I think they are clearly software-related. But the question is what the root cause is.
You don't always know what the error condition is. It could be: "Well if the solder is cracked on this connection and this other sensor fails in this way, the following feedback loop is created and the software responds to the erroneous input by accelerating the car."
This is almost certainly some sort of cascade from the root problem. The cascade is software related. The root problem may well be hardware related. However I don't think you can just blame cosmic rays, etc. since the behavior described is too narrow. Why not uncommanded braking or power steering errors?
they'd just divert all Google requests to a proxy server that would do some extra filtering on both the request and response side......
If they actually blocked Google, many Australians would think they just went too far. Not like anyone uses Google to search for porn or anything (or at least that's probably not what most Australians think);-)
I argue we are in an age that intellectual/politico arguments say that an individual has the right to expression and information...and that is what is getting imposed on humanity as "good" for this day and age. Just like we (intello/politico cabal) believe that it is wrong to allow rape of 12 year olds. So respect my culture...is not an argument...we move by imposing what the intellectual cabal think is good. And freedom of information and speech is considered good by the intello cabal who influence the running of the world.
However what that amounts to is a conviction that there is one perfect culture (at least in terms of ethical and ethnic culture) which we can strive towards. I think this is a dangerous idea because it reduces the scope of ideas which are acceptable somewhere in the world. For example, if I say that I have no problem with bridal kidnapping as practised in some cultures (ancient Rome, pre-modern India, medieval Ireland) provided that cultural controls exist to prevent abuse, folks in that intello-political cabal (your words) rush out to condemn me without necessarily even looking at the issues involved. This doesn't bring us any closer to truth.
(Yes, I would defend all three of the bridal kidnapping examples I mentioned, btw.)
I guess I am more of an anthropologist at heart than a human rights advocate.
Culture covers pretty much everything: Language, law, philosophy, values, religious beliefs, marriage customs, material creations, and much more. These all fit together in complex ways. I don't think we should be too fast to judge other cultures.
I don't think culture is beyond criticism either. However, I think it is important that the substance of the criticism not be "well, they aren't like our culture! They don't value the same things we do!" For this reason I think it is important for any criticism of culture to start off with a sympathetic analysis before getting into criticism. For example, if the age of marriage is 12 in some culture, if arranged marriages or bridal kidnapping are common, and if sex is seen as an obligation of marriage, we should start by asking why and how these contribute to the functioning of the society rather than simply saying "they're wrong. We know better." In general, I think valid complaints about other cultures fall into two categories:
1) Structural Inconsistencies. For example, "You, as an Israeli, say you have the human rights of self-defence and self-determination. Yet you say the Palestinians cannot have these things. You can't say these are universal and hence applicable to you but are not applicable to others when it is inconvenient to you!" Or more appropriate for this debate, "You Australians say this is not a problem because your government operates according to principles of transparency. However, they won't let you see the list of censored sites. That's not transparent."
2) Functional break-down. For example, "In Utah when I lived there, there was an idea that if you don't talk to teenagers about the risks of having sex, they won't get ideas. However, when we actually look at statistics, this couldn't be further from the truth. I guess the question is, do you want your daughter to have sex and get pregnant at the age of 16? If not, you might want to reconsider...." Or more appropriate for this debate, "We say we believe in free speech here in the US, and yet our obscenity law is designed to allow each community to decide what they don't want to be exposed to. With the rise of the internet, doesn't this lead to censorship?"
At the same time, two examples come to mind that are easy to criticize in this area: Apartheid in South Africa and the sort of slavery we saw in the US. Both of these can be heavily criticized through both angles.
But many folks don't like that. It's too much work. Why actually learn about what you are thinking of criticizing when you can just do so without expending that intellectual effort?;-)
First, Australia's censorship regimen is directed almost exclusively at sexually explicit content. It's not that different from obscenity law here in the US, except that the government (rather than a committee of twelve specially selected for their lack of qualifications) gets to make the decision. So I think the Australian censorship purpose is not directed at political viewpoints, etc. However, the fact that it is centrally managed makes it open to abuse. Believe it or not, we went through a lot of the same sort of crap during the Reagan Years and the Meese Commission. Thank goodness our courts stepped in (here in the US) and put an end to some of those abuses.
