Kleinfeld's bias is immediately exposed with the line, "...and vastly out-competing them in college."
She pretends as if the system is fair, impartial, and gender neutral. The education system is none of these things. Having sons who attend this indoctrination through therapy institution, I see it on a daily basis.
Excellent point. This is why I find such concern sincere hut misguided at best, if I’m being 100 percent charitable: it assumes the system really is good and men need to be brought back to the reservation. Never a thought that maybe it’s the far-left positions women are gravitating towards which are the problem.
Exactly. No, they're not "outcompeting" them so much as they are "favored". Of course, given the whole academia edifice is collapsing in on itself, perhaps being favored by them is not necessarily a good thing. We can see it in that viral video of the woman who had two degrees but couldn't even get a minimum wage job.
There’s a very good case to be made that it’s all zero-sum and was intended to be from the get-go. Civil rights law was sold, in large part, as “no more discrimination against blacks,” but also “better outcomes for blacks” (both understandable and defensible goals given American history) and it turned into “all these other groups need to be elevated at the expense of this other one particular group everybody hates.”
Now that those beneficiaries are feeling the effects of the poisonous fruit, suddenly it’s a problem.
That’s the egalitarian principle in a nutshell. Flattening. All mountains brought low, all valleys filled in, and so on. In education as well as all other areas of life (except for the elites).
History has seen these kinds of trends before. It seldom ends well for the presiding regime. Turns out that enforcing conditions under which fighting-age men feel alienated, demonized, and - most crucially - like they have nothing to lose, is a risky policy.
The large concentration of effeminacy going around is almost entirely caused by anti-male attitudes in education, the arts, and wider society. Reward men for not being men and you get two results: men who either kill themselves trying to break their brain to do what it was never meant to do, or twisted soulless bugmen who live in some freakish Lovecraft nightmare where hate is love and good is evil.
It's only natural that males who have seen how destructive this system has become (particularly over the last quarter century) would reject the entire frame.
There is no going back to that plantation. And the way things are going, said plantation will not be around for much longer.
It's just extraordinary. Gen Y fortysomethings carry on like teen girls, and Millennial thirtysomethings act like fifty year-old spinsters. This can't end well.
What's clear throughout is that their solution is always yet more equality. But dysfunctional gender dynamics cannot be repaired by ever more doses of equality and liberalism, because liberalism and equality are the very cause of the dysfunction.
Yes precisely. That’s part of the point the commentators make: men are rejecting small-l liberalism. They’re rejecting the false “Republican vs. Democrat” binary, and it scares the hell out of them.
Me, I’m heartened as long as it doesn’t turn into the he-man women-haters club. That’s not good either.
Getting past the GOP vs dems false binary is vital, as is broadening one's horizons beyond the Western hemisphere. Just look at what's going on in China. They have tens of millions of young men with no hope of marrying. Factor in BRICS's ascendancy and the American Empire's rapidly dwindling ability to play world police, and we could be in for an interesting 15 years.
Maybe the Chinese conquer the world on a hunt for wives?
The “Democrat vs. Republican” thing is two flavors of neoliberalism. America is so propagandized it doesn’t even realize it’s being propagandized. We think these are the only choices for us and the world, and anything else is fascism or communism, depending on which flavor of neoliberalism you prefer.
I hear you. But I must say resisting positive misogyny get's tough sometimes. Many of my interactions with modern womanhood are so depressing.
Reading old books that desribe women of sounder generations is a good corrective. As is considering (most of) the women not as active agents of corruption, but as victims of degraded social conditions.
Maybe because I’m a boring married old head, but I don’t see all of these problems firsthand—I read about them. My guess is they’re far more prevalent in the young and the very online.
And you’re right to see women as mostly victims. I’d argue most men are too. The difference is that women’s reactions are lauded (“All men are trash!”) but men’s are not. Weird, right?
