Tribalism

Unlinking

The subtitle to Republican Is Not a Synonym for Racist says that "Conservatives must reckon with their policies’ discriminatory effects. That would be more likely if liberals stopped carelessly crying bigot."

Yeah. Good luck with that. The two broad political persuasions that are considered to make up most the American political spectrum don't come with governing bodies that can enforce a mandate against calling the other side out as perverse. Or, for that matter, seeing being called out as perverse as a cover for the other side's perversity. This is simply part and parcel of an understanding that right and wrong are objective facts about the world, independent of time or place.

I think that the author, Peter Beinart makes a slight misstatement when he notes: "Progressivism is progressive. It seeks ever-greater moral advance." Perhaps I'm misreading it, but this implies to me the Progressivism has no theoretical end state: the advance of morality is never-ending. But I think that what many modern self-described Progressives are after is moving the world closer and closer to what they understand is the correct understanding of proper thought and behavior. What keeps Progressivism moving "forward" at time marches on is the movement in that understanding. As one problem is solved, another moves in to take its place. When I was younger (not that I considered myself a Progressive), the idea of "microaggressions" would have struck us as not worth bothering with - mainly because we had bigger fish to fry at the time. But now that those fish have been safely cooked, younger people have determined that there are new issues to be dealt with. Such is simply the way of things.

And once one arrives at an understanding of what one considers objective reality, it's easy to come to the expectation that everyone recognizes it - or should recognize it. The liberally-applied (pun intended) term of "bigot" is nothing more than a charge that conservatives have already reckoned with the discriminatory effects of their policy choices - and decided that, if those effects aren't the whole point, that they're fine with them. Because one can't possibly look at the world and not realize what's happening.

Despite the stereotype that concepts such as cultural relativity are mainly embraced by the Left in America, the fact is that both sides accept or reject the concept based on how much they feel that their own position is one that every thinking person should hold. Getting people to walk away from that idea is going to be a difficult lift, given how deeply it's ingrained in the way people see the world and their place in it.

Shakedown

Some time back, I was reading an article on the Greek Debt Crisis (it's remarkable that this seems like ancient history already) and one of the people they spoke to made an interesting pair of observations that work basically like this: There are always opportunities in a crisis, and those opportunities always come at a cost to someone. They were remarkable points, and they stayed with me ever since, mainly because they helped me articulate something that I'd sort of understood, but hadn't found a concise way to say: A lot of prosperity actually isn't. It just seems that way because someone else is paying the costs. This isn't to say that all prosperity is due more to cost-shifting than actual economic bounty, but since money is just as green if it turns out that someone else actually did the work to earn it, from the point of view of many observers, the two can be difficult to separate.

The point came up again when I was reading this article in The Atlantic about Justice Clarence Thomas' misgivings about the current practice of civil forfeiture. (For the uninitiated, civil forfeiture is the practice of seizing assets and then, initiating a legal action against those assets, rather than the owner. What sets civil forfeiture apart from criminal forfeiture, apart from the asset{s} being the defendant, is that no criminal charge is necessary. As a DEA agent put it: “We don’t have to prove that the person is guilty. It’s that the money is presumed to be guilty.”) The federal government and the states alike have civil forfeiture laws, and they can be moneymakers - the Justice department's forfeiture programs "brought in about $28 billion over the last decade."

But, as I noted, other jurisdictions are in on the act. And for some of them, it's an important source of revenue. Justice Thomas cited an article in The New Yorker on the practice, and it carried this passage:

“We all know the way things are right now—budgets are tight,” Steve Westbrook, the executive director of the Sheriffs’ Association of Texas, says. “It’s definitely a valuable asset to law enforcement, for purchasing equipment and getting things you normally wouldn’t be able to get to fight crime.” Many officers contend that their departments would collapse if the practice were too heavily regulated, and that a valuable public-safety measure would be lost.

In other words, if we're not allowed to continue a practice that is easily abused into becoming virtual police shakedowns, we won't have the money we need to protect and serve. Or, we're too broke to care about right and wrong.

The New Yorker piece focuses on what seemed to be remarkably open abuse of the program in Tenaha, Texas. But what took me back to the story about the Greek debt crisis and the observations therein was how many of the people were from out-of-state. The police there weren't using the process of civil asset forfeiture to clean up their city. They were using the fact that they were situated on a major highway to fleece motorists passing through.

