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Comment by ahoyhere | Hacker News Reader

You don't need to hit a bully to break his power.

The trick is to emasculate them. Show them you don't care. When they insult you or hurt you, laugh at them. You just have to mean it.

I was bullied for years until I realized one day why they bullied me - I smelled of fear, and I didn't react, I just stood there and looked at them. Suddenly it all made sense, they were like braindead sharks to blood.

So I started smiling and laughing at them.

Took the wind right out of their sails, and they weren't able to force me to come down to their level.

I won.

Play their game and they still win on some level, because hurting another person hurts yourself.

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What's all this talk about "their level"?

"Hurting someone hurts yourself", bullshit. Revenge is sweet. Defending yourself is not a weakness or immoral, it's rather noble.

If you go with the "laugh at them" technique, they will still go around bullying other kids.

But, stand up and fight them, and they learn a lesson that bullying has some serious consequences. You also set an example to other bullies and other kids being bullied.

Unlike probably most people here on HN, I have done real violence to someone else. Over and over, in fact. I had the cops called on me and I've had to live with the consequences. And I don't mean legal consequences.

Beating up on other people kills you inside, slowly, because it shows you exactly what kind of person you are.

It doesn't matter if you're "standing up" to some other kid. Violence is violence.

I'm not saying violence is never required, but if you're resorting to violence when a smile and a chuckle will do, you're weak -- you don't have enough willpower to control yourself, or brains to think up an alternative.

> Beating up on other people kills you inside, slowly, because it shows you exactly what kind of person you are.

I disagree. What kills you inside slowly, is all the authority figures telling you what a horrible person you are for defending yourself.

I mean, by all means if you live in a place where the cops will actually do something if someone hurts, just call the cops. But you have to remember that the world doesn't consist entirely of north america.

>It doesn't matter if you're "standing up" to some other kid. Violence is violence.

Self-defense and unprovoked violence are two entirely different things. The law recognizes this and so do most sentient beings.

>"Thee law recognizes this and so do most sentient beings."

Sadly, this does not include most school administrators.

He said sentient beings.

It would be inconvenient for them to recognize the difference between provoked and unprovoked violence. The grand unifying theory of bad school administrators can be summed up in one word: indifference. (Not malice, as many assume. They genuinely don't care who started a fight.)

Obviously, this doesn't apply to every single administrator. #include <std_disclaimer.h>

Yeah, and being bullied kills you inside too, only quickly and with much more duration.

If I could go back and do it all again there'd be two or three more swung fists. Probably no more than that, either, because that's all it would take.

In fact I think this debate would be really different if defending yourself against being bullied actually required sustained violence, but instead rather we're in a world where I can ask "How many people have killed themselves that could have been saved by them instead swinging their fists once?" and get a number probably at least in the thousands.

This isn't just a philosophy debating match; children are dying over this, and a lot more are getting badly hurt.

My mother used to beat me, until I was big enough to fight back, which I did. Guess which hurt me more?

Her abuse of me doesn't weigh on me nearly as much as mine of her, because in the latter I had a choice. So there you go.

We're not talking about parental or family abuse here. This is bullying, which is not the same thing. Being less bad, it admits of different solutions.

> But, stand up and fight them, and they learn a lesson that bullying has some serious consequences.

No. They'll just learn that bullying you has serious consequences, and that they should find an other target.

> But, stand up and fight them, and they learn a lesson that bullying has some serious consequences.

"An armed society is a polite society." -- RAH

Where "armed" just means where people are willing and able to defend themselves.

"Hurting someone hurts yourself", bullshit. Revenge is sweet.

Revenge has nothing to do with self-defense.

Along the same lines, non-reactiveness can also work and can even be fun. There is this one kid on campus who I've run into a few times. The kid apparently knows every brown kid--except me. The first time we met he asked me if I was a freshman(I'm a senior). I went along and said yes. He went on cracking a few jokes about me. I just sat there with a coy smile on my face, staring at him, without saying a word. It didn't take long before he was the one looking really stupid making fun of a non-reactive guy. He appeared as the unfunny clown.

The same thing happend last week when I run into the same guy late night. He was there with a dozen or so friends after a night out. I was there just to grab some pizza and get back to work. So he asks me if I knew anybody here. I just shook my head and said no. He asked me my name. I told him my name. He proceeds to yell out that I am here alone and don't know anyone. Then it came out that I knew several people in his group. He looked stupid and drunk. And I got a laugh at his expense. All by just playing dumb and being non-reactive.

While I do agree you need to emasculate a bully, "smiling and laughing" only works if you're being verbally bullied. In order to emasculate a physical bully, you need to either make them feel fear or pain.

This was my method too. You attack them with words, and it's often just as good as punching them in the face. Another thing that works is to be extremely unpredictable. If they believe you may flip out on them, often that's enough.

Laugh at them, turn them in to a joke whenever they attempt to do something to you, and eventually they'll realize that people are laughing at them, not what they are doing to you.

I did have to get physical a few times but it was only the odd extreme case where this didn't work.

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