Why I'm Turning Off Anonymous Comments

Because they're worthless.

Now let's back up a second. I am not, I should be very clear, referring to the content of anonymous comments--I have had a number of very insightful comments which happened not to be made by someone who gave their name. These comments are valuable and I'm glad to have received them.

And I have not been inundated by anon hate the way some blogs I follow have been, so it's not really about that--although the possibility of that occurring is a factor in the decision, definitely.

No, the issue is twofold. First, anonymity is entirely unnecessary here. The only reason a person might need to be anonymous is if some kind of negative consequence were going to befall them either for what they say, or for being here at all. But I'm fairly confident that none of my commenters is living under an authoritarian regime likely to arrest, torture, or murder them for expressing an opinion on a blog, nor do I suspect that any of you are engaged in some kind of undercover operation or secret agents or otherwise subject to the sort of scrutiny that makes connecting to the Internet a risky endeavor--and if you are, what are you doing risking coming here? No, for anyone actually commenting here making a Google account on a fake name is surely protection enough, and if you're really paranoid you can even do it through an anonymizing proxy of some sort.

And since none of you need an anonymous posting option, I'm under no obligation to provide it--and anonymity works against what I'm trying to accomplish with this blog.

I want, ultimately, to do three things with this blog. The first is to get my ideas and words out into the world. Having or not having anonymous comments makes no difference to this purpose.

The second is to provoke and participate in discussion. Anonymity makes this difficult, because I have no way of telling if multiple anonymous comments in a thread are by the same person or not.

The third is to create community, and anonymity makes this impossible. Anonymous commenters are a faceless, amorphous mass. Because I do not know which comments are by different people and which are by the same people, it is impossible to build a sense of who anyone is. Identities become impossible to discern, and without individual identities there can be no relationships and therefore no community.

And, frankly, I am disgusted by the culture of the Internet, and much of that disgust is provoked by the rampant abuse of anonymity as a shield from behind which cowards can bully and harass, express bigotry without exposing themselves to the social consequences, or maliciously and sadistically hurt others to make themselves feel big. Even putting aside trolls, it encourages a dehumanizing and depersonalizing sense of power and distance, a hyper-rationalist form of discourse in which having an identity is an exploitable personal flaw and expressing emotions is a signifier of weakness and inferiority.

That is not what I want my blog to be. I don't want people to just make provocative statements, I want them to defend those statements with the passion that only comes when your reputation depends on it. I want continuity between discussions, so that something a person says in one thread can be brought up in a later one to ask them to explain an apparent contradiction or hypocrisy. I want people to own what they say, so that they put a little thought into it before they say it. And most of all, I want the opportunity to get to know the people I interact with here, which requires that they be people and not faceless ciphers.

A brief thought on privilege

I was hoping to have another fundamentals post today, on privilege, but it's going to take more brainmeats than I can spare at the moment, as well as more forks/spoons/culinary-implements-as-signifiers-of-mental-health of your choice.

So instead just one brief spot, inspired by a chart I keep seeing floating around Tumblr which purports to assign numeric scores to various forms of privilege: that is not how privilege works. Privilege is not some kind of score, it is a list, of rules which don't apply equally to everyone. Everyone has privilege in some form or another, and while it is easy to say to some privileges are pretty obviously worth more than others (the white privilege of "if someone shoots you, it is relatively hard for them to get off on a self-defense plea" as opposed to the trivial black privilege of "can get away with using the n-word in mixed company"), there are other privileges much harder to compare (say, the male privilege of "significantly less likely to be raped" as opposed to the cis privilege of "significantly less likely to be murdered").

But it's actually more complicated than that, because not only are privileges a list of rules that apply differently to different people, but they apply at different times and in different circumstances. There are scenarios in which being white is a disadvantage--say, the only white kid at an otherwise all-black middle school--it's just that society's overall racism means there are fewer of them and they are less impactful than the scenarios in which being black is a disadvantage. This is unlikely to matter on the level of individual experience, however, because of course one's own privilege is hard to see.

Again, this is not to say that there aren't groups which are systemically privileged over other groups. There is, generally speaking, one clearly privileged group in each demographic category, which in the U.S. sums up broadly to wealthy white English-speaking Christian heterosexual cis men. In the overwhelming majority of circumstances, members of these groups have massive privilege over others--but it's entirely pointless to fight over whether, for example, Jews or asexual people are more privileged. (And they both are, because everyone is privileged.) That serves only to divide us, when we should all be working together to destroy the systems underlying privilege.

The point of privilege is not to rank people according to how oppressed they are. That is an impossible and self-defeating activity. The point, is instead, to note that everyone has blind spots which make them unaware of how unfair our society is to others. And again, it's not that blacks should be sympathetic to whites because they have privileges whites don't--blacks do have privileges that whites don't, but they're bullshit compared to the massive privileges whites have that blacks don't. Instead, it's to note that a black Christian may be blind to the injustices faced by a white pagan, or a straight woman blind to the injustices faced by a gay man, and so on. All of us are blind to our own privilege, and the only way to see it is to believe someone else when that someone else tells us they don't have it.

When is violence an appropriate response?

I don't know.

I honestly don't.

I do know this. I know that when I was 17 and got stopped going 94 miles an hour, I reached for my coat in the passenger seat because my license was in it, and the cop who stopped me pulled his gun. It was frightening enough, but in hindsight I realize, if I were black he'd have shot me in the head until the gun ran out of bullets, because that is what cops do to black people.

And I know that if you are constantly subject to violence and the fear of violence, if the courts encourage violence against you by punishing it less often and less severely, if the people whose job is supposedly to protect you instead treat you as a threat, then it is not my place to tell you that you can't use violence in response.

And I know this, too: in communities around America, the police act like an occupying army, carry the equipment of an occupying army, speak and think like an occupying army, which makes them, guess what, an occupying army.

And this as well: if you put on the uniform of an occupying army and walk out onto the battlefield, it doesn't matter if your soul is as pure and sinless as the driven snow, you are a legitimate target.

"Some people," says the voice of wisdom in a well-acted but otherwise terrible and reactionary film, "just want to watch the world burn." Given what this world does to them, I can't blame them.

It may be that violence will just give them the excuse to clamp down harder. Or it may be that violence is the only hope of tearing down a system designed to prevent any kind of meaningful change. It's not my place to make that decision--only to lend my voice in support of the people who do have that right.

And one other thing I know: I know that when you have the power--a weapon in your hand, armor on your chest, an entire power structure designed to protect you from accountability--then violence is definitely not appropriate.

Well this should be a popular opinion...

Fuck Veterans Day.

Don't get me wrong. It's not unreasonable at all to have a day of remembrance and mourning for the people who have sacrificed their lives and safety in order to protect their homes. It's just that we already have a day for that, Memorial Day.

Also, the last time the U.S. military actually did any of that was World War II. Every other military conflict of the last 150 years or so, and quite a few of the ones before that, were pure imperialist assertions of power. Even World War II was mostly an assertion that the islands of the Pacific were our imperial protectorates, not Japan's; that the alliance of empires on the other side were rather a lot more horrific than the alliance of empires on our side is mostly a happy coincidence. (Well, happy for the Allies, not so much for the people who lived in those empires. Or for Japanese-Americans. Or... well, you get the point.)

And, I mean, being a soldier is one of the few ways in which a working class or lower middle class American can get a decently paying job or an education. We should be at least as sympathetic toward them as we are toward the young people pushed into gangs by similar social pressures. Admittedly, gangs have done a lot less harm in the world than the U.S. military, but you wouldn't know it from the media, which tend to villify the former and laud the latter. It's really not their fault.

No, the problem is that Veterans Day isn't about mourning sacrifices or solemnly pondering necessary evils, it's about a jingoistic celebration of authoritarian, imperialist might. It's about speeches where our leaders try to one-up one another in their over-the-top declarations of how utterly fantabulous it is that a significant percentage of our society and economy is dedicated to the pursuit of slaughter and destruction in foreign lands. It's about the lie that spreading chaos and death makes us safer, that "we fight them there so we don't have to fight them here," as if there would be a "them" if we weren't fighting there.

So yeah. Fuck it. Have a Peace Day instead. Or move Election Day to November 11 so we can all have that off. Better yet, make it the second Monday in November or something, because holidays that don't create three-day weekends are stupid.

But that won't happen any time soon, because the U.S. is a highly aggressive imperial power, and we now exist in a state of perpetual war that our leaders have no interest in ending. But that doesn't mean we have to celebrate it.

Election Day Reminder

Most of my readers are in the U.S. Most of my USian readers, in turn, live in places where you can, in fact, vote for real Congressional representation, not a single half-assed shadow representative.

Enjoy that right. Exercise it. Go vote today.

