The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Bruce Baugh:

Terry, I take the real debate to be "Why is so much of the burden of prevention and response put on probable victims rather than probable perpetrators, when it comes to driving? And what can we do to reduce the fear in actual and potential bicyclists (and pedestrians) and increase the concern felt by those most likely to be responsible for harm to others?"

Recently I've read (among other things) a biography of Emily Post and surveys of the history of fascism and the Russian Revolution, and it occurs to me that part of the harm from bullying is this:

It attacks the idea of community.

Etiquette, broadly construed, is for the people championing it about living harmoniously. Miss Manners has written very eloquently about this idea, that shared rules which impose a bit on everyone let us all coexist with much less chafing and thereby end up with more practical, usable overall freedom of emotions and general well-being. Because we aren't wasting effort on pointless, avoidable clashes and unpleasantness, we have the energy to use on things that actually matter to us.

Bullying and trolling, on the other hand, are both exercises of pure power conflict. Someone must lose and someone must win, and that's all there is to it. Victims and victimizers both learn, when this stuff is allowed to happen, that all that language about shared interests, coexistence, and the like ceases to apply, and makes it easy to believe that such things are always lies and never apply and anyone who thinks otherwise is just deluding themselves or pandering consciously to tyrants.

And trust destroyed is really, really hard to rebuild, a lot of the time.

Tom, it has to be a sustained, active, sometimes aggressive thing. "We're not doing that now." (Actually, for an example of it done firmly but not aggressively, see abi's comments in the earlier thread that led to this one here.)

Tom Whitmore@224: So far, the best thing I know to do is to promote a shared interest in giving up on unrewarding exchanges. "We seem stuck. How about we stop and move on to something else?" "Sure!" That's a very healthy kind of exchange to have, a lot of the time.

Leah Miller@205: Something that can differentiate a bully from someone simply committing an act of violence is the ability to get away with it for a long period of time. My greatest failure as an authority figure was allowing a bully to remain in the organization and continue bullying based on the fact that she always kept just barely within the rules, and never committed the exact same offense twice where anyone was watching. Oh, golly, yes.

This is really, really a problem for any community where a lot of people are not especially graceful in social interactions, or where a lot of people come from widely varying backgrounds. Rules lawyering can let a lot of abuse go on. I like the formulation I encountered some years back, though, that the authorities for a community (formal or informal) should be concerned first and foremost with the well-being of those who are making a sincere sustained effort to abide by the rules and their spirit, to keep the community healthy and happy. Those bent on pushing boundaries should feel that they are on sufferance.

I've seen way, way too many good groups go down because the authorities bent over backward trying to appease those who clearly weren't actually interested in (or capable of) good-faith cooperation in the first place. There are some group collapses I look back on with real regret for having been one of those authorities myself. These days, whenever I'm involved in the management of a group, I make it very clear that people who aren't happy with it and can't be easily satisfied in ways that leave it working and enjoyable for others should go ahead and leave now. The world is full of groups - they don't have to be in this one. And if they say they really want to be there, particularly because there are other people they want to associate with, then I say that they have an obligation to knock off the stuff that makes those others angry, unhappy, and uninterested in participating any more.

Groups are, first and foremost, for those who want to take up the shared responsibility of making them work. Everyone else is there only insofar as the ones joining in feel like dealing with them.

I'm not sure of the intellectual history of this ida that troublemakers actually deserve more attention and coddling than well-behaved supportive participants. (I will not be surprised if someone here does! Link, link, if you do!) It seems part of the same ambient cognitive smog as ideas like "smart people have better judgement than stupid people, so because I'm smart you need to favor my ideas about everything". Nasty stuff and escaping from it is hard work of just the sort Dan was talking about, at least for me. It shouldn't be such effort to decide, and to act on the decision, that the group members with demonstrated good will take priority, but wow, it really is sometimes.

Dan Hoey@190: Definitely, some learning isn't fun. The good part is that if you actually do learn, and it sounds like you are, then you don't have to keep hurting that particular way and get to move on to more interesting things. Best wishes on it.

A side note about terminology: I notice myself labeling things less lately, and focusing more on describing actual experiences as best I can. Samuel Delany's take on genres is very much an influence on this. Thus, for instance, I don't really worry about whether it's best to call a particular rhetorical tactic a style of bullying rather than some other sort of failing - I'm good with saying "That's not dealing with what others are saying, that's just reaserting your original point again and again and ignoring questions and responses, and I'm bored of dealing with it." Or whatever.

