Hainault sword attack

[Uncle fester]

A lot of untreated/undiagnosed mental health issues, a lot of substance abuse, a lot of people with no support networks, as well as a general lack of empathy in society.

Most of our soup kitchen punters should have support available somewhere but don't.

That explains a lot of the more extreme stuff, but there has definitely been a more subtle, or not, change in society as a whole

Polarisation in society has been escalating since the Brexit/Trump double whammy, but I think the pandemic really shattered some illusions many might have been clinging onto about their fellow citizens. From top to bottom we saw people flagarantly flout scientific advice that was intended to save lives simply because they didn't want to be told what to do. However subconsciously and with mountains of evidence as to why they shouldn't, I think a lot of people do still look to those in charge for cues on how to behave or standards to aspire to and the carry on of the Tory administration either modelled selfishness for them or really drove home that power doesn't care about them and we're more or less on our own at a societal level.

In the immediate aftermath many who were told they were key workers and heroes during the pandemic, at the same time as being treated pretty horribly by some members of the public, and were swiftly disregarded again afterwards. Denied any semblance of a tangible reward for what they did (pay increases). That doesn't engender a lot of love or respect for society.

It's possibly also a collective trauma reaction. Every time period has its ups and downs, but for a lot of people the last decade and a bit has just been ever-worsening. The cusp of world war three feels more palpable than in a good while and that's right after a global plague we've sort of been expected to just shrug off, to get right back to normal as if nothing happened.

I trace the origins back to the fake WMD that led to the second Iraq war. That kicked off a wave of instability in the middle east and taught western voters that yes, your leaders are telling you some outrageous lies.

[David in Gwent]

From THE TRUTH?

The truth is that Sock is a moron and I don't want to play your game either.

Yet, rather predictably, you’ve stormed in and proven his point

Incorrect, simpletons like Sock should be pulled up when calling it a "plague" it's practically demented.

[sockwithaticket]

Aw, bless, I've really wound you up through correct usage of English.

One of the Cambridge Dictionary definitions of plague:

A serious disease which kills many people.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictio ... ish/plague

Given that reported covid deaths run into the millions, I feel it a rather apt word to have used.

Now, don't you have some windows to lick?

[Guy Smiley]

Fucking DAC coming in and proving the point with grace, style and panache as usual

While it's not reported daily here any more, I saw a headline the other day outlining current Covid cases, hospitalisations and deaths in NZ and we're still having weekly, double digit death figures in a small population. It's... a plague.

Back to the overall thrust of the chat, I think the underlying anger and despair presenting across societies (mainly in the west I think) is the result of the dominance of capital over human interest. Corporation driven policies that see tax relief for companies and executives while the lower tiers shoulder the economic burden is a bit of a no brainer when it comes to dissatisfaction and increasing violent acts. Outside the west, we see some kickback to repression and brutality that's a bit of a different issue but ties into public anger through government complicity... the current Gaza mess is an example.

On top of all that... the last ten years or so has seen the main players in the social media landscape step up and into a realm of influence we'd never seen before and the rise of the swivel eyed loon goes hand in hand with that. The poor bastards are being played and we're all suffering as a result.

[mat the expat]

Fucking DAC coming in and proving the point with grace, style and panache as usual

While it's not reported daily here any more, I saw a headline the other day outlining current Covid cases, hospitalisations and deaths in NZ and we're still having weekly, double digit death figures in a small population. It's... a plague.

Back to the overall thrust of the chat, I think the underlying anger and despair presenting across societies (mainly in the west I think) is the result of the dominance of capital over human interest. Corporation driven policies that see tax relief for companies and executives while the lower tiers shoulder the economic burden is a bit of a no brainer when it comes to dissatisfaction and increasing violent acts. Outside the west, we see some kickback to repression and brutality that's a bit of a different issue but ties into public anger through government complicity... the current Gaza mess is an example.

On top of all that... the last ten years or so has seen the main players in the social media landscape step up and into a realm of influence we'd never seen before and the rise of the swivel eyed loon goes hand in hand with that. The poor bastards are being played and we're all suffering as a result.

