Bullying...or Bullying?

[starcraftzzz]

Bullying would be reduced if it wasnt for republicans passing laws that protected bullies

Liberalization of the schools have made bullying acceptable.

Do you have something to say besides regurgitated talking points?

[
"Poor little Johnny has a bad homelife that is why he lashes out at others. We need to accept that and protect him."

Yep republicans do just that Hell they passed two bills that protected bullies.

 

[Pho_King]

People with authoritarian personalities tend to gravitate to the political right. Not every conservative is an autoritarian, of course; but many are.

Authoritarians tend to not oppose bullying because bullying is what authoritarians do.

I suppose the corrollary to that is that pussies, wimps, and cowards gravitate to the left.

 

[BuddyColt]

If you stand up to a bully using physical means most schools just punish both children to avoid any conflict.

Bullies avoid physical confrontation. They like to urinate people off, but stand up to them and they run like scalded dogs... then again, most bullies are a bunch of dumb S.O.B.s anyway.

I prefer using the legal system for the most part, but sometimes bullies are terrorists that stay on the outskirts of the legal system. If you know who they are, a face to face is generally enough to end the problem.

you sound very much like a bully.

You mean as opposed to allowing people to ruin my life for their amusement? If I'm not screwing with you, I see no reason that you should get your pleasure from my pain. If rebelling against that means that I would be the bully, then as the old saying goes... it takes one to know one.

I'll tell you like this: I walk around the block to avoid confrontation, but if someone thinks that I will be a good victim, it isn't going to happen. Yes, watching someone that has wreaked havoc on the lives of others simply for amusement and entertainment getting their butt stomped gives me a certain feeling of satisfaction.

 

[Pho_King]

Bullies avoid physical confrontation. They like to urinate people off, but stand up to them and they run like scalded dogs... then again, most bullies are a bunch of dumb S.O.B.s anyway.

I prefer using the legal system for the most part, but sometimes bullies are terrorists that stay on the outskirts of the legal system. If you know who they are, a face to face is generally enough to end the problem.

you sound very much like a bully.

You mean as opposed to allowing people to ruin my life for their amusement? If I'm not screwing with you, I see no reason that you should get your pleasure from my pain. If rebelling against that means that I would be the bully, then as the old saying goes... it takes one to know one.

I'll tell you like this: I walk around the block to avoid confrontation, but if someone thinks that I will be a good victim, it isn't going to happen. Yes, watching someone that has wreaked havoc on the lives of others simply for amusement and entertainment getting their butt stomped gives me a certain feeling of satisfaction.

Let me guess... you were one of the drama club types....

 

[PoliticalChic]

People with authoritarian personalities tend to gravitate to the political right. Not every conservative is an autoritarian, of course; but many are.

Authoritarians tend to not oppose bullying because bullying is what authoritarians do.

Georgie!!!

That quote comes right out of Progressive Talking Points 101!!

Geeeezzzz, Georgie....I'd a thought you would have outgrown that propaganda...

OK...here is your review:

a. Into the backwash of the Enlightenment came the seismic shocks of two world wars. The First World War dealt a body blow to religious belief, trust in authority, and faith in human progress. And the Second World War, and fascism, Nazism, the Holocaust, shot holes in the optimism about man’s goodness, and the power of reason. Eugenics, a prime ideology prior, received a rude jolt, and sudden curtailment. Thus the open door to Marxism fueled by nihilism.

b. Herbert Marcuse explained that freedom was actually tyranny in the form of ‘repressive tolerance, and ‘liberating’ tolerance apparently meant tolerating only left wing thinking.

c. The wave of vilification of bourgeois culture received impetus from “The Authoritarian Personality,” by Adorno, et. al. which identified antidemocratic indicia such as obedience and respect for authority. Conservatism, of course, was another name for fascism, and represented personal pathology. In another work, they blame the Enlightenment itself and reason for the rise of fascism, but fail to see the repudiation of religion as a major factor.

d. It was this attack on reason that paved the way for the rejection of rationality by postmodernism. Postmodernism is a tendency in post-World War II culture characterized by the rejection of objective truth and global cultural narrative. The term "Postmodernism" comes from its rejection of the "Modern" scientific mentality of objectivity and progress associated with the Enlightenment, as well as extending its criticism to religion.

