Comment by aragot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aragot | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

What's wrong with the American society? You can be the country of awesomeness and freedom and entrepreneurship, and at times you also have those weird customs like bullying at school.

So beware game creators: This topic will be "understood" by other European cultures but it will not match what they live at school. For example we keep watching movies like Back to the Future where Marty gets bullied, or others with baby showers and popular girls dressed in pink, but it doesn't match any experience we live here.

About bullying in France: I didn't have any. No physical violence, except once on the beach, so pretty much out of school. I'm pretty sure most French people have never seen a wedgie or a swirlie. I don't even know how to translate those into French. We probably don't have a word for "bully".

Ok, we do have the word "racket". But this is only about stealing. And even in this instance... we use the English word.

So I'd say: Don't lose hope. Society doesn't have to be tough on children. You can change it somehow.

In my opinion, this is key to all of this. I don't have those bad experiences and can't understand where all these problems come from. In my experience, from a country which is not usa, kids and teenagers are perfectly capable of making new friends constantly, sometimes they slowly stop hanging around with some of them, occasionally they get into a fight about some specific situation but they forget the day after, maybe they don't get along with somebody or whatever, some friendships last for less than a year and some last forever. But all of this without the drama and the suffering everybody is mentioning here.

So I can't understand when some say "that's life", because that's not life and saying so stops everybody from looking for an alternative.

When I was a kid and later a teenager everybody used to tell me "enjoy your time in school (and later in college), cause once you are out of college your happiest days are behind". That was, in essence, wrong. But it was true in many senses. And that's how it should be everywhere. We should put every effort needed to make it so.

Well, that was certainly from 'I was never bullied' to 'bullying doesn't exist in Europe' in less than 2.8 seconds.

If you'll pardon me for being rather blunt, it's exactly this sort of snooty French uninformed bullshit that gives your country its reputation of arrogant holier than thou know-it-alls.

Bullying is a major problem across Europe, as recognized by the European Commission (and most everybody else in 2014), and a lot of effort has been spend the last 20 years to combat it. Estimates range from 10 to 30 percent of children being bullied at some point in their initial education (that's roughly 'anything before university'). But don't take my word for it, obviously - just 2 minutes of googling could have told you so. And while you're at it, just 20 more minutes will give you not only a much deeper consideration for the problem, but also some chilling examples of lives across the world being ruined by a, for all intents and purposes, emerging behaviour.

What is true though, is France's reputation for its denial of the existence of it (because well, you guys buried all social inequalities after you chopped off the heads of your last kings, right?) and the resulting cognitive dissonance regarding all things bullying. To be fair though, your governments have started recognizing and acting on it a number of years ago (even if it was years after most other member states, but hey, there are plenty of other things that other members states were later than France to adopt, so I'm not harping on that). But apparently not everybody has gotten 'le memo' yet - because well, you were never bullied, so it doesn't exist in Europe, right?

Oh, and because apparently I need to teach you your own language, the word is 'harcelement'.

(for context, I'm not an American, and also this comment is probably more vitriolic than it should be, but hey - I've reached the breaking point for nationalistic nonsense and 'my experience is x, therefore x is universal' idiocy on HN, and this post happened to combine them in the most obnoxious way possible).

My personal experience with US high school as an exchange student is that there was a much higher pressure on being "cool" and "popular", than back home, to a great detrimental effect on the social environment. Students were being unfriendly and mean to each other for no other apparent reason than to climb the social ladder. It also seemed like it was a goal to be disgusting - with indoor spitting, food-fights and generally gross behavior. Not only kids, but also weak teachers were bullied. Reciprocally, some teachers bullied weak students to an extent I consider clearly unprofessional. And god forbid if you were gay or something (this was in the mid-nineties, so a while back now).

How refreshening it was to return to my native high school after that year! Although it had is problem too, at least the norm among student was to be nice to each other. Being "cool" was certainly a thing, but students generally weren't obsessed about it. I am generally nostalgic about my high school days, except the year in the US.

This is just my personal anecdote, and is of course ludicrous to say that "bullying doesn't exist in Europe", but I cannot help but wondering whether my experience fit into a pattern. Watching American teenage dramas, it's just too uncannily like what I observed myself.

Hi roel_v, you're assuming I'm arrogant because I'm French, and it is not nice because I was careful to also praise the upsides of both US and France.

You're also too keen on assuming I like social inequalities. In fact, the place I grew up safe from violence was a Catholic high school: They amount to 20% of French schools and cost €800 per year, compared to the $24000 it costs in Australia. Catholic school are even careful to have hallal meals and the vice manager of mine was muslim. I'm telling there is no discrimintation on race, religion or money here. I'd capture more truth with "People from public schools just hate to be krelboynes" in lieu of all discriminations I hear.

I like Klapaucius' comment because it emphasizes more on a "user story", and it tells us much more than statistics: Inuit people have 27 different words for snow, and we don't have a translation for "this guy is a bully", "wedgie" or "swirlie". "Harceleur" isn't colloquial for schools.

So when one makes a video game about it, he has to take care of culture and markets.

Well that my post wasn't nice is I think indisputable, but I wasn't saying that you're arrogant because you're French, just that the arrogance exhumed by your post reminds me of more often observed behaviour of your fellow countrymen. But let's not dwell on that - it would be silly of me to claim that something in the ink of your passports influences your behaviour.

I'm also not sure how I suggested you like social inequalities - if anything, I'm more inclined to think that you dislike them so much, that you deny their existence in cases where there obviously are. Apart from Catholic schools not costing 25k in Australia (I'm not even sure what the relevance of that is, but I know for a fact that the Catholic secondary school I went to a fundraiser for last year in Adelaide costs around 1000 AUD a year, and other Catholic schools in the greater Adelaide area cost the same; figures that are corroborated by the data I can find online for the rest of Australia). You seem to basically be denying that there is racism, or discrimination of muslims, in France? Are you serious? Because if that is what you're arguing, based on 'a vice principal was a muslim, so there is no discrimination', then I don't even know where to start in refuting you.

Your further argument is even more laughable and not only that, but plain wrong. You seem to be saying that the existence of words in a language indicates something intricate about the culture or society in which that language is used. That Inuit have 27 (or 30, or 50, or 100's) of words for the same thing is plain wrong, and the linguistic debate about what a 'word' means and how that relates to the Inuit language is not very relevant here (but you might want to start with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow and http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/there-... ). What is certain though is that the premise you derive from it, doesn't have merit.

So pray tell, what then makes your assertion of 'we don't have bullies because we don't have a word for it' more valid than e.g. my assertion 'the French are in denial about bullying because they don't even have a word for it'? (Apart from that I still don't agree with you on that point - there are plenty of ways French newspapers manage to express the concept every time another suicide because of bullying is in the news).

What enrages me most (well, not enrage, just annoys enough to spend 10 minutes to type this), is that instead of saying 'yeah maybe I kinda mis-expressed reality by making generalizations from what is probably a myopic point of observation', you basically make it even worse by saying 'not only do we not have bullying, we don't have racism or any other form of discrimination either'! In a country where millions are living in banlieues, and which has been officially sanctioned for the forced expulsion of Roma, just to name a few issues!

Not saying we don't have any. I'm saying this form is different in the US. We have racaille, but it's a very different form.

You're reading my comments with the worst mind, max out with pseudo-quotes like "we don't have bullying, we don't have racism", then you say you're "enraged" by what I said.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com