Suicide Victims are Cowards?

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brimstoneSalad
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Re: Suicide Victims are Cowards?

Post by brimstoneSalad »

EquALLity wrote:why would you condemn a person for that if that person is trying to fix the issue?
The person has already accepted it as a personal problem, shaming makes no difference (or only motivates), because the person is already ashamed and using that shame to motivate change.
EquALLity wrote:When you say that it's 'accepting responsibility', it sounds like an implication that people who don't consider it apart of themselves are just pretending they are not responsible.
Shaming doesn't work for most people because they will rationalize and reject responsibility. For those who will accept it, it can. For others, the better approach is to identify the issue as a disease and say, "you are good, but your disease is bad and you need to be brave and face it".

Either way, it's just a difference in outlook and mindset.
EquALLity wrote:Anxiety is the name of the disorder, and your response there was to my comment about anxiety specifically identifying it as a disorder.
You didn't say it was a matter of perspective anywhere in that post.
In that very line I did. You misunderstood me. I said it can be seen as a disease, OR a condition of chronic cowardice. These are two potentially equally valid perspectives.
EquALLity wrote:So you're saying that, even if people don't consider things apart of themselves, other people who say those things are apart of those people are just as right?
This contradicts the idea that people who have mental illnesses are not at fault.
"Fault", and identity is largely a matter of perspective. It depends on whose perspective you agree with.

If Bob says anxiety is a disease he has and isn't part of his personhood, then from Bob's perspective, this is not Bob's fault.
If John said Bob is full of it, and is just a coward, and that "anxiety" isn't a real disease and just means chronic cowardice and Bob is trying to offload responsibility based on a delusion.... then from John's perspective, it is Bob's fault (Bob is just in denial).

I'm more inclined to advocate for Bob's perspective, particularly for treatable conditions (when the person proves this is his or her perspective by actively treating them), because the only most objective determinate of who and what a person is at core is who and what that person says he or she is. Everybody else could have opinions on the subject ranging in severity between any extremes.

But, just an abstract philosophical notion of "fault" is of limited utility and doesn't mean much, since "you" itself is so indefinite.

That said, when we're talking about the utility of "fault" in [criminal] justice, the issue is very different: It was functionally your fault if most people would see it as your fault and if punishing you for it would deter others from acting in that way (consequentialism in punishment).

Please make sure to read that part of the deontology thread. This may be too off topic here.
EquALLity wrote:Or it could be neutral not to. I'm not saying that's true, but the opposites aren't the only options.
Neutrality is a razor's edge. We talk about things like going to a movie instead of donating to charity as being morally neutral, but it's not necessarily that simple from every perspective of normalization (it's just a much easier shorthand that people can understand).

This could be a complicated discussion, and would be pretty off topic for this thread (which is already ridiculous :D ).
EquALLity wrote:And we can measure bravery/cowardice by whether or not your bravery is more significant than your cowardice.
I don't think you understand.

If there are two people, and one person affects another person, that second person can say whether that was good, bad, or mostly neutral.
If there are two people, and one is brave or cowardly, there is no means by which to measure that directly since nobody's view on the matter is necessarily important, since bravery and cowardice in themselves as qualities don't directly affect people. You're not necessarily affecting others in a positive or negative way by being brave or cowardly.

Simply being cowardly, assuming you're never in a position where that cowardice will harm others, may not in itself be harmful.
Simply being brave, assuming the same, may not be helpful.

We can talk about virtue ethics all day, but it derives moral authority from the consequences of those virtues, and they aren't always relevant.

Being cowardly vs. brave may only be about as relevant as not being able to run as fast as another person, or not being as good at math in practice.
I think you're putting too much weight upon one single virtue.

A person could be cowardly, but still do more good than harm by working based on his or her abilities to do good, and avoiding situations in which his or her cowardice would pose as a liability.
EquALLity wrote:You had a metric before:
"Confessing, or giving up your friends, would be more cowardly than bearing the pain. It's a spectrum, or a ratio, that would take into consideration the degree of pain and fear, and the magnitude of the betrayal of your original will or duty."
That's all well and good, but I think you missed my point.
brimstoneSalad wrote:How exactly do you weigh those? Where's the balance point?
At which point is cowardice and bravery precisely balanced? If one is negative and one is positive, where is zero?

When we're dealing in something like good and bad, there's actually a razor's edge of a balance point (a few potential ones), where your actions are equivalent to having not existed by some form of normalization, or we can compare to amoral behavior based on some standard.
When we look at rationality, we can look at patterns of behavior and self-criticism (like comparing science to pseudoscience).

Looking at cowardice vs. bravery is a bit different from either of those.
EquALLity wrote:By what seems like your logic of doing one cowardly act makes you a coward, a person who gives information from torture is a coward. So by your logic everyone (because everyone would do that eventually) is a coward, and the word is completely meaningless.
By that logic, since no matter how strong you are, there will always be a rock too big for you to lift, then everybody is weak.
Like physical strength, there are many ways we can potentially judge cowardice and bravery; one is against a standard (like an average).

If you're stronger/braver than X, then you're strong/brave. If you're weaker or more cowardly than X, then you're weak/cowardly.

Of course, that does make the word on its own less meaningful, since it has to be contextualized, but so does "tall" or "strong", and really, most other virtues and vices.
EquALLity wrote:
brimstoneSalad wrote:Yes, but one action can also reveal a tendency or habit that underlies that action. We are very often our habits.
It *can*, but not necessarily.
It shouldn't be ruled out. Not sure how this is relevant, though; in any case, fewer sample points will be less accurate than more. The spread of behavior, of course, varies by the trait you're looking at.

For rationality, it just takes a small sample. For morality, it takes a very large one because our behaviors in that regard represent a huge mix (based on habit and culture). For cowardice, we might find occasional outliers in phobias, and then otherwise find that behavior is pretty consistent. So it would depend on what you're looking at. If we're talking about general anxiety, that would be a general trend (as opposed to just a single phobia), and require fewer sample points.
EquALLity wrote: Religion isn't about removing your bias in the way that teaching is supposed to be.
Science is about removing bias; teaching is not.

This is why I talked about courts; that's one way to help remove bias from justice. Your example was a teacher acting as judge, jury, and executioner. Not conducive to controlling bias. Controlling for bias is very expensive and resource intensive.
EquALLity wrote: What? I never said anything about trials.

"Excuse me, Kelly, what did you see Bill do to John?"
"Bill, what did you do?"
"John, what did he do?"