That's what you were gettin' at...."c"....weren't you?
You buy that?

You would do yourself a favor in picking up a copy of Melanie Phillips' "World Turned Upside Down," which, I believe might be the source of the above....

 

[PoliticalChic]

People with authoritarian personalities tend to gravitate to the political right. Not every conservative is an autoritarian, of course; but many are.

Authoritarians tend to not oppose bullying because bullying is what authoritarians do.

And you might be interested in Codevilla's piece, as well....
America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution
By Angelo M. Codevilla from the July 2010 - August 2010 issue
The American Spectator : America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution


a. As their number and sense of importance grew, so did their distaste for common Americans. Believing itself "scientific," this Progressive class sought to explain its differences from its neighbors in "scientific" terms. The most elaborate of these attempts was Theodor Adorno's widely acclaimed The Authoritarian Personality (1948). It invented a set of criteria by which to define personality traits, ranked these traits and their intensity in any given person on what it called the "F scale" (F for fascist), interviewed hundreds of Americans, and concluded that most who were not liberal Democrats were latent fascists. This way of thinking about non-Progressives filtered down to college curricula.


b. [Their textbooks] defined conservatism in terms of answers to certain questions, had defined a number of personality disorders in terms of other questions, and run a survey that proved "scientifically" that conservatives were maladjusted ne'er-do-well ignoramuses. (My class project, titled "Liberalism and Personality," following the same methodology, proved just as scientifically that liberals suffered from the very same social diseases, and even more amusing ones.)

c. The point is this: though not one in a thousand of today's bipartisan ruling class ever heard of Adorno or McCloskey, much less can explain the Feuerbachian-Marxist notion that human judgments are "epiphenomenal" products of spiritual or material alienation, the notion that the common people's words are, like grunts, mere signs of pain, pleasure, and frustration, is now axiomatic among our ruling class. They absorbed it osmotically, second -- or thirdhand, from their education and from companions. Truly, after Barack Obama described his opponents' clinging to "God and guns" as a characteristic of inferior Americans, he justified himself by pointing out he had said "what everybody knows is true." Confident "knowledge" that "some of us, the ones who matter," have grasped truths that the common herd cannot, truths that direct us, truths the grasping of which entitles us to discount what the ruled say and to presume what they mean, made our Progressives into a class long before they took power.


C'mon...'fess up:
That's what you learned, isn't it, Georgie?

 

[BuddyColt]

you sound very much like a bully.

You mean as opposed to allowing people to ruin my life for their amusement? If I'm not screwing with you, I see no reason that you should get your pleasure from my pain. If rebelling against that means that I would be the bully, then as the old saying goes... it takes one to know one.

I'll tell you like this: I walk around the block to avoid confrontation, but if someone thinks that I will be a good victim, it isn't going to happen. Yes, watching someone that has wreaked havoc on the lives of others simply for amusement and entertainment getting their butt stomped gives me a certain feeling of satisfaction.

Let me guess... you were one of the drama club types....

No, were you?

 

[Zoom-boing]

1. “I was bullied as a child. Mercilessly. Would my childhood have been more pleasant had I not been bullied? Of course. But my adulthood would have been robbed of its clarity, and of my clear-eyed understanding of the world in which we live—bullies and all.

2. Forty-seven US states have passed “anti-bullying” laws, with New Jersey’s “Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights” being the most recent and extreme. At the core of these laws is the seemingly compassionate goal of protecting our children. But protecting our children from bullies also prevents our children from ever learning the true nature of bullies—and how to deal with bullies—in a world often shaped by the aggressive use of force.

3. When President Obama launched his “StopBullying.gov” initiative in March of this year, the CBS headline read “Obama: bullying shouldn’t be a part of growing up.” But bullying is a part of growing up. It is a part of life….

