
Why Geeks Get Bullied (It's Not Necessarily for Being Geeks) - roguecoder
http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/01/why-geeks-get-bullied-its-not-necessarily-for-being-geeks/272723/
======
SiVal
It's extremely common in the animal (incl. human) world to seek dominance. In
cultures where physical domination is rewarded, you have violence to establish
the dominance. In cultures where intellectual dominance is rewarded, you have
more expressions of contempt for "stupid" people. When you have a diverse
group, you have the strong beating up the weak and the smart verbally
humiliating the dumb. It's not complicated. It's about public status and
privately making yourself feel superior.

Blaming it on class and gender roles is one of those things that urban
intellectuals do to maintain their status among urban intellectuals. Maybe he
should analyze it from a Marxist-feminist perspective for good measure.

~~~
afshin
"Blaming it on class and gender roles is one of those things that urban
intellectuals do to maintain their status among urban intellectuals. Maybe he
should analyze it from a Marxist-feminist perspective for good measure."

I don't suppose the irony of this statement escaped you.

~~~
dasil003
It's escaping _me_. He said "for good measure". Where is the irony?

~~~
James_Duval
His comment exhibits anti-intellectual posturing.

~~~
psutor
It's actually anti- _urban_ -intellectual posturing, suggesting that the
comment author is on a higher level intellectually.

I had a good laugh at both the joke itself and that the telling of the joke is
an act of "verbally humiliating the dumb".

~~~
James_Duval
Oh, I think I saw a different irony to you -- I saw the comment as an act of
verbal aggression towards the author of the article on the grounds that the
author was _being too academic_.

The author of an article about geeks being bullied, not because they were too
academic, but because they were seen as being of a different class.

I prefer your interpretation to be honest, but clearly there is enough irony
for everyone.

~~~
pekk
I agree with your exact wording: applying Marxist theory to everything is
exactly 'more academic' in the sense that it is an artifact of fashion in
educational institutions. It isn't actually 'more intellectual' because it is
content-free, being equally applicable to everything, and brings little or no
insight to any topic outside of economics.

Taking this criticism as validation of Marxist analysis (or accusing the
critic of bullying, etc.) is cheap and pointless, like Freudians answering
criticism of a weak Freudian analysis by saying the critic is only criticizing
due to reaction formation.

If we disallow this kind of criticism then we are validating every kind of
posturing. Not everything anyone says can be correct and it isn't bullying or
snobbery to say so. It's not even personal.

~~~
James_Duval
I'm not sure what exactly you're responding to, here, but I'm certainly not
disallowing this kind of criticism or claiming that the top-level comment
validates Marxist analysis because it's poorly thought-out.

I don't use Marxist analysis myself, at least not deliberately (I am not
myself an academic), either.

I don't know what you mean by:

>content-free, being equally applicable to everything

and I think that:

>brings little or no insight to any topic outside of economics

ignores the fact that a large amount of history, culture and contemporary
society has been profoundly shaped by economics.

>Not everything anyone says can be correct and it isn't bullying or snobbery
to say so. It's not even personal.

Yes. There are a lot of things I agree with in your post, the problem is that
they are "equally applicable to everything", so I feel like I've joined an
argument halfway through, and I have no idea what you are responding to or
why.

------
cromwellian
Did this author not watch _Revenge of the Nerds_? Were Booger, Gilbert, or
Lewis of economically higher class than the Jocks?

I was bullied, I grew up poor. Neither of my parents were college educated.
Mother raised 3 kids as a single parent while doing menial jobs. Living in a
crime ridden neighborhood in Baltimore City where other kids were getting
killed for their Nikes, books and computers were my only refuge, fantasy words
of SciFi, even distopian ones, a better place to live than where I started.
(BTW, when I got into a better school finally in the suburbs, I was made fun
of by kids because my family was poor, not because of privilege)

My theory of why geeks are bullied is the same as why goths are bullied, or
why fat people are bullied. When lions hunt buffalo on the plains, they look
for those they get separated from the pack. Simply put, attacking an
individual that is part of a smaller, less powerful, group is more likely to
succeed without anyone coming to their defense.

If geeks, even as a small population, worked like the Crips, bullies wouldn't
dare, knowing that an attack on one would invite tit-for-tat counter attacks.
If a bully goes after someone who has lots of friends in the main group, they
put themselves at bigger risk.

The more interesting question is why geeks don't have a mutual defense or
strength in numbers, the answer there probably lurks in perhaps connections
between seeking out things because you implicitly like them, and seeking out
things because they are likely to strengthen the bonds within your social
group ("fitting in", "bowing to peer pressure"). Most of the non-fake-geeks I
know just can't stomach being in-authentic, of pretending to like stuff just
to fit in, and so there may just be some core personality or emotional
intelligence traits that are different in people end up at the fringes like
this. If you subscribe to Meyers-Briggs, then it's people who are in
categories like INTP.