Support for, concerns about #HeForShe

Edit: So as universalperson points out in the comments, Hugo Schwyzer is seriously awful an referring to him as a feminist ally is pretty inaccurate. On the other hand, I still stand by saying that he's the strongest one Good Man Project had--he talked the talk while acting horribly in private, as opposed to actively attacking feminism and feminists. 

So, you may have heard about a speech Emma Watson gave at the UN recently, in which she went out of her way to emphasize the ways in which patriarchy hurts men and invite men into the feminist movement. Part of the purpose of the speech was to announce the launch of a new UN campaign, #HeForShe, encouraging men to pledge to speak out against instances of sexism and misogyny in their communities.

And this is, net, probably a good thing, which is why I have signed the pledge. Plus, you know, I was doing it already, and, as I said on Twitter, if Emma Watson and Lauren Faust are telling you to do something, it is probably worth at least checking out.

But at the same time, I'm a little cautious. I remember when the Good Man Project sounded like a great idea, a way to help repair the very real damage patriarchy and kyriarchy do to men and, in the process, help gain men as allies against the kyriarchy.

It didn't work out that way. The year after its founding, the Good Man Project posted a series of anti-feminist articles by one of its founders, leading to the resignation of the strongest feminist ally among its regular contributors and resulting in its present state, a site where an article about the pain of being in "the friend zone" can share front page space with an article about using the pain of losing a friend to make one a better CEO, parenting and dating tips, but not a trace of politics, not a mention of, say, the behavior of men in creating #GamerGate or the moral obligation to not touch stolen nude pictures of celebrities or, I don't know, the launch of #HeForShe? The entire site is predicated on the notion that it is possible to be a "good man" in isolation, that men's issues can be separated from gender issues--that, in short, one can become a better man without thinking about women. And that's when it's not just being the watered-down diet version of the Men's Rights movement.

Because that's the thing: Yes, the patriarchy hurts men too. Hegemonic masculinity pressures men to avoid cultivating emotional intelligence, makes it difficult for them to form close friendships or seek help when in need. Male rape victims suffer the consequences of rape culture just as women do. Because the kyriarchy constructs masculinity as being about power, and particularly power over women, trans men are falsely seen as "starting as women" and barred from accessing that power or asserting masculinity; gay men are seen as unmasculine and threatening; men who do not particularly relish displays of power are seen as unmasculine and dispensable. Men are poisoned with false narratives and expectations about relationships, their place in the world, the source of their identity, and the nature of gender.

But all of this is collateral damage.

Supporting feminism because kyriarchy hurts men is like getting upset over a terrorist bombing because the resulting traffic jam made you late for work. Yes, that's a negative effect, but focusing on it is self-centered and narcissistic.

Women are the targets of misogyny and sexism. They are the ones who face it day in and out, who see all of it, not just the bits that happen to men. They are the ones who can see the enemy, who know the enemy, who have no choice about being in this fight, because they are the ones being directly attacked.

We men are necessarily on the sidelines. So we can help. We can support. We can take action, discuss theory, even, if invited to do so, offer advice. But it must be women that lead, because a feminism that forefronts men's concerns makes as much sense as a movement for racial equality that focuses on making whites feel better or a labor movement that emphasizes keeping managers happy; it's inherently self-defeating.

If you want to see what a movement looks like that primarily focuses on the ways in which patriarchy hurts men, look no further than the Red Pill on Reddit, if you can stomach it. Men feel as if they've been robbed of something they're entitled to, powerless, lost, purposeless, isolated because they've been taught by the patriarchy that their role is to exercise power, that certain emotions are "unmanly," that women are their property and birthright. They feel powerless because they expect power, lost, purposeless, and isolated because they are emotionally stunted and unable to form healthy relationships, and robbed because they've been lied to about what they're entitled to.

These are all problems that feminism can solve, because they're all collateral damage of the war on women: all stem from a system of gender relations that defines "man" as "wielder of power over women." But focusing on these problems puts the emphasis on the feelings of powerlessness and loss, pushing toward a "solution" of seeking to give men still more power over women. The result is to make the feeling being robbed worse, to stoke anger and resentment and hate. The result is MRAs and PUAs and, ultimately, rapes and mass shootings.

The focus, instead, needs to be on the underlying causes. Where feminism focuses on helping men, it needs to be about tough love--about helping men shed their entitlement, their expectations of power. Where feminism focuses on recruiting men, it should be about encouraging self-policing, about teaching men to teach men to be less entitled and to reduce unrealistic expectations of power. Then and only then can men work on healing the damage of patriarchy, after they've worked helping take it down.

And most importantly of all, men need to learn to help, not save. This is a theme I've hammered again and again in my analyses this past year, because it's important. There's a reason there's a degree of controversy over whether men should even call themselves feminists, whether it might not be better to refer to themselves as feminist allies, and it's because of the savior problem. Far too many men walk into feminist spaces because they want to Save the Women, imposing their own ideas--necessarily based on incomplete information, because no man experiences the entire reality of sexism as experienced by women--of what needs to be done, all in service of their own ego and self-image as a Good Person who will Rescue Those Poor People. It is a profoundly self-centered approach that infantilizes and dehumanizes the people one is seeking to save.

No, the proper role of men in a feminist movement is as helpers--our job is to say "What do you need?" and then either provide what's asked for or get out of the way. Not because of any fundamental difference between men and women, but because that is the moral way and only really workable way to get involved in another person's problems: to offer one's resources and then allow the person in need to decide how to use them.

And helping isn't easy. Trying to help is harder than trying to save. It means surrendering power and control, opening oneself up to rejection, and putting one's own feelings and wants and ideas about what's helpful second to the expressed needs of another person. Which is why, ultimately, I worry about #HeForShe in the long term. Getting involved in someone else's equality movement to benefit oneself seems like very much the wrong reasons. A man who supports feminism to help himself, or to feel better, or to get praised, is pretty much guaranteed to be doing it wrong--and an entire international movement of people doing it wrong could do real damage.

So yes, I signed the #HeForShe pledge. And yes, I do encourage other men to do it as well. But I also encourage you to focus on the ForShe part. This isn't HeForHe, isn't about our egos and our needs. To return to my rather strained earlier metaphor, this isn't about stopping traffic jams, it's about stopping bombings. If the traffic jam is what it takes to get you involved, so be it--but the traffic jams cannot be priority one. They cannot be a priority at all; you're just going to have to trust that the side effects will naturally fade as we tackle the core problem.

I don't normally do this, but I feel this is an important conversation that needs to happen as part of #HeForShe, so: Please consider reblogging, sharing, and linking to this post.

Fundamentals: Criticism and Social Justice

The world in which we live is deeply, horrifyingly unfair.

Some of that unfairness is inescapable, a consequence of the terrifying randomness and even more terrifying determinism of the universe. Our friends and loved ones are as likely to be hit by buses as our enemies. Babies who haven't even figured out that other people exist yet, let alone tried to hurt them, get diseases that cause horrible lifelong suffering. Market forces tend to amplify initial small disparities in wealth. Trashy reality shows are more profitable than well-written and acted dramas, even though hardly anyone actually watches them.

But a lot of that unfairness was invented by humans, and is entirely under human control. This kind of unfairness can be divided into two categories, which is an entire article on its own, but we're interested today in only one of them, systemic injustice: all of the ways in which the systems and power relations that comprise our society are structurally unfair, even in the absence of deliberate action by any one individual. In other words, for this particular topic we're less interested in unfairness that arises from people cheating, and more interested in unfairness that arises from the rules themselves.

That's where social justice comes in. The idea is simple, its execution hard: create a society in which as much systemic injustice as possible is eliminated or corrected for. More fundamentally, social justice is simply the idea that fixing systemic injustice wherever possible is a major moral imperative. That one is not personally responsible for any particular unfair act is irrelevant; systemic injustice is a problem of a community, rather than individuals, and therefore a matter of communal, rather than personal, responsibility.

Which brings us to the role of criticism in all this, and in particular a specific family of critical schools including the feminist, queer, and postcolonial schools, among others. The common thread is a particular function of critical analysis, namely the identification of ways in which the text expresses, reflects, encourages, or perpetuates systemic injustices. From a social justice perspective, this is an extremely important activity. Texts, after all, are a major component of a culture, and a community's culture is the primary means by which it influences the behavior of individuals within the community. In other words, it is by means of culture that systemic injustices perpetuate themselves, and therefore it is in the realm of culture that they must be met, identified, and combatted.

The primary function of criticism in general, if such a thing exists, could be said to think about culture and engage with it more mindfully. The function of social justice criticism, then, is to engage with culture while being mindful of systemic injustices. Note that this is not necessarily the same thing as criticizing a particular culture; particularly when dealing with works that originate outside one's own community, it's important not to project one's own community's issues onto that other community. That said, the interpretation of a text is as much an expression of culture as the creation of the text, so it is entirely legitimate to look at how a text from one culture might read in one's own culture, as part of a critique of one's own culture.