4. Winston Churchill understood bullies. Neville Chamberlain did not. … the Holocaust might never have happened, if men like Churchill were in power during Hitler’s rise, instead of bully-blind wishful thinkers like Chamberlain. Right now, America is led by wishful thinkers and blind hopers who do not understand the true nature of the world’s bullies….since President Obama began physically bowing down to the world’s bullies, and philosophically bowing down and apologizing for America’s power, the world’s bullies—sensing weakness from the world’s lone superpower—have gone on the march.

5. China shifted gears from its “peaceful rise” to openly calling for “China to abandon modesty about its global goals and ‘sprint to become world number one….the top power.’” Egypt threw off its “weak horse” leader for the “strong horse” Muslim Brotherhood. Turkey went from relatively moderate friend of America and Israel, to a belligerent bully that launches flotillas and expels ambassadors. Lebanon has been swallowed …Yemen is in chaos … Libyan rebels are rounding up blacks …, and the Palestinian Authority has joined forces with the internationally-recognized terrorist bullies of Hamas, and shouting from the streets “We tell Obama that we are a people that doesn’t bow to anyone.”

6. The way to deal with bullies is not to bow down to them, and not to pass laws or resolutions that say “bullies shall not be bullies” (every failed or flouted U.N. resolution and sanction is evidence of just that). The only way to deal with bullies is to look them straight in the eye and to deal with them in the only language they understand: the language of the bully.

Wow the intellectually dishonest piece didn't have a shred of common senses! Amazing what people believe!

7. Here is how my bullying story ended. After years of being terrorized by bullies, and wishing in vain that my bullies would go away or tire of tormenting me, I finally decided to change tactics. I grabbed the biggest, meanest bully by the throat, slammed him against a wall, lifted him off the ground, and breathed my warning into his shocked and trembling face.

8. I spoke to him in the language that he understood. The language of the bully….My years of torment ended in that moment."
In Defense of Bullying

Great in theory, but in reality it's not the case. Many times bullies pick their preys because they are physically larger and stronger than the victim. Many times the victims are weak and have never been in a fight. If or even when they fight back they get their asses kicked. Some bullies will lay off, but most will then up the bullying. In other cases it's not one bully but it's a gang of kids picking on one again smaller kid. What is that kid going to do? Fighting back wasn't an option.

I remember back during highschool football. During doubles over the summer there was one set of water fountains, we shared them with the soccers players. On the occassions the soccer players got their first, many of the football players including myself would toss them off water fountains and push them out of line. One day, a little kid took offense (as he justifiably should have) of getting pushed off the water fountain (it was well in the 90s that day) and he tried to push one of the football players off the fountain. That kid took a massive beating.

People always say you need to fight back and that is what I will tell my kids if they ever bullied. But again what do you tell a say 100 LB 5' freshman getting picked on by a 200 IL 6' Junior? "You go punch that bully?" You better get the insurance card ready. What do you tell a 120 lb 5'3 kid getting picked on by a dozen 150lb 5'6 kids?

You tell them to buddy up with a 200lb senior. (Did you ever see the movie 'My Bodyguard', 1980? New kid gets bullied so he hires the most feared kid in school to be his bodyguard. Yup, that's the ticket!)

You (the parent) get involved and get it resolved if the kid can't defend himself.

 

[George Costanza]

1. "In the latest of what seems to be a string of reports of students and teachers bullying the mentally challenged in America’s schools, 18-year-old Stormy Rich is claiming that she has been penalized for standing up for the mentally challenged student in question.

2. The school maintains that Rich should not have taken matters into her own hands, though she had complained to the school for weeks about the issue, and did nothing violent.

3. Rich explained: “[The bullies] would be mean to her, tell her she couldn’t sit on certain spots on the bus…They were giving her food that they put in their mouth. I actually had to tell her to spit it out because she didn’t understand.”

