a golden age of wimpery

henry draws my attention to this story, which has a shape remarkably similar to mine: people repress your song instead of trying to deal with your content. it can happen to a high school student, or to a professor, or to you. there are a variety of factors that have taken us into this new golden era of american censorship, authoritarianism, and breathtaking stupidity: the mass shooting phenomenon has everyone - especially anyone running any sort of institution - pissing in their depends, just pouring all day. the 'anti-bullying' obsession, possibly the only decently-funded educational initiative of the last decade, is boiling up into every aspect of society, so that people pretend to experience a nasty comment on the internet as an act of violence. war on terror, universal surveillance, and so on: no one wants to be free or wants anyone else to be free because they are too scared to be free. people wonder why the right is angry etc: the only thing any leftist ever said about trump. i'm asking instead whether we really want to live scared of our own shadows and out of our wits, live a life of cravens, and use that to motivate morbid censorship and insipid totalitarianism. everyone just wants to be protected by the authorities, while the authorities tremble like they've got parkinson's.