A Million Petty Tyrants

When news broke that someone was shooting up YouTube, the usual suspects geared up to profit from it. You can be sure that the ridiculous little twerp David Hogg was looking for cheap airfare to California, so he could mug for the cameras. Then it turned out to be a Persian woman, who was pissed about being censured. She was a nut, but what sent her over the edge was the way she was treated by the petty tyrants of YouTube. She was the multicultural version of Falling Down.

The funny thing is, none of the respectable people have bothered to notice what has been happening with social media until now. This story on PJ Media takes the girl angle and this post on National Review takes the CivNat approach. If the shooter had been Baked Alaska or Sam Hyde, they would be saying the usual things about extreme right wing extremist hate speakers. Instead it was a neurotic foreign vegan, tormented into a homicidal rage by the semi-official thought police now running the public square.

Of course, when bullets start flying, people tend to get serious. Up until now, the people running the social media companies have paid no price for their behavior. In fact, they have been publicly praised by the left side of the ruling class, and quietly praised by the right side. All of a sudden, the folks in charge have to consider the possibility of a lunatic with a gun showing up in their offices, when one of their moderators willy-nilly decides to nuke a user account. That changes the math of being the morality police.

Even through this has been ignored by the media, there are now two types of meetings going on in companies like YouTube. The people in charge are huddling in their executive suites, talking about security and how best to make sure the next lunatic does not get beyond the first floor. The soulless shrew running YouTube will no doubt make sure security around her is beefed up in response to this incident. She will probably issue a memo demanding greater vigilance by the YouTube morality police.

There is a second form of meeting going on today. That’s the one in the lunchrooms and chat rooms for employees of these social media companies. These are the people who take the bullet when the next pistol packing Persian shows up with a beef about the arbitrarily enforced terms of service. At least for a little while, some of them will think twice before pushing the button to delete a video or take down an account. After all, that vegan yoga instructor with quirky politics, could be a really good marksman.

A smart man once said that the post-modern age is a period where the best people painfully relearn all the things everyone used to know. For example, the whole point of liberal democracy was not to give the people a say in how things are run, but to give them a non-violent veto. Instead of the angry rabble stringing up their local rulers and burning down their mansion, the angry rabble gets to vote out some candidates or perhaps pass a referendum that will be ignored. Political liberty is the pressure release.

The guy on street corner, waving around a manifesto, proselytizing to his fellow citizens, is only a threat to the public order, if the people in charge don’t have better answers or a way to steal his ideas. Otherwise, he is just a crank who can be ignored. Today, the street corner is a user account on social media and the manifesto is a series of videos detailing some political or social cause. All of which is entirely harmless, just as long as the people in charge have better answers. Within this lifetime, people used to know this.

Something else people used to know is that the guy with a tiny bit of power, is often the most dictatorial. Meter maids, building inspectors, zoning office clerks, these are people with very narrow authority, but hey wield it with the zeal of a bloodthirsty tyrant. That is because the sort of people attracted to the work, are the sort of people looking for any chance to have authority over another person. The way American cities solved their sadist problem is they installed parking meters and made the sadists into meter maids.

Today, it is the social media companies hiring the petty tyrants, sadists and mentally disturbed spinsters, giving them a job of reading your tweets. These are the people who scan the internet, looking for “hate speech” they can put on a list, so that other petty tyrants can use it to torment the hate speaker or anyone interested in him. These are people who relish the task, because it is the only time anyone notices them. Our public space is turning into a daycare center run by sadistic schoolmarms.

The people in charge of social media firms spend so much time smelling their own farts, they truly think they can regulate what the world has to say about things. Again, people used to know better. Reality is that thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it and reality is, there is no controlling public opinion. There is no way to stifle dissent. The only thing that comes from efforts to do so is a violent response. But, the petty tyrants will only learn that lesson when the next Persian vegan shows up at their door.

65 thoughts on “A Million Petty Tyrants

  1. My problems are legion, but with the Z man it is this:

    You trash all the good reasons, real, Buckley was popular with all the bad, supposed, reasons he just didn’t do enough to suit you.

