Internet Bullying

In view of the tragic consequences of Internet and meatspace bullying for children (with suicides in some cases) it is important for grownups, even superannuated grownups with careers, to name incidents where they’ve been bullied. Some of my brightest students here in Hong Kong come to class to complain about emotional and physical bullying.

Bullying is not restricted to children. In fact, many incidents are sponsored by grownups, who foster overcompetitiveness amongst children and participate in the persecution of marginalized kids. In one incident in the USA which resulted in a suicide, the mother of the bully egged the bully on. When I was a kid, the “den mother” of our Cub Scout group told my brother that she knew her son was delirious because “he asked how you were, and he hates you”.

I have been bullied online since 1987 when I started participating at Princeton on Internet forums, primarily because of my writing style. It appears to the casual user to be “verbose”, and to say of it that it is “verbose” sounds like an intelligent comment…because it implies, logically, that the reader (1) knows what I’m trying to say and (2) could express it more briefly.

Of course, this is nonsense almost all the time. Most people who find a text “verbose” have thrown it to one side before finishing it…and many people in the habit of tossing texts aside are anti-intellectual, incurious about the world, and lazy. The impression of “verbosity” is often created by complex sentence structure whether or not that complexity is appropriate. It’s also created when the writer attempts to be polite, and for this reason qualifies what he or she writes. More and more, as general literacy declines, the illusion of verbosity is also created by accurate spelling and grammar…as seen in Mike Judge’s 2005 film Idiocracy, where “Joe Normal”, the time traveler, uses ordinary 2005 English in 2500 only to learn that he “talks like a fag”.

The most serious incident occured in 2007 when at a local site (www.lamma.com.HK), I’d been invited and encouraged to “post”. I posted my comments, and after discovering that I could post art works, enhanced my comments with art, and on the basis of the latter, was invited to stage a one-man show at a local gallery.

In “posting” I was anonymous at first but soon enough broke my anonymity. Several posters who remained under cover objected to what I had to say, including two moderators. Another user “stalked” me in meat space: where I live, most residents have to take hourly ferries to the main island and the mainland; this user posted comments based on observing me on the ferry.

My submissions were complex enough to be subject to misinterpretation, and soon enough an organized campaign of online bullying was in full cry.

My response included the attempt to analyze some of the responses for “transitive identity thinking”, which I explained as inappropriately equating two different things based on their mutual semi-identity with a third.

For example, my “verbosity” has, in this type of thinking, to be of one type only, this being the “verbosity” that people, employed in subaltern jobs in a Hong Kong where you need wings to stay above the bullshit, encountered in their jobs and what passes for their political lives: there could be no other type of verbosity. Therefore, speaking in hip catchphrases, with a great deal of irony such that at any time you could evade responsibility for anything you said by claiming that you were taking the piss, was the only acceptable prose style. Almost any style was “verbose”, that is, unfamiliar.

I analyzed the responses as a form of Fascism while carefully differentiating “real”, full-blown Fascism, from the songs of the doomed. This was followed by threats to get me fired from my job and appeals to the sysadmin to eject me.

But instead of doing so, he made me the moderator of my own forum after we met in person.

This forum was then trashed by the other moderators by means of cross-posting. At the same time, threats were made to disrupt the art exhibit.

The “stalker”, who was female, then introduced herself on condition that I present her with an original of an art work I’d posted. Interpreting this as a friendly gesture, I did so, but as the anonymous abuse continued, and I replied in the only way I know how (with brisk and literate replies), the “stalker” decided that I was useless to her, and stopped returning phone calls. I found out later that she also destroyed the original drawing I gave her.

One on one bullying, where a single bully stalks and harasses a single target, is bad enough, but at this placeblog, the situation was far more disturbing, for thanks to the Internet, my refusal to take shit could transform a village of already-dysfunctional ex-colonials and international riff raff into a crowd of peasants with pitchforks and torches. Perhaps for this reason, a core group of friends urged me to desist as is usually the case in bullying, where the victim is told to behave differently to stop the bullying (often with no effect). A reality had been created by a cybernetic mob, so I left the site rather than make things much, much worse; but, of course, the moderators at the site should be fired.

The comments at the post here “The Impertinence of Actaeon” are made by one of the moderators at the site as far as I can tell. He has, since 2007, pursued me from anonymous mail accounts with abuse and mockery. His main issue seems to be that I boast excessively about trivial accomplishments.

