When did bullying become an ideology?

[nancylebov]

In a comment to this fromozarque, I said

This relates to something I've been trying to put a finger on--there's been a fairly recent ideologization of verbal bullying, a belief that people should be tough enough to ignore insults, and if they don't like being insulted, it's a personal defect. [1] Stoicism has been around for a long time, but I don't think it used to be invoked by people who are proudly unwilling to control their own cruelty.

[1] There's a contradiction there--if people really could ignore insults, there'd be no point in insulting them.

For more about the right to react when you've been insulted, see this fromshadesong.

Comments

[ms-daisy-cutter.livejournal.com]

You hang out in a much rougher online neighborhood than I do, which I suppose isn't surprising.

<grin>

To be honest, most of my LJ friends aren't like that, even though I originally "met" many of them in alt.tasteless. They're often "rougher" and more cynical in tone, yes, but the vast majority of them have their heads screwed on straight when it comes to basic morals and ethics. Even the ones who sometimes struggle to do the right thing know what the right thing is.

As for elsewhere on the 'net, I did spend quite a bit of time on more right-leaning blogs in the first few years after 9/11. Eventually I got sick of the Bible-thumping, the sneering at anybody who wasn't xtian or Jewish, the sexism and sometimes outright misogyny, the crypto- (and sometimes not-so-crypto-) racism, the homophobia, and so forth. Many of them are as bad as the Islamofascists they decry (and, in some cases, proud of it (http://www.amazon.com/Enemy-At-Home-Cultural-Responsibility/dp/0385510128/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-0134242-5077766?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1178462512&sr=8-1)).

I'm appalled at what you're mentioning — it's nastier than I could have imagined.

Yes, it's quite appalling.

One aspect I forgot to mention in my previous comment was how much of the pro-bullying sentiment surfaced after Columbine. The fact that Harris and Klebold were nasty pieces of work, and that many of their victims (well, the best-known, anyway) were popular, white-bread xtians, seemed to justify bullying in the minds of many e-trogs. Never mind that bullying was a precipitating factor in the massacre (though of course the blame rests solely with H&K...millions of bullied children and teens don't murder their classmates).