The censorship policies of political forums are a bit like those of casinos and private video gaming servers. Some users are banned because they don’t abide by the rules, but the majority of those who are banned, are banned because they cannot be defeated, and no one wants to attempt to contend with them. I feel that most political forums, for instance, /r/anarchism need to post some kind of disclaimer along these lines:

‘These are the forum postulates and biases. If you go against or even question those postulates for a split-second, no matter how right you are in doing so, you will be banned. This is the place where we have all gathered to be wrong together in a specific way. No one is going to appreciate how objectively or scientifically right you are here. Basically, we’ve all drank this certain kind of Kool-Aid, and unless you drink that Kool-Aid as well, you’ll never really be a part of this forum.’

At my age, I wouldn’t have a problem drinking the Kool-Aid, if it were fun special Kool-Aid like they used to make us drink in the commie pinko sex cults of the newly-minted millennium. But postmodern liberal Kool-Aid is nowhere near that fun. These aren’t LSD/MDMA, free expression, good, good lovin’ hippies. These are politically correct, vegetarian, yoga self-deprivation hippies, and their Kool-Aid not only isn’t fun, it doesn’t even physically exist, because Kool-Aid contains refined sugar. Now it’s a metaphorical Kool-Aid, often expressed through interpretive dance, and it’s laced with censorship, repression, political revisionism, material starvation, and outright totalitarianism. And I’ve already drank too much. It’s making me want to puke all over the people who shoved it down my throat.

I don’t have a problem with people who deprive themselves, other than concern for their well-being, my main problem is with people who project that onto others via being judgmental. And there are liberal who are just as judgmental as any conservative. I have an ultra-conservative grandma who thinks refined sugar is the devil, and she would fit right into some of the hippie communes I’ve encountered… It’s funny how much some liberal hippies have in common with Granbo and the Morality Squad…

Watching a hippie meditate, I am reminded of someone in prayer. Through willful ignorance, tuning the mind to an escapist oblivion, she insulates herself from the world, and the consequences of her own actions. “We can’t help some people,” says the church lady, “But we can pray for them.” Why not do something useful, beyond ‘creating an intention’? You are no more help to the world than the average church-goer, and just as judgmental.

I remember I had this crazy friend in Dallas who always wanted to join a commune. One of those self-sustaining places, where they grow their own food and everyone shared everything. And he joined several. He told me he was drugged, and most of them were trying to brainwash him. “But those were the drugs I liked, and they were giving me free doses,” he said, “So I just played along with whatever they were saying, and enjoyed the ride.” He would eventually get kicked out for not being a true believer, and move onto the next community.

Most of those compounds were some kind of cult, usually designed to get the leadership laid and rich. And there are plenty of such groups in the cities as well, with more urban implications. Being exploited by a sex cult means that some underground society is sending its agents to have these contrived relationships with you, and you think they are real, but it’s really just some secret society fucking with you. I hate those kinds of organizations, and I regret any unknowing dealings I may have had with them, in the past, dealings which had more to do with drugs than sex.

It is clear that some liberals’ definition of the term ‘anarchist’ is the one that crystallized within the past 10 years. The word has meant different things in different eras. Thus, you cannot say my writing is ‘not anarchist’, you can only say that it wouldn’t be considered anarchist by the standards of what that word has recently come to mean, via Orwellian liberal revisionism. But a false consensus enforced by a peer group is no different than one enforced by the State. Words mean different things to different people. A bunch of like-minded people could and have effectively changed the meaning of a word. But if you ask me, most of the so-called ‘anarchists’ of the post-millenium era are actually very typical liberal Democrats, who have re-branded themselves as ‘anarchist’ both for the sake of the mass appeal of an edgy image, and to take the word away from less partisan, unbiased centrist anarchists.

