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Comment by fc417fc802 | Hacker News Reader

> does not understand the social situation or just does not have it in him to hit back.

So I should adopt poor behavior because some other group did? There's sometimes a point to that for in person interactions with small groups but I don't see how that applies at larger scales. It becomes nothing more than an excuse for the poor behavior of your own in-group, which further exacerbates polarization for little to no benefit.

Realize that such behavior isn't going to change the mind of the opposition, and those in your group already agreed with you regardless. Then the bad behavior is a particularly harmful form of virtue signalling.

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Self defense is not poor behavior. Responding to attack is not poor behavior. Submission is not good behavior.

On a larger scale, demanding that victims enable and accommodate their own bullies achieves exactly the same as in school yard. Bullies get stronger and dominant while victims get blamed for what bullies do.

That is why Canada is responding to tariffs. Whan goes on here is that republican enablers really want everyone else to just accept insults, lies and attacks passively and ineffectively. It feels good to them, because they are in group and harm to out group feels good.

How do you choose to defend yourself? What attack(s) do you percieve? What is your response to percieved attack?

The rest I pretty much agree with.

I don't disagree with what you literally wrote there but I don't feel like it's really a response to what I wrote. It seems to me that you are misconstruing the definition of self defense in order to justify poor behavior.

As far as I'm concerned, responding to immature behavior or misrepresentations or whatever with your own similarly poor behavior is not (at least in general) a form of self defense. It's just childish behavior.

If your argument amounts to "they behaved like a child so it's okay if I behave like a child" then I guess we just have fundamentally incompatible worldviews.

The much more important point that I was trying to make though is that, even if you feel 100% morally justified that doesn't make it an effective tactic. The behavior you described in your earlier comment serves only to further divide parties that already disagree while actively eroding social standards. It isn't just pointless behavior, it's actively harmful.

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