This thread is useful, to me at least and apparently to Dan and others, precisely because we're talking about actual stuff. Good work. :)

Evan, I think a crucial point comes from Caroline above: Very often the game the bully is playing isn't with their victim. The victim isn't a peer, or a rival, or an enemy; the victim is an object, a prop to be used in an exchange with someone who does matter to the bully. This is crucial because it changes what the victim can and should do. The strategies available to an under-powered, under-protected player don't matter if the bully isn't playing with the victim in the first place. The victim has to do something to change the entire terms of engagement - all the stories of victims striking back work, in part, I think, because they are about the victim making themselves into a player.

This applies very strongly to a lot of online bullying and related intimidation. Take the archetypal cases like the vandals of alt.syntax.tactical or 4chan.org's /b/ board. They're playing a game with the other members of their community, not with their target of the day.

There are exceptions, of course, but it seems to me that this is really, really, very important.

Heresiarch: For me a won conversation is one where I'm right at the end, not at the beginning. Yeah! Mom (who's reading this, I think; hi, Mom!) and Dad raised us with an emphasis on heading in the right direction and not worrying so much about where we happened to be at a particular moment. Confirming the truth of something I think I know is good, and so is discovering something new to learn. Thinking of every exchange as having the potential to be positive-sum is a happy way to go.

David Dyer-Bennett: In addition to abi's Call out the bullying behavior as losing behavior. , I'd add:

Define victory in other ways, too. A winning thread may, for instance, be one in which a bunch of people learn things because those who have info share it in useful ways, and one in which a bunch of people get to draw on their knowledge and experience to illuminate a mystery, and one in which a lot of people make each other laugh and admire each other's craftsmanship, and so on.

And also define some things that aren't losing, like deciding that everyone's had an interesting and useful say and now we're moving on even though disagreements remain.

If we say "this is what we want" and then reward it with praise and attention when we get it, that helps lay a great foundation for dealing with specific problem cases.

Constance@563: I find the news depressing in part because I wish to be informed and the mainstream news, print and broadcast, just doesn't do it. Sorting through tolerated lies, encouraged lies, and active hostility to judgments that would make the conservative consensus in the halls of authority look bad grinds me down.

Mutual pleasure, Xopher - your question goaded me into trying to articulate something I've fumbled with in the past. (A productive discomfort!)

Xopher: First off, agreed about the problem with Roberts' presentation.

Now, about discomfort. I think it's not that many of us actually get off on being uncomfortable. But the fact of different experience can be a pleasure of its own, with the discomfort subsumed into that. I don't like lumpy ground, but I really miss being able to sleep out of doors, with so much of the world around me, and like that. Discomfort looms large or small in the experience as a whole for a lot of reasons.

Sean: For what it's worth, as one more data point, my counselor says that one of her biggest thing is encouraging clients to take seriously the idea that they're dealing with real matters of real consequence and to give ourselves time for rest and reflection, and for things that we truly enjoy to build us up again.

Xopher: On the other hand, sometimes good and bad features are rolled together inextricably. Sweating isn't fun, but getting things done that make one sweaty may well be, for instance. I think that reading a difficult book can be like climbing a steep slope to see a view you'd never have if you stayed down below, or for that matter learning how to live with someone you love who brings to the relationship a set of habits and needs that isn't 100% compatible with how you've lived on your own. In these kinds of experiences, payoffs and costs are all rolled together in a complex cycle.

Avram, it doesn't seem at all implausible that as Andrew's #225 suggests, Roberts gets a variety of satisfactions from his fiction reading, none of which may particularly be well described as "pleasure". Or at least that the pleasures he cultivates and welcomes are all removed from the kinds of pleasures a bunch of us are talking about here.

I don't know that it's true in his case, but I know folks with a deep appreciation for good craft in various ways for whom "pleasure" is never really the point, at least.

P J Evans: Yup, that's it. Part of the problem is that a lot of us aren't reliably good about talking about your pleasures, what triggers them and how they feel to us. It doesn't help that there are enough people who bolster their own sense of self by trampling on expressions of pleasure to breed a lot of defensive reactions, either.

Serge: I figure it's like stiff upper lips, just lower down.

Until now this thread has had no mention of my favorite song about rocket packs. I fix:

"It's the Eighties, So Where's Our Rocket Packs?", by Daniel Amos

C'mon, Graydon Sanders is our Jamie Hyneman.

C'mon, Graydon Sanders is our Jamie Hyneman.

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