Nobody has to go to court for that.
They do need to set up a court if you want any hope of controlling for teacher bias.
This is why we do not administer justice like that in the real world.
EquALLity wrote: But in cases where it's pretty clear, like the kid being bullied has sources and stuff, it should be punished.
Sources? I don't know what you mean by that. But bullying can be using physical or social power against somebody; it's easy enough to mob somebody and frame him or her based on a group's lie.
EquALLity wrote: It may sometimes be unambiguous, but I don't see reason to believe most forms of bullying are this way.
If any are ambiguous, you have problems with enforcement. Remember the psychology of random enforcement I talked about? It defeats the very important understanding of justice and cause and effect children need to develop.

If you inconsistently or arbitrarily enforce rules, even with good intention, you may be doing more harm to the children by teaching them that authority isn't fair and that they might as well break the rules because it's just the bad luck of getting caught or blamed when innocent that matters. "If it's your day to get in trouble, you'll get in trouble, no matter what you do."
EquALLity wrote: Calling someone a 'fat bitch' is obviously an attack.
It wouldn't vary much with who you ask.
What if I'm joking? What if it's a friendly tease? What if you simply misheard what I said, and I said "that itch" in some context your misinterpreted?

Have you ever supervised children? You can't tell. You have to guess. It's almost never obvious, and sometimes when it seems to be, you were wrong and you punished an innocent child.
EquALLity wrote: You don't have evidence for this, and the evidence available contradicts it.
I only agree that extreme cases of bullying are harmful for those particular children -- but only those children. On the whole, it may be more harmful to ALL children than helpful to the few to enforce rules against bullying.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullying# ... evelopment
There's a lot of argument about the positive development that comes from bullying (moderate bullying, at least).

And again, the burden of proof isn't on me. I'm saying we don't need to spend resources on this; leave it as it is. You're advocating resource expenditure -- acting against normal social equilibrium.
EquALLity wrote: What resources?
The resources required to implement these policies. Class time, student time, teacher time, salary, school property, infrastructure, repairs. Nothing is free when done during school, or on school premises.
EquALLity wrote: Why would that make it useless?
If you don't consistently punish, it doesn't deter behavior well. Random punishment gives people the impression that punishment is random, and defeats the sense of cause and effect that we need to instill.

Random punishment, even for bad things, could even be much more harmful for those reasons.
EquALLity wrote:
brimstoneSalad wrote:Anonymity is fine for that.
Not necessarily.
It allows people to move around in online communities if they are being bothered without being followed and harassed. It limits the social function of the internet for people one knows in person, but that's a small price to pay. Bullying proper (rather than just conflict) requires an imbalance of power, and online anonymously can easily shift this by changing environments.
EquALLity wrote:Why would it not be useful when it's less consistent?
It might be less useful, but the threat of getting in trouble remains.
Irrelevant. The issue is how this affects human psychology. People equate low probability of punishment with virtually none, and focus more on avoiding being caught than on not doing the acts. You are teaching children to be more effective criminals, and teaching them the psychology of criminals when you show them that authority is not consistent or fair.
EquALLity wrote:Innocent people might be punished occasionally, but it wouldn't happen that much where it'd outweigh the good done from people being punished rightfully.
This is a huge misconception.

Have you ever been punished unjustly for something you didn't do?
This fosters a mindset of "fuck authority, I'm going to get in trouble anyway". It gives children the sense -- which becomes the criminal mentality in adulthood -- that crime and punishment are not causally related. You'll be randomly punished or not whether you do crimes or not.

This is one of the worst things you could possibly do to children during their development. Probably worse than beating them when you get drunk. Worse than neglect. Children need, above all else, structure and fair rules that teach them causality so they can be civil and follow rules as adults.

My experience supports the random punishment hypothesis -- I just happen to be smart enough to understand that's not true. In retrospect, I can remember that I was punished unjustly about as often as I was punished justly, and I can also remember only a few times other peers were punished when they should have been in conflicts (the vast majority of times they got away with it, because it was random), and almost as many times them being punished when they did virtually nothing.
Most children coming out of that kind of experience aren't able to reason that school is a particularly bad environment for rule enforcement, since the rules they try to enforce are impossibly strict and there aren't enough resources to do so.

Your cost-benefit analysis is skewed to a great degree because you've failed to consider the immense and long-lasting harm it does to punish a child unjustly. An hour of detention is nothing -- teaching them for a lifetime that authority is unfair and punishment is arbitrary and not associated with breaking the rules does profound harm to society.

One in a hundred, or even one in a thousand misdiagnoses of bullying and punishment because of it is unacceptable. All the supposed good you do in preventing bullying (and I don't believe it does any good, because I don't believe it prevents it in a cost effective way, and I don't believe that moderate bullying is a net harm anyway) is vastly outweighed by the harm done in teaching children that actions have no consequences and punishment is a random affair.

If you're going to enforce any kind of rule, you need to do it with laser precision, 99.9% of rule breaking must be promptly caught and dealt with, with a false positive so low (and without bias) that even children will not get the wrong idea from it.
The resources to do that are not available, and falling short of that is probably only harmful.
EquALLity wrote:The cost could be an easy informational assembly with a power-point, and the benefit would be less bullying.
Take a guess, in dollars, what that costs. Hint: It's in the thousands of dollars range.
EquALLity wrote:I think you do, for most bullies. They want to bully to put other people down so that they feel better about themselves. It doesn't matter what they use to put a person down, so long as they have something.
This is an over-simplification, and not very accurate. Is this what they have taught in the bullying lessons? It's kind of wrong. Rhetoric, most likely.

Children bully to fit in, and groups bully for entertainment. A more engaging school environment is more likely to reduce bullying than a boring school environment where you've told them not to or else.
Children also bully when they form adversarial relationships and a power difference develops, usually from friendships that have fallen out. These cases need counseling between the pairs or groups to discuss their differences, and settle the feuds.

Other children, who are abused, may bully because that's how they've been taught to behave. This is an issue of home life, and needs to be handled by social services.
EquALLity wrote: Well, I found this: https://www.bullyfree.com/school-progra ... eness-data
It's a start, but it's a very poorly done study, with very poor reported metrics. This kind of stuff needs to be vastly improved before we can see what's cost effective.
EquALLity wrote:It becomes shaming when it becomes a personal insult as opposed to critiquing a behavior.
Again, you can't necessarily tell the difference.
EquALLity wrote:Are they actually using ten times the resources of the average person?
Many times, yes.
EquALLity wrote:Also, if you spend a lot of money on food that are better for the environment, would that be a good thing, because it would cause people to be more likely to invest in those foods instead of animal products?
They aren't. You don't get that fat eating beans. Anyway, no, I don't think wasteful purchases are useful.
EquALLity wrote:There are always going to be kids who are the most 'weird' or 'ugly'. I'm not sure what your point is.
When you reduce deviation in the extreme outliers (the ones most at risk for suicide), the bullying gets distributed better and becomes much less harmful (and more mutual, and no longer bullying when there's a more equitable power level -- it's the extreme one-sided bullying that's most harmful, not the little back and forth quarrels). It will often form more between groups, or just in feuds, which should be addressed differently.