    Buckley would have strongly, in fact his reading still does, encourage[d] you Sir to do more, even if, as a Catholic I’m sure Bill is with me here, you are doing it through aggrandizing yourself on the legacy of a dead man.

  2. Ironically, or not, nevertheless by God, those who denigrate Buckley always make me, and I could be alone, revere the man more, not for what I thought about him as a youngster, but for how he fought.

    And won.

    The spoiled, gimme dat mentality of the Z man notwithstanding, Buckley’s victories over leftism can never be known, because of the vastness of the defeats, most often silent.

    Without these silent defeats, we get the Z man and today’s modern cultural sepsis, predicted by Buckley.

  3. And when Buckley told you about these shower-temperature-adjusters, he didn’t kill them all Rambo-style and is therefore at fault for every last single problem humanity faces today?

    What did you do to throw acid in the Godless faces of your alma matter, like Buckley did in/with GAMAY?

    What will you say when the next generation blames you for their inaction?

    A lot less, and a lot less persuasively, than Buckley, of course.

    No sin, just normal.

  4. Persian vegan lady had every right to be furious-She was being unfairly censored. Unfortunately, her passions didn’t extend to daily visits to the gun range.
    Perhaps with the next disgruntled & unfairly targeted nutjob…

  5. “Deerfield Mayor Harriet Rosenthal implied the students from the local high school helped sway her decision to bring about the ordinance.”

    The reason this country has so many problems is because it’s a nation of Jewish grandmothers instead of a nation of men anymore.

  6. Not to put too fine a spin on it, but “feminism.” The last 40 years have seen the progressive movement (heavily fortified with feminist idealism) tamp down any remnant of what was believed to be “masculine.” When this nation came out of WWII, someone spouting off in the public square meant nothing to the millions of men who had faced the horror of war overseas and millions more at home who had endured the hardships of an unknown outcome, rationing, and a war-footing economy. Little people squawking on the commons were at most an annoyance as the majority knew the true nature of the world was far more harsh and complex. Today, in a world where progressives believe its possible to obtain Utopia via a central government, every minor (percieved) transgression is immediately quashed. The result is a culture nearly devoid of any understanding of conflict, or understanding of why allowing individuals to rant is not only a right we should cherish, one that millions fought and died for, it also serves the dual purpose of pressure valve and compromise, without which at some point conflict reemerges! Progressivism = Imbecility.

  7. Hey! What’s wrong about smelling your own farts!? What choice does one have, anyway? I’m old, I’m windy, methane is odorless unless you’ve been eating eggs (sulphur).

  8. “In a sluggish economy, never, ever fuck with another man’s livelihood” –Guido the killer pimp

  9. On behalf of a lawyer friend, I hand delivered copies of a court pleading to a law firm specializing in mortgage foreclosures. I arrived on a weekday morning and the front, glass door was locked. I hollered through the door who I was and what I was delivering to the receptionist at the front desk. She called someone and I was finally allowed to enter the office. After the delivery, I told my friend what happened and she replied that the firm was a foreclosure mill and they were afraid that someone would burst into the office with guns blazing. She said that she knew another foreclosure mill with a security guard.

  10. YouTube was shot up by a female, Persian, vegan, animal rights activist. On the tragic/comedy spectrum that’s kind of in the middle. If there had been no deaths it would be firmly in comedy

    • Theoretically deaths can be funny. Like that mob boss who got whacked and the cigar never fell outta his mouth. Or, think W or Moonbeam getting whacked instead of Kate Steinle. Now that’s funny!

  11. Pingback: The burn rate is broken people. | Dark Brightness

  12. Zuckerberg and Sandberg have gone totally creepy, when you watch the interviews. They can’t square the circle that they are in the exact business of collecting your data and selling it to people. That is what they do (Google as well), and they can’t admit it, so they go around in circles about users and connections and all the good things about being connected. Screw that.

