Category: Cultural insanity
Please pardon me if this is nothing but stream of consciousness. The final thing I did yesterday evening before turning out the light was finish reading Jeff Guinn’s The Road to Jonestown. The book is as enthralling as it is appalling. I read every word of it, down to the acknowledgements and the end notes, trying to comprehend what cruel trick of the human brain made hundreds of people willing to follow such an obviously megalomaniacal charlatan as Jim Jones unto death. Guinn gives as much information as you’d ever want to know about how Jones became what he became…
When Internet companies began banning “hate” and bouncing white supremacists from their services, we cried in alarm that what could be done to them could be done to us — to libertarians, to gun-rights activists, to defenders of the Bill of Rights, to anyone whose opinions some Silicon Valley hotshot decided to hate today. But I think we at least expected there’d be a fairly long slippery slope and that we weren’t even actually on the edge of that slope yet. But no. It has already begun. Brad R., who’s been as much on top of this issue as anyone…
Good advice from Brad R.: how to keep your libertarian website alive in the face of arbitrary decisions by domain registrars, cloud services, Google, and other “providers” who may not like your views. Poll (take it FWIW) says a majority of Americans, and even a plurality of black Americans, don’t want those Confederate statues torn down. Others, OTOH, want to begin with Lincoln, then tear down every monument to anyone who ever owned a slave. Bye-bye Washington and Jefferson. Bye-bye signers of the nation’s founding documents. Welcome to un-personhood. (Going to be quite interesting when that state at the top…