Ultimately, the goal of this is not to say, for example, "This movie is racist and therefore bad." (Though, of course, there are movies which are bad and racist, including ones where the racism is what makes them bad. But racism doesn't automatically make a work bad, it makes it racist.) The goal is not to attack individual works or creators--though sometimes that is necessary, because one of the ways in which systemic injustice functions is by making it easy to ignore individual acts of injustice--but rather to, as a member of the community, participate in one's communal responsibility to help identify and mitigate systemic unfairness.

The key point here is that social justice criticism is emphatically not about attacking another, because it's not about the Other at all. It's about confronting the darkness in the extended Self, one's own communities and cultures, and exposing it to light so that it can be dealt with. It's about embracing one's own culpability in communal responsibility for the state of the culture, and choosing to be mindful of that responsibility as a first step toward performing it.

Fundamentals: Community, Culture, and Responsibility

"Fundamentals" is an irregular series in which I write about certain basic ideas underlying my work on this site.

No human being exists in isolation. Each and every one of us is a member of multiple communities, some joined by choice (e.g., fandoms), others thrust upon us as a consequence of birth or upbringing (e.g., family, ethnicity), as a consequence of other choices (e.g., coworkers), or external circumstances and pressures; some are permanent, others temporary. And every community has a culture: collective rules and values, stories, material products, and so on. We are shaped by the cultures of the communities to which we belong, and they in turn emerge from the actions of each individual within the community. This does not deny individual choice, free will, or any of that; rather, it simply notes the plain fact that we are neither mindless drones nor completely autonomous actors unaffected by our environments and interactions with others. We are both individuals and members of communities, and it is equally a mistake to overemphasize either.

Which brings us to a rather critical point about responsibility. There is a tendency among some, I think, to assume that responsibility is exclusive and zero sum--in other words, that there are a finite number of responsibility points for any given occurrence, and if I take them all then no one else gets any. In other words, if Bob does something bad, to suggest that Bob was influenced by the surrounding culture is to deny, at least in part, that Bob was responsible for his actions.

This is nonsense. Take it as given that an individual is totally responsible for their actions and the consequences thereof. Culture emerges from the aggregate actions of all members of a community, and therefore all members of a community are responsible for their actions that contribute to that culture. All members of the community are shaped by that culture, and therefore their actions are influenced by--in other words, partial consequences of--the culture, which is to say the aggregate actions of all members of the community.

Thus, consider Alice, who shares a community and culture with Bob. Alice's actions help shape the culture of that community, and therefore also Bob's actions. Thus, Alice is partially responsible for the actions of Bob.

If we are totally responsible for our own actions and the consequences thereof, in other words, it follows that we are also responsible for the cultures we create and the ways in which they shape our own and others' actions. Personal responsibility necessarily implies cultural and communal responsibility.

Which, let's be clear on some things before anybody accuses me of saying something I'm not:

• This does not mean that anything anyone does is the responsibility of every community to which they belong. Rather, it is necessary to first show how a particular culture influenced the person's actions, and only then is it possible to assign responsibility to the community.
• This does not apply only to "bad" actions and influences. Culture can have lots of positive influences, in which case every member of the community has some responsibility for that, too.
• As I already said, this does not negate personal responsibility, but follows logically from it. A person is still entirely responsible for their own actions, it is simply also the case that there is communal responsibility. Like most seeming contradictions, this only appears to be one because of an unstated assumption, that responsibility is zero-sum and exclusive. Reject that notion, and it is completely possible for two people to be completely responsible for the same event, let alone one person completely responsible and another partially responsible.
• Personal and social responsibility are not qualitatively the same. Personal responsibility, generally, is much more direct and concentrated; social responsibility tends to be diffuse by its very nature, spread thinly across many people. There are, of course, exceptions: for example, when a prominent community leader deliberately creates a culture of hatred and fear, for example, they carry a much larger and more concentrated portion of the responsibility for members of the community who lash out than the rank and file do, though again that does not negate the responsibility of the rest of the community for accepting and perpetrating the culture.

Fundamentals: Aesthetics and Ethics

I've been thinking about this for a while, and I've decided to start an irregular series of posts in which I discuss sort of fundamental ideas behind how I approach texts, write for this site, and just generally approach the world. There will be at least a couple this and next week, mostly because I realized that I had something I wanted to say, but felt I needed to explain some underlying concepts first. And it just generally occurred to me that I might want to have some posts I could just point to and say "go here" instead of having to repeat myself in articles and comments. Anyway, this is the first of these posts.

One of the most basic principles underlying my approach to criticism is that aesthetics are inextricable from ethics. Before I go any further, I should make clear that I am emphatically not endorsing Chekhov's view that all art should be didactic and encourage "good morals." However, neither am I endorsing Wilde's contrary ars arsa position.

First there is the trivial sense: the creation of art is an action, which occurs in the real world and has consequences for real people. It is thus impossible for it to not have some moral dimension--"it's for art" is not a defense against accusations of immorality. (Although, to be clear, many "moral" objections to art are simply prudery; however, the correct response is not "art is above moral concerns" but rather "your morality blows.")

More importantly, however, aesthetics and ethics are fundamentally connected at their root: both are expressions of values, which is to say that both aesthetic and moral judgment derive from some underlying sense that some things--objects, ideas, sensations, material social conditions, whatever--are better than others.That quality of better does not actually vary between the aesthetic and the moral; better is better.

So, while separate categories, the aesthetic and the moral are inextricably intertwined. You can see it in the way we sometimes respond to either, the way we might refer to an immoral act as "disgusting" or a particularly moral one as "beautiful," or conversely the way we might refer to bad art as "wrong" and good art as "right."

This entanglement, in turn, means that the moral dimension is a legitimate consideration in any form of criticism. It is not as simple as saying that aesthetically good art must also be morally good or vice versa; rather it is, as I said, that the ethical dimension is one thing to consider in making aesthetic judgments (and the aesthetic is one thing to consider in making moral judgments).

A short version: beauty is good, but it is neither necessary to, nor sufficient for, goodness. Goodness is beautiful, but it is neither necessary to, nor sufficient for, beauty.

A stray thought regarding Terry Pratchett and Ferguson, MO

I forgot to queue up Wednesday's regular Sailor Moon post, and unfortunately the chatlog is on a computer I won't have access to until tonight. So have Thursday's post today, and Wednesday's post will go up tomorrow.

The other night, I was rereading Terry Pratchett's Night Watch, and I wondered: would Ferguson be as bad as it is if all cops were required to read the Watch books?

And the answer is, of course, yes, because the human ability to compartmentalize and justify via special pleading is infinite, but still, I can't help but think that things might be slightly better if the prevailing cultural image of cop-as-hero was more Vimes and less Dirty Harry.

A Few Thoughts on the Death of Robin Williams

Trigger Warning: Suicide, End-of-Life Decisions

By now you have probably heard that actor and comedian Robin Williams committed suicide yesterday. I have a few thoughts related to this.

Depression is not the only mental illness that can cause suicide. Williams suffered from bipolar disorder, not depressive disorder. Please, if you are going to use his death as an opportunity to spread awareness regarding mental illness, do so accurately. (I am aware of reports that he was depressed, but that is referring to depression as a symptom. It is a symptom of numerous disorders, including major depressive disorder (which is what is meant when you say someone "has depression") and bipolar disorder.)

As an atheist, I believe that each human life is unique, infinitely valuable, brief, and irreplaceable; that once gone, a person is lost forever and utterly irretrievable. As a survivor of a suicide attempt, I am very grateful that when I reached out in fear afterwards, people were there to help me and get me into treatment. As someone who has intervened in the suicide attempt of a loved one, I am very glad I was there to do so.

That said, there is a very fine line to walk between recognizing that suicidal ideation and impulses can be a symptom of some psychological disorders, and respecting the unlimited right of individuals to make their own end-of-life decisions. If a person judges that they are in unbearable pain, it is not relevant whether that pain is psychological or physiological; they have every right to decide to end it.

That said, suicidal impulses are a symptom of multiple psychological disorders, and a treatable symptom. Consent issues become very complex where life-threatening illness is concerned; and even moreso where those diseases distort the sufferer's thoughts and feelings. if a person's suicidal impulse comes not from their "natural" selves but from their disease, is intervening any different than intervening to help a person having a heart attack? As always, the right thing to do depends heavily on one's relationship with the person. A doctor or a loved one has very different rights and responsibilities than a stranger. In this case, I must assume everyone reading this was a stranger to Mr. Williams; as such, we have no right to intervene in his desire to die or to judge it after the fact.