Just the fact that you’ll never see any government official or main stream media outlet use the term “Far Left”, let alone acknowledge even the existence of such a thing, tells you everything you need to know.
Yes. Just like how Antifa is never highlighted as a hate group or extremist organization. The brown shirts weren’t identified as such in mid-century Germany either. If your violence supports the ruling regime, you’re never an extremist.
I distinctly remember TV news magazine shows in the late 80s and early 90s bemoaning the sTAtisTics that teachers called on boys “too much” in class even when girls raised their hands. One of my middle school teachers even wheeled in a big TV to show us one such story, then she apologized for being “part of the problem.” It was insidious.
This was 4th grade. 1989. This teacher was way ahead of her time in terms of lefty programming. She worked “the environment” into every subject. We learned the depletion of the o-zone layer would likely kill is by 2000.
Man that sucks. I have 3 kids who were in elementary school in the 20-teens and we worked really hard to make sure they understood that “the environment” was not their responsibility and that they were not personally in any actual danger. “Environmental anxiety” inflicted on children is cruel.
The problem for Republicans is that they have spent over a century crushing the working class and any organization that helps them (unions). Then since the 80s they've been deindustrializing the nation and eliminating jobs for men under specious economic theories like comparative advantage which just makes the world a zero sum game of moving production wherever the state/corporate nexus can force the lowest wages onto their workers (and a lot of currrency manipulation to aid in that). Even at the higher ends they bring in H1-Bs or farm out a shit ton of the work to India (see how that worked for Boeing, treasonous scum they are). The Republicans have NEVER fought for workers, even trying to coup one of the few presidents who did take up our cause. When Trump slightly curtailed the H1-B program it was a nice gesture but hardly sufficient.
I'm thankful that guys like Tucker Carlson and Trump are questioning a lot of this now but I'm still waiting for them to realize how badly the right has fucked up. And more importantly, they don't seem to have a vision for this - many even decry the one good thing the Biden admin is doing: breaking up monopolies (slow going but at least in the right direction). If the right and left could both get behind that we could transform our economy in a decade and start to have small retail businesses again. We could place tariffs on a lot of imports and rebuild our manufacturing base. It's quite simple really but too many Repubs are all in on globohomo (at least the economic part of it).
These are the issues: monopoly power, financial oligarchy and their continuing push for globohomo. Any program for providing vision and purpose for young men has to take on those forces or it will be DOA or worse: it will direct them straight into the hands of those who care nothing for them and will only use them to replace one set of avaricious cretins with another.
The Republicans spent so long licking corporations’ boots that they’re having difficulty breaking out of that programming now that they realize the corporations hate them. You’re right that a large part of the problem was aided and abetted by the GOP. I get twitchy anytime anyone brings up Austrian economics or Ayn Rand.
I think both parties like monopolies as long as those companies toe the party line, act as government proxies, and DONATE TO REELECTION CAMPAIGNS. We have such a stupid system.
The whole thing is a disaster. It's also worldwide, unfortunately. And I don't just mean the first world. Growing up in Indonesia, I felt traces of it (though I didn't really know what it was until I truly see it in America). It's just that the third world lagged behind a few decades or so. Because America rules the world (can't stress this enough).
I don't mean to blackpill, just saying that the only out of this is through.
That's true because without God's grace, all you have is resentment. And I understand that temptation, tbh. I think the problem with the secularist redpill types is that they fundamentally agree with "equality". By that, I mean they expect men and women to act the same way and so when they didn't, they felt betrayed.
One wisdom I got from my dad is that men and women are not the same and you shouldn't expect from a woman what you would expect from a man. It took me a while to internalize that. And unfortunately, most people today do expect men and women to think, feel, and act the same way (though perhaps not consciously).
Resentment and envy are killers. Unfortunately we have large swaths of society here in the U.S. motivated by nothing but resentment and envy. We’re seeing where that leads and it isn’t pretty.
