On Defenses Against Charges of Crimethink

I was recently sent the following article by a friend of mine. He thought it would make my head explode.

Judge rules against researcher who lost job over transgender tweets

Maya Forstater’s view of sex ‘not worthy of respect in democratic society’, employment judge finds

My head, as it turns out, is intact. I have long stopped expecting sanity out of Current Year thinking. That something is insane does not mean it is surprising.

It is increasingly apparent that the holiness spiral of cultural Marxist thought is not only increasing, but accelerating. It took probably 80 years between the start of feminism and refusing to support it being a fireable offense. For gay rights, it took maybe 30. For trans rights, it’s less than 5. Whatever the next shoe to drop will be (I’ve long guessed citizenship), expect it to become a condition of mainstream employment within a few years, maybe less. The best guess as to why is from Moldbug’s recent writings – social media increased not only visible social signaling, but also became the metric for media success, thereby shaping topic choice by increasingly low-paid journalists. Anything with traction for generating social justice mob outrage suddenly got large signal boosts in short spaces of time, leading to more signaling, leading to more articles, leading to rapid changes in leftist norms.

But there is another aspect to this rapid acceleration that is more noteworthy. We are now at the point where previously acceptable ideas that are now essentially forbidden (opposing gay marriage, thinking there are only two immutable sexes) were mainstream within the period of permanent electronic storage of online writing. Which means that anybody who happened to share the wrong article or write some moderate-at-the-time facebook post back in 2013 is at risk of being crowbarred out of employment and polite society, should someone care enough to dig through all of their old writings and posts.

In other words, it is no longer a reliable guarantee of being left alone, like Havel’s greengrocer, to hold fairly mainstream opinions on social justice matters. One must, in addition, be willing to change one’s ideas at an increasingly rapid rate. In other words, you have to be mainstream at every point in time. It used to be prudent advice to not post extreme opinions online, and that this would be sufficient. But the faster moral fashions change, the less this is going to work. The only solution is going to be full passivism – don’t post anything political, at all, in any publicly searchable forum that can be linked to you. You never really know which ideas that are normal today will become crimethink tomorrow.

To make matters worse, the fact that these are moral fashions, rather than dress fashions, prevents a lot of honest discourse or understanding about the underlying process if you want to come across as sincere. When hemlines go up or down, you can just change from a long skirt to a miniskirt without having to explain why, as it’s well understood that keeping with the times is just a pastime and a sport. You don’t have to denounce last season’s miniskirts as the work of the devil. On the other hand, people that are sincerely concerned about trans rights (or indeed gay marriage) have an almost complete inability to explain, even to themselves, when exactly they began to view this as a crucial moral issue and why. A mere five or six years ago, many of these people almost certainly found cross-dressing (as it was known then, but which probably will become a hate-term in a year or two) and its associated subcultures as largely ridiculous, curious, or comical. At some point, it become the world’s most important moral issue to them. Even if this new perspective is completely correct, what changed their mind? If it is such an obvious human right now, why was it not an obvious human right in 2012? They were fully functioning adults. Did they just not care? Surely it can’t just be that the New York Times started publishing articles about it. Are they really so sheep-like on the supposedly great moral questions of our age?

The people who are apt to get themselves in the most trouble are those who don’t understand the process, want to discuss and take seriously these ideas at each point in time, but change their tune at an insufficiently rapid pace.

But there is another aspect worth noting. Steve Sailer had a wonderful expression for the process of crimethink hunting – the Eye of Soros. Like the Eye of Sauron in Lord of the Rings, it is very powerful, and you don’t want it to fall on you, as it will destroy you. But thankfully, it can’t be looking in all places at once. Most people who shared some article back in 2016 saying there were only two sexes won’t actually be fired. It needs someone malicious to go to the effort of hunting through all your previous postings, finding the most incriminating thing that can be taken out of context, and starting a big publicity campaign against your employer, your friends and your family. Most people aren’t nasty or sociopathic enough to do this on a regular basis. It’s usually journalists, or some particularly vindictive person you know.

