Thread by @st00perduck

there is smth interesting in the relatively recent and p drastic decline in bullying rates (see downthread of quoted; i'd love to read some phenomenological data of how the change occurred) but the screenshotted brings up points i rarely see discussed by anyone (except @ctbeiser)

you have to remember, mid-late-2000s US culture was at this bizarre stalemate. Bush had spent most of his goodwill, the invasion of Iraq which a supermajority of the population had enthusiastically supported had degenerated into a historically unpopular war

however the antiwar movement that had opposed it from the start was sbasically dead in the water, gigantic marches in the streets reduced to weird coalitions of left-liberals, socialists, libertarians, and various crank types on the Internet, which was still mostly a curiosity

moreover, just 8 years after Columbine—whose debate was still raging, w/ violent video games and scary rap and metal music still being huge topics of controversy—the US got hit w/ Virginia Tech, perpetrated by yet another weirdo loner w/ a seeming love for first-person shooters

around this same time there was increasing media attention on teenage suicide caused by bullying: in 2006 the case of Megan Meier (farcically fictionalised in the film cyberbu//y), then many others: Tyler Long, Tyler Clementi, Ty Smalley, Amanda Todd, Rehtaeh Parsons

the thing abt bullying and suicide is that practically no one likes them, edgelordery aside. it's p much uncontroversial to say that bullying is bad—it occupies the exact intersection of "cruel" and "pathetic" that neither herren- nor sklavenmoral can rly abide

so when the chintzy PSAs started being cranked out in like 2007 it was *safe political territory*. both Bush-branded "compassionate conservatives" and cool socially-conscious left-liberals could sign onto it. saying you'd "do smth abt bullying" gained you bipartisan applause

well...there were some people who stepped up to "defend the indefensible" early on: from three corners, three angles. first of all we have to get this out of the way: a huge amt of bullying was (and is) specifically homophobic. so there was always a huge focus on antigay bullying

in fact, i'd genuinely attribute the black-swan success of the early-2010s LGBT rights campaign to its hitching itself to antibullying stuff. It Gets Better, The Trevor Project, &c. successfully turned the terms of debate to "protect vulnerable gay teenagers at all costs"

i remember this becoming, simultaneously, a popular forum weapon and an early "wholesome meme". (and a *v effective* example of "when they go low, we go high". unironically, don't underestimate the value of the Michelle Obama approach at the right moment)

keep the Internet popularity in mind for later, but to deal w/ the obvious for now: this represented a threat to social conservatism. Focus on the Family and the rest of the Dobson ilk had to defend themselves from the resulting scrutiny, so they went on the attack

they insisted that antibullying efforts were "covers" for liberals trying to force gay indoctrination onto your children. at the time, this earned them swift backlash from everyone who wasn't a homophobic evangelical, but it'll become a theme later on

now, the other big thing about it was that this was happening at the same time as the early rise of digital activism. it rly didn't take much to go on Twitter or MySpace or later Facebook and add a virtual ribbon to your page saying you didn't approve of bullying

plus, a lot of things can be conceptualised as bullying. dictatorship is the rule of bullies, war is big countries bullying smaller countries, &c. (Focus on the Family actually tried this tactic by making themselves out to be the victims of bullying by powerful Hollywood gays!)

this is what Persona 5 is about, fwiw, at least up until the final boss: part of what galvanised stuff like Anonymous was the idea of taking on bullies at every level of life, from the Steubenville rapists to cults like Scientology to entire governments around the world

antibullying was an authentically populist cause, in every sense of the term: it was in various permutations grassroots and genuinely popular, and promoted cynically or otherwise by celebrities and politicians. it meant everyone could be the hero of their own story

naturally, there's some cranky fogies who might not be on board w/ that. so we have a second, more Laschian theme: the antibullying movement, as an outgrowth of the self-esteem movement, is helping make us more narcissistic, softer, more fragile

there's a Reason interview w/ Camille Paglia in 2015, the tail end of the movement, where she says, "So I know what they're getting in school, and it's basically zero. What they're being taught is, 'Don't bully. Like everyone. Negotiate and compromise.' They know nothing [else]."