For one good example, look at how school uniforms reduce bullying (over differences in clothing or fashion, or lack thereof).

If you have a kid with really bad acne, that kid needs medication -- the whole school doesn't need an anti-bullying program. You have a kid with a lisp? Speech therapy. Huge nose? Nose job.
All of these are both longer lasting and cheaper solutions to extreme cases of bullying, and things which improve self esteem much more than coddling.

Take some time to look at the kids in your class who may be targets of bullying, and itemize why. Look at the costs of addressing these issues directly to cut the bullying off at its source; the social power difference.
EquALLity wrote:I don't see why it matters why it's aesthetic.
Because a better solution for everybody might be weight loss.
EquALLity wrote:It shouldn't be obesity shaming, though. It should be against the actions, not the result of them. Being obese isn't inherently unethical; it's the actions that lead to it that are.
It's a smoking gun that proves the actions.
EquALLity wrote:If you say, "It's wasteful for you to consume that much food, because you don't need it, and it's harmful to the planet", then that's fine, and it's not obesity shaming.
As a social experiment, try going around and telling obese people that. See how long it takes for you to be branded a bully and fat shamer.
You won't like the results, but you'll learn what I mean by anti-bullying bullies.
EquALLity wrote:It doesn't create that effect at all in my school.
I feel like you may just not have experienced it. Try the above experiment.
EquALLity wrote:It creates a chilling atmosphere in that it makes people afraid to be bullied, and in that it makes those who are bullied afraid to go to school.
That's not a chilling atmosphere, it's an atmosphere of terror. Chilling is something else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect

However, that only exists for some students, and there are better ways to address this than trying to tackle the symptom of the problem (which we do not have the resources for).
EquALLity wrote:Yes, but bullying is an important topic.
Apparently as important as Intelligent Design, as a matter of dogma, since they aren't even teaching it properly.
If they want to teach legitimate psychology, that may have value in itself. But a bunch of PSA rhetoric is something I can't really agree with wasting education resources on.
EquALLity wrote:They're a religious group, yes, and it's bigoted to be discriminatory towards them.
Being a Muslim is a choice, like being a card carrying member of the KKK. Do you agree that it's equally bigoted to discriminate against the latter?

You can't refuse to serve them if they come into your store -- neither of them -- but there are still plenty of things we can and should have leeway to discriminate on without being branded as haters and have all of our arguments misrepresented or ignored.
EquALLity wrote:When have they been politically correct? They refuse to even call Donald Trump racist.
Is there evidence that he's a racist?
EquALLity wrote:It is a reality. Not everyone is bullied.
What do you define as bullying that you think you can find somebody who can honestly claim to have never experienced an iota of it in his or her life?
wikipedia wrote:Bullying is the use of force, threat, or coercion to abuse, intimidate, or aggressively dominate others. The behavior is often repeated and habitual. One essential prerequisite is the perception, by the bully or by others, of an imbalance of social or physical power, which distinguishes bullying from conflict.
We all run into bullies now and then, and we've probably all been guilty of doing a little bullying. It's a spectrum, and while it's usually habitual, it doesn't have to be, The only requirement is a perceived power difference (although you don't seem to have been suggesting that).
EquALLity wrote:There's a difference between one kid saying one comment and bullying.
What are you talking about?
One "fat bitch" doesn't count as bullying, but some arbitrarily high number of such events from the same person to the same person does?
EquALLity wrote:Again, there's a difference between one asshole saying one thing and bullying.
Where do you get this from? That asshole is probably bullying.
EquALLity wrote:The ideas won't go away on their own because people can't publicize them. People will pass them onto their kids etc..
No, not if they're socially despised ideas. Children in a predominately X area where X people despise Y religion will overwhelmingly opt not to adopt Y in adulthood, regardless of parents. Peers, not parents, have the most influence on ideology during childhood development.
EquALLity wrote:And it'll create resentment.
It'll go extinct. Not really a concern from a dead ideology.
EquALLity wrote:They win on the Internet, where we have the free exchange of ideas.
Again, this can take years. And now religions are starting to isolate themselves on the internet too, into bubbles where they can't be bothered by reason.

How much suffering has to happen while we patiently wait for good arguments to slowly win out?
EquALLity wrote:I agree that you can't totally stop bullying without stopping the free exchange of ideas in practice, but there are still many situations in which bullying can be stopped in practice without hurting the free exchange of ideas.
These situations are very rare. Overt physical assault I agreed on. For others, I think you vastly overestimate the ability and competence of teachers.
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Re: Suicide Victims are Cowards?

Post by EquALLity »

brimstoneSalad wrote:The person has already accepted it as a personal problem, shaming makes no difference (or only motivates), because the person is already ashamed and using that shame to motivate change.
Again, you are implying that it truly is a personal problem by saying the person has 'accepted' it.

But also, you don't need to be ashamed to self-improve, and it's not necessarily a net good for self-improvement.
brimstoneSalad wrote:Shaming doesn't work for most people because they will rationalize and reject responsibility. For those who will accept it, it can. For others, the better approach is to identify the issue as a disease and say, "you are good, but your disease is bad and you need to be brave and face it".

Either way, it's just a difference in outlook and mindset.
Here, again, you are implying that it's a personal problem by saying people who consider it a disorder are 'rationalizing' and 'rejecting responsibility'.

For some mental health issues, when I think about them more, I just don't see how they could possibly be personal problems.
What about PTSD from war? And depression from bullying?
I just don't see how you can pin that stuff on the victims. The causes for the problems are external.
brimstoneSalad wrote:In that very line I did. You misunderstood me. I said it can be seen as a disease, OR a condition of chronic cowardice. These are two potentially equally valid perspectives.
It didn't seem that way based on the context and other statements you wrote, but if that's what you meant, then ok.
brimstoneSalad wrote:"Fault", and identity is largely a matter of perspective. It depends on whose perspective you agree with.

If Bob says anxiety is a disease he has and isn't part of his personhood, then from Bob's perspective, this is not Bob's fault.
If John said Bob is full of it, and is just a coward, and that "anxiety" isn't a real disease and just means chronic cowardice and Bob is trying to offload responsibility based on a delusion.... then from John's perspective, it is Bob's fault (Bob is just in denial).

