[Citation needed]

1. Stop shaming the victims.

2. Stop punishing victims who defend themselves.

3. Stop shaming the victims.

4. Be willing to step up and use proportionate tactics against kids that bully your kids (or your kids’ friends, or your neighbors’ kids, or whatever). Taunting and teasing for taunting and teasing, asskicking for asskicking, injury for injury, etc.

5. Stop shaming the victims.

No state involvement required.

Bullying is not worse than it has ever been. If anything it’s not as bad. But it’s not as bad precisely because of the “panic” over it, the awareness, etc.

Sort of like police brutality. Police aren’t any more venal, dishonest, thieving, or violent than they’ve always been. There’s just more cameras around, and Respectable Journalists are more willing to shine light on it. This is as it should be.

I’m astonished that anyone would think sending an attack dog into a prison cell to “subdue an unruly prisoner” is in any way a legitimate form of prisoner control. I also love the universal authoritarian logic that the only legitimate response to having a police attack dog tearing at your arm with his teeth is to lie prone on the ground and submit to the mauling passively to show that you are not resisting arrest and wait to be taken into custody.

Although I do agree with the sympathy for the dog. It certainly isn’t his fault that his handlers sent him in to assault a prisoner.

How screwy have things gotten that even right-wing teleevangelists are screaming “Hey, there are too many damned people in our jails”?

In my experience, there’s a dividing line based on the primacy of religion among conservatives when it comes to social issues. Most of the serious, committed religious conservative I’ve known are very fond of homeschooling and other lifestyles that are vehemently attacked at the local level as being akin to having an open air crack market in your living room by local government agencies. Most of the nominally religious conservatives I’ve ever known tend to be far less concerned about these as they are generally “moderate” on most social issues. Thus they tend to be dismissive about police militarization, abuse of power, etc. because they are not likely to be targets; serious religious conservatives who homeschool are in many areas as likely to be victimized by aggressive local authorities as drug users. Thus they tend to understand that the weapon used on the hippies today will be used on them tomorrow.

Except that there’s no such thing as a war so unpopular they can’t get enough volunteers. I think it wouldn’t matter if they were to go to war against Mother Theresa’s order of nuns with foxnews cheerleading in the background, most people I know who went into the military thought that “the morality or immorality of the war is the government’s problem not ours.”

Really? I read the same article and didn’t get that impression whatsoever.

Bob, you have a good point, but as usual, the primary problem is not “Big Agrictulture,” it’s Big Government….

I agree with you. There is little that can be done about “Big Agriculture” until their partner in crime, “Big Government” is dealt with. “Big Agriculture” would be forced by market forces (As the hub bub over “pink slime” is demonstrating.) to be more compliant to the will of an informed populace if there were: A: An informed populace. and B: no “Big Government” to appeal to.

In a reality where you COULD directly market beeves raised on poly-cultural perennial greens and processed on the farm directly to end users with minimal regulatory restrictions, “Big Agriculture” would wither and fade, destroyed by the very abuses to the ecosystem that “Big Government” goes out of their way to allow.

So yes, the real target of my ire is “Big Government”. As much as I dislike “Big Agriculture”, they are just playing the game “Big Government” has created. Remove the game, and “Big Agriculture” will adapt to market forces.

But… I don’t see the way for that to happen outside of waiting for some massive debt-collapse or something forcing the government into total bankruptcy.

The solution seems so obvious: Build government such that it cannot directly gift money to citizens or to businesses on the citizen’s behalf. But that approach has been demonstrated to fail in democracies simply because politicians can change that to get votes. People would, it seems, on average anyway, prefer to get a Cheeseburger today than to have stability tomorrow.

Volunteer firefighter responding to a call sees smoke. Stops on bridge, gets out of vehicle to look for origin of smoke. Falls off bridge and dies. Man later caught and admits to setting fire to railroad ties; charged with 1st degree murder.

First, let me start by saying that this guy is an idiot and probably did this for the wrong reasons.

That being said, I find nothing all that offensive about posting a memorial to soldiers who fought for the Germans during World War II. Most fo the time, they are branded “nazi soldiers” when in fact, the vast majority of them were nothing of the sort. They were German farm boys, forced by coercive, violent government action to go and fight their war. We tend to forget that when we think about WWII being a abttle of good vs evil – it was, but in large part, the evil folks weren’t the ones fighting. The evil folks just sent otherwise good men to do their fighting for them, by proxy, and gave them a choice between that and the firing squad.

As is the case so often with these sorts fo things. War is easy for those who wage it. Much less so for those forced to fight it, 0ften against their will. THis is why I think the draft is evil, because it allows unscrupulous men to wage unscrupulous wars thatwould never have the support needed to field an army if it weren’t for the draft.

When folks started talking recently about bringing it back, I began to state my opinion quite loudly – which is to say, if you don’t have enough popular support for the war to field an army of volunteers, then you shouldn’t be fighting it.

And Shecky wonders why intelligent folks don’t take him seriously!

PS: Most of the regular commenters here are extremely reasonable, which is why they are here and not at Huffington Post. Just don’t do the drive-by trolling “Government invented the internet, therefore libertarians are wrong about everything” crap that so many idiots seem to love and we’ll get along fine.

PPS: I just ordered “Folks, This Ain’t Normal” for my Nook, Salatin seems like an interesting dude.

What does seem to be increasing is more awareness about the nature of bullying among youngsters and understanding about the victims. This is behavior that would be considered criminal if it was done by adults even on other adults, yet has a history of misplaced punishment, being tolerated and laughed off by authority figures up through high school.

And Gillespie wonders why folks call him glib!