We're definitely living in "Interesting Times"

[Calculon]

That explains a lot of the more extreme stuff, but there has definitely been a more subtle, or not, change in society as a whole

Polarisation in society has been escalating since the Brexit/Trump double whammy, but I think the pandemic really shattered some illusions many might have been clinging onto about their fellow citizens. From top to bottom we saw people flagarantly flout scientific advice that was intended to save lives simply because they didn't want to be told what to do. However subconsciously and with mountains of evidence as to why they shouldn't, I think a lot of people do still look to those in charge for cues on how to behave or standards to aspire to and the carry on of the Tory administration either modelled selfishness for them or really drove home that power doesn't care about them and we're more or less on our own at a societal level.

In the immediate aftermath many who were told they were key workers and heroes during the pandemic, at the same time as being treated pretty horribly by some members of the public, and were swiftly disregarded again afterwards. Denied any semblance of a tangible reward for what they did (pay increases). That doesn't engender a lot of love or respect for society.

It's possibly also a collective trauma reaction. Every time period has its ups and downs, but for a lot of people the last decade and a bit has just been ever-worsening. The cusp of world war three feels more palpable than in a good while and that's right after a global plague we've sort of been expected to just shrug off, to get right back to normal as if nothing happened.

I trace the origins back to the fake WMD that led to the second Iraq war. That kicked off a wave of instability in the middle east and taught western voters that yes, your leaders are telling you some outrageous lies.

Indeed, the MAGA crowd frequently cite the Iraq war and WMD as justification for not trusting the government on everything from Ukraine aid to covid regulations. And TBF, some of those covid regulations were nonsense

[Guy Smiley]

A pertinent post today from a blogger I follow, Australian author more known for dark humour and satire (He Died With A Falafel In His Hand) John Birmingham which addresses the topic of loneliness and online socialising... worth a read

https://aliensideboob.substack.com/p/mo ... tent=share

I drove up the freeway to Ipswich early on Easter Sunday a couple of years ago. It must have been after the worst of COVID had receded, but it can’t have been too long after that weird, liminal disruption to all of our lives.

The clock was running. I do remember that. I was making the hour or so round trip to pick up an old friend we were hosting for Easter lunch. I remember what we had. A slow-cooked shoulder of lamb with all of the trimmings, and chocolate, of course. Way too much chocolate. It was a very old-fashioned meal, top-shelf stodge, really. But this was an old-fashioned friendship, one that reached back over 50 years to the very first day of primary school.

That had been in September for me, shortly after my family arrived in Brisbane, among the last of the Ten Pound Poms. I recall a few things about my first day at school. They sat me down next to the only kid who didn't have someone sitting next to him, and he promptly wet himself.

We were sitting at one of the old-fashioned wooden desks that put two students next to each other on a fold-up bench. When I realised what was creeping across the bench towards me, I put my hand up to ask Sister Angela if I could move. The rest of the class burst out laughing.

The casual cruelty of that moment stayed with me for decades. It’s with me still. I wonder whether that kid remembers it, too. I wonder whether he's even alive to do so.

The other thing I remember from that day was making a friend. The same friend I was driving up the freeway to pick up for lunch half a century later. Not the kid who wet himself, but one of the few who didn't seem to find it funny. He came and found me at ‘little lunch’ and explained that he used to sit where I was now sitting, and it was no fun at all, not for him, not for me, and not for the other kid. Looking back on it, he was remarkably empathic for a six-year-old.

That might be why we became friends, but our shared love of Doctor Who also helped.

I hadn't seen him for many years; the Easter Sunday, I drove up the freeway. In the way of things, our lives had taken very different paths, and we had drifted apart. I knew he'd been doing it tough. He lost half of his family to cancer. He’d had his own close calls with that motherfucker. And, well, he'd been the fat kid in class, too. He carried that struggle with him into adulthood.

I was prepared to find him reduced in his circumstances. I was not ready to find him ravaged. That's what the years had done. They had ravaged him. I had to help him up the front steps of our house, and when I put my hand on his arm to steady him, my fingers sunk into the flesh like pressing into a warm marshmallow.

It was a shock. As a kid he had always been the bigger one, the stronger one, larger than life itself. And in the intervening years, life had taken its revenge on him for that perceived slight.

There's a lot I could share with you about that day, but I won't. All you really need to know Is that I had never been more unprepared to confront another’s isolation. I had thought I was simply reconnecting with a mate who’d drifted out of reach over the years. Instead, what happened, I think, is that I blundered into the singular exile of a man who had gradually lost himself in the house where he grew up but now lived alone.