It's been said that representative governments more or less have to do what their constituents ask of them. While some politicians appear to have ironclad holds on their seats, even that depends on people approving of the job that's being done. Being gerrymandered into a safely partisan seat doesn't save you from a primary challenge. And it seems that a lot of the time, the public asks their government to deliver valuable services to them, but not to raise their taxes. Borrowing money from the global investor community (whether persons or nation-states) is a workable solution for the federal government, but states and localities don't always have that option, and so they have to be... creative.

And for the people they serve that creativity often goes unnoticed, but even if they do see it, their options are either pony up more of the costs themselves or do without - and if they were willing to have done that in the first place, it's unlikely that the shakedowns would have started in the first place.

Picking Sides

It’s not even clear whether he truly harbors animosity toward the people he tagets or if he really knows much about them, but it’s undeniable that Trump knows exactly what these attacks do for him.
Vann R. Newkirk II, "Donald Trump’s Eternal Feud With Blackness"

Ah, a cynic after my own heart. But I think that Mr. Newkirk is on to something. President Trump heads to Twitter to open fire on people because being seen doing so shore him up with his base of voters. And while that base of voters is fairly large - they tend to keep his approval ratings from dropping below 35%, they're still a minority of the overall electorate. And the President likely understands the utility of keeping them fired up until the mid-term elections.

The article as a whole focuses on the fact that many of President Trump's targets are Black. This fairly visible fact had lead many to label him a racist, but I think that we can borrow Mr. Newkirk's sentence again and point out that it’s not even clear whether he truly harbors animosity toward Black people or if he really knows much about them, but it’s undeniable that Trump knows exactly what these attacks do for him. And I think that the President realized this, and decided to hop on the "Birther" train, because he understood that it would play well with a group of people he needed to support him, and seemed open to doing so.

While the amount that President Obama did for the Black community specifically is debatable, it's fairly clear that there was a large segment of Conservatives/Republicans who believed that he was deliberately screwing them over to give handouts to the undeserving, Black, urban poor. He was, in effect, openly buying their votes, with goods wrested from the desperate hands of hardworking White Americans who'd never done anything wrong in their lives, but were now being made to pay for past injustices that not only were they not complicit in, but that they surely would have vigorously opposed, had they been around for them. And I understand that I sound like I'm exaggerating their understanding of their innocence to sneer at them, but it's worth keeping in mind that when I graduated high school, less than twenty years had passed since the Loving v. Virginia verdict had been decided. Yet many of my White classmates swore up and down that racism was dead and buried, as if the courts had managed to repeal it in the same stroke that had done in miscegenation laws.

This is in part due to the monstrous caricature of a human that we often make racists out to be. When your understanding of the bad guy is someone who would as soon murder someone of a different color as look at them, it's difficult to see even rather unusually open day-to-day prejudices as qualifying. But it's also in large part due to a national self-image that equates haven obtained something you didn't earn with dependency and morally culpable weakness. It's difficult to push someone into realizing that they benefited from the sins of their grandfathers, when their self-image relies on them believing that they started with nothing and built everything they hard with their own hard work and grit.

And that's the conflict between large groups of White and Black Americans that President Trump has openly taken a side in. And it's unsurprising. After all, it works, and one could have predicted that it would work to one degree or another. Mainly because President Trump mainly appears to avoid the sort of open, snarling, racism that would prompt his backers to feel is if they were supporting a monster. Instead, he simply agrees with their assessment that their woes are caused by the machinations of nasty people who sought to put themselves in positions of power by bribing people who lacked the moral backbone to refuse ill-gotten gains, or to be appreciative of what they have.

Every so often, I run into someone who tells me that even if every nasty thing that "they" say that White people do to Black people is fact, I should be grateful to be an American because I'd be worse off everywhere else, and they can become incensed when I decline to treat them as if they're doing me a favor by allowing me to stay. President Trump speaks their language, and he does so easily, if not always eloquently. And even though I may roll my eyes at their irritation with my ingratitude, I understand (at least in part, I think) where they are coming from. They don't want to see themselves as bad people any more than anyone else does. And they find themselves in a world where there is no shortage of people willing to line up and call them out for thieves and cheaters.

