The most “local” it gets is one’s own frame of reference. I haven’t read anyone here relating the phrases you quoted in the way you are choosing to interpret them. Could this be your own defensiveness? I cannot speak for others, but this does not reflect what I personally am trying to communicate.
I try to assume a barest minimum about anything, ever. I think it depends upon the individual. People can have deep biases for or against others without requiring them to be “angry”. Does a soldier need to be overcome by fear and/or hatred to kill somebody? Some of them probably are, but for some it might be a duty, an objective, or something else. Not unlike how if someone harasses me, I might hypothetically decide to punch them in the nose, and can do this without becoming upset or losing my temper. Assuming that everybody who does an act, good bad or indifferent, must obviously feel the same way seems to me to be overly reductive.
OTOH “controlling” is a more loaded term. Not unlike some connotations of “discipline” it has lots of linguistic baggage. The desire to be “controlling” other people does not make it so, in any direct sense. Telling others what to do is almost always obnoxious and imposing, but says more about the mind state of the speaker than it does the autonomy of the listener. Control is internal to one’s self, it is not really transferable. even if deadly force is applied, one can choose to what extent they will dignify it with cooperation. Acknowledging this as always being a choice is often met with resentment by some, who are invested in the idea of saving face under the pretext of their choice having been made for them. But I see it as respecting that people are internally inviolable, that personal autonomy is our very core, and that even death does does not change this. I am sensitive to the fact that some do not agree with this.
I think I do agree with you though that most who attack others are externalizing deep emotional problems. But the bigger problem is that I think that. by far, most people do this to some extent. People are generally too reactionary. Getting upset because they have been wronged is quite understandable, but it is only the flip side of the same upset which caused someone to wrong them. Causally, I think it is part of the same problem, which yields in me a different take upon “empathy” than some find palatable. In contemporary therapeutic terms, I’d say that the solution is “owning your feelings” - by which I mean understanding that your emotional state is yours, and not directly caused by anyone else. There are of course relations between stimulus and response, but nobody directly makes another person feel what they feel. When people know this, then emotional games, as many of these attacks are, tend to be outgrown.
This is more of your super disgusting victim blaming. Is there no levels you won’t stoop too? Well, seeing as you’ve outright defended white supremacist terrorists before, saying how it’s the VICTIMS fault for daring to feel upset when their families were murdered, I guess not!
When people attempt to cause others distress, the attackers are responsible for that distress. Not the victims. Other people absolutely can directly cause emotional reactions. You may as well go on about “Well, I hit you with a hammer, but I didn’t DIRECTLY cause your pain, you’re responsible for feeling what you feel.” That’s about as sensible as the things you’re saying now, and outright attacking victims of harassment for being victims while making excuses and defending the perpetrators.
That is, again, not at all what I am saying. I do not blame victims, nor defend violent bigots.
My concern is what people do, and why. And as such, my experience has been that notions such as blame, excusing, and fault are overlays people use to make sense of things after the fact. They don’t apply as much to people’s motivations. Although they are more of a factor in describing cycles of abuse.
The attackers are responsible - or should I say, culpable - for their actions. If they didn’t commit their heinous act, then others would not be in that distress. Not unlike murder - a person isn’t prosecuted because the person is gone, or because people grieve - that could have happened anyway. They are prosecuted because of their act of taking a life which they had no right to take. If the emotions of the grieved make this punishment more severe, then it is becoming revenge instead of justice. Speaking of loaded language, “responsible” is another often abused example. Responsibility literally means “a reaction to”. It is the victim, or wronged party, or their friends and family who have a response. Even police are called responders, as they respond to threats or emergencies. This is why, to clarify, in the US at least people are prosecuted for culpability, that is, that they are guilty of having wronged someone through their actions.
Therapy does not belong in the courtroom, nor vice-versa.
I’d suggest checking out Alfred Adler who rejected Freud’s drive theories. Adler said that man was mostly interested in establishing his superiority over others as a result of his inner emotional conflicts, which seems like common sense to us, but it was heresy at the time. Adler’s view was a sort of Humanism that said mental health must involve service to humanity in the present and in the future, which he called “the social interest.”. Obviously, if everyone that thinks they are accomplishing something were really getting anything done, most of our problems would be solved. However, Adler said that more often people’s feeling of inferiority express themselves in pointless compulsive activity or hypochondria such as insomnia. Fast forward to today and see how much of mankinds potential is wasted on video games, updating Facebook, and having online arguments. This is all compulsive activity. And although people may think that arguing on line somehow proves how “concerned” they are, it’s really pretty much the opposite.
A hundred years later, Freudians still largely ignore the issue of compulsion except for antiquated drive theories. Luckily, they did not steal Adlers ideas right away, or he would have vanished from history. , Another reasons we can see Adler’s techniques in general use in various types of therapy is that he focused on how the client interacts with the world rather than the relationship of the therapist. Adler also gave us the terms “inferiority complex” and “superiority complex,” which should be used more widely.
I simultaneously find Adler’s work important, but also awfully tedious. It is great to acknowledge that many people are preoccupied in emotion conflicts and games, but I am skeptical as to whether or not Adlerian psychotherapy offers any way out of this. In practice, it is easy to posit infinite regressions.
