That may surely be a factor, but here another factor has likely been the change in administration in 2006. The previous social democratic administration was vehemently opposed to doing anything about the bullies, always suggesting the victim do something about him instead. The change came when the current right-wing administration took over.
Preferably in a way that makes an unforgettable impression.
But that would take some real conflict resolution skills on the part of psychologists and social workers, and that stuff's kinda hard....
But why get out and deal with the harsh world outside when it's much more cushy to stay in your office drinking coffee? Or at least that's how many teachers and other school officials seem to think.
Actually, most bullies I've had to deal with have been the slow ones. Most of them had either sawdust or vacuum between their ears, and flunked most of their classes except sports, which pretty much was the only class that most of them shone in.
If you're gonna be fucking around on windy cliffs, learn to climb, grab some rope so you don't fall, and learn to protect yourself. It's nobody else's duty to do so.
Your analogy is flawed. There is no legal mandate that you play around on windy cliffs, but there is a legal mandate that kids must attend school. That's why I consider those that make you go to school at least partially responsible for any problems you encounter there.
Those poor bullies are really the victims of the kids they beat up, because the kids being beaten up are practically asking the bullies to commit violence against them.
Sounds a lot like Muslims defending the Islamic imperative that females must use a burqa: Those poor men are really the victims of the improperly dressed women. They can't help that they are being sexually aroused by women not covering their entire body and head with pieces of cloth, and so it's not their fault that they rape them. Not covering your head is practically asking to be gang-raped by every man in sight.
That version is laughed at by many who at the same time consider your version the absolute truth.
If you something that other kids have that they don't, you will be bullied
Not necessarily, although it is likely very common. I was bullied in grade school, with typical attributes of bullying victims like wearing glasses, not being good at sports, having unpopular interests such as computers, reading technical literature, not to mention my interest in dinosaurs (which nowadays is not that strong, but I still enjoy reading about it every now and then, like with any other natural science topic).
But when I was in 7th grade, something happened that made all attempts at bullying stop immediately: I took part (and succeeded in passing the top-level-questions) in a (knowledge quiz type) game show aired on national television. Despite the decidedly nerdy topic, dinosaurs, this event became a turning point in my life. From being a bullied nobody with nerdy interests, I became known to everyone in the school, and a lot of people outside the school too (TV station ratings estimate the number of viewers to more than one million, which is pretty good for a country of nine million), and suddenly everyone wanted to be my friend, including my former bullies. The name-calling was gone, instead they all said hi when I passed and really wanted me to stop and chat with them, etc. People flagged me down on the streets and wanted autographs, etc. It was a great time.
Although accidental, the timing turned out to be perfect. A half year later, Jurassic Park had its premiere, and I was contacted by major radio stations and newspapers for press screenings and double-page interviews as a "dinosaur expert" (I was 13 at the time). This caused another flurry of attention and renewed interest from the public at large.
Yeah, you feel bad if someone is shot by a hunter, but should they really have been running around in the woods wearing a deer costume?
A hunter that cannot distinguish real deer from a guy in a deer costume should never be allowed to become a hunter, or even buying a firearm, in the first place.
How much is one wage? I thought wage meant salary, which does not have a fixed size. You'll have to excuse me for not having English as my native tongue, which means that there could be slang words that I haven't heard of.
the guy in an English class who can barely read so the teacher dumbs down the class
Reminds me of when I had just begun high school. One of the first lessons in Swedish (yes, I'm a native swede) started out with a test where we were asked to write down all the letters in the alphabet, and mark all the vowels with a ring. I was stupefied, since I couldn't really believe that there were people entering high school that still lacked such fundamental knowledge. I even recall snidely asking the teacher if I had taken a wrong turn and ended up in a primary school. She agreed that the test was silly, but told me that they'd had cases where pupils hadn't known the alphabet, so they'd decided to test all newcomers for this.
or the person struggling with basic math in Calculus so the entire class has to slow down.
When I started studying at the above high school, we were actually divided into several groups in mathematics based on prior knowledge, learning capacity and interest. I attended the top class, which skipped most of the basic training and focused more on more complicated subjects such as proving theorems. But after just a year the school abolished this system, because of the prevailing social democratic notion that this system meant that all students were not given "equal opportunities", which was very politically incorrect at the time. Instead, everyone had to step down to the level of those that almost didn't know how to compute 2+2.