A lot of this, I suspect stems from the simple fact that many people see the world as a zero-sum game, and when they're losing, someone else has to be winning and vice versa. And President Trump, much moreso than more establishment Republicans, told them that they'd earned the right to be winning. And in that, he doesn't need to have an active animosity towards anyone else. An intense enough focus on the self crowds out consideration for others, and left to go long enough, it creates a world in which when others are losing, then you must be winning. The two simply become indistinguishable.

Handed Over

The current sexual abuse/harassment scandal that is floating around the American entertainment, political and business establishments kind of reminds me of discussions that I used to have with people about race when I was younger. Both of them seem to be driven by an understanding of Power that allows Power to be unmoored from human choices.

I don't know when it first occurred to me, but one day I had the realization that the the Black community in the United States had abdicated a lot of control over its own destiny to other people - people who had their own lives and priorities to worry about. "We" (not that it was a unanimous decision) had done this because we had learned to be afraid of the power that the White community wielded. I feel that I sound like a broken record in this, but we learned to fear what White people thought of us, and never sought to have them be concerned with what we thought of them. Sometimes, the relationship between the genders seems the same way. Women fear the power that men wield, and this manifests itself in women fearing what men think of them, but men don't generally have that same concern.

You can see this, I think, in understandings that: "White people need to have conversations with White people about racism," or "Men need to have conversations with men about sexism and sexual harassment." But I've always been dubious about the idea that the best way for a group to advance itself is for other people to talk about them. Racism and sexism have always struck me as being, to some degree about incentives. And so racism will go away when it starts to cost more than it's worth, and the same with sexism. For me, as a Black person, we, as the Black community in the United States have to make racism cost more than its worth, because we're the ones who want that and will be major beneficiaries of it. We're the ones who are going to have to create the conditions that mean that not being a racist is more valuable than being a racist. The issue that I've always had with the idea that "White people need to have conversations with White people about racism," is that it presupposes that Black people don't have anything of value to bring to the conversation. It's that perceived lack of value, I think, that sustains racism.

I am of the opinion that our overall concern with the Power that White people wield, and our unwillingness and/or inability to see our own role in giving them that Power puts us into the role of supplicants. And supplicants, like suckers, never get an even break.

Sexism, I think, operates on a similar dynamic. And while gender issues may be having a moment in the light at the time, I'm unsure that it will last. And if it doesn't, we may see the same pattern play itself out again. Which would be a shame.

Aligned

There is this picture of a wolfpack that's been making the rounds on the Internet. It's been floating around for the past couple of years, from what I understand, but I just encountered it earlier today. Somewhere along the line it acquired a description that makes it out to be a marvel of teamwork and leadership in the animal world, and, of course therefore a model that we humans should be emulating.

I found the picture, with its new description, on LinkedIn. Which doesn't surprise me. LinkedIn has something of a low-grade obsession with leadership. If someone can create a flashy graphic or pithy meme that claims to explain the secrets of leadership, it's a safe bet that someone will post it on LinkedIn. So of course, the wolfpack photo, with its description that was all about wonderful leadership, made it there.

As you may have already guessed, if you didn't already know, the new caption that the photograph had acquired was completely bogus. Someone had attached it to the the photograph along the way, and it bore no resemblance to the original caption that the photograph had been published with. I found this out fairly quickly - a former co-worker of mine had come along and posted the Snopes link to the debunking. But it had been posted, and reshared, by a couple of people before that. I tend to be dubious of the leadership tropes that finds their way onto LinkedIn. A lot of it looks suspiciously like virtue-signalling. And to be honest, this wolf photo caption did to. More than likely, if my old co-worker hadn't posted the Snopes link, I'd have simply gone right past it without a second thought. But if it had been something that I found more interesting, or more compelling, would I have been taken in? I like to think that when information that just happens to align with my prejudices and preconceptions finds me on the internet, that I tend to fact check it. After all, everyone's inclined to fact check the things they suspect (or want) to be false - it's the things that one wants to be true that get you. But I don't have time to fact-check everything, and a lot of things slide.

And so I wonder if that's the secret to how things spread on the internet - being seeing plausible, and not too good to be true. The internet is a deep well of information, and that very depth is what makes it unreliable - there's so much information that it's difficult to check the provenance of it all.

To Do Right

Millions of Americans have, in recent weeks, discovered that their favorite movies and shows were made by men now accused of sexual assault or harassment. This presents a dilemma for those who would prefer to watch art by people who haven’t built their careers on the sexual exploitation of those around them. But how can moviegoers avoid supporting such institutions and individuals?
Is There Any Way to Be an Ethical Moviegoer in the Post-Weinstein Era?

