s also being tactical and proceeding with logical purpose based on the priorities given to him by his enemy. If you keep saying to people “all immigration skepticism naturally trends in the direction of nazism and is an embryonic form of it; therefore you can’t have someone advocate for immigration-skeptical politics because it will lead to a recurrence of A Certain Historic Event”, what you’re trying to do is discourage, and that will work for most people who think about these issues. But then what you’re also essentially doing is telling people that decentering the event in question, being calculatedly impious about it, is the target you need to hit. And you are by default both empowering and training people who are crazy or disagreeable or nasty or determined enough about their political goals to try and hit it.

Michael Tracey is a third example. He has been an all-purpose thorn in the side for as long as I can remember. He turbocharged this role when he began questioning some of the narratives around Jeffrey Epstein and the Epstein files, including the popular consensus that Epstein was a child trafficker and whether the evidence speaking to this had been widely misinterpreted, blown out of proportion or cynically exploited in a way that constitutes a moral panic and mass hysteria. He questioned the accuracy of some of the claims of people who identified themselves as (and profited from identifying themselves as) “Epstein Surviors”. This - irritation of all sides - seems to be the Tracey sweet spot, thought from my personal observation he has in recent times been slightly more of an irritation to the left, since implicit within his journalism was the idea that someone can identify themselves as a victim but actually be full of shit, which is not a respectable position for anyone to hold.

His position as a public hate figure has gone into overdrive with the Cornell seven case, where Tracey has again spent his time just pointing out a lot of the obvious discrepancies with the facts of the case and how it’s been reported, and the ways in which these facts are being intentionally and ourtageously misrespresented, often by prominent public figures who should know better. He published the name of Jane Doe - his rationale for doing so seems to have been that it had been made public in court documents; that it was not illegal to print it; and that there was a lot of hypocrisy abroad in publishing the accused name but not the accuser. He subsequently deleted it - I shudder to think how much pressure must have been brought to bear on a person of Michael’s character for him to do that but it included people doxxing him and his address, which turned out to be a house his family had formerly lived at, resulting the harrassment of the people who lived there. He turned up at Ithaca town council in New York to loudly protest their moratorium on student events, which in turn was based on the idea that with collegiate gang rapists at large and the area therefore wasn’t safe. In the meeting he shouted at the mayor “you ought to resign for impugning the seven men total on the basis of a civil complaint that was filed by a notoriously unscrupulous lawyer”. He was escorted out having not been given the formal opportunity to speak. He next turned up at a pro-Jane Doe rally and following confrontations with protestors who were specifically looking for him (see picture above), he had to be escorted away by police for his own safety.

Again, as with the other examples - the environment around the Epstein and Cornell issues is oppressively patrolled from a propriety point of view while still allowing people the maximal ability to find out inconvenient facts if they want to, that it kind of demands the existence of someone like Michael Tracey. It’s true that Michael is a modern manifestation of a type of needling, bolshy, incorrigible journalist that has always existed to some degree. But he has a particular role in the time of social media, and it’s role in turn of managing consensus. After all, the first time I became aware of the Cornell Seven case it was not as an emerging story which unfolded into a moral scandal as more details emerged. It was an oven-ready (to use Boris Johnson’s phrase) outrage, we were to trust that the work had been done and it was already correctly identified as one, and that questions on that front were unnecessary and unseemly. Yet it was clear from the details that did leak out that there were threads to pull at, and that the way it was being reported to the public was evasive.

Michael Tracey is of course a human being, and he wasn’t willed into existence as a psychic response to the social pressure cooker of the internet… but he’s not not that either. The tension of the situation demands someone who deprioirtises the standards of respectablity, decency, and appropriateness, since that mostly just means what progressive people are happy to about. The situation demands a kind of pressure release valve.

I’m not trying to say that these three are all the same type of guy, or that each of them uses their talent for disagreeability in the same way, within the same moral framework. I’m sure Michael Tracey in particular would emphasise he is not very like Trump or Fuentes politically, and is just doing the most basic and essential tasks of a normal journalist - and that he only seems unusual because we’ve forgotten what that looks like. I concede that point while noting he *is* similar, in that all three are part of a collective response to two contradictory impacts of the internet. Those are that it provides the maximal ability to control and direct public conversation through tone policing, social pressure, signalling etc, while also providing maximal access to information that contradicts and undermines that control. The result is a population of incorrigible people pleasers but also a more limited number of disagreeability supersoldiers of the type outlined here.

I’d love to tell you that my primary literary reference for any given event is Shakespeare or Tolstoy or Yeats or whatever, and you’ll have to believe that stuff is in here somewhere (taps head) - but I grew up reading comics, so it is what it is. In thinking about this situation my mind kept straying back to the phase DC went through in the early 90s, of seeming to kill off its most storied characters with new villains who were their dark mirror images. Batman was taken out of action by Bane, and Superman was killed by a creature called Doomsday, described thus by Wikipedia:

Doomsday was born in prehistoric times on Krypton, long before the humanoid Kryptonian race gained dominance over the planet about 250,000 years ago. It was at that time a violent, hellish world, where only the absolute strongest of creatures could survive. In a cruel experiment involving evolution, intended to create the perfect living being, an alien scientist released a humanoid infant onto the surface of the planet, where he was promptly killed by the harsh environment. The baby’s remains were collected and used to clone a stronger version. This process was repeated over and over for decades as a form of accelerated natural evolution. The agony of these repeated deaths was recorded in his genes, driving the being insane and instilling hatred of all life.