Lots of these disaffected young men fall into misogyny, which is an easy out that doesn’t actually fix any problems. I will point out that criticism of women does not equal misogyny despite what we’re told. Just like criticism of men doesn’t equal misandry. Both things are classic “You know it when you see it.”
Not all of society. Maybe by its upper elite, which then trickles down via their propaganda. I agree our society has a lot of problems. I won’t go so far as to be done with it all just yet.
I do think that women becoming hyperliberal is an issue and I do not wanna give the impression that I am not aware this is the high status position at the moment.
My criticism of the Gooncave is mostly because I do wish to see some sort of cultural movement that's legit and not crazy which offers an alternative. I plan to write more about why liberalisation of women is bad
You’re welcome. It was a well-thought out piece and I appreciate that you wrote it.
The Gooncave, as you call it, is not a good alternative to the longhouse. Hating women for being women is an absurd position, and it seems like for every nuanced take and criticism of feminism or whatever you want to call it, there are three people calling every single woman a money- and status-hungry whore (again, I ask, like your mom?) and offering no positive vision of everything.
I agree with the anger at being told that EVERYTHING is men’s fault. But misogyny isn’t the answer.
I look forward to your next piece! I’m sure it’ll be just as interesting.
Great stuff. I broadly agree. One thing I want to add though is the distinction between liberals and progressives.
Almost everyone I know is liberal (universal healthcare, gun control, same-sex marriage, equal access to education etc etc) but they (we) all get annoyed by the cultural issues that animate progressives. DEI, unlimited immigration, trans rights, gender issues, pronouns, identity politics.
I have a couple of friends who have switched from left to right and neither buys into what the right is selling; they just hate what the progressive left is selling.
I think liberals have faded into the background and left the field for progressives. We might be able to tempt a lot of people back over to the left if it weren't for the cultural extremes that progressives have adopted.
Thanks for the comment. I can see a difference between liberal and progressive as well. Even conservatives are liberals in the academic sense.
The American right’s problem is that there’s no real tradition of “the right” in America like there is in Europe—and no, “right” does not equal “Nazi” anymore than “left” equals “commie”—and that it’s pure reaction. There does need to be some sort of underpinning intellectually and conceptually beyond “not progressive,” because otherwise it’s an incoherent worldview.
That said, I’m glad young men are seemingly rejecting the worldview that hates them and wishes they were neutered and/or women.
Terms like “left” and “right” are only meaningful in a given context. Otherwise, it’s just a way of lazily dismissing ideas you don’t like or agree with.
Anecdotally I've seen young men become partisans in order to vent their frustrations with society.
But these same disenfranchised young men would be better served by trying to become the leaders of their own lives, getting married, having kids, and doing what they can to earn as much as possible.
If more young men, under the guidance of responsible male mentors, did this we wouldn't see this sort of partisan divide. Otherwise these young men are going to be walking down the road to more loneliness, desperation, and civil discord that amounts to nothing.
"Maybe the option of being nothing other than a subservient, soy-eating flesh bag who has to ask for permission to pee standing up (denied!) isn’t very appealing."
This is stupid. I'm a twentysomething man and I'm doing great. You're living in some degraded fantasy world where men like me are neverending victims and I gotta tune you out. I don't need the victimhood.
I’m not opposed to teaching kids to be kind, but there’s a type of bullying which is basically self-policing. Making fun of a kid for having a deformity or being small or being ugly (some people are just ugly) or having other issues beyond their control is one thing. Making fun of a kid who is being a little asshole is another, to try and straighten them out. That’s also been eliminated.
The whole bullying thing is interesting. I hesitate to join in the "pro-bullying" bandwagon that the right had jumped on because I was bullied as a kid and from what I can tell it's usually some fat kid who probably has issues at home and decided to take it out on an isolated target, which would be the weird kid with no friends. That's my experience at the very least.