Which means that increasingly, there will only be one reliable precaution against both current and future crimethink charges. It is the same one as during the Soviet Union.

You need to be able to judge the character of the people you’re talking to, and whether you can trust them. The worse things get, the more all of us will live and die on this ability.

Trustworthiness in terms of being receptive to strange, unpopular ideas is less correlated than you might think with simple partisan voting patterns. There are republican friends I have that I can only say certain things to, and democrats to whom I can say almost anything.

If I had to summarize the two strongest indicators that someone is trustworthy enough to be spoken to freely, I’d say they are the following.

First, do they have a sense of humor, both in general, and about political matters specifically? This is probably the largest one. Anybody who treats everything going on in the Current Year as deathly serious is heavily invested in the partisan aspects of the game, which sooner or later includes joining outrage mobs against bad thoughts.

Second, are they able to have an argument about questions of abstract principle without taking it personally and getting angry? People who can listen to strange arguments and consider them without an immediate need to lash out at you are much less likely to then badmouth you to everyone around  you. Actually getting you in trouble generally requires active work, and mostly only those with a grudge are willing to do it.

In my experience, people who pass both tests have a very high likelihood of being trustworthy in terms of talking about controversial political and social thoughts.

I don’t hold myself up as a particular expert at this process. The nature of the game is that everyone thinks they’re doing well and things are just fine, right up until they get canned. 

This of course leaves the last question. Why do it? Isn’t it just safer to shut your mouth?

Of course it is. It always is. The only justification is the one Solzhenitsyn gave, which is as true now as it was then.

Live not by lies.

He walked the walk, in a way that few others do. But he makes a strong moral case for the position. Every day, we choose some point on the spectrum between prudent silence and ill-advised honesty. If Solzhenitsyn’s work has a running theme, it’s that when you do the right and truthful thing, you probably won’t be rewarded for it, and will likely be punished.

But you should do it anyway.

If we are too frightened, then we should stop complaining that someone is suffocating us.

We ourselves are doing it. Let us then bow down even more, let us wail, and out brothers the biologists will help to bring nearer the day when they are able to read our thoughts are worthless and hopeless.

And if we get cold feet, even taking this step, then we are worthless and hopeless, and the scorn of Pushkin should be directed to us:

Why should cattle have the gifts of freedom? Their heritage from generation to generation is the belled yoke and the lash

On the Charlie Hedbo killings

It's taken me a while to write about the Charlie Hedbo killings. It takes me a while to write anything anymore in this august journal, but it wasn't just that.

I felt genuinely stirred by one thing, first and foremost. The Charlie Hedbo staff had some pretty damn enormous stones. Drawing original Mohammed cartoons, under your own name, when the location of your office is publicly known, after you've already been firebombed once for doing so? That, my friend, is some serious commitment to thick liberty of speech. The ghost of John Stuart Mill is applauding the glorious dead of Charlie Hedbo. They paid the ultimate price to insist that the right to speak one's mind exists not only as a theoretical construct, but one that you can actually exercise. Behold, the roll of honour:

• Cabu (Jean Cabut), 76, cartoonist

• Elsa Cayat, 54, psychoanalyst and columnist.

• Charb (Stéphane Charbonnier), 47, cartoonist, columnist, and editor-in-chief of Charlie Hebdo.

• Philippe Honoré, 74, cartoonist

• Bernard Maris, 68, economist, editor, and columnist

• Mustapha Ourrad , 60, copy editor.

• Tignous (Bernard Verlhac), 57, cartoonist.

• Georges Wolinski, 80, cartoonist

Alas, I fear we will not see their kind again soon.

The whole #JeSuisCharlie show of support was a mixed bag. I was at least heartened by the extent of explicit public solidarity, though I was inclined to agree with the various commentators who noted that there is a definite strain of false bravery by association in the hashtag, at least compared with the stupendous bravery of the actual Hedbo staff. But this is relatively minor.

