Advocating Bullying? [WTF]

[40oz]

Phml said:

I'm on the "man up" side. Which doesn't mean go punch a dude, but rather stop trying so hard to look punchable.

Yeah some people are bullied because of circumstances they can't avoid, and this sucks. Others go out of their way to be special little snowflakes different from the unwashed masses, then they act surprised when the very same people they hold in contempt react with anger and violence.

It's not going to hurt you any to conform to expected social norms in public. It might even teach you a thing or two about different perspectives and other people.

I am too, except with small children. Sometimes kids just say needlessly rotten things because their communication skills aren't at their peak yet, or they haven't had enough social interaction to talk to their peers in a way that wont hurt their feelings, or keep themselves from being offended by others. At times when I'm in the shower or browsing through Facebook I sometimes randomly recall times when I was really young, some of the things kids have said to me that made me feel stupid and inferior. Today, being an adult man with critical thinking skills and a stern assertive voice, stuff like that wouldn't happen to me, and if it did id know how to respond or cope with it. But at that time, being 7 or 8 years old, there really was no way I would have had the capacity to handle it successfully by myself.

not to mention bullying seems to me to be a way to strengthen a relationship with some people by hurting others. My younger brother and I have a really strong bond because our relationship is pretty much founded on making fun of people, detecting hypocrisy and being so sarcastic to a point where we pretty much excluded everyone from communicating with us at times. It drove our mom and dad crazy sometimes. People suffered sometimes but damn it if we weren't laughing our asses off. I've kinda grown out of it (to a point) but ya see stuff like that on the forums here all the time.

but I guess all I can say is that sometimes a kid will have to get bullied and the best you can hope for is that he or she will grow up and realize that they were all just stupid kids when it happened. I think everyone can take it if they at least have one friend to confide in, even if its a parent or sibling.

[Maes]

40oz said:

Today, being an adult man with critical thinking skills and a stern assertive voice, stuff like that wouldn't happen to me, and if it did id know how to respond or cope with it. But at that time, being 7 or 8 years old, there really was no way I would have had the capacity to handle it successfully by myself.

The kids that could pull that off at 7-8 yo were also known as "bullies".

[geekmarine]

Phml said:

I'm on the "man up" side. Which doesn't mean go punch a dude, but rather stop trying so hard to look punchable.

Yeah some people are bullied because of circumstances they can't avoid, and this sucks. Others go out of their way to be special little snowflakes different from the unwashed masses, then they act surprised when the very same people they hold in contempt react with anger and violence.

It's not going to hurt you any to conform to expected social norms in public. It might even teach you a thing or two about different perspectives and other people.

I've never really understood what this means. I hear people say something along those lines a lot, but I've never really gotten it, as it relates to my own bullying growing up. I never went out of my way to bother anybody or act like a spaz, I never really knew why I was targeted other than that I seemed like an easy target. I don't know what social norms I wasn't conforming to, or why it's assumed that if you're bullied it's because you don't conform to social norms.

[Pure Hellspawn]

Phml said:

I'm on the "man up" side. Which doesn't mean go punch a dude, but rather stop trying so hard to look punchable.

Yeah some people are bullied because of circumstances they can't avoid, and this sucks. Others go out of their way to be special little snowflakes different from the unwashed masses, then they act surprised when the very same people they hold in contempt react with anger and violence.

It's not going to hurt you any to conform to expected social norms in public. It might even teach you a thing or two about different perspectives and other people.

People should be able to do whatever they want as long as it doesn't harm anyone or anything. Now if they hate those other people, then they shouldn't be surprised if they are hated back.

Being bullied for circumstances that can't be avoided: This accounts for a significant amount of bullying.

[FireFish]

geekmarine said:

I've never really understood what this means. I hear people say something along those lines a lot, but I've never really gotten it, as it relates to my own bullying growing up. I never went out of my way to bother anybody or act like a spaz, I never really knew why I was targeted other than that I seemed like an easy target. I don't know what social norms I wasn't conforming to, or why it's assumed that if you're bullied it's because you don't conform to social norms.

Excuses by people to invent a reason to bully others, they act like braindead cave-men with a license to bully and mentally harm or torture their fellow persons.

For them it is enough that you wear something they think is odd, for them it is enough to notice you wont retaliate, for them it is enough that your natural facial features look funny to them, It is enough for them to think you are ugly.

These people do it because they experience fun while doing it without ever thinking about what the victim is feeling, they simply want their fun at that moment which is an integral part of being a psychopath ; a person with no empathy, a person without the ability to even understand or realize what other people (and animals) might feel in such conditions. If the victim would suicide they wont even feel regret they would just go 'oh my, i had no idea.'

*although the above would be the most extreme cases

[Pencil of Doom]

I hate Bullying, but however if someone tries to bully me, i punch the bully's stomach and lift the bully's head with an uppercut to the jaw and then i stare into its eyes with anger and rage.
And then i finger its eyes and finish by grabbing its head and slam it to the wall or the ground.
I have some enemies that have attacked me some months ago, but one day they are gonna pay.
And this is the way i fight bullies or any other idiot that wants to harm me, my friends and my family.

