That Mirror in the Room With You Now?
Burn Witch Burn on Notes and they’ve no intention of running out of witches
I first was going to rather unoriginally recount what happened as middle-school cafeteria moves itself over to Notes and toddlers sitting on either side of the playmat screaming “we’re gonna tell Daddy!” but it’s more accurately told like this:
A pair of draggle-tailed sparrows so mad, they’re doing their damnedest to transition into shrikes and unable to see it’s their own intestines they’ve hung on the barbed wire and bleeding through the mysterious veins and arteries of cyberspace.
So who’s doing all this carnaging?
A nice lady Substacker who supports justice with all her might slimed another Substacker as a Nazi etc. etc. etc., and subscribing to and liking that young man as I do, I remarked that she was both intemperate and incorrect, and eventually, after I said this:
Are we discussing ideology or individuals whose free speech you’d like throttled?
she said this:
A Jew who defends neo-Nazis. No irony there. Lol
and our later conversations have been of the same tenor, and she’s spent a couple of days restacking much of what I Noted to her, with some interesting editorial commentary.
And then a guy whose Substack and podcast expose the wickedness of Cluster B personality types waled into the nice lady, and I remarked to him this:
[name redacted], you’ve elsewhere demonstrated an incapacity for entering into civil discourse with those you disagree with.
because he has in the elsewheres called me a nasty person who hates strong men, and after calling me a narc for the nice lady, he blocked me, and then unblocked me, and when in a subsequent thread he said that people like the nice lady are insects to be stamped out, I remarked that sounded a little Rwandish, and after a bit of further anger on his part, he called me a manipulative bitch in a Note that ended with bitch too, but invited me to reply to him, warning me that he was gonna screenshot everything and discuss it on his evening podcast, and when I said this
We’re here in the open air. Observers can judge for themselves.
he blocked me again.
This is some painful shit to behold.
These two not-very-nice people, each in their forties now, each wanting so badly to be my enemies in the fight against Badness as each has defined it, and some of each of their partisans too, there’s enough of their own history told online to show the desperate anguish they fight not to drown in.
That doesn’t make their failures to self-tame excusable. You do rightly or you don’t.
This is absolutely 100% both self-appointed sides in the Fight Against Wrongness; it’s not a memewar but people so terrifyingly consumed with hatred that they can’t recognize their own faces in the mirror.
I wonder if this is how it felt right before the Civil War.
Your sparrow-to-shrike metaphor is a hell of a thing. Admired!