One odd and yet somewhat positive result to come from this affair is that it finally, surprisingly dragged a number of US publications kicking and screaming into publishing some kind of depiction of Mohammed. They were for the most part unwilling in initial reporting to show any of the original cartoons that provoked the ire of the killers. They were certainly unwilling to print absolutely any of the Danish Mohammed cartoons a few years ago, to their great disgrace. 

But when the cover of the next edition of Charlie Hedbo was released, it seemed to finally shame some fraction of the American media into growing some balls, no matter how tiny and shriveled. Partly I suspect this was out of sympathy for their fellow journalists, partly because they perhaps sensed that they'd have enough of a justification and safety in numbers. Still, credit where diminutive credit is due, a surprising number at long, long last were willing to show something. According to the Daily Beast, the Washington Post ran photos of the cover, while USA Today and the Los Angeles Times put photos on their website. Even the BBC, to my astonishment, put a picture up, in one online story (which seems to be the the 'trial balloon' option, since you can take it back down again if you suddenly get scared). But of course, cowardice continues to win the day at CNN, ABC, AP, The New York Times, and so on. If you're unwilling to even reprint a cover specifically related to the story, whose depiction of Mohammed is not only mild and inoffensive, but which even contains the words 'All is Forgiven' above it, you'd sure as hell better not claim that you, too, are Charlie.

You can bet your ass that even the current crop of the recently less craven won't run more Mohammed pictures again soon. But the current reversal was made possible by the fact that for a short-lived time, a good number of the usual suspects who would ordinarily trumpet how free speech shouldn't include the right to say anything that might hurt the feelings of (certain chosen) religious minorities were at least temporarily shamed into silence. As expected, it didn't last long. It never does.

From this point on, alas, the story had mainly disappointment for me. 

With the distance of a few days, what strikes me the most about it is the fact that the only approved, socially acceptable response is sadness, and a "show of support", whatever that means. (Of course, half the left can't even muster that, going only for mealy-mouthed equivocation of "I support free speech, but..".).

But even take the #JeSuisCharlie people, whose solidarity I'm still glad to have. What exactly does it get you? You can have candlelit vigils in Paris. You can have hashtags. You can "show support", as an individual, and you can even assemble an impressive number of world leaders to do the same.

But then what?

What, exactly, does anyone plan to do in response? What, if any, policies or actions will change as a result?

The men who invaded the Charlie Hedbo offices were willing to trade their own lives, with very high expectation, to make sure that the people who drew and printed Mohammed cartoons were brutally and publicly killed. They were willing to die to send the message that if you create and distribute pictures of Mohammed under your own name, you will eventually be hunted down, even if you have police protection.

Will future such men be deterred by your hashtags? 

Will they be frightened by your "support"?

It is worth asking whether the killers succeeded in their purpose. Depressingly, I have to conclude that they did.

If you were a cartoonist, what would you learn from all this?

I'd learn, if I didn't already know it, that if I wrote a Mohammed cartoon, there's a strong chance I'd get killed. I might also learn that there's a reasonable chance I'd get a sympathetic hashtag going afterwards. How do you think that bargain strikes most cartoonists?

You don't have to guess to find out. Have a look through The Australian's gallery of cartoons drawn in the aftermath. I see a strong sentiment that the pen is mightier than the sword. I see a distinct lack of new drawings of Mohammed. 

I don't mean to single these guys out as cowards. They've just performed exactly the calculation that the terrorists wanted them to perform: if you draw a cartoon about Mohammed and publish it in such a way that we can identify you, you may be killed. Eli Valley drew about the dilemma quite poignantly here. It ends with the depressing conclusion: "The only context for me is this: call me a coward, but I want to continue to be alive." Not exactly stirring, is it? But then again, what have you done lately that's equivalently brave as what you're asking of him?

Mr Valley is absolutely right in his calculation of the stakes. Doubt not that this is deadly serious. Ask Molly Norris, a Seattle cartoonist in hiding since 2010 after death threats were made to her over her cartoons during 'Everyone Draw Mohammed' day. This is happening in America too. The only difference is that very few got printed the first time around, so there's fewer people to threaten.

