We have learned nothing since the Abbey 'Playboy' riots

Within the space of 48 hours, controversial 'pick-up artist' Julien Blanc was deported from Australia, then denied entry to Britain, where more than 150,000 people signed a petition demanding his exclusion.

So it shouldn't come as any surprise at all that 11,000 Irish people have already signed a change.org petition calling for him to be banned from Ireland. Blanc peddles a particularly outdated, juvenile and unpleasant attitude towards women.

His schtick is undeniably misogynistic and his jokes about choking Japanese women are stupid and racist.

So it's just as well we have so many brave people willing to take several seconds out of their busy day to click an online petition to ban him, isn't it?

That Julien Blanc is an unpleasant weirdo is not in doubt. That any mug prepared to pay two grand to attend his dating seminars is a virgin who is terrified of women is equally probable. But to lay the blame for future sexual assaults in Ireland at the feet of an American charlatan and his socially-inadequate fans, as some campaigners have done, is absurd and dangerous.

I've been in rooms while female comedians joked that their 'ideal man' is a dead one. I've seen Jo Brand joke that the best way to a man's heart is "with a knife". And they're just the ones you can print in a family newspaper. In the current climate, such jokes could be probably described as incitement to hatred, but none of the men in the crowd worried they might be assaulted by women who had been whipped into a misandrist frenzy by the gags.

Such complacency didn't stem from male privilege, it was simply rooted in the knowledge that both sexes are smart enough to know that what they see on a stage is not to be taken literally.

Even that most basic belief in the intelligence of other people is absent from those who would ban Blanc, but faith in human nature is never a consideration for those who have recently converted to the Church of the Perpetually Offended.

The mob may have swapped their flaming torches and pitchforks for Twitter and change.org, but the mentality is the same. What is depressing is these constant, strident call for shows to be cancelled, people to be censored and visas denied is that they are made by those who have the audacity to call themselves 'liberal' or - stretching irony even further - 'progressive.'

They are nothing of the sort. In fact, these smug, satisfied bullies are simply Mary Whitehouse for a digital age. People like to laugh at Whitehouse, who was a thoroughly vile individual, and I imagine they similarly scoff at the Catholic National League for Decency, or any of those other fundamentalists who spent their days searching for immorality. But we have simply swapped one brand of stifling intolerance for another.

The new breed of self-appointed censor is probably appalled at the philistines who tried to storm the stage of the Abbey when 'Playboy Of The Western World' was first staged more than 100 years ago. That remains a beacon of boorish mob stupidity, yet that spirit is alive and well in those Irish people talking about rushing the stage if Blanc ever appears here.

Until relatively recently anybody who called for censorship was correctly dismissed as a crank and probably a religious fanatic, but once you start to decorate your objections with phrases such 'misogyny' or 'sexism', you have reached the oxymoronoic stage of censoring in the name of tolerance.

Blanc is not the threat here. He's a vaguely pathetic man with an embarrassing attitude towards women. But if we ban him, we should be consistent - burn every copy of '50 Shades Of Grey'! Ban every Eminem album! Boycott 'The Fall'! The list is as long as your pet peeves.

Or we could show these new cultural fascists the same contempt we showed their stage-invading ancestors and refuse to be bullied and cowed by the cranky minority.