Speech was never free. Those of us on this side of the divide know this instinctively. It’s why most of us refuse to divulge our real names and home addresses openly. When I opened up comments here, I intended to create a place where we could all practice free speech, in a bubble where you can’t be secretly reported by someone you’ve never met, and subsequently punished by your boss for something you typed out.
Expression has always involved consequences. In a more sensible era, these were generally limited to social sanction in one’s immediate area. If your great-grandfather repeatedly called the mayor a faggot, the mayor’s friends would probably quit talking to him. No one likes to hang out with the dude with the impulsive anger problem. He’s depressing. He probably wouldn’t have been fired or driven from his home, unless he was so uncontrollable that he caused a problem at work. People would just quit taking him seriously, and life would go on.
As the internet has changed, its rules have changed. By this we don’t merely mean that the customs we use on the internet have changed with the times. As time increases, we edge more toward self-censorship. History repudiates Orwell, who dreamt of free people, stifled under the yoke of a brutal legal system. The status-quo invites any group of people, anywhere, to target and annoy users that fall afoul of an ever evolving series of complex speech rules, that are nowhere consistently laid down.
While the internet has changed, society has also devolved. Campus speech codes, workplace anti-harassment policy, organized boycotts and the centralization of mass media conspire to wrest popular control of information from local communities, giving it over to corporate figureheads. The potential of the community to develop strong, shared values — culture itself — has vanished along with aggressive enforcement of “tolerance”. At the same time, the potential for free and open debate has collapsed.
What we are left with is a mass of disaffected, largely powerless atoms, screaming in anonymous space, each wishing that his neighbor would pay him some attention.
Boxer ..
Cane Caldo is screaming like a lil-girl after his spanking (at Dal’s place). It’s, really, a cry for help more than anything else.
[And .. YES .. I lol’ed when I read his response to you. Especially after he tried to twist out of his statement you called him out for. What a lil-bitch. He went full retard .. you never go full retard .. unless you’re a retard. And .. the shoe fits.]
I thought the back and forth was going good until he went that route. I like a good debate and learned my lesson in youth by going the insult and belitting route. The minute you do that, you lost the debate.
He played the legalism card. List three certain possibilities, but don’t publicly say which one you believe while obviously implying one. It’s a very politician kind of thing to do. When you accused him of making a (direct) accusation, he got all righteously indignant, thinking that that wrangling was an adequate defense. The only thing left was name calling.
It was never about fair and free debate, but setting a trap and being “clever” instead.
The whole time I was wondering why you were engaging, but I suppose it was for the benefit of everyone else reading along.
I’m glad my boss is awesome.
This isn’t specifically a Cane Caldo thread. (Really, he doesn’t deserve one.) I mainly put that screenshot up to prove that, once again, I made the rankings.
Agreed .. but .. he’s a symptom of a larger problem.
They believe in Freedom and liberty for me but not for thee. They do the very thing our enemies (yes .. th wimminz & male wimminz are our enemies) do and call it good.
Our Lord has instructed us to not be of two minds. (James 1:8 – A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.)
It’s good that you picked up challenge .. I’m not respected enough for any traction at Dalrock’s place.
I have no kids of my own, but my sister and her husband do.
Like the last guy who argued with Dalrock, I have a private life, and people I love. There are photos of me with my sisters’ kids, up on the internet. My name is attached to them. Nevermind that these children are totally uninvolved in whatever petty internet arguments I might get into. I suppose they’re fair game. I look forward to being “outed” on Cane Caldo or Dalrock.
Source: https://dalrock.wordpress.com/2018/01/04/its-a-man-baby/#comment-256443
It’s really weird to think about. Free speech has been outsourced to private companies and special interest organizations. The corporation that controls my people’s folk religion is heavily into the game, too.
http://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=54875634&itype=CMSID
I suppose I should be glad they’re only wanting to keep me from talking. Four generations ago, they took guys like me out into the desert, and executed us in a blood atonement ritual. Even so, who made an entire city into the private property of the LDS Church?
“I have no kids of my own, but my sister and her husband do.”
Ah. I’d wondered why you didn’t like my tangent to the son’s book that pastor had reviewed. I didn’t think there was a personal angle because the guy was a published author not using a pseudonym. Only now that I double check, the book author is phonetically the same but spelled differently, so maybe it is a pseudonym. If so then I was in the wrong to bring it up.
