deeper, vigilantism of whatever sort need not actually follow legal statute. Although, accusations may range from the supernatural to the sordid, there is also innuendo that is just plain confusing even to the very perpetrators! Bullies are seldom candid as to their motives, and long lived grudges don't become more lucid over time. The varied motives for bullying are subject to a fairly vast body of study and surmise. But the example made by singling out targets for bullying is observably effective as peer pressure for keeping others in fear and under control. You ask how the community of the social events I attend has been poisoned for me. Do you understand what is a toxic social environment? I live in fear of being harassed, thrown out, banned, at anytime, because of the most transparent agitation by the most notorious liars. Complaints have even been lodged against me before my very arrival at the hotel! And I suspect that the process, such as it is, works entirely by gossip, with no written record. It is no secret how I am subject to the most hateful defamation as some kind of undesirable. And I am shadowed everywhere around the hotel whose function space serves the various functions of the event, every day, by the volunteer security of the function, intimidating others amid the crowds as we mill about, in order to prevent them from interacting with me. I learned about this from other who told me later. It was actually decades ago that I first learned of how a rotten cockblocking clique of bullies who had it in for me, were actually sneaking up behind girls I was talking to as the crowds were milling about, and asking them: "Is this guy bothering you?" Finally one of them attending the function from far out of town, had the guts and sense to tell me! Now the bullies volunteer for convention security in order to throw their weight around in socially isolating their targets of stalking, myself and some others I am finally learning about at all, round the clock for the entire three days or more. Often, they can get the collaboration of hotel security, who are often fairly thugly, bored and uneducated.
Therefore, Pup, surely because someone ineptly attempted to bully you behind your back and failed, cannot be taken as conclusive evidence that it never succeeds. There are many variables. Indeed, true, not actually everyone can be co-opted. But not literally everyone needs to be.
carlitos, as you request, I shall be more specific: Yes, I am a big nerd! And Science Fiction conventions are an important social outlet for me. Cons attract many kinds of vulnerable people to come and open themselves up, and interact more playfully than one ever will patiently hanging out in bars or whatever, but at the same time cons thereby draw the very bullies that prey upon people who are at all different. The socially inept in general, divide into two categories: the harmlessly awkward and oddball on the one hand, and the angry emotionally immature though actually well organized domineering social know-it-alls on the other. It's a disastrous mix! -like Junior High School on steroids, run by sadistic petty bureaucrats and Heterosexual vicious Queens and there toadies, and all completely unchecked, running rampant and rough shod over the most poorly equipped to deal with it and ever put a stop to it.
Checkmite, to answer your artificial hypothetical dilemma, addressing the problem is the most important of course. And I can see where your headed, but go on and play though!
A closing word about full on organized gang stalking or cause stalking out in the streets: I find that there are credible accounts and discourse, even history. But one must put aside the Tabloid Weird nonsense that couldn't have been better concocted in order to discredit any well possibly real and disturbing socio-political phenomenon.
Even in my own unpleasant experience, I repeatedly discover not that I am paranoid, but that I have not been paranoid enough!