“You are blocked from following @freddiedeboer and viewing @freddiedeboer’s Tweets.”
Yesterday, Fredrik “Freddie” deBoer was tweeting out his newly pixeled attack on liberalism on behalf of leftism, and, quite in keeping with that posture, went from lashing out against self-styled “paleoliberal” Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute – for “not being interested in economic justice… really” ((
https://twitter.com/freddiedeboer/status/711573194121957376
)) – to Twitter-blocking Mark R. Yzaguirre, who had, inconceivably, insisted on arguing the merits of realized liberal democracy or social democracy vs. deBoer’s wish for something certainly much better (if not anywhere ever existent). I turned out to be next in line for the virtual executioner, apparently for my impertinence or impudence while taking notice – unless the real point for Mr. deBoer was satisfaction of sadistic or narcissistic compulsion, or psychological compensation, or imaginary validation of status perception, or all of the above.
One might fault Yzaguirre and Konczal for tweeting under the pretense of seeking serious discussion on Twitter, but the mistake is a common one. The Bonsai version of a political conversation between the two of them and deBoer had, predictably, as little new to offer a reader as deBoer’s re-seasoned polemic: Anything beyond the old leftier-than-thou thrust and counter-thrust in its barest form would exceed Twitter’s parameters. Still…
@CK_MacLeod The key test will be whether he bans you for your insolence.
— Mark R. Yzaguirre (@markyzaguirre) March 20, 2016
What I was trying to force into 140 characters above, before Mr. Yzaguirre’s quite prescient reply, is that deBoer’s dismissal of Konczal and then especially of Yzaguirre (as at last, tragically, of me) struck me as an unconscious, exquisitely between-the-tweets exposition on what is lost – dignity, humanity, intellectual humility, open-mindedness, civility, and all of the other gentlepersonly virtues- in the paradoxically moralistic reduction of political philosophy or simply politics to morally unreflective ideology. The ideological Left can generally be distinguished from its social liberal and neo-liberal sometime allies by the resolutely blinkered refusal to acknowledge anything in the older liberal idea that is not to be deemed a hypocritical charade on behalf of oppression, or that is to be taken as in any way representative of some even potentially valid position. Only “justice” as the Left narrowly defines it is justice at all: Alternatives are and must remain utterly unthinkable: blocked. ((The problem was also central “Chait’s Insanity,” discussed at this site in 2014.))
Not that only leftists block, or ideologically block – even if, as a matter of personal fact, it is still a complete mystery to me why some major minor tweeps who happen to be well to deBoer’s right have also in the past reached out and annihilated me. In deBoer’s case, I at least have the cause, or very “pre-” pretext, before me:
@freddiedeboer yes, sir – I will now return to my proper place of silent awe @markyzaguirre
— CK MacLeod (@CK_MacLeod) March 20, 2016
I confess: Not my best work either. In any event or non-event my exile from the Freddieverse followed immediately, denying me future access to exchanges like this one:
https://twitter.com/freddiedeboer/status/711582471578464256
I expect I will also have to get by without clarification as to what question Mr. deBoer believed had already been answered, but the words, in context, evoke for me the Bolshevik functionary or Cultural Revolutionist explaining “shut up” to yesterday’s ally, today’s objective class enemy, tomorrow’s non-person: These questions have already been answered by dialectical materialist science of history, comrade.
By next week or sooner, deBoer may well again be putting on his “last reasonable person” costume before chastising colleagues for their own re-echoey insularity, but, if he does so and convincingly, I will have to rely on some source other than my Twitter feed to find out. Or I may simply counter-ignore all things deBoerian for now on, content to savor the perfection of the last glimpse: The intellectual mounting the barricades in his mind and shouting down all within hearing – moving, in undeniable if also undeniably trivial form, by sheer necessity, from the denunciation of competing perspectives to the proscription of those about whom, as he avers with conspicuous pride, but disproves in acting to prove, he could not possibly care less.