~~~
__--__
> When lions hunt buffalo on the plains, they look for those they get
> separated from the pack. Simply put, attacking an individual that is part of
> a smaller, less powerful, group is more likely to succeed without anyone
> coming to their defense.

This was exactly my experience in school. I wasn't bullied in high school, I
was bullied throughout elementary instead. I'm INTP, introverted, extremely
geeky, but none of that was why I was bullied. I was bullied because I was fat
and I didn't know how to fight back. I was an easy target, basically. I had
friends, but none who were capable of physically standing up for me, so we all
suffered the consequences.

The bullying stopped in 7th grade (13 years old) when I stabbed one of my
bullies with a pen and was suspended. I also started weight lifting and made a
name for myself on the JV football team. The bullying stopped, even though I
had become no less the geek and didn't stop hanging out with my geek friends.

> The more interesting question is why geeks don't have a mutual defense or
> strength in numbers

In my experience, fear. In a typical school pecking order, if you're not
capable of physically dominating others, then you live in constant fear of
being physically dominated yourself. I certainly was.

------
jonny_eh
Class and gender roles? Where's the evidence? It's all just conjecture and
anecdote.

If that's how we're going to do it, I would assume a simpler explanation.
Kids, and often adults too, want to show to their peers, or themselves, that
they're strong. So they pick on the weak to prove it.

~~~
calibraxis
Personally, I think class, gender and race are ultimately major factors;
there's huge amounts of literature on their effects on society. But it's
probably easier to look directly at schools and families; these are the most
concrete relevant institutions.

Schools generally aren't enlightened places. Many of them, especially for the
poor, are particularly clear about their prison-like nature: need for written
permission to move ("hall pass"), threat of prison, etc. So you get some
prison-like dynamics. But even many above-average ones impose hierarchy,
rating individuals and setting them against each another using competition
(competition is a well-known way to atomize and control people), obedience to
authority figures no matter how ridiculous, etc. In any case, these places
generally provide virtually nothing in the way of conflict resolution, like
particularly nasty governments.

And most families aren't utopian institutions either. Parents often act like
owners of their children, and take out their frustrations and psychological
problems on them. Child abuse (even for conservative notions of "abuse") is
rampant. Even when parents aren't overtly abusive, they may simply not be
particularly competent at the skill of nurturing children's minds and bodies.

------
precisioncoder
I feel like people are missing the point about the "fake geek" meme. If a
bunch of football players were strutting around in batman costumes at
conventions I feel like the same ire would be directed at them. Geeks are (or
were) mostly outcasts. The geek world was their world. Now the popular kids
are into geek culture since it's the in thing and they feel like they are
losing their world. Being pushed to the perimeter of a world they built as a
refuge. I understand the view, and I often feel wistful that if I see someone
wearing a batman t-shirt there's a much smaller chance than before that he's
friend material.

~~~
dasil003
The correct response to the trauma that many geeks experienced growing up is
to understand the pain and thus avoid inflicting it on others. When we were
kids we would have loved for this stuff to be popular (hence why we talked
about it to everyone), but now we are so traumatized that we don't want anyone
without the same wounding to be allowed access? I refuse to become embittered
and grudgeful to the point that I'm lashing out at people for showing merely a
_passing_ interest in one of my treasured hobbies (fake geeks on TV is another
matter). We're not in high school anymore, most of the jocks grew up and so
did most of the geeks. The ones from both camps who are stuck in a mentality
formed years before reaching psychological and social maturity are living
tragically stunted lives. Our goal should be transcendence; there are many who
have suffered far greater abuse than geeks who have achieved it.

~~~
pekk
If you think this is "inflicting it on others" then maybe you do not
understand the meaning of serious childhood bullying. I don't think that grown
up geeks are getting friends together to beat fake-geeks into submission or
brand them as fags. There's no parity here.