He believes himself to be anonymous, but I believe I know who he is: a corporate refugee from the US who’d I’d heard “holding forth” with some authority on the ferry in 2005, and who was a self-proclaimed authority on things Chinese at the site. I’d made the mistake of correcting him based on references on some issue or other in 2006, and ever since then, I have been subject to bullying…including his campaign at the Lamma island site.

I also encountered bullying on one of the old usenet groups, comp.programming. It’s dominated by a computer author/editor who believes that “you can do anything with C”. Not many computer scientists would agree with his folklore: most recommend Java for everyday applications.

In 2003, while writing my book “Build Your Own .Net Language and Compiler”, I realized that “object-oriented design” addressed many of the problems I’d found in the C programming language, notably the need for complex data structures to have, themselves, extra code for printing and validating their contents.

I posted some C code which was with a great deal of surprising hostility (surprising because I was a newbie) analyzed for failures to be efficient in the small. In particular, I chose, in the “test” zone of a for() loop, to calculate something using operators, and this was accounted as a sign of “incompetence”.

My experience reminded me of the trial of Joe Normal in Idiocracy, Mike Judge’s film of a moronized America of 2500.

The Lamma site is increasingly being abandoned for Facebook. More than one inhabitant of this island has mentioned to me bad experiences posting on its Forums because its moderator professes to be a “postmodern” moderator who understands that people need to be oh so hip…on an island of artists who cannot draw the human form, writers who can neither understand nor write complex syntax, and lovers of the earth who cannot hike more than a mile.

Note, however, that I am being in the above very critical of people. Wait a minute, isn’t that bullying? And based on saying such wounding things, don’t I deserve to be bullied in return?

This was the claim on the Lamma island site. However, it equates two very different things.

The bully selects only one person for stalking, or emotional or physical abuse. Whereas describing a group of people negatively isn’t bullying.

If you proclaim yourself to be a writer, but cannot understand or write syntax above a smallish upper bound of complexity, you’re not a writer (or, if you prefer, you’re a bad writer) even if you appeal to certain saws and maxims such as “write simply”. The truth of what the critic, as opposed to the bully, says is automatic once you assert membership in the set of people she’s singled out for criticism. Whereas the bully attempts to destroy the personhood of the target no matter what the target does.

In fact, the very ability to criticise people considered as groups of people is on the wane, perhaps because people are afraid of political incorrectness…although to describe people by way of describing the bad behavior that defines the group isn’t “discrimination”. The result, of the disappearance of the ability to speak truth to the power of deviant groups, is the expansion of bullying as a safety-valve.

There are, in fact, three situations: the one on one “classic” bully: the loner lashing out for good or ill against a community either dysfunctional or not: and the crowd of bullies, the crowd of peasants with pitchforks and torches, pursuing the outlier individual. Form (2) is not bullying: form (3) is where you get Fascism.

Don’t put up with bullying. Fight back no matter how isolated you seem to be. And above all, do not tell a child being bullied that boys will be boys or that it’s part of growing up, whether the bullying happens online or in meatspace.

An Adorno dream (an actual dream that the Tedster had in 1966)

I was asked to leave a faculty meeting because they were going to talk about me. When I returned, one of my colleagues, Herr Keller or Herr Patzer, I couldn’t make out which, stuck his leg out to trip me up. I complained volubly about this outrageous behavior. I was told that I did not understand the situation. This was an ancient tradition. What I now had to do was apply to the dean and make a formal complaint. He would then inform me that the faculty had resolved that I should no longer be permitted to attend its meetings. Overcome with shock, I awoke.

- From Dream Notes, Theodor W. Adorno. Edited by Christopher Godde and Henri Lonitz: translated by Rodney Livingstone. Polity 2007.

This needs to be read alongside something TWA wrote in 1948 (Minima Moralia): that the inner weakness of modern men appears in the organs they sell and in group activities. In contradiction to methodological individualism, corporations, software “packages” and weekly staff meetings are radically less than the sum of their parts and the disturbing thing about TWA’s dream is that it could almost literally describe what goes on in organizations.

Of course, do people engage in “childish” tricks such as tripping a colleague? Not usually: but in 1980, a Hollywood director, being sued owing to the deaths of people in a helicopter accident he was filming, tripped one of the plaintiffs in the courtroom.