this sums up this theme of anti-antibullying: we're not teaching our kids to stand up for themselves, we're teaching them to be sissies and tattletales. we need tough ppl who readily self-sacrifice, but we're getting self-absorbed softies who cry until they get what they want

this is sort of a natural contrarian view, as well as one that didn't gel w/ the predominant themes of the period. it became super important later on, hence the date of that quote. but for a long time it remained primarily a shock position, a sort of opinion-column goatse

it really can't be understated how much antibullying was *everywhere*. Demi Lovato was spokeswoman for Teens Against Bullying, and it came up on Disney *a lot*. schools and other institutions held showings of Bully, the documentary. Glee was basically Antibullying: The Show

when South Park inevitably ended up satirising the campaigns (alongside Kony 2012, which was fundamentally an application of the antibullying model to global politics) in "Butterballs", it was *sympathetically*—the episode even ends w/ its own antibullying moral

when even South Park basically supports a huge pop culture-backed mainstream bipartisan social movement, there's gnna be a v predictable contingent who see that in itself as damning. ofc i mean the people who wld see it as a psyop: the fringes of the digital fringes

my dear friend @baroquespiral has a whole book (you should read it, i linked it) about this conceptual figure he calls the Young-Boy, in dialogue with/rejoinder to Tiqqun. the Young-Boy plays a major role both in antibullying and in its fringe opposition
andataexpress.square.site/product/theory…

basically, the Young-Boy is discontented, energetic, sceptical of what ppl in charge tell him. he sees himself in V and Tyler Durden. so to an extent he's a natural figure for the radicalisation of antibullying into Anonymous-type adventures, as i described above

but at the same time, antibullying is *also* extremely Young-Girl coded: it's trendy, it's fashionable, it's Disney-brand safe. so the more disconnected side of the Young-Boy is not so enthusiastic, he's suspicious: *why* are these cultural elites trying to sell us this line?

so here's the third theme: there's *something* sinister underlying this whole antibullying scheme. it's to make us all compliant, or to co-opt grassroots energy for establishment purposes, or to sell us some sort of plan to surveil us more and censor the Internet

ultimately for him it does not rly matter exactly what it's a psyop *for*, it's just that anything that big has got to be a psyop. if you *really* go digging, like on ancient archived 4chan posts or whatnot, you might find his rants on this, but his was never a mainstream idea

let's fast forward to 7 May 2018 rq: Melania Trump has launched her own First Lady project, a successor to Nancy Reagan's Just Say No and Michelle Obama's Let's Move!, an antibullying initiative called Be Best. immediately, there is a flurry of criticism and mockery

now, just on the face, the First Lady to a man who got to become President largely by being really good at bullying every other candidate, the wife of the Bully-in-Chief, launching a campaign against bullying is laughable. but there was smth deeper going on there

ultimately there was a sense that launching an antibullying campaign in 2018 was sort of intrinsically languid. if Dr. Jill Biden launched an antibullying campaign, sure, it wldn't garner nearly as much mockery, but the public reaction wld be summarisable as "...eh"

i can confidently say 7 May 2018 is not the day the antibullying movement truly died; it should not be inscribed on its gravestone. what was it? i think it died so slowly and pitifully that we didn't even notice its passing

2015, the year of that Paglia interview from earlier, was also the year Obergefell v. Hodges was decided, and gay marriage became the law of the land in the United States. this was, despite being a victory for the practical concerns brought on by the AIDS crisis, hugely symbolic

it shouldn't be underrated as a blow to the idea that LGBT existence is illegitimate, and therefore a safe target for picking on. for a lot of people in America, esp. younger people, it became a lot safer to be openly gay. that's a great thing!