~~~
dasil003
Wow, way to completely miss the point.

It's not about the acts themselves. First of all bullying can range from light
to severe just like nerdrage can range from light to severe, so right away
you're comparison is nonsensical in the general sense.

More importantly, the point is that when one experiences hurt, the healthy
thing is to understand where those feelings come from and allow yourself to
release the hatred rather than holding it into our core being and reflecting
it back out to others in the future. I'm not saying this easy, it's not easy
for anybody (and it's not just nerds that experience abuse btw), but if you
don't do this it will rot and wither your soul and it will be you who
ultimately suffers the most.

------
discountgenius
There are many reasons why kids get bullied. There is no unified theory of
bullying that explains it all.

For years I thought I was picked on because I was smarter than my peers.
Looking back, it seems more likely that I was really kind of a brat about
getting better scores on things. There were plenty of smart kids at my school
who didn't get picked on.

~~~
James_Duval
I'm pretty sure the people who bullied you were to blame for you being
bullied! Continue to be a brat about those better scores, it encourages the
rest of us and sometimes it puts a bigger brat in their place.

------
jacques_chester
I suggest that a simpler hypothesis is that children mature at different
rates. Empathy and moral self-control emerge at different times in different
children. The overlap between adorable sociopaths who can talk and adorable
intellectuals who can feel lasts for quite a while.

To make it worse, children are placed together in a deliberately infantilising
environment with very few role models who aren't basically wardens as well as
educators.

~~~
Cthulhu_
And yet, I'd argue that placing people at different stages of development -
smart kids & dumb kids, apprentice and senior developers, etc - is a good
thing. Putting kids that show increased intellect will give them a skewed
perception of reality, i.e. that the average person is smart, instead of
realizing diversity in people and dealing with it.

Primary lesson there: You are not special.

~~~
jacques_chester
An Australian longitudinal study was recently linked from HN showing that
streaming intelligent kids makes them happier, more successful and better
adjusted. Throughout school and afterwards.

There is a difference between an apprenticeship and simply being forced to mix
with children who literally don't yet have the same neurological architecture
as you.

edit: here's the link --
<http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/Articles_id_10489.aspx>

------
TelmoMenezes
My hypothesis on bullying is simple: human beings are animals and like to
fight for dominant positions. The low intellectual and/or emotional
development of some kids will lead them to try for overt dominance, instead of
the more sophisticated and hypocritical adult versions. Geeks are targeted
because they are weak -- either in physical strength or in alliances.

~~~
orangethirty
Or maybe just different. I always had to deal with people who felt insecure
around me. School was easy and I got good grades without trying. Meanwhile,
others were struggling. That made them hate me. Though the joke was on them
when I started practicing martial arts. (:

------
dasil003
I'm all for taking a good hard look at your assumptions and personal narrative
to clean up biases, but this guy is generalizing _way_ too much. Take this for
instance:

> _Americans have trouble seeing class, and the intersection between class and
> intellectualism—or geekishness, if you prefer—can be especially invisible._

"Geekishness" is an intersection of class and intellectualism? That's
absolutely horseshit. There are no shortage of poor geeks and rich jocks.
Being middle class definitely confers some advantages to _pursuing_ those
interests, but it has nothing to do with the innate quality of geekiness.
Furthermore, geeky interests are not particularly intellectual per se, it's
just we like to get involved in the details of them beyond what most people
consider normal.

~~~
kamaal
>>innate quality of geekiness

Very well put. The problem is most geek/nerd kids don't realize they are
geeks/nerds until some point in their teenage.

In my case, I always wondered 'Why I was so different from others?'. It was
only until a time in teenage that I realized this was actually a positive
quality. Over time I saw geeks/nerds do far better than life than others,
especially bullies.

Most bullies I know have only gone downwards in their lives, even the rich
ones have only gone down with time.

~~~
Cthulhu_
> Most bullies I know have only gone downwards in their lives, even the rich
> ones have only gone down with time.

^ this. I was bullied by some kid, took me years later (and processing an
experience at his house) to realize he was probably beat up by his mom.

Short straw went to him, imho.

------
konstruktor
So after decades of arguing, finally getting close to a consensus that we stop
blaming the victims and focus on the perpetrator with the crime of rape, we
are now starting the same kind of discussion all over again with yet another
kind of abuse? Well done, society.