That's easy. Make your own movies and television shows.

Because in the long run, if your ethics demand that your never support anyone who's done something that you find reprehensible, you're going to start having to do a lot of things yourself. Consider it a corollary to "If you want something done right..." If you want something done by someone who has never done anything you have ethical qualms with, well, sometimes, maybe even doing yourself won't cut it, but it's likely to be as close as you'll ever get. Because, for the most part, other people's lives are invisible to us. The surveillance apparatus that would be needed to ensure that the people who make the goods and services we use would be pretty much unacceptable to anyone who would have to live under it, and to a lot of people who wouldn't.

And pretty soon, the compromises would have to begin. Kevin Spacey has effectively had his career ended by a single drunken incident of propositioning an underage young man way back in the day. Not a trivial offense to be sure, but also, unlikely to be the worst thing that the people who run the businesses that supply us have done. There are likely much worse crimes hiding in the broad expanse of the corporate world. Given the rate at which new accusations of sexual misconduct come out, it's likely a very safe bet that some of the money that each of us is spending on a day-to-day basis is going into the pockets of someone who, were their life a completely open book, would have faced felony charges for something at some point along the way. There comes a point where "innocent until accused" may be a practical stance to take, but hardly an accurate one.

I think that part of the problem that society faces in looking for ranks of people with clean hands to run the world is that bad behavior isn't the exception. It's the rule. And it's the rule in part because there isn't a single objective standard of bad behavior. A decade or so ago, here in the Seattle area, a young entrepreneur managed to stir up a teapot tempest with a wonky scheme that came to be known as "bumvertising(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumvertising)." At it's core, it was simply a means of getting a message out by paying panhandlers a small amount to display a corporate message alongside their own. But for advocates for the poor and homeless, it was travesty. Bad enough that one wouldn't want to support any business that engaged in it? For some people yes, for others, not so much. And it's that subjectivity that means that businesses are going to have to be selective about who they appease and who they decide to ignore.

But bad behavior, I've come to think, is also the rule because behaving well often means doing without. Up and down the scale. One thing that I've noticed coming to the fore over the years is a greater focus on the idea that more of us than are willing to admit to it are living in poverty. And that mindset of deprivation is catching on. And I'd be willing to bet that some combination of "I want this," "I need this" and "I deserve this" is at the core of the vast majority of ethical compromises, small and large, that people make, whether or not the rest of us really understand what drives a given person to want, need or feel they deserve whatever it turns out to be. And this isn't to say that all transgressions are the same - it's to point out that our broader society, despite the fact that it often preaches doing without rather than doing wrong, does a really poor job of actually instilling that value in people.

And so, in the end, it's highly unlikely that the people who have risen to the top of the food chain are going to be the ethical paragons that people might want them to be. Few people anywhere else in the food chain would manage it, either.

You Know You're Wrong

He could have confirmed that he harassed women, that he is sorry, and that he did it even though he knew at the time that it was wrong.
Wasted Reckonings

The article is subtitled, "What do we really want out of public apologies from alleged sexual harassers?" But I suspect that it could be applied to any form of apology for anything. Because I think that Ms. Waldman puts her finger on the one thing that people often want from those who they feel have transgressed against them - an admission of willful wrongdoing that reinforces the idea that whatever expectation was violated was, in fact, the way things were supposed to be. And in this, it becomes a reinforcement of the idea that good and bad, right and wrong, are objective and fixed qualities that everyone knows - and that everyone knows to obey.

I think that it may be especially important in situations like (but not perhaps limited to) sexual harassment and assault, where the survivors often spend a good deal of time wondering if they had done something wrong, but I suspect that this reaffirmation of a singular truth (and that we understand what it is) would be welcomed in any number of other circumstances.

From my own point of view, it's a difficult thing to obtain because people don't do things that they understand are wrong when they are doing them. They may understand that their behavior isn't acceptable or appreciated, but I don't think that the understand it to be ethically out-of-bounds. As much as I can't fathom what would possess someone like Louis C.K. to masturbate in front of a woman who would rather that he didn't, I do suspect that, at the time, he had some sort of sincerely-held justification for that action.