At the same time, I am not entirely sure the situation in the US, post-Miller v. California, is much better. Miller basically allowed individual communities what sexually explicit content they wanted to be allowed. This means that individual communities can serve as venues for attempts to censor the porn market in the US. The Meese Commission made great use of this, usually bringing prosecution against porn companies in as many jurisdictions as they could trying to force either bankrupcy due to defence fees or a conviction somewhere (anywhere!). Of course charges would be dropped if the defendant would sign away his/her Constitutional rights...... Lawyers involved said "we never lost a case." (That is, until they went after "Adam and Eve" and that company countersued... The government lost the countersuit and had to drop charges.) Eventually this tactic was declared to be Unconstitutional but only because of the terms of the proposed settlements. The idea of multi-jurisdictional is not entirely foreclosed. All we need is an overreaching executive and they could do something worse: instead of filtering the internet, they could put folks in jail.
A new generation of McCarthy sympathizers is possible, given that the Texas textbook requirements have now been revised to show McC in a positive light.
And then there are Andrew McCarthy's columns, which, for example, accuse lawyers who render services to Guantanamo detainees of treason.
More likely we will just see a new McCarthyism rise up based on Andrew's work rather than Joe's....
Ok, so Google has this "safe search" setting. Presumably if safe search is turned off at least some of what it returns will be material subject to bans in Australia. So it seems that is a perfect justification for banning Google, or at least requiring that Google queries pass through a government-controlled proxy server that can ensure that safe-search is always turned on.
Furthermore Australia has not had the best record of transparency regarding censorship either. For example, 9 Songs was given permission for screening but Comstock Films' documentaries were not, despite those documentaries winning awards (both contain graphic, explicit sexual content). Given that the government won't let citizens see what they are banning, what makes you confident that this won't be exercised in arbitrary ways?
I dunno. What constitutes infringement of such a gene patent?
I think it's fiarly obvious that exclusive rights to genes, read literally, would be stupid. After all, that would allow the pharmaceutical company to go around suing breast cancer patients for patent infringement on the theory that they probably have the patented genes. If these are not provided for in statute specificaly, I don't think they should be subject to patent.
The closest thing I can think of are plant patents, but they are surprisingly limited. If I buy two patented roses, I can hybridize them without running afoul with the patent laws at least here in the US. OTOH, if I propagate from cuttings, I am infringing. OTOH a properly cared for rose bush will outlive the patent anyway so I can just wait.... Same thing with apple trees.
I am not saying that gene patents are entirely bad, but before we go around allowing them we had better define in statute exactly what rights are granted and not just extend by judicial fiat the patent system to those areas.
I agree with you about martial arts, btw. There's something about being confident and being able to win a fight that is a great deterrence. It also builds a host of other skills which can be helpful in many other unrelated circumstances.
A few years after the bullying stopped for me, I had a run-in with a street gang. I figured out that they were going to try to provoke me into throwing the first punch or to backing off and that either way I was going to be in trouble. I was holding a tennis racket and did the only thing I could think of doing: adopting a "pacifist but not afraid of you" stance, letting them push me around a bit, but refusing to do anything they told me to do and plainly telling them that if they wanted to hit me I was not going to strike back. It wasn't twenty, but there were five folks there and I assumed they were armed.
I won the confrontation. They never escalated beyond shoving and they looked discouraged when they walked away. I had a spiritual experience during that confrontation. I don't like to credit things to divine intervention but something happened beyond what I can explain in simple terms.
Basically this administrator stacked everything against me. He said that since everyone was picking on me, it must be my fault, and chose a venue for confrontation where I was going down. I am fairly anti-authoritarian and I think this has a lot to do with it.
Let kids settle things out on the schoolyard. They'll learn a lot more from it than if we wait until they bring a bomb to school.
I think if you read my posts carefully, I see most of the interference in the bullying directed against me as misguided. The boxing glove incident is a good example. Instead of letting us fight on the playground, tooth and nail as it were, he decided to teach me a lesson. The boxing match was designed to punish me for fighting back the only way I could. If he had let the fight continue in the school yard, that would have been one thing. I probably would have inflicted some substantial pain on my opponent and maybe he would have backed off.