Ignore the silliness and implausibility of the above for a moment. We tell ourselves, and it’s true, that we get the behaviour we incentivise; but it’s also true that for a certain type of person who is always with us, punishment (repression, rejection, denial) is itself a kind of incentive, which certainly explains some of the indestructible supervillains we have on the scene, and should encourage us to expect more like them in future.

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The Cornell Seven case happened in America, not in Europe and certainly not in Ireland, so we should be careful about taking too many lessons from it; despite the dominance of that country and it’s culture we’re not yet fully aligned to its norms around consent, media behaviour or campus bureaucracy, although of course we’re getting there. In particular the fraternity/ sorority structures that were a feature of this case seem very weird to European eyes. In spite of the parochial nature of some facets, it’s also reflective of internationalised changes in sexual behaviour, the gendered split in partisan politics and in media. So it’s worth talking about, even for an outsider; doubly so since it seems to carry so many political implications for men as an interest group, yet I’ve seen almost no analysis from that perspective.

As usual the immediate impact of details of this case breaking, after the standard condemnations, is a flurry of articles in the storied “teach boys not to” genre. There’s loads to pick from; here is a local example from Ireland, written by well-known Green politican Hazel Chu in her characteristic breathless and unreflective style.

Chu is a good example of the authors of this genre of piece because of her bad record of interventions on this topic. I’ve written about this in the past too, here and here. That first one is eight years old, and though as with anything I’ve written that long ago I disagree with plenty of it and would rephrase given the chance, the essentials are correct. The “Teach Boys Not To” genre never wrestles with the fact that the current generations of men (in the west at least) are the most sexual-consent-sensitive to ever exist and have been raised in that environment and in those values, so it may be that whatever we want from education we’re already getting - or that the quest to patrol their inner lives is itself having a counterproductive effect. The authors of these pieces never admit (or realise) that what they are trying to do is regulate expressions of sexuality, or that behaviour on that front is part of a complex web of behaviour that introduces responsibilities on all parties - and that, in a liberal society, these can’t be reintroduced selectively and on one side only - sorry for quoting myself*, but

… (the sexual restraint of older times) was not a single discrete belief but one of many, beaded on a string – you can’t pick up the individual bead without lifting the whole necklace. If you want the old-time civility then you also take the other old-time beliefs that were adjacent to it, that flow logically from it, and that are it’s emotional foundation…

The second article linked notes that the whole “Teach Boys Not To” genre is built on the probably false belief that regulating small incivilities will have the end result of managing more extreme behaviour, like a kind of moral broken windows theory - endorsed, of course, by people who normally hate such theories. Anyway - I don’t credit myself with any insight, the point here is that these are very obvious complexities that anyone who spent five minutes thinking about the topic would come up with; and yet here we are.

The “Teach Boys Not To” articles are representative in a negative way of the reactions to this case in legitimate media, in that anyone looking for close examination of the moral or legal complications highlighted by it - or how we will come to grips with those - would have been disappointed. To take one more or less at random, this editorial from Time magazine essentially pretends those complexities don’t exist. I think men will notice these things, with everything that implies politically.

What happened in the Cornell case does seem horrifying to me but it’s impossible as a man to read about it and not wonder at the possible implications, situations where our beliefs about consent and sexual liberation seem to rub up against each other in a way that’s impossible to reconcile. Everyone involved in the Cornell case - with it’s chat messages about Free Pussy from the men, initial happy confirmations of being a slut from the woman, and sunny references to gangbangs from both - behaved like a products of a fully pornografied environment (let’s call it FPE). One feature of the case that is reflective of society at large contained in microcosm in the case is instead of acknowledging these two things - the moral centrality of consent, and the normality of the FPE mindset - are in direct contradiction to each other, instead what we get is the depravity of the latter expressed through the language of, and with the legal and moral consequences of, the former - to queasy effect. The wholesome chungus affirmation-talk from all parties about such a sordid situation before the accusations were levelled is low-key one of the most distinctive and repulsive features of this case - it’s definitely the most offensive part from an aesthetic perspective.

The question of how all this affects men’s behaviour or thought processes is probably not one that I’m best placed to answer. Any analysis will note that increased risk-taking (of which there was lot’s going on here) is a key feature of male psychology and especially that of young men; I suspect I’m amongst the top 10% of most risk averse people on the planet, amongst men maybe the top 1%. If I was quietly enjoying a drink at a party and got a chat message saying there was “free pussy upstairs” I have to admit my first thought would be to take out my SIM card out of my phone and bite down on it, throw the phone in the nearest river, and then catch a plane to whatever country with no extradition laws I could get to that same evening. But then of course it’s exactly because I have that attitude that I’m never likely to find myself in that situation. There is a proportion of men who will never think that way. My point is that the sociological consequences of this type of case, and the culture that creates it are twofold - one is the general male withdrawal from culture, politics, romance, life, work and everything else that you see everywhere in the civilised world. The other is that, perversely, you may see more Cornells because of a concentrating and sorting effect, with the most risk averse opting out of everything like a tide rolling back to reveal the ugliest tangled wreckage piled up on the shore. You will end up with (and we have) extreme (and widespread) passivity and disengagement on one end and a nub of extreme recklessness at the other, with normality the no man’s land in the middle, a hollowed centre being the motif of our age.

