Hacker News Reader

Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

The purpose of the sticks and stones saying is to prevent disproportionate physical responses to verbal insults.

You are justified in needing to use violence to stop someone from attacking you with sticks and stones because those cannot be mentally shrugged off, but it is better to walk away from words being said to you, since you can mentally shrug them off.

View on HN

One has to be careful here. Sometimes physical violence is the only effective answer to stop bullying.

People often underestimate how much constant mobbing can hurt. Ignore? It gets worse. Fight back verbally? Usually doesn't work, since verbal harassers are much more versed at insulting and hurting mentally. You just can't be so good as someone who practices insults and mockery day in day out.

What choice do you have? Move the battle to the playground where, even if you can't win, you at least may have a chance to cause some harm to the enemy.

Kick the bastard with the fist? In most of the cases it works[1]. If the bully is physically weaker, he won't bully your child again. If the bully is stronger, he kicks too, there's a fight, but still, next time bully will think about consequences of insulting again.

[1] of course, physical force only in a very limited way. Overuse of physical force to actually injure someone, or use weapons and tools, is of course not a way to go.

EDIT: Physical violence doesn't always work. Frequently is not even a good, let alone the best option. But still, there are situations when it can be an adequate response, and this option shouldn't be a priori dismissed.

My experience has been, there's effective strategies against bullying that work if you have a single bully. Physical violence is one of them, you do some damage to that single bully, and they'll think better of using you as their punching bag.

If you have a group of bullies, you're sunk. You can't fight everyone, they are going to maintain their "superiority" via unfair tactics if they can. You beat one of them in a fight, the rest are going to jump in and beat you down to maintain the status quo.

Going to administration is the best path. Document your complaints, establish a pattern of behavior. Find sympathetic adults and confide in them.

What's funny is, my experience has been that bullying is a phenomenon of smaller school size. Once I got to junior high, my grade school bullies all of a sudden just weren't interested anymore. Bullying in high school was almost unheard of. We had something like 2500 students in my high school.

I look at these teen dramas with high school bullies, and those schools look tiny, just a few hundred students. If anyone knows research into this area which explains the correlation, I'd love to read about it.

Like most clever sayings, there are parameters where it does not apply.

But for a children calling each other a mean name on the playground, or acute instances of verbal insult such as words exchange in a bar, the cost benefit analysis of the saying is accurate.

Repeated instances of bullying or communal insults and humiliation cross into the abuse realm, and are not addressed by the saying.

Which brings me to probably most misunderstood of Jesus teachings: "turning the other cheek". People usually interpret it as a call to pacifism - do not respond to violence with more violence. What people miss is that for Jesus contemporaries being slapped in the face hardly counted as violence (if it happens between two adult men it is really hard to cause any lasting damage this way). Instead, slap in the face would be considered an insult, and the meaning of "turn the other cheek" phrase is pretty similar to "stick and stones" saying - don't unnecessarily escalate from insult to violence.

Another interesting look at "turn the other cheek":

https://web.archive.org/web/20160307005615/http://dharmagate...

Thanks, that was really interesting read :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com