The scientists also note that 95% of these bullies go on to become flagrant homosexuals
I don't know about that (I mean, how can you know that someone is gay if they steadfastly refuse to admit it themselves), but I do know that several of those that bullied me when I was a kid are now or has already been in prison, at least one of them because he botched a robbery out of his own stupidity. Sure, it is based on hearsay, but it fits their personalities perfectly.
So my personal revenge is this: Who won in the end? They, who went on to become criminal lowlifes or me, who went on to get a good education and a nice, interesting job.
It turned out he was constantly bullied by one kid because he was gay.... Why did he hate him so much?
My gut feeling? Because the bully was insecure about his own sexuality. By lashing out and abusing someone who is openly gay, he might have been able to convince himself that he was not gay himself, regardless of whether this was the case or not.
In that context, school shootings are quite understandable. It makes sense that school shootings are not just revenge against the actual bullies, but also revenge at all those who knew about the bullying but did nothing to stop it, including teachers and other school officials. That's likely why the death toll has sometimes been pretty high.
In short, I certainly would never condone such acts, but I can understand them.
Personally, I got my own little revenge a couple of years ago when I learned that the worst bully at my former school was now in prison for an attempted but botched robbery of a gas station. Of course, Swedish prisons are more like hotels than American pound-me-in-the-a** prisons, but at least they won't allow the prisoner to leave.
or teachers could and would routinely change the behaviour of bullies.
If they cared, that is. When I was young, many teachers and other school officials routinely shrugged off complaints of bullying with excuses like "it's just kids playing", or "it happens to everybody, there's nothing we can do".
there is something that makes them light up on the radar of bullies
Yes and no. When I was in grade school, I was bullied from the first to the fifth grade. I don't remember how it started, since I was very young (I was just seven years old), but it was both verbal and physical, although much more often verbal. Then we moved (not because of the bullying, but rather because we needed more space at home), and I changed to another school. At the new school, a couple of people immediately tried bullying me, but since the bullying was only verbal, and I had learned to ignore verbal bullying, they soon stopped trying. They tried the same thing with pretty much every newcomer to the school, apparently to identify those receptive to it.
So, they may try a few times with everybody, but the radar lights up when someone responds in the wrong way. Getting angry or upset because of verbal bullying is the wrong thing to do, because that's exactly what they like. Ignoring it worked fine though. Of course, that's just my experience from one instance of bullying. And the same would certainly not work with physical abuse.
When I was a kid, the suggested way to solve the problem was always for the victim to change to another school. They always refused to move the bully, or even do anything else about it that involved the bully. An ambitious teacher or other school employee might sometimes call the bully's parents, but usually the parents got defensive and accused the teacher of telling lies about their kid, who "would never do such things".
Sometimes, when faced with a complaint about bullying, the school denied that bullying existed at all. "It's just kids playing" was a pretty common answer. The idea seemed to be that if they denied that the problem existed, it would go away or at least become invisible, letting them pretend that bullying didn't exist at their perfect little school.
But there seems to be some slow progress though. Today, the official government policy on the matter is that the one to move should be the bully, not the victim.
It took no more than a minute to empty the bullies locker into the garbage bags.
A great addition would be to put garbage in the locker. And I don't just mean any garbage, really dirty and smelly garbage would be optimal. Household trash contaminated with uncooked shrimp and fish residue that has been left to ripen a few days would be great. Or in Sweden, you could use surströmming, which smells even worse than that. Of course, if you do that, the entire building might have to be evacuated to vent the awful smell out.
I just regret I didn't do that against those who bullied me during my early school years.
Re:The whole secrecy only adds to the resistance
on
Making Sense of ACTA
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· Score: 1
but then we also have Pirate party representatives in the EU parliament...
The parliament might be all that stands between us and ACTA being implemented in the EU. Because of the Lisbon Treaty, the EU parliament now has a say in virtually every new law and agreement that is to be ratified by the union. I don't think that they'll take the fact that they have not been allowed to see the draft treaty yet lightly, and might put some heavy grit in the machinery. They are very keen on using the newly acquired powers, and hopefully, they'll use their power to strike down the ACTA.
