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Comment by MichaelCollins | Hacker News Reader

Having been on the receiving end of some physical and social/psychological bullying, I think maybe we've gone astray by suppressing the former in favor of the latter. The times I got into fights I was left bruised and humbled, but in all but one case I was able to bury the hatchet with those people. The rumor spreading is different. With social bullying there's no sense of finality after a fight, no reconciliation or resolution. I've gotten and made apologies after fights, but never after social bullying.

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Formalize it into combat sports, with rules, referees, and medical personnel on staff. Or just competitive sports in general. But don't permit physical bullying. Your experiences elide over cases where there was serious harm done to the victim, physical or otherwise, or led to disproportionate retaliation.

Heh, most of the fights I ever got in were in the context of a competitive sports team. There was always informal refereeing; other people on the team pulling the fight apart when they decided it was over. And there is an unspoken code of conduct; putting somebody in a headlock ended the fight, and you would never try to do something insane like gouging somebody's eyes out.

Of course sometimes a small minority of people are insane and decide to maim and murder people. But I don't think "zero tolerance" environments are good at suppressing that. These policies are ineffectual against psychological/social bullying; how do you prove anything about a maliciously planted word-of-mouth rumor? That stuff goes unpunished, and that sort of bullying does more long-term damage than a typical schoolyard fight. Those festering social wounds probably drive more people to homicidal insanity than anything else.

You're also overlooking that physical bullying usually goes hand-in-hand with psychological/social bullying. A bully is not going to be choosy about tactics. But this whole tangent is orthogonal to the original discussion, anyway: schoolyard fights aren't necessarily about bullying, as they may involve combatants who are on equal footing. The ones you're describing certainly sound like disputes between parties of parity, more than a situation when one party is being dominated by another. A fight where a bully pummels the victim and is free to continue the torment doesn't really solve anything.

most times i see people get into fights there's their friends around so nobody pulls a weapon and to break it up if somebody goes down so people don't start kicking the other guy or whatever. it's a controlled way to resolve differences and tbh i don't get why people don't like it. like if it's 1 person jumping another that's different but i've got friends i fought with first and friends i fought with so we stayed friends after.

>Formalize it into combat sports, with rules, referees, and medical personnel on staff.

So, what I'm hearing is, we need to bring back dueling.

Yeah but in a nonlethal way. I mentioned maybe it could be channeled into competitive sports- that could include esports.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0dr7hXabqI&t=36s

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