Note: This post expands on the concluding paragraphs of another recent post. Please see there for context.
When the author was young—in the Internet’s teenage years and the early years of the web—he was semi-prominent in a number of technological and other endeavors in which by some sociological fluke the author and those of similar views were either outright in the majority or at least the dominant political faction. We too had our dissenters and would frequently engage in ferocious political debate with them, the author not being among the least ferocious. But we always tried to argue facts and reason without ill-feeling against our opponents. If anybody had ever suggested that we should use our numerical strength to shun and shame the dissenters into silence or exit, this suggestion would have been universally deemed unworthy of philosophers or gentlemen (as almost all of us were).
We were confident our words would suffice. Some of the more psychologically astute among usIt is a relative term, given that so many of us were somewhere on the autism disorder spectrum. would even go out of their way to be solicitous and technically helpful to the dissenters in the hope that if arguments alone were not enough, the resultant good feeling might inspire some of them to emulate us. But all agreed that it would be shameful to permit politics to contaminate our technical collaboration with the dissenters. We had (or so we thought) on our side the truth, and in many cases telephone-number IQs and encyclopedic knowledge of not only technical facts, but also those of history, law, and politics. Surely, we ought to prevail even without descending to ad hominem and dirty, alienating tricks. Perhaps that is why, all our advantages notwithstanding, we always lost the political battles in the end.This is why among the very small group of people and entities to whom the author does not try extend his general benign indifference slightly tinged by benevolence and empathy is the Gawker empire. Most of its many outlets produce occasionally worthwhile content but invariably leaven it with occasional political rants, invariably delivered at the level of the over-excited freshman. For the frequent unpleasant shocks this has administered, the author bears Gawker and co. genuine, if passive, malevolence and he takes genuine psychic pleasure at their failures and the prospect of their collapse. That is unworthy, but the author is only human with all human failings. Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.
Publius Terentius Afer.
One of the more entertaining of these endeavors was the game Olympia.Previously mentioned here. The author was one of the first to sign up for it and immediately proceeded to recruit an alliance of skilled and like-minded players. Among them was D, a clever young man and—as a fellow at a think tank near the university where the author was then a graduate student—one of the few allies he ever met in person. D and the author would exchange countless e-mails and share more than a few meals, plotting strategies, exchanging snippets of code, and sometimes debating politics for D was of Progressive views, then a minority view among our peers, but now the received opinion in many circles.
