Herds and A Minor Libertarianism Skirmish

I hate the idea of “losing myself” in a crowd.

Do you trust yourself more, or do you trust the crowd more?

It gave us looting and destruction during what started as a protest about the death of a young man in Tottenham

Notably, 'lower status' doesn't mean 'less trustworthy.' Destruction is low status, but you may trust yourself even less than crowds.

Problem: elitism. Elitism is naturally unpopular, and thus ineffective in non-exclusive publications. What if instead of a generic crowd, I could lose myself in a crowd of clones of me? Necessarily, such a crowd would be smarter than me by myself. Crowds are dumb because they're made of dumber people. Dumber than those who write articles fluently, at least, and thus dumber than anyone who's in position to end up telling us that crowds are untrustworthy.

Herd mentality – in all its forms, both ancient and modern – is probably the thing that frightens me most in the world.

It may still be true that crowds can express thoughts dumber than their average participant. I will hold as obvious that a crowd of my clones wouldn't act like any crowd you've seen. How about your clones?

On a mundane level, however, it gives us neither of these; it simply endorses mediocrity and prevents us from thinking

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Until recently, I believed that the fight for equality would herald a new age of empathy, diversity and understanding.

ProTip: if you want empathy, fight for empathy. Might as well fight for nachos because you want empathy.

 For example, according to most of the Americans that I have met online, to be accepted as a “libertarian” then I have to be in favour of guns.

Err, is this about acceptance or about the law of identity? Yes, if you want to be a libertarian, you can't be haplophobic. That's part of the definition. (Judging by the rest of the article, it seems the thrust is virtue-signalling at the expense of libertarians, not herds per se. Pity.)

 (held by most sane individuals on this side of the Atlantic, including the majority of our own police force)

Sorry dear, they're not sane. Which means neither are you. Luckily sanity is highly compartmentalized. This prevents it from spreading. While it also prevents sanity from spreading, spreading sanity is painful, whereas spreading falsehood generally isn't, so this is normally good.

Another commonly displayed “libertarian” approach that I struggle to respect is the puerile desire to offend

Two probable problems: taking status as binary and 'respecting' vs. 'not persecuting.'
The correct libertarian response to disliking offence given for the purpose of giving offence is to Exit. Cost/benefit that shizzle. Exit with requisite granularity. Maybe suggest increasing granularity to have to throw out less baby with bathwater. If necessary, be libertarian-adjacent.

Second, you are in fact allowed to like people who have unsavoury habits. You know, despite those habits.

She could also mean being forced to put up with it, in which case it's libertarians betraying their own principles.

By the way: cunt, nigger. We can say 'fuck' and 'hell' now. How liberating.

 Maybe I am still that little girl on the edges of the playground

I'm totes gunna signal acceptance of my fallibility. I don't accept it at all, but you know, signaling is so cheap, I just have to!

preening contrarians whose sole function is to cause shock and awe, their tweets a heady mix of clickbait, worthless insults and self-aggrandizement.

Self-fulfilling belief. Think this and it becomes impossible to learn better. It's fine if it's true, but...

So, third probable problem: 'giving offence to etiquette' vs. 'giving offence to those who wish to exert control by being offended.' See my final response to the third last quote. Being deliberately offensive to the politically-offended serves the purpose of driving the faggots off and signalling unwillingness to bow to such cunty tactics.

I hope Williams isn't a feminist. Supposed to be fighting the stereotype of women as prudes.