OTOH, the Western media does have tendency to dehumanize "bullies". I still find it weird how in Japanese media, there's this trope of the protagonist becoming friends with his bully (Doraemon, Yugioh, and so on). I have yet to find any example of such from the West.
I’m not on the “bullying is good” bandwagon either. I guess defining bullying is one issue. I always saw it as unprovoked meanness for no other reason. Maybe I’m wrong though.
That’s an interesting aspect of Japanese media I wasn’t aware of. I wonder if that happens a lot in real life in Japan.
"I always saw it as unprovoked meanness for no other reason."
Same here. Maybe it's because I've been out of the school-loop, but the idea of bullying as keeping someone accountable never strike me right. Personally, I think the whole "bullying is good" thing is just internet contrarianism.
I don’t disagree with this in principle. I would say that bullying is different than policing. How we discourage the former while teaching the latter is the hard part.
Kleinfeld's bias is immediately exposed with the line, "...and vastly out-competing them in college."
She pretends as if the system is fair, impartial, and gender neutral. The education system is none of these things. Having sons who attend this indoctrination through therapy institution, I see it on a daily basis.
Excellent point. This is why I find such concern sincere hut misguided at best, if I’m being 100 percent charitable: it assumes the system really is good and men need to be brought back to the reservation. Never a thought that maybe it’s the far-left positions women are gravitating towards which are the problem.
Exactly. No, they're not "outcompeting" them so much as they are "favored". Of course, given the whole academia edifice is collapsing in on itself, perhaps being favored by them is not necessarily a good thing. We can see it in that viral video of the woman who had two degrees but couldn't even get a minimum wage job.
There’s a very good case to be made that it’s all zero-sum and was intended to be from the get-go. Civil rights law was sold, in large part, as “no more discrimination against blacks,” but also “better outcomes for blacks” (both understandable and defensible goals given American history) and it turned into “all these other groups need to be elevated at the expense of this other one particular group everybody hates.”
Now that those beneficiaries are feeling the effects of the poisonous fruit, suddenly it’s a problem.
The whole premise of the last 50 years seems to be to bring the demands on the student body to the lowest possible level, quantity instead of quality.
That’s the egalitarian principle in a nutshell. Flattening. All mountains brought low, all valleys filled in, and so on. In education as well as all other areas of life (except for the elites).
All according to plan.
Cloward-Piven
Rules for Radicals
Divide and Conquer
NeoMarxism
The Tavistock Institute
The Club of Rome
The Committee of 300
Chabad-Lubavitch
Satan
History has seen these kinds of trends before. It seldom ends well for the presiding regime. Turns out that enforcing conditions under which fighting-age men feel alienated, demonized, and - most crucially - like they have nothing to lose, is a risky policy.
I am worried that these fighting-aged men are abandoning the military and are being replaced by fighting-aged men from other countries.
What if you import 10 million foreign aged fighting men over a few years ? Does that help?
That depends if you're into accelerationism.
Yay then we get to be slaughtered by the millions when the next war starts. Can’t wait.
Pro tip: Get out of the cities.
No.
The large concentration of effeminacy going around is almost entirely caused by anti-male attitudes in education, the arts, and wider society. Reward men for not being men and you get two results: men who either kill themselves trying to break their brain to do what it was never meant to do, or twisted soulless bugmen who live in some freakish Lovecraft nightmare where hate is love and good is evil.
It's only natural that males who have seen how destructive this system has become (particularly over the last quarter century) would reject the entire frame.
There is no going back to that plantation. And the way things are going, said plantation will not be around for much longer.
It’s also natural that some broken males decide to become women. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
It's just extraordinary. Gen Y fortysomethings carry on like teen girls, and Millennial thirtysomethings act like fifty year-old spinsters. This can't end well.
And geriatric boomers pretend they're children. No one acts as they should.
It's not called clown world for no reason.
Great work and interesting passages quoted!