This was not a "waste," or any sort of violation; Mr. Williams clearly felt his pain was unbearable and chose to end it. None of us are close enough to him to be able to see whether this was an impulse sparked by his disease or a final, free choice in the face of pain no longer bearable (and indeed, this is a false dichotomy; it was almost certainly some blend of both). However, given that we cannot see from here which it was, out of respect for him, the basic respect due any person, we must assume that his choice was the best choice available from his perspective.

This is not to say that mourning is wrong. Every death is a tragedy. Even where the death itself is blessed release, the circumstances that made it such are inevitably horrific. Nor is there anything wrong with using this as an opportunity to spread awareness about and acceptance of mental illness, as that could help people seek treatment or reduce the unnecessary suffering they experience as a consequence of the stigma against mental illness. All I am saying is that I believe we should do this respectfully.

Suicide and depression support hotlines for multiple countries.

I'm tired of having this argument

Imagine a typical playground scene. Bully Mcbullyperson is picking on Meekins again, pinning them down and hocking a loogie in their face. Their eyes meet.

Scenario 1: Bully calls Meekins a loser. 

Scenario 2: Meekins calls Bully a loser. 

I think most people would readily agree that, in scenario 1, Bully is verbally bullying Meekins, which is deplorable, while scenario 2 Meekins is performing an act of defiance and should be cheered. 

This a clear case where morality is NOT symmetric: When an oppressed person mocks, belittles, or insults the oppressor, it's awesome. When the oppressor mocks, belittles, or insults the oppressed, it's wrong. Substituting one person for another changes the morality of the action. 

Got that? Morality is not always symmetric. It matters who you are and what your position is; right and wrong are different for different people in different scenarios. 

On to another question: WHY is it wrong for Bully to insult Meekins? It can't be a deontological principle; "don't insult people" would make it wrong for both of them, and a declaration that insulting someone while they're down is a priori wrong is just dodging the question. It can't be utilitarian, either; there is a high likelihood that Meekins comment will result in a beating, more than negating the pleasure of making it. 

No, this is a clear case where virtue ethics takes hold. We despise Bully's insult because insulting someone while they're down is the action of a bully and a coward, and we cheer Meekins because insulting the powerful takes courage. 

Ah, and there's the rub: the morality of the insult has nothing to do with the prior actions of our two characters. Meekins does not "get insult privileges" as a reward for being oppressed, nor does Bully "lose" them as a punishment. Rather, it is purely a matter of relative power; Bully's power means that insulting Meekins risks nothing, and is therefore cowardly; Meekins, on the other hand, is taking a great risk, which is courageous. 

We live in a kyriarchy, which is to say a system of intertwined hierarchies. All else being equal, the rich have more power than the poor, men have more power than women, whites have more power than people of color,* cis heterosexual people have more power than LGBT people, and so on. 

Now, this does not mean that members of underprivileged groups get to say whatever they want to members of privileged groups. Morality is complex, and multiple factors interact--generally speaking, an unprovoked verbal assault on an individual is almost always wrong. But it does mean that the bar is lower when it comes to members of underprivileged groups talking about privileged groups in the abstract, because the courage it takes to do so helps counteract the general idea that generalizing about people isn't good. 

So, next time you feel the urge to say "people would react differently if you said that about [other group]," pause a moment, and consider this question first:

Yeah, they would. So what?

*You. Yes, you. White person about to comment about how downtrodden you are in an attempt to refute this. Consider two things first: One, are you really suffering because people of color have more power than you, or are you butthurt because privileges you take for granted are being shared with people who aren't you? Two, are you really suffering because people of color have more power than you, or because of some other group unrelated to race (most likely, the rich) have power over you? Any comments of this type which do not answer both those questions will be deleted. 

Transgender horses, the Doctor, and real names

Moffat-era Doctor Who gets a lot wrong about gender. "Susan the horse" in "A Town Called Mercy" is a great example of how badly it's handled as a matter of course--let's deliberately raise the existence of trans* people so that we can make a joke about how funny it is that they exist! While also suggesting that it's a choice! (This Tumblr post covers it much better than I ever could.)

But very rarely, it gets something right. Susan's chosen a name for herself, and it tells you quite a bit about her (which the Doctor deliberately ignores in calling her "him.") That becomes important in "The Name of the Doctor": "The name I chose is the Doctor. The name you choose, it's like, it's like a promise you make."

A person's real name is always the name they choose to be known by. Just because most people default to the name their parents picked doesn't make that their real name. Just because the government may insist they use a particular name on forms doesn't make that their real name. A person's real name is the one they introduce themselves with.

Addenda to Tuesday's Post About Piracy

Two additional thoughts I either forgot about or didn't think of until after posting:

• Although of course there is a fairly obvious legal difference, I do not see any moral difference between using AdBlock while watching a free, ad-supported streaming service like Crunchyroll, and just pirating the shows. In both cases, you are circumventing the distributor in order to eliminate the cost (monetary in the case of piracy, time in the case of AdBlock) of accessing the show, and in both cases, while the immediate and obvious victim is the parasitic and predatory for-profit industry that distributes the work, in the long run they are quite good at passing those losses along to the actual creators.
• No one ever needs access to a creative work. It is debatable, as I noted in the previous post, whether people have a right to access others' work, but it is never a need; no one has ever actually died from being unable to watch the next episode of Mad Men. "I needed it" is a legitimate justification for theft--it is justified for a starving person to steal food, for example. But merely very much wanting something is not actually justification for taking it; regardless of whether a given act of media piracy is right or wrong, its rightness or wrongness is unaffected by how much the downloader wants to watch it.

"Equestranauts" Showcases Biggest Problem of Brony Community

Apologies for extreme lateness, I am once again ill. 

The recent Bob's Burgers episode "Equestranauts" offered a very funny take on the brony subculture, as the titular burger joint owner had to pretend to be an adult fan of Equestranauts, an action- and friendship-packed show designed to market horse toys to little girls, in order to get back a toy a collector swindled out of his daughter.

Quite a bit of the episode is a simple, fairly gentle lampooning of convention culture in general and bronies in particular. The usual exaggerations for fictional depictions of conventions are in play, of course, most notably that cosplay is depicted as de rigeur rather than an expensive and time-devouring hobby pursued by a few. Notably, however, there does seem to be some awareness of the quirks of bronies. Admittedly, both Tina and Bob (especially Bob) are subjected to gatekeeping by defensive fans, more commonly a phenomenon of the science fiction, comics, and gaming fandoms, but here said gatekeeping is actually possible to pass, after which they are basically accepted into the community.

That community itself is depicted as, in large part, harmless silliness; unusual, perhaps imperfectly socialized, men hanging about and being faintly ridiculous. Most are welcoming and friendly and just looking to have some innocent fun feeling out over their favorite cartoon; only Bronconius is portrayed negatively. 

Where the episode is most interesting, however, is in its climax, where the Equesticles are called out for allowing Bronconius free reign as he swindled little girls, pushed people around, and generally acted like a selfish, domineering jerk. And there, perhaps accidentally, the episode accurately depicts the bronies' biggest problem, the paradox of tolerance. 

This old philosophical problem is simply summarized: some people are, for whatever reason, frequently aggressive, controlling, and intolerant. Perhaps more importantly, most people are occasionally aggressive, controlling, and intolerant, and the more they get away with the behavior, the likelier they are to believe it is acceptable. There are few constraints on individual behavior more powerful than this aggressive intolerance; thus, a community which tolerates all behavior by its members is necessarily one which is experienced as intolerant by most members--put another way, in the absence of an asshole control mechanism, assholes run rampant. 

Bronies, as a group, are extremely reluctant to police other bronies. A combination of factors, including the show's themes of friendship and harmony, and statistical tendencies for bronies to be likelier than the general populace to be poorly socialized, victims of bullying, and neurotic, combine to create a subculture where most people are unwilling to rock the boat, even to deal with someone walking the boat. An embattled mentality, mostly originating with extremely negative mainstream media coverage early in the fandom and attempts by 4chan to expunge Friendship Is Magic-related discussion, has created a culture of defensiveness, where criticism of bad behavior by individual members is treated as an attack on the community (which, to be fair, it sometimes is, because there is a natural tendency for said individuals become the most visible face of the community to outsiders).

For example, there is a frequent implication in mainstream media coverage that the majority of bronies have a deviant sexual interest in children (sometimes more than an implication, as in Amanda Marcotte's characteristically knee-jerk Slate piece on Equestria Girls), which is hardly the case. (My own surveys and interviews suggest that very few bronies actually consume clop, for instance.) However, there are sufficient numbers of bronies that it is statistically certain that there at least a few members of the community who are sexual predators, and it falls on the community to identify and out them. Unfortunately, reports of such behavior at brony conventions are frequently rejected outright as "trolling" or outsiders trying to make trouble; a wagon-circling effect occurs which denies that such individuals exist within the brony community at all.