  13. “The people in charge of social media firms spend so much time smelling their own farts, they truly think they can regulate what the world has to say about things.”
    This is why ZCuckMan is worse than useless. He is insinuating that the 150-IQ billionaires with unlimited data & the best analysts & focus groups that money can buy are behaving like they do out of cluelessness.
    Just think about that for a second. That’s ridiculous.
    These CEOs A-B test before they change the color of their “like” buttons. Do you really think that they would make such a massive strategic decision based on the smell of their farts? Get real.
    They’ve got their reasons. Since alienating half of the market is an inherently bad business move, it must be something besides financial reasons.
    Like tribal interests.
    Just look at who runs Facebook & youtube. Spoiler alert: It’s not Puritans, Roundheads, or WASPs.
    Social media, like every other kind of media, is disproportionately owned & influenced by Jews.
    So the portfolio of ideas that are good for their group (blank slatism, multiculturalism, cultural marxism, worship of the minority, etc…) are pushed & praised as much as their platforms will allow.
    The portfolio of ideas that are bad for their group (traditionalism, christianity, nationalism, respect for the majority, etc…) will be suppressed and defamed as much as their platforms will allow.
    It’s just like in Print, Radio, TV & Film. It’s just like in Academia.
    We see it over & over. Jews in the West insert themselves into the culture and morals-influencing institutions of their host nations & use them to make that host nation’s culture & morals more comfortable for Jews.
    This pattern is so clear & obvious that it takes a true effort to avoid seeing it. Or as in the case of ZCuckMan, to see it but not admit it because doing that would make him like one of the low-status people he thinks are icky.

    • Type out your rant. Walk away from it for 15 minutes and then ruthlessly edit it to half the length. Then post. You’ll thank me later.

    • *If* what you say *were* true: “Social media … is disproportionately owned & influenced by Jews”, why were so many of *Rabbi* Dennis Prager’s thoroughly wholesome PragerU videos “age-restricted” (not suitable for children!)

      The Ten Commandments: Do Not Murder, presented by Dennis Prager
      Israel’s Legal Founding, presented by scholar and author Alan Dershowitz

      and many others.

  14. Stifling dissent is an unstated corollary to the decades-long project of dumbing down our schools. We don’t have to enforce Newspeak to make expressing forbidden thoughts impossible; extreme ignorance — and *pride* in one’s ignorance — will do that just fine, and this is what our educational policy has accomplished. Unfortunately for The Party, their enforcers moderating YouTube etc. have been educated in the same schools… with predictable results.

  15. I would add that the fact that it was a lefty Iranian girl vegan that was into “peaceful protest” — rather than a deplorable right-wing nut-case — is another proof of God’s existence.

    • Sad thing is, she actually wasn’t bad looking, once you factor out the crazy. She should have been married to some nice guy back in Persia and having kids, not in the US making deranged videos about dead bunnies. Aside from horrifically damaging our country, a lot of times immigration is bad for the immigrants, too.

  16. Add stewardesses to the list of petty bureaucratic sadists. I once had one tell me I needed to un-recline my seat because the lady behind me needed the room. I said I would be happy to if the person in front of me un-reclined her seat as well. She got angry and did the whole “I’ll turn this plane around right now” routine. They think because they demonstrate how to use a seat cushion as a floatation device while you are flying over the midwest, that they are more than waitresses.

    • I’m old enough to remember when stewardesses were pretty and helpful, and actually tried to make sure that people had a pleasant experience on the flight, as opposed to deranged harridans smothering dogs in overhead luggage bins. Oddly enough, the younger ones are the worst. You will still occasionally meet an older one who still can recall the old “Pan Am” days, or who learned her trade under someone who did, but otherwise, today’s flight crews are a good advertisement to take the train.

      • Then you are also old enough to remember that back in the day air traveling Americans were above average in income and behavior. The industry was regulated, tickets were expensive and the passengers dressed like it. Try policing the ghetto mobs who sold $200 in food stamps for their $100 ticket before you compare Don Draper’s air traveler to Obama’s.

        • There’s some truth in that, but the standards of air crews are still far lower than they have to be, even given the proletarianization of air travel. Hell, Amtrak personnel, traffic cops and even my local DMV are nore polite and helpful.

