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Comment by SiVal | Hacker News Reader

It's extremely common in the animal (incl. human) world to seek dominance. In cultures where physical domination is rewarded, you have violence to establish the dominance. In cultures where intellectual dominance is rewarded, you have more expressions of contempt for "stupid" people. When you have a diverse group, you have the strong beating up the weak and the smart verbally humiliating the dumb. It's not complicated. It's about public status and privately making yourself feel superior.

Blaming it on class and gender roles is one of those things that urban intellectuals do to maintain their status among urban intellectuals. Maybe he should analyze it from a Marxist-feminist perspective for good measure.

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"Blaming it on class and gender roles is one of those things that urban intellectuals do to maintain their status among urban intellectuals. Maybe he should analyze it from a Marxist-feminist perspective for good measure."

I don't suppose the irony of this statement escaped you.

It's escaping me. He said "for good measure". Where is the irony?

His comment exhibits anti-intellectual posturing.

It's actually anti-urban-intellectual posturing, suggesting that the comment author is on a higher level intellectually.

I had a good laugh at both the joke itself and that the telling of the joke is an act of "verbally humiliating the dumb".

It's domination-posturing all the way down!

Oh, I think I saw a different irony to you -- I saw the comment as an act of verbal aggression towards the author of the article on the grounds that the author was being too academic.

The author of an article about geeks being bullied, not because they were too academic, but because they were seen as being of a different class.

I prefer your interpretation to be honest, but clearly there is enough irony for everyone.

I agree with your exact wording: applying Marxist theory to everything is exactly 'more academic' in the sense that it is an artifact of fashion in educational institutions. It isn't actually 'more intellectual' because it is content-free, being equally applicable to everything, and brings little or no insight to any topic outside of economics.

Taking this criticism as validation of Marxist analysis (or accusing the critic of bullying, etc.) is cheap and pointless, like Freudians answering criticism of a weak Freudian analysis by saying the critic is only criticizing due to reaction formation.

If we disallow this kind of criticism then we are validating every kind of posturing. Not everything anyone says can be correct and it isn't bullying or snobbery to say so. It's not even personal.

I'm not sure what exactly you're responding to, here, but I'm certainly not disallowing this kind of criticism or claiming that the top-level comment validates Marxist analysis because it's poorly thought-out.

I don't use Marxist analysis myself, at least not deliberately (I am not myself an academic), either.

I don't know what you mean by:

>content-free, being equally applicable to everything

and I think that:

>brings little or no insight to any topic outside of economics

ignores the fact that a large amount of history, culture and contemporary society has been profoundly shaped by economics.

>Not everything anyone says can be correct and it isn't bullying or snobbery to say so. It's not even personal.

Yes. There are a lot of things I agree with in your post, the problem is that they are "equally applicable to everything", so I feel like I've joined an argument halfway through, and I have no idea what you are responding to or why.

I'm just waiting for him to give the atlantic a wedgie.

"When you have a diverse group, you have the strong beating up the weak and the smart verbally humiliating the dumb."

Anecdotal evidence, which I have not been able to disprove so far, is its more like in a diverse group, people who don't follow the "greek golden mean" tend to get pounded down for not being diverse. Lets rephrase the original article as "kid who hyperfocuses on art gets pounded by kids who do some sport, some TV, some movies, some socializing, etc". For another anecdote no surprise I did a heck of a lot of computer "stuff", but also did weightlifting and long distance bicycling and also hung out with the kids who joined the .mil (at least back then, we all hung out together in later high school years), I also hung out with the geeks and the heavy metal kids (who were actually pretty cool), no problemo with bullying for me... I'd see kids who did nothing but ace math all day have a rough time of it. Or kids who did nothing but pick their nose all day have a rough time. The correlation seems to be if only one word description fits, gonna have a rough time.

You did weightlifting? So you were a pretty big kid? That, probably more than anything else, helped you to not be bullied.

I was a tall, strong, athletic teenager and I was certainly bullied. This is partly why I'm concerned about the strong vs weak/natural order talk going on here. I don't think it's that simple.

I'm not trying to make a point involving absolutes but I noticed, among my peer group anyway, that size and fitness is inversely proportional with the amount of attention a kid receives from bullies. Certainly there can be other factors -- I think bullying is primarily the result of social ostracism, which can have many causes -- but it's much easier to pick on people you do not perceive as a serious threat.

Not huge, big for a non-athlete, kinda on the wimpy scale of athletes, at least until after .mil. More like basic training prep, which was physically pretty easy after proper preparation (other than the sleep deprivation).

Not unusual at all for the biggest bully to be kinda wimpy compared to even an average kid, I think there's a bit of a compensation reaction.

I will admit the "helped not be bullied" bit IS true solely WRT my point of diversity although I think you have the reaction mechanism wrong. I did not hang out with the football players much but we did commiserate about leg days (everyone hates leg days, lets just say the soreness the day after is probably the most painful thing anyone intentionally does as an inherent part of any sport) and I did not hang out with the mountain biker kids but we could talk about favorite trails and stuff. I don't think it matters that I was big-ish, even as a scrawny little long distance runner I could have at least talked with track and field kids about blisters or something even if I never joined the track and field team. The point being that it gave me the diversity to communicate with kids other than my classmates who took calculus and "intro to o-chem" their senior year. In retrospect, solely looking at bullying oriented outcome it probably is a heck of a lot easier to listen to some heavy metal than to doing squats in the weight room, for the identical quantity "X" of not being bullied, if that makes any sense. The other problem with weightlifting is it leads to ... enhanced caloric intake, which becomes a problem later on in life if you drift away from lifting but continue to eat entire roasted (small) chickens in one sitting, for example. I'm still kinda fat even now.

That sounds like it might have to do with the bullies taking the rejection of the things they care about as unimportant as a personal attack. Which makes sense: anyone who came here and said, "who cares about start ups? I work at a huge conglomerate corporation and we do just fine!" would get piled on pretty quick.

Those who interact with people as though their interests were worth being interested in are possibly less likely to provoke retaliation. People who are single-minded may not realize that the connotation to the people around them is insulting, but it doesn't mean it's not.

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