We are defining the boundaries of normality by tearing apart the people outside it.
They can’t shit on us, said Alex. That’s really what I’m saying. You can’t shit on us anymore. There was a silence. I just want them to stop shitting on us, said Alex. OK, I said. Sorry.
The New York Times, baffled by Delaware’s obstinacy, tried to argue the state into change in an 1867 editorial. If it had previously existed in [the convicted person’s] bosom a spark of self-respect t...
Practically every prime-time program is populated by people who are just the right sort of mad, and I now knew what the formula was. The right sort of mad are people who are a bit madder than we fear...
Others took exception to being forced to wear little-girl-type dresses (a psychopath-devised punishment for noncooperation in the program).
Only a handful of therapeutic communities inspired by his Massachusetts ones exist in American prisons today. But, as it happens, one of them is situated on the top floor of the Hudson County Correcti...
Judging a person on how flustered they appear in the face of a shaming is a truly strange and arbitrary way of forming an opinion on someone. •
It may very well be that the frotteurist is a helpless victim in the clutches of his obsession, but it’s equally possible that he’s simply a bored creep looking for a cheap thrill.
It is a frightening and huge thought, I said, that the ninety-nine percent of us wandering around down here are having our lives pushed and pulled around by that psychopathic fraction up there. It
Ignominy is universally acknowledged to be a worse punishment than death . . . It would seem strange that ignominy should ever have been adopted as a milder punishment than death, did we not know that...
I thought about my own over-anxious brain, my own sort of madness. Was it a more powerful engine in my life than my rationality?
I suppose that when shamings are delivered like remotely administered drone strikes nobody needs to think about how ferocious our collective power might be. The snowflake never needs to feel responsib...
I hadn’t realized what a collage of mental disorders my whole life has been,
His name was Roger Stone. And he was the man who first introduced Alex Jones to his close friend Donald Trump. *
Google has the informal corporate motto of don’t be evil, but they make money when anything happens online, even the bad stuff.’ In
But with social media, we’ve created a stage for constant artificial high drama. Every day a new person emerges as a magnificent hero or a sickening villain. It’s all very sweeping, and not the way we...
After the interview ended, Stone and I were ushered out. Alex had an interview with Ted Nugent to conduct. In the elevator, Stone scrutinized me. When we try to assess threats, he said, the kooks are...
We have to think about what level of mercilessness we feel comfortable with.
His second message was that a smart orator could, if he knew the tricks, hypnotize the crowd into acquiescence or whip it up to do his bidding. Le Bon listed the tricks: ‘A crowd is only impressed by...
You keep staying on our block we gonna have to show you what the burner do. Thank you, it’s great meeting you, says Phoenix. What’s a burner? I whisper. A gun, Phoenix whispers back. The man loops and...