the_dunk_tank

Antisocial behaviour is basically anything that annoys someone but isn't a crime, like children playing ball games in the street, or teens meeting up in groups.

Whether something is antisocial doesn’t reference legality at all, in my opinion. A behavior is antisocial if its purpose is to resist social norms. These norms may or may not be codified into law, and of course the antisocial behaviors may only become illegal after public outcry.

Random individual antisocial actions occur all the time. When it becomes a trend, then one has to question what deeper angst it expresses. That doesn’t absolve all antisocial behavior nor make it legitimate all the time.

When a right-winger drives around town obnoxiously rolling coal onto cyclists, that is antisocial behavior. It becomes a trend when it captures a growing sentiment among right-wingers that the larger society has left them behind in a supposedly misguided quest to save the environment.

Antisocial behaviors are not always good, nor always bad. It depends on the political content of the behavior.

Maybe there is some deep class struggle in the dirt bikers that I’m missing, but more likely there is nothing particularly deep about it, and it’s just teenagers goofing around and giving their parents/society the middle finger. If that’s the case then I would agree that severely criminalizing the behavior is ridiculous — and I agree with the sentiment of this post that it is an embarrassing thing to campaign on at the national level — but we shouldn’t kid ourselves that by denying that it is antisocial.