A popular graduate school cartoon in the 1980s showed a female dissertation candidate punching a colleague, and the department chair saying, “excellent rebut, give her the job”. It was funny because it was true.

By being man enough to talk, throughout his career, about bullying such as he, as a boy with a funny name, a queer and pretentious way of speaking, and a Jewish father and Catholic mother, experienced throughout his life, Adorno attracted it. Three years after his dream, he was singled out by Stalinist thugs for classroom disruption.

Bullying is thought to be a childhood phenomenon, but if you inquire into its origins you find it emerged, possibly, in British public schools of the late 18th century as a form of hijinx. Does this mean it is indeed a thing of childhood, what Adorno called the nightmare?

Very possibly not. The very classes who were throwing their kids into public schools had (1) bullied monks out of monastery land in the 16th century, (2) bullied the losers in various phases of the English Civil War and (3) were by the late 18th century making fortunes in the African slave trade.

Bullying is primarily in fact an adult phenomenon.

Structurally, Adorno’s dream captures real life. Individually, people are very civilized, but in weekly staff meetings there’s a low-level barbarism that targets precisely the employee who threatens the undifferentiated Herr Keller-Patzers and needs to be brought down a peg. Appeals to authority then reveal that what Adorno called the nightmare (of childhood) has been institutionalized as a necessity.

Ward Churchill and the “smallpox blankets” issue

Stanley Fish has here an almost excessively Fair and Balanced treatment of the denoument of the Ward Churchill issue at Univ of Colorado (Boulder): Churchill made “inflammatory” statements as to the collective guilt of WTC victims, lost his tenure as a result of political pressure, was rehabilitated in a jury trial.

One of the canards used against him was that he recounted the “smallpox blankets” accusation that at some point in time, the US military distributed blankets, infected with smallpox, to Native Americans. This is said to be “irresponsible scholarship” since it appears that the only documentary substantiation appears in a letter written around the time of the French and Indian wars by that old blood-drinker, Lord Jeffrey Amherst, who, so famously in the Amherst College song, for the French and the Indians did not care a thing.

A number of neocon puff adders have waxed fulsome about “scholarship”, which is a nifty way of avoiding these facts:

(1) Documenting the “history” of a pre-historical society without “writing” is an activity which does not predate the availability of sound recording in the 1940s, at which point it became possible to capture actual written primary documents in the form of Indians, and other peoples, who could recount first-hand their knowledge and tell their ancestor’s side of things.

(2) Documenting war crimes is complicated by the fact that the war criminals, with exceptions such as the Nazis, do not in many cases document their plans and “accomplishments”.

(3) The consensus of scholars is that the United States, in securing Manifest Destiny, killed quite a lot of Native Americans: if you don’t know that you might flunk the SAT. I believe Churchill used the smallpox story by way of example since actually recounting in detail the horrors visited upon Native Americans starting around the time of King Phillips’ war would sicken and then bore his students.

Nearly all people on earth are pure victims, and as Walter Benjamin saw in his vision of the angel of history, history is a boneyard of people who die, usually at the hands of another. It’s just common sense, when presented with a rapidly developing society encountering an indigenous society, to expect the members of the former to try to eliminate the latter, except for the womenfolk. If we can use sound recording to get stories of smallpox blankets, then those sound records become secondary and even primary historical records.

Most of history is the Cinderella story with no Fairy Godmother, no coach and four, no Prince Charming and not even much pumpkin. But, prior to the primitive sound-recording equipment of the 1940s, and today’s Internet and the cellphone, victims disappeared from the written record. But now they appear as if at the last Trump, like Henry V’s men, some crying for a surgeon and all saying I died at such a place.

As Stanley Fish shows, Ward Churchill did nothing except vigorously defend a commonly held view: that the United States acted genocidally towards the Native Americans. Tenure exists to protect this kind of expression.

I am old enough to have grown up in a neighborhood in which the flower bed planted by a sissy boy was kicked to nothing by a man who is now a successful millionaire. This man half-killed a friend of mine by dropping a brick on his head when they were children, and my father, a physician, confirmed recently that he examined this victim. The fact is that in the 1950s, boys of upper middle class fathers could get away with murder, and Rusty Calley took this attitude of invulnerability with him into Vietnam and it caused the massacre at My Lai.

It’s men like these who attacked Ward Churchill.

The bullying of Ward Churchill for doing his job is part of a rotten system in which the real bullies are grownups. Stanley Fish has spoken the truth, in his own way of course.