Do men need a license to be allowed socialise (MOD NOTE IN OP)

thoughts and prayers

#DoBetter

#BeKind

Apologies, was giving them the benefit of the doubt, but no they were indeed pursuing a line of victim blaming

Yes, it does happen as do ALL of the other points outlined in Point 2 of Labre34 points.

I raised this EXACT type of behaviour yesterday on the previous thread which was closed only for to be told by a man (posting here) that it was just male banter and something males do from time to time and I was trying to outlaw interaction between men and women by saying its not acceptable.

They actually said they'd be chuffed if someone catcalled them in the street.

So clearly, there are people who excuse and condone this type of behaviour and until we get past that point, its very hard to make progress.

Another man on the previous thread also referred to the smile brigade in a negative way, so it is positive to know that people are aware it still exists and its unwelcome.

Good post.

Do the people attending and organising vigils have a plan for what happens next? Is everyone going to apply substantial pressure on government to provide the badly needed overhaul of the policing and justice system? And not let up until they do?

Cos if that doesnt happen then all the vigils did was allow people, mostly female, to vent and let off steam. I saw a women's group organised a 1 hour vigil outside the dail. 1 poxy hour ffs. It needs to be 24/7 and it needs to be noisy, a nuisance and forceful until the necessary changes are made to policing and justice.

Yet you felt it was appropriate to post that victims should have some responsibility for their actions in a thread which was started in relation to said event.

Not the time or the place for any right minded person imo.

All this talk of zero tolerance on male violence against women. What about violence against men. I personally don't know any woman that got attacked but I know several of my male friends that got a beating on nights out. I've been attacked several times myself but luckily I always managed to diffuse the situation. I hardly wanted to leave the house today with all the hatred towards men I was hearing. Ended up going out in town for the day and although I was sheepish at first I ended up having good craic with a few men/women around town. Restored some confidence in me and I think I'll be avoiding alot of the social media and coverage on the matter for a while.

In my view one of the major issues which nobody talks enough about in these debates is collectivism vs individualism. Feminists and other activist movements in the 'identity politics' arena view the world through a collectivist lens; whereas most people, male or female, view the world largely through an individualist lens. This, more than anything, is what causes such unimaginably bitter and toxic conflicts when these debates come up, largely because neither side has ever considered that the other has an entirely different way of interpreting the world around them and human civilisation generally.

When it comes to collectivism, feminists and other "woke" movements see the world in terms of groups. You are in X group, and if another member of X group says this or experiences that, by extension so do you. If a member of X group, or if X group itself, is ridiculed or made fun of by someone, that person is by extension making fun of you and every other member of that group. Etc etc etc etc.

Because of this worldview, they fire back in the same terms. If *a* man does something bad? *Men*, as a *group*, are responsible for him. He's on their "team" and he's "one of them" so all of them have some "connection" to him, because they're men. If something bad is done to a women? Same issue. She's not some random stranger, she's one of *us*. And *we* have to defend another *member* of our *tribe*.

So, so, so much of this ongoing gender war bullsh!t from the 2010s has its root in this very simply discrepancy between how the two groups see the world.

If some random stranger I've never met is killed in a fight, they're killed in a fight. I don't particularly care because I don't know them - not a family member, not a close friend, etc. It provokes a negative reaction in the general "crime sucks and we're too lenient on it" kind of way, but nothing more or less personal than that, because there is a very narrow subset of humans I actually directly care about and/or empathise with, and what we have in common isn't a chromosome or a set of genitalia, it's actual direct personal experience of eachother.

Conversely, if a stranger I've never met does something bad and I hear about it, my gut instinct will be "he sucks, f*ck him" - but nothing further, because I don't know him. He has nothing to do with me, he's not in my life, not even an "extra" in my story, he's a nobody to me because I just don't know him. And therefore I couldn't give a bollocks.

Feminists and other identity-based activist movements, however, just don't see the world like this. If one woman is insulted, objectified, assaulted, murdered etc, they don't see it as an individual thing the way the rest of us do - they see it as a "we are ALL X" thing, because literally everything in life is filtered through an identity-based lens of which *group* one belongs to. That's why there is such an overwhelming push by them to regard individual incidents of everything from disrespect and crass joking to violence and murder, as a group v group thing. Because they are absolutely incapable of understanding that some people in the world see every man or woman as an island, and simply do not subscribe in any way to collectivist beliefs.

I do not believe that men or women are groups. Every individual human being is an individual, and once someone is outside my own personal social circle, their behaviour is not my responsibility and their problems are not my problems. That's why I, and I suspect other men who have the same reaction this week to being called out on this, don't regard it as our problem - I'm not out there being violent or murdering anyone, male or female, and that very specifically is where my involvement in this ends. I don't care about strangers, or their bad behaviour or bad things that happen to them, because they're strangers and they're outside my sphere of influence and/or empathy. I don't know them, I have no connection to them, I just don't have the time or energy to give them a second thought.

That doesn't mean I defend or condone other people doing bad things - of course it doesn't. But this idea that you're obliged to be personally "wired in" to the life experiences and trials and tribulations of everyone you read about in the news is bizarre. Nobody in the world has the emotional or psychological capacity to care that much about that many strangers at all times.

So no, I don't believe this is my problem to fix. I don't allow toxic people, male or female, to be characters in my life. I cut them out. And if some random stranger does something sh!t, that's why he's a stranger. His bullsh!t is nothing to do with me and I strenuously object to being told I have to care just because I, like him, happen to have been born with a d!ck.

hatrickpatrick,

I think you're wrong because - as some posters have already pointed out - political liberals will rotate between collectivism and individualism depending on whether or not "white males" are implicated, and to protect their ideology depending who *is* implicated.

So collectivism isn't the bottom line for these activists.