@Boxer
“Like the last guy who argued with Dalrock”
There is NO arguing with Dalrock, he is a pathological liar, and when he starts to lose an argument, he outright bans you, proving that every time I’ve accused Dalrock of being a gutless coward, that I was 100% right in my assessment
Here’s 3 links of people exposing Dalrock
https://secularpatriarchy.wordpress.com/2013/08/20/cowards-chauvinists-and-dalrock/
http://rooshnme.blogspot.co.nz/2014/07/dalrock-is-not-mra.html
http://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2013/11/18/dalrock-on-why-men-should-avoid-women-whove-wasted-a-lot-of-courtship-and-used-up-their-most-attractivefertile-years/
I couldn’t be bothered trying to find more….I’ve wasted enough of my time and emotions dealing with this asshat
Pretty saddened to see you believing Dalrock over what transpired between him and me:
Dalrock lied through his teeth in his reasons given to ban me, and in order to make it look like I lied he reinserted ALL my comments on that thread after I pulled him up on deleting my comments all the time DURING the time frame of our exchange together
Bottom line, Dalrock covered his tracks which makes him a duplicitous low down snake, piece of shit….and yes if I ever met Dalrock in real life I would “confront” him about his pathetic behavior, and this confrontation wouldn’t be pleasant.
Now you know why Dalrock hides in complete anonymity:
Dalrock has NO email address
Dalrock has NO Facebook
Dalrock has NO Twitter
Dalrock has NO Google+
Dalrock has NO Disqus profile
Dalrock has NO way for you to contact him outside of WordPress and It’s because there are thousands of people he has maligned and pissed off who would most probably kill him if they ever met him.
I don’t believe in violence at all as a solution for our grievances we have with others on the Internet, and I wish the man NO PHYSICAL HARM, but hopefully you will see why Dalrock is so hated on WordPress.com
The way he treats others, and his cowardly way he maintains an ironclad control with his moderation tells me that I’m dealing with a CULT LEADER
Yo Gunner:
Thanks for bringing up the Protestant dimension, below. That’s a really interesting aspect to nationality that I didn’t think of.
The average reader would think an ethnic Mormon would have the religion aspect at the front of his argument about nationality, but we don’t, usually. Our own ethnic group is composed of a very few different religious groups, and we also reify outsiders to the extent that we seem to imagine you guys see yourselves the way we see you, as a sort of gray mass of “others” with negligible spiritual differences.
I wish I could do your comment justice (as well as those contributed by everyone else) but I’m just not a very quick thinker. It’ll probably be a day or two.
Hey Kryptonian:
I’m about as welcome on Dalrock at this point as you are, but yeah. The wordpress spam filters work really well against spam, but they also capture innocents. This post here is a good example. I’m guessing it’s because you inserted multiple links.
Incidentally, I note (with some amusement) that you included a link to David Futrelle’s blog. If you poke around on We Hunted The Mammoth, you’ll see that he and I trolled the hell out of each other, years ago (back then his blog was called “Manboobz”, and my blog was called “La Presse”). I went over and mocked him until he banned me. He’s deleted much of my conversation, but the remnants ought to be there, still.
Good times!
What is, I suppose, the saddest thing of all, is that I’d actually feel safer arguing with David Futrelle, at this point, than many of the people on our side.
@Boxer
Haha That got a chuckle out of me…..The internet is truly a small place!
I’ll go and check out your exchange with David Futrell just for a laugh
“What is, I suppose, the saddest thing of all, is that I.d actually feel safer arguing with David Futrelle, at this point, than many of the people on our side”
Nailed it!! This is what I’ve found as well, united we stand, divide we fall and all that
The ironic thing here Boxer is we castigate the Libtards, the Feminists and the pathetic Social Justice Warriors for being such cry babies, they need to have a safe space every time we critique them, so they are the foremost advocates of banning people, deleting comments etc, YET my experience has found, not just with Dalrock, but I’m talking about staunch Right Wing conservatives, and ultra hard line Christian Fundamentalists, that they are the biggest offenders and pussy’s I’ve ever seen…..They are fanatical in disallowing comments, banning comments etc
It’s like wtf is going on here, we are adopting the same cowardly tactics as our mortal enemies (present company excluded)…..birds of a feather flock together…maybe they’re not as “conservative” as I thought
Anyway much respect to you Boxer, you are intelligent, perceptive, and you love a good debate in here
I will always pop in here and read your articles ..
Regards
Kryptonian51
@Gunner Q
The pseudonym (including just the initials) is the main reason, along with Boxer’s well written post, why I made the redaction request. It was proof positive that author desired (some) anonymity.
@Boxer
I.ve never felt very comfortable personally using a pseudonym and asserting anonymity. It always felt dishonest and a bit weak*, so I never went anonymous. A lot of famous people have that problem and they survive. I.m only somewhat infamous and have been picking fights for a long time. I do have kids now, so I realize I am taking chances. However, when grandmas were able to track me down to my home address, I figured there wasn’t much I could do to stop it.
