The Crisis of Tolerance and Anonymity

When I was a kid, what attracted me the most about liberalism was its tolerance of views with which it disagreed. Want to lead a parade of Illinois Nazis through Skokie? Well, I’m from the ACLU, I hold your views in contempt, and I’m here to defend your right to march anyway. This sort of thing, however, suggests that at the very least, there’s a crisis of tolerance within liberalism.

And then there’s this, which is just plain repellent.

And people wonder why I use pseudonyms. Sheesh. I had a personal moral crisis about two weeks about when I was researching for this blog and stumbled across this. Recognize it? My first instalanche, but alas, long before my blogging days had begun, and while I was still active duty and afraid to use my real name. Cho Su-Ha. Get it? Now, I find it here, here, and here.

My first angry entry into the nascent North Korean freedom movement spread across the Internet like crab lice through the French fleet after a week of shore leave in Phuket. In fact, I’m deeply flattered, but somewhat ashamed that I didn’t write it under my own name. Does this make me a bad person? I never intended for people to take one letter as a sign that Korea was undergoing a broad-based pyschological shift. I wish I could believe that, but I don’t.