    • Even worse are the people in charge of home owner associations, I have a friend where they come out and measure the high of your grass. And if you blow them off, they start foreclosure proceedings against your house.

  17. Well said. Comments about the nature of petty tyrants are especially right on, and the social media seems to be a breeding ground for such. (Which is why I avoid Twitter, FB etc.)

  18. For one fictional take on what happens when the petty tyrants become unbearable see, “Unintended Consequences” by John Ross. It is mostly aimed at members of the gun culture but the abuses of the FAA, EPA and others are also involved.

    • I’ve read that book several times and wonder when someone is going to go full on Henry Bowman. Given the state of things I can’t imagine it taking to long.

  19. The intimidation-through-exempliary-violence thing works best when there’s a neat package, like ‘The Religion of Peace(TM)’.

    Social Media greed-heads gotta be going nuts about how to placate a constantly mutating pathogen like The Prog. Agenda. It’d be fun to put those staff meetings up on U-Tube.

    • That lack of a package is why Christians and Men of the West get stepped on. If they were well steeped in ideology and behaved fractionally the way the Left thinks they do, well this would be a very different country and probably a better one

      This would require a much greater emphasis on tribe and identity and less atomized individualism , both of which make empires untenable and consumerism a no go

      This shift in consciousness is happening slowly, in real time not Internet time and you can see the fear on the powers that be reflected in increasing propaganda

      Its a brittle society that is easily replaced and if they don’t stop it, a White and possibly Christian identity along side all the others ones especially if that identity is hostile to others in the end game for them.

      And note “identity” doesn’t mean everyone goes 14-88 here. Its knowledge that civic nationalism is a lie. ideology matters , religion matters and you skin color is your uniform and acting accordingly

      • Great point, think Vox Day might sue you as it’s something he frequently talks about, as has Z. Jesus this has been a strange 24 hours on the Zman blog. We’ve all done a fair 180 from the contemplative reflection from yesterday, all thanks to The Veganator. Are we becoming as manic as our mortal enemies? Nietzche warned about fighting monsters, does the same thing happen from fighting fuckin morning? Surreal

  20. She was the multicultural version of Falling Down.

    This is the perfect description of her.

  21. I would argue that there are two seminal lessons to be gleaned from the YouTube incident. The first is that people will crack (and do crazy things) when pushed too far by bureaucratic insanity and societal powerlessness. The second is that personal security is a naive illusion. In our modern technological world, unless you seal yourself in a panic room, no one is really safe anymore.

    • NO one is ever really safe from harm of any kind. That is an illusion sold to Americans in the 1940s to the present by both parties but particularly by Democrats. Any rational American knows better. You can make lots of money, live in a great upper-class neighborhood and still find you and your family can be victims of a horrific crime. I distinctly remember a horrific murder in Connecticut when I lived in NYC and people writing their hands as though this kind of thing never happens.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheshire,_Connecticut,_home_invasion_murders

  22. When the control control crowd starts laughing about the idea that people armed with hunting rifles and handguns can take down a tyrannical government (the actual reason for the 2nd Amendment), this crazy-ass lady is the response. Imagine a few million of her. The petty tyrants would be the first to go, after that the ones on top would no longer have their Praetorian Guard.

  23. God damn that Wojiciki “chick” looks like a dude! Wait until snipers start picking off these titans of industry, that will be a hell of a show.

  24. “Today, it is the social media companies hiring the petty tyrants, sadists and mentally disturbed spinsters, giving them a job of reading your tweets. These are the people who scan the internet, looking for “hate speech” they can put on a list, so that other petty tyrants can use it to torment the hate speaker or anyone interested in him. ”

    And I am curious to know if these gutless dweebs are incentivized for their actions. For example, a moderator who blacklists the most user accounts is awarded an extra scoop of gelatinized soy during the 11 minute, mid workday feed. Do it two months in a row, and one actually gets to sit on a stool while they consume their paste.

    The problem becomes, they are going to soon run out of channels to censor, even by their own standards of what is acceptable. That means they will be forced to compete over censoring the looniest of their own team, like vegan girl here, and those are the ones who are most prone to violence.

    More popcorn, anyone?