------
skreech
There are lots of peer reviewed papers that come to a completely different
conclusion than this article (for example, that social skills and verbal
skills are critical).

I recommend reading those instead of this article, which seems based on
speculation.

------
trustfundbaby
Bullies pick on folks who don't really fit in i.e who other people in a group
won't stand up for, and who don't hit back. It really isn't more complicated
than that. Thinking it is is giving bullies waaaay too much credit.

~~~
icebraining
Suggesting that people's behaviours are shaped by society's class structure is
not giving them credit. The author wasn't claiming that the bullies were
making a rational decision to beat him up based on the class difference.

~~~
jiggy2011
It probably made it easier for them to rationalize though, if the bullies can
think of themselves as vehicles of karmic justice.

------
tehwalrus
Lots of people seem to be cross at a few of his incidental points (the article
is _not_ saying that social class is the root of all bullying) so I'll just
emphasise the conclusion:

 _The problem is that this can lead you to a place where suffering, or
persecution, only matters when, or because, the victim is special. This, in
turn, can make it hard to see the ways in which_ violence is not special, but
routine — _and if you can't understand the violence directed against you, how
can you stop it?_

The point he's making is that anti-nerd violence _is not unique_ , but part of
the wider culture of violence for all sorts of reasons (and in all sorts of
directions - up and down the social 'ladders').

I encourage you to read the disqus comments on the article itself, where the
author responds to many of the objections raised here.

------
lucian1900
His anecdote is irrelevant. Plenty of poor children get bullied.

This article makes things worse, if anything.

~~~
James_Duval
His anecdote is irrelevant to _bullying_ , not to _the bullying of geeks_.

~~~
lucian1900
To both, because it is an anecdote. Plenty of poor geeks get bullied too.

~~~
James_Duval
Anecdotes and anecdata can be ignored from a statistical point of view, when
determining the truth of a statement about a population, it's true, but people
can still illustrate a point with an anecdote - and the anecdote is not
central to his post's argument, it's just an illustration.

What he is suggesting is that both privilege and a lack of privilege (he
mentions homosexuality as an example, poverty might be another example) are
more important than "being a geek" to whether you get bullied.

When you are called a geek, consider what the aggressor means by that; is it
that s/he considers you overly-effeminate? That you can't afford to take part
in social activities, making you an outcast? Or perhaps that you have
opportunities and a position in the mainstream which they can't have?

That is all the author is saying (I think, I may have mis-read or read
selectively). They're not saying that poor geeks don't get bullied.

~~~
pekk
Sure, people are bullied for having qualities that are inherent to being a
geek, or very strongly associated. But not for actually being a geek.

What? That's a meaningless distinction.

Of course bullies do not necessarily use the word 'geek,' that word is a
product of people trying to carve out a measure of societal and self-respect
by claiming the label (like others have claimed 'queer' - a closely related
concept given that all these targets are lumped together as bottoms for the
purposes of imposing domination with impunity).

It's far from true that nobody is attacked for having qualities encapsulated
in the word 'geek'.

~~~
James_Duval
Why is that a meaningless distinction?

A quality can be necessary for being a 'geek' without being sufficient for it.

>It's far from true that nobody is attacked for having qualities encapsulated
in the word 'geek'.

I agree.

However, those qualities can be found in many different populations, and as
geek is roughly approximated to "X qualities + intelligence" the question I
feel as though the author is asking is whether the "+ intelligence" part of
the definition is useful.

>(like others have claimed 'queer' - a closely related concept given that all
these targets are lumped together as bottoms for the purposes of imposing
domination with impunity)

I agree very strongly with this.

------
chatmasta
Honestly, all you need to do to avoid bullying is have the balls to fire back
at anyone who makes fun of you. If you just sit back and take it, you make
yourself a target. By if you immediately fire back with a response,
effectively "bullying the bully," he'll eventually stop targeting you. This is
such a basic male social concept that I would expect "geeks" (btw, why even
self label yourself? Seems to set yourself up for failure) of all people to
understand it.

I think a lot of what people see as "bullying" is actually a just half of this
male social pattern of "giving each other shit." It's just what guys do. If
you can handle it and fire back, you don't call it bullying. It's only when
you refuse to participate that it becomes bullying. Obviously, that line of
logic has some inherent victim blaming, and I am _not_ defending bullying at
all. I think it's despicable. But at some point you just need to accept the
status quo and learn to defend yourself instead of lamenting about it. And if
you're truly smarter than the person bullying you, it should be no problem to
come up with a quick witted response.

Come on people. Get some confidence.

------
jasonwocky
Geeks get _ostracized_ because other kids are more or less forced to compete
with them for grades in school, and resent the fact that they come up short.
This is as opposed to, e.g. jocks who mostly compete with other folks who've
voluntarily chosen the same arena of competition.

Geeks get _bullied_ because it's easy for people who are prone to bullying to
bully ostracized kids.

------
dnautics
what about the other way around? Maybe people who get bullied
disproportionately wind up becoming geeks.