But that's not what happened. Instead this was an example of where the school administration went out of their way to compound the bullying by restructuring things so that the bullying would be more effective.
I am not saying the school administration should have coddled me etc. However they ABSOLUTELY should not have come into the fight on the side of the bullies. Looking back on all of the difficulties I went through as a child, this is the only thing that still makes me angry.
The worst of the bullies when I was a kid was the son of a police officer. The bully's father (the police officer), years later, was arrested for sexually molesting a child. I would be very surprised if the kid wasn't abused substantially at home.
Are you going to tell me that anything the school did was going to prevent such a person from beating me up on my way home from school?
Interestingly more than twenty years later, I actually feel sorry for that bully. I can't imagine the sort of hell he must have gone through as a kid.
If it crosses over into harassment or slander, that's another matter. In that case you are (allegedly, at least) harming another person with what you say - and while the federal government may not have a valid claim to curb what you have to say, that person may.
Harassment against public officers by attacking their policies in matters of public importance? Since when?
As for slander, nothing I have said is a clearly incorrect statement of fact so it's not inapplicable.
"George W Bush is the worst human in history, several orders of magnitude worse than Hitler. I wish he were incarcerated and put in a cell along with murderers who would rape him senseless every day" is not slander...... It might be wrong. It might be damaging to Bush's reputation if someone believes it. However it isn't a statement of fact that I knew or should have known was false. It is just an opinion.
Indeed everything I have suggested would seem to be at the core of what the First Amendment protects. Do you disagree?
I have generally operated on the principle that most people do unto others what they want done unto them. Some folks, such as bullies, just tend also to have self-destructive urges, so they take these out on others secretly hoping that someone will return the favor. Hence the fastest way to get respect from a bully is to stand up to them and return the behavior. Even if you lost the fight, showing you cannot be intimidated and are willing to stand up causes things to die back a bit.
This doesn't always mean direct confrontation. If the bully is indirect, going indirect in response is good too. But if you want things to die down, intentionally respond with less force than the attacker. Control the situation rather than let the other one do it.
IANAL either but I looked it up. In MA, 16 is indeed a bright line rule.
Really, though, this is an abuse of discretion on the part of the prosecutor although I live all the way across the country, I am inclined to make full use of my first amendment rights on that nature (phone calls, letters, letters to the editors, facebook posts, etc. pointing out that this is the sort of thing that gives lawyers a bad name and that the DA's office must be populated by power-hungry thugs....)
Oh wait, would that be cyberbullying? I thought it would have been Constitutionally protected.....
I was bullied every day through most of elementary and middle school. Not once did the bullies take my lunch money. They just beat me up with no pretext at least twice a day. Sometimes I would get bullied while walking home from school or walking down the street to a friend's house later in the afternoon.
To believe what you wrote, you must never have lived in a small town.....
I can understand what you're trying to say, but the teachers saw kids hit the girl in the hallways. It doesn't matter if it's constant bullying or a one time incident, how does that go on without any sort of reprimand?
I think it should have been reprimanded.
But we shouldn't delude ourselves that it would have made a difference.
It wouldn't surprise me if the guys involved fucked her and then had nothing else to do with her and weren't involved in the bullying. That's not the nicest thing to do, but it's hardly strange behaviour for teenage guys.
I actually agree with you. Too bad you were modded down. But then I was modded down for another comment.
The idea that we prosecute 17 year olds for having sex with 15 year olds strikes me as a very perverse approach to our age of consent rules. This is nothing more than "let's make it look like we are doing something to make sure no teenage girl ever commits suicide again!"
It's like the sexting case in PA: Let's prosecute children and sentence them to some time in jail plus being designated as a sex offender for life in order to keep them safe! Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. It;s a good thing I am not from that county or I would give the DA's office an earfull.
It is far worse when you transfer from another location and have no friends.
That was me. I was also raised as a Quaker (which meant I was expected by my parents to respond nonviolently).
But years later, the father of the worst of the bullies was indicted for sexually abusing a minor. Looking back on things this many years later, there is a realization that although I had it rough, I am willing to bet that I had it easy compared to those who were bullying me.
I was bullied once and (being the smaller and weaker kid) bit my attacker. The principal's approach was to bring out boxing gloves and to tell us to fight it out like men. I'm not joking......