What's clear throughout is that their solution is always yet more equality. But dysfunctional gender dynamics cannot be repaired by ever more doses of equality and liberalism, because liberalism and equality are the very cause of the dysfunction.
Yes precisely. That’s part of the point the commentators make: men are rejecting small-l liberalism. They’re rejecting the false “Republican vs. Democrat” binary, and it scares the hell out of them.
Me, I’m heartened as long as it doesn’t turn into the he-man women-haters club. That’s not good either.
Getting past the GOP vs dems false binary is vital, as is broadening one's horizons beyond the Western hemisphere. Just look at what's going on in China. They have tens of millions of young men with no hope of marrying. Factor in BRICS's ascendancy and the American Empire's rapidly dwindling ability to play world police, and we could be in for an interesting 15 years.
Maybe the Chinese conquer the world on a hunt for wives?
The “Democrat vs. Republican” thing is two flavors of neoliberalism. America is so propagandized it doesn’t even realize it’s being propagandized. We think these are the only choices for us and the world, and anything else is fascism or communism, depending on which flavor of neoliberalism you prefer.
I hear you. But I must say resisting positive misogyny get's tough sometimes. Many of my interactions with modern womanhood are so depressing.
Reading old books that desribe women of sounder generations is a good corrective. As is considering (most of) the women not as active agents of corruption, but as victims of degraded social conditions.
Maybe because I’m a boring married old head, but I don’t see all of these problems firsthand—I read about them. My guess is they’re far more prevalent in the young and the very online.
And you’re right to see women as mostly victims. I’d argue most men are too. The difference is that women’s reactions are lauded (“All men are trash!”) but men’s are not. Weird, right?
Real men don't hate women just like real women don't hate men. Hate is for small people.
I couldn’t agree more.
Just the fact that you’ll never see any government official or main stream media outlet use the term “Far Left”, let alone acknowledge even the existence of such a thing, tells you everything you need to know.
Yes. Just like how Antifa is never highlighted as a hate group or extremist organization. The brown shirts weren’t identified as such in mid-century Germany either. If your violence supports the ruling regime, you’re never an extremist.
I distinctly remember TV news magazine shows in the late 80s and early 90s bemoaning the sTAtisTics that teachers called on boys “too much” in class even when girls raised their hands. One of my middle school teachers even wheeled in a big TV to show us one such story, then she apologized for being “part of the problem.” It was insidious.
That’s child abuse. Man, I heard some wacky shit in school back in the day but not that.
This was 4th grade. 1989. This teacher was way ahead of her time in terms of lefty programming. She worked “the environment” into every subject. We learned the depletion of the o-zone layer would likely kill is by 2000.
Man that sucks. I have 3 kids who were in elementary school in the 20-teens and we worked really hard to make sure they understood that “the environment” was not their responsibility and that they were not personally in any actual danger. “Environmental anxiety” inflicted on children is cruel.
The problem for Republicans is that they have spent over a century crushing the working class and any organization that helps them (unions). Then since the 80s they've been deindustrializing the nation and eliminating jobs for men under specious economic theories like comparative advantage which just makes the world a zero sum game of moving production wherever the state/corporate nexus can force the lowest wages onto their workers (and a lot of currrency manipulation to aid in that). Even at the higher ends they bring in H1-Bs or farm out a shit ton of the work to India (see how that worked for Boeing, treasonous scum they are). The Republicans have NEVER fought for workers, even trying to coup one of the few presidents who did take up our cause. When Trump slightly curtailed the H1-B program it was a nice gesture but hardly sufficient.
I'm thankful that guys like Tucker Carlson and Trump are questioning a lot of this now but I'm still waiting for them to realize how badly the right has fucked up. And more importantly, they don't seem to have a vision for this - many even decry the one good thing the Biden admin is doing: breaking up monopolies (slow going but at least in the right direction). If the right and left could both get behind that we could transform our economy in a decade and start to have small retail businesses again. We could place tariffs on a lot of imports and rebuild our manufacturing base. It's quite simple really but too many Repubs are all in on globohomo (at least the economic part of it).