After all, if our society’s guiding principle is “you should be able to do whatever you like as long as it doesn’t harm anyone else”, then key part of that sentence is not “do whatever you like” but the “… as long as…”; because the person who can determine what exceptions meet that criteria is a person who has a great deal of power. The unintentional consequence of our golden rule is to empower people who are best at expanding the concept of harm, or best placed to make claims that they are suffering harm simply by existing, or (most importantly) anyone claiming to act on their behalf. It disempowers people who are bad at those things, or are less able to claim them. “Consent” is part of that tool-kit. That explains why the idea of the increasing centrality of Consent can feel good, right and important (because it is), but also ominous. It certainly explains why Consent can seem essential when determining if certain parties were harmed in a particular incident yet to offer no relief for others (“why doesn’t it matter that I was high too?”).

The primacy of Consent is an elaboration of the basic principles of our world, so even if you notice some inconsistencies and difficulties with how it’s applied, there’s no real scope to pick those apart. People lack both the language and the mindset: it’s interesting that even people who allege skepticism about some details of the Cornell case habitually still refer to Jane Doe as the victim where they argue the facts have not yet been determined. Even people who reject progressive principles use its language to describe their world, since that is the language of decency and upward mobility; but that language itself contains those principles. A good (different) example of this is the way the sleaziest and most reactionary tabloids will still use the preferred pronouns of people who claim a trans identity. The point is - if you feel yourself part of a group that is philosophically disadvantaged by this development, retreating is a more tangible option than arguing back.

A selection of texts between various parties involved in this incident have been leaked; I have zero doubt that the ones that have been made public have been leaked in order to support one side but even the ones I’ve seen do cause me to feel a lot of sympathy for the woman involved. I’m projecting my own feelings onto her but I see a person doing something awful to themselves in order to fit in or be liked or loved, and then fawning to explain it away afterwards as a positive experience - because to acknowledge the reverse is true is just too pathetic and annihilating. I also think that people who have sought to debunk the facts of the case haven’t given the proper weight to the physical strength difference between one woman and a single man, let alone multiple men; it’s weird to see groups of people who are normally determined to emphasise the essential nature of sex differences be so blind to the consequences of them in influencing people’s actions in this case. Part of the difficulty in this case arises from the fact that we no longer (if we ever did) have the moral language to describe and condemn something that is awful and sordid, but not actually illegal.

The respectable media was fully behind Jane Doe when the story came out; they haven’t changed their minds but I’ve sensed a certain drifting away from her cause and less strident writing about her. You wouldn’t expect there to be a drift in the other direction and there hasn’t been; the most notable people speaking on the case are still dealing with the complications implicit in it by pretending they don’t exist. When you look at recent polling over which parts of which coalitions blame the opposite sex for their problems, the key theme was that Progressive women regard men as the primary cause of their ills. I make no judgement as to whether that’s true or reasonable, only that it has consequences. It’s not really possible to reconcile that view into a framework that appeals to both women and men. Again: men are a distinct interest group whether they acknowledge they are or not, and it’s hard to believe that as a group they won’t notice this and act (which is to say vote, but also evade) accordingly. A phrase that is re-populairsed from time to time when issues like the Cornell one hit the headlines is “there are no perfect victims”, and it’s true: there aren’t. But the necessary counterpart to that claim is that there are no perfect villains either, I’ve yet to see anyone wrestle with the implications of that.

*I’m not sorry at all

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My first thought when I saw that a new stand-off was happening on Garvaghy Road was to be transported to my friend’s front room in 1995, watching on TV as Drumcree first became an internationally recognised flashpoint during the late troubles; a core memory. It’s a weird event to get all “eating a madeleine” about, but that’s what happened - I was suddenly assaulted by a rush of memories ranging from George Mitchell’s bewilderment at the phrase “the dogs in the street” to the fact that, since there was a long period where it was literally illegal to broadcast Gerry Adams’s voice on the TV, footage of him was voiced over by an actor, like a henchman in a spaghetti western. In other words: Christ, I’m old. Like everything that happens in every inter-ethnic conflict, the Garvaghy Road situation is both absurd and deadly serious, but I’d guess I’m not alone - perhaps nostalgia is an underrated factor in why this is all unfolding now.

After a few hours commentators began to solidify their positions and so my second reaction became - wow - the online populist right in Ireland as potential political force really is dead isn’t it? Having never lived. As someone who thinks the Irish political system needs to be shaken to attention and can see no other direction from which a tremor might originate, this was supremely depressing; to be this far along and still making elementary political mistakes at maximum volume. The general reaction from these quarters was that the proposed march and reaction to it was a psyop, designed to distract from the real issue of mass migration; that it was sent with the intention of dividing Unionist and Nationalists who would otherwise unite in their joint interests in fighting multiculturalism; and above all that the number one objective was to attack Sinn Féin for being willing to protest a proposed Orange Order march, while failing to get behind various anti-immigration protests in Ireland. You can see examples of what I’m talking about here, here, and also below. There are lots of other examples.