Not to say it was all bad. Apparently some teachers, wanting the problem to go away, started bribing one of the worst of the bullies to stay away from me. In retrospect I don't really respect that approach either.....
Whats disturbing, is that the adults did nothing to protect this poor girl when it should have been immediately obvious she was being victimized. Sometimes when your being bullied, simply having an older kid or adult take your side can be immensely comforting.
When I was a kid, nothing disillusioned me about authority figures more than the misguided attempts of school administrators to interfere when I was being bullied. Keep in mind that I went to great lengths to avoid being bullied (sometimes by groups of kids) and sometimes this meant breaking school rules (like going through a hole in the fence around the school during lunch when I was being chased). The school administrators came out against me all too often. Once one principle even brought out boxing gloves and told us we had better fight it out with gloves on.
Looking back at it, I can see where the administrators were coming from but that doesn't make them any less wrong. I don't even really appreciate the attempts by some teachers to bribe one of the worst of the bullies with candy bars (so that he wouldn't bully me).
The further sad fact is that nobody can address bullying effectively when it happens, say, when the kid is walking home from school. So what are you gonna do? I did well because I had parents who were willing to discuss the matter with me and provide proper role models. But generally they didn't go to the teachers or administrators about the problems, which was a good thing given how bad of a mess the school officials generally made of things when they got involved.
The solution here is parenting. And while I find the lack of action by school officials disturbing, I wonder if they would have made things worse by getting involved. In reality they probably should have gotten in touch with the girl's parents proactively and discussed the situation.
I expect to work with my son on martial arts training as he gets a little older. He has had some issues with teasing at school. I have taught him how to deal with that:
"If you are teased, the best thing to do is to turn it around to a joke on the person teasing you."
One subtext to this: It shows confidence and courage, and it puts you in control. If you get upset, you let them control you. In the end that's what the struggle is about: who is going to control what you do? You or them?
So I think that even in the realm of insults, there is room to teach kids to be inventive.
Stupid laws passed of dubious Constitutional muster aimed at preventing another tragedy of this sort just as we saw after Megan Meier's suicide. Queue the national histeria.
Look: this sort of thing has been going on a long time. (While I was bullied extensively in grade school a lot of that stopped at least for me by the time I reached high school, but I can still relate.) It's tragic but not much can be done. The administrators are often clueless and/or helpless, as are the teachers, and there is only so much they can do anyway.
I survived and thrived because my parents did a good job in helping address this sort of thing with me (by talking to me about it. not by interfering). I found out later that some of my teachers had been bribing some of the bullies to stay away from me, but that didn't matter much since I was beat up by plenty of other kids as well.
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I think they are clearly software-related. But the question is what the root cause is.
You don't always know what the error condition is. It could be: "Well if the solder is cracked on this connection and this other sensor fails in this way, the following feedback loop is created and the software responds to the erroneous input by accelerating the car."
This is almost certainly some sort of cascade from the root problem. The cascade is software related. The root problem may well be hardware related. However I don't think you can just blame cosmic rays, etc. since the behavior described is too narrow. Why not uncommanded braking or power steering errors?
They can do what the Chinese did and run their own root DNS servers....
Sure it costs money. But it can come from a budget deficit rather than the ISP.....
they'd just divert all Google requests to a proxy server that would do some extra filtering on both the request and response side......
If they actually blocked Google, many Australians would think they just went too far. Not like anyone uses Google to search for porn or anything (or at least that's probably not what most Australians think) ;-)
However what that amounts to is a conviction that there is one perfect culture (at least in terms of ethical and ethnic culture) which we can strive towards. I think this is a dangerous idea because it reduces the scope of ideas which are acceptable somewhere in the world. For example, if I say that I have no problem with bridal kidnapping as practised in some cultures (ancient Rome, pre-modern India, medieval Ireland) provided that cultural controls exist to prevent abuse, folks in that intello-political cabal (your words) rush out to condemn me without necessarily even looking at the issues involved. This doesn't bring us any closer to truth.
(Yes, I would defend all three of the bridal kidnapping examples I mentioned, btw.)
I guess I am more of an anthropologist at heart than a human rights advocate.
