Germany isn’t the only thing abolishing itself.
A quote from the past.
In me, the Christianity of my forbears reaches its logical conclusion. In me the stern intellectual conscience that Christianity fosters and makes paramount turns against Christianity. In me Christianity … devours itself.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, from the Introduction of the 1918 English Translation of Antichrist (1895), by H. L Mencken.
A quote from yesterday:
… the actually-existing, so-called liberal state is impossible to justify on the mundane liberal terms most intellectuals claim to accept.
…the fact is, mundane liberalism is flatly incompatible with the security state as we know it. That anyone spurred to action against the illiberal security state by the democratic jusificatory [sic] ethos of mundane liberalism has come to seem a little “libertarian,” and may even therefore confess some personal “libertarian” sympathies, suggests to me a problem with “liberalism” as it is embodied in actual political discourse and practice. It suggests that liberalism is effectively a corrupt form of statist institutional conservatism …
Will Wilkinson, 20-JAN-2014.
And some quotes from the last few days:
(1) The whole episode disgusts me – as it should disgust anyone interested in a tolerant and diverse society. If this is the gay rights movement today – hounding our opponents with a fanaticism more like the religious right than anyone else – then count me out. If we are about intimidating the free speech of others, we are no better than the anti-gay bullies who came before us.
(2) … There is only one permissible opinion at Mozilla, and all dissidents must be purged! Yep, that’s left-liberal tolerance in a nut-shell. … This is a repugnantly illiberal sentiment. It is also unbelievably stupid for the gay rights movement. You want to squander the real gains we have made by argument and engagement by becoming just as intolerant of others’ views as the Christianists? You’ve just found a great way to do this. It’s a bad, self-inflicted blow. And all of us will come to regret it.
(3)When people’s lives and careers are subject to litmus tests, and fired if they do not publicly renounce what may well be their sincere conviction, we have crossed a line. This is McCarthyism applied by civil actors. This is the definition of intolerance. … It’s staggering to me that a minority long persecuted for holding unpopular views can now turn around and persecute others for the exact same reason. If we cannot live and work alongside people with whom we deeply disagree, we are finished as a liberal society.
… There you have the illiberal mindset. Morality trumps freedom. Our opponents must be humiliated, ridiculed and “isolated as perverts”. I mean “bigots”, excuse me.
Orwell wept.
Andrew Sullivan, 04-APR-2014 [emphasis added]. And somewhere from the realm beyond I can hear the scolding voice of Christopher Hitchens whispering similar sentiments.
And Sullivan should have phrased his expression in the declarative instead of the conditional. Since, it seems evident to me, that we have arrived and we cannot live with people with whom we disagree, and that we are indeed finished as a liberal society because progressive morality trumps freedom, and liberalism has reached its logical conclusion by abolishing itself.
Freddie deBoer also asks, “Is the social justice left really abandoning free speech?” and follows up with:
But I can only honestly represent to you both my personal experience and my read of the current journalism and literature on this subject, and both tell me that there is a distressing current of antagonism towards free expression within the social justice left.
The lesson of Eich’s purging by hashtag advocacy is that it was completely effective and simultaneously completely costless for everyone who wanted it to happen. That is an incredibly terrifying amount of power, and it guarantees that we’ll see much, much more of this kind of thing in the years to come. There is simply no reason why not. If you can get drunk on alcohol, and not suffer any consequences, you will drink. If you can get drunk on power, and push your opponents around with complete impunity, you will just keep pushing.
But liberalism, as classically understood, with its notions of free and open debate and tolerance of opposing viewpoints which form the basis of the civil society, is not compatible with the exercise of this kind of power, whether it is employed by the state or by a howling mob.
But the mob had a clear choice: ‘niceness, community, and civilization‘ – that is, ‘liberalism’ – or howling. And it chose to howl; like it always does the moment it thinks it can get away with it. Now that is knows it has the upper hand – the whip hand – and is just starting to feel its oats, it is simply a matter of time before Jericho’s new army blasts its terrible trumpets and brings down all the other walls surrounding the beleaguered remains of our civility. No rest until absolute victory.
If one wonders why there is an urgent and compelling need for political innovation and discourse concerning radically different approaches to social organization, then I would argue that this is it. If any idea threatens whatever rough beast is now visibly slouching towards us, then it won’t be long until such discussions and their participants simply won’t be tolerated and will be silenced, one way or another.