These are from accounts of varying sizes, and some of the people making and reposting similar statements are small - it’s all contextual as the Irish social media market isn’t big. It doesn’t matter - the truth, as we’re constantly rediscovering, is that a movement does have to answer for the worst excesses of its loudest members. The tweets I’ve linked to are representative of a particular line of thought prevalent amongst many anti-immigration protesters in Ireland, as instances of protestors appearing alongside unionist flags and iconography during protests has shown that. A combination of hatred for Sinn Fein, alongside a desire to position utterances to appeal to the tastes and concerns of audiences outside Ireland is trampling all the understanding of the basic requirements of electability in Ireland, and it appears to be not just an incorrigible problem but in medical terms a terminal one. History means that Ireland as a state and a people implicitly define themselves in opposition to unionism; a philsophical coming together with unionism is a contradiction in terms for most Irish people, it can never happen, and will never have popular support at any level. Please understand: I’m just telling you something objectively true as regards the feelings of normal Irish people, I’m not trying to persuade anyone who might doubt that this position is nice, good or reasonable. You can consider what this means for a potential united Ireland on your own time. For our purposes here, the upshot is that SF in this case are, in the minds of Irish voters, basically on the side of the angels.

Orange marches, and how the Catholic community in the north feel about them, are not high salience issues for southern voters, who are as happy not thinking about the north as the average English voter is. But that doesn’t mean these things are meaningless when activated, and that they don’t need to be treated with care. As I described with Palestine a few weeks ago, if this issue is forced into their field of vision, the average voter will always come down on one particular side and it’s not the pro-Unionist one. This is perhaps the most basic electoral fact in Irish life and certainly anyone seeking to don the mantle of nationalism has to understand it if they want to get off the starting line. Anyone who can’t or won’t get to grips with this reveals that they are subject to an incentive structure that prioritises either their own hobby horses or the views of American and British audiences at the expense of normal Irish people, so there is no future here.

The last few week’s developments on the Garvaghy Road have been a huge boon for SF. I’m not a close observer of the northern executive but it seems that their position as a party of power is moribund, since they have neither the resources nor the dynamism to accomplish anything. These events have blessedly returned them to their comfort zone of strident rhetoric and activist action. In the south, the party has been adrift in the last few years, its polling with key demographics slipping due to an inability to hold together the contradictory demands of their base on immigration. The Orange Order have kindly provided them with the opportunity to appear as selfless defenders of the most basic red lines in Irish politics, unafraid to get their hands dirty and reflect the deepest concerns of their core voters, and forget about that other nonsense. It allowed SF to reconnect to a civil rights legacy in the north that is not fully theirs, but that people in Ireland hold in high regard. This success has been amplified and guaranteed by the reaction of the online right, who had been nibbling away at SF’s self-image and self-confidence. All in all none of this solves a long term problem for them but it does damage the emergent right in Ireland, and that amounts to the same thing. If SF’s enemies are going to be stupid enough to tacitly align themselves with Unionism, the party certainly won’t stand in their way while they make that catastrophic error.

None of this is to give SF any credit, or to suggest they’ve changed. The presence of Kneecap, a Rosa Parks banner and the preponderance of Palestinian flags at the protest site show they haven’t. But so what? None of that means that attacking them now is a wise move. Mainstream parties at least understand this, and have adopted the correct approach of either lightly being pro-nationalist in relation to the issue or not talking about it where they feel they have nothing to gain.

I don’t particularly like SF and I’m not suggesting it’s essential to row in behind them; one can simply ignore the situation. I understand why people want to focus on other issues, why people think there is a certain amount of hypocrisy when Sinn Féin seeks to defend the rights of Irish people as a group in some cases but consider it forbidden to do so in others, and I get the urge to highlight that. I even understand why people have a certain amount of legalistic sympathy with the Orange Order position. For that, see John McGuirk’s column here - but the difference is he’s a commentator and is not trying to get people elected or start a political movement, and so doesn’t have to worry about whether the public enjoy hearing this. For anyone who does need to worry about those things, the choices are either to not talk about it, or to swallow your disgust and weigh in on the same side as SF. If it hurts you to do the latter, then do the former. This is the normal restraint and message discipline anyone who wants to get elected, or wants the public to listen to them, needs to display - and of course the less leeway you have with any segment of the legitimate media, the more you need to display that discipline. If doing so niggles at you, you can take solace from the fact that there will be other opportunities in the near future for you to highlight the phoniness of the SF position. This post by Patrick Quinlan is a good example of a thoughtful and restrained approach that sails through that narrow channel.

A lingering question here is what is going to become of the populist energy fuelling immigration protests in Ireland if the movement itself can’t mature politically. The answer, unfortunately for everyone, is nothing. As I’ve said more than once - when political energy manifests in an inchoate form, we can easily trick ourselves into thinking it must naturally become coherent or gain power; but in fact that might never happen, if that energy cannot corral itself into an electable form. Doing so takes conscious effort, and most of all restraint. If that doesn’t happen the energy doesn’t go anywhere - it just sort of rots, out in the open. That means that protests will continue, and both that and the online discourse will cause the government trouble and embarrassment of various kinds, but that’s it. People will continue geeing each other up in the padded cells of their timelines, but the more energy is expressed without ever gaining power, the more putrescent and unappealing that energy will seem.

