Some food for thought on bullying

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(In relation to the rant below: sorry. I do know you agree with me. I knew once I got started I'd have a hard time stopping. I just went to answer your post and it all came out...)

This is a tempting idea, but since I dislike violence, just send all the bullies to an isolated place. Let them live with each other. They can tell each other how great they are as they bully each other. Of course, I'm not sure how long that part will last... (Just to be clear: I'm not sure how long they'll keep spouting self-serving crap about bullying being great. It might make for an interesting experiment, though. See how long the belief lasts.)

I did think of one thing which would make my idea unjust, though. Since I guess bullies are just obsessed with spreading their genes around, they'd have kids. Some of those kids might not be bullies... and they'd find themselves stuck on an island packed with bullies desperate for victims. The thought of that makes me sick. The thought of bullies makes me sick. The thought that anyone would try to say bullying was anything other than disgusting and horrendous makes me want to projectile vomit.

By the standards of some of the arguments used here, Phoebe Prince was "weak" and "deserved" what happened to her, and her bullies were doing a "service" by driving her to kill herself. Which proves how wrong those arguments are. Those smug little creeps aren't worth as much, all together, as poor Phoebe or any single victim of bullies is. Or Rehtaeh Parsons. Another good example. A bunch of idiots rape her and then they and their friends taunt her about it until she kills herself. Guess what? She's worth a lot more than they are. Lump all the bullies from both of those cases together, toss in a few more bullies for good measure, and all together, they aren't worth a single decent human being.

If passing on your genes makes you great, then mosquitoes must be truly wonderful creatures. Maybe anyone who buys into this argument ought to go stand out in the woods at night so those wonderful mosquitoes can suck their blood and pass on their genes. I mean, I have to at least wonder about either the intellect or the decency of anyone who would take any argument in favour of bullying seriously. How can they not see how self-serving it is? You could say the same thing about murder. After all, the murderer must have been stronger than his victim. He was weeding out the weak... Gah! I had a teacher once who said something like this. He told me I ought to go to prison, where I'd really be bullied. Said it would "teach me something". Guess what? He was one of the worst teachers in that school, a nasty, useless jerk. Who was proud of having been in prison... supposedly the fact he came out in one piece proved he was tough. Well, he was tough, but so is old shoe leather.

I've been trying and trying not to go into a rant over this thread, but there's only so much I can read before I have to say something. Bullying is despicable, period. If there are people who managed to survive it and do okay, as long as they didn't hurt anyone else, I'm honestly happy for them. But not everyone can do that. And the victims of bullies aren't the ones who are doing wrong. It is the bullies, and their apologists, who are the problem.

Yeah, this article is a bunch of victim blaming BS. The author of this article and anyone who tries to justify bullying is scum in my book. Wanderer said it much better than I ever could have.

Bullying is disgusting and greatly contributed to ruining my life.

"Children learn vital skills through bullying, it builds character."

I actually heard a lot of bs about that as a kid and how it would somehow teach me things that I'll need later in life. Yeah, right. It taught me to be afraid of and hate people and expect people to hate me and want to do bad things to me. I never knew how to stop it and telling wouldn't have helped. The teachers generally ignored stuff like that even if they saw it.

Who knows how my life could have been different if I could have been home schooled rather than spend years suffering and barely learning anything because of bullies and my general hatred of school. I quit at 16 and was so glad to be free.

Tehnically neither is accurate, since parasites need a host to survive, in the same way predators need prey. Predators and parasites would starve to death without their prey/host as a food source. Bullies do not need to be cruel to survive (although a bully may believe otherwise and their beliefs may be logical within the limits of their personal experience)....by which I mean that bullying is not a pre-requisite for the continuation of or advancement of humanity as a species-- if anything, I believe that treating each other badly rather than trying to understand one another and co-operate holds us back and creates more social problems than it solves.

I don't consider myself as bullied, even though I was teased by my classmates during all my schooltime, but I'm indifferent to that and didn't suffer because of it, so, even if what happened to me would be classified as "bullying", I don't see myself as someone that has been bullied.
I guess I've never been beaten up because I scare people. The only times I've been in fist fights have been during elementary school, but I voluntarily entered those fist fights.
I think that those fist fights only helped me to know how hard I could beat someone. Ahw well. It changed nothing.
Then during middle school no one wanted to enter in a fist fights, because boys said "we can't beat a girl" and girls said "we're too classy to enter a first fight".
I'm in high school now. I started scaring my classmates from the first day and now no one bothers me. People tease me at times, but I'm indifferent to that.
I've learned that, if you don't want people to bully you, you must scare them. This way they will hate you, maybe they will say bad things about you while you're not listening, but no one will have the guts to bother you.

My opinion on bullying it that bullying is just stupid.
I see no reason to bother someone just because they're different from you.
Everyone is different, so the bullies could become the bullied one day.

