THE German electorate will head to the polls today to cast their ballots on Angela Merkel or Martin Schulz. Find out how to watch the results online, as they come in. The Joy of Destruction The Weekly Standard. Josh Cobin seems a good enough guy. A little pudgy, maybe, with his hair thinning on top and a beard borrowed from a Civil War officerone who forgot to get a trim before Mathew Brady showed up to take the battalion photograph. At 2. 9, Josh is probably a little old for the sloppy look he affects. A little old for his baggy shorts and ball cap. But hes got a steady job at Go. Daddy, the Internet registration firm, down in Scottsdale, Arizona, where theyre too cutting edgetoo Age of the Internetto care about the old corporate uniform of jacket and tie. Hes kind to dogs, concerned with making the world a better place, all that sort of thing. Plus, he told a television interviewer, hes got a great sense of humor. Anyway, one hot August day, he saw in the discussion feeds he follows online that plans were being made to fight the fascism of Donald Trump by rallying against the president during a scheduled trip to Arizona. And though he would later insist that he is not a member of antifa, the loose knit organization behind the rally, Josh decided to join the self proclaimed anti fascist forces. So he put a few supplies, water bottles and whatnot, in a backpack, hid his face behind a gas mask, and marched off in his baggy shorts to protest the presidents August 2. Come experience an October night of terror at Farmaggedon. With 4 scare houses plus an interactive Zombie Paintball experience, nightmares are guaranteedPhoenix Convention Centerwhere, caught up in all the excitement, he got second degree burns on his hand trying to hurl a tear gas canister back at the police. Watch The Bodyguard Online (2017). And when he attempted to kick another as it spun along the pavement, he was hit with yet a third shot from the police a ball of pepper spray that doubled him over and knocked him to the ground, clutching his privates in agony. The blow to the groin soon showed up on video, of course, the way many things do these days. Watch Stake Land II Online on this page. And, the way many things do, it quickly became an Internet meme, with Twitterers, Facebookers, and Instagrammers adding comic comments and song fragments to the scene that looked just like the hackneyed movie trope of a man hit between the legs. The story might have ended there, but Josh seemed to like the attention. He posted on a Reddit thread some pictures of the protest, to prove that he really was the figure in the video and to tell readers that he hadnt been hurt too badly. His lawyer would later reverse field, insisting her client had serious injuries that required significant medical treatment. But she had to argue something at his bail hearingbecause, unsurprisingly, the hapless Josh was soon arrested. Once his pepper shot video spread, a local television station, 3. TVCBS 5 in Phoenix, tracked him down through his Reddit postings for a live interviewan interview in which he apparently thought he was being cagey by showing his face but asking the station not to air his name. I dont equate kicking or putting back tear gas canisters as attacking police, he told the television audience. Sadly, the police did equate all that with attacking the police, and they had no trouble identifying him from his postings and his television interview. On August 2. 4, Joshua Stuart Cobin, 2. Scottsdale, Arizona, was arraigned on three charges of felony assault. Nearly every part of this saga would have been unintelligible 2. Josh learned about the protest online, probably even before he learned about the presidential trip that was the occasion for the protest. The image of his taking a pepper ball to the groin spread because of online video sharing. And he boasted about his deeds in a popular online discussion thread, an odd modern form of confession. Most of all, Josh Cobins story shows the strange social merging of virtual life and real life. The accusation that Trump is a fascist started as a typical bit of Twitter hyperbole, and now it stalks America in the form of a Go. Daddy employee in a gas mask. To arrive at the notion that hurling things at the police isnt attacking them, Josh had to confuse what one can get away with saying on a Reddit feed with what one can get away with actually doing on the streets of Phoenix. He looked like a cartoon figure in the online videohe bumbled his way into an online confession of his actsin confusion about consequences offline. Joshua Stuart Cobin burned his hand because he didnt know that recently fired tear gas canisters really are hot, unlike the computer keyboards on which he typed his virtually hot protests against President Trump. The glory of the Internet is that it allows like minded people to find one another. And the horror of the Internet is that it allows like minded people to find one another. Coin collectors, baseball card enthusiasts, and used book readers have all benefited from the opportunities offered by online connection. So have neo Nazis, child pornographers, and Communist agitators. Where they were once connected only by the sickly sweet smell of the ink from the mimeograph machine clumping away on the kitchen table, the forces of anger now have instantaneous links. And that instantaneity allows a radicalizing more rapid than the world has ever seen. Back in a 1. 99. 9 study called The Law of Group Polarization, legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein suggested that discussion among people with similar views causes a hardening of opinion. In a striking empirical regularity, he wrote, deliberation tends to move groups, and the individuals who compose them, toward a more extreme point in the direction indicated by their own predeliberation judgments. It hardly matters whether the groups are pro gun, pro abortion, or pro anarchy. With sufficient group discussion on one side of an issue, everyone involved takes a step toward the extreme The mildly supportive become strongly supportive, the strongly supportive become wildly supportive, and the wildly supportive become fanatical psychopaths. In such books as Violence and the Sacred 1. The Scapegoat 1. French American theorist Ren Girard offered an explanation for this kind of thing, developing his ideas about scapegoating and what he called mimetic rivalry. Against Freud, Girard argued that human desires do not always come packaged in predetermined forms. We create many of them in imitation of others. We learn to want by watching what others want, and we catch desire the way we catch a disease. More recent years have seen some attention paid to the concept of competitive victimhood. A fascinating 2. Laura De Guissm and Laurent Licata, for example, pointed out that a groups empathy for the victimhood of others is significantly decreased whenever the group expands its own sense of victimhood. But Girard was there first, warning that the idea of victimhood, stripped of its Christianity, would itself become a device of cultural violence, with people competing for the status of victim even as they trample those who oppose them or merely fail to support them sufficiently. If that sounds like the current protestersif that sounds like too much of our current political agitation on both left and rightit should. Trying to understand antifa, the Washington Post recently described the amorphous group as a collection of predominantly communists, socialists and anarchists who reject turning to the police or the state to achieve radical ends, preferring to pursue their radical ends through violent confrontation on the streets. The disorganized organization could not have existed before the Internetor, at least, it could never have found so quickly people like Josh Cobin to march alongside it, before such leaderless collectives were made possible by computerized communication. The group polarization of online discussions, the mimetic rivalry to show oneself more pure than others, the Twitterized brutality toward those who fail to show enough purity, the outrage on the hunt for something to be outraged about The Internet sometimes seems to have been invented for the sole purpose of proving the social contagion theories of Ren Girard. Its doing a bang up job.