Guest post: All those stories where the bully is the bad guy

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12 responses to “Guest post: All those stories where the bully is the bad guy”

1. 

   Omar

   Sep 19, 2026 12:19 AM

   How did Trump overcome decades of cultural conditioning that should have raised a forest of red flags? If he’d been written into a Disney movie NOBODY WOULD HAVE BELIEVED IT. Trump is a human amalgam of all of the Seven Deadly Sins, and exhibits just about every other moral failing and character flaw you could possibly imagine, and has been since before winning the Republican nomination, the campaign for which saw him commit an untold number of offences, any one of which would have utterly ended the campaign of any normal candidate. Gaining power has only made him worse, and he was awful to start with.

   WRONG! If you ask me, the signs are all there! We definitely live in the End Times, and Trump will shortly reveal that He is Our Saviour Jesus Christ returned to Earth.!!!!! Yes Sireee!

   It says in the Bible: Every eye shall hear Him and every ear shall see Him.! I’m pretty sure that’s what it says. And that has already come to pass.! All round the world.! On every TV set, You betcha.!

   So we all better do what He wants. Let Him have Greenland, Canada, China and whatever else he fancies. Before it’s too late.!!!
2. 

   Bjarte Foshaug

   Sep 19, 2026 2:04 AM

   How is it that a country that once upon a time prided itself on being a society of straightforward, no-nonsense people who frowned on conspicuous boastfulness and greed could fall for the likes of Trump?

   There’s obviously more to it, but I think the following (largely hard-wired*) gut reactions have a lot to do with it.

   1. Any enemy of my enemy is my friend

   “Anyone whom the Dems dislike that much can’t be entirely bad”, “He hates the same people I hate”, “He’ll own the Libs”, “I don’t care who wins, or what else is included in the deal, or who else gets hurt as a result, as long as these assholes lose!”

   2. My party, right or wrong

   “I’m voting for the candidate with the ‘R’ before his name”, “I don’t care about substance. As long as it’s called ‘conservatism’/’the Right’/’MAGA’ and my own party is doing it, I’m all in”, “Red team, yay! Blue team, booo!”, “Any point for my team is obvious. Any point for the other team means the referee is partisan (and probably gay)”.

   3. Whataboutery / Tu Quoque

   “Her emails”, “Hunter Biden’s laptop”, “The rule of law is just a sham anyway”, “Everyone is corrupt, but at least this one isn’t being hypocritical about it”. “Everybody’s always lying, but at least this one doesn’t pretend to care about the truth”, “Everyone is a crock, but at least this one is our crook”.

   4. Intellectual Laziness**

   “Who has time for all that tedious and boring ‘education’ and ‘critical thinking’ and ‘analysis” and ‘fact checking’ business these days?”, “Unless you’re an arrogant elitists who think you know better than ordinary folks, you have no use of System Two”. System One (a.k.a. the ‘gut’) tells you everything you’ll ever need to know”, “The truth is always simple and obvious, and any appeal to complexity, nuance and uncertainty is just obfuscation”, “Any argument or piece of information that can’t be reduced to a headline, a soundbite, a meme, or a tweet, can be safely and conclusively dismissed in advance”, “It’s all bread and circus, and I’m not sure about the bread”, “Whoever shouts loudest gets heard”, “Whoever pushes my buttons hardest owns me”.

   * As I keep saying, I strongly suspect that ultimately the fatal flaw of any system is human brain-wiring

   ** By far the most important point, and arguably the precondition for all the others.
3. 

   KBPlayer

   Sep 19, 2026 2:40 AM

   Trump’s persona is of the villainous mayor in Jaws. You see that guy’s stance and suit and hear his speech, and you realise he’s a bad man. So why do 39% of the American public still approve of this guy?
4. 

   Ophelia Benson

   Sep 19, 2026 4:16 AM

   Any plausible answer to that question is deeply depressing.
5. 

   Ian Hargreaves

   Sep 19, 2026 6:19 AM

   I assumed at first this was satirical.

   “a country that once upon a time prided itself on being a society of straightforward, no-nonsense people who frowned on conspicuous boastfulness and greed”.

   Imagine a survey, conducted globally. One question: which country’s inhabitants do you most associate with the words “boastful” and “greedy”? There could surely be only one winner. The lack of self-awareness in that sentence, especially given where it started, is funny.

   “What about all of those stories where the bully is the bad guy”

   There’s an interesting video somewhere on Youtube examining the plot of “The Karate Kid” – the original one. It starts from the position that Daniel – the title character and ostensible “good guy” is in fact an obnoxious bully, and that he is enabled in this attitude by his teacher. And point by point it demonstrates that this is the case. And the viewing audience is so inured to the system that they don’t notice it and cheer for him.

   But beyond that, just so much of American culture valorises bullying. One of the biggest icons of American culture for most of my life is Batman – a billionaire who uses his wealth not to address inequality, to take down oligarchs or corrupt politicians, but who instead focuses on bending his mind, body and endless resources to beating up mostly working class street criminals. Look at literally any Batman movie. Oh, sure, he’ll eventually work his way round to dealing with a costumed maniac or an alien or whatever, but he is *always* shown spending his day-to-day beating up people who are probably struggling to make rent.