~~~
mikecane
Or drug addicts or alcoholics or suicidal. So, no.

------
Crake
TFA says: "I wasn't being bullied because I was sensitive, in other words. I
was being bullied because I was privileged" and that his refusal to accept
this was "but simply an excuse to perpetuate" the "system of power."

What the fuck, man. I guess all those ~privileged~ gay kids who killed
themselves deserved it for not checking their privilege. Ridiculous.

As a GLBT, and in addition to that, a smart and geeky one, I got bullied a lot
in high school. There were some occasions where I couldn't (and still can't)
understand the reasons why, but there were at least a few times where it was
pretty clear whether I was being targeted for being GLBT or being targeted for
being smart. This author is full of shit.

------
thesz
I read up to "gender roles" where "more into D&D than football" was mentioned.
The I stopped, as author linked it to homophobia.

This thing is not a gender role difference. This thing is difference in force
and fitness. Being fit allows you to both bully and stand for bullying. There
nothing related to homophobia there.

I was bullied myself until some spring my "friends" found that I can pullup
more than them. I wasn't bulied anymore. I was hated, but that's different
story.

I also should mention that there are almost no gender roles in human society.
Especially for males - they should be successful in finding food and a place
to stay at night and that's all.

Thus I consider author dumb one. He sees things that do not exist.

~~~
mikecane
>>>I also should mention that there are almost no gender roles in human
society.

That is just so wrong. You need to have a look around.

~~~
thesz
Compare humans to pigeons, for example. Human gender differentiation is much
less exressed.

------
RyanMcGreal
A social hierarchy based on insecurity will persecute _anyone_ who is
different: by socioeconomic status, by interests, by gender normativeness, by
sexuality, and so on. We don't need to subsume one in another to make sense of
the system.

------
kentwistle
Obviously picked on him because he's so smart and brilliant. Some birds aren't
meant to be caged, their feathers are just too bright.

~~~
tehwalrus
this is precisely the point the author is attacking; the problem of deciding
that the bullying is the result of the fact that you're special, not part of a
routine culture of violence.