It feels sometimes as if we are all forever in danger of losing ourselves and our connection to others. It feels, too, as though we’ve never been more connected at the very moment we drift apart.

It's a difficult idea to grapple with, modern loneliness, because it is beset on all sides by contradiction, and every time it seems you've made some definitive conclusion, that determination reveals its negating argument. And yet, I can't help but feel as though so much of the sorrow of the world is the sorrow of loneliness.

That implies a collective experience of something which, by definition, we cannot share. Last week, when I touched upon this subject in a private column, a surprising number of people replied with their personal experiences of loneliness. Some simply knew themselves to be introverted, some had been diagnosed with spectrum disorders, which served to isolate them from all others at a molecular level, and many reflected on the everyday experience of feeling disconnected in a crowd, at a party or some other social gathering.

Leo: I've never been more lonely than at a crowded party with people who I knew slightly but who all knew each other better. The worst period of isolation in my life was working shift work in my 20s with a team of people I realised I had nothing in common with. Nothing. It was years of being ignored and slighted.

Susan: I went away with 11 people recently, all uni friends of my husband or their spouses, and I came back very sad because none of them took any time to engage with me and my (obviously) weird hobbies.

Halwes: I feel lonely when I'm in the city. Good as gold by myself for weeks at a time in the bush but get a really despairing feeling when I land in any city. I say good morning to people in the city who look at me like I'm about to rob them.

Such experiences, while uncomfortable and gruelling, are neither unique nor unexampled. Two thousand years ago, Seneca warned us that where there is no love, crowds are not company; faces are just a gallery of pictures, and talk merely a tinkling cymbal. Recall Virginia Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway, having “the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown” even amidst the social whirl of London, while The Great Gatsby’s Nick Carraway was both “within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”

Long before Leo hit the party circuit, Susan came home forlorn from an uninviting university reunion, and Halwes frightened all those passersby on his morning constitutional; Matthew Arnold wrote that in the sea of life, ‘we mortal millions’ were fated to live alone, ‘with echoing straits between us thrown’.

Maybe it is simply that, at scale, individual loneliness metastasises into some much rougher, greater beast, but modern alienation presents as different not just in scale but also in effect. Heart sickness and ennui, the most interior of feelings, become externalised as mass pathologies.

It’s not a simple algorithm. The inputs are many, and the outcomes diverse. Does Trump give rise to QANON? Well, duh. He was the star of that shit show. But COVID and the mass isolation of global lockdowns were arguably the producers, with a big assist from the structural collapse of old media business models and their replacement by online social platforms configured as virality engines. Good luck disentangling that, or with quantifying how much of the growth of armed white nationalist militias is driven by the erosion of anglo-saxon political hegemony – and how much is just a lot of sad, lonely men getting together to cosplay the apocalypse on the weekend because the other sad, lonely men in the local chapter of the Aryan Brotherhood are the only ones who’ll play with them.

I recall a guest on one of The Bulwark’s eleventy billion podcasts, some dude who’d set himself the Sisyphean task of going deep on the armed wing of the alt-right so we wouldn’t have to, explaining with some measure of surprise just how many Proud Boys and Oathkeepers had fallen down Hitler’s rabbit hole because this was what they had instead of rewarding friendships.

Loneliness is complicated.

Modern loneliness is all about the tech until it’s not.

When I first started to think about this, I already had a title for the essay or maybe just a subtitle.

It’s the Phones, Stupid.


The ski jump into anomie takes off at the exact moment a generation of teens got their first smartphones and social media accounts. It might not be causation, but that’s some profound-ass correlation, right there, between Zuckerberg getting rich and the rest of us getting miserable. By the sort of coincidence that is either creepy or simply inevitable in a digitally saturated world, I was pondering this on my muffin walk this morning when an email from the tech writer Mike Elgan popped up in my feed, almost as though he couldn’t help butting in on the topic.

We’re currently living in an era where technology impacts literally everything. As one obvious example, our politics is characterized by divisiveness, disinformation and radicalization. Nearly every aspect of this new politics was brought about by the existence of the global internet, social media and the ability of anyone to create any kind of content and instantly reach a global audience by gaming algorithms. Russian disinformation, Chinese censorship, the decline of traditional media, the small-donation fundraising of radicals in Congress — all of it is the direct result of digital technology.