   Trump is the President America deserves, has been building towards for over half a century, and he is the ideal person to oversee (indeed to accelerate) the end of American hegemony. I don’t think I’ll much like what follows either, but it’s the nature of being the victim of a bully that you don’t get to choose how they die, you only get to take a grim satisfaction in the manner of it when it happens.
6. 

   Ophelia Benson

   Sep 19, 2026 8:44 AM

   Well, both strains are real. The boastful bully strain and the Frank Capra aw shucks down home good guy strain. (Women of course are absent from both strains.)
7. 

   Ophelia Benson

   Sep 19, 2026 8:47 AM

   And icons and cultures and their comparative sizes are a tad subjective – I for one would never think of Batman as one of the biggest icons of American culture.
8. 

   Jim Baerg

   Sep 19, 2026 8:53 AM

   Seems relevant

   https://www.benjaminlcorey.com/could-american-evangelicals-spot-the-antichrist-heres-the-biblical-predictions/
9. 

   Ian Hargreaves

   Sep 19, 2026 10:03 AM

   “I for one would never think of Batman as one of the biggest icons of American culture.”

   As you say, subjective and arguable. And by “icons of American culture”, I was more referring to how America is perceived and portrays itself abroad, rather than necessarily how it portrays itself to itself… if there’s a difference. Again, arguable.

   An objective measure though: per wikipedia, prior to 2000 only seven film series had grossed over a billion dollars: Star Wars, Star Trek and Jurassic Park aren’t really about a specific character. The others were James Bond (not American), and three American men: Rocky, Indiana Jones… and Batman. He’s pretty big.
10. 

    Mike B

    Sep 19, 2026 10:17 AM

    To me, the answer is straightforward:

    A major portion of the American population has been debased by:

    1. Religion

    2. Marketing/advertising

    3. Television/mass media

    Religion makes you stupid enough to believe anything.

    Marketing/advertising makes you hungry and “feeds” an appetite that cannot be satiated.

    Television/mass media makes you enraged.

    Angry, stupid, hungry people are permitted to vote.
11. 

    Omar

    Sep 19, 2026 5:41 PM

    Mike B: Going through your above items:

    1. Religion makes you stupid enough to believe anything.

    But its function is arguably that of a social glue. It does not matter what we believe, so long as we all believe it together. In any religious ceremony, the group is worshipping itself. (After Emile Durkheim.) For my mother, forced by circumstances to live with a wife-bashing husband (my father) and a severely mentally retarded daughter (my only sibling) her religious faith was very important. It arguably kept her from worse dependence on alcohol than the one that she finished up with.

    2. Marketing/advertising makes you hungry and “feeds” an appetite that cannot be satiated.

    Maybe then, it would be better to follow scripture and not go ‘laying up treasures on Earth….’ etc. (Not one that many professing Christians observe that one in practice.)

    3. Television/mass media makes you enraged.

    Only to my knowledge when there’s justification: e.g. all over the US I believe, in response to President Nixon’s resignation speech over Watergate.

    4. Angry, stupid, hungry people are permitted to vote.

    Now you are getting into really dangerous territory. Regulated democracy is a contradiction in terms. They had something called ‘guided democracy’ in Indonesia under Soekharno, which was the prelude to one of the world’s worst mass-murdering military dictatorships, under a clique led by General Suharto. Check via Google for details.

    Cheers.
12. 

    iknklast

    Sep 21, 2026 9:00 PM

    3. Television/mass media makes you enraged.

    Only to my knowledge when there’s justification: e.g. all over the US I believe, in response to President Nixon’s resignation speech over Watergate.

    Not really. There are many times it happens without justification. I saw my family get outraged over things that were shown on television, or in the tabloids, without bothering to check if there was justification. I watched liberal friends of mine get outraged over supposed things about Hillary Clinton that went viral on mass media, without checking to see if there was justification.

    It’s how Trump plays his game. He consumes vast amounts of media, which tells him what people are outraged over. He then amplifies it, magnifies it, and shouts hate, anger, and spittle everywhere, which makes it even louder and angrier. He has given all those people who have spent the last several decades shouting at their television, at their Twitter/X feed, someone to count on, somewhere to channel all that anger and rage.

    When people are uninformed about science, arts, politics, or other things, it leads to a huge amount of unjustified rage. When people feel entitled (as a lot of people in the US do, especially white males), seeing other people getting the same goodies (or even perceiving that they do) leads to a huge amount of unjustified rage because the ‘undeserving’ have stolen what is rightfully theirs – in their mind. And the TV, the movies, and the Internet have for a long time been touting the story that white males are at the bottom of the pecking order these days. A single woman or person of color in the office, or in the services where they go, can lead them to believe that.

    To them, it is a zero sum game. If they are not the only winners, they are losing.