I’m old enough to remember when the advice people gave to deal with a bully was “Beat their ass and they’ll stop.”
But bullies somehow changed the narrative to where fighting back was wrong. It’s not. Self defense is never wrong. The only people that argue this are bullies.
Some people only speak the language of violence, and if you want them to understand your reply it must be delivered in a way they understand.
Bullies do not self correct their behavior. They find it rewarding and it continues until they are stopped.
But bullies somehow changed the narrative to where fighting back was wrong.
I grew up in the age of zero tolerance policies in school which meant you would get suspended for fighting back no matter the circumstances. I blame those policies for the shift.
Same motherfucker policy was responsible for getting me suspended when I fought back against a bully he hit me from behind knocking me down.
But I remember in middle school had a bully kept picking at me. My dad said the next time he did it to beat the shit out of him. So he was flicking my ear during study hall. So I threw his ass down the blenchers and then beat the fuck of him.
He never messed with me, nor did any other bullies. And I am no fighter and wasn’t strong. I found over the years most bullies are just weak ass pussies and that break down if you give any resistance.
Same here with dad. I handled my shit in the 4th grade a single time. Bullies at my school remembered and I got left alone. I got suspended and dad got me ice cream because I was standing up for myself.
Several years later some bullies from another school who didn’t know me tried pulling some shit in the wrong place. Not school grounds so there were no policies stopping us. I had just turned old enough to drive. A group of them tried their luck and started talking shit. So I pulled out my tire tool and started swinging. I didn’t hit anyone. I just came out looking crazy and they went on their way.
This will not be everyone’s experience, but in mine you just have to look insane enough that no one doubts you’ll try to maim them.
My dad got me ice cream too. He was proud of me. And no at that school bully me again. Just had to teach that same lesson at each new school.
Yeah our millennial era zero tolerance horseshit was such garbage. I saw kids get suspended because they got punched. That kinda injustice was asking for kids to snap, when in reality kids should have been given a firm handshake for defending themselves.
In the age of zero tolerance, my son discovered that the school security will respond to fights, but not punches.
He had someone bullying him in high school, making fun of him for having a big nose. Told the guy he was done, and didn’t want to hear it anymore, and said if he said one more thing, there’d be trouble.
The guy opened his mouth again, my son stood up, punched him in the face, and sat back down. There was a security guard walking by at the time, and he saw it, and just kept walking.
I’ve felt my son’s punches in karate class, so my first reaction when he told me about it was to ask if I should prepare for a visit from the police, but he said he pulled the punch.
No one ever said anything about his nose again.
It amazed me that anyone would ever consider bullying him. 6’5" tall, solid muscle, about 12 years of Karate classes. It seemed like bullying him would be obviously suicidal, but he is a good kid who didn’t want to hurt anyone, so bullies irrationally thought he was an easy target.
I think you’re right. I grew up right before that… got bullied a lot until about 6th grade. Got into fights at the bus stop probably once every two weeks or so. Got beat up pretty bad when we had deep snow one time.
Once I got home, I got a knife and a bat and went over to his house where he was outside with a neighbor. I chased that SOB around with a steak knife and a bat until he ran out of breath… didn’t hit him when he started crying and begging me not to hurt him; but I sure instilled the fear of god in him.
He’s a Baltimore city police officer last I heard.
He’s a Baltimore city police officer last I heard.
That tracks.
Did the bully look like this and hang out with kids that look like Dragon Ball Z characters?
That policy lead to a LOT of abuse from the staff at my sped-ed school as-well. “You looked at me funny? Calls timeout staff to drag you by each of your limbs to the carpeted room”
My high school in the latter half of the 90’s tried zero tolerance… briefly. Fighting got worse under the policy, cuz us kids figured if we’re gonna catch a suspension, might as well earn it.
And the people responsible for that were thr columbine shooters, who were actually remarkably aggressive bullies themselves and not the victims people make them out to be.
Actually, there was a zero tolerance policy in my middle school several years before Columbine.
Nah I was in school before Columbine and we had zero tolerance policies also.