For example, if one asserts that concepts such as “superiority” and “inferiority” are not even generally meaningful, they could be said to be acting from a position of superiority by trying to place themselves outside of its system. If one asserts that those terms are always relative comparisons, and that comparing the self to others is a waste of time, it is easy to say that they are acting from an inferior position, because they fear being compared to others. So it isn’t hard to wonder if the approach does not offer itself as being a naturalized total system, with no outside. This would make it one of the “Games Psychologists Play”, to borrow from Berne.
I agree with Adler that people usually are mired in emotional conflicts, and that social involvements are generally a more productive area to examine and work with than Freudian drives. Compulsion has been a huge problem, and gotten worse. But where I think I have strong differences with Adler are that his notions of the “social” seem doubtful to me. I see society in more post-structuralist/constructionist terms, where real social activity is when people formalize their relationships together. Many commonly-referred to concepts such as inferiority, superiority, dominance, submission, etc strike me as being wholly unrealistic. Adler seemed to consider these in teleological terms, that a person’s success or failure in life is in relation to their having a clear purpose. But I disagree that there is a deep relationship between cause and purpose. Deep implicate structures can often even appear as being acausal. People can inherit purpose from society, family, friends, institutions - but also create their own, or internalize the values of other societies. Others may, by chance or deliberately, feel that no purpose is more accurate for their lives.
Everyone has had to navigate the appalling century-long wank-fest over psychological jargon that has greatly reduced the practical applications of psychology. And each controversy seems to fade like any tempest in a teacup. The various approaches people have used to avoid this issue (sometimes unsuccessfully) would make a good essay. Even Kernberg, who has spent decades doing a commendable job of untangling various models seems to look back on all that effort with a certain amount of regret at all the years he wasted.
Okay, but that’s not an argument. You’re saying “they can’t be winning because I wouldn’t be happy where they are.” Assholes have different standards than regular humans.
I am not saying any such thing, it doesn’t have anything to do with me, or happiness. They are not “winning” even by their own standards because they have no values or goals which can be clearly explained and audited. Just like most bigotry circuses, it is only “about” their own insecurities. But just because they can’t knock out their own shadow doesn’t mean others aren’t actually hurt for them trying.
I… Don’t think that is true. You know, I have no real dog in this race, so I am not going to be too argumentative. But…
I do think the majority of people that have a bit of aggressiveness in them occasionally delight from winding people up. And it isn’t just on the internet.
Confession
This is something I have done a million times. Not to make myself feel better, but to interact with someone on a non superficial, but still slightly awkward level. I feel bad about admitting this.
When someone at the grocery store cuts me off with their cart or rams into me because they are texting, I stop, look at them in the eyes, and say nothing. Till they apologize. I then acknowledge them and move on.
My friends say this is an asshole move. I disagree. So the implicit values in your statement (assholes are bad), I can’t really agree with.
Eta
(Kids are always exempt. For some reason they always gang rush me I swear I have a toddler magnet )
And you’re doing it here! Of course a self-described trolley supports his own propensity for driving trollies. And you’re not confessing so much as bragging.
Since when is shaming people for actions they themselves know are wrong driving trollies? I’ve done it more times than I care to count.
Deal with me politely, with a modicum of consideration, and you will never see The Look. If you ram me with a cart because you can’t be bothered to look up in traffic and you can’t be bothered to apologise, you may not only get The Look, you may very well hear, in very polite language, in a very polite tone of voice, with absolutely no name-calling, precisely what you did wrong.
Funny thing: I suspect most people would rather I cursed and yelled.
Note that it ain’t the ramming alone: everyone lapses or gets sidetracked at some point or another. It’s the failure to acknowledge that your lapse may have affected someone else. We live in the world with other people, lots of 'em; politesse is a necessary social lubricant. A lot of people seem to forget that.
@japhroaig, I don’t consider that jerkish at all, provided you walk the walk when you yourself lapse. Sometimes it’s necessary to assert that you are indeed a person, not an inconveniently placed object. (“Sometimes” seems to be more often as times passes, unfortunately.)
You clearly explained their goal quite well yourself: “Alienating everybody as they descend into an echo-chamber of belligerence.” They want to run off the people on forum(s) who say things they disagree with, until only people who agree with them are left. Honestly, I’d say most people on internet forums do that to some extent. We certainly do here on BoingBoing, when someone shows up spouting sexist/homophobic/racist/etc bullshit. It ultimately boils down to “achieve victory over the opposition,” which is pretty nearly a universal human motivation, for reasonably broad definitions of “opposition” and “victory.”
That’s one hell of a piece of logic you’ve got going on there. You’re making ludicrous assumptions about women who sue their former employers, even while noting that people can be fired for unfair reasons. Those women, always whining about gender bias when they should really keep their mouths shut, amirite?
Also,
If a woman person of color is fired unfairly and then can find an attorney to make a gender racial-bias case, the result will be that boards think twice before promoting women people of color.
FTFY, and maybe that makes the horseshit-edness of your statement a little more clear.
Emphasis mine.
For one thing, work on how you state things because, oh, look, your bias is showing.
I swear I have a toddler magnet 
)