Derpygate is another good example of this phenomenon; fans expressing legitimate concerns regarding the use of an ableist slur in the show and conflation of physical and mental disabilities were met with accusations of trying to "censor" the show or "erase" the disabled, fan campaigns treated it as a personal attack on the character in question, and in some cases the concerned fans were subject to vicious harassment, to the point that some of the people involved in the show had to issue calls for it to stop. And yet, two years later, it is by and large the individuals who had those concerns who are remembered as the villains, for daring to question whether the show and its fandom are the perfect paragons of politeness, harmony, and equality bronies like to paint themselves as.

The instinct to circle around and protect a member of the community is not in itself problematic, but it must be tempered by a willingness to recognize that some members don't deserve protection, and that sometimes the community itself is to blame. If we do not call out the Bronconiuses in our ranks, others will--and they will assume they represent who bronies are.

Assorted Contradictory Thoughts on Media Piracy

Otaku Journalist has been running a series on anime piracy lately, and it's gotten me thinking.

I am fairly confident the following are all true:

• People have a fundamental right to participate in their culture, which necessarily means they need access to cultural products.
• Radio chased folk culture into an alley and murdered it a century ago, replacing it almost entirely with commercial mass media. The Internet has revived a zombie version of folk culture in the form of fandoms, but even fandoms have a commercial product at the core.
• The relationship between industry (any industry) and consumers is a predator-prey relationship. The industry wants your money, and uses products as bait to get it. They will take as much as they can get away with, and care nothing about you or the products except as a source of money.
• The previous point applies to an industry (or a corporation within that industry) as a gestalt entity. The motivations of the people working in the industry vary; many actually do care about their customers or creating quality products.
• Generally speaking, people should be rewarded for their labor.
• We as a culture undervalue creative work severely. We have come to expect that content will be free, and thus it is increasingly common that writers and artists are expected to work for the privilege of having their work published, as opposed to actually getting paid. (A growing number of news sites, for example, from fan-news sites like The Mary Sue to major general-audience national sites like Huffington Post and USA Today (web edition only), do not pay their writers.) This is unsustainable.
• Physical media (books, tapes, DVDs, etc.) are rivalrous and excludable, i.e. private goods. Digital distribution is non-rivalrous and most non-excludable, i.e. a public good. Generally, governments are significantly better at managing public goods than private enterprises are.
• The idea of handing management of the arts over to the government is fundamentally horrifying.
• Most people who say they use piracy solely as a way to sample media, and buy the shows they enjoy once they become commercially available, are lying most of the time.

Conclusion: Piracy is a convoluted mess where everyone on all sides is both right and wrong, and there doesn't really seem to be a solution.

Because I was (never) a slave in Egypt

This is an article I originally posted on The Slacktiverse on October 19, 2012. It has been lightly edited for typos and is otherwise identical to that post, because this is still everything I have to say on the subject.

I skipped Passover this year. There was a lot going on–Anime Boston was that weekend, and my food processor was broken so I couldn’t make the sauce for the lamb, and so on–and I didn’t think I would miss it. After all, it’s an empty, meaningless ritual dedicated to the worship of a being that doesn’t exist, commemorating events that never happened. Except, of course, that it’s an empty, meaningless ritual I’ve participated in every year of my life except this one.

Oh, and except that it’s not empty or meaningless at all.

Passover is the only time I say prayers. Sometimes in Hebrew, sometimes in English–depends on who I’m celebrating with–every year, I ask call God the King of the Universe and ask hir to bless the matzo and the wine. I sing about how any one of the miracles God performed in the course of freeing the Jews from Egyptian bondage would have been enough, but zie kept on performing more.
The rest of the year, if I find myself somewhere that people are praying (a religious wedding or funeral, say), I keep my head down and my mouth shut. I don’t join in, because that would be dishonest. But on Passover I say the prayers and sing the songs, because that is what you do on Passover.

The prayers and songs, considered in isolation, are meaningless. But they are part of the package of Passover for me, and that package is deeply meaningful, because of its central theme, which as far as I am concerned is the central theme of Judaism: Because I was a slave in Egypt.

I wasn’t, of course. No Jews ever were; the story is just that–a story, not history.

But when I was a kid, my parents used to tell me about their participation in the civil rights movement. Stories of my mother fighting apartheid in her native South Africa, my father hitchhiking thousands of miles from Arizona to join the March on Washington. They did this, they told me, because “never again” means “never again to anyone.” They taught me that, because of the Holocaust, because of pogroms, because of the Inquisition–because of all the times and places in which Jews were persecuted–Jews have a special responsibility to aid other persecuted peoples.
This is a pretty problematic attitude, of course. Everyone has a responsibility to help the victims of persecution, especially if you yourself are among the privileged. But still, there’s something worth pursuing there.

You see, I’ve never been persecuted for being Jewish. Oh, there was apparently some time in elementary school when I came home crying because some other kids accused me of killing Jesus, and there was a nasty kid a few years later who broke one of our windows, but these are isolated incidents. There was no pervasive pattern of intolerance; I’ve never felt less-than because of being Jewish, or missed out on a job opportunity, and I’ve certainly never been put in a labor camp or chased out of my home. Why, then, should I feel any sort of kinship with the victims of persecution?

Because I was a slave in Egypt…

You see, every year at Passover, we recite the story of Passover. There’s a bit in there where it says you are supposed to tell the story as if it happened to us–not our ancestors, fictional or otherwise, but to us. It doesn’t matter that the Egyptian bondage never happened to me–I am still to take the lessons of it to heart. I am still to open my doors to any in need.

“Never again” means never again to anyone.

I don’t recall my parents ever explicitly drawing the connection, but it’s clear to me. So the Exodus never happened? Well, the Holocaust didn’t happen to me, either. My family left Europe decades before the Holocaust began. As far as my own experience is concerned, both events are equally just stories.

But not meaningless. Because I was a slave in Egypt, I support gay marriage and immigration amnesty. Because “never again” means never again to anyone, I oppose the mistreatment of the Palestinian people by the Israeli government.

Of course there are excellent secular reasons to do those things. I like to think that, if I weren’t Jewish, I would still do those things for the secular reasons. But as it is, I do them for the Jewish reasons: Because I was (never) a slave in Egypt.

Fixing Angel Season 4

Content Note: Includes discussion of consent issues and the rape of fictional characters

So I've now watched Angel through the end of Season 4, and wow was it ever frustrating. There was so much potential, and a few episodes (especially near the end) were wonderful, but it just kept misfiring, and it all comes down to one basic problem: for a season ostensibly about free will and agency in the face of well-meaning attempts to erase that agency in the name of peace and harmony, the writers seemed to consistently flub issues of consent, which is rather central to having any agency.

The two main areas where they drop the ball on consent are the horrifically squicky, quasi-incestuous Connor/Cordelia "relationship" and the final resolution of Connor's story (at least, not having seen Season 5, I'm assuming this is the final resolution).

We'll start with the infinitely awful ConCord arc. Incestuous overtones aside, Cordelia (who, in the show's grossest recurring motif, is CONSTANTLY being threatened with or subjected to various magical rapes) is mind-controlled by Jasmine into sleeping with Connor. Jasmine is thus guilty of raping both of them: her magic is functioning as a date-rape drug on Cordelia and she's committing rape by fraud of Connor, since he believes he's sleeping with a free-willed Cordelia that wants to be with him. This is compounded when the mind-controlled Cordelia becomes pregnant and carries it to term, without ever being able to consent to the pregnancy--mystical complications of which ultimately leave her in a coma, in which state her blood is then used (again, without her consent) to fight against Jasmine.

This is fairly straightforward to fix: Drop the mind-control aspect (and, preferably, Cordelia's involvement) and just make it that Connor's child is a mystical pregnancy, which the mother chooses of her own will to keep, and then once Jasmine is born she starts working the mind-control mojo, rather than in squicky rape scenarios before.

The other major problem is the end of the season, where Angel wishes Connor into a happier life. Unfortunately, since this entails erasing all of Connor's memories (as well as the memories of everyone who knew him except Angel) and replacing them with new ones, it is effectively murdering Connor and replacing him with a completely different person who looks like him. This is a ridiculously easy fix: just have Angel consult with Connor before doing this!

Now, it's possible that these issues, especially the latter, are intentional sour notes to provoke further discussion about issues of agency and consent. Unfortunately, there's nothing to suggest that in the text--unless Angel gets called out for what he did to Connor (and, to a lesser extent, his friends) in the fifth season, we're left with it being presented as a happy ending for Connor, and any suggestion that the ConCord plotline is supposed to be a serious examination of consent issues and rape culture runs smack into the problem that this isn't the first time Cordelia has been raped and impregnated via mystical means.