Who knows how much longer the window of opportunity will remain open. Make all the hay you can while the sun still shines.
SOME AMENDATIONS:
Popehat, Harvey Silvergate of Fire: Eventually That Animal Is Going To Turn On You, And You’re Going To End Up The Victim!
@5:20: The thing that makes me laugh the most is that I am considered a right-winger by people on the Academic Left, only people on the Academic Left are sufficiently narrow-minded to call me a right-winger. Actually, I’m a liberal, but I’m a a civil-libertarian liberal, an old-fashioned liberal who actually not only believes in a decent society that helps its most unfortunate members survive, but who also happens to believe in Freedom. Because so much of the Left today doesn’t believe in liberty, especially the Academic Left. There’s something wrong with calling the Academic Left ‘liberalism’, they’re not liberals at all. They’re really leftist totalitarians. Why is it, when I’m representing students, so many of those students are conservatives? The reason is that the campus is a very hostile, alien place for student or faculty members of conservative thought. I do represent students on the left from time to time when occasionally even they taste the whip of academic censorship, but more frequently my clients are conservatives, and that’s because they’re mostly the ones who are victimized.
The saddest thing about Harvard, and mind you I’m a graduate of its Law School and I’m supposed to be a loyal alum, and I try to be a loyal alum, because I’m trying to bring Harvard back to the principles that it still claims that it believes in, but doesn’t practice. And that is: respect for free speech, academic freedom meaning respect, or at least tolerance, of views that are considered to be obnoxious, retrograde, Evil! They’re only words, or essays, and they should be completely protected. You can be thrown out of Harvard for saying something politically incorrect. The censorship at Harvard runs from top to bottom.
(AMENDATION: Be sure to check out Sam Harris’ interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
[Ali] … I wanted a quiet life in academia, and I wanted to be safe.
So I approached Cynthia, and she took me to the Brookings Institute, and to Rand, and to Johns Hopkins, and to Georgetown—she took me to all these institutions, and there was no interest. They didn’t say it to my face, but I got the feeling that they were uncomfortable with what I had been saying about Islam.
…
Harris: So the truly mortifying answer to the question of why you are at the AEI is that no liberal institution would offer you shelter when you most needed it—and when your value to the global conversation about free speech, the rights of women, and other norms of civilization was crystal clear. And ever since, your affiliation with the one institution that did take you in has been used to defame you in liberal circles. Perfect.
Hirsi Ali: Well, it certainly seemed at the time that none of the other institutions were willing to talk about Islam in the way that I do—and specifically about its treatment of women.
Harris: And they still won’t. I consider this one of the great moral scandals of our time. How you’ve been treated reminds me of what many liberals did during the Salman Rushdie affair, blaming him for his recklessness in the face of the hair-trigger sensitivities of the Muslim community.
I’m a liberal by nearly every measure. Give me a list of liberal values and prejudices, and I will check almost every box.
Hirsi Ali: So will I.
…Harris: As a relevant counterpoint, I should say that when I was raising money for your security, I got in touch with some of my contacts in the “moderate” Muslim community. In particular, I reached out to Reza Aslan, with whom I was on entirely cordial terms. I said, essentially, “Reza, wouldn’t it be great if the vast majority of Muslims who are moderate helped protect Ayaan from the minority who aren’t?” It seems to me undeniable that if people like Reza are going to argue that Islam is just like any other religion, they have a real interest in ensuring that people can safely criticize their faith—or even leave it.
But all Reza did was attack you as a bigot and deny, against all evidence, that you had any security concerns worth taking seriously. His response came as quite a shock to me, frankly. I was unprepared to encounter this level of moral blindness and ill will, especially at a moment when I was reaching out for help.
People, is this an opportunity to split the reasonable liberals away from the evil mob with whom they still affiliate? Maybe.)
There is also the historically recurrent and universal human phenomenon of the opportunistic abandonment of formerly claimed ‘sacred’ principles when they are no longer useful or convenient. The party of a minority viewpoint which is out of power will, naturally, publicly and loudly extol the transcendent virtues of maximum effective tolerance for minority viewpoints. They will claim that they will continue to respect these sacred principles should their point of view ever come into majority and their party ascend to power. That the members of a waning majority can, on the basis of the growing-minority’s adamant dedication to these sacred principles, trust the members of that opposition and conclude that they need not resist with all their might and to the last man, and that they can relent and surrender with the confidence that they will be treated fairly and without abuse or retribution.
