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Recently, the Guardian doxxed Lom3z, the right-wing author best known for What is the Longhouse, based on an unwise registration of a linkable LLC name. As Ahmari points out, he's "an erstwhile Bernie-ish bro who at some point snapped, or became disaffected with the millennial left, and shifted rightward." An MFA holder who was a lecturer at UCI (not tenure track, of course) for a decade, of an unsurprising "off-white" background.
What I'm confused about: why is this a story at all? Presumably, the main effects of this are to make him unemployable and perhaps cause some interpersonal issues. What is a random reader expected to do? Unless you happen to employ him, seemingly nothing. The exposé does detail his sins, which includes publishing ponderous Yarvin tomes and obscure works by Russian White counter-revolutionaries.
And yet it is a story, and a story that gets me emotionally invested, so I suppose my question should really be less why is this a story and more why do I consider this a story? As much as I like the longhouse concept, it's hard to consider Lom3z or his biography at all important; he could die tomorrow, and no one aside from his loved ones would notice.
I think what gets me is that there's simultaneously an appropriation of victimhood (evil bad guy publishes anonymous essay causing evilness!) combined with an inquisitorial zeal to punish, and apparently the power to do exactly that. I just don't see how someone can have both these traits simultaneously, and yet it's depressingly common. I guess I see the doxxing as a distillation of the current zeitgeist of exceptional purity, and that's something to point to when thinking about it.
Another question: what happened to Ahmari? I recall him being on the outs for theoconnery, but now he's publishing snark in the New Statesman about other right-wing writers. Did something change, or did he have some kind of beef with Lom3z?
It's meant to harass and intimidate him, to mark him as a target for leftists, specifically antifa, and to chill others who may want to express right wing opinions.
It's not the random reader that this is intended for, it is for the radical reader. For the radical reader it means that the enemy has a name, a face, a place of work and a home. He has family and friends.
The point of anonymity and pseudonymity it to protect your real assets from retaliation, and that's how and why it is being used today just as much as it was for the Federalist Papers, and forever before then.
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The Guardian (Like the New York Times before it), was exercising its right to kick people in the balls:
It is a story. It has plot, characters, setting, conflict, and all the rest. It just isn't news.
They've pulled a great trick: they (often) write newsworthy stories, therefore (all) stories they write are newsworthy. Heck, they're even called "the news", so anything they see fit to print must be real news.
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It's a story pour encourager les autres, of course.
This has always been the case, and is nothing new. The establishment has now styled itself as a revolution against its victims. People who call themselves "punks" enthusiastically sign up to the same stifling speech rules as every HR department in every multinational megacorporation in the western world and excoriate others who deviate.
These punks live in a crab bucket. A person (especially a white person) has little hope of advancement in journalism or academia, where hundreds apply for every job.
Angry about his reduced station at life compared to his grandiose self-perception, the doxxer lashes out at the one group it is still permissible to attack.
For one day at least, the doxxer gets to feel powerful in an otherwise small and wasted life.
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Why was Scott's identity a story at all? Why was Beff Jezos'?
Dissident not only exists but has the impudence of publishing dissident litterature? That gets written because he is now a known quantity to networks of activists that will attempt to make his life and that of his friends hell if tries to get a hold of any power. It's a signal to friends that enemies exist in this particular place and must be destroyed, nothing more.
At best it sounds a little bit absurd because the power of those activists has recently diminished and they're no longer able to cancel people at will, so this type of "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" publications are thankfully impotent complaints.
There is no larger story, no bigger picture, just journalists throwing mud at people they find contemptuous, as is, disgustingly, their job.
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