August 16, 2015

Dialing Back the Mob

Unless this is some sort of Onion-style joke or something, Suey Park appears to have repented:

Also this from Popehat on Roosh:

It's beyond my modest abilities to feel empathy for Roosh; I won't pretend to. There is in my gut, in my lizard brain, a visceral joy at seeing him humiliated and threatened.

But we try not to order society via our lizard brains, and that's a good thing. Now, if we were to govern by my lizard brain, that would be perfectly acceptable, because my deep-seated hates and fears and instincts are all reasonable and proper. The problem is all those other damn lizard brains out there, worn by lunatics with different hates and fears and instincts. Roosh has a lizard brain too, and so do the losers willing to pay sixty bucks to hear him talk about how evil non-plastic women are. When we unleash the lizard brains — when we give into the temptation to ignore the distinction between speech and assault, between insulting and attacking — we will find to our great regret that the majority of lizard brains don't work like the ones we see on our carefully moderated Twitter feed. Most lizard brains are really fucking scary. For every lizard brain cheering when someone we hate gets chased down the threat by a screaming mob, there's two our three lizard brains ready to cheer when that happens to someone we agree with. I am more afraid of the consequences of normalizing and condoning this behavior than I am gleeful about the humiliation of an awful person.

Maybe it's too much to hope for, and there certainly is ample evidence in our history with its continual moral panic flare-ups to suggest that it is, but nevertheless: my hope for the impending backlash is that participation in such shaming mobs itself will come to be seen as something shameful, something that marks a person as not only brutish, cruel, and stupid, but also profoundly uncool. Dare to dream.

Posted by Dr. Frank at August 16, 2015 03:35 PM