And then, the minute the old minority achieves enough power to do so, they throw all that away and crush the new minority into powder. They don’t even feel bad about the obvious hypocrisy, which is, after all, so, so easy to rationalize away. After all, they were abusing their power for bad, whereas we are only using it for good. See? Easy peasy. So one should always expect it to happen, regardless of any claims to the contrary.
In one particular context, Rod Dreher calls this, “The Law of Merited Impossibility”
The Law Of Merited Impossibility is an epistemological construct governing the paradoxical way overclass opinion makers frame the discourse about the clash between religious liberty and gay civil rights. It is best summed up by the phrase, “It’s a complete absurdity to believe that Christians will suffer a single thing from the expansion of gay rights, and boy, do they deserve what they’re going to get.”
Or, more simply and abstractly:
It’s not going to happen, and when it does, you people will deserve it.
And indeed, Chapter Two of Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals [Review coming soon], “Of Means and Ends”, is chock full of stories illustrating precisely this pre-power, post-power hypocritical dynamic. The fundamental question for a non-progressive is “How hard should I fight? Can I trust them not to be nasty, totalitarian tyrants the moment they take hold of the reigns? Will they stay true to their espoused principles?”
And you can hear Alinsky laugh and laugh at you.
Ha Ha! Chump Sucker! Of course you can’t trust them; they have revealed themselves, and without even a glimmer of concern for how it has ruined their reputation. Of course you can never afford to give them an inch. Of course they’ll ‘abandon’ these principles; that’s what people always do when they have power, which is why power is so dangerous. And actually, if you’d open your eyes, you’ll notice that they already have. The days of discourse have departed.
Handle's Haus 
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Let me just explain things from my perspective.
I wrote a few blogs, and stopped. These were, at worst, stupidly opinionated like many other assholes on the Internet. Several months later, I discovered a ludicrous governmental conspiracy theory involving me; truly ludicrous, and vicious to boot.
Since then I’ve agit…no…threaten…no, not really…sent a few emails. Meanwhile I have been subject to repeated, arrogant threats and a surreal harassment campaign.
So, who is pushing his opponents around with complete impunity? Whose liberty have I infringed? No, I have reached the end of my tether reading evil interpretations of my private, god damned attempts to be reasonable, harassment and threats. Just leave me alone.
@James,
Are you on the left, or the right?
I would borrow Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s phrase, and describe myself as a “liberal of the extreme right”.
I miss your blogging James; you are a talented and erudite writer from whom I always learn something. I will give you the benefit of the doubt with regards to your claims of harassment and say that this disturbs and angers me a great deal and that I am sympathetic to your plight. Nevertheless, and as I’ve stated before, I honestly know nothing about it. I like you, and if there’s some way I can help you I will. But I am not your enemy, so appeals through me will not reach their intended destination.
I think James deserves an email *wink* *wink*
I would prefer people to be able to discuss hypothetical, radical political change of a non-violent character on the Internet, without being subject to the threat of government-orchestrated mob or lunatic violence, or harassment. There is a clear difference between this and spontaneous, unguided public opinion. I acknowledge that some forms of criticism on the Internet are irresponsible, but don’t accept that only geniuses should be allowed to participate in these discourses. Note that I am not “Obama”, and neither does any other unexceptional intellect have to be regarded as an aspiring political leader or rabble-rouser.
I am concerned that if the government can form absurd hypotheses to justify abuse of its critics, it has abrogated free speech. I suggest that it has a strong incentive not to behave in such an uncompromising way, which is related to the general theme of this post. Maybe I am not the person to talk to about that; I don’t speak for anyone else. Heck, I’m just some opinionated asshole.
It’s worse than that, actually.
The funny thing is Eich didn’t even say anything. Putting aside legal fictions that conflate actual verbal expression of one’s sentiments with any participation in the political process no matter how passive or peripheral, all Eich did was give money. Everything he’s ever said has been as close to the progressive claimed ideal as is possible without agreeing with them and openly advocating for their causes. That was not enough, indeed, intolerable.
He didn’t run for office. He never even opened his mouth. He never even moved his pen. But it was not enough.
