“Freedom of Speech and All That”

24 Jul, 2010 by Morgan Freeberg

Print this article Font size -16+

Very magnanimous and thoughtful of this punkweasel to give that little nod to the First Amendment, as he waxes lyrically about this “gatekeeper” idea.

You knew it was coming, folks. Shirley Sherrod is a perfect wonderful human being now, don’t dare say a word against her — call her “Saint Shirley” — and now that this horrible, dreadful nightmare has descended upon her, we need to go back and do something about these bad, bad bloggers. The “Internet is like this giant bathroom wall” upon which anybody can write anything about anybody. Something must be done! Need a “gatekeeper”!

We’re gearing up for a giant Architects-and-Medicators battle.

I’m putting it in that growing file, because Architects…and we are not a fringe group, we are a goodly sized half of humanity or something approaching half…see it as people doing things, and those things having an effect on other things. Like, DUH. That’s the way the entire universe works.

Just because someone’s late catching on to this, is that a necessity for creating more rules? Well, Architects see it like this; it’s a pretty short discourse. If you’re out-and-out lying you can bring someone some harm, and that is troubling — but we have libel laws, we have slander laws. Okay then. We already have laws. Conversation over.

Medicators, on the other hand, have this primal urge toward more and more regulation and they don’t really care who’s doing the regulating. I’ve often thought maybe they care a lot about not knowing. They want it done by a stranger. There has to be this system of elites and commoners, and most of the Medicators want to be on a first-name basis only with the commoners. They don’t want the responsibility.

So they want all of human activity to go into a great big bell housing, and then everything in the bell housing is affected by some magical focusing lens…which is someone they’ll never actually meet. They’re constantly doing this. All of humankind needs to be arranged into a giant “V”, like a big flock of birds.

We go ahead and do it and the results aren’t any better than they were before — the Medicator does not care.

They just want the ranking system. They care about the process, not about the results. So now I expect they’ll all rally behind this “gatekeeper” idea or something like it. Regulated is better. Until it isn’t. And then, somehow, it still is.

So that’s how I see it. There are people who will support this idea, not because they care about bloggers slandering people but because they absolutely loathe the idea of ordinary people being allowed to influence things. They aren’t terrified of ordinary flawed people like themselves making things worse; they’re terrified of their peers and compatriots of equal stature & rank making things better. That absolutely fills them with dread.

The character of the Medicator really comes out after some massive regulation scheme or social program has already been passed, and its deleterious effects on our lives begins to be felt. And then they invite you in on the massive bitch-fest. We’re sharing an experience, so let’s bitch about it. That’s how they do the medicating. Bitch about the weather, bitch about social security, bitch about the bus not showing up on time.

Mark Steyn commented once about a new slang that has developed in the UK: “It’s health-n-safety gone mad, mate; health-n-safety gone mad!” This is how it works. A new bureaucracy extends its tendrils into our lives, we’re all affected in the same way, life becomes less joyous and we get together and start medicating/bitching. Then come up with some new ideas about the next thing that has to be regulated.

The truth is, these people don’t care about progress, or damage for that matter. All they care about is escape, and what they’re trying to escape is a sense of identity. They want to be part of a comfortably large mass, each man within indistinguishable from the next one, and everything anybody does anywhere is attributable to some all-knowing regulatory busybody that is managed by magical strangers whom they don’t know.

This is not to say we will not find anybody who wants to be the gatekeeper. We will. We’ll find someone just chomping at the bit to become the gatekeeper. That’s the most frightening part of it.

Cross-posted at House of Eratosthenes.