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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28726 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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While I am not the biggest fan of arguments about how people need to be bullied more, I take issue with your assumption that

As a result of this bullying they all sympathize with the victims of bullying and will not bully another person.

This doesn’t match my model of how “bullying” and related behavior works. Otherwise, for instance, no frats would have hazing rituals for the pledges, because after the first pledge class joined the frat, they’d all sympathize with the next pledge class and swear never to put them through what they themselves went through. More generally, cf. theories about the “cycle of abuse”.

This doesn’t match my model of how “bullying” and related behavior works. Otherwise, for instance, no frats would have hazing rituals for the pledges, because after the first pledge class joined the frat, they’d all sympathize with the next pledge class and swear never to put them through what they themselves went through.

One of the reasons why frat hazing is so stable is that there's an intermediate stage when you're a sophomore or a junior and expected to participate in the ritual as a hazer. Since the conscription to the Russian army was changed from 24 months to just twelve, I've heard of some cases when hazing was successfully stopped in specific companies by sufficiently motivated soldiers, usually those drafted as undergrads: with just two drafts a year you basically jump from a bottom bitch straight to a top dog, and you get to write your own rules if you can sway the rest of your draft.

The fact that hazing still exists in the rest of the army is a telling sign that the "cycle of abuse" is real, though. Power is delicious.

I agree, I was adopting the assumption of the OP I was replying to for the purpose of illustrating the issue of perpetuating the model. I think frats and related hazing are excellent examples for "some people who are bullied come to see it as normal behavior to inflict on others."

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