These are the issues: monopoly power, financial oligarchy and their continuing push for globohomo. Any program for providing vision and purpose for young men has to take on those forces or it will be DOA or worse: it will direct them straight into the hands of those who care nothing for them and will only use them to replace one set of avaricious cretins with another.
The Republicans spent so long licking corporations’ boots that they’re having difficulty breaking out of that programming now that they realize the corporations hate them. You’re right that a large part of the problem was aided and abetted by the GOP. I get twitchy anytime anyone brings up Austrian economics or Ayn Rand.
I think both parties like monopolies as long as those companies toe the party line, act as government proxies, and DONATE TO REELECTION CAMPAIGNS. We have such a stupid system.
Nah just be a democrat. If not that just tow a more socialist / direct democratic parties and organizations, voting 3rd party really does nothing.
The whole thing is a disaster. It's also worldwide, unfortunately. And I don't just mean the first world. Growing up in Indonesia, I felt traces of it (though I didn't really know what it was until I truly see it in America). It's just that the third world lagged behind a few decades or so. Because America rules the world (can't stress this enough).
I don't mean to blackpill, just saying that the only out of this is through.
You’re not blackpilling at all. You’re 100 percent correct! The only way out is through, and I’d add with God. Try to get as close to God as possible.
That's true because without God's grace, all you have is resentment. And I understand that temptation, tbh. I think the problem with the secularist redpill types is that they fundamentally agree with "equality". By that, I mean they expect men and women to act the same way and so when they didn't, they felt betrayed.
One wisdom I got from my dad is that men and women are not the same and you shouldn't expect from a woman what you would expect from a man. It took me a while to internalize that. And unfortunately, most people today do expect men and women to think, feel, and act the same way (though perhaps not consciously).
Resentment and envy are killers. Unfortunately we have large swaths of society here in the U.S. motivated by nothing but resentment and envy. We’re seeing where that leads and it isn’t pretty.
Lots of these disaffected young men fall into misogyny, which is an easy out that doesn’t actually fix any problems. I will point out that criticism of women does not equal misogyny despite what we’re told. Just like criticism of men doesn’t equal misandry. Both things are classic “You know it when you see it.”
Great point. If one wishes to experience authentic personhood, one would do well to study the manual provided by the Creator.
It’s not always easy, but it is necessary.
Men are designed to be disposable. We’re just sperm donors. Generally considered by society to be worthless sacks of shit.
Fuck society. Society can suck my dick.
Not all of society. Maybe by its upper elite, which then trickles down via their propaganda. I agree our society has a lot of problems. I won’t go so far as to be done with it all just yet.
Thanks for highlighting my piece!
I do think that women becoming hyperliberal is an issue and I do not wanna give the impression that I am not aware this is the high status position at the moment.
My criticism of the Gooncave is mostly because I do wish to see some sort of cultural movement that's legit and not crazy which offers an alternative. I plan to write more about why liberalisation of women is bad
You’re welcome. It was a well-thought out piece and I appreciate that you wrote it.
The Gooncave, as you call it, is not a good alternative to the longhouse. Hating women for being women is an absurd position, and it seems like for every nuanced take and criticism of feminism or whatever you want to call it, there are three people calling every single woman a money- and status-hungry whore (again, I ask, like your mom?) and offering no positive vision of everything.
I agree with the anger at being told that EVERYTHING is men’s fault. But misogyny isn’t the answer.
I look forward to your next piece! I’m sure it’ll be just as interesting.
Insightful piece, man. It comes off a bit like fence straddling, but insightful nonetheless.
Thank you. I appreciate that and appreciate you reading.
Great stuff. I broadly agree. One thing I want to add though is the distinction between liberals and progressives.