What’s even more hypocritical is that these detractors from anarchist tradition probably will or have at some point in their lives, given a lecture about ‘cultural misappropriation’, even as they have stolen their own self-applied label from a pre-existing cause, and then tried to imply that those who came before them are ‘posers’. And these are the kind of ignorant, self-entitled, college age ‘anarchists’ who have come up with the idea of the ‘Safe Space’.

This is what writers for the New York Times think about Safe Spaces. And I agree with them, for the most part. Allow me to quote from this article in my own, and respond to it piecemeal.

“…the university would hold a simultaneous, competing talk to provide ‘research and facts’ about ‘the role of culture in sexual assault.’ Meanwhile, student volunteers put up posters advertising that a ‘safe space’ would be available for anyone who found the debate too upsetting. The safe space, Ms. Byron explained, was intended to give people who might find comments ‘troubling’ or ‘triggering’, a place to recuperate. The room was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma. Emma Hall, a junior, rape survivor and ‘sexual assault peer educator’ who helped set up the room and worked in it during the debate, estimates that a couple of dozen people used it. At one point she went to the lecture hall — it was packed — but after a while, she had to return to the safe space.

‘I was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs’, Ms. Hall said. Safe spaces are an expression of the conviction, increasingly prevalent among college students, that their schools should keep them from being ‘bombarded’ by discomfiting or distressing viewpoints. Think of the safe space as the live-action version of the better-known trigger warning, a notice put on top of a syllabus or an assigned reading to alert students to the presence of potentially disturbing material. Some people trace safe spaces back to the feminist consciousness-raising groups of the 1960s and 1970s, others to the gay and lesbian movement of the early 1990s. In most cases, safe spaces are innocuous gatherings of like-minded people who agree to refrain from ridicule, criticism or what they term ‘microaggressions’ — subtle displays of racial or sexual bias — so that everyone can relax enough to explore the nuances of, say, a fluid gender identity. As long as all parties consent to such restrictions, these little islands of self-restraint seem like a perfectly fine idea…”

It’s ridiculous to say that the whole world, or any space that can properly be called ‘public’ should be just as comfortable to you as your living room, simply because the world is so diverse, and populated by people with conflicting interests. In addition, expectations of public safety should only entail safety from violence and resource starvation, not safety from social scrutiny or potentially offensive ideas, art, politics, ‘verbal assaults’, etc. If the idea of a simultaneously ‘free’ AND ‘equal’ space is hard to fathom, adding ‘safety’ (from emotional harm, especially) to that list of demands of public space, seems quite unrealistically idealistic. I think SafeR Spaces might be a good idea, or making things safeR… but total safety is something which can never be guaranteed in a material world, and trying to create it entails sacrifices to liberty that many people aren’t willing to make.

We all know the Ben Franklin quote about liberty and safety (or ‘security’, as it were). You are not safe anywhere. A nuclear bomb could fall out of the sky and kill you and all your friends at any moment, a fact which, if you had been in school during the Cold War, would have been drilled into your head by the public education system. In a more mundane way, you could get hit by a car or a natural disaster. Someone could be upset with you over a trivial personal matter and start a fight with you. You could get caught in the crossfire of a street gang war. You could trip over your own shoelaces and break your neck! No one can provide you with universal safety, from the environment, from others, or from your own incompetence, and even if they could, they could just as easily take it away for capricious, petty, whimsical, or arbitrary reasons. This is the main reason I believe in martial arts training and the second amendment, both of which I feel empower me to protect myself, so I won’t be dependent upon safety provided to me by others.

Rather than being offended by what’s going on in public, I’m frequently offended by what goes on behind my back, in private. But what I find most offensive, is that some people don’t have a safe home of their own. Some people don’t have food that is safe to eat. Some people don’t have a decent job or enough money. Some people don’t have a doctor. Some people don’t have an education. Some people think they have an education, but they’ve really been brainwashed one way or another. And the brainwashed are voting against my sane perspective in record numbers. All of that is a lot more offensive to me than some lunatic waving a picket sign, or giving a speech in a college, or on the internet.