They never should have stopped calling them “weird.”
Yeah, no kidding. It was Walz’s winning strategy until the corpos told him to cool it. They’d already decided it was trump’s time to win
That was so mild too. Call them creepy shrimp dick loners. Make them look deeply unsettling and unhinged and inhumane and illogical little unlikeable creeps they are and isolate them. Use whatever sticks. Their top guy is a proven rapist and was best buds with pedophiles. Keep hammering that!
Taking the higher moral stand doesn’t work with these people; grab them by their fucking hair and drag them through the mud kicking and screaming. Do you wanna win and maybe slow this country’s descent into full on fascism or do you want to “not stoop to their level” and “uphold decorum” with words? Because what’s coming is going to be much more unkind than words.
That is the only way to handle these types. Time to grow some ovaries and start calling these pieces of filth what they are.
The great thing about “weird” is that it’s not really aggressive but more disgust. Like, if some guy says women are inferior you can say “that’s freaking weird dude” and leave it at that.
It seems that internal polling put the “weird” message as not really helping (or hurting) the Harris campaign. Arguably, keeping up the “weird” message may have been useful, but they were likely trying to find something that seemed to have a larger impact.
“they”
He’s right. Only effective strategy against a bully is to fight back.
“If you push me, I am going to hit you with a Buick.”
I’ve lost “friends” over this philosophy, but the friends I’ve gained since taking on the philosophy feel a lot more real.
Likewise, if you’re being bullied, destroy the bully and the bullying will stop.
I never cease to be amazed at the “if you don’t treat bullies with respect you are the baddie” discourse in the US. It’s been the MO in schools for about 80 years and has become the standard operating procedure for many adults. Protecting yourself and others from bullies is an ethical imperative. As is supporting others who have defended themselves or others are being further victimized as a result. Bullies (and the people/systems that support them) lack empathy, compassion, reason, and accountability and are only happy when they feel powerful, which they achieve by harming anyone they think they can get away with. The only language they understand is force and any other tactic is as useful as yelling at a brick wall.
100% - Cheers!
Colonel Graff:
Tell me why you kept on kicking him. You had already won.
Ender Wiggin:
Knocking him down won the first fight. I wanted to win all the next ones, too. So they’d leave me alone.
I’ve said this for a while now. You want to make a dent? You go after the ego.
Picture this: an endless stream of totally “realistic” phone-recorded AI videos of Trump playing golf. He lines up the putt—misses. Tries again—air ball. It’s literally an inch away now—misses again. Doesn’t blink, just traps it in, smirks, walks off like he nailed it. Over and over.
The key is subtlety. These can’t look staged or flashy—make them feel like someone’s nephew filmed it from the cart. Make it look like he’s genuinely terrible but thinks he’s crushing it.
Then blast them everywhere. Flood the algorithm. Turn his “I’m the best at golf” schtick into a punchline.
This is how you use AI to actually take Trump down—with a thousand tiny ego papercuts.
Just gonna leave this here.
Let’s adopt this as a manual…
I had a theory during Covid that if I would be able to embarass the shit out of anti-vaxers on Nextdoor, that they’d stop showing up and spreading bad info. I never got to check / test / confirm any results to what I was (completely unscientifically) doing; but this is a great article to make me feel like I am getting a pat on the back.
I have big narc tendencies and lemme tell ya that shit would kill me. The only point I am saying this is to harden the fuck up through some niche forum so that ‚public embarrassment’ doesn’t feel like dying anymore.
It kinda worked. But it took a lot of trolling like a lot and multiple bans on any possible social media you can imagine to shape oneself into someone more resistant to words.
First gain resistance by learning to say whatever shit is on your tongue and feel nothing about consequences and then come back to reason and you feel like unlocking superpower. Finally not shaped by others but being more of a rock staying solid and unaffected by external factors whatever happens.
The hardest battles are those we fight with ourselves
I know you’re getting down votes, but I appreciate your honesty and willingness to do some introspection. Good on ya.