I'm more inclined to advocate for Bob's perspective, particularly for treatable conditions (when the person proves this is his or her perspective by actively treating them), because the only most objective determinate of who and what a person is at core is who and what that person says he or she is. Everybody else could have opinions on the subject ranging in severity between any extremes.

But, just an abstract philosophical notion of "fault" is of limited utility and doesn't mean much, since "you" itself is so indefinite.
Are you saying that those two perspectives are equal?

What if, for a phobia of spiders for example, people just try to face their fears by going near spiders or whatever, and they don't actually get professional help, and try to overcome their disorder in that way? That's personal treatment, which would seem to side with John's perspective, if professional help would side with Bob's.
I think that's actually better than getting medicine though. Medicine doesn't solve the core of the problem; it just kind of temporarily pushes the problem aside.
brimstoneSalad wrote:This could be a complicated discussion, and would be pretty off topic for this thread (which is already ridiculous :D ).
Hey! Did you just call my topic ridiculous? :lol:

Anyway, I read that discussion- pretty interesting! I think I agree with what you were saying about fairness. It's quite counter-intuitive, though.
I might leave a reply later.
brimstoneSalad wrote:I don't think you understand.

If there are two people, and one person affects another person, that second person can say whether that was good, bad, or mostly neutral.
If there are two people, and one is brave or cowardly, there is no means by which to measure that directly since nobody's view on the matter is necessarily important, since bravery and cowardice in themselves as qualities don't directly affect people. You're not necessarily affecting others in a positive or negative way by being brave or cowardly.

Simply being cowardly, assuming you're never in a position where that cowardice will harm others, may not in itself be harmful.
Simply being brave, assuming the same, may not be helpful.

We can talk about virtue ethics all day, but it derives moral authority from the consequences of those virtues, and they aren't always relevant.

Being cowardly vs. brave may only be about as relevant as not being able to run as fast as another person, or not being as good at math in practice.
I think you're putting too much weight upon one single virtue.

A person could be cowardly, but still do more good than harm by working based on his or her abilities to do good, and avoiding situations in which his or her cowardice would pose as a liability.
I'm not sure what your point is about morality here. I never said or implied that being a coward makes you a bad person, or that being brave makes you a good person.
brimstoneSalad wrote:That's all well and good, but I think you missed my point.
In that statement, you were acknowledging that some acts are more cowardly/brave than other cowardly/brave acts, and that it's a spectrum.
So by extension, you'd add up the amount of 'cowardly points' (like two points on the spectrum for running away from a spider and refusing to deal with it, and four points for running away from a butterfly and refusing to deal with it, if that makes sense), and see how they compare to the 'bravery points'. Whichever corresponding characteristic is stronger is the one that defines a person.
brimstoneSalad wrote:At which point is cowardice and bravery precisely balanced? If one is negative and one is positive, where is zero?

When we're dealing in something like good and bad, there's actually a razor's edge of a balance point (a few potential ones), where your actions are equivalent to having not existed by some form of normalization, or we can compare to amoral behavior based on some standard.
When we look at rationality, we can look at patterns of behavior and self-criticism (like comparing science to pseudoscience).

Looking at cowardice vs. bravery is a bit different from either of those.
Now that I think about it, one action couldn't be perfectly balanced. However, a sum of actions may lead you to be neutral due to bravery cancelling out cowardice (vice versa).

What do you mean by a 'razor's edge'?
brimstoneSalad wrote:By that logic, since no matter how strong you are, there will always be a rock too big for you to lift, then everybody is weak.
Yes, by what seemed like your logic, if you applied it to physical strength.
It seemed like you were suggesting being cowardly in some respects automatically makes you a coward.
brimstoneSalad wrote:Like physical strength, there are many ways we can potentially judge cowardice and bravery; one is against a standard (like an average).

If you're stronger/braver than X, then you're strong/brave. If you're weaker or more cowardly than X, then you're weak/cowardly.

Of course, that does make the word on its own less meaningful, since it has to be contextualized, but so does "tall" or "strong", and really, most other virtues and vices.
Yes, I agree with that being one way.
brimstoneSalad wrote:It shouldn't be ruled out. Not sure how this is relevant, though; in any case, fewer sample points will be less accurate than more. The spread of behavior, of course, varies by the trait you're looking at.

For rationality, it just takes a small sample. For morality, it takes a very large one because our behaviors in that regard represent a huge mix (based on habit and culture). For cowardice, we might find occasional outliers in phobias, and then otherwise find that behavior is pretty consistent. So it would depend on what you're looking at. If we're talking about general anxiety, that would be a general trend (as opposed to just a single phobia), and require fewer sample points.
I never said it should be ruled out, and this is very relevant because suicide is often impulsive and not representative of what a person would typically do.

With generalized anxiety disorder, that's still not necessarily true.
And if you are calling anxiety a feeling, that has no bearing on cowardice anyway, because the actions are what're relevant.
Literally everything can give you anxiety, but that doesn't make you a coward or even cowardly (less brave than you would be otherwise though not necessarily a coward).

Also, one other thing I can think of that doesn't abide by the rule I'm saying applies to bravery/cowardice and morality is honesty/loyalty.
If you are only honest 51% of the time, you're still not an honest person, because honesty is about pretty much always telling the truth.
brimstoneSalad wrote:Science is about removing bias; teaching is not.

This is why I talked about courts; that's one way to help remove bias from justice. Your example was a teacher acting as judge, jury, and executioner. Not conducive to controlling bias. Controlling for bias is very expensive and resource intensive.
Teaching is about removing bias. Teachers are not supposed to impose their religions/political beliefs/etc. on the class, even subtly.

However, like you mention later in your reply, there are a lot of bad teachers. So I concede that we can always trust their judgement.
brimstoneSalad wrote: They do need to set up a court if you want any hope of controlling for teacher bias.
This is why we do not administer justice like that in the real world.
Ok, I concede this point.
brimstoneSalad wrote:Sources? I don't know what you mean by that. But bullying can be using physical or social power against somebody; it's easy enough to mob somebody and frame him or her based on a group's lie.
By sources, I mean other students who witnessed the event.
brimstoneSalad wrote:If any are ambiguous, you have problems with enforcement. Remember the psychology of random enforcement I talked about? It defeats the very important understanding of justice and cause and effect children need to develop.

If you inconsistently or arbitrarily enforce rules, even with good intention, you may be doing more harm to the children by teaching them that authority isn't fair and that they might as well break the rules because it's just the bad luck of getting caught or blamed when innocent that matters. "If it's your day to get in trouble, you'll get in trouble, no matter what you do."
I concede this too.
brimstoneSalad wrote:What if I'm joking? What if it's a friendly tease? What if you simply misheard what I said, and I said "that itch" in some context your misinterpreted?

