The McGregor verdict and modus ponens
Hypocrisy goes both ways
If you know anything about mixed martial arts, I’m sure you’re familiar with the name Conor McGregor. He’s a titan in the field, perhaps the single most famous sportsperson from this island since George Best, and a rare sportsperson who can honestly claim to have achieved the status of international household name, right up there with Cristiano Ronaldo, Venus Williams or Michael Jordan.
If you only know him from his MMA career, you may be unaware that he is scum. Scum of the lowest order: a narcissistic, immature, pathologically thin-skinned, emotionally incontinent, short-tempered, bullying, coke-addled, vicious thug and rapist. Despite having made a name for himself through his career in MMA, the “controversies” section on his Wikipedia page is nearly 500 words longer than the “professional mixed martial arts career” section, and includes such charming anecdotes as the occasion on which McGregor assaulted a man in his fifties in a pub, prompted by the outrageous provocation of the man politely declining a glass of whiskey McGregor had offered him. Until very recently, his laundry list of well-documented episodes of violent assault, sexual misconduct and general scumbaggery have done nothing to slow down his career, as he pivoted into the film industry with this year’s remake of Road House, and recently announced his intention to run for President in next year’s election.1
It need hardly be said that I think he would be just about the most atrocious ambassador for the nation imaginable, and after running through the list of Irish citizens I most despise, I’m honestly struggling to think of one I think would be a poorer fit. Leo Varadkar? Gerry Adams? Marylou McDonald? Maria Bailey, of Swing-gate fame? Barry Keoghan? Ryan Tubridy? Aisling Bea? Bono? Bob Geldof? The 2 Johnnies? Jacksepticeye? One of those interchangeable (and insufferable) post-punk “musicians” clogging up the airwaves? Jedward? Dustin the Turkey? Any of these, I believe, would represent the nation far better than McGregor.
And what unnerves me most is that I don’t think this is some far-off hypothetical: I think that McGregor has a decent chance of being elected. For anyone who thinks that such an outcome is preposterous, the fact that known gangster Gerry “The Monk” Hutch recently came within a hair’s breadth of being elected to the Dáil should prompt some earnest (and alarmed) reconsideration.
Within Ireland, McGregor is particularly well-known for his mistreatment of women, having been accused of rape and sexual assault on multiple occasions in Spain, Corsica, the US, and of course in his home country. Criminal charges have never been brought against him, owing to lack of evidence (an unfortunately perennial problem in cases of this type); but one complainant, Nikita Hand, was brave enough to sue him in a civil action, and the jury has recently found in Hand’s favour. Now that the trial is over, the injunction on the media has been lifted and they are permitted to disclose various details about the case, including the fact that Hand alleges that, after she filed the civil action, masked men broke into her home and stabbed her partner. McGregor finally appears to be facing some meaningful repercussions for his misconduct as, in light of the ruling, various brands (including IO Interactive, Musgraves and Wetherspoons) have announced that they are cutting their professional ties with him and/or refusing to stock his licensed beer and whiskey.
One reaction to the outcome of the trial I found particularly sharp was from Waterford Whispers News, a satire website which aspires to be sort of like the parochial Irish equivalent of The Onion. Between 2013-16, the website would reliably have a wittingly biting take on virtually every major news story in Ireland (this one was a particular favourite). After that golden era, the website kind of fell off and stopped seeing nearly as much traction on social media. Much like their main source of inspiration, they dropped all pretensions to neutrality and pretty much openly announced that their satire would only be a means to advance a socially progressive worldview, to the point that, earlier this year, they were literally selling merch with the dictionary definition of the word "woke" printed on it - what is this, 2014?
But occasionally, WWN can still knock the ball out of the park, as with the post below:
The joke is sharply observed. There are many working-class activists who are opposed to inward migration into Ireland, and who will often justify said opposition on the grounds that they are concerned about immigrants sexually assaulting Irish women. With very few exceptions, such people tend to be fervent admirers of Conor McGregor. It would not surprise me if at least one of the men who allegedly broke into Nikita Hand’s house with the goal of intimidating her into silence subsequently attended an anti-immigration protest at which he chanted the slogan “keep women safe”. The hypocrisy is indisputable: either such people only get up in arms about Irish women being raped when it’s foreigners doing the raping (but turn a blind eye when it’s one of their own); or their opposition to immigration is driven entirely by racial animus, and the ostensible concern about sexual assault is a fig leaf. Sharp take, no notes.
Well, maybe one.
Are you familiar with the phrase “one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens”?