One would hope that Reddit mods would understand this, since one of the founders of Reddit committed suicide over censorship and totalitarian state harassment, but the moderators of many political forums DON’T seem to understand at all that, just like in Iran, censorship does not prevent violence, censorship PROVOKES violence. If people are not allowed to express themselves verbally and artistically, they will often express themselves violently. Though many mods argue that there are specific places for specific opinions, this is akin to the Free Speech Zones liberals hated so much when George W Bush imposed them on the people who demonstrated against HIM. And also, they are still banning people from very general forums just for taking an unpopular or disestablished side of a very legitimate polarized ideological conflict.

And how could the internet ever possibly be considered ‘unsafe’? It is literally a bunch of squiggly lines on a screen. A screen you can turn off and go outside anytime you want. That person on the other side of the world who has offended you so badly, probably doesn’t have the ability to transmit his fist through the telephone wires, and punch you in the face through your own monitor. So it’s not that bad. It’s all in your head. If ANY place should be safe to have a no-holds-barred discussion about ANY topic, it should be the internet, if only because discussion participants are so physically far-removed from eachother that it PREVENTS violence over mere words.

Today, I’m writing a bug report against the Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox spell-check dictionary, which does not include the words ‘misandry, masculist, or masculism’, thus making these words appear to be illegitimate when typing them into a web browser. The fact that such major communications companies would conspire to slip such terms down the memory hole is abhorrent corporate policy, reflects a palpable liberal bias, intellectually discredits the feminist cause by way of hypocrisy, and it needs to be addressed immediately. They can delete these words from the dictionary, but not from our minds.

The other point this article makes, and a point I’ve made many times in the past as well, is that when people are surrounded by nothing but the coddlingly supportive their whole lives, it leaves them unable to face contention, think for themselves, or defend their opinions. So, whatever college cloisters these young minds from, they will eventually be unable to contend with in the real world.

“…This new bureaucracy may be exacerbating students’ ‘self-infantilization’, as Judith Shapiro, the former president of Barnard College, suggested in an essay for Inside Higher Ed. But why are students so eager to self-infantilize? Their parents should probably share the blame. Eric Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, wrote on Slate last month that although universities cosset students more than they used to, that’s what they have to do, because today’s undergraduates are more puerile than their predecessors. ‘Perhaps over-programmed children engineered to the specifications of college admissions offices no longer experience the risks and challenges that breed maturity…’”

The concept of ‘self-infantilization’ is something I thought of a long time ago when I said that over-privileged suburban kids tend to have an ‘extended adolescence’ that lasts well into their 20’s and sometimes 30’s. Also, ‘self-indoctrination’ (‘I’m not going to watch/read/listen to that because it might offend me’) is quite common among such spoiled and sheltered people. And those people who refuse to imbibe certain media will still criticize it, even though they have never given it a chance. So they aren’t just indoctrinating themselves, but others as well. They are literally accusing people of being closed-minded for listening to Slayer or reading Mein Kampf, when they themselves are guilty of being so closed-minded, they have never even studied these kinds of offensive media in a detached and scientific, aesthetic, ironic, satirical, or historical way. I personally love to listen to people I disagree with, because it helps me understand them, and sometimes they even change my opinion! Wow, what a concept. I was born a pretty typical, middle-class straight white cisgender male Gnostic Christian who has read and continues to read a diverse array of literature, such as the Satanic Bible, Asian, Yiddish, and Hindu Mysticism, many books on the occult, Karl Marx, Ayn Rand, Noam Chomsky, PJ O’Rourke, Naomi Klein, Milton Friedman, and several books on evolution, psychology, neuroscience, and astrophysics. And I enjoyed most of it, and incorporated quite a bit of this education into my personal worldview!