I'll be embarrassed, shamed, disgraced, mortified, humiliated... (One Bad Apple)

But sure, let's all sing an upbeat song about being bullied.

There is no way I can write coherently about this episode.

Some things never heal.

It's February 5, 2014. Eleven-year-old Michael Morones is in the hospital after attempting suicide two weeks ago. Doctors believe he likely has brain damage, and may even be blind, but it will be months or years before the full extent of his injuries is known. He attempted to hang himself after prolonged bullying over his love for My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.

His parents are taking the attitude that his bullies should not be punished, because it is not in keeping with the principles of the show. They are using the donations the brony community and others have raised to pay for his medical care, but also to set up a fund to combat bullying.

A boy is in the hospital because he did not conform to society's standards of masculinity. The people who put him there will not be punished, and will most likely go on to do it again.

Welcome to the bully culture.

It's November 24, 2012. The top song is still Maroon 5 with "One More Night," and the top two movies are still Twilight and Bond, though at least the surprisingly good Rise of the Guardians debuts at number four. In the headlines, Israel continues firing into Gaza and vice versa, the voice of Elmo resigns in the face of allegations of sexual abuse, and Australian scientists determine that Sandy Island, which is shown on a number of marine charts and maps, including Google Earth, does not actually exist.

In ponies we have "One Bad Apple," a pastiche of the cartoons of the 1970s and 80s written by Cindy Morrow and directed by James Wootton.

Which is where the trouble starts, really; pastiche is a favored technique of postmodern writing, and so it is no surprise that Friendship Is Magic assays several over its run. The thing is, postmodern art is characterized by processes of decontextualization and recontextualization. The idea is to shed new light on the work or genre subject to pastiche, or to call attention to aspects of the new context that jar with the borrowed elements. "One Bad Apple" doesn't do that; the elements of 1970s and 80s cartoons are instead treated like the most boring Internet memes, decontextualized and repeated without any recontextualization, as if they have some intrinsic value independent of the change of context.

Which would work well if they did, but unfortunately, we are talking about the cartoons of the 1970s and 1980s here.

It's some time in the fall of 1989; I am eight years old. I am at a classmate's house along with four or five other boys, working on a project that has something to do with the local Native American tribes. To ensure that I do not contaminate the project by contributing to it, the other boys take turns holding me pinned to the floor. They have to take turns because they have to hold their breath to do it; breathing air that touched me would be bad. The most striking thing about this memory is how utterly normal it seemed at the time.

In School Bullying: New Perspectives on a Growing Problem, author and bullying expert David Dupper defines bullying as "the systematic abuse of power," and expands to describe it as "the unprovoked physical or psychological abuse of an individual by another individual or group over time to create an ongoing pattern of abuse against a victim who cannot easily defend him or herself." That is what happened to me, to Michael Morones, to the Cutie Mark Crusaders. It is not what happened, at least on screen, to Babs Seed.

There is very little good about American cartoons of the 1970s and 80s. Due to a number of pressures, mostly lack of funds, tight content restrictions, and an exodus of talent caused by the aforementioned lack of funds and tight content restrictions, most cartoons were cheaply produced, formulaic pap. Much of "One Bad Apple" references these cartoons, particularly the musical number, which both in musical style and in the frequent use of repetitive, simple backgrounds resembles the musical numbers of shows such as Josie and the Pussycats or Jem. The conversation at the end of the episode, in which a child has to explain a (subtly misused, already outdated) slang term to a clueless adult, is another standard gag of the era, with "bad means good" being the most common such slang term.

Even the bullying plot which dominates the episode is, ultimately, just another reference to the "very special episodes" that were a common feature of family and children's television in the 1980s and, less frequently, into the 1990s.

It's late 1991 or early 1992. I'm ten or eleven years old. They're more sophisticated than a couple of years ago; no one lays a finger on me. They don't even touch my desk if they can help it; if someone brushes against it by accident, they have to immediately go to the washbasin in the corner of the classroom and scrub. I try to tell my parents what's going on. "It's just teasing," my father tells me. "Ignore it and they'll stop."

I've been doing nothing about it, carefully showing no outward sign that it affects me, for years. They haven't stopped. Lesson learned: Telling an adult is useless. They don't know what to do either, and they'll tell you it's your fault.

On my father's advice, I try striking back in kind. I make what I think is a witty zinger against one of them. I will not say what it was, because it was based on the girl in question's name, and I have no interest in revealing anyone's identity. Everyone laughs--at me.

Lesson learned: Don't bother trying to fight back. They can't be stopped.

"Very special episodes" were a format (frequently preceded with advertising along the lines of "Tonight, on a very special [show name]") in which a character of a normally much lighter show confronted a Serious Issue of the Day, usually in the form of a new character who suffered from or caused the issue. Substance abuse was the most common topic, due largely to the willingness of the U.S. government to pay makers of popular shows to make episodes that polemicized against drugs, but everything from the Challenger explosion (on Punky Brewster) to abortion (a critically applauded, highly controversial episode of Maude that helped start the trend), racism (a particularly ridiculous episode of Family Ties stands out here), and the apocryphal lurking pedophile (Diff'rent Strokes). Bullying was another common topic, so it's no surprise finding it here.

Unfortunately, like most "very special episodes," the topic is horribly mishandled. The myth of the self-doubting, pitiable bully is repeated, all aggression is castigated as bullying, and the solution at the end is that the bully needs more and better friends, all in keeping with the teachings of the bully culture.

It's 1993. I'm twelve years old. The girls are worse by far than the boys. The boys merely tell me that I'm disgusting, weak, worthless. The girls don't need words to let me know it, and that makes it far harder not to believe it.

But now there are three or four of us in the same boat. We band together, bottom of the social hierarchy, and bond over a shared love of cartoons, science fiction, and utterly ridiculous, rule-free roleplaying campaigns that we play during lunch and occasionally gym.

The typical bully, according to Dupper, "tend[s] to be easily frustrated, have low levels of empathy, have difficulty following rules, view violence positively, defiant toward adults, break school rules, have poorer school adjustment, and [be] more likely to drink alcohol and smoke." Contrary to the usual narrative, bullies have average or higher self-esteem. Boys are more likely to be bullies and girls more likely to be bullied, but neither by very much; boys tend to use more direct tactics such as physical or verbal attacks, while girls (as also documented by Rachel Simmons in her Odd Girl Out) are more likely to use indirect tactics such as social exclusion, rumor-spreading, and manipulation of friendships and relationships.

At first the episode proceeds fairly realistically. Babs bullies as a way of asserting her social status, pushing down the lower kids in the hierarchy (the Cutie Mark Crusaders) in order to elevate herself and get in with the more dominant kids (Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon). Though her tactics are almost entirely direct, that makes sense for the show's main demographic; per Simmons, indirect bullying generally doesn't start until the preteen years, with even girls preferring direct tactics up to about the age of eight.

But as it progresses, it becomes clear that the episode is largely missing what it is truly like to be bullied. Babs Seed is clearly a marginalized kid with severe self-doubt, which just isn't most bullies; while the kids at the very top of their schools' hierarchies generally don't bully, the kids immediately beneath them are the most likely to bully. Unsurprisingly, bullying tends to coordinate with strong social skills and status; how else would they get away with it? Victim-bullies (that is, bullies who are themselves victims of bullying previously or in another context) do exist, and are often the most vicious bullies and the most likely to continue their aggressive behavior into adulthood, but are nonetheless rare.

Most damningly for the episode, Scootaloo and Apple Bloom reject Sweetie Belle's suggestions of telling an adult because they don't want to be "snitches," but that's not why bullied kids don't tell adults.

It's the fall of 1995. I am fourteen years old. We are supposed to run a mile in gym class. I know I won't be able to run it, so I walk instead, chatting with a friend I've recently made. The gym teacher comes up behind us. He calls me a fat sack of crap who will die of a heart attack before he's thirty, and tells me that I'll deserve it for being lazy.

After temperament, the strongest predictor of bullying is the behavior of adults in the environment. Kids bully because they see adults bully, or because they see that bullies get away with it. You can tell kids that they need to tell an adult when they're being bullied, but unless they perceive that the adults are willing and able to help, they're not going to bother. As Dupper puts it, "Even when teachers witness bullying behavior, they often fail to recognize it as bullying behavior, and they may even exacerbate the problem by blaming the victim. As a result, very few students who have been bullied report the incident to an authority figure."

It's the spring of 1996. I am fifteen years old. For months now, a particular senior has taken it upon himself to torment me. Because I'm short and have a belly and a Jewfro, he calls me "troll." My shoes don't fit, so I often walk with a limp, and for various reasons I don't like using my locker, so I carry all my books at all times in an enormous backpack. My clothes are cheap, shabby, and frequently unwashed. He likes to ask me if I'm homeless, to say I carry my house on my back. In combination with the troll thing, he frequently says that I live under a bridge.

