I’m Expecting Gasps, Applause
Today is this blog’s birthday. Fourteen bloody years. And the damn thing’s still here. Just sayin’.
Oh, and you may want a moment to process this.
Consider this an open thread, in which to share links and bicker.
Today is this blog’s birthday. Fourteen bloody years. And the damn thing’s still here. Just sayin’.
Oh, and you may want a moment to process this.
Consider this an open thread, in which to share links and bicker.
A couple of childhood academic memories (in the case of 9-year-old Alex confirmed by mom).
In 4th grade, Miss Austin wrote the week’s 10 vocabulary words on the board and I noticed one was misspelled. I was too timid to call the Academic Authority Figure on it, so I went home and told my mother. Mom, who was and remains a jewel among mothers, went back with me to the school, confirmed that it was indeed incorrect, and politely pointed it out to the teacher. Miss Austin’s response “oh, well I’ve never been very good at spelling.”
$*@!%:*&!!!!
By 10th grade I was finally in the gifted program, but still had a few ‘regular’ classes. One of them was typing. Typing was an elective, which didn’t mean it was something I’d elected to take, instead it was something some counselor had elected to shove me into. The entire rest of the class was girls who spent every waking moment talking about hair, makeup, boys, and TigerBeat. I was a head taller than all of them, so none of them tried to pick on me, but it was still the most excruciatingly tedious semester of my life.
Typing was an elective, which didn’t mean it was something I’d elected to take, instead it was something some counselor had elected to shove me into.
I found it very useful as it enabled me to touch-type all through university. But I took it in the summer. All advanced placement classes during the regular school year.
Leonard was one year held back so quite a physical disparity. It seemed that Leonard’s mission in life was to make my life hell at lunch and recess.
One man I met long ago had the opposite experience: he attended a high school attended by gifted children and the children of the wealthy. The one kid who was bullied was the slow one.
Oh, and you may want a moment to process this.
I hate to break it to e/em/eir/eirs, but cleavage just screams “she/her”.
—
14 years, eh?
I think I’ve been lurking for most of it. And, if memory serves, I might just be responsible for the “Donate” button.
Clickable at all fine browsers.
@ JG: “I hate to break it to e/em/eir/eirs, but cleavage just screams “she/her”.”
Perhaps ‘she/her’ should wear a tie, long and broad, to cover her cleft chest?
It’s too bad that “grow up” and “get over yourself”
Shortly after the Columbine shootings I was contacted by a former high school classmate who had swallowed the “bullying drove them to it” narrative and wanted to enlist my help setting up a support organization for similar school-aged teens. The web site was an utter cringefest – “outcasts.org”, full of punk rebellion imagery and similar nonsense, all of which was clearly a typical adolescent “own the criticism and double down” coping mechanism. I not-too-gently pointed out that at 26 years of age, if she was still smarting about being teased in high school she was the one who needed therapy. And to be kept away from impressionable teenagers.
High school is not Pump Up The Volume or The Chocolate War or Heathers. It’s an eyeblink. It’s to be gotten through so you can get on with the rest of your life.
try disarming them with a message of concern or kindness
Try the Ender Wiggin strategy. It works better.
the organization was founded by parents of an 11 year old child from Oklahoma who fought back against bullying and was subsequently suspended from school. The child subsequently killed himself.
Sorry, but I call bullshit. No eleven-year-old kills themselves for being suspended. There’s a lot more to this that’s not being told.
For example, the pink shirt anti-bullying campaign started with a kid being called gay (or something similar) for wearing a pink shirt to school. That’s it. That was the extent of the “bullying”. Much of the “anti-bullying” nonsense is in fact an attempt to squelch any kind of negativity about homosexuality among schoolchildren. It’s not and never was about actual physical force or the credible threat thereof, which is what bullying used to mean. By dragging in the canard about gay teens being beaten up and murdered en masse, they link a twelve-year-old calling another twelve-year-old “gaaaay” as a casual insult they barely understand to dead gay teens. And treat the former like the latter.