I abhor censorship, including self-censorship. It saddens me that so many require (or think that they require) anonymity. I really don’t see how you can solve the problems (“..society has also devolved..”) by anonymity. It encourages a lack of personal connection. I agree with what Bruce Charlton writes on the subject: those who are anonymous don’t deserve the level of respect that would be due to more personal relationships.
* Probably ironic how common this is in the androsphere.
@Boxer,
On the topic at hand, everyone is at a different point. The anomens say the nomens are fools; to the nomens the anomens are cowards. Tom Petty says, “I won’t back down.” That’s not courage; it’s stupidity and pride, for you may be weaker or wrong or both.
Jesus says, “who lives by the sword dies by the sword.” On occasion one of the children would come to me in tears, “So and so hit me with a sword!” I would ask, “What were you doing?” The answer: “(Sniff) swordfighting (sniff)” Well, if that is the game you are playing, then that’s the game that you get hurt by. If you change the rules because you don’t want to get hurt, then you are playing a different game.
You have to answer to your own conscience. I say that unless you have stared down the barrel of State violence or been threatened with it by a member of one of the State’s official victim classes, then it may be a simple matter of your personal preference whether you go nomen or not. Even our Mr. Ramsey above is having reservations now that there’s value on the line. The ideas are the same regardless of who promotes them, and anonymity abstracts the ideas from the promoter. When you are trying to recover a Blue Pill marriage from the brink of State violence, having an identifiable blog or going full-on Red Pill with the missus is a real life recipe for real life disaster.
BTW “I have no kids of my own, but my sister and her husband do.” They have kids of your own? The statement makes me think of “I’m not gay but my boyfriend is,” or “I’m not an actor but I play one on TV.” C’est a rire.
@Kryptonian51
I don’t care for stirring the shit, preferring peace with all, and I often have trouble keeping track of who’s who in the comments, or who sounds like whom from way back, or any of that stuff. Dalrock’s blog has been of inestimable help to me personally, but its comment section usually goes off-topic pretty quickly and sometimes hilariously, usually with factions, like with your thing and like the recent hullabaloo with Boxer and Cane. Both Boxer and Cane have blogs that I follow and enjoy, so I’m not picking sides. I’ll even follow yours if you continue writing. I’m looking for ideas that help me in everyday real life situations, so it’s amazing to me how many people get wrapped around an axle and on what pretext. I sort of figure if I have to resort to quoting my pseudo-self and someone else’s pseudo-self to prove I’m right and they’re wrong then the cause is lost regardless of who wins a dialectical skirmish. A chacun son tour.
krypto, as dull as I can be sometimes, from my detached and relatively clueless point of view even I noticed that you landed at Dalrock’s like a ton of bricks, and you started in agreement but were making all manner of accusations within half a dozen comments. Why would he spam you when your comments were in general agreement to begin with?
Dear Caspar:
I consider my nephews to be “mine” insofar as Dalrock, Cane Caldo and others of their ilk consider them fair targets for harassment, merely due to some position I may or may not take on the internet.
So, yes, in this context, they are my responsibility.
Best,
Boxer
@Caspar
Being anonymous isn’t necessarily cowardly, but it isn’t a mark of bravery either. If someone in the androsphere is coming across as a bastion of manhood, hiding behind a pseudonym isn’t manly toughness. It’s being safe. Is there shame in that? Perhaps not. Wintery Knight’s explanation seems quite reasonable, for example.
On the flip-side, using my real name doesn’t remove my fear or make me tough. I could easily be denied church membership for my wild, very public heretical beliefs. But nobody at church has yet gotten it in their head to google search me, apparently. If my family found out, I don’t know what they’d do either, considering my father is a (retired) Anabaptist minister. And what if China decides to deny my family’s application for adoption because I stand strongly against censorship and fascism? Plus I work in a tech profession and you know that future employers are competent enough to find this stuff. So, who wouldn’t have reservations?
The apostles didn’t back down. They stood strong and they made it personal. And in some cases paid for it. I can’t hide what I really believe just because there are consequences. I won’t say this is required for everyone but the examples of those who have gone before us suggest quite strongly that we shouldn’t hide who we are. Just my opinion. (I just wish I did a better job spreading the gospel and showing love rather than getting involved in various unproductive controversies)
When everyone is anonymous, there can be no community at all. I’m suggesting that this is fundamental. The internet ultimately fails in this regard because life (and ultimately reality, including the divine) is personal. While using one’s real name isn’t particularly personal, it’s better than nothing and at least allows for real community.