In an earlier entry, I said that this decade saw a dramatic decrease in tolerance for bullying, but I realize that this is only part of the story. Bullying in schools has gone down and rarely dips into the realm of physical violence, the type that my father used to brag about witnessing in the 70's and 80's when people were apparently as bad as that kid from It (part I). Obviously, we don't see too many of these things anymore, right? Even since I survived middle school, it sounds as though younger family members never endured what I went through that I considered normal. They didn't have to deal with getting punched in sensitive places, having their shoes tossed out of the school bus window, being challenged to fights, and receiving swear words for nicknames. They didn't have fathers and authority figures who called them weaklings, thing-skinned, and pathetic for complaining about this kind of bullying. That makes me happy, because they won't end up as psychologically broken because of it.

However, over the last few years, I've been noticing a new form of bullying, one that we've heard people talk about for a while, but which has escalated to a point that I find incredibly unhealthy for us as a society, if not outright dangerous. In dearth of opportunities to bully others in public physical forums, people have turned to bullying and demeaning others in public virtual forums. Yes, we know that internet bullying is bad, and we launched campaigns against it, but I do not believe that the campaigns are working. I believe that they can work, if delivered with an inspired execution, but what I see now is a downward spiral in this new age.

The first and most obvious case of internet bullying comes in the real of politics and culture with some political subtext, and this is also where I began noticing a marked decrease in quality of conversation. Politics always had heated, emotional discussion, enough so that it's banned on BZPower. I've heard BZPers make cases for why politics should be allowed on the site, because we're supposedly mature enough to have these discussions and we have such a great sense of community, but I've begun to notice that even in communities organized around incredibly mature leadership and moderation, any discussion about politics will get ugly. The sign of the times that tipped me off about how bad things are getting now is that I used to get rude comments only from people who disagreed with me, but now even conversations with people I agree with tend to lose their decency from the get-go. I remember reading through political threads and encountering about a 50/50 ratio of hate-fueled comments and careful comments that were considerate of everyone's feelings. Now, the vast majority of comments make me cringe.

People are perhaps the most honest about their opinions on their fellow man in politics: everyone else is the the stupidest, least competent, most misguided, most fragile, most morally reprehensible person to exist. Anyone who doesn't conform to you exactly. And gradually, I see that trickle down to non-political things. People will say absolutely horrendous things about a celebrity, usually for the most trivial reasons. Everyone gets paranoid and assumes that everyone else represents a social movement that's abhorrent.

This contempt that we used to only see in political and religious discussion is now airborn. It contaminates even the most unifying aspects of our culture. BZPower forbids politics and religion, but these days I wonder if we should ban all discussion on STAR WARS, too. I remember that I gathered a lot of heat back in the day for saying that I really like Episodes I-III, and the treatment that I got on BZPower is nothing compared to the various Youtube discussions that I've had, where people will say the cruelest things simply because someone likes a movie that they didn't like. Alternatively, if you didn't like something that others like, then you must be self-righteous, pretentious, or you're over-sensitive. Those are the most polite insults I've heard, but most of us are sadly all-too familiar with how the internet works and how terrible this discourse can get. For example, I just saw an article entitled "Seven Things Justice League Did Better the Avengers, and Seven Things It Did Worse", and in the comments section, I saw one comment that I think does a pretty accurate job of representing what the average comment looks like these days: "1 way this article could improve: the writer kills himself." Surprise, surprise, it had zero dislikes.

I think that this is the unspoken message behind a lot of comments on the internet, isn't it? We want people that we disagree with to kill themselves. If they aren't moral abominations, then they're complete freaks. If they're not complete freaks, then they're stupid. If they're not stupid, they're functionally stupid, and so forth. We simply cannot believe that perhaps, just maybe, the people that we address on the internet are just like the people that we meet on the street. Perhaps, when a person complains about something, they're not nagging, but just expressing an opinion about something that they don't like?

Until then, we live in a world where apparently anyone who liked Marvel blindly supports a corporate empire as a brainwashed sycophant, anyone who likes DC must be a prejudiced fanboy, anyone who likes The Phantom Menace isn't worth talking to and is a blasphemer, anyone who dislikes Christopher Nolan must be an insecure haters who are full of themselves, anyone who likes Titanic supports bad romances, anyone who likes Toy Story has no culture, anyone who liked the new Les Miserables has even less culture, anyone who enjoys Michael Bay movies must be the lowest common denominator, anyone who watched Twilight must be too dumb to be allowed to breed, and anyone who likes that one unpopular sequel must apparently kick puppies. Take your pick. It has become bad that ScreenJunkies, the people behind Honest Trailers who make money by making fun of movies, even began requesting that people try to have friendly discussions about movies and realize that it's okay that we don't all like the same things. They realize the type of influence that they have, and they decide to use it in their small little sphere, and I for one really appreciate that.

At the end of the day, I think that it's incredibly important for people to realize that we're all just people who have our own opinions on what we think is great, and we like different things. People don't too often intentionally hold an opinion just because it's nefarious. A person who disagrees with you, or who has different tastes than yours, isn't necessarily a corrupt, despicable person who's light years behind your intellectually and emotionally. They're probably just a regular person. As inconceivable as that may seem to some. Who knew that we could be unique human beings? I, for one, choose to have some faith in the people that I meet everyday, because we just might be more alike than we are unalike. We are, after all, human beings.