So many people define ‘open-mindedness’ as: ‘willing to live in persistent delusions’ rather than ‘willing to listen to and incorporate the perspectives of everyone into their own worldview’. Most people become hostile when their delusions are challenged by the sane, and that’s what ‘safe space’ policies are all about: institutionalizing reactionary liberal politics and biases. The fact that so-called ‘anarchists’ would embrace such prohibitive rhetoric is really disgusting, because it’s everything a real anarchist hates.

“But the notion that ticklish conversations must be scrubbed clean of controversy has a way of leaking out and spreading. Once you designate some spaces as safe, you imply that the rest are unsafe. It follows that they should be made safer. This logic clearly informed a campaign undertaken this fall by a Columbia University student group called Everyone Allied Against Homophobia that consisted of slipping a flier under the door of every dorm room on campus. The headline of the flier stated, ‘I want this space to be a safer space.’ The text below instructed students to tape the fliers to their windows. The group’s vice president then had the flier published in the Columbia Daily Spectator, the student newspaper, along with an editorial asserting that ‘making spaces safer is about learning how to be kind to each other.’”

What’s really fucked up about this is, if you read the article, they talk about not just wanting to make public spaces ‘safe’ (for everyone of a certain bias), but also trying to make private bedrooms ‘safe’ in this exact same way. And people were actually volunteering for this! This gets into that Family Guy show where the FCC was censoring reality, going into Peter Griffin’s shower and putting a real-life black bar over his junk. This is one step removed from making ALL spaces public, and completely eliminating the concept of privacy altogether. And given that there are seriously some lesbians who honestly think that all hetereosexual intercourse is rape, and they will likely be on whatever committee that decides the standards for ‘private bedroom safety’, do you really want that to happen? I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at this horrible idea. Homosexuals, feminists, and transgenders already exert enough social influence over my sex life (or lack thereof) as a heterosexual male, and I don’t really want them in my bedroom, nor do I feel that polyamorists and homosexuals are qualified to comment on the dynamics of a monogamous, committed heterosexual relationship, nor do I feel qualified to comment on THEIR personal relationships! Because, as someone firmly of the monogamous, hetero persuasion, I really have no idea how transgenderism, homosexuality, and polyamorism work.

“Last fall, the president of Smith College, Kathleen McCartney, apologized for causing students and faculty to be ‘hurt’ when she failed to object to a racial epithet uttered by a fellow panel member at an alumnae event in New York. The offender was the free-speech advocate Wendy Kaminer, who had been arguing against the use of the euphemism ‘the n-word’ when teaching American history or ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.’ ‘It’s amazing to me that they can’t distinguish between racist speech and speech about racist speech, between racism and discussions of racism,’ Ms. Kaminer said in an email.”

Feminists and other special interests will always try to make ‘Safe Space’ about race or gender. But it isn’t always about that!

Some say that these ‘free speech’ and ‘liberal control over public opinion through censorship, revisionism, and mass-media’ arguments are the bastion of racists, homophobes, and sexists, and in a way, they often can be, but there are many political, social, and business situations where dissenting opinion and lone wolfism are key to avoiding the pitfalls of committee thinking, and providing the kinds of quality assurance that turns sketch-pad designs into solid, finished products. Which is exactly why total inclusion into free speech, knowing and accepting that there will be conflicts between those of differing values and priorities, is such an important cornerstone of American society. T Maybe I shouldn’t talk about racial issues, but I feel in middle age I have to, after years of youthful optimism and sacrifice for special interest agendas, explain why I have internally backed off to a more centrist position on the matter. You see, liberal philosophy doesn’t allow white people to ever assume that we aren’t racist. We are supposed to acknowledge that all white people are inherently racist, without admitting that people of all races can or may not be racist, because then that devolves into the assumption of race war, which is seen as a tenet of more conservative ideologies. This internalization of general prejudice is supposed to evoke within white people a drive to overcompensate for our supposed racism by specially treating other races, which is both racist itself, and patronizing to those we treat this way. There is only so much good one can do for others in this way.

