{"id":32394,"date":"2017-08-18T13:44:11","date_gmt":"2017-08-18T20:44:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/?p=32394"},"modified":"2017-08-18T13:56:18","modified_gmt":"2017-08-18T20:56:18","slug":"what-is-it-with-the-angry-ones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/2017\/08\/18\/what-is-it-with-the-angry-ones\/","title":{"rendered":"What is it with the angry ones?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been viewing with dread the power of a handful of Silicon Valleyites to kick anybody they want to kick out of their domain registries, search results, hosting services, and social media platforms.<\/p>\n

The people being booted may be slime, but most of them are guilty only of having ugly ideas. Expressing ugly ideas is an unavoidable — and protected — aspect of freedom. This sets a terrible precedent<\/p>\n

“Not censorship because it’s not done by government!” says traditional libertarian dogma. But traditional libertarians never envisioned a handful of the corporately self-righteous having arbitrary power to shut up anyone they want to silence at any time.<\/p>\n

I admit that if they were on my cyber-property, I’d prefer not to have racial supremacists (of any stripe) around, either. But then, I don’t run a supposedly impartial domain registry or a social media operation that’s ominously become the main ‘Net access point billions around the world.<\/p>\n

—–<\/p>\n

One of the minor happenings in this week’s Purge of White Supremacist Evil was OKCupid banning some guy<\/a> for being a white racist. <\/p>\n

Now, this probably falls back into the old libertarian concept. OKCupid is privately owned and it can set whatever standards it wants for membership. It’s also not Google or F*c*b**k, aiming to rule the world. A ban from a dating site doesn’t condemn the poor sap — however loathsome he may be — to a lifetime of loneliness. His own nastiness might guarantee him a lonely old age, but it won’t be OKCupid’s fault.<\/p>\n

But OKCupid didn’t quietly ban him. They publicized his name and (it seems) a few other details that fell short of an outright doxing. That was dubious of them. They also urged their members to report any other Eeeeevil White Men so they could also be kicked to the dating curb. No word on whether they’ll be kicking out bigots of other races.<\/p>\n

The censorship (or not) aspects of this might be a topic for another day. This minute, I’m writing because I recognized the guy’s name — and you might, too: Chris Cantwell.<\/p>\n

I saw that and thought. No. Wait. That can’t be Christopher Cantwell. But it is<\/a>. This is the same Christopher Cantwell who, just two years ago, was an interesting (though irritating and provocative) libertarian blogger.<\/p>\n

Two years ago, I linked to his writings a couple times and even wrote a blog post<\/a> about him. I said that he and his perpetual rage were exhausting. I said I thought his pride in his anger and his belief that we should all be angry all the time was a road to burnout. I understood that he was contentious and made a lot of enemies. But never, ever did I see what he eventually became.<\/p>\n

Go to his blog now (I won’t link to it) and you’ll find pure poison dripping on your eyeballs. (For instance, while there are many valid reasons for despising President Trump, the fact that his daughter married a Jew isn’t one of them — except to people like the new, but hardly improved, Christopher Cantwell.)<\/p>\n

You folks who endured him in the Free State Project (until he was kicked out for advocating violence) might have seen this coming. I sure didn’t. It completely escapes me how someone can go from being a believer in individualism to being the worst sort of collectivist group-thinker overnight.<\/p>\n

Perhaps I should have seen it coming, though. Because this isn’t the first time I’ve observed a supposed libertarian transform into a rabid Nazi-wannabe with lightning-strike speed. It’s at least the second, possibly the third.<\/p>\n

And the thing the scary transformers all had in common was … rage. Even while they were still celebrating individualism and individual rights, their dominant mode was fury. And a sense that their fury was something to be proud of. Anybody who didn’t agree with them was a coward. Nobody but they were smart enough. Everybody else was wrong-headed, foolish, weak, devious, etc., etc. etc. Anger, anger, anger, anger, anger all the time.<\/p>\n

I still don’t understand exactly how their rage eventually overrides their stated principles. I don’t know the mechanism at work. Obviously, there are lots of angry libertarians and angry free-market anarchists who don’t<\/em> morph into Nazi clones overnight. <\/p>\n

But equally obviously white supremacists are angry. Always. About everything. One of the reasons they’re so spectacularly ineffective is that no individual supremacist can get along with another for more than about 15 minutes. They’re all so fury-driven, so convinced that nobody else is good enough, so sure that even their closest potential allies are either plotters or fools. Every faction detests every other tiny faction. Individual supremacists constantly rail at each other online, and presumably off.<\/p>\n

So yeah, it’s easy to see how the sheer “two-minute hate” factor of white supremacism could attract anybody for whom anger is all-important. But what happens to the mind of that person who in some moment suddenly switches from individualism to one of the nastiest forms of collectivism on the planet?<\/p>\n

You’d think the cognitive dissonance, endured even for a millisecond, would make the person’s head explode.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been viewing with dread the power of a handful of Silicon Valleyites to kick anybody they want to kick out of their domain registries, search results, hosting services, and social media platforms. The people being booted may be slime, but most of them are guilty only of having ugly ideas. Expressing ugly ideas is an unavoidable — and protected — aspect of freedom. This sets a terrible precedent “Not censorship because it’s not done by government!” says traditional libertarian dogma. But traditional libertarians never envisioned a handful of the corporately self-righteous having arbitrary power to shut up anyone they…<\/p>\n

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