Luke Ford

* Los Angeles Times: “Before his death, 10-year-old Anthony Avalos came out as gay, official says. Authorities are investigating whether homophobia played a role in his death.”

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* The latest on Milo.

* Supreme Court upholds Trump’s travel ban. The right keeps winning.

* Japanese blogger stabbed to death after internet abuse seminar

One of Japan’s most prominent bloggers has been stabbed to death minutes after giving a seminar on how to resolve personal disputes on the internet.

Media reports said Kenichiro Okamoto, better known by his blogger name Hagex, died on Sunday evening after reportedly being attacked by a man he had argued with online.

The suspect, Hidemitsu Matsumoto, allegedly followed Okamoto into the toilets after he had ended his talk at a venue in the south-western city of Fukuoka.

Okamoto was stabbed several times before staggering out of the toilets after his assailant, who fled on a bicycle, according to the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper….

Moments before the fatal stabbing, the 41-year-old had shared advice at a public event on how to deal with online disputes.

According to reports, the suspect had posted messages containing personal abuse directed at Okamoto and other commenters on the blog. The Mainichi quoted a source as saying that Okamoto “had got into trouble before with internet users over the content of the blog”.

In a message purportedly written immediately after the stabbing, Matsumoto said he had continued to abuse Okamoto by opening a new account every time his existing account was deleted.

He added: “I am going to go now to my neighborhood police box to voluntarily surrender and take responsibility for my actions.”

Matsumoto, 42, reportedly confessed to stabbing Okamoto, telling police he had grown to “hate” the celebrity blogger and wanted to kill him.

Regarded as a leading expert on cybercrime and the dark web, Okamoto worked for an IT security consulting firm and made regular TV appearances.

Japanese Twitter users paid tribute to the blogger, with many voicing disbelief over the violent nature of his death. “Rest in peace, Hagex,” one user wrote.

The IT journalist Daisuke Tsuda said he was shocked to learn of Okamoto’s death. “How could this have happened?” he wrote.

Online personalities and journalists are often victims of online abuse in Japan, where attempts are being made to crack down on hate speech.

From Vox:

Who is Bronze Age Pervert?
That’s not altogether clear. His profile photograph is of an impossibly buff man facing away from the camera. His bio identifies him as an “Aspiring Nudist Bodybuilder. Free speech and anti-xenoestrogen activist.” He’s been cited to me by a number of sources familiar with the cultural landscape of something of a leadership figure among devotees of Pepe the Frog. He frequently condemns other alt-right figures, such as Richard Spencer, at times suggesting they might be in league with the FBI.

His posts veer between retweeting MRA rhetoric about “roasties” (slang for women with multiple sexual partners), claiming that Jordan Peterson plagiarized his suggestion of “enforced monogamy” from him (in an earlier forum post, he claimed women should be reduced to breeding stock), and celebrating on #HandsomeThursdays the physiques of chiseled, muscular Aryan and Slavic men. It’s not clear, in his internet-slang-laced posts, where performative trolling ends and authentic far-right views begin, nor does it necessarily matter.

Nobody knows who Bronze Age Pervert is. But among a subset of internet denizens, he’s something of a demigod: a Jordan Peterson in miniature. He was well-known enough for the neoreactionary and proto-alt-right thinker Curtis Yarvin (better known by his pseudonym, Mencius Moldbug) to name-check him in a recent interview with an Atlantic journalist, telling Rosie Gray that Bronze Age Pervert was his contact inside the White House. While this seems to have been an attempt to troll Gray, it speaks to Bronze Age Pervert’s relative notoriety within this tight community.

An anonymous follower of his on another neoreactionary blog declared him the leader of the alt-right in language that, though comically over the top, nevertheless speaks to the fundamental mythic tendency of these movements:

“Bursting away the built up rust of the last centuries so new myths may be sung. He frees us from the constrictions of historicism and geographism- placing the race question in the light of the Faustian imperial infinity. By having us all take up barbarism the Right is spared from the civcuck middling elements having too much a say … new culture will be anti-fragile to the attaqs against it, it will soon give us victory. Long live our liege lord.”

It’s, of course, ridiculous. But it’s also illustrative. What Peterson makes implicit, Bronge Age Pervert and his followers make explicit: the intersection of trolling (complete with language taken straight from Internet memes) and traditionalism. The traditionalist aesthetic allows for both an embrace of an imagined past — in which order is triumphant over chaos — and a thoroughly contemporary assumption of transgression.

Bronze Age Pervert is an embodiment of the strange and effective tension between nostalgia and transgression that makes men like Peterson so popular. His blend of say-anything internet irony, highly eroticized valorization of splendid “warrior” bodies, and atavistic appeals to return to an era when men were real men is as close as you can get to a distillation of the Petersonian essence.

In one tweet, Bronze Age Pervert posts a painting of a naked wood nymph with a thoroughly Nietzschean caption: “return of the maenads …… imagine being torn limb from limb by crazed bacchant-gril as irregular drums beat and very thin, circular demented melody plays on two flutes handled by goat-men … I want such death.”

In a Twitter DM interview, Bronze Age Pervert told me that he did not call himself a traditionalist “because there’s no tradition I can think of that I’m trying to preserve.” He looks, he said, to Homeric and Classical Greek thought, as well as to Tibetan Buddhism, but isn’t trying to “adopt or revive” them.

“Most traditions are hostile to beauty and excellence,” he said, although he believes in a “biological hierarchy” that privileges some traditions over others (he’s a fan of the French, the Greeks, the Japanese; he dislikes Ashkenazi Jews).