~~~
pekk
But it isn't a routine culture of violence. It is a culture of shaming,
violence and impunity against victims with very specific traits. Which
actually do include things like intellectual ability, sensitivity or
preference to be alone. It actually isn't equally applied to everyone.

~~~
tehwalrus
I didn't mean it applied equally to everyone; I mean it applies to all sorts
of people for all sorts of reasons, nerds and not.

 _victims with very specific traits_ \- You're choosing to ignore a whole load
of violence (including harassment) which undoubtedly occurs against members of
all minorities (indeed, to all "diversity streams" - since women are in fact
the majority.) You're arbitrarily filtering out all sorts of similar violence
that happens to people who aren't nerds, which isn't valid (the author
argues).

------
yourapostasy
I tend to agree with the comments that this is probably way over-thinking the
issue from a certain perspective, but the author makes a subtle point that I
generally agree with. The general premise that bullies don't particularly
single out geeks leads to some interesting implications that I think has not
been commented upon very much. She acknowledges that:

> On the contrary, I think people get bullied for lots of reasons.

Which leads to the implication she touches upon near the end of the essay:

> ...violence is not special, but routine—and if you can't understand the
> violence directed against you, how can you stop it?

She's pointing out that geeks shouldn't necessarily think that they were
bullied because they were smarter than the others, but because bullying is a
common feature upon the dystopic educational landscape. And not recognizing
this leads to a situation where bullying of victims who are not somehow
especially outstanding in some way (smart being only one attribute of
specialness), is not recognized as bullying. She cites that this sometimes
emerges from previous victims of bullying themselves by mentioning how male
geeks sometimes bully female geeks for not being "real geeks".

All this is well and good, but it unfortunately doesn't materially help the
folks on the ground waking up today and dreading their daily bullying
gauntlet. This perspective is where I think the article is possibly over-
thinking the issue, by not providing actionable information. To be fair, I
don't think that was her intent, but judging from the comments, there is a
sub-group of people who seem to desire that kind of information with these
articles that explore bullying.

At the risk of generalizing, and supplying actionable information that may be
out of date, in my personal anecdotal experience bullies select victims that
somehow respond in a manner that rewards the bullying. Thus the commonly-
dispensed advice to "ignore them". But I think that advice often doesn't come
with a helping of _how_ to ignore them, and really should be dispensed as
advice on _using ignoring as a way to stand up for yourself_. Ignoring taunts
while showing on your face that the taunting shatters your confidence and
self-worth tends to incite further bullying. Ignoring in a manner (which will
not be easy to pull off) that fizzles out the "fun" of the bullying is a means
of standing up for oneself. This may sometimes mean actually interacting with
the bully, but not in a manner that they expect; the "ignoring" refers to
ignoring the intended effect of the bullying, and figuring out what action
takes the fun out of the bullying. I wish someone had told me this when I was
first going through my daily gauntlet.

For males, and increasingly for females, physical bullying is sometimes the
form. I was very fortunate that I grew up in a part of the world and time
where just fighting back was sufficient to stop physical bullying. I got the
snot beaten out of me sometimes, but the ringleaders I was up against
uniformly did not like to get their hands dirty, so using the element of
surprise to land in a hit that draws blood (visible bruising counts) helped me
dissuade them from further bullying. These days, there are more nasty places
where you can get murdered fighting back. Be safe, play it smart, and don't
get yourself killed if you are stuck in that kind of situation; if you're in
such a dangerous situation and the adults around you aren't helping, some
anonymous forums can sometimes provide ideas from sympathetic adults who have
been-there-done-that.

YMMV, and all that.

~~~
pekk
> in my personal anecdotal experience bullies select victims that somehow
> respond in a manner that rewards the bullying.

And here we are again, blaming the victim. Substitute 'rape' for 'bully' and
you get a readout of the same regressive mentality. The target of bullying or
of rape gets the 'bottom' role; the kind of argument you are making is that
they are more or less justly assigned that role for being inherently
effeminate or oversensitive and that the solution is for them to toughen up.
Because you didn't suffer that much, because you were so much better at
dealing with the bullying. Sorry, it doesn't work that way. You are
congratulating yourself for having it relatively easy.

~~~
yourapostasy
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough; I tried to point out there are _lots_ of
different kinds of bullies, and bullying situations. I never tried to set out
that what I was saying was representative of bullying in general, as I've
never made a study of the issue. I tried to put qualifiers around what I
reported was based upon my limited, personal, anecdotal experience.

For the record, I do not blame the victim. I've done my speaking stint with a
battered women's shelter in my area, I've seen and worked with victims aplenty
and have a perspective that informs me better than to blame the victim. But
victims need to know there are ways to stand up, get help, and get out of the
situation. In some settings where bullying takes place in the US public school
system (the context that I'm familiar with), there might actually be no help
feasibly available. Facing the reality that one might have to fight back (and
note that I first described it in a metaphorical sense of redirecting the
bullying's energy in a judo-like manner), is to acknowledge this situation on
the ground, and does not mean I desire to blame the victim or in any way stop
advocating for more assistance infrastructure like what we have for battered
women.

If you have a more studied perspective, or your own personal views that
influence how you view the issue that can help the kids getting bullied today,
then I encourage you to share it here. If you want to go down the
"...congratulating yourself for having it relatively easy..." road, then we
all here discussing about bullying could be guilty of the same
characterization, because this is #firstworldproblems to an orphaned 6-year
old girl on the streets of Mumbai. There is _always_ someone, somewhere,
somewhen that has it tougher. My position is I'd rather not devolve into that
kind of meta-discussion, and instead put more energy into a discussion that
can help those suffering at the moment. Or we can just agree to disagree.

------
Qantourisc
I blame the parents! The most important thing to teach your kid as soon as
possible is self-reflection.

