1766: Time for the Bullying to Stop

Over the weekend, mankind enjoyed a significant step forward in the field of space travel. Unmanned spacecraft Rosetta successfully detached its probe, named Philae, and landed on Comet 67P, aka Chryumov-Grasimenko. It was the culmination of a ten-year mission for Dr Matt Taylor and his colleagues at the European Space Agency, and a historic moment for humanity: we finally had the chance to examine a comet up close, and perhaps make some steps forward in understanding the way the universe works; how the solar system formed; perhaps even how there came to be life on this planet.

As much as it was a historic moment for humanity, then, imagine how Dr Matt Taylor felt as a significant portion of his life’s work finally came to fruition as the probe successfully touched down and began transmitting data back to Earth.

Then imagine how Dr Matt Taylor felt when confronted with a giddy press more concerned with his sartorial choices than with the scientific milestone he had just passed — the shirt in question being a rather loud Hawaiian-style number featuring rather vivid, camp, retro-style imagery of women in PVC outfits shooting guns and generally looking pretty badass. (A shirt, I might add, made for and given to him as a gift by his friend Elly Prizeman.)

“I don’t care if you landed a spacecraft on a comet,” read a headline on The Verge put together by the two-person team — yes, this garbage took two people to put together — of former Polygon editor Chris Plante and his colleague Arielle Duhaime-Ross, “your shirt is sexist and ostracizing.” And this was far from the only article published that day attacking him and his wardrobe rather than celebrating his achievements.

We don’t have to imagine how Dr Matt Taylor felt. Because it was captured on film.

Can you imagine. Can you imagine reaching the culmination of a ten-year project, making such a significant step forward, and then some blowhard on the Internet telling you that your shirt is directly responsible for women not wanting to enter the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics? Can you imagine having to deal with abuse seemingly supported by the mainstream media, whom you previously thought would be keen to celebrate your achievement but now are, quite rightly, somewhat wary of?

Welcome to a world dominated by bullies.

The Internet has brought with it many great things, one of the most powerful being the principle that “everyone has a voice”. The Internet has done more to advance the concept of free speech than pretty much anything else in the world, but while some people use this for good — to share information, to reach out to people who need help, to make friends in far-flung corners of the world without having to physically travel there — there are others who use it for ill. To lie, to cheat, to accuse, to blow things out of proportion, to bully.

This particular breed of unpleasant individual has been seemingly growing in numbers — or, if not numbers then certainly prominence — in the last few years, largely thanks to social networking sites Twitter and Tumblr. Ostensibly concerned with admirable-sounding concepts such as “social justice” and feminism, these individuals purport to be progressive thinkers who want to make the world a better place for everyone, but in actual fact are nasty, narrow-minded bullies who simply attack anyone who doesn’t see the world in the same way they do.

When you have Boris fucking Johnson calling you out on your bullshit, you should probably rein it in a bit:

The mission is a colossal achievement. Millions of us have been watching Philae’s heart-stopping journey. Everyone in this country should be proud of Dr Taylor and his colleagues, and he has every right to let his feelings show.

Except, of course, that he wasn’t crying with relief. He wasn’t weeping with sheer excitement at this interstellar rendezvous. I am afraid he was crying because he felt he had sinned. He was overcome with guilt and shame for wearing what some people decided was an “inappropriate” shirt on television.

Why was he forced into this humiliation? Because he was subjected to an unrelenting tweetstorm of abuse. He was bombarded across the Internet with a hurtling dustcloud of hate, orchestrated by lobby groups and politically correct media organisations.

And so I want, naturally, to defend this blameless man. And as for all those who have monstered him and convicted him in the kangaroo court of the Web — they should all be ashamed of themselves.

Sadly, Dr Matt Taylor’s trials were far from the first time this sort of outrage has erupted, and it will be far from the last time this happens, too. These supposed advocates of social justice — referred to in the vernacular by their opponents as “social justice warriors” or “SJWs” — are renowned for two things: taking offence at everything it’s possible to take offence at, and then bullying people into submission, often until those suffering the bullying end up apologising, as Dr Taylor did.

This sounds ridiculous, but it’s all too painfully familiar for me. I was bullied repeatedly throughout primary and secondary school — and once again at one of my previous workplaces — and the execution was exactly the same. Wear down the victim’s defences with repeated, unprovoked, unwarranted attacks until they snap in one way or another — be it violently, at which point the bullies can point at the victim and say “look how violent they’re being!”, or tearfully, as in Dr Taylor’s case, at which point the bullies can point and laugh at the victim and claim that they’re only upset because they know they did wrong — and then move on in the knowledge of a job “well done”.

It keeps happening, too, and these people never get called on it because they wield a considerable amount of influence and power — influence and power that lets them get away with a whole lot of nonsense.