Hence, the current implied scenario. Reprinting someone else's otherwise respectful depiction of Mohammed probably won't get you killed. Drawing your own anonymous Mohammed cartoon won't get you killed. Owning up to your public drawing quite possibly will.

Is there any serious doubt that of the people in the west who were, i) willing to publicly put their name to pictures of Mohammed, and ii) were set to run such cartoons in a major print publication, a large fraction were killed last week?

This is why the the terrorists succeeded.

So let's take it as given that "support", while better than opposition, will not in fact diminish the chances of future attacks occurring, nor will it significantly reduce the likely deterrent that the current attacks provide against new people drawing pictures of Mohammed. On its own, support, in other words, won't achieve anything. We return to the question from before. What, then, does anyone propose to do?

There is a very good reason that sadness is the only socially acceptable response. Anger, by contrast, requires action. When people are angry, they might actually do something. Is there anything that current political opinion will actually allow to be done?

The terrorists who perpetrated the act are already dead, so aside from cathartic displays equivalent to hanging Mussolini's corpse, there is nothing to be done there.

And since since we are loudly informed by all the great and the good that such attacks are representative of absolutely no wider sociological phenomenon but are merely the work of a tiny number of deranged madmen, apparently there's nothing to do directly to anyone else either.

So what if one's anger were turned towards the question of how we might ensure that this doesn't happen again, what might acceptable opinion consider?

Various Deus Ex Machina type answers get proposed. Better surveillance! Stop the flow of weapons to terrorist groups! Convince more Muslims to embrace free speech!

Very good. How, exactly, should this be accomplished?

The only one that might have any chance is the first. At least in America, we tried that. It was called The Patriot Act. While it is hard to judge its effectiveness, when the very name of your policy has effectively become shorthand for 'knee-jerk response to terrorism that permanently eroded important civil liberties', you may see why 'better surveillance' is not in fact an ideal policy response.

As for the second option, if anyone has the vaguest idea about what policy France might have implemented that would have succeeded in preventing the terrorists from having access to the weapons they had, I'm yet to hear it.

As for the third, nobody in any position of political power seems to have much of an idea how to get radical Muslims to love free speech other than 'be scrupulously nice to Muslims, insist that they're all peace-loving, don't discriminate against them, try not to offend them by depicting pictures of Mohammed...'

Give or take a few hiccups, it seems to me that this is the policy we've already been trying, no? This, in other words, is what brought us to the current position. Even if one were to think that we haven't done enough in this direction (like communism, true outreach has never been tried!), it surely seems worth at least considering the possibility that this policy actually does not work, and then what else one might do.

The West has collectively taken an enormous bet. It has bet that it can allow mass immigration from certain Muslim countries and successfully include such people into society in a way that doesn't compromise the West's own core values or result in permanent social conflict.

Maybe that bet is right. Every fibre of my being hopes that it is right. But Gnon cares little what you'd like to be true. It care only about what is.

However, the West, and the left in particular, cannot back away from its bet, no matter how high the stakes, no matter what evidence piles up. Because something much bigger is at issue. To acknowledge the possibility that the policy of large scale immigration from certain countries might have been mistaken would be to contemplate the notion that radical egalitarianism is false; that, much as we may hope it to be true, people are not all the same, and cultural systems are not all equally valid.

This will never be given up by the left. Never, ever, ever. 

Muslim immigration was never the cause, it was only ever the symptom. The cause was always our iron belief in radical egalitarianism. 

And this is why, in the end, we come to the conclusion that we knew all along. 

What, exactly, will the West do in response to all this? 

Nothing.

It will do nothing at all.

What is Said, What is Unsaid

Political correctness, like all successful forms of social censorship, tends to go through two phases.

There is a loud phase, where average people are actively confronted about why they can't say those mean things any more. Sanctimonious and humourless scolds, buoyed with righteous indignation, delight in vocally complaining about the oppressiveness of some other other innocuous set of jokes and observations. Most of the populace doesn't have much of a dog in the fight, so just goes with the default position of trying not to offend people, and accedes to the request. A smaller group of contrarian reactionaries fights a rearguard action of ridicule and stubborn insistence on the status quo, but usually knows it's a losing battle. Cthulu swims left, after all, so you may as well get on the right side of history™.