Elgan went on to point out that education, religion, science — even dating and marriage have been similarly impacted. Indeed, ‘every aspect of human society is now mediated and affected by machines.’

Jaron Lanier, the VR pioneer turned technology doomsayer, lays much of the blame on the business model where we all traded away our personal data for free access to search engines and social media. Echoing Elgan on how tech has reshaped our politics and culture, Lanier says the dominant platforms created a faux communal space while designing the algorithms that controlled it to exploit base human weaknesses such as vanity, irritability, and paranoia.

We have rewritten our wetware. Alienation is not just a feature; it’s the profit engine driving everything.

But it is not in itself, everything.

Our agency has been diminished, but human will is not extinguished. We can still make choices. They might be inconvenient and uncomfortable, but being hard does not make them unsound. Reading a book is much harder than scrolling a social feed. Reaching out from isolation can be undeniably more difficult than just sitting quietly in our empty spaces. For one thing, just sitting doesn’t expose us to the pain of rejection. And while we sit, we can always scroll.

But honestly, it’s better that we don’t.

As I grow older, I find that I have to put more effort into reaching out. Because, of course, I do. The things that make friendship and connection so easy when we’re young, time and proximity, work against us as the years pile on. With children and careers, time becomes short. The friends we held close in our teens and twenties might well scatter to the far side of the world in their thirties and beyond. It seems as if we’ll never have that easy confluence of time and presence until, of course… we do. Because the seasons of work and parenthood also pass.

There can probably be no one solution to modern loneliness because it takes so many forms for so many different people. But pulling back from one’s particular circumstances to the general question of how we might lessen the pain of isolation, we find alternatives. That might mean driving for an hour on Easter Sunday to pick up an old school friend who would otherwise have spent the day alone. Or it could mean hosting online drinks and a Zoom or FaceTime chat with some blog buddies to discuss the first season of Fallout. (We’ll be doing this in a week or two, and I am excited!) One completely analogue solution and one digital, but both require more time and effort than pulling to refresh my Facebook feed, and both are very personal to me, of course.

Your experience will vary.

But loneliness is one of those problems we literally cannot solve alone.

[epwc]

Good piece

[geordie_6]

Aw, bless, I've really wound you up through correct usage of English.

One of the Cambridge Dictionary definitions of plague:

A serious disease which kills many people.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictio ... ish/plague

Given that reported covid deaths run into the millions, I feel it a rather apt word to have used.

Now, don't you have some windows to lick?

Now tell him that it decimated the population, that may make his head explode.

[David in Gwent]

Aw, bless, I've really wound you up through correct usage of English.

One of the Cambridge Dictionary definitions of plague:

A serious disease which kills many people.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictio ... ish/plague

Given that reported covid deaths run into the millions, I feel it a rather apt word to have used.

Now, don't you have some windows to lick?

You're dishonest:

noun. an epidemic disease that causes high mortality; pestilence.

What was the mortality rate? 0.1%?

[David in Gwent]

That explains a lot of the more extreme stuff, but there has definitely been a more subtle, or not, change in society as a whole

Polarisation in society has been escalating since the Brexit/Trump double whammy, but I think the pandemic really shattered some illusions many might have been clinging onto about their fellow citizens. From top to bottom we saw people flagarantly flout scientific advice that was intended to save lives simply because they didn't want to be told what to do. However subconsciously and with mountains of evidence as to why they shouldn't, I think a lot of people do still look to those in charge for cues on how to behave or standards to aspire to and the carry on of the Tory administration either modelled selfishness for them or really drove home that power doesn't care about them and we're more or less on our own at a societal level.

In the immediate aftermath many who were told they were key workers and heroes during the pandemic, at the same time as being treated pretty horribly by some members of the public, and were swiftly disregarded again afterwards. Denied any semblance of a tangible reward for what they did (pay increases). That doesn't engender a lot of love or respect for society.

It's possibly also a collective trauma reaction. Every time period has its ups and downs, but for a lot of people the last decade and a bit has just been ever-worsening. The cusp of world war three feels more palpable than in a good while and that's right after a global plague we've sort of been expected to just shrug off, to get right back to normal as if nothing happened.