I am reminded of Rothbard’ line about the Puritans disenfranchising other Protestants:
Sound familiar? Actually, if you asked Eich, I think he would have preferred mere disenfranchisement to what actually occurred to him. The message is clear. The only way to live one’s life in peace is to actually be ‘orthodox in religion’, or to pretend to be, or keep one’s head down and pay lip-service to it when necessary and never, ever, leave any publicly-uncoverable crumb of evidence that you weren’t that can be traced to your real life identity.
And most importantly, remember, it was not the state or the government which made this happen. The state only stood by and watched it happen. Stood by and let the mob have its fun.
“I am reminded of Rothbard’ line about the Puritans”
Indeed. History repeats itself first time as tragedy, second time as farce, and, apparently no one notices the repetition after that.
You wrote that stuff under your real name?
Threats, unless they come from, say, gov’t officials or organized crime figures are kind of irrelevant. There’s something like a 1 to a 100 disparity between words and deeds..
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I am an RSS reader, I used it a few years ago, stopped and have started again. Sometimes it can be overwhelming, but it makes it so much easier to follow multiple blogs.
Our “left singularity” won’t look like Cambodia’s, I don’t think, but it’ll be pretty crazy in its own way. You’re right, these internet career lynchings will come a lot thicker and faster. Sullivan, with deranged fear and hatred of dissenters, is a funny one to be noticing it, but I guess he’s the sanest man on the Left now.
That’s false in my case. I agree with the following, although (speaking very hypothetically) I would expect something in return for a credible promise to obey these norms:
*Blogging lends itself too easily to agitation propaganda, so this type of medium should be eschewed by contrarians in most cases.
*Critics should not aspire to, and hesitate even to discuss overhauling the entire state in some foreseeable or planned revolution
*Critics should not recklessly undermine the sanctity of important institutions
*Critics should make it difficult for rabble-rousers to exploit their ideas
*Although some powerful individuals have to be mentioned by name, critique should not be unnecessarily personal or polemic
I might not like it, but I also don’t find the intrusion of sockpuppets unreasonable, and more abstractly I can see the sense in making it difficult for ambitious critics to obtain high status within mainstream society.
The tolerance I would expect is:
*Critics who obey these norms should not be exposed to the threat of mob coercion by the government, however indirectly. They should, in commonsense terms, be left alone by the government; hysterical theories should be a cause for negotiation, not threats.
*Critics should, like any citizen, be protected by the legal system from any criminal aggression that should arise spontaneously.
*Young or unexceptional people who participate in contrarian discourse should, provided they keep to the norms and don’t break the law, not be aggressively patronised by the government, i.e. be routinely subject to invasive surveillance or threats.
I think that this agreement, were it feasible, would benefit all concerned.
I admit that I give the appearance of opportunistic reasoning. This is partly because I’m erratic, but also due to my strict commitment to rationality. I was quite happy with the apparent norm of Internet discourse in which no-one would dream of threatening their intellectual opponents; but when that is violated, and the threats continue, one is left wondering whether the choice is between cowardly submission–which might nonetheless be dangerous–to a mysterious opponent that has no official, symbolic or moral authority to compel it, and therefore has its cake and eats it in a frankly disgusting way; or else a brutally realistic discussion about what might happen, above all in an evolutionary sense, because these decisions aren’t taken in a vacuum, if the American government were to make it effectively impossible for serious criticism to take place on the Internet.
The origin of this rough beast visibly slouching towards us, according to my intuitive sense of these things, is that the model of memetic production in Western societies isn’t sustainable; it can’t innovate enough to keep up with the demand for religious progression, or keep young people on side, and isn’t nimble enough to steer this public religion in a benign direction, viz. away from moralistic egalitarianism. So, abstractly, cooperation between critics and the state would be the best and perhaps only way to tame this beast.
“Of course they’ll ‘abandon’ these principles; that’s what people always do when they have power, which is why power is so dangerous.”
That’s often true, but the cases where it’s not true are important, in part because they are overrepresented among states that were so successful that they are historically important. In particular, roots of the Industrial Revolution tend to run through Dutch and British regimes which were not paragons of tolerance in an absolute sense — but were pretty tolerant in comparison to their predecessors and most of their contemporaries. There also seems to be a clear tendency for other successful merchant states to be more eclectic than the average of their neighbors. This doesn’t change the fact that power is dangerous, but it does mean it’s not a safe bet to look at the future and figure all tolerance movements will trend to intolerance in power. Many will, but it is likely that a disproportionate number of the state-level organizations that will matter down the road will be those that trended differently.