This phase is the part that everyone remembers.

But after that, there's a quiet phase of political correctness too. Once the kulaks have been beaten into obedience and the new list of proscribed words and ideas becomes the reigning orthodoxy, what's left behind is the silence of the things that used to be said but now aren't. It lingers a while, like a bell that's been struck, and then gradually fades to nothing. Once this happens, it's easy to forget that it was ever there. What goes unsaid long enough eventually goes unthought, as Mr Sailer put it.

And the only way to see what's gone is to look at the past, and see what used to be said but now isn't.

In the case of political correctness, since it's a relatively recent phenomenon, you don't even need to go that far in the past.

Movies are a great example of this. It's a useful exercise to consider which classic movies from the past couldn't get made today.

Some ones are kept around in the public consciousness as examples of how wicked we used to be - everyone knows you can't make Birth of a Nation any more, but very few people today would even want to. Other movies are partially excused because of their cinematic value, although it's well understood that nobody should get the wrong idea - Gone With the Wind, for instance (1940, 8.2 out of 10 on IMDB). People still like that movie, but nobody would imagine that the current script, with its copious references to 'darkies' would get through even the first read-through at a studio. But this was made a long time ago, so they should get some credit for their good intentions - it was progressive for refraining from using the word 'nigger' and including the word 'damn', both choices of which proved surprisingly far-sighted. So Gone With the Wind gets a partial pass, like a racist Grandma that people still find lovable as long as you don't get her on the subject of the Japanese or crime in America.

But interestingly enough, there are some modern examples too, that people still think of fondly, but couldn't get made today.

Rain Man, for instance (made in 1988, 8.0 on IMDB), will never ever have a sequel or a reboot. It is inconceivable that you could make it today. The entire premise of the movie is that Dustin Hoffman is an autistic savant, and Tom Cruise is his intolerant brother who needs to transport him across the country in order to get access to an inheritance. The premise of nearly every joke is Dustin Hoffman's odd and innocent behaviour, and Tom Cruise's aggressive, cynical and frustrated ways of dealing with it. (Sample quote, yelled at Dustin Hoffman's head: "You can't tell me that you're not in there somewhere!).

As it turns out, the portrayal of Dustin Hoffman's character is actually rather sympathetic - while a lot of the jokes involve the absurdity of his behaviour, at least part of it is about Tom Cruise being a complete insensitive dick about it all, so the broad message is certainly not that it's hilarious to make fun of autistic people. But that wouldn't stop the autism activists having a fit if it were made today. It wouldn't get greenlit, it wouldn't get seriously discussed, it wouldn't get through the first glance through of a script reader, and because everyone knows this, it wouldn't get written in the first place.

Or take Silence of the Lambs (made in 1991, 8.6 on IMDB). The offending premise here is a little bit more subtle - the serial killer Buffalo Bill, whom the protagonists are hunting, is a man who kills and dismembers women in part because he was frustrated at his inability to become transsexual. That is to say, he wanted to become a woman as a result of childhood abuse (because why else would you want to become a member of the opposite sex if your thinking wasn't deranged for some good reason), but he was denied a sex change operation due to said abusive circumstances. It's taken as a fairly straightforward premise of the movie that the desire to amputate one's genitals and attempt to become a member of the opposite sex was, prima facie, an indication of likely mental illness. Hence it's not surprising that he would wind up killing women as part of his sexual confusion and jealousy.

These days, it's a mark of bigotry to even raise questions about whether transsexuals should be allowed to use women's bathrooms, or compete in womens MMA tournaments.

If the movie were being rewritten today, Buffalo Bill would probably be a killer driven by misogyny, and his evil childhood influences would be rejection by women and too much reading of the manosphere. THAT will make you kill people! Transsexuals are just fine, in fact they're better than that, they're almost a protected group (or will be soon - trust me).

And these are just the changes that have happened in my lifetime.

The changes in the zeitgeist that happened before one's lifetime are far harder to see.