It’s a bit of tomfoolery to be honest. I have no idea what I written here but it sounds like ramblings of a lunatic the logic of who made some perverse sense few hours ago but it is too emphemeral to understand after some time passes.
I am method acting comments on lemmy for some reason, looking to see what happens I guess
The thing is I could craft a perfect comment that would be likeable but what would that give me other than empty dopamine?
It’s far more interesting to go against this desire of validation and see what happens.
Can we truly free ourselves from the need to conform? Is it possible?
Nothing I have written recently was written to please an audience. Maybe I have done too much to the other side now, to irritate the audience but that’s how you seek those ways.
All that effort to stop audience in defining who you are and seek authenticity. To stop “being perceived” as the prime factor in “being”
If you don’t fight from a losing position, what incentive does anyone have to put you to win a winning when it is voting time? Counting on the Trump admin being awful enough for people to vote Dem is way too risky. Fight and inspire. Build collation and prepare to rebuild a new vision. You can’t just offer return to neoliberal politics is not the answer either. You’ll just restart the cycle over again for the next Trump.
DAMMIT! We WERE going to have Him RUN for President but now we need to Find Someone ELSE! Is Charlie Kirk’s pal GAVIN NEWSOM around?
-The DNC LITERALLY!
8647
If one of them says, “Well Harris was/would be worse!”, explain the concept of Schodinger’s Cat to them; in a universe where Harris was never President, you can’t say shit about what she would have done.
We need to go back to mercilessly mocking them and calling them weird.
Starts with you, coach. Until I see you on your soap box beating these shit heels with a bag of nickels you are just blowing hot air.
What? He was the one who started calling Republicans weird, he was the OG bully of the campaign
Is calling someone weird bullying now? That’s some weak shit. Normal is a myth.
I like how even mainstream politicians openly cuss now but we still censor their shit in online news articles… Whos fucking sensibilities are they worried about offending exactly if they dont censor words?
Nah, they don’t want to become a target. They’ll wait until it blows up on the streets, then point and say ‘see?’. Meanwhile, the public is waiting for the congressmen to do something. It’s something to watch.
Ain’t it something how seemingly every Dem in power grew a spine the second after they handed Trump the White House?
Who grew a spine?
Cory Booker’s long speech?
What I think is funny is that the dems tried hard with good policies and overwhelmingly got voted out and no people are wondering why they aren’t doing anything.
Exactly.
The senate is particularly bad. Schumer is basically MIA and is effectively rolling over because thinks letting republicans get everything they want somehow looks good for him.
They don’t have the votes in the senate either so I’m guessing the strategy is let the GOP do what they want until midterms and point out how bad things are getting for the average American at that point.
They don’t have the votes to pass a law, they do have the votes to stop laws from being passed. Further, the Republicans just killed a rule that allows 30 senators to block all bills by challenging executive decisions. The Republicans killed the rule to roll back a Biden admin decision to allow California stricter emission standards. Every challenge requires a mandatory 10h of debate. There are about 100 years worth of Trump admin decisions Dems can challenge to block the upcoming budget bill.
Will they do that? Probably not, because they rolled over on the CR when they could have easily filibustered it.
And yes, Schumer knows about this, he wrote an open letter warning Republicans not kill the rule.
This is what I hate about the Democrats. They’ll happily roll over, yet I guarantee you the Republicans will abuse the hell out of this rule if a Dem president gets into office.
They did a shit job of explaining their good policies in soundbites people could understand.
Maybe good policies aren’t able to be put into soundbites.
Obama’s campaigns were fairly successful at selling good policies as soundbites. The party did a shit job of following through.
Obama was and still is great at speeches.
The only people who thought his campaign was one of soundbites are the terminally online.
He had detailed policies AND soundbites.
They had soundbites but he explained their good policies in speeches people could understand.
Yeah no shit.
Oh, should we bully the Nazis now?
Pity we wasted four years NOT throwing Cheetolini in prison where he belongs, before he was able to do all the damage he has done.
Right?
“THE MIGRANTS ARE POISONING THE BLOOD OF AMERICA”
“Erm, anyone else think these guys are wEiRd???” 🤓🤓