[Platinum Shell]

J.B.R said:

I hate Bullying, but however if someone tries to bully me, i punch the bully's stomach and lift the bully's head with an uppercut to the jaw and then i stare into its eyes with anger and rage.
And then i finger its eyes and finish by grabbing its head and slam it to the wall or the ground.
I have some enemies that have attacked me some months ago, but one day they are gonna pay.
And this is the way i fight bullies or any other idiot that wants to harm me, my friends and my family.

Do you use your fists of pain?

[Maes]

J.B.R said:

I hate Bullying, but however if someone tries to bully me, i punch the bully's stomach and lift the bully's head with an uppercut to the jaw and then i stare into its eyes with anger and rage.

You mean, after you ripped off his head with the spinal cord hanging underneath, and the big bloody red letters spelling "FATALITY" start dripping? :-)

[BaronOfStuff]

J.B.R said:

Shit, son. Who stole your milk?

[Technician]

Platinum Shell said:

Do you use your fists of pain?

He uses his power of imagination.

[clamgor]

geo said:

Life is a comedy, no matter how tragic.

In a way, yes.

[dg93]

This is just my two cents on this topic: No matter how the media and schools advocate for anti-bullying, kids will always find ways to still bully. Unfortunately, it is human nature and it is not a very good aspect of it. Kids/adults bully most of the time out of insecurity and desire for being dominate.

People should learn to ignore bullies and not give into showing emotion from constant antagonization. However, if a bully is causing psychical harm to you, then you should have a right to defend him/herself from attackers.

[clamgor]

doomguy93 said:

People should learn to ignore bullies and not give into showing emotion from constant antagonization.

Sometimes, ignoring them doesn't work.

[geo]

Everyone is different and no one can be a hero... without a few villains in world fucking things up.

[Phml]

I've never really understood what this means.

Do you think every person who has ever been bullied talk about it at length?

Everyone gets bullied at least in one occasion in their life. The difference between those who stay bullied and those who don't is more often than not whether they act like victims or not.

Just in this thread, you see these neat, comfy narratives of us nerds vs them jocks, bullies being insecure mentally-challenged brutes using violence as a way to assert domination. Essentially nothing but feel good talks.

Then if someone pops in with a different opinion, they're framed either as a jock or as a bystander who hasn't ever experienced the situation first-hand; because otherwise it'd ruin this comforting fantasy where there's absolutely nothing the victim could do on their own to stop being a victim.

There's an obvious Catch-22 in there. Much of "manning up" in this context, at least for men and I guess if we're talking at least teens (40oz makes a good point about young children), means stop whining about it all the time. Stop going on and on about your feelings. In short, stop being a pussy.

So the people who keep talking about bullying, those who dominate the discussion, are those who don't follow these rules, those who keep being victimized. You have the people who fare the worst speaking up, and this creates a negative loop of terrible advice being justified by those same people being the only ones sufficiently involved in the conversation, all agreeing with each other.

It's like listening to the lowest ranked football team to learn football. Except, whoops, we wouldn't want to learn football because it's a sport, and we are nerds, yuck sports!

But seriously, that's not to blame people. Today you've got the Internet, you've got mass media pushing the idea it's ok for men to bawl like babies and share their emotions; enormous echo chambers to the point it's easy to feel like this is reality, this is the whole world, this is accurate. But it isn't.

In many situations (not all! but many) it is easy to identify and tune out the parts of your behavior that causes you to be picked on by others. Again there are some who see claims like this as blame and react defensively; but that's not blame, that's frustration. You can try to complain collectively and change the laws so bullying will stop, which will take years, decades, perhaps centuries and won't work anyway because to an extent we're biologically hard-wired to certain violent behaviors. Or you could have a few hours of introspection and be rid of the problem forever. Change the world or change yourself, which is the easiest? Which is the most likely to work?

Obviously you have people who are genuinely not smart enough to do that, yet I feel confident most people here, including you geekmarine, aren't in that group. Yet again and again we see people picking the hardest, inefficient choice. It's just frustrating.

[Pencil of Doom]

Platinum Shell said:

Do you use your fists of pain?

Yes, i do, but really my punches are very painful therefore i call them fists of pain.

[Pencil of Doom]

Maes said:

You mean, after you ripped off his head with the spinal cord hanging underneath, and the big bloody red letters spelling "FATALITY" start dripping? :-)

That's near-impossible because for that i would have to force my blood pumping to my hands.
And i what i said is that i first punch in the stomach to distract, then lift the face by the jaw for pain and then stare into my enemy's eyes to provoke fear into them.
And i believe i made myself clear.

[BaronOfStuff]

J.B.R said:

And i believe i made myself clear.

This fuckin' guy...