If you really want to see what they are, pick a few random primary sources from Moldbug, cited next to each relevant post.

If conservatism is the democracy of the dead, the only way to find out how they might vote if they could is to actually read what they've written.

Who knows what ideas are going entirely unthought in your head, not for having examined the subject and rejected it, but by simply having never heard it at all.

An Open Letter to OKCupid Regarding your Campaign to get Brendan Eich Fired

Well, Moldbug was certainly prescient on this one. (Isn't he always?). The technology brown scare has really started to flex its muscles, rooting out any indications of right wing though among people in technology. First Pax Dickinson, chanelling Milan Kundera's descriptions of Communist Czechoslovakia, got fired for making jokes about feminism.

This time, Brendan Eich got forced to resign as CEO of Mozilla (the company the makes the Firefox web browser). It's hard to tell whether he jumped, was pushed, or some combination of the above. What was his big sin? Well, it turned out that back in 2008 he...wait for it... donated $1000 to a cause supporting Proposition 8 to overturn the intrusive California Supreme Court decision on gay marriage. Oh Noz! OMG! Never mind that more than half of California supported this ballot initiative at the time (that's how it passed). Never mind that Brendan Eich's view on gay marriage in 2008 was the same as Barack Obama's view on gay marriage in 2008. Never mind that all the evidence suggests that Eich was totally even-handed in all his personal and professional dealings with staff. The man invented javascript, but he appears to have a sincere belief in at least some views identified as conservative. Out he goes! The professional grievance lobbies come out demanding blood, and Mozilla caves.

You might think that this beast would thus be sated, if you had no concept of how beasts work.

Flush with success, we now see the next iteration - a campaign to get users to boycott file storage company Dropbox over the fact that they appointed Condoleezza Rice to their board.

My favourite part of this ridiculous screed was the point where they displayed a brief moment of dim comprehension only to swat down the cognitive dissonance immediately. They begin with a hypothetical query about the true nature of the campaign to boycott Dropbox over Rice's appointment:

Why is this? Because she was a part of the Bush administration? Because she is a Republican and we should hate Republicans? I mean, come on, isn't Al Gore on Apple's Board? He's no saint!

No. This is not an issue of partisanship. It makes sense that Dropbox would want an accomplished, high-level, well-connected individual on their Board of Directors as they prepare for their IPO. ...

Choosing Condoleezza Rice for Dropbox's Board is problematic on a number of deeper levels, and invites serious concerns about Drew Houston and the senior leadership at Dropbox's commitment to freedom, openness, and ethics. 

Red hot tip, this is exactly the same as Al Gore being on Apple's board. Except that a) Al Gore isn't a prominent Republican, and b) nobody much seemed to know or care that Al Gore was on Apple's board. I sure didn't.  Hmm, I wonder if the two might be related?

How can you tell this? Let's look at the much vaunted concerns about freedom, openness and ethics raised. Point 1 was, you can guess:

She helped start the Iraq War. 

I presume you'd have started a similar campaign if, say, Hillary Clinton had been appointed to the board then?

On and on it goes, citing such other non-partisan concerns such as 'she was involved in the creation of the Bush administration's torture program' and 'Rice was on the Board of Directors at Chevron'. To add to the hilarity, the site doesn't even explain what exactly is wrong with being on the Chevron board, it just presumes readers will know.

Buried in the middle is the marginally relevant concern that 'Rice not only supports warrantless wiretaps, she authorized several'. But what has this got to do with Dropbox? Do you think she's going to set up a rival NSA within Dropbox to snoop on your stuff? Why would she do that?

More importantly, when you're sandwiching this between complaints about Chevron and the Iraq war, you'll forgive me for being somewhat hesitant to take your complaints about privacy at face value.

You may think I'm just beating up on some random no-name group of punters complaining about Dropbox. Not so. This came to my attention because it got voted to the front page of Hacker News. As of now, it has 1810 points, which is a huge amount for a story on there. The only thing that got it removed from the front page relatively quickly (given its points) was a campaign of downvotes from long-time users who were disgusted at the (sadly probably inevitable) trend of Hacker News turning into yet one more Reddit-esque bastion of approved liberal opinion, rather than an apolitical place where hackers can talk about tech stuff.