but as my friend @ettingermentum demonstrates in this piece, conservatives p much immediately pivoted to trying to attack the "T" in LGBT, as a wedge issue. and it failed in part bc the first "bathroom bill" was promptly recognised as legal bullying
ettingermentum.news/p/the-modern-e…

it *still* fails among the voting population p regularly, but imo there's still been a vibe shift. gender stuff is still "weird" for ppl in a way that, e.g., the gay couple on Modern Family isn't, and the GOP has newer cultural tools they can use against trans acceptance

(incidentally i've been saying for years that if the Democrats really want to support trans rights, they should strike a top-secret backroom deal w/ ABC to put a Modern Family-type show on the air w/ a lesbian aunt who's married to an adorably loopy middle-aged trans woman)

i've been hammering on this point long enough: the Republicans keep slamming trans people using panic tropes reappropriated from MeToo, but Democrats (and the left more broadly) only rarely hit back w/ the antibullying tropes of yore. so really: why is that?

i think part of it has to do w/ the great and terrible 2014 ofc, but it'd been brewing for a while. if you look at GG, everyone knows the application of antibullying tropes by either side was farcical, even if the anti- side's claim was technically more legitimate

the gamer pitch was, roughly: we have been bullied our whole lives for being nerdy losers, and now these SJWs want to take away our hobby. the SJW pitch was: we are the ones actively being bullied here. which was true, but *as a movement*, there had been a recent jettisoning

if you remember the Social Justice Elder Gods from 2012 Tumblr (does The Arkh Project ring a bell?), you prob remember they kind of actively prided themselves on expertise in bullying. it's just that they viewed themselves as bullying *the right people*, ppl w/ more privilege

under this paradigm, antibullying was problematic bc it represented "one law for the lion and the ox": social oppression of minorities was regarded as basically ontologically different from "mere" bullying, and bullying was a *tool* that cld be used to cut either way

this was rly a development from *within* the broader antibullying memeplex p much entirely orthogonal to the three anti-antibullying themes i detailed earlier (i'll get back to those), injected w/ then-obscure academic theory, and is a v diff't angle to anything else so far

the earliest "anti-SJWs" i remember observing on Tumblr were basically anti-revisionists for antibullying: the root of oppression as it exists now is the idea it's justifiable to be unkind to people for no good reason; what good does it do to reproduce that idea?

the early "SJWs" responded by saying, in effect: well, do we not like seeing bullies get what's coming to them? ppl w/ more privilege benefit from systematised bullying, so they're basically bullies by default, and deserve whatever's coming to them

the effects of this subtle redefinition of the grounds of how ppl online understood power, activism, and so on meant that antibullying in itself started looking...kind of corny, secondary to more fundamental concerns, whatever those concerns might be

(e.g., in the case of LGBT issues, the LGBT rights movement had won a lot of cultural and political victories by reframing "homophobia" in general as a subset of "bullying" in general. but the "SJW" approach reframes "gay bullying" as a subset of "homophobia" in specificity)

(i personally regard this as a bad move, not least bc the former approach got non-LGBT ppl to see themselves as having a *personal stake* in ending homophobia, bc no one wants to be bullied, and the new one tells non-LGBT ppl they have a personal stake in *upholding* homophobia)

in any case, in part bc the early SJWs were a sort of mutant strain of antibullying, a particular strain of reactionary contrarianism started framing itself as specifically opposed to antibullying, synthesising the three themes of anti-antibullying

this was the Long 2015, which is i feel in some ways more apt a title than the Long 2014, bc 2014 was this singular eruption, and 2015 was the volcanic ash filling the sky. early-Sargonesque urgency giving way to SJW cringe compliations, liberal college student OWNED, and so on

now, the purveyors of the three themes didn't always get along. for a while there, outside the Religious Right, theme one was anathema—even Moldbug supported gay marriage, after all. so the first theme to gain major *online* traction was theme two

this was the crass contrarian edge, the /b/tard-adjacent types who were primarily concerned that carelordery of any type wld ruin their fun. and frankly i sympathise to an extent: i think there *is* a line between edginess and trolling and outright bullying and harassment

and ofc, when aimed at the right targets, trolling can even be intensely satisfying—Hal Turner getting raided was one of the coolest and funniest things i can remember. but there's always been a more bitter, nasty side to the "stop ruining our fun" brigade as well