Culture covers pretty much everything: Language, law, philosophy, values, religious beliefs, marriage customs, material creations, and much more. These all fit together in complex ways. I don't think we should be too fast to judge other cultures.
I don't think culture is beyond criticism either. However, I think it is important that the substance of the criticism not be "well, they aren't like our culture! They don't value the same things we do!" For this reason I think it is important for any criticism of culture to start off with a sympathetic analysis before getting into criticism. For example, if the age of marriage is 12 in some culture, if arranged marriages or bridal kidnapping are common, and if sex is seen as an obligation of marriage, we should start by asking why and how these contribute to the functioning of the society rather than simply saying "they're wrong. We know better." In general, I think valid complaints about other cultures fall into two categories:
1) Structural Inconsistencies. For example, "You, as an Israeli, say you have the human rights of self-defence and self-determination. Yet you say the Palestinians cannot have these things. You can't say these are universal and hence applicable to you but are not applicable to others when it is inconvenient to you!" Or more appropriate for this debate, "You Australians say this is not a problem because your government operates according to principles of transparency. However, they won't let you see the list of censored sites. That's not transparent."
2) Functional break-down. For example, "In Utah when I lived there, there was an idea that if you don't talk to teenagers about the risks of having sex, they won't get ideas. However, when we actually look at statistics, this couldn't be further from the truth. I guess the question is, do you want your daughter to have sex and get pregnant at the age of 16? If not, you might want to reconsider...." Or more appropriate for this debate, "We say we believe in free speech here in the US, and yet our obscenity law is designed to allow each community to decide what they don't want to be exposed to. With the rise of the internet, doesn't this lead to censorship?"
At the same time, two examples come to mind that are easy to criticize in this area: Apartheid in South Africa and the sort of slavery we saw in the US. Both of these can be heavily criticized through both angles.
But many folks don't like that. It's too much work. Why actually learn about what you are thinking of criticizing when you can just do so without expending that intellectual effort? ;-)
First, Australia's censorship regimen is directed almost exclusively at sexually explicit content. It's not that different from obscenity law here in the US, except that the government (rather than a committee of twelve specially selected for their lack of qualifications) gets to make the decision. So I think the Australian censorship purpose is not directed at political viewpoints, etc. However, the fact that it is centrally managed makes it open to abuse. Believe it or not, we went through a lot of the same sort of crap during the Reagan Years and the Meese Commission. Thank goodness our courts stepped in (here in the US) and put an end to some of those abuses.
At the same time, I am not entirely sure the situation in the US, post-Miller v. California, is much better. Miller basically allowed individual communities what sexually explicit content they wanted to be allowed. This means that individual communities can serve as venues for attempts to censor the porn market in the US. The Meese Commission made great use of this, usually bringing prosecution against porn companies in as many jurisdictions as they could trying to force either bankrupcy due to defence fees or a conviction somewhere (anywhere!). Of course charges would be dropped if the defendant would sign away his/her Constitutional rights...... Lawyers involved said "we never lost a case." (That is, until they went after "Adam and Eve" and that company countersued... The government lost the countersuit and had to drop charges.) Eventually this tactic was declared to be Unconstitutional but only because of the terms of the proposed settlements. The idea of multi-jurisdictional is not entirely foreclosed. All we need is an overreaching executive and they could do something worse: instead of filtering the internet, they could put folks in jail.
And then there are Andrew McCarthy's columns, which, for example, accuse lawyers who render services to Guantanamo detainees of treason.
More likely we will just see a new McCarthyism rise up based on Andrew's work rather than Joe's....
Ok, so Google has this "safe search" setting. Presumably if safe search is turned off at least some of what it returns will be material subject to bans in Australia. So it seems that is a perfect justification for banning Google, or at least requiring that Google queries pass through a government-controlled proxy server that can ensure that safe-search is always turned on.
Furthermore Australia has not had the best record of transparency regarding censorship either. For example, 9 Songs was given permission for screening but Comstock Films' documentaries were not, despite those documentaries winning awards (both contain graphic, explicit sexual content). Given that the government won't let citizens see what they are banning, what makes you confident that this won't be exercised in arbitrary ways?
I dunno. What constitutes infringement of such a gene patent?