The saddest thing for an electoral system that needs more ideological variety, is that a lot of the participants will be happy with this situation as they are ultimately getting what they want from these interactions. Like the Deadheads of old, their joy is the experience of being in the camp and following the caravan, not the journey coming to its conclusion. Politics and political change is about a long slow build up, often carried out in the dark, building coalitions, developing policy positions, understanding the local concerns you have no sense of so that you can understand enough to speak to them. Quite a lot of people whose political lives are lived online their true love is the punch-up and the feeling of being at war. Positive political change would if anything be a problem, especially if it’s done quietly - because where is the thrill in that? Powerful feelings can if anything be deepened by intensifying and multiplying the fringeness of your causes, and pushing yourself away from the average voter.

The nature of outsider movements is that they draw in people who are not only willing to be disagreeable, but like it. The risk is that they gather all the disagreeable people in one place, and that the thing they work on is their righteous fury at being marginal, rather than overcoming that marginality. Every corner of the internet bonds over laughing at normies in its own way. But normies are the electorate, and politics is fundamentally a popularity contest. As in all such contests, the winner will be the person who can present their views as closest to those of the average person - so you have to keep in view what the average person thinks. You don’t have to say you believe something you don’t, or give credit where it’s not due, but you do have to understand what’s unpopular and avoid seeming to grab it with both hands. It’s also essential to avoid seeming to be motivated purely by negative sentiment to an all powerful enemy. People are drawn to strength; constantly bitching about your opponent as they try to act in the world makes you seem passive and small-time; and by contrast it highlights the agency of your opponent, allowing them to seem like they believe in something larger than themselves, whether they do or not. Why give them that win? The “good” news is it probably doesn’t matter; you can only drive past so many exits before you accept you’re never getting to your destination, and we’re likely past that point already. Great.

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Joe Rogan won Donald Trump the election, or so they say. And then? Reports were that there was a vibe-shift, and suddenly it seemed we were living in a Joe Rogan world. It certainly seems like he now runs the US comedy scene. Many inhabitants of that scene were never very happy with that arrangement, and the willingness to tolerate Rogan as kingpin has soured. This journey has been chronicled by a YouTube creator called The Elephant Graveyard (henceforth TEG); these videos about the awfulness of Joe, his circle of hangers-on, and his terrible impact on the culture and how we came to this impasse have become a kind of holy writ in left of centre spaces, the official summary of the charge sheet against Joe and his ilk. The videos are very popular too - the most recent one has five million views after only two weeks; link below.

The videos are good. TEG He makes lots of points that I agree with about the peculiar awfulness of Joe current content and the world he made, a lot of which overlaps with the general criticism of podcasts I made recently. But something I don’t like about TEGs approach is he does the standard thing of assuming there is something inherently pathological and wrong about a person who opposes some parts of progressive policy having power, influence and position in popular culture. Despite the vibeshift comprising only a brief and minor interruption into business as usual, it seems no one is chastened, and we haven’t learned very much. Even someone who hates Trump and is happy to put his influence in the rearview will admit that the unrestrained and overbearing exercise of cultural power by progressives is what got us into this situation. But that truth is being reframed even as we speak, and TEGs videos are being used in that effort. We need to keep the truth in front of our face.

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Pop Star Ed Sheeran’s career is imploding in real time; the whole saga is too convoluted to go into here, basically one of the support acts on his tour made some pro-Palestine statements on stage and was dropped. Ed let that happen, all of his other support acts and his band decided they didn’t want any part of this and walked away. In the past week he’s become the dreaded main character of social media, seen as a fairweather supporter of the key social cause of our era/ crypto-genocidaire (pick your angle) and is losing lots of followers.

The majority of the support acts were either Irish or had strong Irish connections; Ed is from England but has made a big deal about his relationship with us - emphasising his familial roots, employing Irish musicians, recording Irish songs, calling himself culturally Irish, the list goes on. Part of the turn against him on social media has been Irish content creators who had previously welcomed him revoking his green card, emphasising his englishness etc etc. Irish identity is policed and gatekept in a way other identities aren’t; I don’t like the way it’s done, many of the people who do the gatekeeping, and the subjects that cause them to fulfill the role, but I’ve come around on the idea that the gatekeeping instinct itself is right and important; I get it. Ed’s situation is a good entry point to talk about the surrounding complexities.

There is a lot of cultural capital tied up in being Irish. Part of that is that Irishness allows certain white people to participate in a world where to be marginal is a requirement of being seen as substantive, real, and dignified. Ireland and Irish creators have always had an outsized voice in popular culture, but the actual local Irish media market is very small and limited in reach, as are individual Irish-owned media outlets. Internationally, knowledge and interest about day to day life in Ireland is also limited. Any content creator who tries to make a living thinking, talking or writing about Ireland from an Irish point of view discovers there’s a hard floor (if you do it well) but also a hard ceiling to those activities, unless you can shape your output to suit the political and cultural agenda of non-Irish people. Sometimes the people you are shaping for actively dislike Ireland and are weaponising/ using interest in it in a careless, insincere and cynical way.

What you end up with is people in the diaspora who don’t have any living links to or experience with Ireland, and very little interest or knowledge in the country especially as it is now, speaking to Irish experience or representing Ireland. There are extreme versions of this at either end. On the benign side you get someone like Joe Biden, coming to Ireland and selling the Irish American experience back to Irish people as Irishness, coming out on stage to the Dropkick Murphys. Guinness is an example of the way this can happen at an organisational rather than individual level. The drinks brand, which is not Irish owned or a public utility, continually seeks to make its interests, imagery and history indistinguishable from Irishness. I stopped drinking Guinness a while ago because it bothers me so much that they act like they have ownership over Ireland as a brand and a feeling, and they don’t.