I trace the origins back to the fake WMD that led to the second Iraq war. That kicked off a wave of instability in the middle east and taught western voters that yes, your leaders are telling you some outrageous lies.

Yep, the Blair years.

[David in Gwent]

Fucking DAC coming in and proving the point with grace, style and panache as usual

While it's not reported daily here any more, I saw a headline the other day outlining current Covid cases, hospitalisations and deaths in NZ and we're still having weekly, double digit death figures in a small population. It's... a plague.

Back to the overall thrust of the chat, I think the underlying anger and despair presenting across societies (mainly in the west I think) is the result of the dominance of capital over human interest. Corporation driven policies that see tax relief for companies and executives while the lower tiers shoulder the economic burden is a bit of a no brainer when it comes to dissatisfaction and increasing violent acts. Outside the west, we see some kickback to repression and brutality that's a bit of a different issue but ties into public anger through government complicity... the current Gaza mess is an example.

On top of all that... the last ten years or so has seen the main players in the social media landscape step up and into a realm of influence we'd never seen before and the rise of the swivel eyed loon goes hand in hand with that. The poor bastards are being played and we're all suffering as a result.

Yes, that's a decent privilleged white man's view. Well done.

You haven't got the faintest fucking idea as to why the working and lower middle classes are pissed off do you? Not a fucking scooby.

[Guy Smiley]

It’s always good when a swivel eyed loon like you, DAC, tries to tell anyone that they don’t know what’s going on.

Inside your paranoid little world, sure… I wouldn’t want to know. But you’re a minority, little man. You’re just a mouse scuttling around behind the skirting board of reality. Squeak on, dude.

[David in Gwent]

It’s always good when a swivel eyed loon like you, DAC, tries to tell anyone that they don’t know what’s going on.

Inside your paranoid little world, sure… I wouldn’t want to know. But you’re a minority, little man. You’re just a mouse scuttling around behind the skirting board of reality. Squeak on, dude.

Tell me you've had 3 covid vaccines and 3 booster shots without telling me you've had 2 covid vaccines and 3 booster shots.

[Slick]

Fucking DAC coming in and proving the point with grace, style and panache as usual

While it's not reported daily here any more, I saw a headline the other day outlining current Covid cases, hospitalisations and deaths in NZ and we're still having weekly, double digit death figures in a small population. It's... a plague.

Back to the overall thrust of the chat, I think the underlying anger and despair presenting across societies (mainly in the west I think) is the result of the dominance of capital over human interest. Corporation driven policies that see tax relief for companies and executives while the lower tiers shoulder the economic burden is a bit of a no brainer when it comes to dissatisfaction and increasing violent acts. Outside the west, we see some kickback to repression and brutality that's a bit of a different issue but ties into public anger through government complicity... the current Gaza mess is an example.

On top of all that... the last ten years or so has seen the main players in the social media landscape step up and into a realm of influence we'd never seen before and the rise of the swivel eyed loon goes hand in hand with that. The poor bastards are being played and we're all suffering as a result.

Yes, that's a decent privilleged white man's view. Well done.

You haven't got the faintest fucking idea as to why the working and lower middle classes are pissed off do you? Not a fucking scooby.

Usually takes us a bit longer to get to the Working Class Hero bit, but I guess posting the same inane drivel over multiple threads and websites eats up that time.

[David in Gwent]

Fucking DAC coming in and proving the point with grace, style and panache as usual

While it's not reported daily here any more, I saw a headline the other day outlining current Covid cases, hospitalisations and deaths in NZ and we're still having weekly, double digit death figures in a small population. It's... a plague.

Back to the overall thrust of the chat, I think the underlying anger and despair presenting across societies (mainly in the west I think) is the result of the dominance of capital over human interest. Corporation driven policies that see tax relief for companies and executives while the lower tiers shoulder the economic burden is a bit of a no brainer when it comes to dissatisfaction and increasing violent acts. Outside the west, we see some kickback to repression and brutality that's a bit of a different issue but ties into public anger through government complicity... the current Gaza mess is an example.

On top of all that... the last ten years or so has seen the main players in the social media landscape step up and into a realm of influence we'd never seen before and the rise of the swivel eyed loon goes hand in hand with that. The poor bastards are being played and we're all suffering as a result.

Yes, that's a decent privilleged white man's view. Well done.