I don't count on the riksdag to do that, they are a bunch of sheep. The FRA law proved it. As you probably know, those who opposed it were coerced by the administration to vote contrary to their own opinion.
It is very unlikely that there will be a radical change in the Internet. Too many businesses, governments and people rely on current standards, that are going to be disruptive and expensive to change.
if I were a Microsoft shareholder I would want Microsoft to be wanting to make inroads in to this market. Morals do not pay the bills.
Is there any limit to this? Let's take this a couple of steps further: If you were a shareholder in a company that sold torture devices you knew were used on the citizens of the buying country, or maybe tabulating machines you knew were used in a genocide, would you still choose money over morals, knowing that your company is actively supplying tools used to kill and/or mutilate people every day?
I'm pretty sure that not buying a product is a strong and clear signal to a corporation that their product sucks.
I beg to differ. There are billions of products I abstain from buying, every day, without them necessarily being bad products. Simply not buying a product does not send any signal at all, since it is the default. The only signal that may be sent is if almost everyone chooses to not buy a product, but that signal is still very unclear. The producer might just think that their marketing is lacking, or any other of a hundred reasons other than "our product sucks".
The only way to send a clear signal that you don't like a product is to tell the manufacturer so, either directly to some representative of theirs, or indirectly by posting messages on blogs, message boards, etc, about how much the product sucks.
Not to diminish anything about the Linux kernel, but many of the largest supercomputers are just very large groups of pretty ordinary rack or blade servers, interconnected by special high-performance low-latency networks. I'd say that the (hardware) difference between a wireless router and a home PC is far bigger than the difference between a home PC and a compute cluster node.
Slashdot Mirror
That may surely be a factor, but here another factor has likely been the change in administration in 2006. The previous social democratic administration was vehemently opposed to doing anything about the bullies, always suggesting the victim do something about him instead. The change came when the current right-wing administration took over.
Teaching the bullies a thing or two
Preferably in a way that makes an unforgettable impression.
But that would take some real conflict resolution skills on the part of psychologists and social workers, and that stuff's kinda hard....
But why get out and deal with the harsh world outside when it's much more cushy to stay in your office drinking coffee? Or at least that's how many teachers and other school officials seem to think.
But still, what you are in essence doing is to tell your kid that it's his fault, and that he needs to change for the bullying to stop.
the ones that are a bit slower?
Actually, most bullies I've had to deal with have been the slow ones. Most of them had either sawdust or vacuum between their ears, and flunked most of their classes except sports, which pretty much was the only class that most of them shone in.
If you're gonna be fucking around on windy cliffs, learn to climb, grab some rope so you don't fall, and learn to protect yourself. It's nobody else's duty to do so.
Your analogy is flawed. There is no legal mandate that you play around on windy cliffs, but there is a legal mandate that kids must attend school. That's why I consider those that make you go to school at least partially responsible for any problems you encounter there.
Those poor bullies are really the victims of the kids they beat up, because the kids being beaten up are practically asking the bullies to commit violence against them.
Sounds a lot like Muslims defending the Islamic imperative that females must use a burqa: Those poor men are really the victims of the improperly dressed women. They can't help that they are being sexually aroused by women not covering their entire body and head with pieces of cloth, and so it's not their fault that they rape them. Not covering your head is practically asking to be gang-raped by every man in sight.
That version is laughed at by many who at the same time consider your version the absolute truth.
If you something that other kids have that they don't, you will be bullied
Not necessarily, although it is likely very common. I was bullied in grade school, with typical attributes of bullying victims like wearing glasses, not being good at sports, having unpopular interests such as computers, reading technical literature, not to mention my interest in dinosaurs (which nowadays is not that strong, but I still enjoy reading about it every now and then, like with any other natural science topic).
But when I was in 7th grade, something happened that made all attempts at bullying stop immediately: I took part (and succeeded in passing the top-level-questions) in a (knowledge quiz type) game show aired on national television. Despite the decidedly nerdy topic, dinosaurs, this event became a turning point in my life. From being a bullied nobody with nerdy interests, I became known to everyone in the school, and a lot of people outside the school too (TV station ratings estimate the number of viewers to more than one million, which is pretty good for a country of nine million), and suddenly everyone wanted to be my friend, including my former bullies. The name-calling was gone, instead they all said hi when I passed and really wanted me to stop and chat with them, etc. People flagged me down on the streets and wanted autographs, etc. It was a great time.