Almost everyone I know is liberal (universal healthcare, gun control, same-sex marriage, equal access to education etc etc) but they (we) all get annoyed by the cultural issues that animate progressives. DEI, unlimited immigration, trans rights, gender issues, pronouns, identity politics.
I have a couple of friends who have switched from left to right and neither buys into what the right is selling; they just hate what the progressive left is selling.
I think liberals have faded into the background and left the field for progressives. We might be able to tempt a lot of people back over to the left if it weren't for the cultural extremes that progressives have adopted.
Thanks for the comment. I can see a difference between liberal and progressive as well. Even conservatives are liberals in the academic sense.
The American right’s problem is that there’s no real tradition of “the right” in America like there is in Europe—and no, “right” does not equal “Nazi” anymore than “left” equals “commie”—and that it’s pure reaction. There does need to be some sort of underpinning intellectually and conceptually beyond “not progressive,” because otherwise it’s an incoherent worldview.
That said, I’m glad young men are seemingly rejecting the worldview that hates them and wishes they were neutered and/or women.
Terms like “left” and “right” are only meaningful in a given context. Otherwise, it’s just a way of lazily dismissing ideas you don’t like or agree with.
Yeah it is. There is so much more encompassed in each broad term. Until new terms catch on, though, I guess we’re stuck.
Anecdotally I've seen young men become partisans in order to vent their frustrations with society.
But these same disenfranchised young men would be better served by trying to become the leaders of their own lives, getting married, having kids, and doing what they can to earn as much as possible.
If more young men, under the guidance of responsible male mentors, did this we wouldn't see this sort of partisan divide. Otherwise these young men are going to be walking down the road to more loneliness, desperation, and civil discord that amounts to nothing.
Right on. Mentorship is huge, as is self-improvement. Both sound like corny cliches, but they’re corny cliches for a reason—they work.
"Maybe the option of being nothing other than a subservient, soy-eating flesh bag who has to ask for permission to pee standing up (denied!) isn’t very appealing."
This is stupid. I'm a twentysomething man and I'm doing great. You're living in some degraded fantasy world where men like me are neverending victims and I gotta tune you out. I don't need the victimhood.
I’m not opposed to teaching kids to be kind, but there’s a type of bullying which is basically self-policing. Making fun of a kid for having a deformity or being small or being ugly (some people are just ugly) or having other issues beyond their control is one thing. Making fun of a kid who is being a little asshole is another, to try and straighten them out. That’s also been eliminated.
You cannot destroy the concept of shame and retain a civil society. We have done that and fain astonishment at the result.
No you cannot. And yet we try…
feign...
The whole bullying thing is interesting. I hesitate to join in the "pro-bullying" bandwagon that the right had jumped on because I was bullied as a kid and from what I can tell it's usually some fat kid who probably has issues at home and decided to take it out on an isolated target, which would be the weird kid with no friends. That's my experience at the very least.
OTOH, the Western media does have tendency to dehumanize "bullies". I still find it weird how in Japanese media, there's this trope of the protagonist becoming friends with his bully (Doraemon, Yugioh, and so on). I have yet to find any example of such from the West.
I’m not on the “bullying is good” bandwagon either. I guess defining bullying is one issue. I always saw it as unprovoked meanness for no other reason. Maybe I’m wrong though.
That’s an interesting aspect of Japanese media I wasn’t aware of. I wonder if that happens a lot in real life in Japan.
"I always saw it as unprovoked meanness for no other reason."
Same here. Maybe it's because I've been out of the school-loop, but the idea of bullying as keeping someone accountable never strike me right. Personally, I think the whole "bullying is good" thing is just internet contrarianism.
I saw kids “bullying” other kids when they were antagonizing a third-party kid, or acting in a way not befitting the group. It wasn’t mean-spirited.
I don’t disagree with this in principle. I would say that bullying is different than policing. How we discourage the former while teaching the latter is the hard part.