[dew]

J.B.R said:

Yes, i do, but really my punches are very painful

Did your mother tell you that? *pada psh*

[geekmarine]

Well to be fair, I haven't been bullied since I was in elementary school, so I am today very much removed from the situation, but looking back, I have no clue why I was targeted, and so so no way of changing any behaviors I might have been doing that would've provoked such attacks. It's certainly not that I was acting like a little shit - I never spent any time near the bullies when I could avoid it, and I wasn't exactly outgoing, I mostly kept to myself. Yet you assert with certainty that if I was bullied, I must have been actively engaging in behavior that bothered them - well I avoided them at all costs and kept to myself, meaning they sought me out and I did everything possible to AVOID bothering them (not even intentionally, that's just my nature, I tend to avoid wanting to bother other people).

Now, I get what you mean in general when you say some people deliberately attract the attention of bullies - you have the show-offs, you have the smartasses, the loudmouths, the dweebs with no social skills but feel the need to constantly get in other people's faces anyway, etc.

I wasn't any of those things - I was just a quiet kid who wanted to keep to myself. The only thing I can think of that I did to remotely attract the attention of bullies was that I was an easy target - and I'm sorry, but even if I were to subscribe to your twist on social darawinism that bullying helps put people in their place, being quiet and keeping to yourself should not be grounds for getting a beating. That's not behavior that needs to be kept in check by anyone. Having a loud mouth or anything like that, yeah, I get that, but why also punish the opposite?

[FireFish]

geekmarine said:

I have no clue why I was targeted, and so so no way of changing any behaviors I might have been doing that would've provoked such attacks. It's certainly not that I was acting like a little shit - I never spent any time near the bullies when I could avoid it, and I wasn't exactly outgoing, I mostly kept to myself. Yet you assert with certainty that if I was bullied, I must have been actively engaging in behavior that bothered them - well I avoided them at all costs and kept to myself, meaning they sought me out and I did everything possible to AVOID bothering them (not even intentionally, that's just my nature, I tend to avoid wanting to bother other people).

Do not break your head over it, it is the past and you are beyond it.
The most absolute and simple truth is this and i wrote it earlier ;

----
For them it is enough that you wear something they think is odd, for them it is enough to notice you wont retaliate, for them it is enough that your natural facial features look funny to them, It is enough for them to think you are ugly.

These people do it because they experience fun while doing it without ever thinking about what the victim is feeling, they simply want their fun at that moment
----

They need no good reason, and you as a human have emotions, it is standard to have them. all this extremely bad advice to shut down your emotions is bullshit. You would be storing hatred and anger
which will manifest itself later in life and you would end up at a shrink whom would need days to fish those emotions out of you.

[clamgor]

I'm forgetting here that there are some cases of adults and teenagers bullying children. It's a ridiculous gig, to beat up a child when you're about 6-10 years older than them.

But that happens.

The children can't fight back. But some of them might try, very few succeed. It's a hopeless case and the only road to turn to is instead point them out to authorities.

But still, you don't live this life without learning how to fight back. That's human nature. It's why we have lived for thousands of years as a dominant species instead of going extinct.

[geekmarine]

Don't worry, it's not like I'm getting personally worked up over something from my childhood or anything, I just think it's ignorant to say, "Well anyone who gets bullied was probably acting like a little shithead in the first place and they deserve what they got." Where does that assumption come from? And I mean, really thinking about it, the people I knew who acted like complete shitheads tended to be the bullies themselves. There's this notion that bullying is some form of social darwinism, that it's the strong picking on the weak. Physically, that may be the case, but often, the kid who ends up being the bully is the same kid who is at the bottom of the social totem pole. Yeah, true, there's also popular kids ostracizing everyone else, but that's kind of a different situation. The popular kids may make fun of you if you try to hang with them, but generally speaking, unlike bullies, don't actively hunt you down.

[geo]

Crasger said:

I'm forgetting here that there are some cases of adults and teenagers bullying children. It's a ridiculous gig, to beat up a child when you're about 6-10 years older than them.

Some just call that abuse and not bullying. I don't think bullying is illegal. Abuse is.

[clamgor]

geo said:

I don't think bullying is illegal. Abuse is.

Something I'd like to point out:

I absolutely fucking hate it when people start misusing the words "bullying" and "abuse" y'know?

When you just do something kinda wrong to the person but it won't leave scars. Basically, joking around with them. And they call you out as a bully or an abuser.

This is why I think we shouldn't bring kids up to think they're the victim all the time.

[Kontra Kommando]

Crasger said:

Something I'd like to point out:

I absolutely fucking hate it when people start misusing the words "bullying" and "abuse" y'know?

When you just do something kinda wrong to the person but it won't leave scars. Basically, joking around with them. And they call you out as a bully or an abuser.

This is why I think we shouldn't bring kids up to think they're the victim all the time.

Sometimes people use the word abuse, as a way to disarm people in a heated discussion. Or they will ask you to "stop shouting", even though you are barely raising your voice. Its a really underhanded and manipulative tactic. But I find that verbally pointing out that strategy will sometimes cause the accuser to become flustered.

Verbal disagreements are not abuse; calling someone a disparaging name or punching them in the face is. Sometimes, it makes you want to demonstrate the difference to them; but the winner always keeps their composure.