Although accidental, the timing turned out to be perfect. A half year later, Jurassic Park had its premiere, and I was contacted by major radio stations and newspapers for press screenings and double-page interviews as a "dinosaur expert" (I was 13 at the time). This caused another flurry of attention and renewed interest from the public at large.
Yeah, you feel bad if someone is shot by a hunter, but should they really have been running around in the woods wearing a deer costume?
A hunter that cannot distinguish real deer from a guy in a deer costume should never be allowed to become a hunter, or even buying a firearm, in the first place.
they make 6 wages a year
How much is one wage? I thought wage meant salary, which does not have a fixed size. You'll have to excuse me for not having English as my native tongue, which means that there could be slang words that I haven't heard of.
the guy in an English class who can barely read so the teacher dumbs down the class
Reminds me of when I had just begun high school. One of the first lessons in Swedish (yes, I'm a native swede) started out with a test where we were asked to write down all the letters in the alphabet, and mark all the vowels with a ring. I was stupefied, since I couldn't really believe that there were people entering high school that still lacked such fundamental knowledge. I even recall snidely asking the teacher if I had taken a wrong turn and ended up in a primary school. She agreed that the test was silly, but told me that they'd had cases where pupils hadn't known the alphabet, so they'd decided to test all newcomers for this.
or the person struggling with basic math in Calculus so the entire class has to slow down.
When I started studying at the above high school, we were actually divided into several groups in mathematics based on prior knowledge, learning capacity and interest. I attended the top class, which skipped most of the basic training and focused more on more complicated subjects such as proving theorems. But after just a year the school abolished this system, because of the prevailing social democratic notion that this system meant that all students were not given "equal opportunities", which was very politically incorrect at the time. Instead, everyone had to step down to the level of those that almost didn't know how to compute 2+2.
The scientists also note that 95% of these bullies go on to become flagrant homosexuals
I don't know about that (I mean, how can you know that someone is gay if they steadfastly refuse to admit it themselves), but I do know that several of those that bullied me when I was a kid are now or has already been in prison, at least one of them because he botched a robbery out of his own stupidity. Sure, it is based on hearsay, but it fits their personalities perfectly.
So my personal revenge is this: Who won in the end? They, who went on to become criminal lowlifes or me, who went on to get a good education and a nice, interesting job.
It turned out he was constantly bullied by one kid because he was gay. ... Why did he hate him so much?
My gut feeling? Because the bully was insecure about his own sexuality. By lashing out and abusing someone who is openly gay, he might have been able to convince himself that he was not gay himself, regardless of whether this was the case or not.
Well, the unfortunate and scary thing about human nature is that you don't have to be a monster to sometimes act like one.
Or conversely, as the saying "wolf in sheep's clothing" means: You can be a monster even if you don't always act as one.
In that context, school shootings are quite understandable. It makes sense that school shootings are not just revenge against the actual bullies, but also revenge at all those who knew about the bullying but did nothing to stop it, including teachers and other school officials. That's likely why the death toll has sometimes been pretty high.
In short, I certainly would never condone such acts, but I can understand them.
Personally, I got my own little revenge a couple of years ago when I learned that the worst bully at my former school was now in prison for an attempted but botched robbery of a gas station. Of course, Swedish prisons are more like hotels than American pound-me-in-the-a** prisons, but at least they won't allow the prisoner to leave.
or teachers could and would routinely change the behaviour of bullies.
If they cared, that is. When I was young, many teachers and other school officials routinely shrugged off complaints of bullying with excuses like "it's just kids playing", or "it happens to everybody, there's nothing we can do".
there is something that makes them light up on the radar of bullies
Yes and no. When I was in grade school, I was bullied from the first to the fifth grade. I don't remember how it started, since I was very young (I was just seven years old), but it was both verbal and physical, although much more often verbal. Then we moved (not because of the bullying, but rather because we needed more space at home), and I changed to another school. At the new school, a couple of people immediately tried bullying me, but since the bullying was only verbal, and I had learned to ignore verbal bullying, they soon stopped trying. They tried the same thing with pretty much every newcomer to the school, apparently to identify those receptive to it.