You haven't got the faintest fucking idea as to why the working and lower middle classes are pissed off do you? Not a fucking scooby.

Usually takes us a bit longer to get to the Working Class Hero bit, but I guess posting the same inane drivel over multiple threads and websites eats up that time.

People are sick to back teeth of the decline of services like schools, hospitals, the roads, inflation, identity politics and gender politics. They are fucked off with constant D.I.E bollocks at work as well as being told they're racist to even begin question 1000 people a week arriving on boats which they ultimately have to pay for. They are pissed off with the rise in violence, the rise is sexual violence and the rise in the sense that they don't recognise their communities - all whilst being told by people like you and smiley that were just intolerant.

We're sick and fucking tired of your nonsense.

[epwc]

We're sick and fucking tired of your nonsense.

And the answer is what? Reform? Suella? Jacob Rees Mogg?

Good luck with any of that lot, they seem really nice caring people. I think leaving Europe has worked well so far, we should extend that to leaving the rest of the fucking world.

[Guy Smiley]

It’s always good when a swivel eyed loon like you, DAC, tries to tell anyone that they don’t know what’s going on.

Inside your paranoid little world, sure… I wouldn’t want to know. But you’re a minority, little man. You’re just a mouse scuttling around behind the skirting board of reality. Squeak on, dude.

Tell me you've had 3 covid vaccines and 3 booster shots without telling me you've had 2 covid vaccines and 3 booster shots.

Ah... Covid. Prime cause of fatal sword attacks in the metro area. All part of the Grand Conspiracy, of course. The Elites moving to effect the New World Order... I salute our reptilian overlords.

[robmatic]

Fucking DAC coming in and proving the point with grace, style and panache as usual

While it's not reported daily here any more, I saw a headline the other day outlining current Covid cases, hospitalisations and deaths in NZ and we're still having weekly, double digit death figures in a small population. It's... a plague.

Back to the overall thrust of the chat, I think the underlying anger and despair presenting across societies (mainly in the west I think) is the result of the dominance of capital over human interest. Corporation driven policies that see tax relief for companies and executives while the lower tiers shoulder the economic burden is a bit of a no brainer when it comes to dissatisfaction and increasing violent acts. Outside the west, we see some kickback to repression and brutality that's a bit of a different issue but ties into public anger through government complicity... the current Gaza mess is an example.

On top of all that... the last ten years or so has seen the main players in the social media landscape step up and into a realm of influence we'd never seen before and the rise of the swivel eyed loon goes hand in hand with that. The poor bastards are being played and we're all suffering as a result.

Yes, that's a decent privilleged white man's view. Well done.

You haven't got the faintest fucking idea as to why the working and lower middle classes are pissed off do you? Not a fucking scooby.

Usually takes us a bit longer to get to the Working Class Hero bit, but I guess posting the same inane drivel over multiple threads and websites eats up that time.

I personally enjoy middle class, middle aged blokes lecturing me about the working classes.

[epwc]

I personally enjoy middle class, middle aged blokes lecturing me about the working classes.

[Uncle fester]

My partner has become increasingly right wing conservative in his world view

https://www.irishtimes.com/health/your- ... cal-views/

Dear Roe,

My partner and I moved abroad more than 10 years ago as expats. We are both 40. We are planning to move back home to Ireland in the next year. While abroad, my partner has become increasingly right wing conservative in his world view, mostly I believe as a response to the cultural climate of the country that we currently live in. Unfortunately, he now waxes lyrical about how Ireland is acquiescing to the whims of the “woke mob” and has expressed to me that he does not think he will be able to adjust to life back at home as even his elderly parents are horrified about his newfound love of conspiracy theories and autocrats. Recently, a conversation between my partner and my own father went totally off the rails, when my partner rudely mocked my dad for expressing concerns about the influence of the alt right during the Dublin riots. My partner was never like this when he lived in Ireland, he was definitely more moderate if not socially liberal. I am more left of centre and cannot have a reasonable discussion with him about politics, abortion, LGBTQ topics etc without him becoming defensive and exhorting me to “open my eyes to the truth”. My partner is a great person otherwise, and I love him dearly. He has a kind and gentle side, which is being buried by all this nonsense. I am terrified of my partner embarrassing himself in front of our friends and family when we move back to Ireland. I desperately want him to revert to the person he was before we immigrated. It makes me so sad. Any advice?