Have you ever supervised children? You can't tell. You have to guess. It's almost never obvious, and sometimes when it seems to be, you were wrong and you punished an innocent child.
True, yeah.

'That itch', though? :P
brimstoneSalad wrote:I only agree that extreme cases of bullying are harmful for those particular children -- but only those children. On the whole, it may be more harmful to ALL children than helpful to the few to enforce rules against bullying.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullying# ... evelopment
There's a lot of argument about the positive development that comes from bullying (moderate bullying, at least).

And again, the burden of proof isn't on me. I'm saying we don't need to spend resources on this; leave it as it is. You're advocating resource expenditure -- acting against normal social equilibrium.
It's not only harmful to those children who are bullied. It's also harmful to bullies and bystanders, and it creates a bad atmosphere in the school where people don't feel safe.
brimstoneSalad wrote: The resources required to implement these policies. Class time, student time, teacher time, salary, school property, infrastructure, repairs. Nothing is free when done during school, or on school premises.
Class time, student time, teacher time, salary, and infrastructure won't be impacted by a power point presentation/won't cost extra money because of these things.

What can you think of that would require that extra money because of those resources?
brimstoneSalad wrote: If you don't consistently punish, it doesn't deter behavior well. Random punishment gives people the impression that punishment is random, and defeats the sense of cause and effect that we need to instill.

Random punishment, even for bad things, could even be much more harmful for those reasons.
Ok, good point.
brimstoneSalad wrote: It allows people to move around in online communities if they are being bothered without being followed and harassed. It limits the social function of the internet for people one knows in person, but that's a small price to pay. Bullying proper (rather than just conflict) requires an imbalance of power, and online anonymously can easily shift this by changing environments.
This doesn't address all forms of cyber bullying (one example of a type that wouldn't be solved by anonymity is someone making a hate page).
brimstoneSalad wrote:This is a huge misconception.

Have you ever been punished unjustly for something you didn't do?
This fosters a mindset of "fuck authority, I'm going to get in trouble anyway". It gives children the sense -- which becomes the criminal mentality in adulthood -- that crime and punishment are not causally related. You'll be randomly punished or not whether you do crimes or not.

This is one of the worst things you could possibly do to children during their development. Probably worse than beating them when you get drunk. Worse than neglect. Children need, above all else, structure and fair rules that teach them causality so they can be civil and follow rules as adults.

My experience supports the random punishment hypothesis -- I just happen to be smart enough to understand that's not true. In retrospect, I can remember that I was punished unjustly about as often as I was punished justly, and I can also remember only a few times other peers were punished when they should have been in conflicts (the vast majority of times they got away with it, because it was random), and almost as many times them being punished when they did virtually nothing.
Most children coming out of that kind of experience aren't able to reason that school is a particularly bad environment for rule enforcement, since the rules they try to enforce are impossibly strict and there aren't enough resources to do so.

Your cost-benefit analysis is skewed to a great degree because you've failed to consider the immense and long-lasting harm it does to punish a child unjustly. An hour of detention is nothing -- teaching them for a lifetime that authority is unfair and punishment is arbitrary and not associated with breaking the rules does profound harm to society.

One in a hundred, or even one in a thousand misdiagnoses of bullying and punishment because of it is unacceptable. All the supposed good you do in preventing bullying (and I don't believe it does any good, because I don't believe it prevents it in a cost effective way, and I don't believe that moderate bullying is a net harm anyway) is vastly outweighed by the harm done in teaching children that actions have no consequences and punishment is a random affair.

If you're going to enforce any kind of rule, you need to do it with laser precision, 99.9% of rule breaking must be promptly caught and dealt with, with a false positive so low (and without bias) that even children will not get the wrong idea from it.
The resources to do that are not available, and falling short of that is probably only harmful.
Yeah, I see what you're saying.
brimstoneSalad wrote:Take a guess, in dollars, what that costs. Hint: It's in the thousands of dollars range.
What? :shock:
What makes you think that?
brimstoneSalad wrote:This is an over-simplification, and not very accurate. Is this what they have taught in the bullying lessons? It's kind of wrong. Rhetoric, most likely.

Children bully to fit in, and groups bully for entertainment. A more engaging school environment is more likely to reduce bullying than a boring school environment where you've told them not to or else.
Children also bully when they form adversarial relationships and a power difference develops, usually from friendships that have fallen out. These cases need counseling between the pairs or groups to discuss their differences, and settle the feuds.

Other children, who are abused, may bully because that's how they've been taught to behave. This is an issue of home life, and needs to be handled by social services.
Yes, it is what they teach. Do you have evidence for what you're saying here?
I'm inclined to believe the school about this.

Why would they use rhetoric?
brimstoneSalad wrote:It's a start, but it's a very poorly done study, with very poor reported metrics. This kind of stuff needs to be vastly improved before we can see what's cost effective.
Why do you think the study is very poor?
brimstoneSalad wrote:Again, you can't necessarily tell the difference.
It's the difference between, "Your actions are bad" and "you are bad".
brimstoneSalad wrote:Many times, yes.
Do you have a source?
brimstoneSalad wrote:They aren't. You don't get that fat eating beans. Anyway, no, I don't think wasteful purchases are useful.
This is just a general question I've been thinking about.
Awhile ago, I saw online that someone said vegans should eat as little food as possible to sustain themselves because of animals inevitably killed during vegetable production, and I questioned the validity of it.

Wouldn't it cause business to move more towards plant foods and away from animal products if there was a higher demand for the vegetables?
brimstoneSalad wrote:When you reduce deviation in the extreme outliers (the ones most at risk for suicide), the bullying gets distributed better and becomes much less harmful (and more mutual, and no longer bullying when there's a more equitable power level -- it's the extreme one-sided bullying that's most harmful, not the little back and forth quarrels). It will often form more between groups, or just in feuds, which should be addressed differently.

For one good example, look at how school uniforms reduce bullying (over differences in clothing or fashion, or lack thereof).

If you have a kid with really bad acne, that kid needs medication -- the whole school doesn't need an anti-bullying program. You have a kid with a lisp? Speech therapy. Huge nose? Nose job.
All of these are both longer lasting and cheaper solutions to extreme cases of bullying, and things which improve self esteem much more than coddling.

Take some time to look at the kids in your class who may be targets of bullying, and itemize why. Look at the costs of addressing these issues directly to cut the bullying off at its source; the social power difference.
Your solution is to shift responsibility for bullying onto the victims, costing them a lot of money, reinforcing the idea that the bullies are right?
Forcing kids to get plastic surgery so that they don't get bullied reinforces the idea that the bullies were right in picking on them.