The problem with witch hunts is that, as Monsieur Rabelais put it, the appetite grows by eating.

As Moldbug described during the Dickinson affair:

The logic of the witch hunter is simple.  It has hardly changed since Matthew Hopkins' day.  The first requirement is to invert the reality of power.  Power at its most basic level is the power to harm or destroy other human beings.  The obvious reality is that witch hunters gang up and destroy witches. Whereas witches are never, ever seen to gang up and destroy witch hunters.  By this test alone, we can see that the conspiracy is imaginary (Brown Scare) rather than real (Red Scare).

Think about it.  Obviously, if the witches had any power whatsoever, they wouldn't waste their time gallivanting around on broomsticks, fellating Satan and cursing cows with sour milk.  They're getting burned right and left, for Christ's sake!  Priorities!  No, they'd turn the tables and lay some serious voodoo on the witch-hunters.  In a country where anyone who speaks out against the witches is soon found dangling by his heels from an oak at midnight with his head shrunk to the size of a baseball, we won't see a lot of witch-hunting and we know there's a serious witch problem.  In a country where witch-hunting is a stable and lucrative career, and also an amateur pastime enjoyed by millions of hobbyists on the weekend, we know there are no real witches worth a damn.

We do not see Pax Dickinson and Paul Graham ganging up to destroy Gawker.  We see them curling up into a fetal position and trying to survive.  An America in which hackers could purge journalists for communist deviation, rather than journalists purging hackers for fascist deviation, would be a very different America.  Ya think?

Whereas the real America, the America in which a journalist little more than an intern, with no discernible achievements but a sharp tongue, a Columbia degree and trouble using MySQL, can quite effectively bully one of the most accomplished hackers of his era, not to mention a way better writer - this is the remarkable America that we live in and need to explain.

Thugs love power. They love to control other people, and no control is as absolute as the ability to decide another's fate. This is as old as man. In tribal societies, people were open in their desire to rule. The modern political thug prefers mainly to destroy ideological components.

But I think the point about inverting the reality of power is not just about convincing the masses, although that's important too. At least equally important is that modern witch hunters are trying to convince themselves that their cause is that of the righteous underdog. Nobody is the villain in their own narrative. If I am strong and Brendan Eich is weak, why I would be simply a mean bully who liked getting people fired for disagreeing with me. It must be the case that Brendan Eich is the real oppressor, heinously depriving me of liberties by virtue of the fact that a) he's standing in the room, and b) six years ago he once made a political donation supporting a ballot initiative that has since been ruled unconstitutional. Be honest, you cowards. Do you really think that in modern California you are more likely to be fired for being gay than you are to be fired for being a fundamentalist Christian who thinks that homosexuality is a sin? Being fired for being gay is illegal in the State of California. Ironically, so is being fired for one's religion. Of course, religion is interpreted rather narrowly here. If Brendan Eich makes a donation to a cause that he believes in because of his religion, that's totally different. Unless his religion were Islam, maybe then he'd have a better chance of succeeding. In the end, it's just politics all the way down.

The modern thug adds insult to injury with the consummate hypocrisy of their position.

What does a totalitarian society look like? Totalitarianism is a world where the ruling ideology must be adhered to in every corner of life. It is a world where the smallest indications of dissent must be stifled. It is a world where in the limit every action must become a political action, as the existence of even independent and non-political groups is a potential challenge. As Il Duce put it, 'all within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.' Replace 'state' with 'ideology' and you've got a pretty good working definition.

America, obviously, is not a totalitarian society. Pace Jonah Goldberg, the gay lobbyists who sought Eich's ouster were certainly not Fascists, or even fascists. But are they totalitarians? Or would they be, if they got their way? This depends on the person, but also on the level of dissent being discussed. On the question of whether gays should be lynched, or whether it should be acceptable to advocate as such, I'd say that many of them would probably quite openly admit to totalitarianism. And quite reasonably, too. They would be sincere in their belief that this is something that would make the world a better place, in the same way we'd be better off in a world where it were socially unacceptable for anyone to say that they support murder or child torture.We're mostly all totalitarians on that.