Your partner and I do not align politically and would likely end up arguing over a dinner table, would the occasion ever arise. I’m explicitly stating this because I’m not going to pretend that my answer is unbiased. I’m also flagging that anyone who uses the word “woke” as a pejorative will likely not appreciate this column (or my thoughts generally) and so in the interest in saving those people time and rising blood pressure, I’m giving them the chance to bail now and go read anything else in the world.

Disclaimers completed, so back to you, dear Letter Writer.

This may be a deal-breaker that ends your relationship, which I think you know. Some people are happy being with partners who hold very different political opinions — but that’s not the relationship you signed up for. Your partner has changed drastically over time, and his changed values, ways of thinking, and modes of interacting no longer feel compatible with what you want in a partner. Remove the specifics of the political beliefs, and what you’re experiencing is growing incompatibility in a relationship, which many people experience. People can change in all kinds of ways that can lead to the relationship ending; for example, shifts in their goals, life plans, priorities and personalities. Becoming incompatible over time is a perfectly valid reason to end a relationship.

I say this because sometimes there can be a reductive, simplistic rhetoric around political beliefs as if it’s something people should just get over; that we should simply not bring politics up at the dinner table and everything will be fine. But a partner suddenly embracing a worldview that is at odds with your own is reason enough to end a relationship. You get to leave if you want to — and I personally would.

But if you do think this is worth working on and want to address this with your partner, focus on values. Something that I find fascinating about western conservatism in particular is how little focus there is on building, developing or creating anything that doesn’t involve limiting the rights of others. There’s a very intense sense of being against a lot, and being for very little. There’s also a cultish obsession with being the group who “really” knows what’s going on, and who can claim the one “truth”, which is why there’s been such a rise in not only conspiracy theories but media figures who claim that everyone else is lying and they alone will speak honestly. This hasn’t come out of nowhere; people feel disenfranchised, lonely and powerless, and are seeking out some sense of control in a world where they otherwise don’t feel valued or heard. Most of us can understand those emotions, but I also think there are ways of addressing those needs and emotions without oppressing, disrespecting or instilling fear in others. Many people feel lonely and powerless — what we do with those feelings, and whether we try to empower others or push them down, shows our value system.

I’m not just explaining this for the sake of soapboxing, but to give you an entry point to speak to your partner. Arrange a time and tell him it’s clear that his world view has changed significantly since you first met and that you’re struggling to process those changes and figure out if your values are still compatible. See what he says and if he has any immediate thoughts. If he asks for examples, focus on the values he displayed when you got together — not just politically, but personally. Speak about how when you fell in love with him, you admired his empathy, embrace of nuance, desire to treat others respectfully, desire for the world to be safer for everyone, curiosity and desire to learn from others and whatever the case may be. Be specific and list the things he stood for, not against. Then note the changes you have observed and how they seem to reflect a different set of values and explain how it’s impacting your connection with him.

Use “I” statements here, like “I feel like we used to value having engaged, respectful conversations between ourselves and with others, but from my perspective, it feels like you value ‘winning’ conversations more now. I feel like you mock me and others during conversations, and the way you speak to me makes me feel disrespected and makes me not want to discuss topics with you, when I used to love how respectful and engaged our conversations were.” You can make other points about the values he used to display versus how you feel like he has changed: moving from valuing empathy to control; moving from valuing equality to superiority; moving from valuing listening and learning to being the person “in the know”; moving from valuing being open-minded to being defensive and closed off; and moving from valuing connecting with his friends and family to pushing them away. Keep it grounded in your experience of his changes.

Then, pay attention to how he reacts. You are explaining to your partner that you feel distant from him, that his behaviour is driving you (and others) away, and that you feel like your values are no longer compatible. He either values you and your relationship enough to take this seriously and look at his behaviour and make some changes, or he values his newfound belief system and desire to feel in control more, and won’t engage with you meaningfully.

If he seems genuinely invested in addressing these issues and committed to being with you and you want to try to make it work, I recommend getting a couples counsellor who will help you get back to understanding each other and speaking respectfully.

But think very carefully about whether you want to be with this person for who he is now, or whether you’re holding on to a version of him that no longer exists. If that’s the case, it’s time to end the relationship, mourn what you once had, and find someone compatible with you today. Good luck.

[David in Gwent]