Possibly there’s even a tendency for successful expansionist military states to be more eclectic than their neighbors, though our documentation tends to be poor and/or confusing. Even for Rome, where we have a lot of remaining documents, who can really know quite how good they were at integrating aliens compared to the median contemporary rival? As I understand it it is at least highly plausible that they were better at taking up alien technology than the average contemporary rival, which is suggestive. And even for early Islam, you can laugh about the very notion of a fanatical cult being inclusive — but it seems to me that even though they didn’t make the route to inclusion painless, they at least made it wide and clearly marked compared to many other historical societies (China, e.g.) and that may have contributed significantly to their expansionist success.
Also, multiple nations rooted in Northeast Europe developed interesting mechanisms for revealing true consensus (imperfectly and skewedly, but still significantly and importantly). Various kinds of assemblies, jury trial, open trials, old mechanisms like petitioning publicly morphing into new mechanisms like freedom of the press… That there was ever a tendency to develop such mechanisms in a historically important class of societies shows that the modern left push to marginalize them or replace them with ersatz mechanisms for papering over preference falsification (e.g. new obstacles to elective office matched with obstacles to organizations and contributions, bans on hate speech, limitations of legitimacy of speech to official press or official academy, and various career sanctions like the Summers-through-Eich history under discussion) is not an inevitable consequence of power, just a (very) common strategy choice for powerful groups.
Civilized norms of attitudes and behavior are a kind of order that is susceptible to the forces of entropy without constant effort to maintain and preserve them. It is always quicker and easier to tear down and revert to human defaults than it is to build up a culture where the respect for, and internal motivation to conform to, unnatural, counter-impulsive standards of interaction is so strong that people will resist their urges to do anything within their ability to gain power, dominate their neighbors, and crush their enemies. Just as in a prisoner’s dilemma game, there are high-trust and low-trust social equilibria, and it is much more likely that a society will fall down and devolve into endless tit-for-tat than it is that it will climb up into stable and continuous civil cooperation.
An example of a group formed out of freedom’s crucible are the Dissenters, and the intense and fanatical intolerance of the British Puritans is, of course, infamous.
To maintain that a large boulder elevated on a slanted slope need not always fall down is possible, but requires an explanation regarding the mechanism that is holding the thing in place, when the forces upon it are constantly threatening to bring it down. You can say, “Ah, see here, there is a kind of support holding it up, and we need not fear its further migration downward.”
As I see it, the ancient cultural support for liberal norms is both a moral inheritance and the product of a certain balance of power. The inheritance is vanishing, and the alignment of power forces has become unbalanced. I see no reason why the boulder won’t continue rolling towards us until our valley village is destroyed. Can you give me one?
“intense and fanatical intolerance of the British Puritans is, of course, infamous”
Meh. Notorious, maybe. They seem like the end of an era to me, and not all that remarkable in that era. (E.g. some atrocities against Dutch cities in their revolt against Spain, and my uninformed “everybody played hard” impression of the 30 years war, and those poor Albigensians…) And not all that impressive compared to the inter-era French Revolution, which was itself outclassed in the twentieth century. The Puritans do seem to have destroyed their brand by genuinely pissing off most of the people they ruled, but while that reflects badly on them it doesn’t rise to the level of infamy.
“Can you give me one [reason]?”
I don’t see any great reason to expect it to happen in current US society, or any other particular modern nation, although it isn’t *ridiculously* unlikely for it to happen in any of a number of modern societies. It seems pretty darned unlikely for it to happen *smoothly*: no existing powerful factions I can think of could very credibly commit to a compromise based on a commitment like the Declaration of Right or Bill of Rights. But there remain factors in “Anglosphere” society that might make it rationally tempting for some kinds of conquerors or coup instigators to go for something like a limited-franchise republic with teeth — chosen as the closest viable-today analogy I can think of to what William of Orange was rationally tempted to go for. I agree with (I gather) Moldbug that the Cathedral has displayed hubris in taking legitimacy and perceived authority (and related things like competence and credibility) for granted. Unlike Moldbug, I do not look at the Stuarts as a solution, quite the opposite: I see James II as an interesting historical analogue to the current situation. AFAICS it would have been difficult before the Glorious Revolution to predict that nemesis was destined to be one of my examples of societies that built a successful relatively tolerant coalition.