But where down the line should dissent still be allowed?  What about if one wants to publicly argue that that homosexuality should be made illegal and punishable by a prison term? Should the social consequences of that speech be social shunning? Being fired? Being imprisoned itself, like some of Europe's Holocaust denial laws or German laws against displaying Nazi propaganda? What about simply saying that homosexuality is a sin and should be discouraged? Or to say that marriage should only be between a man and a woman?

This is the way it always goes. My causes are aspects of fundamental rights that no conscionable person should disagree with. Your causes are mean-spirited, naked partisanship. Condoleezza Rice supported torture!

So between a world that I favor, where pretty much anyone can say anything about political matters and not be fired, and a world where rigid ideology is enforced and dissenters are hauled away to re-education camps, where is modern America?

I don't know, exactly. I don't even think there's a definite answer. But it's worth pondering the possible truth of Conquest's Second Law:

Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.

Would you say that Mozilla's actions are consistent with this law, or not?

I resent the intrusion of politics on more and more aspects of life. I resent this even on causes that I'm personally minded to support, such as gay marriage.

During the Eich furor, dating website OKCupid decided to publicly weigh in by displaying a message to Firefox users when they opened the OKCupid website, telling them they'd rather they not use the browser due to Eich's views.

As it turns out, this was one area that I was actually able to do something small about, as I was (I blush) paying for their A-list membership.

Well, you d***heads, here's $4.95 a month that you'll no longer get, to indicate in my own small way my disapproval of your pathetic and cowardly lack of commitment to free speech, and in particular to thick liberty. Yours is the thinnest gruel of free speech - in theory you can say anything you want and you won't be imprisoned by the government. In practice, you can't say anything that departs too far from mainstream opinion without being fired and shunned. I understand that government action and private action aren't the same. Does that mean we should celebrate every private action taken to restrict the sphere of what one can utter in public life?

For Mozilla, they were in a tight spot. Keep Eich, and the liberals boycott. Cave, and the conservatives and free speech types boycott. I still think their decision was pathetic, but predictable.

But you, OKCupid, deliberately decided to insert yourself into this fray, without any prompting from anyone else. You decided to lead the charge for a browser boycott.

Screw you, OKCupid, you miserable worthless popinjays. Screw you, for making me decide which dating website to use based on politics. We can now have the conservative dating website and the liberal dating website. What a triumph for an inclusive society devoted to pluralism and thick liberty.

I do not wish to have to think about politics when deciding which brand of soft drink to buy, which petrol station to fill up my car at, and which dating website to patronise. Maybe you want to live in a society of the blues and the greens. I do not.

But by George, if you do make me decide my dating website choice based on politics, it won't take me long to figure out where I stand regarding you.

And you know the part that galls me the most?

In your smug self-satisfaction, you will almost certainly take boycotts like mine as proof that there really was a massive homophobic mob out there that you bravely took a stand against. You will tar those disgusted by your speech-stifling actions as bigots motivated only by hatred, while congratulating yourselves on your courage. The tiny lost revenue is proof of your suffering and martyrdom for the great liberal cause.

When bullies on your own side decide to form a lynch mob to expand their political success, do as principled gay rights advocates like Andrew Sullivan did and tell them to go screw themselves.

We mercifully live in a society where the vast majority of our decisions can be made without thinking about politics at every step.

You give that blessing up at your peril.

PC Non-Sequiturs About Terrorism

Apparently a gunman in Belgium named Nordine Amrani shot and killed three people in Liege, Belgium, and wounded 75.

Here's the BBC with some helpful context:

Officials said the attacker acted alone, ruling out terrorism.

Uhhh, this rules out terrorism... how, exactly? Surely nobody acting alone could ever be involved in a politically-motivated act designed to inspire civilian terror!

Any bets as to whether you think they'd apply the same logic to Timothy McVeigh or that nutcase in Norway? Anyone at all? I'm offering highly competitive odds.