I think it's fiarly obvious that exclusive rights to genes, read literally, would be stupid. After all, that would allow the pharmaceutical company to go around suing breast cancer patients for patent infringement on the theory that they probably have the patented genes. If these are not provided for in statute specificaly, I don't think they should be subject to patent.
The closest thing I can think of are plant patents, but they are surprisingly limited. If I buy two patented roses, I can hybridize them without running afoul with the patent laws at least here in the US. OTOH, if I propagate from cuttings, I am infringing. OTOH a properly cared for rose bush will outlive the patent anyway so I can just wait.... Same thing with apple trees.
I am not saying that gene patents are entirely bad, but before we go around allowing them we had better define in statute exactly what rights are granted and not just extend by judicial fiat the patent system to those areas.
I agree with you about martial arts, btw. There's something about being confident and being able to win a fight that is a great deterrence. It also builds a host of other skills which can be helpful in many other unrelated circumstances.
But those are too easy to turn into taunts:
M&M
Peepee
etc....
A few years after the bullying stopped for me, I had a run-in with a street gang. I figured out that they were going to try to provoke me into throwing the first punch or to backing off and that either way I was going to be in trouble. I was holding a tennis racket and did the only thing I could think of doing: adopting a "pacifist but not afraid of you" stance, letting them push me around a bit, but refusing to do anything they told me to do and plainly telling them that if they wanted to hit me I was not going to strike back. It wasn't twenty, but there were five folks there and I assumed they were armed.
I won the confrontation. They never escalated beyond shoving and they looked discouraged when they walked away. I had a spiritual experience during that confrontation. I don't like to credit things to divine intervention but something happened beyond what I can explain in simple terms.
Basically this administrator stacked everything against me. He said that since everyone was picking on me, it must be my fault, and chose a venue for confrontation where I was going down. I am fairly anti-authoritarian and I think this has a lot to do with it.
I think if you read my posts carefully, I see most of the interference in the bullying directed against me as misguided. The boxing glove incident is a good example. Instead of letting us fight on the playground, tooth and nail as it were, he decided to teach me a lesson. The boxing match was designed to punish me for fighting back the only way I could. If he had let the fight continue in the school yard, that would have been one thing. I probably would have inflicted some substantial pain on my opponent and maybe he would have backed off.
But that's not what happened. Instead this was an example of where the school administration went out of their way to compound the bullying by restructuring things so that the bullying would be more effective.
I am not saying the school administration should have coddled me etc. However they ABSOLUTELY should not have come into the fight on the side of the bullies. Looking back on all of the difficulties I went through as a child, this is the only thing that still makes me angry.
The worst of the bullies when I was a kid was the son of a police officer. The bully's father (the police officer), years later, was arrested for sexually molesting a child. I would be very surprised if the kid wasn't abused substantially at home.
Are you going to tell me that anything the school did was going to prevent such a person from beating me up on my way home from school?
Interestingly more than twenty years later, I actually feel sorry for that bully. I can't imagine the sort of hell he must have gone through as a kid.
Harassment against public officers by attacking their policies in matters of public importance? Since when?
As for slander, nothing I have said is a clearly incorrect statement of fact so it's not inapplicable.
"George W Bush is the worst human in history, several orders of magnitude worse than Hitler. I wish he were incarcerated and put in a cell along with murderers who would rape him senseless every day" is not slander...... It might be wrong. It might be damaging to Bush's reputation if someone believes it. However it isn't a statement of fact that I knew or should have known was false. It is just an opinion.
Indeed everything I have suggested would seem to be at the core of what the First Amendment protects. Do you disagree?
I have generally operated on the principle that most people do unto others what they want done unto them. Some folks, such as bullies, just tend also to have self-destructive urges, so they take these out on others secretly hoping that someone will return the favor. Hence the fastest way to get respect from a bully is to stand up to them and return the behavior. Even if you lost the fight, showing you cannot be intimidated and are willing to stand up causes things to die back a bit.
This doesn't always mean direct confrontation. If the bully is indirect, going indirect in response is good too. But if you want things to die down, intentionally respond with less force than the attacker. Control the situation rather than let the other one do it.
IANAL either but I looked it up. In MA, 16 is indeed a bright line rule.