It’s also conceivable for it to happen smoothly somewhere if some political genius figures out a viable way to negotiate something similar to a free city. That has consistently been a nonstarter in the modern world so far, but there are various medieval instances of sovereigns being rationally motivated to go for them, and it looks to me as though the raw fiscal incentive today could be large compared to what tempted kings long ago.
The best reason I can think of to *expect* something like this to happen in current rich countries is not terribly convincing. Today if you pick killteams from the population of a rich country, and one side gets to choose first and gets a few percent of the population, and the other side gets to choose last and gets the rest (with no attached property advantages/disadvantages, just the human capital; exact population percentages dependent on things like how many months or years it is before the battle kicks off), I think choosing first could well be the bigger military advantage than the complementary enormous numerical advantage. Until sometime in the second half of the twentieth century, that might have been true of sea and air warfare, but land warfare seems to have been the great equalizer. So seeing this growing instability — one man one vote falling away from a useful estimate of effectiveness even in land warfare — I could handwavingly argue that many regions are metastable w.r.t. falling into a form of government where the deciders are (casually extrapolating from history) likely motivated to resurrect rule of law and freedom of contract and security of property and all that crazy stuff. But this is a huge oversimplification, so who the heck really knows?
I am amazed that the descendants of the people who admired Communism in all its incarnations, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, et. al. can be so deluded as to believe the “social justice left is abandoning free speech.” The Left was never in favor of freedom of any kind.
Now we hear whining from all the fools for ideals that were never held and likely aren’t even possible. Every self-congratulating supporter of the Left will own the bloodshed to come.
I think the progressive reasoning is that the protections of progressivism should only extend to people that are not in opposition in any way to progressivism. “Good” principles are rendered inert when employed by “bad” people. Sarah Palin, Michelle Malkin, Thomas Sowell are all Uncle Toms first and foremost.
As you pointed out there is also a valuable lesson for libertarians here in that the eternal boogeyman “the state” doesn’t technically have anything to do with this. And the favored talking point that is circulated these days is that “freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences of speech.” No one can cry foul as long as no body is drawing a government paycheck at the Ministry of Mau-Mau.
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A new phase of the coming dark era will begin when, by some means, IP addresses are used to track down an assortment of anonymous commenters on blogs like this and those commenters are outed and punished like Eich was. Overnight, almost all the rest of us will disappear from the commenting sections and the only people left will be a few brave, financially independent souls who dare to speak out using their real names.
When you think of the power that technology has now to track down people, to control a population – with cameras everywhere, massive government databases crosschecked to find dissidents, etc – and you think of the unscrupulous fanaticism of the progressive fundamentalists – and their coming demographic absolute majority through population replacement – it’s hard to be optimistic. The one thing I hold to is that no other people on earth has been able to tame white men when their blood is up.
I also would not write off the younger generation. The progressive fundamentalists – the 60s generation – are now “the establishment”. I think a lot of young men are not happy with the direction things are going..
Fortunately, the solution to this already exists in developments such as TOR or I2P.
I only read thoughtcrime blogs from behind the i2p proxy. Installation is simple, configuration can be difficult but a person of your intellect should have no trouble finding and interpreting the proper documentation. (The proxy is localhost:4444, btw.)
The high level of anonymity from i2p comes at a cost though, in speed. To compensate for this, just use the Opera web browser and be sure to set ‘turbo mode’ to ‘on’. For even faster browsing, just disable all images and you’ll approach non-proxied speeds.
I have yet to see anyone in the right/reactionary blogs properly analyze the Eich situation for what actually happened.
This didn’t have anything to do with LGBT activisits saying or doing anything pertinent in the near term. This didn’t have anything to do with a culture of limousine liberalism at Mozilla’s upper levels, which was in place long before Eich was named CEO (look at the Board that voted him in, and the foundations they are on.)
This is Google, which funds 97% of the Mozilla Foundation, not wanting to fuck up its market position by taking any sociopolitical risk. It’s similar to Disney’s constant caving to PC norms when it comes to ABC or Disney movies. Disney makes all its real money from the parks, and everything else is a rounding error in its budgets. The mere thought that something might make people stop going to the parks for the day will get a show instantly cut from ABC. Likewise, Google makes all its money from search and everything else is a hobby (which is why they fund the primary competitor to Chrome.)