He has a couple of friends--tough-looking boys, slightly shorter and smaller than he--and a spectacularly gorgeous girlfriend. All laugh whenever he teases me.

I don't know it, but he's my last bully. After he graduates at the end of the year, I will never be bullied again, though some of my friends still will.

It doesn't matter, though. It's too late.

Dupper points out that verbal and indirect bullying have the same long-term neurological effects as physical abuse. Simmons argues quite convincingly that the prevalence of indirect bullying among girls is because girls are encouraged to be non-aggressive, and as such most obvious outlets for aggression (whether destructive or healthy) are closed off. The result is that aggression--which is a natural and inevitable part of living in a community and having relationships with other people--must be channeled into what she terms "alternative aggressions," frequently vicious, deniable methods of acting out against the targets of aggression.

This is where the episode veers from being merely mistaken to being outright irresponsible and potentially dangerous to children. The Cutie Mark Crusaders have aggressive feelings toward Babs Seed; who wouldn't after a sustained campaign of many days of torment? They act on these feelings inappropriately, absolutely, by putting Babs Seed in a dangerous situation that could cause her serious harm.

But--and I cannot stress this enough--they are not bullying her.

It's the spring of 1999. I am seventeen years old. My achalasia--a rare neuromuscular condition in which the esophagus clamps shut, preventing swallowing--has worsened to the point that in any given meal I have better than even odds of throwing up undigested food which has never seen the inside of my stomach. Drinking water sometimes helps, but it will be several years before I hit on the strategy of carrying a large water bottle everywhere I go, and so instead I am dependent on the water fountain in the corner of the cafeteria. When I do throw up I have only seconds of warning, which means it is usually either in the water fountain or the trash can nearby, in full view of everyone. Nobody says anything to my face, but I can feel them watching. I stop eating lunch, and my weight begins to plummet. Occasionally I hear the whispered rumors--that I have an eating disorder, that I have some sort of stomach disease, that I have Ebola or AIDS.

Dupper argues that bullying in our schools is a reflection of bullying in the larger culture, from nation-states using their militaries to pound weaker countries into submission to action heroes that murder with impunity and then mock their victims to audience cheers. Adults often send mixed messages by encouraging bullying in some areas, particularly sports, while decrying it in others. Inaccurate or sympathetic portrayals of bullying in children's media likewise frequently subtly or outright blame victims while excusing the bullies themselves.

Dupper himself does not draw the analogy, but his depiction is very similar to rape culture, the phenomenon whereby Western culture simultaneously claims to hate rape while finding excuses to excuse rapists, blame victims, and spread false beliefs about who is likely to rape and how rape occurs. Obviously, rape is a much more serious crime than bullying, but they have much in common, being expressions of power at the expense of another, made easier by a cultural milieu that makes it easy to isolate victims and discourages them from reporting what has happened.

The Cutie Mark Crusaders have lashed out aggressively against Babs Seed, yes, but neither in a sustained campaign nor without provocation. They are not bullies, and it is entirely wrong to equate what they did with what Babs Seed did. Both are wrong, but the CMC acted out of fear and desperation; Babs acted out of a desire for status.

The end of the episode has the CMC and Babs Seed becoming friends, of course, because this is Friendship Is Magic. It is also, of course, not impossible for former bully and former victim to become friends. However, Applejack and the structure of the episode strongly imply that they should be friends, that it is somehow a failing if they do not become friends, and therein lies the problem, because it implies that aggressive feelings are inherently bad--precisely what Simmons identifies as the cause of the epidemic of indirect bullying in girls. Good parenting on Applejack's part--and responsible writing for children about bullying on the part of Morrow--would be for her to help the CMC find a way to express their feelings against Babs nonviolently, constructively, but still aggressively--for example, the way Rainbow Dash confronted Gilda in "Griffon the Brush-Off," a vastly superior treatment of the topic of bullying.

It's March of 2000, two days after my attempt. We Adult Non-Violents have lunch at the same time as the Twelve-to-Eighteen Non-Violent Girls. Even being in the same room makes it impossible for me to eat; I get special dispensation to eat lunch alone.

I'm better now. A lot better. It usually doesn't bother me. But I've been reading up on bullying lately, and today while I was in line to pay for my lunch, I heard a child laugh. For just a moment, I wanted to die. I felt sick the rest of the afternoon, and it took enormous effort to do basically anything.

It's 1989 and 1992 and 3 and 4 and 5 and 6 and 9 and 2000. It's 2012 and 2014.

Some things never heal.

There is no way I can write coherently about this episode.


If you would like to donate to the Michael Morones Recovery Fund, you can do so here.

Next week: Something better. It has to be.

Beyond the Inferno: Situational and Virtue Ethics in Fullmetal Alchemist

Warning: Extensive spoilers for Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood and the Fullmetal Alchemist manga.

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood spends a lot of time tackling some fairly complex ethical questions for a shounen series, not least of which is its examination of vengeance and situational ethics. Of course, situational ethics tends to get a bad rap, being characterized (much like ethical relativism, to which it is related but not equivalent) as a sophistic cover for amorality. But really, situational ethics is nothing more than the trivial observation that the context of an ethical decision can alter the outcome. On some level, this should be obvious; it is clear that curling one’s index finger caries different moal implications depending on whether the finger is pressed against the trigger of a gun or not. But FMA:B goes beyond the trivial in its examination, and as such, has earned some undeserved criticism for inconsistency on the question of whether revenge is justified.

A significant factor in this criticism is that we live in a culture where two major ethical systems dominate, the Manichaean and the utilitarian. In a Manichaean worldview, morality is determined by ingroup and outgroup status—anything which helps the ingroup or harms the outgroup is good, and anything which does the opposite is bad. The same action may thus be regarded as good when done to the outgroup, and bad when done to the ingroup, or vice versa. This is the moral view generally embraced by militaries (“support your comrades, kill the bad guys”), and can be found in quite a few places in our culture, such as most action movies and video games, the Harry Potter series, and the Republican party. Contract the ingroup until it consists of only the individual self, and you have capitalism, libertarianism, and objectivism.

At the other extreme, expand the ingroup to include all of humanity and you have the utilitarian view: anything which net benefits people is good, anything which net harms them is bad. It’s certainly a more progressive worldview than Manichaeanism, but still based entirely on the outcomes of actions. It does not matter why or how you benefit people, as long as you do. Which sounds reasonable on the face of it, until you realize that depending on whether you count misery as a small amount of happiness or a negative amount of happiness, utilitarianism either says that a world of 50 quadrillion miserable people is better than a world of 5 billion happy people, or it says that murdering severely depressed, unloved people is not only morally permissible but mandatory.

FMA:B, on the other hand, mostly follows an ethical system that is largely disfavored in our culture, virtue ethics. In virtue ethics, an action is good if it demonstrates that the person doing it has the qualities of a good person, and bad if it demonstrates they have the qualities of a bad person. This is where we come to the question of revenge, because FMA:B quite consistently argues that pursuing revenge turns you into a bad person.

Key to this are the characters of Scar and Mustang. Scar is the survivor of genocide; most of his people are dead, murdered by the Amestrian military and particularly its State Alchemists, their homeland of Ishbal is ruined and largely abandoned, and most of the survivors live in slums scattered throughout Amestris. Early in the series, Scar is introduced as an antagonist, murdering every State Alchemist (an organization which the main character joined long after the Ishbalan War) he can find. From the start, Scar is depicted as inhuman: nigh-superhumanly fast and skilled in hand-to-hand combat, cold, implacable, without even a name—he is known only by the prominent facial scarring he received during the attack that killed his family. As the series progresses, however, Scar slowly turns away from vengeance, ultimately adopting the twofold goal of making Amestris admit what it did to his people, and reform in order to ensure it never happens again. This is accomplished through a process of humanization, as Scar acquires companions—a cowardly, disgraced Amestrian soldier, a foreign child on a journey of her own, and ultimately Marcoh, a medical doctor driven by guilt over the experiments he performed on Ishbalan prisoners of war—and is thus given opportunities to demonstrate emotion and character depth. Key in his development are his two confrontations with the character Winry, whose parents—Amestrian doctors who tried to help the Ishbalans during the war—were Scar’s first victims.

In the first encounter, Winry learns that Scar is responsible for her parents’ deaths and points a gun at him, but is unable to pull the trigger. Details of the scene cause Scar to flash back (post-traumatic stress disorder is another recurring theme of the series) to the death of his family, in a way that places Scar in the position of the State Alchemist who killed his family, main character Ed Elric in the position of Scar’s brother who died saving Scar, and Winry in the position of Scar. Scar flees in confusion, and soon after spares Marcoh’s life in exchange for learning more about the Ishbalan War, showing that already he is acquiring motivations other than mere revenge.