Yeah, I wound up really learning it in an afterschool ROP class and it has served me well ever since. The ‘school day’ one was a waste of everyone’s time.
Sorry, but I call bullshit. No eleven-year-old kills themselves for being suspended. There’s a lot more to this that’s not being told.
Well, bullshit on your bullshit. While I agree that there may be more to some of these stories that is not being told, I don’t see anything suspicious with this story. An 11 year old boy did kill himself. I’m not following your reasoning on this whole gay thing. We are talking about an 11 year old. His story, with reasonable sounding parents’ comments:
https://www.greatschools.org/gk/articles/a-father-fights-bullying/
Putting an 11 year old in a position of being punished, not only for something he didn’t do/instigate but for something he was a victim of, punishing A CHILD for the most basic human human right, the right to defend themselves, is nothing less than child abuse. Hell, we grant animals that right. You don’t think the conflict and confusion of right/wrong in such a situation is capable of inflicting serious emotional and psychological damage on an 11 year old? As I said, I think this goes further to the failure of Western Civilization to respect itself. I believe it is this same problem that is driving the high suicide rates of our tip-of-the-spear military personnel. The rules of engagement are damn near suicidal. Well, they have been since at least Viet Nam but from what I have read and people I have talked to it has gotten a good bit worse mostly due to the unrealistic after-the-fact expectations, partly driven by technological progress and unrealistic movie fiction, of our so-called “betters”.
Much like the case of Rehtaeh Parsons, there is always more to the story than you’re being told. And the parents are absolutely the last people I would trust to be giving an accurate account of what happened.
If this:
doesn’t set off your bullshit detector I’m not sure what to tell you.
Putting an 11 year old in a position of being punished, not only for something he didn’t do/instigate but for something he was a victim of
…has been going on for decades. It happened to me in elementary school, it happened to other people on this thread, it happened to lots of people who didn’t commit suicide as a result. Life isn’t fair, and children have been successfully learning that for years.
Yes, that certainly did set off my bullshit detector in that it sounds like another example of females, most likely this little girl’s mother, trying to make a drama tragedy that happened to someone else about themselves. But that has no bearing on the boy’s story. Help me out here…are you saying the boy died of some other cause and everyone in this story is conspiring to make it about suicide or that there is no such little boy? While such things happened to many people who do not commit suicide, that’s not a logical argument to say it didn’t affect this boy this way. Again, I think it fits in with the combat military suicides in a similar manner.
You’re telling an 11 year old boy that not only do the adults not care about his safety but ON TOP OF THAT, he is so unfit for his society that he doesn’t even deserve the right to defend himself. An 11 year old. And that doesn’t have potential to do serious psychological harm to anyone just because most people process it in a different manner. Right.
Charles Murray has written another book about race, and it is guaranteed to further enrage the radical egalitarians who already hate him:
“Two known facts, long since documented beyond reasonable doubt, need to be brought into the open and incorporated into the way we think about public policy: American whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have different violent crime rates and different means and distributions of cognitive ability. The allegations of racism in policing, college admissions, segregation in housing, and hiring and promotions in the workplace ignore the ways in which the problems that prompt the allegations of systemic racism are driven by these two realities.”
“In for a penny, in for a pound.”
Something, something, pound Penny…
wait, what?
You’re telling an 11 year old boy that not only do the adults not care about his safety but ON TOP OF THAT, he is so unfit for his society that he doesn’t even deserve the right to defend himself. An 11 year old.
All right! I get to live up to my handle!
Said 11 year old boy’s loving parents didn’t detect anything off about said 5th/6th grader prior to his suicide? Seems odd to me, unless there was something about the home life where said little angel wouldn’t talk to his parents about the *bleep* he was going through in school.
(In case you think I am being flip about suicide, I had planned to do that very thing. I was ~9 years older than the lad in question at the time I was planning to do so. The only thing that stopped me was the realization that I had a debt of pain to pay back and that while there might be an afterlife, I did not know that to be the case. If there is an afterlife, then the days spent here will be as nothing. If there isn’t, this is all that I can experience.
To some degree, commenting here does not provide any installments upon the aforementioned debt. @WTP may invoke a conversation that will.)
@ RC: “… where said little angel wouldn’t talk to his parents about the *bleep* he was going through in school.”
I never told anyone or complained about the daily bullying at school or home. In the family only my brother knew of it and its effect on him has been described above. There was no point in telling anyone. My belief then was that bullies, even if cautioned, would always find an apparently ‘innocent’ way to make me suffer. One becomes totally conditioned and becomes fearful at the mere sight of them after years of being targeted. [A nudge is as good as a wink to a blind man.] At my school in the 1960s the senior boys kept discipline in the school yard at recess breaks and their attitude was laissez faire to say the least. The teaching staff retreated at recess times to the staff room. I didn’t even report the time when two lads, 6’3″ and 6’5″ grabbed me, one behind and one in front and choked me unconscious during year 11 while we waited for a teacher to arrive. [I’m 5’7″.] Those two lads went on to become sporting ‘Gods’ of the school and were highly honoured. Speaking now as a retired teacher and behavioural specialist I still hold to the belief that, for all the noble anti-bullying programs, the dynamic of active [adolescent] peer groups is such that adults would have to be on the spot nearly all the time to prevent bullying. Bullies are cunning and duplicitous. For me the daily/routine bullying tapered off in later years partly as I became so superbly fit and was extremely strong that the other lads started to show some grudging respect for my athletic ability, but there was never any doubt that I was at the bottom of the pecking order still.
I must also add that I experienced frequent bullying while working in a state government department for human services and the bullies were all trained in social work/welfare; they were really nasty people and not just to me. If one is different and stands out one gets hammered. There is one certainty I know: it is that autistics such as I who have extremely limited ability to empathise, but who are highly logical, don’t mix well with highly emotional [and often needy] SJW types.
Cheers, David.
Onwards to 20.
*hits tip jar*
Healthy social interaction was almost exclusively something that happened after school,
Which is why the education totalitarians spread lies about homeschooled kids being harmed by “lack of socialization”. The vast network of home schoolers shows kids who are not only ahead of their publik skool peers in academics, but because their extra-curricular activities are chosen and voluntary (classes in dance or cooking or art or joining sports teams, etc) they get a lot of positive social interactions with peers and develop friendships.
Cheers, David.
*hits tip jar*
Bless you, sir, and madam. Should you run into an old acquaintance for the first time in several years, may it not be when your lockdown hair is at its most voluminous and unruly.
And so, in time, clever kids will learn to shut down and be quiet – to pretend they don’t know the answer – or tune out altogether… to minimise resentment and the risk of subsequent bullying
That. Getting my son out of state school was worth every penny.
That. Getting my son out of state school was worth every penny.
Well, as you read these things, there’s often an air of smart kids being sacrificed for some supposed greater good. Such that a “good, responsible citizen,” as one Guardian columnist put it, is one who needlessly degrades the life-chances of their own children, and encourages others to do the same, while publicly applauding themselves for their nakedly dishonest socialist pieties. The children used as offerings will apparently “learn street sense, who to be wary of, who to avoid, how to keep their heads down.” Though how they will learn these things, and at what cost, is mysteriously unexplored.
And the people who mouth these pieties, as in the examples linked above, and who presume to confine the rest of us to state education – for our own good – are very often people with no first-hand experience of it. For instance, the Guardian’s Zoe Williams comes to mind. As I said some time ago,
Ms Williams’ own education was at Godolphin and Latymer, to which well-heeled lefties send their children while pretending it’s just like any other proletarian school – and where the list of extracurricular activities includes visits to Rome and Morocco and an eight-day tour of Barbados.
..an eight-day tour of Barbados
Well I guess there are a lot of beaches to inspect
Ladies and gentlemen, Lords, Ladies, and serfs, The First Baron Sacremento speaks.
California priorities.
A paraphrase, but not by much.
Yeah…that was a translation from Spanish, Farnsworth. Peasants means like farmers.
Also, Either I am failing to communicate or Dick Head is slipping into halitosis so no point in that conversation.
But as for getting out of state schools, maybe outside the US there’s a difference but in many/most private schools in the US this policy of holding the victim equally accountable for “fighting” is standard, AIUI. Too many lawyer kids in private schools, or so I’m told.
Yeah…that was a translation from Spanish, Farnsworth. Peasants means like farmers.
Presumably he said “campensino” (which means “peasant farmer”), not “agricultor” (which means “farmer” in the generic sense). And that reminds me: as I recall the word for “farmer” in ancient Britain was “agricola”.
“in many/most private schools in the US this policy of holding the victim equally accountable for ‘fighting’ is standard”
I believe you are correct. I have certainly read enough stories about that over the years. When I was a child in the sixties most schools had no truck with that sort of nonsense, fortunately. There was some bullying, but bullies were recognized as the bad guys.
I did not encounter much bullying in the public high school that I attended, possibly in part because I was in all AP classes. Most of the bad behavior was just plain robbery and assault thanks to the “diverse” minority from the other nearby neighborhood.
Yeah…that was a translation from Spanish, Farnsworth.
Even if it was, you know he was thinking it.
And that reminds me: as I recall the word for “farmer” in ancient Britain was “agricola”.
It was, at least when the Romans were there…
are you saying the boy died of some other cause and everyone in this story is conspiring to make it about suicide or that there is no such little boy?
Apparently Richard’s halitosis is contagious, because no, I didn’t. Also, I am not a lobster.
I’m saying that merely being bullied at school, even for a protracted period of time, and then being suspended from said school, does not rise to the level of trauma that would cause an eleven-year-old to commit suicide only hours later. Clearly I am not disputing the boy’s existence or his death; merely the motivation. Frankly, I am also a little suspicious of the cause of death.
This whole issue has taken on more than a little of an air of ” ‘Teen Bullying – Don’t Do It’ by Big Fun“.
Sorry…my mistake. DR and RC are generally indicated by the same icon/avitar on my view of this blog so I have in the past gotten the two of you mixed up. I usually catch it. Either way, my criticism of the problem of bullying, and yes I acknowledge a good bit of the bullying campaigns are BS…WHICH IS HOW/WHY I STOPPED AT THAT DONATION TABLE IN THE FIRST PLACE…ahem… my criticism is ONLY in the context of punishing children for fighting back. THAT is my primary/only concern and point being that if we stop punishing children for simply defending themselves a great deal of this bullying BS goes away. I really don’t understand why this is so hard to get across to people of a supposedly “conservative” nature. And AGAIN, the story of the little girl has ZERO to do with the validity of the boy’s suicide. I’m not calling for zero tolerance of bullying. That is absurd. And I agree that to some degree it is a part of socialization that children need to learn to deal with. What I object to…seems I can’t say this enough as I am some sort of retard in being able to communicate this without shouting so here goes again…is STOP PUNISHING CHILDREN FOR USING THE ONE, PRIMARY, NATURAL TOOL through which any rational society can be built. This goes way beyond the bullying and the specific child victim. It is what has made our civilization such cowards. This idea that fighting back is wrong has been ingrained in generations of (now) adults. How the hell do you think we got to the point where our society is now being run by the “mean girl” contingent? The complacency, the keep-your-head-down-and-let-someone-else-take-the-heat mentality? This shit started in the 60’s, gained ground in the 70’s. It should have been stopped then.
It was, at least when the Romans were there…
It persisted for some time afterwards, if I am wise in relying on philologist Tolkien’s fictional Farmer Giles of Ham (“Julii Agricoli de Hammo”).
…philologist Tolkien…
What he does in the privacy of his domus is his own business, even if it is still illegal in 18 states.
“Bidh romansan a ’dol dhachaigh !”
“Bidh romansan a ’dol dhachaigh !”
Now write that 100 times before sunrise or I’ll cut your balls off.
What he does in the privacy of his domus is his own business, even if it is still illegal in 18 states.
Sadly, with the the decline of education in America I suspect a significant number of professors would like to make his work illegal.
A paraphrase, but not by much.
What double standards?
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/gina-caranos-firing-is-the-product-of-yet-more-calvinball/
While researching a thriller writer for an interview (a minor author, you wouldn’t know her), Google helpfully included her Twitter feed, which included this gem:
“Trump was trying not only to stop the certification. He wanted the mob to kill at least Pence and Pelosi, the 2 next in line to the Presidency. That leadership gap would have added to the chaos and helped his coup. Trump isn’t this smart, but someone helping him had a real plan.”
I can’t even …
Isn’t a coup an attempt to overthrow the current ruler/leader/head of a country? Which at the time was still Donald Trump?
Or has coup been re-defined like woman, man, etc to mean whatever they want them to mean, and any given moment?
What double standards?
If it weren’t for double standards they’d have no standards at all.
What double standards?
The supposedly “racist” and “anti-Semitic” Instagram post that ostensibly resulted in Ms Corano’s firing is a tad hyperbolical in its implied comparison, and therefore of questionable taste; but to construe Corano’s intent as one of racial hatred, or of encouraging animosity towards Jewish people, or “denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities,” as Lucasfilm put it, is both laughable and perverse. However clumsy it may be, the message more obviously reads as an appeal for tolerance, not tribalism. A warning against othering and slippery slopes.
Computer LabRat: Great point.
Myself, I’ve wondered how Trump can be accused of Insurrection since he was head of State and chief executive of the government at the time.
The charge reveals that the accusers see themselves as the rightful government even when not in office.
But we already knew that.
Following my comment above,I suggest the Impeachment Managers are themselves guilty of lese majeste and should be subject to the traditional punishment.
(I can’t do the proper) accent marks.)
(I can’t do the proper) accent marks.)
It’s usually “ampersand (&)” “the letter (eg “e”)” “the type of accent (eg “grave”)” “semi-colon (;)” with no spaces between those characters. I’m often too lazy to put them in.
The result “è”.
Without iodine in the diet, people developed goiters. Cravats were used to hide the neck and a scarf to keep the cravat closed. THIS is the origin of the necktie.
Teachers were so effective at discouraging me that I did not realize until senior year that I was really smart. Not till college that I found out I was 1/1000 smart. I’ve never forgiven them.
Being a nerdy looking kid I had my share of bullies. I karate kicked one of them. He got even by blowing up my mailbox. I called it square.
He wanted the mob to kill at least Pence and Pelosi, the 2 next in line to the Presidency. That leadership gap would have added to the chaos and helped his coup.
That conspiracy cupcake is sprinkled with irony.
Teachers were so effective at discouraging me…I’ve never forgiven them.
In my school it didn’t matter that I was smart and they knew it and I knew it; they still did their best to discourage me. I was consistently top three in the school for average and cconsistently number one each year in at least two subject areas. Teachers and guidance counselors tried to discourage me from going to university and pushed me towards community college. I think it was because my parents were blue collar. Dad worked at a tire shop and mom worked at a dry cleaners.
The irony today is they push almost all students towards university when they would be better served by a community college or trade school.
Without iodine in the diet, people developed goiters. Cravats were used to hide the neck
Never heard that, and Wikipedia does not mention it. [citation needed]
Myself, I’ve wondered how Trump can be accused of Insurrection since he was head of State and chief executive of the government at the time.
Calling for followers to riot to overturn an election sounds like incitement to insurrection. After all, Trump was only an elected president in a democratic republic, not a king calling for “insurrection” against opponents.
That said, it seems clear that Trump did not call for such mob action anyway, which makes the insurrection claim absurd.
That said, it seems clear that Trump did not call for such mob action anyway, which makes the insurrection claim absurd.
True. But I would wager that if you take the letters from all of the words Trump used in his speech and rearranged them, they would say damn near anything. Guilty son of a bitch.