Kilkenny GAA Thread Part 2 **MOD NOTE POST 1***

Realt Dearg Sec wrote: »

Can you not see that what people are saying is that the culture of camera phones and social media creates a Puritanical situation where people's behaviour is subjected to mass reactions, nationwide and sometimes worldwide, that create a "punishment" that is wildly, massively disproportionate to the wrongdoing in the first place? That this culture does huge damage to the mental well-being of people caught in these firestorms, subject to a completely unregulated type of mob justice where their actions get fed into a kind of narrative (of one kind or another, in this case I'm guessing "toxic masculinity", but it could be anything), they become a symbol of some social ill of which they may never have heard, and become the focal point for an otherwise directionless rage?

I mean, if that is a fair or proportionate type of punishment, if the only lesson we have to learn as a society from events like this is that "eejits shouldn't do stupid things", then that's very handy because we don't have to do any introspection, asking ourselves what sort of values we, as a society, are actually espousing when we burn people like this at the stake. But it seems to me that in the rush to teach ourselves a lesson about the morality of hookers or lad culture or keeping ourselves off instagram, all of which we can safely burn these lads at the stake for, we let ourselves off the hook, not having to ask any questions about what the bloodlust these kinds of events provoke tells us about ourselves. Personally I'd rather we learned something from our tendency to do this kind of thing, than feel morally vindicated by declaring that these lads should have known better, as if that legitimates what has followed.

Powerhouse wrote: »

The last fifteen years or so has hardly been an era where Kilkenny hurlers found praise hard to come by, but was there ever a player elevated so quickly and inappropriately in the minds of Kilkenny supporters than this guy?