In the second encounter, Scar is immobilized and wounded, and several characters are debating whether to kill him, given that he has information they need. Winry steps in and begins treating Scar’s wounds, stating that although she does not forgive him, it’s what her parents would have done. At this point Scar’s transformation begins in earnest, and the series begins moving him from antagonist to, arguably, tritagonist or even deuteragonist.

Contrasted heavily to Scar is Mustang, an Amestrian State Alchemist regarded as a war hero for his participation in the genocide of the Ishbalans. From the start, Mustang is depicted as somewhat morally ambiguous, but mostly good. He seeks to become the head of the Amestrian military dictatorship, but not solely out of ambition; rather, he sees it as the only way to institute reforms. His explicitly stated plan is to become dictator, transform the country into one where genocide and dictatorship are not tolerated, and then turn himself in to a war crimes tribunal for his actions in Ishbal. Early in the series, Mustang’s best friend, Hughes, is murdered, and Mustang spends much of the series pursuing the mystery of who killed him and why, although like most of the cast he spends much of the second and third phases of the series too busy dealing with larger events to spend much time on personal goals.

Relatively shortly after Hughes' death, Mustang encounters Lust, who contributed to Hughes’ death but is not the one who personally killed him. Lust is an extremely dangerous fighter, among the series’ more lethal antagonists, and manages to permanently disable one of Mustang’s closest followers, seriously injure Mustang, and nearly kill Mustang’s right-hand woman Riza (who is also strongly implied to be his love interest) and their ally Al Elric, Ed’s brother. Mustang responds with a furious show of force, brutally and efficiently killing Lust in an agonizing fashion. The scene is deeply uncomfortable, but played as a triumphant victory nonetheless, and indeed it is the first real victory anyone has had against the main antagonists of the series.

Much later, in the final run of episodes leading up to the series finale, Mustang finally meets Hughes killer, Envy, who not only confesses but brags and taunts Mustang about the killing. Mustang proceeds to violently, painfully, and methodically demolish Envy in a lengthy fight sequence that spans two episodes. Unlike his attacks on Lust, which looked and sounded extremely painful but were nonetheless clearly Mustang trying to kill her as quickly as possible using whatever resources he had on hand (Lust finally dies mere centimeters from striking a killing blow on Mustang), his fight with Envy is clearly torture. He gives Envy time to recover between attacks, allows him opportunities to attempt counterattacks (all of which Mustang immediately defeats), and deliberately uses attacks designed to be painful and disorienting rather than lethal (such as burning out Envy’s tongue and eyes). The sequence is extremely difficult to watch, and clearly the series very much intends it as such, because immediately after Envy’s defeat Riza, Scar, and Ed confront Mustang, persuade him that this pursuit of revenge and hatred is inappropriate for the man who will become the country’s leader, and force him to back off from striking the killing blow.

Finally, in the last episodes of the series, nearly the entire cast gathers to fight Father, the immortal power behind the throne of Amestris. Al sacrifices himself to save Ed, and Ed attacks Father in a berserker rage, seriously injuring him. There is then a brief fight between Father and another character, Greed, after which Ed strikes a final blow on Father, causing his body to be destroyed and his soul to return to the primordial chaos from which it originated. This entire sequence is again portrayed as a heroic act, with the assembled characters chanting Ed’s name as he fights Father.

Here, then, is the apparent inconsistency: Why is it wrong for Scar to kill State Alchemists, Winry to kill Scar, and Mustang to kill Envy, yet right for Mustang to kill Lust and Ed to kill Father? And the answer, of course, is context.

The latter two incidents have in common that the antagonist being killed is an immediate and deadly threat, is highly capable of defending themselves, and has only just caused serious harm to someone close to the protagonist doing the killing. The protagonist, in other words, is both acting in the heat of the moment and “punching up”—attacking someone more powerful than they. In addition, in both cases the protagonist has been well-established as a fighter, though Ed has been consistently portrayed as refusing to kill up until his fight with Father. Finally, they do not draw out the attacks more than is necessary; they are clearly acting to defeat the opponent, not cause them to suffer for its own sake.

All of the other incidents differ in at least one respect. Winry is consistently depicted as a non-combatant, as her confrontation with Scar makes clear: Ed tells her “these hands were made for healing, not killing” when he talks her down. Scar’s attacks on State Alchemists are based on old pain, and represent a premeditated plan; in addition, he targets all State Alchemists indiscriminately, not just those who participated in the Ishbalan genocide.

Finally, there is Mustang’s revenge on Envy, which of all of these scenes gets the most attention from the narrative, taking up the last seven minutes of episode 53 and the first ten or so of episode 54. That it gets this much time is especially notable given that, at this point in the series, there are no fewer than fifteen separate groups of characters being actively followed by the narrative, allowing an average of 1.47 minutes per group per episode—to give a single confrontation more than ten times that much screen time clearly marks it as both a major plot event and a key moment of character and thematic development.

All of which it is. The audience has minimal empathy with Envy in this scene, as he has been thoroughly vile throughout the series, killing beloved characters, taunting and tormenting others, and gleefully recounting his participation in multiple horrific acts, including deliberately setting off the conflict that culminated in the genocide of Ishbal. If anyone in the series deserves to die, it’s him—and yet the visuals repeatedly depict Mustang as a figure of terror, his face contorted in rage (including shadows noticeably similar to Scar’s scar) as he clinically describes precisely how little of a threat Envy is and how he plans to cause Envy maximum pain. After Envy attempts to flee, Mustang becomes much like a horror movie monster, unstoppable, implacable, and inescapable as he pursues Envy and just keeps hurting him, over and over and over again.

Mustang is consumed utterly by hatred, and the contrast between this and him fighting Lust (or Ed fighting Father) could not be clearer. In those scenes, the protagonist was immediately, furiously angry, but still recognizable themselves. They were not given over entirely to their anger, and thus still appeared human. Here, Mustang is monstrous, much like Scar in his early appearances, existing solely to make the enemy hurt without regard to any other concerns.

In both the fight with Lust and the fight with Envy, the effect of Mustang’s actions is identical: a lethal and dangerous enemy who has committed terrible crimes (and intends to commit more) dies painfully. However, the circumstances of that killing (the situation part of situational ethics) make it clear that against Lust Mustang is acting out of desire to protect his friends, loved ones, and allies, and anger at the immediate harm Lust has caused. In the latter, Mustang is acting out of desire to see his hated enemy suffer as much as possible. In other words, against Lust Mustang is being righteous, protective, loyal, and just; against Envy he is being sadistic. The former are virtues, the latter a vice, and thus under the series’ virtue ethos the former is right and the latter wrong.

This is primarily Scar’s argument in the scene where the other characters talk Mustang down, but it is not the only argument used against him. Ed and Riza instead use a slightly more complex variant of virtue ethics, in which the virtues themselves are situational—specifically, individual personality and social roles both influence what virtues apply for a particular person. This goes back to Winry’s “hands of a healer”; Ed’s argument in that scene is that it is wrong for Winry to kill because she is inclined to the virtues of compassion and empathy, and because her role in society is as a healer and maker of prostheses. The implication is that it would be wrong for Winry to kill, even in a situation like Mustang’s fight with Lust, because it would go against her core virtues and contradict her social role. Mustang, on the other hand, is neither particularly compassionate or empathetic, and as a soldier, his social role requires killing. However, as Ed points out, he seeks to become the ruler of Amestris in order to reform it. Is the kind of person who sadistically tortures hated enemies the kind of person who can transform a military dictatorship into a just and peaceful democracy?

The series is quite clear that the answer is no, and so Riza (whom Mustang ordered years ago to kill him if he ever became corrupted by power and ambition or strayed from the path of reforming Amestris) pulls her gun on Mustang and tells him that if he kills Envy, she will kill him, finish out the current mission, and kill herself. It is this ultimatum which finally breaks Mustang out of his berserker rage and forces him to back down from torturing Envy (who, for complex reasons outside the scope of this essay, commits suicide shortly thereafter).

Situational ethics, as I said, often gets a bad rap. Like moral relativism, it is frequently characterized as being a cover for underlying amorality. In truth, any sufficiently complex ethical schema can be gamed to justify basically anything, and so the extreme case of a complex ethos such as situational ethics or relativism does shade into amorality. On the other hand, simpler ethical schema lack flexibility and nuance, and so the extreme case of a simple ethos such as utilitarianism or deontology shades into extremism. FMA:B is not particularly inconsistent in its ethics, as critics allege; rather, it consistently portrays a complex virtue ethos in which the morality of an action is as much or more a function of the motivations, goals, social role, and emotional state of the person performing the action as it is a function of who the action targets or what outcomes it results in.