This is a concept in formal logic that it took me awhile to get my head around. A modus ponens argument takes the form “if A, then B; A; therefore B”, while a modus tollens argument takes the form “If A, then B; not B; therefore not A”. In other words, if someone is saying you should believe B because A is true, the success of that argument hinges on whether or not you believe A is true; if you don’t believe that A is true, their argument immediately backfires. The concept is best illustrated using examples (all of which are sourced from this article):
Spencer Case explaining what finally caused him to leave the Mormon church
I continued to discuss my doubts with my dad and with my new bishop, Bishop Olson, both of whom admonished me to go on a mission. At that point my departure would have been imminent. I recall one phone conversation with Bishop Olson in which he inadvertently nudged me to part ways with the church. He said the fact that I was still in the church having these conversations with him, seeking the truth, was proof that I really did know that it was true. Otherwise, what was the sense in my still going to church? Why would I continue seeking? He had a point. He ended the phone call with “See you in church this Sunday.” I never went back.
If it’s wrong for people in Asian countries to kill and eat dogs because they can suffer and are intelligent, does that imply that we shouldn’t kill and eat pigs either? Or conversely, does it imply that we should eat dogs too?
XKCD’s The Economic Argument:
Perhaps you’ve guessed where I’m going with this. As I said, it is inarguably true that if you’re up in arms about immigrants assaulting Irish women, you should be equally outraged when an Irishman like Conor McGregor does so. But the reverse is also true: if you’re up in arms about an Irishman like Conor McGregor assaulting Irish women, you should be equally outraged when an immigrant does so.
Cast your mind back to January 2022. The country was reeling from the shocking, inexplicable murder of Ashling Murphy, a primary school teacher who went for a run along the Grand Canal near Tullamore only to be brutally stabbed to death by an unknown assailant. In the week following her murder, social media was agog with insinuations or outright accusations that all Irish men were indirectly complicit in her murder; that her murder was the result of a toxic Irish rape culture which knowingly ignores, downplays or minimises male violence towards women. Both President Michael D. Higgins and then-Taoiseach Leo Varadkar offered their condolences to the victim’s family. Rape crisis organisations called on the Department of Education to implement a national policy on sexual harassment and assault in schools.
Then, less than a week later, they arrested the murderer, and he turned out to be a Roma man from Slovakia named Jozef Puska. Everyone immediately shut up about it. Overnight, it went from being the most talked about story in Ireland to being a page four story at best. The silence was deafening, particularly in light of the furore that had preceded it the week prior.
Ask yourself: in what universe can it be that a murder case is the most talked-about news story in a particular country, and the arrest of the perpetrator results in the amount of traffic it generates falling to 43% of its peak? That should have been the peak of interest in the story: the murderer brought to justice, the heroic denouement. A sharp drop like this is not what it looks like when a news story organically runs out of steam, the conclusion of one news cycle leading into the next. This is a society collectively choosing to ignore the news story while it’s still ongoing, avoiding thinking about it because it makes them uncomfortable.
Before Puska’s arrest, numerous activists on social media had decided, sight unseen, that a crime like Murphy’s murder doesn’t happen in a vacuum: the perpetrator must have grown up in a culture in which men feel entitled to do as they please with women’s bodies, in which male violence towards women is downplayed or minimised. This is not at all an unreasonable presumption to make. Nothing about Puska’s identity or ethnic background should have changed that supposition: it’s still the same guy doing the same crime for the same reasons. So why, after his arrest, didn’t we hear that argument trotted out quite so often in armchair psychoanalysis of Puska’s motivations?2
Oh. Because that would imply that it’s not (just?) Irish culture which is toxic, misogynistic and dismissive of male violence towards women, but Roma culture. Well, we can’t have that, can we? Wouldn’t want to be accused of being racist, or “legitimising” arguments made by the “far-right”.
Lest you think I’m exaggerating, consider the media’s reaction to the victim impact statement Murphy’s boyfriend Ryan Casey made at Puska’s trial. Casey can fairly claim to have been more bereaved by Murphy’s death than anyone, save her immediate family. Regarding Puska, Casey asserted:
It just sickens me to the core that someone can come to this country, be fully supported in terms of social housing, social welfare, and free medical care for over ten years, never hold down a legitimate job and never once contribute to society in any way shape or form, and commit such a horrendous, evil act of incomprehensible violence.
This statement was conspicuously omitted from the Irish Times's and Newstalk’s coverage of the murder trial. When the statement came up on the BBC current affairs programme The View, journalist Kitty Holland (in a real mask-off moment) criticised Casey for his comments, arguing that his remarks had been “not helpful”, “not good” and had been “latched onto” by the far right.