Well, on the other hand, based on the articles reasoning. Does not, a lot of talent get lost through the domination of others? If people, me included, are reluctant to engage in society does not my lack of production burden the system? Bullying is a way to assert dominance not on merits but on intimidation, it's a shortcut for indolent people. It may have worked in a tribal hunter gather society but how exactly does it fit into today's society? In the long run people who are bullied, like myself, will get over it but at what cost?

Ever tried searching the web for nerds deserve to be bullied? The general consensus is clearly much the opposite of what replies in this thread would have you believe: it is that, as long as someone successfully bullies you, they’re proving you to be weak, and this alone more than justifies the bullying. As long as you fail to defend yourself effectively, you’re fair game. It doesn’t really matter whether you’ve ever had a chance: if you haven’t, this is part of your weakness and hence part of what makes you deserve to be bullied. This view is exactly the one you’d expect from natural selection: the strong will always find a way to feel justified in weeding out the weak to make room for themselves and for their genes in the future gene pool of the species.

I think it’s interesting how many people make an exception for those with “disabilities”, whatever that may be. In other words, to these people, there’s a certain “threshold” of weakness—where your weakness begins to be called a “disability”—beyond which you cease to be an acceptable target for bullying. But you’d better not be just short of weak enough to be called “disabled”, because then you’re in for the massive bullying your weakness will so rightly earn you. I don’t think the exception for “disabilities” is motivated by any feeling that “disabled” people somehow get a free pass through natural selection, but by an artifact in the complex social dynamics of our species; namely, that, once someone is openly regarded as “disabled” stooping so low as to bother with them makes bullies themselves look weak, which they can’t afford.

On the other hand, the very paradox that you deserve to be bullied more the weaker you are, but suddenly increasing weakness makes you off-limits, may be an effective way to signal that you can’t be bothered to be very logical. This is important to assert your status. After all, who does bother to be as logical as they can in a futile attempt to use their brain to get the respect they can’t earn with their brawn? Nerds, of course! You don’t want to be one of them—especially not while making the point that they so very much deserve to be bullied.

Quiz – do you deserve to be bullied at?

Do Most Bullying Victimes Deserve to be Bullied/Not Deserve Help?
The Top 7 Movie Nerds Who Deserved to Be Bullied
Kids who get bullied are weak and deserve their torment
FACT: Most people that get bullied in school deserve it to some degree
Parents Say Aspie Deserved Bullying

Personally I think bullying someone who can't defend themselves is like picking a fight with someone with their hands and legs tied and useless. Some people I know get off on that kind of thing, but not me.

I like to counter-bully (bully bullies). I think they of all people deserve to be bullied, and it's especially funny when they have their vulnerable egos or feelings hurt when someone stronger or smarter bullies them back. No sympathy from me.

I don’t think it’s quite the same. If your opponent is artificially restrained to prevent them from using their strong and otherwise effective arms and legs to fight back and destroy you, I think almost everyone would agree it’s not a “fair” fight. However, if they’re not tied and you just prevail due to your superior raw strength or training, that’s as “fair” as you can get—you’re putting them in their place.

Depending on the rest of the situation, however, it could also be argued that someone whose limbs are tied, rendering them defenceless, has already proven not to be fit enough to stop you from restraining them in the first place and hence deserves their fate, too.



If you successfully counter-bully a bully, you’re merely proving them wrong about who is stronger. You won’t be able to do that to one who was actually right in targetting you.

By the way, I mean “stronger” in a very general sense relating to natural selection, but, in fact, you have to be really careful when trying to humiliate someone by outsmarting them, because, if they’re brawnier or otherwise better at physical combat than you, they always have the option of beating the s**t out of you and having the last laugh. Anyone thinking intelligence is better than brute force should really never forget this basic fact.

Last edited by Spiderpig on 13 Jul 2016, 9:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.

There’s a plethora of interesting quotations in the “Real Life” section of the The Social Darwinist article of TV Tropes. They actually make me think the “social darwinist” label is just a gratuitous way to show in a bad light ideas which are inescapable conclusions from the facts.

This is my favorite:



Then there are a few overtly racist ones, but you shouldn’t throw the baby¹ out with the bathwater: it is true that a civilization proves to be stronger than another by vanquishing it, but this by no means guarantees that every single descendant of the victors is fitter than every single one of the defeated. Everyone has to prove their fitness individually, no matter their descent, so racism is only a hindrance to a clear understanding of the situation and an excuse to delude yourself with a dangerous belief that you’re fitter than you actually are—this will prove to be a costly mistake when you’re challenged to fight one of those you arrogantly labelled as inferiors who can actually beat the living s**t out of you.

As always, when it comes to fighting for survival, we have an awful lot to learn from ancient peoples, who weren’t afraid to show their utter contempt for any form of weakness, and who would have absolutely no respect for so many people living comfortably today in the developed world, with plenty of opportunities we never earned. For example,



http://www.history.com/news/history-lis ... ng-spartan

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¹ Well, if it’s a weak baby, Spartans would probably agree wholeheartedly that you should.