JAMES LILEKS ON PAYPAL’S SELF-IMMOLATION:

I’m going to unwind from PayPal, because – well, you know. This will not affect any ongoing subscriptions for many months, but Jeebus Crow, this terms-of-service nonsense is ridiculous. I have my ideas about how it happened, though.

They’re not sitting around thinking “how do we shut down the voices of everyone who stands in our way?”

I don’t think they’re not that self-aware.

It’s more like “we are the smart and correct people whose beliefs are good and true and settled, and there are no good-faith rebuttals. Disagreement can only come from a bad place. No reasonable or good person can defend hate.”

Hmm. Hate.

Okay, well, I think you may have gleaned over the years that I hate fatuous anti-human abstract architecture that destroys the historical fabric of settled, established communities.

Does that count? Why not? It’s hate. It’s grounded in a series of defensible aesthetic opinions, but it could be defined in the end as hate.

No, of course not, that’s not what we’re talking about!

Okay, well, I hate Putin. Does that count?

No, that’s good hate, and good hate isn’t hate hate. Besides, if we banned good hate we’d have to ban all sorts of people with strong opinions about things that don’t matter.

Why not? If hate is the defining term, do they not understand how this could be applied in the broadest possible fashion? I you fail to apply it in the broadest possible fashion, then you might seem, oh, what’s the word, selective?

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