Also, I remember once watching an episode of King of the Hill with my friend and his Dad. Background on me and my friend, is that we were both long-haired liberals at the time, who appreciated the show for entirely different reasons than my friend’s Dad. While he was empathizing with Hank Hill as a fellow redneck, my friend and I as college liberals were laughing at Hank Hill. So while many people who watch that show are laughing at Hank Hill’s expense, many are laughing with him at the situations that modern society puts a lower-middle class, somewhat uneducated white male through.

While both of these popular television programs could sometimes be classified as sexually or racially offensive, I reiterate that everything is offensive to someone, I mean, we all have different perspectives, so who am I or anyone to say that certain speech oughtta be prohibited just because it is unpopular, or I don’t personally like it? Free speech is a key principle this country was based on, and I’ll stick to the principles even if I don’t agree with all the ramifications.

And if Nazi rhetoric is a trauma trigger for some people, if masculist rhetoric is a trauma trigger for some people, than why would you refuse to acknowledge that feminist rhetoric, which often recalls the words of everyone’s cheating ex-girlfriend, can also cause some people to be re-traumatized? Maybe the KKK is offended by the Black Panthers.

Maybe I find this aggressively vitriolic feminist to be obnoxious:

But we all have to tolerate eachother, anyway!

Finally, what really bothers me is that these so-called ‘Safe Spaces’ are likely to be administrated by certain kinds of people (such as: women, gays, transgenders, other races, other cultures, other social and economic classes) who tend to be biased against ME, as a straight white male. Because it is falsely assumed, via liberal bias and common stereotype, that I am over-privileged, I am often the target of these people, who rationalize lying to, cheating on, and stealing from me, via some kind of vague, pseudo-revolutionary revenge against ‘the system’. I am not, nor have I ever been, any more a part of this system than they are, am far removed from any benefit of it, and have been just as oppressed by it. But because I am white, Christian, and male, I get put in this fascist, elitist box by people who know almost nothing about me or my background, as the product of a suburban Baby Boomer couple’s divorce, who grew up with a single mom in the ghetto.

Now, I like to believe that most people in this day and age, even Texans, are not ideologically racist. But pragmatically, how do people of different cultures share the same resources without conflict? American society, I have found, is culture clash plus a class war. I want to turn this pond into a park, but someone else wants to make it a bath house. I want to marry a beautiful woman, but the community wants to turn her out, cut her into little pieces so that everyone gets a slice. And so we wage wars against eachother, using systemic, economic, and social powers to do so. And yet so-called ‘socialists’, who say they don’t acknowledge class or are blind to it, are often in denial of the class war. Just like ‘color-blind’ people are often ignorant of racial conflicts.

I have also noticed that those who are so anal about safety and making everything safe, tend to live inherently insecure or unsafe lifestyles that they demand society accommodate. Kind of like the woman who is obsessive about cleaning, because she herself is not clean.

I don’t need yet another lecture from a 22-year-old Californian who identifies as ‘anarchist’, but is actually a typical liberal Democrat, about how Anarcho-Capitalism is fascist bullshit. I figured that out a long time ago, because I live in Texas, which is a reptile pit full of those exploitative, oppressive, prejudiced, victim-blaming assholes. Conservative libertarians are the most obnoxious hypocrites in the world. They cause the problems of others, then blame others for their problems. They set up rigged business, social, and political competitions, then when you beat them anyway, they say, “You ruined my business, asshole. You may have won the battle, but you won’t win the war. I’ll see to it you never work in this town again.” Not only have businessmen turned the art of manipulative marketing and swindling, making people feel like crap without buying their defective, over-priced product, y

On the other hand, communists are social and political liars, with a sense of entitlement equal to that of most conservatives. Either way, you have people who rationalize lying, cheating and stealing because it’s what the other side does, and they have to compete somehow with the ‘other side’. But these people are so similar, I don’t see it as two sides anymore. Two sides of the same bad penny, perhaps. In my experience, the ones who complain that your speech has incurred emotional distress on their part, are the same people who deliberately, materially starve out anyone they don’t agree with. Pettily, these people will use their social capital to starve you over politics, like Stalin starved the Jews.