So, they may try a few times with everybody, but the radar lights up when someone responds in the wrong way. Getting angry or upset because of verbal bullying is the wrong thing to do, because that's exactly what they like. Ignoring it worked fine though. Of course, that's just my experience from one instance of bullying. And the same would certainly not work with physical abuse.
When I was a kid, the suggested way to solve the problem was always for the victim to change to another school. They always refused to move the bully, or even do anything else about it that involved the bully. An ambitious teacher or other school employee might sometimes call the bully's parents, but usually the parents got defensive and accused the teacher of telling lies about their kid, who "would never do such things".
Sometimes, when faced with a complaint about bullying, the school denied that bullying existed at all. "It's just kids playing" was a pretty common answer. The idea seemed to be that if they denied that the problem existed, it would go away or at least become invisible, letting them pretend that bullying didn't exist at their perfect little school.
But there seems to be some slow progress though. Today, the official government policy on the matter is that the one to move should be the bully, not the victim.
It took no more than a minute to empty the bullies locker into the garbage bags.
A great addition would be to put garbage in the locker. And I don't just mean any garbage, really dirty and smelly garbage would be optimal. Household trash contaminated with uncooked shrimp and fish residue that has been left to ripen a few days would be great. Or in Sweden, you could use surströmming, which smells even worse than that. Of course, if you do that, the entire building might have to be evacuated to vent the awful smell out.
I just regret I didn't do that against those who bullied me during my early school years.
but then we also have Pirate party representatives in the EU parliament...
The parliament might be all that stands between us and ACTA being implemented in the EU. Because of the Lisbon Treaty, the EU parliament now has a say in virtually every new law and agreement that is to be ratified by the union. I don't think that they'll take the fact that they have not been allowed to see the draft treaty yet lightly, and might put some heavy grit in the machinery. They are very keen on using the newly acquired powers, and hopefully, they'll use their power to strike down the ACTA.
I don't count on the riksdag to do that, they are a bunch of sheep. The FRA law proved it. As you probably know, those who opposed it were coerced by the administration to vote contrary to their own opinion.
It is very unlikely that there will be a radical change in the Internet. Too many businesses, governments and people rely on current standards, that are going to be disruptive and expensive to change.
Exactly. Case in point: IPv6.
if I were a Microsoft shareholder I would want Microsoft to be wanting to make inroads in to this market. Morals do not pay the bills.
Is there any limit to this? Let's take this a couple of steps further: If you were a shareholder in a company that sold torture devices you knew were used on the citizens of the buying country, or maybe tabulating machines you knew were used in a genocide, would you still choose money over morals, knowing that your company is actively supplying tools used to kill and/or mutilate people every day?
I'm pretty sure that not buying a product is a strong and clear signal to a corporation that their product sucks.
I beg to differ. There are billions of products I abstain from buying, every day, without them necessarily being bad products. Simply not buying a product does not send any signal at all, since it is the default. The only signal that may be sent is if almost everyone chooses to not buy a product, but that signal is still very unclear. The producer might just think that their marketing is lacking, or any other of a hundred reasons other than "our product sucks".
The only way to send a clear signal that you don't like a product is to tell the manufacturer so, either directly to some representative of theirs, or indirectly by posting messages on blogs, message boards, etc, about how much the product sucks.
and on some of the largest supercomputers
Not to diminish anything about the Linux kernel, but many of the largest supercomputers are just very large groups of pretty ordinary rack or blade servers, interconnected by special high-performance low-latency networks. I'd say that the (hardware) difference between a wireless router and a home PC is far bigger than the difference between a home PC and a compute cluster node.
Yep, it's all natural, just like Arsenic,Strychnine, and Nightshade.
Reminds me of someone who (IIRC in a Digg discussion thread) claimed that Cannabis cannot be harmful because "it's a plant, it comes from nature".
What does it matter whether or not it is the last hour...can't the terrorist just set off a bomb...I dunno before the last hour.
The TSA must have forgotten e.g. the Lockerbie bombing.