Consider, if you will, the recent case of Independent Games Festival judge Mattie Brice, an outspoken, anti-men feminist who has claimed to be “leaving” the games industry on several occasions due to the abuse she was supposedly receiving.

Brice tweeted that she was “automatically rating low any games with men in them” during the course of her IGF judging duties and that she was “loving all this power”. Understandably, this tweet — whether or not made in jest — upset a number of people, who complained to the IGF, who subsequently, admirably and promptly asked politely that she, you know, stop doing that lest people think that their judging was rigged. Brice then complained publicly to her Twitter followers about how she was being “harassed” and how the IGF were treating her poorly, and continued until the IGF issued an apology, not her. Her defence in all this? “It was a joke” — the last fallback of the bully, and an excuse I heard many a time when working as a teacher. It was never, ever, true, and you’ll forgive me for being skeptical of this particular instance being a “joke” when we’re talking about a person who made a game called “Destroy All Men” and has often posted anti-men rants on Twitter.

And lest you think I’m singling out Brice here, she is far from the only one; she’s simply one of the most recent examples. I’ve thankfully remained largely free from this sort of nonsense up until now (though it remains to be seen if this blog post will attract zealots) but I’ve witnessed friends and former colleagues being attacked too many times over the last few years for me to sit here continuing to bite my lip.

YouTuber and PC gaming enthusiast TotalBiscuit demonstrated a good understanding of the issue in a recent post, and came to what is quite possibly the crux of this whole social justice thing and why it bugs me so much:

It’s so goddamn American.

A lot of this social justice stuff seems to be focused on a very American set of ideals and circumstances that doesn’t take into account much going on outside the country’s borders. I mean the idea that racism against white people doesn’t exist: let’s take that one on for a second. [Fellow YouTuber and Irishman] Miracle of Sound accurately pointed out the genocide perpetrated against a portion of the Irish population and the hundreds of years of oppression that they suffered under the English. Sounds pretty damn racist to me.

The concept of white privilege is very American, too. You’ll find a lot of British people, particularly Northerners like myself, bemused by it. I grew up in pit towns, or should I say, ex-pit towns, because Thatcher destroyed our economy when she broke the miners’ unions and put a lot of people out of work. Our towns were vast white majorities but I can safely say we had no privilege, no advantages for being white. Some of the richest and most successful people in our towns were Indian and Pakistani.

He’s absolutely right. These social justice types take a very American — specifically, West Coast — view of the world and assume it is the correct one, then shout down anyone who doesn’t agree with them. They release the hounds on Twitter; they publicly shame them on Tumblr; they encourage the media to buy in to the narrative, and, worryingly, they succeed. Compare, for example, the media portrayal of consumer revolt “Gamergate” as a misogynist hate campaign that wants to drive women out of gaming with the reality of it being one of the most articulate, passionate, genuine, diverse, intelligent and inclusive — albeit at times somewhat ill-focused — groups of gamers of all genders, races and creeds that I’ve ever observed. (As an aside, I haven’t involved myself in Gamergate’s activities — as a former member of the press I don’t agree with everything they stand for, though I feel they do have a number of fair points to be made — but I have spent a couple of weeks lurking around their regular online haunts to see what made them tick. It’s been eye-opening to see the dissonance.)

It is worth clarifying at this juncture — and it pisses me off that I have to add this disclaimer — that I am not against the concept of “social justice” or, more accurately, equality. Quite the opposite; I believe in equal opportunities and equal, fair treatment for everyone, and my behaviour towards other people in my own life reflects this. Meanwhile, however, these keyboard crusaders make themselves immune to criticism by simply responding to any critics with “so you’re against social justice, are you? You’re against progressiveness?” but there is a right way and a wrong way to go about things — and bullying people until they seemingly agree with you is very much the wrong way to go about it. That is what this post is about, not about standing against the very principles of progressiveness.

All this has been going on for several years now — longtime readers will doubtless recall a number of posts where I’ve alluded to this in the past, and I’ve seen more friends than I’d care to mention either fall victim to these Internet bully mobs for a careless word at the wrong time or get swept up in their twisted ideology, never to have a rational word to say ever again — and it’s time it stopped.

Why do I bring this up now? Why do I feel that this one lone blog post can make a difference?

Well, frankly, I don’t; I am but one voice shouting into the void, and I would doubtless be argued to be a textbook example of a white cishet male privileged neckbeard shitlord (yes, this is genuinely something that these believers in “social justice” call people), but it’s worth mentioning — particularly as the debacle over Dr Matt Taylor’s shirt has brought this whole sorry situation very much into the public eye. I hope that this helps more people to see what has been brewing in online culture for a few years now — and I hope it helps put a stop to it.

This is not a move towards a progressive society. It’s a move towards 1984-style Thought Policing, and it’s not the direction that we as a society should be moving.

The bullying needs to stop. And it needs to stop now.