Not letting one kid abuse another is not 'coddling'.
brimstoneSalad wrote:Because a better solution for everybody might be weight loss.
Maybe, but I don't see why that's relevant.

The reason why it might be aesthetically unpleasant to some people could be health related, but that doesn't change the reality that health isn't what people really care about when they shame obese people.
brimstoneSalad wrote:It's a smoking gun that proves the actions.
It's not the issue; it's a result of the issue.
If you really care about the ethics of what leads a person to become obese (in many cases), you should address those actions, not the consequence.
brimstoneSalad wrote:As a social experiment, try going around and telling obese people that. See how long it takes for you to be branded a bully and fat shamer.
You won't like the results, but you'll learn what I mean by anti-bullying bullies.
What? :shock:

Because of fat shaming being prevalent in our culture, I wouldn't be surprised if that came off as fat shaming and made people defensive.
brimstoneSalad wrote:I feel like you may just not have experienced it. Try the above experiment.
I don't need to try the experiment to know my school doesn't have a 'chilling atmosphere'.
If it had an atmosphere like that, I would be in that atmosphere and know it. An atmosphere isn't something you'd have to 'experience' if you're already in it.
brimstoneSalad wrote:That's not a chilling atmosphere, it's an atmosphere of terror. Chilling is something else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect

However, that only exists for some students, and there are better ways to address this than trying to tackle the symptom of the problem (which we do not have the resources for).
Terror isn't any better than chilling, but it's not chilling anyway.
brimstoneSalad wrote:Apparently as important as Intelligent Design, as a matter of dogma, since they aren't even teaching it properly.
If they want to teach legitimate psychology, that may have value in itself. But a bunch of PSA rhetoric is something I can't really agree with wasting education resources on.
PSA rhetoric?

It's important to teach about bullying and the harmful impacts of it to prevent it.
brimstoneSalad wrote:Being a Muslim is a choice, like being a card carrying member of the KKK. Do you agree that it's equally bigoted to discriminate against the latter?

You can't refuse to serve them if they come into your store -- neither of them -- but there are still plenty of things we can and should have leeway to discriminate on without being branded as haters and have all of our arguments misrepresented or ignored.
You're really putting words in my mouth here. I never said Islam is a race, and I never said that bigotry towards others based on race is equal to bigotry based on religion.

What do you mean by that people should have leeway to discriminate?
brimstoneSalad wrote:Is there evidence that he's a racist?
Mountains of evidence.

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best. They’re not sending you, they’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bring crime. They’re rapists… And some, I assume, are good people.”
This is untrue, and Donald Trump must know that... So what's motivating him to say it?

"I have people that have been studying [Obama's birth certificate] and they cannot believe what they're finding... I would like to have him show his birth certificate, and can I be honest with you, I hope he can. Because if he can't, if he can't, if he wasn't born in this country, which is a real possibility…then he has pulled one of the great cons in the history of politics."
Why would anyone question Obama's place of birth in the first place?

“The only kind of people I want counting my money are little short guys that wear yamakas every day.”
...

He also suggested Obama did terrible in college on absolutely no basis.
And check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3w3YFq_EdUo
brimstoneSalad wrote: What do you define as bullying that you think you can find somebody who can honestly claim to have never experienced an iota of it in his or her life?
They teach us in school specifically that bullying is repetitive, for one thing. However, some definitions online just say it has the potential to be so, or don't actually mention it at all.

Never mind about that then, I guess.
brimstoneSalad wrote:We all run into bullies now and then, and we've probably all been guilty of doing a little bullying. It's a spectrum, and while it's usually habitual, it doesn't have to be, The only requirement is a perceived power difference (although you don't seem to have been suggesting that).
They teach us about the power thing also.
But yeah, I see.
brimstoneSalad wrote:What are you talking about?
One "fat bitch" doesn't count as bullying, but some arbitrarily high number of such events from the same person to the same person does?
According to what they taught in school, yes, it is repetitive.
But I see what you're saying.
brimstoneSalad wrote:No, not if they're socially despised ideas. Children in a predominately X area where X people despise Y religion will overwhelmingly opt not to adopt Y in adulthood, regardless of parents. Peers, not parents, have the most influence on ideology during childhood development.
Brainwashing and/or homeschooling still have a major influence.
brimstoneSalad wrote:It'll go extinct. Not really a concern from a dead ideology.
I don't think it'll just go extinct.
brimstoneSalad wrote:Again, this can take years. And now religions are starting to isolate themselves on the internet too, into bubbles where they can't be bothered by reason.

How much suffering has to happen while we patiently wait for good arguments to slowly win out?
The good ideas are still winning, though. Look at the rise of progressiveness in America, and how quickly things are changing.
Did you know that most Americans are open to a political revolution to redistribute wealth from the upper class? That over seventy percent want to raise taxes on the rich? Etc. etc.

As for how long it will take, it's horrible that people will have to suffer, but in the end I think it's worth it for when you reach a society that has both freedom of speech and progressivism.
brimstoneSalad wrote:These situations are very rare. Overt physical assault I agreed on. For others, I think you vastly overestimate the ability and competence of teachers.
I don't agree that they're very rare, but I do now agree that many cases of verbal bullying are ambiguous.
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Re: Suicide Victims are Cowards?

Post by brimstoneSalad »

EquALLity wrote: But also, you don't need to be ashamed to self-improve, and it's not necessarily a net good for self-improvement.
People don't have to be ashamed of themselves in entirety (this is probably not that helpful), but for some people it may be helpful to be ashamed of the negative aspect they want to correct to motivate that. If you were proud of being fat, you probably wouldn't have the state of mind necessary to seek to lose weight, for example.
EquALLity wrote: For some mental health issues, when I think about them more, I just don't see how they could possibly be personal problems.
What about PTSD from war? And depression from bullying?
If it becomes part of your identity, or stems from a personal weakness that is part of your identity, then it is. Not everybody gets depression from bullying. Not everybody necessarily even gets (or suffers from long term) PTSD.

Blaming other things for your problems rather than admitting them to be personal failings (that just need to be improved) may not be the most healthy approach (even if it would seem reasonable to blame outside factors). But then again, as I said, for most people it may be a more functional approach to blame outside factors so they aren't demoralized. It's different for different people.
EquALLity wrote:Are you saying that those two perspectives are equal?
Equally true, or accurate representations of reality? Perhaps.
Equally useful to treating the condition, probably not. But again, it depends on the person, and the specific case at hand.
EquALLity wrote:What if, for a phobia of spiders for example, people just try to face their fears by going near spiders or whatever, and they don't actually get professional help, and try to overcome their disorder in that way? That's personal treatment, which would seem to side with John's perspective, if professional help would side with Bob's.
Both may be fine, as long as they DO something. John and Bob seem to have different psychology, and as with anything, they may require different approaches.
EquALLity wrote:I think that's actually better than getting medicine though. Medicine doesn't solve the core of the problem; it just kind of temporarily pushes the problem aside.
Very likely. But again, it depends on the situation.
Maybe if you want to advocate medicine (for something better treated through medication) you should advocate the "otherness" of the condition. if you want to advocate personal action and confronting the problem, you might advocate the personal character flaw representation, to encourage that approach.
EquALLity wrote:I'm not sure what your point is about morality here.
My point was mainly that it's easier to measure morality of actions because of the objective effects of actions on the world. Cowardice doesn't necessarily have objectively bad or good effects, so it's hard to measure it.
EquALLity wrote:So by extension, you'd add up the amount of 'cowardly points' (like two points on the spectrum for running away from a spider and refusing to deal with it, and four points for running away from a butterfly and refusing to deal with it, if that makes sense), and see how they compare to the 'bravery points'. Whichever corresponding characteristic is stronger is the one that defines a person.
What if somebody isn't afraid of spiders, but is afraid of butterflies? How is that more or less cowardly? Both could be equally irrational fears, assuming the spider is not venomous.

It's hard to measure coward points. And there may be no use in it, since it's not necessarily morally relevant.
EquALLity wrote:What do you mean by a 'razor's edge'?
That things are almost never perfectly balanced, because we're not dealing in low number integers here.

You could go from 0.0000000001349759 bravery to -0.000000009827366 very easily. 0 is a razor's edge. In reality, nobody is really neutral, always very slightly positive or negative.

Neutrality is more of an approximation, or a matter of error bars due to uncertainty that overlaps zero.
EquALLity wrote:And if you are calling anxiety a feeling, that has no bearing on cowardice anyway, because the actions are what're relevant.
Actions tend to follow from strong feelings like that, so it's a safe assumption with fewer sample points.
EquALLity wrote:If you are only honest 51% of the time, you're still not an honest person, because honesty is about pretty much always telling the truth.
True, but more honest than somebody who lies 99% of the time.
EquALLity wrote:Teaching is about removing bias.
No, only science is a field focused on controlling bias.

Teaching is first about conveying truth to students as far as the teacher knows. Teachers who believe their religions or political beliefs are true will convey those -- they don't think they're biased, or understand what that means, That's the problem (although they'd accuse a teacher of teaching the opposite to their beliefs to be biased).

Teaching is not a field of bias control; that's a very new concept to education, and not one most teachers put into practice. It's also not one teachers are even equipped to put into practice, because they don't know what biases are or how to control for them.

Science took hundreds of years to advance to the point of doing that reasonably well, and that was because this was the primary goal, and the scientific method is all about that. There's nothing in the core of teaching methodology that's designed inherently to control teachers' biases.
EquALLity wrote:Teachers are not supposed to impose their religions/political beliefs/etc. on the class, even subtly.
Maybe according to some, but the very notion is inconsistently applied. Preachers aren't supposed to convey anything political in their sermons. This isn't reality. Teachers don't have the tools - cognitively - to understand what bias means, or recognize and control for their biases. If none of them understand what bias is, or what this means, then they don't even have to be "bad teachers" to be incapable of it.

As a field, academics is the furthest thing from unbiased.
EquALLity wrote:It's not only harmful to those children who are bullied. It's also harmful to bullies and bystanders, and it creates a bad atmosphere in the school where people don't feel safe.
Is it a net harm, though, when you factor in benefits to development, and learning how to handle conflict?
To kids a shot seems harmful at that moment, but in the long term they acquire immunity.

This is something we need empirical evidence on -- not just biased studies on the harm, but comparing to benefit too.
You can make anything look harmful if you do one-sided studies on it.
EquALLity wrote: What can you think of that would require that extra money because of those resources?
It consumes these resources, which are expensive. Do you know how much money your district gets per student from taxes per day of attendance?
Convert that into an hourly cost per student. Multiply this by the number of students in attendance. This is the expenditure of tax resources involved in this endeavor. Those resources go to paying teacher salary (you'll note the teachers aren't volunteers; they are paid to supervise the students, and in assemblies too), and the costs of the school itself.

The opportunity cost is what else could have been done with that time. A presentation on dieting and weight loss may have done a lot more good with the same resource investment.
EquALLity wrote:
brimstoneSalad wrote:Take a guess, in dollars, what that costs. Hint: It's in the thousands of dollars range.
What? :shock:
What makes you think that?
Talk to your school administrator; somebody responsible for budget, and deciding how to allocate educational time and resources.
This is the kind of thing you'd learn in business classes, or economics. Nothing is free, there are always costs, and opportunity costs.
EquALLity wrote: This doesn't address all forms of cyber bullying (one example of a type that wouldn't be solved by anonymity is someone making a hate page).
That's called libel. Call the police.
EquALLity wrote: Yes, it is what they teach. Do you have evidence for what you're saying here?
I'm inclined to believe the school about this.
Did they present evidence in the form of peer reviewed studies in respected psychology journals? Why would you believe them?
EquALLity wrote:Why would they use rhetoric?
The same reason the media and politicians do. Your local school board is a political institution. If you look into it, you may lose respect for education. There is nothing approaching bias control or objective scientific standards in modern education. It's all politics and corner cutting. ;)

They do this because it's lazier than using real data, and it's what people think anyway. It's easier, sometimes, to pretend to do something about a problem rather than investigate and deal with the actual causes (which would cost even more). If you can appease parents with a few thousand dollars wasted time on a lazy school power point presentation, you get re-elected and you didn't have to actually do anything difficult.

It's why people will sign petitions to end animal cruelty and then go eat a hamburger.
EquALLity wrote:Why do you think the study is very poor?
Psychology itself is a pretty soft science, but they used mostly self reporting and surveys, which isn't very helpful. It's hard to do proper science on these things.
EquALLity wrote:It's the difference between, "Your actions are bad" and "you are bad".
Can you tell the difference? Remember the ambiguity.
And, really -- what is the difference? Why is that relevant?
EquALLity wrote:Awhile ago, I saw online that someone said vegans should eat as little food as possible to sustain themselves because of animals inevitably killed during vegetable production, and I questioned the validity of it.
Few animals are killed in crop production, but it is an issue of sustainability. We should ideally eat what we need to be optimally healthy, and no more, and select from the most sustainable foods we can.
EquALLity wrote:Wouldn't it cause business to move more towards plant foods and away from animal products if there was a higher demand for the vegetables?
Not really. There has to be less demand for animal foods to do that, otherwise they'll just clear more land to grow more veggies too.
Wasting veggies is not helpful to reducing animal cruelty.
EquALLity wrote:Your solution is to shift responsibility for bullying onto the victims, costing them a lot of money, reinforcing the idea that the bullies are right?
Forcing kids to get plastic surgery so that they don't get bullied reinforces the idea that the bullies were right in picking on them.
I understand you don't feel like this is fair, but I'm concerned with efficacy, not justice.
If it fixes the problem, I don't really care who came away feeling like he or she was right. ;)
I didn't say the bullies were morally in the right, if they take that away from policy change there's not much we can do about it, but it doesn't matter as long as things are made better.
EquALLity wrote:Maybe, but I don't see why that's relevant.
Because the important issue is efficacy, not justice.
EquALLity wrote:The reason why it might be aesthetically unpleasant to some people could be health related, but that doesn't change the reality that health isn't what people really care about when they shame obese people.
Doesn't matter, though. They could be shaming kids for wearing green shirts. If the kids stop wearing green shirts (maybe we provide them with red shirts) it's an easy way to stop the problem. As a bonus, you solve two problems at once, since obesity (unlike green shirts) is objectively a health problem.
EquALLity wrote:If you really care about the ethics of what leads a person to become obese (in many cases), you should address those actions, not the consequence.
The process of addressing obesity is talking about weight loss and diet, and that addresses those actions.
EquALLity wrote:Because of fat shaming being prevalent in our culture, I wouldn't be surprised if that came off as fat shaming and made people defensive.
Which is my point.
EquALLity wrote:I don't need to try the experiment to know my school doesn't have a 'chilling atmosphere'.
It may not have a chilling effect for you, because you don't want to say anything that's not permitted. For those who do, it does.
Chilling effect isn't like weather; it's relative to your opinions being those that are chilled.
EquALLity wrote:PSA rhetoric?
Public Service Announcement.
EquALLity wrote:It's important to teach about bullying and the harmful impacts of it to prevent it.
I doubt this claim. Particularly since they're teaching it incorrectly. Also, just informing people of what's going on isn't necessarily going to stop it.
EquALLity wrote:I never said Islam is a race, and I never said that bigotry towards others based on race is equal to bigotry based on religion.
Then why call it bigotry?
EquALLity wrote:What do you mean by that people should have leeway to discriminate?
I should be allowed to dislike homophobes and not hire them into my employment, for example. I don't think it's fair to call me a bigot because I want to discriminate against people who choose to hold beliefs I see as harmful.
EquALLity wrote:
brimstoneSalad wrote:Is there evidence that he's a racist?
Mountains of evidence.
I don't see any of those as indicating he's racist. He's seems nationalist inclined, and possibly culturally xenophobic, but he may also just be pandering. Fabricating political rhetoric against Obama doesn't make you racist; he may be appealing to the racism of others, though, for political gain (doesn't make him one).
The last comment looked like a joke. I'd need to see the context.

I'm very disinclined to judge people like that.
EquALLity wrote:Brainwashing and/or homeschooling still have a major influence.
Less than you'd think, once they leave the nest. The only people who can stay indoctrinated are those who form isolated communities.
EquALLity wrote:I don't think it'll just go extinct.
Please, tell me about some of the religions Christians persecuted within the domain of Christendom. :D
We rarely know more than the names of them, and the most we know of them usually comes from Christian apologia against them (records of Christian writings arguing against these beliefs).
EquALLity wrote:As for how long it will take, it's horrible that people will have to suffer, but in the end I think it's worth it for when you reach a society that has both freedom of speech and progressivism.
Why? I'm more concerned with efficacy than meaningless concepts of justice. Why is free speech important if its consequences are bad?
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Re: Suicide Victims are Cowards?

Post by Red »

So in Global History class today, we were studying ancient Japan and the Samurai, and our teacher taught us that if the Samurai felt as though they have brought shame upon themselves, they would preform Seppuku, which is just cutting into your pancreas area then getting decapitated, so they can die with honour. Then the c-c-c-c-cunt sitting behind me said;
"Well they're just cowards! Why kill yourself and not face you're problems?", which, to say the least, brought my blood to a boil. First if all, they only killed themselves when they felt as though they have dishonoured their masters or if they brought shame upon themselves, not because they can't "face their problems". Second of all, that's kinda irrelevant. I have the feeling she just said that so she can have an excuse to say it. I bet she's been wanting to say it for a long time but never found a good excuse to say it (plus I do most of the talking in the class), so this was the best one she could get. But worst of all, I didn't know how to respond. Sure, I know suicide doesn't exactly make the person selfish or cowardly, especially after reading this thread, but I couldn't find the words to say in that situation. What should I say?
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Re: Suicide Victims are Cowards?

Post by EquALLity »

^Wtf? What a bitch.

You're in Catholic school, right? Turn around and say, "How compassionate towards suicide victims and their loved ones- that's what Jesus would say."
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Re: Suicide Victims are Cowards?

Post by Red »

EquALLity wrote:^Wtf? What a bitch.
*Cunt
EquALLity wrote:You're in Catholic school, right? Turn around and say, "How compassionate towards suicide victims and their loved ones- that's what Jesus would say."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtEBFnAa2Hw
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Re: Suicide Victims are Cowards?

Post by EquALLity »

Where do you find these videos??? :lol: :lol: :lol:
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Re: Suicide Victims are Cowards?

Post by Red »

EquALLity wrote:Where do you find these videos??? :lol: :lol: :lol:
The fucking internet
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Re: Suicide Victims are Cowards?

Post by brimstoneSalad »

RedAppleGP wrote:First if all, they only killed themselves when they felt as though they have dishonoured their masters or if they brought shame upon themselves, not because they can't "face their problems".
Right, it's social expectation. Killing themselves was how they were expected to atone for the shame they brought upon themselves and their families -- in that social context, it WAS making it right.

It's a fucked up society that expects that kind of behavior, but the fault doesn't lie with those who followed it so much as the entire social system.
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Re: Suicide Victims are Cowards?

Post by Red »

brimstoneSalad wrote:Right, it's social expectation. Killing themselves was how they were expected to atone for the shame they brought upon themselves and their families -- in that social context, it WAS making it right.
however do you mean chep
brimstoneSalad wrote:It's a fucked up society that expects that kind of behavior, but the fault doesn't lie with those who followed it so much as the entire social system.
well we don't do it anymore. at least I think
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