discoursedrome:

taxloopholes:

patchesthegreat:

taxloopholes:

thejoey:

This is like full circle to stereotypical high school bullying

nah this kid would pick on people with “cringey interests” because he has a superiority complex. trust me I’ve visited r/rickandmorty

he also has a youtube channel wih 15 subscribers and 100 videos about Anita Sarkeesian

he retweets “respect women” memes on his alt-right twitter account

Man, if the rationale for “this is different from bullying nerds in high school” is “because the targets are arrogant snobs and have misogynistic baggage” it’s probably a good idea to go back to the drawing board on that argument.

Less flip: this is an example of a broader issue that you see, everywhere, where people pick on people specifically for petty, indefensible stuff – their appearance, mannerisms, or interests – and then fall back on substantive criticisms if questioned on it. It’s clear that the substantive criticisms are a pretext rather than a reason for the mockery, since if that weren’t the case the mockery would primarily be about those things. It really is just about going after people who look or act funny, because otherwise why would you fixate on qualities you know are shared by people who don’t have any of the actual flaws used to justify going after that target? The underlying message is that if you look like this, and you share these interests, those things alone make you as bad as someone who does actual bad things, because they evoke that sort of person. (Compare “TERF bangs”, “fat feminist”, etc. Honestly you could publish a book of examples of this just looking at hairstyles.)

This is an interesting phenomenon to me because it’s absolutely universal, and also because there doesn’t seem to be actual bad faith behind it.
That suggests to me that it’s driven by a pretty fundamental
thought process in how people reason about stereotypes and social
groups. People actually do have a (fictitious, one-dimensional) stereotype in their mind when they do this sort of thing, and they conceptualize the attacks as targeting the stereotype. But the way this nearly always manifests in practice as a fixation on petty intricacies of fashion and social performance suggests that those are our most fundamental tools for reasoning about people and morality. This has pretty bleak implications for people interested in grappling with systemic social probles.