And in starving the contrarian, these liberal Democrats posing as anarchists will style themselves Rosa Parks for boycotting (or perhaps it would be more appropriate to call it ‘girlcotting’) you. The obvious difference being that when Rosa Parks and her friends boycotted the bus system, they were fighting the establishment, but when the group does this to an individual, they ARE the social establishment. So it’s like saying Stalin was using ‘non-violent resistance’ when he refused to feed millions of people. Remember that it will always be easier and more appealing for happy fascists to eliminate people they deem ‘negative’ than for them to eliminate the negativity FROM people, thus redeeming them, instead of turning them into enemies. Most of these so called ‘liberal anarchists’ wouldn’t shy away from using guns to enforce their biased idea of social justice, as long as that gun wore the auspice of a government that is completely under their control and shares their particular bias.

Then they talk all this shit about tolerance. Tolerance means allowing people to live and prosper even while there are expressed disagreements between yourselves and them. Then they say you are repressed. But they are the ones who are repressing their honest opinions and valid emotions, and attempting to suppress yours! Then they say you are closed-minded. But your mind is open to all sides of a conflict, and their minds only seem to move in the one direction permitted by their social alliances and democratic group-think principles. These are the same people who will PC Witch-Hunt you for being affiliated with other groups they don’t like, such as MRA’s, NRA’s, anti-Zionists, etc… And ban you from their forum on the mere basis of your past or current communication with those they see as ‘the opposition’.

Though I have written for the MRA cause in the past,

So I am forced to reflect that accusation. “Maybe YOU are obsessed with _______, because it’s the only topic about which I have written that you continually focus upon, gleefully ignoring every other topic I have written about.”

Being denied a microphone is just as oppressive as being denied a gun, or having either jammed into your back by a faction of special interests controlling the government, whether that faction happens to be Haliburton, or the American Unity PAC. Then you have so-called ‘anarchists’ who use the ‘safe space’ and ‘trauma trigger’ rhetoric to rationalize censorship and revisionism. I’ve seen this on Reddit quite a bit. You go into the socialist forum as a contrarian who questions commonly accepted ideas, they will ban you without addressing your points. It’s no different than being black-listed by wealthy Republicans for being a socialist, an experience most of these spoiled Californian Trustifarians are too privileged to have ever endured, but Yellow Dog Democrats and liberals in the South know all too well. I’m sure it’s real easy to be a socialist or a trade unionist on the West Coast or the East Coast, where the slums got so much soul. You try that shit down here, and you’ll get starved and possibly beaten by the establishment, and yes I speak from personal experience.

And I’ve been in a cage before. Let me just tell you. I’ve been put in a cage, after a police SWAT invaded MY PRIVATE SAFE SPACE, and took MY HARD-EARNED MONEY, for cultivating an illegal organism which I sincerely consider a religious sacrament. The people behind this happened to be liberal Democrat women, who held positions of power in the state government (yes this happens sometimes, even in Texas). I consider the way the government has treated me, as a spiritual and therapeutic cannabis user, a flagrant piss-soaking of the First Amendment. Now let me ask you, when’s the last time you heard of this happening to a feminist, or a gay person, or a transgender, or a polyamorist, strictly because the government refused to tolerate their culture? Sexual liberty was legitimized many decades ago, and most of the sexual deviants of this generation know nothing of real persecution. I know people who have done 5 years in the pen for carrying plants across an imaginary line. I talk to them when I want to talk about oppression or how their lives have been ruined by the establishment’s prejudice.

And let me finally say that when it was conservative Republicans trying to censor and prohibit liberal Democrats from demonstration, I was against that, too. I think Simpsons said it best: