Coffee with Shoul and Bronze Mustache in China

Today I met my friend Paul Shoul at Northampton Coffee. What a comfortable place: strong coffee, deep china mugs, a window to look out of. We talked about Paul’s upcoming blog, (watch for a link to it here) and then I read the NY Times.

Found a story about “online throngs,” in China. Here is a snippet.

“Let’s use our keyboards and mouse in our hands as weapons,” one person wrote. “to chop off the heads of these adulterers, to pay for the sacrifice of the husband. It was in reaction to a letter posted to a site in China, where a husband denounced a college student he suspected of having an affair with his wife.

Within days, the hundreds had grown to thousands, and then tens of thousands, with total strangers forming teams that hunted down the student, hounded him out of his university and caused his family to barricade themselves inside their homes.”

It’s Internet Hunting, China Style. Imposing a stern morality on society.

In recent instances, people have scrutinized husbands, suspected of cheating on their wives, fraud on internet auction sites, the secret lives of celebrities and unsolved crimes. On case that drew a huge following involved the poisoning of a Tsinghua University student. Clever Internet names are a part of this story.

“Bronze Mustache” was the subject of the mob, and he made a six-minute video refuting claims he had an affair with Quiet Moon–despite the accusations by Freezing Blade.