On the less benign side you see people using a tenuous (granny they never met, Irish surname) and unfelt connection using that to criticise Ireland and Irish people. This is a bit of a thing in America but a much bigger thing in the UK. I’ve met and know tons of English people with connections to Ireland and interest in it are deep and real and who seek to understand whatever they don’t know about it. But I’ve encountered a lot of the other types, too. I absolutely can’t stand the term “Plastic Paddy” because I always suspected it was invented by people who wanted to denigrate the idea of a diaspora identity, but if there’s such a thing as a Plastic Paddy then there is also it’s opposite that we don’t have a term for, which is people who claim a fragment of Irish identity they don’t truly feel, in order to express a loathing of Irish people. Many, many such cases.

So to summarise, on one side Irish Identity is politically and culturally to people who (at worst) don’t truly know and/or care about Ireland, and on the other side actual Irish voices will always be outnumbered and outgunned in any debate they find themselves in, so gatekeeping makes sense. That doesn’t mean any way you do it is ok. Leaving aside Ed and the middle-east for the moment, I’m not a fan of Conor McGregor but there’s meme of portraying him as English that is really stupid - buttressing our own identity by denigrating someone else’s in an unprompted way is really gross, and that’s aside from the fact that it misses the exact problem with McGregor is that he orients himself towards an audience slice of America, not the UK; if his behaviour is un-Irish it’s in an American rather than English direction. The flipside of that is that Irish Americans are the primary target of gatekeeping on a day to day basis and the tendency to bad mouth them as a matter of routine is mean-spirited and unfair as well.

So let’s apply this to Israel/ Palestine and Ed Sheeran. I absolutely can’t stand the former topic because it combines a subject that is, to me, just objectively not very interesting, and that people are uniformly hysterical and pedantic bores about, with the maximum social cost if your discussion of it falls the wrong side of an invisible and ever-shifting line. My life has only been improved by not speaking or writing about it. Here I go anyway, I guess, being an idiot.

One good voice on this was Goat_poaster on twitter, consistently one of the most interesting Irish accounts. He objected to the treatment of Sheeran and to some of the way that people were speaking about it, because he felt that certain partisan interests were seeking to make their political obsessions qualifying criteria for Irishness. This is a good way of putting the problem and I agree but I also think there’s another angle. I think his not actually being from Ireland led him to misunderstand how the people around him would react to these events. The artistic community in Ireland is very pro-Palestinian, and the nature of pro-Palestinian activism is you can never be a little concerned about it.

This is the world in which Ed has embedded himself, that he has stated he is emotionally bound to, and that he has chosen to use as a key step in his career ladder. His own band are founding members of something called Irish Artists for Palestine which describes itself as “(operating) as a unified collective across Ireland to platform Palestinian voices, coordinate fundraising events, and advocate for an immediate ceasefire and political sanctions”. On the issue of Palestinians Irish people tend to be divided between a small number of activists of this type, some of whom are not nice, and a large group of people who don’t care about the issue on a moment to moment basis but who, for cultural, historical and humanitarian reasons that are both explicable and logical (whether I agree or not) will come down on a pro-Palestinian side pushed lightly, or put in a position where they have to choose. This includes people who find the discourse around the middle east irritating, draining and irrelevant. There isn’t a pro-Israel caucus in Ireland of any great size and there won’t ever be. I think this is really important.

The people who do the gatekeeping in Irish life are motivated by an identical busy-bodying/ curtain twitching/ “what will the neighbours think” impulse that once animated their church-going ancestors, though they are the exact people who also hate the church and it’s legacy the most. In any case the comparison is instructive. After all, if the Church in Ireland was tyrannical it was a popular tyranny, reliant on a core of heartfelt sympathy and devotion amongst the populace. Despite how it’s remembered, it wasn’t something that squatted on top of the people despite recent protestations. Its most objectionable qualities (and most objectionable enforcers) were an extreme, malign manifestation of popular sentiments that were not themselves malign, and also of the reverence for the true Irish god of moral consensus. That’s why the most busybody-ish and self-aggrandizing forms of Pro-Palestinian activism in Ireland is so familiar, and that’s why it can’t just be dismissed. Support for the Palestinian cause is a logical elaboration of how regular Irish people feel about their history, the world, and basic morality. There is a lot of social and moral capital to be extracted from extreme opinions and behaviour on this topic because there is a quite high level of underlying support from people who are well-adjusted and not activist in a pejorative sense.

My point is that Ed Sheeran approached this with an English person’s understanding of the issue and not an Irish person’s. As a simple matter of fact, to be politically neutral on the subject of Palestine in Ireland means being quite pro-Palestinian by international standards. All of this matters to someone who has made Irishness an explicit part of their appeal and has been “gatekept in”, for want of a better term, on the basis that they are aligned to what Irish people are like.