Imagine it. Your girlfriend has been unexpectedly murdered by a complete stranger, but you can take some solace in the fact that not only your friends, family and community have rallied around you, but the entire country. Then it turns out that the perpetrator is an immigrant, and the entire country immediately drops the case like a hot potato. At the perpetrator’s murder trial, you have the temerity to criticise the legislative framework which enabled the murderer to commit his horrific crime (criticisms whose factual accuracy, to the best of my knowledge, no one has yet disputed) - and your criticisms are either ignored, or you are smeared in the press as a xenophobe for having made them. It would be funny in a Kafkaesque sort of way if it wasn’t so sickening. Casey is suing the BBC for defamation, and I hope he wins.
Always and ever it’s like this when an immigrant to Ireland commits a serious crime. Three months after Ashling Murphy’s murder, two gay men were viciously murdered in Sligo because of their sexuality. Obviously this is proof of a lingering culture of homophobia among Irish people - whoops, turns out the killer is an Iraqi Muslim, time to shut up about it forever. After the unprovoked, indiscriminate stabbing of a five-year-old girl and a care assistant which prompted last November’s Dublin riots, “respectable” outlets like The Journal, the Irish Times and the Irish Independent refrained from mentioning that the assailant was Algerian-born (something known to the tabloids and alternative media by that stage), although the Independent was plenty keen to tout the fact that the man who intervened was BRAZILIAN, in literally the first sentence of the article. Waterford Whispers News themselves followed suit, publishing a satirical article about the riots which avoided mentioning anything about the identity of the perpetrator whose crime prompted them (despite being more than willing to include identifying details about native-born Irish criminals in articles about them historically). I distinctly recall seeing, on the same day of the stabbing, a commenter on the r/ireland subreddit saying something to the effect of: "Imagine hearing about a horrible crime like this and your first instinct is to wonder what colour the attacker's skin is. Despicable." You mean, exactly like you're doing right now?
The media and the chattering classes will come up with all sorts of sophisticated and self-serving justifications for why they’re so recalcitrant when reporting on these issues, why they’re adopting a clear double standard depending on whether the perpetrator of a crime is Irish or an immigrant. They’ll assert that they don’t want to unfairly tar the entire community of immigrants in Ireland by fixating too heavily on a crime committed by a single member (even if they’re perfectly willing to tar the entire community of, say, UCD agricultural science students with a baseless accusation since acknowledged to have been invented from whole cloth). They’ll say they don’t want to “legitimise” far-right talking points by bringing them up or grudgingly acknowledging that a stopped clock is right twice a day.3 They’ll claim that it isn’t fair to expect a recent Syrian refugee to adhere to the same standards of behaviour that we expect from someone like Conor McGregor, who grew up in Ireland (the soft bigotry of low expectations, as ever).
But at the end of the day, what it ultimately boils down to is wilfully ignoring or downplaying crimes when they are committed by a member of one’s in-group, or someone you see as a member of a political faction whose good side you want to stay on. Which, you may have noticed, is exactly what anti-immigration protesters are doing when they turn a blind eye to Conor McGregor’s sexual misconduct.
None of all of the above is to imply that I agree with any and all criticisms of Ireland’s policy on immigration, or that I am personally opposed to immigration into Ireland - I am not. All I’m saying is: before you lecture anti-immigration activists on their hypocrisy, first ask yourself whether you’re guilty of the exact same hypocrisy in the other direction.
A clarification for international readers: the President of Ireland is a largely ceremonial role, and the holder wields no actual political power.
Indeed, why did we hear more armchair psychoanalysis of the perpetrator’s motivations before we even knew who the perpetrator was, compared to after? Isn’t this completely backwards?
One might reasonably ask: if the act of making a truthful assertion constitutes “legitimising” a complaint made by the far-right, doesn’t that suggest that the complaint might be, you know - legitimate? Either a topic is legitimate to discuss, or it isn’t. It doesn’t simply become legitimate because the “correct” people are talking about it, and remain illegitimate as long as they ignore it. There’s something weirdly nihilistic about this, the idea that the “legitimacy” of a specific grievance or complaint is a purely social matter (like whether or not distressed jeans are in this season), and wholly untethered from any claims of fact or ethical standards.
Yes, this man is a pice of shit.
“Criminal charges have never been brought against him, owing to lack of evidence (an unfortunately perennial problem in cases of this type).”
Could it be, that there is no evidence, because these rapes did not happen? Could it be, that famous men have become cultural targets for opportunistic liars who want fame and fortune for victimhood of someone famous?
I don’t know what the civil court standards to convict are in Ireland. In the USA, it’s “a preponderance of evidence” standard, or “>50% chance of guilt.” What makes you think the professional managerial class who runs the courts wasn’t simply biased against him, and eager to convict?