Google is confident that liberaltarians will bite their nose to spite their face and switch to DuckDuckGo or some other alternative if Google is no longer against “evil”. Google is confident that conservatives will utlimately choose to use what works best – which is probably Google. As with any form of negotiation, you move the parameters in your favor when the other side or the moderator think that you might be crazy enough to push the big red button. Conservatives need to respond to this by chucking Google search, even though it makes life a little less convenient.
There wasn’t any hashtag advocacy that mattered here. This was simple a megacorporation making a sound business decision. The present so-called conservative cultural norm is to affirm that anything that makes sound business sense is good. There is a lot of talk about social and religious values but not a whole lot of willing martyrs. The answer to that is, of course, a rekindling of faith and the renewed recognition that moral values trump economic success.
“There wasn’t any hashtag advocacy that mattered here.”
What do you make of the OkCupid posturing then?
OKCupid veers more towards the SWPL set, including people into the whole poly thing.
Actually, some quick Wikipedia work does wonders:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OkCupid
In February 2011, OkCupid was acquired by IAC/InterActiveCorp, operators of Match.com, for $50 million.[14] Editorial posts from 2010 by an OkCupid founder criticizing Match.com and pay-dating as exploiting users and as “fundamentally broken” were removed from the OkCupid blog at the same time.[15] In a press response OkCupid’s CEO commented that the removal was voluntary.[16]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAC/InterActiveCorp
IAC was incorporated in 1986 under the name Silver King Broadcasting Company, as a subsidiary of the Home Shopping Network. In 1992, Silver King was spun-off to Home Shopping Network shareholders as a separately traded public company.
In February 2011, IAC acquired the free-to-contact dating site, OkCupid, for $50 million.[6]
In April 2011, IAC extended the deal with Google to hand over all search advertising on Ask.com and other IAC search products to the search giant, which was worth $3.5 billion in 2007, to end on March 31, 2016.[7]
Sacco incident[edit]
On December 22, 2013, IAC fired their Director of Corporate Communications, Justine Sacco. She became a source of controversy for a tweet linking Africa and AIDS to a racial association that was widely taken to be racist although she quickly asserted it to be a joke in the tweet.[12][13] An IAC spokesperson said the “outrageous, offensive comment” did not reflect the company’s “views and values”.[14][15][16] The tweet went ‘viral’, being re-tweeted and scorned around the world, and swiftly, she was fired for the tweet.[17] Following her dismissal, Sacco issued an unconditional apology through The Star, a South African newspaper.[18]
The incident has since become a byword both for the need for people, especially professionals, to be cautious about what they post on social media,[19] and for a justified action to immediately end a racist practice.[20]
Don’t be ‘evil’; or else.
That was done, but did it matter? I think they were pretty much jumping on the bandwagon after the train had reached the station.
The problem with your analysis is that Google, and the Mozilla foundation board, etc., *knew* this about Eich, and in the past, he’d declined the CEO position, probably because he knew this was a possibility, yet they pressured him to take the job anyway, then cut him loose. This is the sort of mistake that companies like Google don’t usually make – it speaks of being rather careless in a way which Google (and other big corporations) usually isn’t.
@ChevalierdeJohnstone – that kind of justified the investment of last few minutes.
To whom it may concern: when commitment to rationality FAIL so epic perhaps there’s a flaw in your model.
This is why for all times boys were toughened by fathers and other boys “bullying.” If we have to destroy civilization down to the alphabet we must recover that toughening up.
For the sake of any god or devil or Atheios or Gaia or Gnon or Game will you all please step back and look at what your thresholds of flight and submission are ?
Then go over and see Free Northerner, he’s got some good idea there.
[my mispellings and misgrammar deliberate. I’m feeling Bully].
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Yo Handle, I came across some new books you might be interested in:
http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15142.html
That book is how the Ford Foundation financed black nationalism.
http://www.baylorpress.com/Book/31/389/Statecraft_and_Salvation.html
That book is on Liberal Internationalism as Secularized Eschatology.
http://us.macmillan.com/thelevellers/RachelFoxley
That book is on the Levellers, the christian sect that are considered proto-communists.
Since Moldbug rarely updates his blog anymore, I thought I’d drop new books/papers that are semi-related to Moldbuggian thought in your comments section (which I have been doing over on his blog since 2009). I hope you don’t mind.
This website certainly has all of the information I wanted concerning this subject and didn’t know who to ask.