"No, YOU Are!"

I'm having trouble finding any content on Whatzisname's site lately that isn't one, long, lovingly crafted ad hominem argument. Makes sense, considering that he spends most of his time trading on his notoriety and pseudonymity drives him (excuse my language) absolutely bugshit insane, but it's getting a bit silly.

(Why do you think I call him "whatzisname"? He LIVES to have his name repeated. He probably Googles himself on an hourly basis.)

Take this whole brouhaha. Some reactionary idiot is yammering on about how Muslims are dogs or some such thing, and what's the response? Not to shoot him down on his merit-free claims, but to just repeat "tell me your name. Tell me your name".

What the hell does that matter? If it's stupid, it's stupid. If it's smart, it's smart. It doesn't matter who wrote it at all, except if they're claiming some kind of expertise.

But then again, considering the fact that he's a "proud censor", and unironically writes things like this:

It's how I arrived at my position on censorship, in the mid-1980s. Like many aspiring writers, you see, I was all for unfettered expression. No limits - civil, criminal, you name it. Let it all hang out.

That's what I believed. Then, one day in law school, one of my profs - feminist legal scholar Kathleen Mahoney - said to me this: "Okay, Warren: have you seen the violent pornography I oppose? Have you actually seen it? Don't you think you should?"

I confessed that, well, I hadn't. So Kathleen said that I should do that first, before I started spouting off.

So I did. The pornography was readily available, at seedy shops down on the Eighth Avenue Mall. I looked at the stuff found on the racks (stuff that now seems very tame, in the Internet age). It made me want to vomit. In the fullness of time, I became an unashamed advocate of limits on expression.

Well. I can see why he focuses so much on names: the pseudonym is ever the foe of the censor's pen.

Read that. Bask in its awesome silliness. Revel in someone actually arguing that "because I find something disturbing, it should be banned." I find Ayn Rand deeply disturbing and horribly injurious to the psyche, but I'm not going to be building a big bonfire out of her books. I'm not a big fan of furries, either, but I'm not going to be tossing them in jail just because they have pictures of a guy in a leather-clad Babs Bunny suit flogging the holy hell out of some girl dressed up like Richie Rich.

Is whatzisname, censorship-happy goon that he is, really so ridiculously naive as to think that his "ick" reaction would be the end of it? Or is this self-described "punk" so relentlessly boring in his interests that nothing he knows or cares about could possibly be censored? Or perhaps he's so self-centered that he can't consider that someone else just might be the victim? This despite the rather nasty history Canada has of censoring any and all GBLT material as "obscene"?

(Has he never even heard of Voltaire? Or the fact that VOLTAIRE WAS A PEN-NAME?)

But, of course, like most censors, what he really is is what he calls everyone else: a coward. He doesn't fear being revealed, of course. He lives for The Name. No, he fears something far, far worse.

To paraphrase Gore, Warren Kinsella fears an inconvenient truth.

(As a coda. Warren clearly fears comments by right-wing crazies. Well, David Neiwert writes on fascism. He's written excellent books on it, in fact. For that, David Neiwert is targeted by any number of neo-fascist assholes and fascist apologists.

David Neiwert has a website.

That website has comments.

No, Warren, you have no excuse.)

Edit: I have no truck with the throngs of idiots whining about "Dhimmitude" or some such thing. Most Canadian conservative sites I've seen are odious, when they aren't just tiresome. They still won't go away with a swipe of the censor's pen, though. Warren should know that by now.

Further Edit: Wait, could it be that he also hates pseudonyms because he thinks they're all the same guy?

There's no more than a few dozen of them across the Great White North...Drawing from a Rolodex of pseudonyms, they type out post after post...

Holy crap. I bet this guy would have also thought Digby, Atrios, Hesiod and myself were the same guy back in 2002. Hilarious!

No, buddy, there are probably more than a dozen or so mouthbreathing conservatives out there. As nice as it would be to think otherwise.