4.“When the school didn’t do anything, I told the girls if the school didn’t do anything, I was going to do something,” Rich continued, and that is apparently what got her in trouble, and led to her being banned from that particular bus.

5. A Lake County Schools spokesperson clarified to FOX 35 Friday that they removed Rich from the bus because she displayed bullying behavior in sticking up for the girl."
18-Year-Old Stormy Rich Punished After Standing Up for Mentally Challenged Girl at School | Umatilla High School | TheBlaze.com


And, in a related discussion....


1. Every normal, not to mention decent, person decries bullying in schools, or any where else. Since there are more conservative parents than liberal parents- this, because more Americans identify themselves as conservative than do as liberal, and because no parent wants his or her child bullied, one would assume that conservatives would be at least equally represented among politicians, educators, and parents in clamoring for more to be done about the alleged epidemic of school bullying.

2. See the following Associated Press report of March, 2011, to see that this is not the case.

a. BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) - North Dakota senators on Thursday approved requiring schools to take new steps to prevent bullying, despite arguments that the effort was a time-wasting example of the "nanny state." North Dakota is one of only a handful of states that doesn't have an anti-bullying law for public schools, said Sen. Richard Marcellais, D-Belcourt. Sens. Oley Larsen, R-Minot, and Margaret Sitte, R-Bismarck, spoke against the measure. Larsen said children need to be taught how to handle bullying, rather than ordering schools to focus on bullying prevention. The legislation "rewards kids for thinking and acting like victims. It will promote a victim mentality and handicap kids for life, not just after the school bell rings," Larsen said…."People do need to learn to stand up for themselves." Senate approves adding school policies on bullying, bill now goes to Dalrymple

3. Note that for the Republicans, the bill smacks of “nanny state,” and it would create a sense of victimhood among students. To the liberal mind, knowing that any other state (or country) has banned something undesirable while one’s own state or country has not is a moral failing!

4. How different the solution would have been in days long ago when teachers, or parents could use physical force to end the problem. Or, in fact, the ‘victim’ could. Thanks to the Left, that is now considered abuse, and therefore illegal. Better the ‘offender’ be taken away by the police, in handcuffs.

a. Having undermined teacher and parental authority, the Left has increasingly transferred same to the state.

b. According to the North Dakota bill, “School districts would need to involve parents, school employees, volunteers, students, law enforcement, domestic violence and sexual assault organizations and community representatives when developing the policy.” What?? No fire department?

5. Since both the Left and the Right detest bullies, and both love their children, the tale is illustrative of how differently the two sides see the solution.
From "Still The Best Hope," Dennis Prager

What Stormy did wrong was to confront a bully at a time when the bully was minding his own business. That makes her the attacker. No issue of self defense or defense of others.

On the other hand, if she had stepped in at a time when the bully was in fact bullying the mentally challenged student, it would have been defense of others - a legitimate legal defense. Or, if the bully had been trying to bully her (Stormy), self defense - once again, a legitimate legal defense.

The solution to bullying in schools lies with the teachers and the administration. The solution to bullying in the adult world is the police and our criminal justice system.

If I was the principal of a school, I would make it very clear to the students that bullying is not going to be tolerated. I would tell the students that anyone who bullies another student will be expelled and anyone who witnesses a bullying incident and fails to report it, will be disciplined as well.

When a bullying incident is reported, I would counsel the student involved and then expel him/her for some appropriate period of time. if it happened again, the expulsion would be permanent. If the bullying incident was serious or violent, I would involve the police and the juvenile court system. Laws are nice when it comes to bullying in school, but not really effective. If it makes the politicians feel good to pass them, so be it. The real solution, however, lies with the teachers and the administration in the particular school.

The LAST thing I would do is to call the victim of the bullying incident in and counsel him/her that what he/she really ought to do is stand up to the bully. First of all, if the victim acted on my advice and was seriously injured, I would become a defendant in a civil action right along with the bully, my school district and anyone else even remotely connected with the incident. More importantly, however, "standing up to the bully" is nice to talk about, but, in actual practice, rarely works.