I don’t think you can be doxxed when you already use your real first and middle names on your blog and you are easily identifiable. The New York Times did not doxx this shrink, he doxxed himself long ago.
* In the comments section of his recent Steve Hsu post, Scott Alexander essentially said that he had stopped writing about HBD a while ago to protect himself.
I work in the corporate world, and my career could be destroyed if it came out that I’ve commented here. I take some precautions now, but years ago in more innocent times, I put my actual email in the email box and didn’t mask my IP address. Is that information still stored somewhere? How vulnerable is it? Is there any reason that it couldn’t be deleted?
* On the doxxing front, this Scott Alexander situation brings to mind Alex Kuczynski’s unmasking in the NYT of my friend Ed Conlon way back in the 90s, when he was writing pseudonymously for The New Yorker about his work as an NYPD officer. She just did it for fun: like her father the similarly repellent Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, disgraced ex-President of Peru, she evidently has few moral scruples.
* Rod Dreher at The American Conservative is doing outstanding work on this subject of emerging soft totalitarianism. He is not self-censoring out of fear in writing under his real name. Rod is very clearly made of the stuff that liberty and civilization are made of. Perhaps only a small percentage of such people are needed to secure these blessings for broad society, but some discreet percentage are surely required.
* Rod Dreher is correct and people of a certain disposition must anticipate a possibility of being unable to work in a growing number of professions. If you have certain religious or political or scientific views, and are honest about them, it may be hard to work in your chosen profession. Unless you are very quiet about your beliefs. East Germany had a Stasi. As Steve Sailer probably has pointed out, now we have volunteers who work for free to monitor the rest of us.
It won’t quite be like the Soviet Union or the old East Bloc in Soviet times–but there are similarites.
1. Many individuals will believe one set of things but be afraid to state those things out loud. It will be hard to tell what people actually think because informers may be anywhere.
2. Many creative individuals will have mundane day jobs and do their “real work” at night. Vaclav Havel comes to mind, offhand.
3. Various professional and occupational fields will be increasingly taken over by hacks. How to define a hack? I think of someone who is (a) predictable, (b) mediocre, and (3) produces what is politically called for and unthreatening. Consistently.
4. You would expect to see people in exile. There was no shortage of creative minds from the Soviet Bloc who got out or were advised to get out–Western observers could conclude these individuals were just the tip of the iceberg. Off the top of my head…
Czeslaw Milosz
Solzhenitsyn was in a class by himself, of course
Andrei Amalrik
Joseph Brodsky
5. As in the Soviet Union, there will be a set of disciplines (The Party Sciences) in which it is understood that the body of research does not actually describe reality, but rather describes a desired reality that doesn’t exist but is wished to exist.
In the Soviet Union, these things included history and economics. Literature was strongly hobbled as well.
in the USA, it seems that psychological topics around gender, psychometrics, and criminology are some of our emerging Party Sciences.
In both systems, journalism is compromised. We don’t have Pravda and Isvestia. But it can be hard to get an accurate portrait of reality by reading the newspaper.
In the Soviet Union, plane crashes were often not reported, according to Hedrick Smith’s old work _The Russians_.
In the US papers, certain events are de-emphasized. To learn of them you should consult the Daily Mail in the UK, rather than the NY Times or the Washington Post.
* The mob cannot fire him. Neither can the odious characters who work for The Times. The question at hand is why his employer would fire him in those circumstances. Here’s a hypothesis: the modal character type in the professional-managerial class today is a craven and other-directed simp who has zero sense of honor.
* The inexorable pressures of government and mammoth insurance companies have lead to the result that the great majority of doctors today are employed, usually by large hospital or academic systems. The loss of the “shopkeeper” private practice doctor is one reason the profession is moving strongly to the left (half the articles in the New England Journal now are SJW crap). Also in most localities psychiatrists are in short supply. If he was cancelled and fired it is certainly possible there wouldn’t be another psych readily available and on the right insurance plans to take on his patients. And psych patients do kill themselves at times.
* If the guy is a psychiatrist that has given out his first and middle name, along with the not-that-huge city that he lives in, how hard would it be for any lame-brain to find him? You don’t need Jim Rockford at $200 per day plus expenses. Shit, if he were of the left, and it was time for me to do this, I wouldn’t have to know anybody and could do this in a day or two (at $200/day + expenses, of course).
I haven’t read the guy’s blog, but I’ll take you all’s word for it that it was good reading. On the naivety of the guy, “indeed”, indeed. It’s not just naivety – it’s a lack of imagination here – think about what someone would have to do to find out who you are.