Really, though, this is an abuse of discretion on the part of the prosecutor although I live all the way across the country, I am inclined to make full use of my first amendment rights on that nature (phone calls, letters, letters to the editors, facebook posts, etc. pointing out that this is the sort of thing that gives lawyers a bad name and that the DA's office must be populated by power-hungry thugs....)
Oh wait, would that be cyberbullying? I thought it would have been Constitutionally protected.....
I was bullied every day through most of elementary and middle school. Not once did the bullies take my lunch money. They just beat me up with no pretext at least twice a day. Sometimes I would get bullied while walking home from school or walking down the street to a friend's house later in the afternoon.
To believe what you wrote, you must never have lived in a small town.....
I think it should have been reprimanded.
But we shouldn't delude ourselves that it would have made a difference.
I actually agree with you. Too bad you were modded down. But then I was modded down for another comment.
The idea that we prosecute 17 year olds for having sex with 15 year olds strikes me as a very perverse approach to our age of consent rules. This is nothing more than "let's make it look like we are doing something to make sure no teenage girl ever commits suicide again!"
It's like the sexting case in PA: Let's prosecute children and sentence them to some time in jail plus being designated as a sex offender for life in order to keep them safe! Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. It;s a good thing I am not from that county or I would give the DA's office an earfull.
That was me. I was also raised as a Quaker (which meant I was expected by my parents to respond nonviolently).
But years later, the father of the worst of the bullies was indicted for sexually abusing a minor. Looking back on things this many years later, there is a realization that although I had it rough, I am willing to bet that I had it easy compared to those who were bullying me.
Yep.....
I remember those days.....
I was bullied once and (being the smaller and weaker kid) bit my attacker. The principal's approach was to bring out boxing gloves and to tell us to fight it out like men. I'm not joking......
Not to say it was all bad. Apparently some teachers, wanting the problem to go away, started bribing one of the worst of the bullies to stay away from me. In retrospect I don't really respect that approach either.....
When I was a kid, nothing disillusioned me about authority figures more than the misguided attempts of school administrators to interfere when I was being bullied. Keep in mind that I went to great lengths to avoid being bullied (sometimes by groups of kids) and sometimes this meant breaking school rules (like going through a hole in the fence around the school during lunch when I was being chased). The school administrators came out against me all too often. Once one principle even brought out boxing gloves and told us we had better fight it out with gloves on.
Looking back at it, I can see where the administrators were coming from but that doesn't make them any less wrong. I don't even really appreciate the attempts by some teachers to bribe one of the worst of the bullies with candy bars (so that he wouldn't bully me).
The further sad fact is that nobody can address bullying effectively when it happens, say, when the kid is walking home from school. So what are you gonna do? I did well because I had parents who were willing to discuss the matter with me and provide proper role models. But generally they didn't go to the teachers or administrators about the problems, which was a good thing given how bad of a mess the school officials generally made of things when they got involved.
The solution here is parenting. And while I find the lack of action by school officials disturbing, I wonder if they would have made things worse by getting involved. In reality they probably should have gotten in touch with the girl's parents proactively and discussed the situation.
I expect to work with my son on martial arts training as he gets a little older. He has had some issues with teasing at school. I have taught him how to deal with that:
"If you are teased, the best thing to do is to turn it around to a joke on the person teasing you."
One subtext to this:
It shows confidence and courage, and it puts you in control. If you get upset, you let them control you. In the end that's what the struggle is about: who is going to control what you do? You or them?
So I think that even in the realm of insults, there is room to teach kids to be inventive.
Stupid laws passed of dubious Constitutional muster aimed at preventing another tragedy of this sort just as we saw after Megan Meier's suicide. Queue the national histeria.
Look: this sort of thing has been going on a long time. (While I was bullied extensively in grade school a lot of that stopped at least for me by the time I reached high school, but I can still relate.) It's tragic but not much can be done. The administrators are often clueless and/or helpless, as are the teachers, and there is only so much they can do anyway.
I survived and thrived because my parents did a good job in helping address this sort of thing with me (by talking to me about it. not by interfering). I found out later that some of my teachers had been bribing some of the bullies to stay away from me, but that didn't matter much since I was beat up by plenty of other kids as well.
So instead we will turn our schools into prisons.