  25. Heh heh…well, that was a fine old rant…right outta archie bunker, updated for the current year…but I like it…especially the part about sadists…I am a retired gov’t worker, and let me tell ya, you aint far wrong about sadistic, low on the totem pole bureaucrats…it wouldn’t be so bad if it were not for the fact that we are so highly taxed and thus they owe us…

    there is something to be said for the weak/lax governments of latin america…

  26. I bet the third type of meeting going on today are among the people who make revenue directly or indirectly through those social media channels.

    “Do we really want to base our livelihoods on the whims of petty tyrants, sadists and mentally disturbed spinsters?”

  27. Delighted to hear from you Zman. It took a narcissistic crazy bitch to bring you back. It’s amazing to see the thought police score such an own goal as the left, despite having literally nothing remotely in common, are far more organised and bizarrely united then the right(Alt/Dissident/traditional/Religious/cuck) ever have been, although hopefully not ever will be. By the way, what does a vegan have for breakfast? Don’t worry, they’ll fuckin tell you.

  28. I think it was Dan Jenkins in Sports Illustrated that talked about petty tyrants at pro golf events.

    You know, the volunteers who hold up quiet signs or the guy who blocks access to a certain avenue.
    If anyone tries to go through here, he will have to go through me!

    In my work I sometimes need city permits. My God the tyrannical nature of some of these low level clerks who
    know they can hold up your own project or stop it cold. When it does go south, the customer invariably will blame me.

    What is Ann Coulter’s latest column? “We used to care about one another”. Temperature is rising in the war between good whites
    and bad whites.

    (You can be sure that the ridiculous little twerp David Hogg was looking for cheap airfare to California, so he could mug for the cameras) .Good One!

    • I knew a guy who owned some restaurants in an unnamed city. The health inspectors would come in and write up a dozen things. He did not care. The reason is, he took care of the local politicians and some friends in the health department leadership. I asked him once why he did not just bribe the inspectors. It would be cheaper. He said they would not take a bribe and would mostly likely report it. It was simply better to pay off the people at the top.

      I used to have an office at Logan Airport. Going home meant driving through airport traffic to get to the tunnel. There was a back way into east Boston, that would let you bypass the traffic and get right to the mouth of the tunnel. The access point was manned by a security guard. Many people tried to bribe the guy, but he never relented. He would only let you through if you had a pass. This was a guy working in a guard shack at an airport making minimum wage.

      • Seems to me the guy working a guard shack making minimum wage has more to lose by being caught taking a bribe. He gets caught, loses his job and now cannot find another one because he’s “dirty” and can’t be trusted. He’s disposable according to the “guys at the top.”

          • The guy lived in East Boston. This is a town where everyone has a scam. But, maybe he was the last honest man in East Boston.

      • For what it’s worth, Gavin McInnes’ experiences with the health inspectors for his restaurant in NYC are instructive. Not corrupt just tyrannical. The fines he incurred for such petty things and yet he endured them and paid them as a matter of course.
        (Mostly ethnically Indian by the way)

        I would have gone mad.

      • I once worked for company that was closing a manufacturing facility, so we sold the equipment to a company in another country. The equipment was being packed for shipment when OSHA showed up for an inspection. They fined us $10K because one of the items had a frayed cord. This despite the fact that no one in the US was ever going to use it again. We paid it and moved on, figuring it’s better to get off their radar asap.

  29. The response to this will be to wall themselves off further from society and to increase their efforts at censorship. It’s like the clear-backpacks at high schools. The answer is never to question the fundamentals or sack the people who let it happen. The answer is to punish the innocent.

    However, it is important to not sweep by the fact that really MOST of these wackjob shooters are Leftists, Anarchists, or Islamists carrying out their particular flavor of Progressivism…

    • The funny thing is the people running these companies are ridiculous greed heads, so they are outsourcing the moderation to offshore operations. My bet is the Persian shooter was targeted by some Muslim male working in a cubicle in Bangalore. Diversity eats its own.

      • Bangalore would more than likely be a Hindu. A Sunni Muslim woman in Dhaka would be a more probable candidate.

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