(side note: i adamantly believe that if the primary example of trolling in the public consciousness was Ghost from True Capitalist Radio instead of, y'know, the person w/ the terrible Sonic comics, this'd be a much nicer world to live in)

so these types kind of got the ball rolling, w/ their grievance being: "the thing that i enjoy most is fucking w/ ppl, and it's not my problem they're too thin-skinned to take it in good humour, so why should i be reprimanded for their failures?"

but there's a more intellectualised take on this as well, again not totally w/o legitimacy, but again w/ a nastier edge. academics have been complaining abt thin-skinned students and colleagues forever, but suddenly there was this sort of double preference cascade happening

which sounded alarm bells for a lot of academics, who feared a more cohesive culture of safetyism having repercussions for their ability to teach and research, and suddenly thrust their complaints into the limelight

most of the academics making legitimate complaints aren't as well-remembered today bc they by and large were not good at grifting off it, but i mean, look at Nicholas Christakis at Yale in those videos from 2016 for instance. that was awful, and undoubtedly added fuel to the fire

but contrast him w/ someone like Jordan Peterson, whose crusade against "postmodern neo-Marxism" is by and large an attempt in itself to silence academic inquiry by demonising all scepticism of his pseudoscientific theories of "archetypal" natural hierarchy in humans

the grifting, fwiw, is what introduces theme three—the "antibullying is a psyop" theme—into mainstream discourse. bc every good grift needs a shadowy villain, to let the griftees feel like they're in on a secret

now that antibullying has already taken blows to its reputation from within and without, here's the REAL story: it was always *meant* to give way to the nastier SJW movement, so that we would all be bullied into compliance for a socialist takeover!...or something

this also meant that the possibility that the criticism of antibullying as having contributed to a safetyist doctrine that stifled inquiry and, yes, even comedy could have been a constructive one, that we could have had a dialogue abt the proper balance of values, was foreclosed

(w/r/t comedy, quickly: Norm Macdonald, i think, had the right idea. he did his fair share of complaining abt political correctness making it hard to joke abt certain subjects, but unlike p much every other prominent comedian who pivoted to that, he had a couple insights)

(first, a long time ago, he had some routines including some v v nasty jokes abt LGBT ppl. and when some of his fans told him that this didn't make them laugh, it made them feel bullied, he stopped and apologised—he had no qualms abt edginess, but he didn't want to be a bully)

(secondly, he pointed out that a lot of comedians who go the "antiwoke" route are themselves abdicating the responsibility to make the audience laugh, and instead aiming for applause, "clapter". he literally just wanted to make ppl laugh in any way, which i appreciate a lot)

i'm getting close to a conclusion here, but i want to do a genealogy of "SJW DESTROYED with FACTS and LOGIC" first. you see, back in the 2000s, the big culture war was atheism v. religion. which ties into LGBT stuff, the Iraq War, academia, libertarianism, &c. in complicated ways

anyway. there was a genre of YouTube videos that i will call the "Hitchslap", bc that's what they called themselves. a Hitchslap invariably featured Christopher Hitchens in a debate w/ some religious apologist, dissecting their argument and then finishing off w/ a witty dismissal

if you were a certain sort of irreligious nerd, they were extremely fun to watch, and it's not hard to see why. watching someone you dislike be proven wrong in so thorough and so flamboyant a fashion they're left sputtering is just that enjoyable

it helps that usually in them his opponent is being effectively forced to defend smth absurdly horrid, be it divine collective punishment, kidnapping and trying to torture gay kids into being straight, or the policies of Henry Kissinger. bullies and bully apologists, basically

but ofc Hitchens was always ill at ease w/ the antibullying ethos, and he has not unjustly been accused of being a bully himself. he was p gung-ho abt the Iraq War, for instance, and even his friends and allies noted v abrasive tendencies in him—here's P. Z. Myers in 2019:

now, the transformation of Internet atheism into anti-SJWism &c. has been retrodden a thousand times and i don't want to tread it any further. instead, i want to show you a video i've liked for abt a decade at least:

this is a *rly old* video, and one that's been reuploaded countless times. it's older than p much every "SJW DESTROYED" video out there, but it's strikingly similar in form: the student crying to an old professor, unprepared for him to reassert his principles & refuse to shut up

and he's right! what the student is doing here is *crybullying*. she's trying to get him to shut up about what's happening in Palestine bc it offends her. she's hoping everyone will take her side and he'll be forced to apologise and leave. it's plainly emotionally manipulative

but there's two things interesting here. one is specific to this video: it has the opposite cultural valence as p much every other "SNOWFLAKE STUDENT EVISCERATED" video. your average right-wing antiwoke type, your Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson fan, hates Norman Finkelstein

more generally, however, the figure of the crybully complicates the antibullying memeplex. sure, everyone has known the figure of the bully who cries to the teacher and then when she walks away turns to his victim and says "you're dead meat", but the crybully *merges* these acts

that is, the crybully uses the antibullying memeplex against itself. even more than ordinary bullying, crybullying is despicable, bc it uses our natural sympathies for ppl who are being and have been bullied as instruments of bullying themselves

so the basic trouble for anyone who values the principles of antibullying is: how do we maintain a stance against bullying, how do we protect ppl from bullies, while knowing that our instincts on that front can so easily be hijacked? that's a tough problem!

and it is one that promotes cynicism too, is the thing. when you encounter your first couple of crybullies, you think, ok, my value system has some weaknesses, but so what? everyone's does. when you encounter your hundredth crybully, you stop caring abt those principles

bc now you've found yourself in an equilibrium where one partner can hit the "defect" button over and over and over, and this makes cooperation under prior norms costly. this is, i think, a p general pattern in the mutual delegitimation of various sides in the culture war

i think it's important to note, right here, that ppl are generally not born evil and also that marginally rational decisions for the sake of often basically good ideas can often paradoxically lead to rly bad places when iterated incrementally

i believe that's what happened to, say, r slash tumblr in action, and you can track it over the years changing from poking light fun at ppl making bizarre points in hostile ways, to getting v nasty abt anyone they considered an "SJW", to becoming an outright reactionary hate sub

so the ppl initially defining themselves by a rejection of the jettisoning of antibullying principles for the sake of redefined goals *themselves* jettison antibullying principles, and ultimately for the sake of even worse goals

this is like 2016-2017, and finally not only is the President of the United States a bully, *the* bully, the best at bullying there ever was, but there is a general equilibrium where the only way to fight a bully is to become a bully yourself

the trouble is that no one likes this equilibrium. everyone complains abt it p constantly to this day. you have this sort of generalised shittiness in Internet culture, and when someone earnestly tries to say "hey what if we all tried being nicer" they get laughed out of the room

and now, ofc, the three themes of anti-antibullying have fused into a single philosophy that's at the heart of the contemporary GOP: everything abt being nice is a psyop, everyone is too thin-skinned, and LGBT people are public enemy №1

so i do have a suggestion, and a bit of a wild one: bring back antibullying, but rebalance the value system to make it more resilient. people like Ron DeSantis are *bullies*, and crybullies at that. call them that. no one likes a bully; that's why they have to cheat to win

don't underestimate the value of not being a bully, bc bullies make things worse for everyone, including themselves, including other bullies. lefty discourse ppl who are constantly baiting ppl in culture war arguments and trying to set everyone against each other? they're bullies

and really, don't underestimate the explanatory power of bullying as a spectrum, and don't mistake it for an unserious terminology. racists, homophobes, &c. of all stripes are bullies, and the justifications are the same at the root from schoolyard harassment to mass murder

i don't have anything to sell to you (yet. aha) but that doesn't mean i don't know of a good place to put your money. these people do v good work trying to help the victims of bully Netanyahu's genocidal war. please stand up for them and donate
anera.org/where-we-work/…