I started my first blog in early 2002, and I ran a decent show until about 2006. Somewhere around in there I disengaged from the warblog community and made Crooked Timber my internet home.

I wanted to know what the academic left were saying to each other, and I wanted to engage with the most opposing viewpoints I could find.

Smart Progressives can actually be pretty cool people, and not all their ideas are bad. But Leftism subsumes Progressivism.

Leftism is not ideology. Leftism is will to power. That will tramples ideology, reason, persuasion, compassion. That will discards conscience and truth as impediments.

Leftism binds its adherents in unbreakable social bonds, demanding always greater mental and moral abdication, to enable ever more antisocial conduct towards non-adherents. Virtue and grace are not earned by spiritual gratitude, nor by creative or constructive effort. They are earned by an inflated sense of grievance, by pointless demonstrations of rage and cruelty, by harming non-adherents to the cult of Leftism.

Because Leftists have no intellectual or moral integrity, they are triggered into extreme cognitive dissonance by rational, fact-based appeals to what ought to be shared values. They can’t argue back, so they get mad. At Crooked Timber in the old days, comment moderation was almost non-existent and the place was a sewer full of feuding monkeys, gathered from every point of the compass to fling shit at one another.

I learned some interesting Progressive ideas, and I had some fun poking those poseurs up in an infuriatingly polite way. But the fun came to an end when John Quiggin took over discussion policy.

Quiggin’s an admirable character in some ways. He’s a gifted mathematician, a highly-compensated and prestigious informer of public policy, and an accomplished athlete. He’s also a cult leader, a snake-oil salesman. So yeah, kind of like Anthony Fauci, except Quiggin’s head points in the other direction. Quiggin tightened the comment toleration like a garrote over the course of several years, leaving about six survivors and a website with the feel of a dead mall.

One name that flashed up on my radar while I was desperately searching for someone to disagree with, was Fredrik deBoer. I don’t remember what he was writing at the time or whether I engaged with him. But I remembered his name, and that he seemed interesting.

The other thing I remember about him is he got crosswise with the Crooked Timber people. They laced into poor Freddie with a ferocity and obscenity that I myself could never have triggered. They really tried to gut him.

Anyway, it turns out old Fred’s still around, and he’s got a blog. Now, our Freddie is guilty of Progressive Piety, clinging bitterly to certain risible falsehoods. But he is not Left in the sense of being antisocial and unreasonable. He retains some integrity, some individual conscience.

And he says the unthinkable. He can point out precisely the moral failings of victim culture. He can doubt whether BLM is a good thing. He’s a fine writer who evinces sincerity, even if you have to wince at some of those sincerities. To the Left this guy is a heretic, a blasphemer, worse than a mere non-believer.

I’ve added his site to my blogroll.