Ms. Waldman notes that, "Apologies are supposedly about acknowledging our mistakes, but in practice they can permit us to disown them." But is doing something that one understands to be wrong when you are doing it really a mistake? Perhaps in the broader theological sense, it can be ascribed to "error," but in everyday parlance a mistake is something that's done out of ignorance, carelessness, misperception et cetera. An act of deliberate wrongdoing is not a "mistake" in that sense.

And perhaps that's the fundamental problem; the difficulty of speaking to an action, or a group of actions, in two different ways that are at odds with one another at the same time. Acknowledging a mistake is a different beast than acknowledging a deliberate misdeed. And I think that society treats them differently. There is a tendency to ascribe mistakes to to a given figure when a person wants to forgive them. But when someone wanted to close the door to forgiveness for a figure, they tend to ascribe deliberate, and malicious, wrongdoing. You see this all the time in politics, where partisan divides tend to make the differences is reactions stark, but it's present in any number of other facets of society.

Regardless of how reasonable one might find such an admission, the expectation that someone will openly call themselves out as a bad person strikes me as a bit much to expect. But that's never stopped anyone before, and so I doubt it will now.

Too Young To Know

#MeAt14 Reminds Internet 14-Year-Olds Are Innocent, Immature, Unable To Consent. Sounds legit. But it's interesting in that when you read through the NPR article, you're presented with pictures of young white women; photos that are clearly selected to show them as childish. Well, it's interesting to me, anyway. Because it's a reminder of the children that I used to work with, in a past life. For them, being "innocent and immature" wasn't a fact of biology, it was a luxury that they didn't have. They needed to have a clear-eyed and practical understanding of how the adult world worked, because they couldn't rely on their parents to shield them well enough that they could manage to be unfamiliar with it.

And it left many of them in a difficult position, because they were legally unable to consent to anything. And this has nothing to do with sex. many of the children in the residential treatment center I worked in chafed under the rules there, but they had no legal right to chose anything else for themselves; the state had made the choice for them, and that's all she wrote. And this isn't to say that they should necessarily have been allowed free rein to determine what their living situations were going to be. It wasn't difficult to see how the choices that many of the kids would have made (or even had access to) would have ended badly. But that didn't erase from many of them the understanding that they'd been able to manage more or less for themselves for some time before state social workers had shown up and decreed that they were going to live in a big brick building miles away from their friends, communities and whatever family they still had.

And so, even though the youth in our center generally ranged from 5 to 14, to survive in the world, one had to understand that for many of them, innocence and immaturity were not their native state, but one that we were attempting to restore them to, despite the fact that those particular children were much more streetwise than most of us staffers and some even had better housekeeping skills. (In all honesty, some of the children I worked with were better cooks then than I am now, some two decades later.) This isn't to say that I would have condoned them being in relationships with adults twice their age or other. We didn't condone them being sexual at all. But many of them had needed to learn to navigate sexuality before they'd come to treatment, and they'd developed differing levels of skill at it. And again, our goal was, as much as we could, dehabituate them from using those skills.

In modern parlance, the fact that some teenagers can afford to be complete naïfs in a world where that carries such serious consequences for others is considered a privilege. When I was growing up, it simply made one lucky to one degree or another. I hadn't realized how fortunate I had been in my own childhood until I was faced with stories of how other childhoods had gone horribly and irreparably wrong. I don't know that those stories have a place in the narrative being woven by "#MeAt14." I suspect they don't, if for no other reason that they'd be seized upon by people looking to justify relationships we commonly consider to be some combination of criminal and perverse.

But I do think that it's important, at some point, to make sure that we remember that the extension of childhood through adolescence is not ordained. We worked to make it that way, and there are people who were missed in that work.

Or the Wrong Side

Postscript: GOP officer who'd vote [Alabama Republican Senate Candidate Roy] Moore even if he was a proven sex offender refused in 2015 to accept the legalization of gay marriage, saying "it's wrong."

"Other than being with an underage person - he didn't really force himself," Alabama Geneva County GOP chairman Riley Seibenhener tells me. "I know that's bad enough, but I don't know. If he withdraws, it's five weeks to the election...that would concede it to the Democrat."
'I Have Never Engaged In Sexual Misconduct,' Moore Says In Statement

To paraphrase from a comic book I once read, anyone can stand by a fellow party member when they're in the right; true partisanship is when you stand by someone when they're wrong. Although to be sure, a lot of people take exception to equating "legal/illegal" with "right/wrong." But while I understand that people (or at least NPR's target demographic) are intended to find the quotes that Toronto Star reporter Daniel Dale Tweeted "shocking," the only thing that I find mildly surprising is that people openly admit to such nakedly partisan motivations in the face of a public piety that says one should always do otherwise.