I want to sympathise with Ed. The tactical purpose of what Macklemore (who seems like a shitty friend) did, let’s be honest, is to put Sheeran in a position where he has to either co-sign or suffer social death. Activists always demand speech on the basis that the message you are to deliver is that of being a decent human, and that delivering the activist message is more important than whatever you’re doing in that moment. But that logic can then be applied (and is) to any and every moment; and every activist cause can be portrayed as being in the spirit of being a decent human being. The end effect, which is intentional, is to make creativity a subcategory of activism, and a slave to it. In that sense activism is fundamentally a philistine impulse, and an enemy of creativity, because inherent within it is a refusal to accept it can be of a lesser importance to creativity even in creativity’s own home. My point is I sympathise with Sheeran, because I don’t like this stuff.

As with many others Ed himself has tried to parse this issue by speaking of himself as a non-political person. This is a mistake on two grounds. Even a politically engaged person can reasonably assert they don’t want to speak about a particular thing at a particular time; all a creator has is their own voice and the ability to use it where they wish. If you accept that can be surrendered under social pressure, you’re fucked. Even leaving creativity aside, on a human level it’s totalitarian and insane to demand that there is never any moment, even if one is (say) delivering a eulogy, or having a staff meeting in the office, or giving a half-time speech to your eight year-old’s soccer team that you can be asked to make or co-sign a political statement. This totalising quality is part of every type of activism that relies on social opprobrium, and the idea can be applied equally to wearing remembrance poppies, or condemning antisemitism, or saying black lives matter, or waving pride flags or any number of other things. But the Palestine people are definitely better at it.

The other factor that makes this situation difficult for Sheeran is that he himself chose Macklemore as a support act; the rapper is a tiresome windbag and moral busybody of a very recognisable type who habitually uses his content as a way of endorsing and agitating for social causes in a clumsy and inartful manner. It’s not realistic to think that he would restrain himself from turning his presence on a big stage towards making a political statement. Sheeran himself has been very keen in the past to mingle his brand with social activism, it takes a very minimal amount of googling to find pictures and headlines of him with Ukrainian and pride flags criticising Brexit and so on. In part his error here arose because he forgot what taking a “non-political” stance means. It doesn’t mean “not political”, but only “not socially costly”. In Ireland there is no social cost to aligning yourself with the Palestinian cause, and potentially a big one from not doing so, or from aligning yourself against it. The world is becoming more like Ireland on this topic. Social status is the most important factor in human affairs so that’s probably something to bear in mind if he wants to base his appeal on being Irish or Irish adjacent - though I think that phase of his career is over for now.

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The launch of GTA VI, the titanic groan of our forgotten monoculture, is getting closer, and the marketing is ramping up. During August, some clips from the game were released, including a long trailer on Netflix looking at the game mechanics, action sequences, and relationship between the story protagonists. One notable feature is that, as with Red Dead Redemption 2 and its soap baths and hair pomade application, GTA VI follows the trend in these games of an increasing focus on performing basic life admin activities in-game, for instance the gym visits in the screencap below as an example. (I note in passing that the female character in the screenshot appears to be learning to bench by repping 70kg in weight, which would easily put her in the top 0.5% of strongest women on the planet, at the start of her strength-building journey. Good for her!)

The USP of these games, and to an increasing degree of many AAA games, is an unrestrained open world experience. When the GTA games first became popular, this was the focus of the moral panic; that a player could do whatever they wanted including running people over in stolen cars and murdering prostitutes and the sense of mainstream coverage was the worst things a player could do were the point of the game, allowing players to fully live out their poisonous ids. I don’t accept that was ever an accurate reading of what the were games for, and in any case those two things aren’t contradictory; players were free in a macro sense but steered by the game towards certain activities. In any case it prompts two questions, which is if the appeal of these games is the freedom they offer, how do we explain the increasing tendency to micromanage the player experience, in this case by turning you into a turkey-toothed lifestyle influencer chud of either gender; I also think it’s worth asking that question as it relates to men specifically, since they are the predominant players of these games. The answer highlights something important about what they get from a world they are determined to lose themselves in.

People differ on what constitutes the first truly open world game (you can go back to things like 1985’s Mercenary ) but in the modern sense, it began with 2001’s GTA 3. Let’s take a step back and consider that one for a moment. This was the first game that offered you total freedom to do what you want in an urban environment, restrained only by the limitations of computer systems at the time, and the player themselves. It was violent and coarse as all these games are; that was and is a huge part of what players get out of it, but it’s the part that’s easiest to understand and most over-emphasised. If you wanted to slough off the main quest indefinitely and go exploring in the different neighbourhoods of liberty city you could do so, listening to the radio and doing taxi rides like a digitised Travis Bickle. The sense of total freedom was thrilling, vertiginous, and new; and utilised the unique expressive virtues of the medium. After all one can’t wander off-page or off-screen in a book or a movie. If a particular vista captures you in a film you can’t inhabit the main character and experience it for one hour, or two, or three, instead of the thirty seconds it appeared on screen. You can’t revisit the same place at different times of the day at different times to see how it looks in different lighting.

Someone circulated clips online during last week from a different GTA sequel, San Andreas. I noted that the English language doesn’t have, and needs, a single word for a pleasurable and enveloping sense of melancholy isolation that’s so characteristic of games at their best, and of these games - when they leave the player alone. “Solitude” isn’t the word because it doesn’t reflect that you are participating in a constructed space; you’re not just alone, you’re enclosed. “Liminal” is another word that people love throwing out, a very fashionable one particualrly in light of Backrooms and it’s links to online culture, but it means “a place between places” or the feeling of being in such a place - which is not quite right. In a way it doesn’t matter, the point is that GTA 3 was one of the first to capture and capitalise on providing that feeling of pure personal freedom in a huge but defined space.

