Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

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1. Don't allow other people to control your feelings.

2. Be forgiving of people who do not mean offense, but are simply inept at the social graces. It's not that hard. You get to choose whether to be offended or not. Choose the not.

BTW, sometimes I listen to celebrities when they deal with hecklers trying to get under their skin. It's fun to watch how they parry the verbal knives. I recall Prince Phillip once being interviewed by "60 Minutes". The reporter really tried to get under his skin. Prince Phillip effortlessly and deftly turned the dagger away each time. He's evidently had a lot of practice :-)

Howard Stern was fun to watch, too. He knew how to get the goat from his interviewees. Except Paul McCartney. McCartney was a master at this game. Watching those two verbally duel was great sport. McCartney got the better of it!

> making excuses for bad behavior

Not at all. I've had to ban people a couple times from the D forums for unprofessional behavior. Not because they made me feel bad, but because I have no interest in running a sewer. We've been fortunate that it's only been a couple, and usually a private word can set things straight.

1. Don't allow other people to control your feelings.

Isn't that a lot like curing depression by saying "why don't you just stop being depressed?" Different people are wired differently and humans are on the whole really bad at consciously controlling their psychological state.

You even said in the previous post that crying and being sad is OK in some situations (like when a loved one died). Why didn't you choose to control your feelings and not be sad then?

I agree with your rules generally, but they're not workable when there's a big power imbalance between the offender and the offendee. Professors and grad students, in particular, have a massive power imbalance. A grad student's success in their multi-year quest for the degree is heavily dependent on the whims of the professor. The student must care about what the professor thinks. Escaping a tyrannical prof could set back the student's career by years.

I considered graduate education after I got my BS, but the risk of ending up as some professor's dog wasn't worth it to me.

That's all well and good but you're still directing your comments at the students. When there's multiple students all complaining about a single person, that's misdirected. Apply some systems thinking here.

In your comment, in response to what should be done, you replied "just [stuff the victim should do]'. That strongly implies that that is all that should be done. Very different message then is you had started with "One thing that hasn't been mentioned here is [the rest of your message]"

I suspect you are being misread due to that word choice, but to be honest I am not quite sure.

> Don't allow other people to control your feelings.

1. You offer this as an excuse for profound hostility and rudeness from someone in a position of power.

2. Every human has buttons that can be pressed and you are no exception.

3. Bullying behavior by someone who has power over others logically causes fear in the target of the bullying.

4. Bullying works. That's why people do it, even though it's a cheat. You are literally blaming the victim.

"Don't allow other people to control your feelings" as a response to a man with a career of bullying shows a profound and perhaps pathological contempt for the well-being of others.

It isn't blaming the victim any more than taking a self-defense class is blaming the victim.

Nor is it making excuses for bullies any more than locking your door at night is excusing thieves.

I mean you said that behavior that offends is partially the fault of the person taking offense, I don’t understand how that’s not blaming the victim here. Having a thick skin is important but I question your priorities when your response to somebody not wanting to be woken up by a screaming phone call at 3am is “there’s no crying in baseball.”

> you said that behavior that offends is partially the fault of the person taking offense

I did not say that. Please read more carefully.

> It takes two to make an offense - one to give offense, the other to take offense. Don't take offense, and there is no offense.

What else does this mean?

It does not mean the offendee is responsible for the behavior of the offender.

It means the offendee is responsible for the offendee's reaction.

Very, very different.

That’s true, but something should also be done to correct the behavior of the offender, which is what I think most of this thread is talking about.

At least one poster in this thread has attempted to bully me. He failed - and not because anyone tried to correct his behavior. It's because his insults do not affect me.

There are multiple ways to stop people from being bullied and harassed. We shouldn’t leave it on everyone to defend themselves, but set baseline standards of acceptable behavior. This is uncontroversial as far as government in general is concerned. For whatever reason, people seem to get upset about it when organizations try to enforce standards that are more stringent than the law.

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