god that's depressing

reading about someone in social justice spaces who routinely harassed and abused other people under social justice pretexts and my own visceral reaction is depressing me

it's a combination of like, revelatory joy that that kind of behavior is sometimes considered bad by like, real progressives and not just either progressivism-skeptical people or those who have been victimized and are therefore suspect

and a kind of dry cynical "if you can't stand the heat get out of the kitchen" kneejerk victim-blaming

like, i was (have been? forever unsure if i would currently be considered an sjw by outside observers, and if they would be right) in online social justice for many many years and like. a lot of rhetoric was about not just condoning but actively encouraging this kind of behavior

and it was extremely normal. it was rarely so impactful because the people doing it were teenagers and the targets were other teenagers so people didn't really have jobs to ruin but like. it was normalized

and like, all of it. any kind of cruel attack was tolerated as long as you could make the target look like a homophobe or something. if you didn't join in a dogpile you were instantly suspect. if you failed to cut off someone problematic completely you were just as bad as them

like, it was generally accepted that if you failed to completely cut off FAMILY MEMBERS with problematic beliefs then you were scum

social justice as it existed online before it kind of fell apart was an environment of continuous and omnidirectional bullying and the fucked is that i'm still not sure if i should be mad about it or not

like i'm still oftentimes not sure if people were right. i never really got bullied. i saw other people get bullied. i understood that anyone could be next, including me, so i should be on my best behavior

and i don't know if genuine positive cultural changes that have come about since then would have come about without an environment like that. is a few dozen thousand teenagers traumatizing each other worth some potential political change? who knows

and i'm also not sure if the internet, as a whole, isn't just a big bully kettle where tolerating unbelievable cruelty is just part of what you need to do to survive

i guess the only things i know are:

1) my time involved in serious social justice should probably be considered a traumatic experience

2) i don't think i'm a better person because of it, even the normal kind of personal growth people normally claim from traumatic experiences

i.e., being more sympathetic to people with similar trauma has just lead me to be distrustful of like, accusations of abuse, which isn't necessarily useful or good

3) i may have better beliefs because of it, i'm not sure, but i grew up so steeped in progressivism that it seems inevitable that i probably would have come into an equally good if potentially slightly different belief set eventually

4) i'm probably less and definitely differently neurotic because of it. social justice definitely taught me how to not hate myself for certain things, and social justice recovery taught me how to not hate myself for others

i don't know if that's unambiguously good because i might be in some ways in a more stable position in life if i hated myself a bit more, but it's almost definitely more good than bad

5) social justice taught me that cruelty on the internet is a fact of life, and to distrust people. it's bad that people online are cruel and untrustworthy but it's good that i learned these lessons

the reason i'm having this visceral reaction is because of all those things. this thread is ambivalent