And I'm starting to think that the "rally 'round the flag" response to the accusations against Roy Moore are showing that this particular piety is starting to fade. I'm also thinking that this is a good thing. Public peities that encourage us to lie about what we're thinking, or who we are, aren't very helpful in the long run; they simply legitimize deceit in the name of avoiding being punished for, well, saying out loud that the Emperor isn't wearing any clothes. And of course, the thing about sticking to the fiction that the Emperor is well-dressed is looking intelligent in front of other people, even though one's allowed themselves to buy into the fact that it's only the foolish who see the Emperor's nakedness. But if we're going to buy into the fact that, come a general election, the only thing that matters about a candidate is the letter after their name, let's own that. It's not like, as a society, we're fooling anyone. Gerrymandering specifically requires people's voting patterns to be predictable well into the future, when state legislators don't know who will run, only that a broad majority of voters will make their selection based, in the end, on partisan affiliation. And while it's true that partisan affiliation can tell you a lot about a person, one would think that there's still some room for genuine evaluation of positions in there. (Even though, clearly, there isn't.) So if the choice comes down to a proven sex offender who holds the right political positions and a person with a clean record who doesn't, why bother to even raise an eyebrow at the "wrong" choice?

Maybe if, as a society, the United States can more easily own up to forming opinions of right/wrong or good/bad based mostly on whether a candidate mirrors back the proper politics, it will be possible to dispense with the need to link mass shooters to politicians we don't like, or declare large swaths of people heroes based on their affiliations.

On The Side

But [Attorney General] Sessions also voiced a concern expressed by many business leaders and politicians over the years: "You just simply can't have a situation in which your competitors pay bribes and you don't."
Trump Used To Disparage An Anti-Bribery Law; Will He Enforce It Now?

On the one hand, I get it. Following a rule that one's competitors don't follow is a voluntary disadvantage. No one likes to compete at a disadvantage when they feel that the stakes are high, and no one likes to feel that they're placing themselves at a disadvantage and not gaining anything for it. But on the other hand, there are no principles of good governance that countenance bribery and other forms of official corruption as a desirable thing.

And so this perhaps feeds into a common critique of the United States; that its businesses are concerned with profitability, and its citizens are concerned with cheap consumer goods, to the exclusion of other considerations. While the United States is thought of as a rich nation, there is the lingering understanding that it got there by screwing over other people. And being more concerned with a little more material wealth than taking a stand against corruption doesn't help that.

There is a feeling in the United States of poverty, and President Trump rode a wave of that feeling into the White House. And in much the same way that a stereotypical Trump supporter is seen to view the prosperity of others as an unwarranted threat to themselves, the Trump Administration seems to view the health of foreign governments as something that unjustly impoverishes the United States. But then again, who ever said that the perception of poverty and ethics were natural bedfellows?

Fallen Star

I don't know if I'm any good at it, but I'm starting to enjoy found object photography.

Bad Geeks

One of the things that pops up in my Google+ stream now and again are complaints about "Geek Guys" (or, to be more precise, the jerks among them) and their treatment of women ("Geek Girls" in particular). My first response to something like this tends to be my standard one - no group large enough to have entered the social consciousness is small enough to not have any assholes in it, and geek culture now having made inroads into the mainstream, there are more than enough geeks out there for them to have a presence.

But with a little more thought, I've come to the conclusion that there's also a greater expectation of empathy and understanding from stereotypical geeks, and that it may not be warranted. Back in the days before personal computers were ubiquitous and programmers could be treated like "rock stars," being a geek (or a nerd) could be kind of sucky. It was, for a very long time, a ticket to being pushed around by the stereotypical "jocks," ignored by just about everyone else and being told to put down the books and pick up some weights. Granted, this behavior wasn't as common as movies made it out to be, but there was, to be sure, a certain amount of truth in entertainment.

And I still think that it's something of a truism that suffering breeds resentment far more often than it breeds empathy. And I think the resentments of geek culture have come to manifest themselves as doing unto others as someone else had once done unto them. Which, even though it seemed fairly predictable, is something of a shame. It would be nice for some group or another to break the cycle, rather than perpetuate it.