Like many games of its type it limits your progress to zones which open up as you reach certain checkpoints. In GTA 3 you begin on one of three interconnected islands; the other two are closed due to a storm. During the first part of the game the player is continuously aware there is a wider and more exotic world out there that has been walled off from them, and that prompts you to progress. In-game, the opening of the bridge is communicated via radio. I wouldn’t expect a modern player to understand because technology has moved on but the experience of this moment - the sense of unprecedented, cavernous possibility and freedom instantly becoming even larger and more enveloping - I can remember when I experienced this moment in-game vividly (night-time, rain falling, radio burbling in the background) and it was one of the most memorable sensory and aesthetic experience of the last 25 years. The key to it’s specialness being a vertiginous sense of possibility and adventure, combined with personal ownership of those things. It could not have been delivered via any other medium.

I absolutely don’t think the yearning for this is exclusively male - there are lots of people who play games who aren’t men. But the dedicated audience for the GTA games is 80-85% male, so it’s indicative of something as it relates to what men versus women enjoy. My point is that commentators look at the violent escapism, the shallow, calculated transgressiveness and the juvenile humour that is hard-coded into the games and stop there. The sense is either that world is so cucked and oppressive that men can only find the freedom they need from nannying HR types in gaming; or alternatively men are so weak and incapable that they have backed down from the challenge of a changing world that they’ve given up and immersed themselves in a lurid fantasy. The thing both these takes have in common is that they see the root impulse to play as a frustrated desire to be an alpha, that is either noble or cringe. I think even if that’s true it’s also something else. If you watch people play these games their behaviour is often dynamic but a lot of it is also meditative; a great deal of the time is spent not really doing much else other than kind of just vibing. What the player is enjoying is not the thrill of conflict and transgression but of privacy, acting in a space that you know is yours and cannot be policed from outside.

I wrote previously about the inherent and sometimes maladaptive male drive towards self-isolation and loneliness, also linked below, and I think it comes into play here in understanding the appeal of these games. The popularity of isolating gaming amongst men tends to be seen as men running away from something in modern society; the alternative, which I think is true, is the structural explanation that games have become very good at providing a certain type of freedom that men have an innate craving for.

That’s what makes it interesting that as these games have evolved so as the microscopic management of the first person experience in a particular direction, and in general to corral and restrict the player by providing them with options in a particular direction, so interesting. The primary reason is the increased technological sophistication. As the technical complexity of these games increases the inner demand to use that technology to tweak and interfere with and massage the player experience becomes unbearable on the part of the creator. There is also an inherent relationship of tension between a creator and the end user, whose goal is expressly to take this thing you have created and make it theirs. I understand the risk from the creator point of view - you’ve made this multi-billion dollar product that your livelihood depends on, it’s very hard to relinquish control of it. Even the idea of doing so inflames your natural sense of ownership.

I think you can extrapolate some wider lessons here, and highlight a natural tension that exists and is resisted in all forms of entertainment but that games are the best at clarifying. Whether you use it for nefarious purposes or not, a feeling of freedom from oversight is a key experience that people need from art. It’s not a coincidence that every action movie now has to either be sent in an era when smartphones don’t exist or to find some way of taking them out of the picture. The paradox is that proliferating and omnipresent media is both the thing that people are trying to escape (the oppressiveness of the panopticon where everyone is tracked, everything is documented, every act is a performance) and the vehicle they use to escape (through endlessly proliferating art, entertainment and discourse that speaks to that discomfort).

The simultaneous desire to escape the world using technology, and to lock oneself in an artificial world, isn’t one that is solely desired by men. As I’ve been writing this, I’ve been trying to think - so then what’s the female equivalent of GTA, in the sense of a recent technological change that facilitates some ambiguous inner-impulse? The closest answer I can come to is the ereader and self-publishing boom in fairy porn. Games and spicy content are twins in more than one way; as technology has become more efficient at delivering these thrills, those thrills in their diluted forms have leaked out of the mainstream art and entertainment and of real life, as recent studies on the decline in sex in movies, and decline in sexual activity in real life attests to. Perhaps to assume that the “real thing” declining at the exact moment that the concentrated online version is intensifying is to make the classic error of assuming the activity that happens in the real world is real, and the digitised version is the fake. Marx in his oft-misunderstood reference to the opium of the people, said of religion that it was “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions”; even if religion was phony and preposterous, the impulse it spoke to was heavy and sad and real. Maybe the fleshpots of liberty city, and its lowbrow denizens (the real ones and the digital ones) deserve to be considered with the same weight, given the part they play in our culture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Both the explanations above were provided by AI.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About the political implications of all this.

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

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

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

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

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

Other articles from me:

A link to the last Ireland update is here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other news stories that caught my eye this month:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Articles on similar topics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Micheál Martin has also spoken about how:

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

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

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

Articles from me on similar subjects:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recent Articles on Similar Subjects

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

Previous updates are here and here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other stories

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

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

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

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

  

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

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

Thanks for reading, more next month.

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

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