I suppose my response wasn't as direct as I thought it was. I do think I am basically agreeing with your point.

I was objecting to the common, "This will teach you to be tough, which is good for you in the long run", which I thought I read implied in tbird81's comment. Though that may be a misreading of tbird81's comment, on reflection.

The first stage of the bully's attack was encircling the victim with his pack. So, no, putting the bully down was never a possibility.

That's already a significant improvement.

Furthermore, in my experience of bullying, the bullies counted on the indifference of adults, and occasionally, tacit encouragement. On most occasions when I asked for help from an adult, the response was, "Shut up, you little faggot." (Incidentally, I don't believe I'd worked out my sexual orientation when I was eight.) I seriously doubt the bullies would have been so confident had adults intervened with any consistency. Of course, it's classic for bullies to threaten retaliation if the victim complains and a parent is informed, but that actually was relatively effective, at least in the case of parents who disapproved of bullying.

I totally agree.

My experience of early elementary school was that the bullies were actually encouraged by many of the teachers and administrators, and I was explicitly blamed for "inciting" them.

We live in a cruelly hierarchical society, in which victim-blaming is extremely common.

Not mine. One good punch to the bully, and they'll call out to their pack, and they'll all beat you until you're bleeding and can't cry out anymore.

It's far more effective if an adult simply walks over and tells the bully to knock it off.

I keep thinking that one of the conceptual errors people frequently make is to confuse what makes a species tougher, in the sense of natural selection, with what makes an individual stronger. If you see a tree growing from a crevice on a sheer cliff, you know that's a pretty tough species of tree. But that's not a strong tree. It would have been a much stronger tree if it had grown in ideal conditions.

We're not getting eaten by sabre-toothed tigers anymore. We need people who are strong -- as in, creative, empathetic, mutually supportive -- far more than we need people who are tough.

We're homeschooling my younger stepson. It was becoming clear that elementary school was simply a waste of his time, even when he was attending a progressive private school (with a generous tuition assistance program). He learns more efficiently on his own initiative. We live in an urban area, one in which there's a fairly substantial community of homeschoolers who coordinate activity, and of course there's the Internet. I'd say he has far more social interaction than I did at his age, both with other children and with adults.

From everything I've heard about modern educational theory, elementary school is pretty much pointless, and I'm increasingly dubious about the structure of later stages of formal education. I took classes on programming and system administration, and that prompted me to study specific topics that I wouldn't have, otherwise -- but, most of what I know about those subjects, I knew from tinkering with Linux on my own desktop, and most of the topics I studied that I wouldn't have on my own initiative, have proven to be obsolete or irrelevant to both my personal and my professional work. Meanwhile, I'm watching my ten-year-old, rapidly learning the ins and outs of package management and system administration, because of his interest in Minecraft.

The main problem with homeschooling, in general, is that I think it's relatively unusual for most people families to be able to ensure there's an adult at home to supervise a younger child. Fortunately, my wife is in graduate school, and my work schedule gives me several weekdays off, so there's always an adult around in our household; we also have adult relatives nearby, as backup. But, I think more broadly yet, our social and economic organization is grossly irrational. We work far more hours than we ought to -- real wages have been static in the US for forty years, even as productivity has more than doubled, so I think we'd all be better off in many ways if our wages were increased, we worked fewer hours, and we did less useless crap that just wastes resources to prop up an irrational economic system based on perpetual expansion.

I hate hearing that bullshit.

In elementary school, the routine was that the bullies would stand in a circle around their victim, and the leader would start hitting the victim. If the victim just curled up in a fetal position and hid his face, then only one bully would hit him. If the victim tried to resist -- say, by pushing the bully away -- then the entire pack would close in, and together beat up the victim, to "teach him a lesson". The yard duty teachers would ignore this, usually, despite the fact it usually happened in the middle of the playground, in plain sight. A few times I was called in to talk to teachers or administrators, who asked me what I was doing to provoke bullies and how I thought I could change my behavior to stop provoking them. My mother insisted I was effeminate and disgusting and deserved to be bullied; my father was more sympathetic.

That was my experience at two elementary schools in wealthy suburbs. Later, we moved to a poor rural area, where there was considerably less bullying. At that school, teachers tended to respond promptly and intervene in bullying and fights to break them up. Zero tolerance for violence? Please, more of that.

I've long wondered if the behavior of kids in wealthy suburbs was the result of their being trained to be sociopaths, to suit their future social roles as managers and professionals.

People can't be blamed for failing to read the full text of the proposition. For one thing, a recurring tactic in the California ballot initiative system is for opponents of one proposition to push their own proposition, with wording that is difficult for a lay person to distinguish from the other proposition, but with some clause that causes it to override the other proposition and nullify its intended effects. What typically happens is that voters will see two propositions that seem to have the same laudable purpose, and will vote for both of them; the deceptive proposition passes as well as the genuine proposition, and nullifies the genuine proposition.

I remember on one occasion in the 1990s, when there was a suite of propositions sponsored by environmental groups, and an opposing suite of propositions sponsored by industry groups. I felt that, as a good activist, I really ought to read through the propositions themselves. For one thing, I'm not a lawyer, and it's a rare person who enjoys spending an entire day reading through dense legalese. More importantly, however, even having done that, I still couldn't tell which proposition was which, except by checking what political groups supported which proposition.

In this case, it was more a matter of pushing a proposition that sounded good from the ballot summary. If someone had a proposition for providing free milk to orphans, it would pass, without most people noticing that on page 35 of the text of the proposition, it called for the purchase of milk contaminated with depleted uranium.

Most people headed to the polls, I expect, with a firm decision about which candidate for president they would support, but little idea of any other issues that would see on the ballot. This is a problem with how our elections work: I doubt any media outlet spent five seconds discussing who was running for the community college board, but that sort of local issue is one in which an individual vote is much more meaningful than a vote for president.

In the last few years, some major social media service providers have been pushing for "real names" policies. Most notably, Google has been doing this. This has been a big controversy with Google+. Google's plan with Google+ was to use it as the basis for an identity authentication system. Part of the privacy threat I see with Prop 35 is that social media services will use it as an excuse to enforce "real names" policies, claiming that it's just too difficult to check whether a pseudonym is a new alias for a registered sex offender, so no one should be allowed to use pseudonyms. That would be a significant blow to free speech on the Internet.

Is anyone else having problems posting to Sl TRANSACTION SUCCESSFUL: RECORD 'Romney, Willard Mitt' INCREMENTED.

I will not consider voting for anyone who supports the murder of innocent people. That is my absolute minimum standard for support for a political candidate. Since both major parties are fully committed to wars of aggression, I believe that voting for them is unconscionable. That leaves me with a choice of refusing to vote, or voting for a candidate that will not win. Since I like a lot of what Jill Stein has to say, I may as well vote for her. At least it slightly increases the odds of her message getting out.

Both major parties supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. So no, there was no difference between the two major parties. The two major parties claim somewhat different domestic policies, but almost never actually differ on foreign policies.

Actually, that sounds like a pretty good candidate to me.

I was surprised last year when I first saw an article from EFF suggesting that we open our wifi networks. I did see some reason to support what they were suggesting, but I was also anxious about opening up my LAN, weak as wireless encryption may actually be. Since then, I bought a new wireless router, which does make it easy to offer separate WLANs with configurable levels of access to each other. I see TLS being used more widely. I've learned a bit about VPNs, and set up OpenVPN on my router. And, I read the article others have mentioned in this thread, that Bruce Schneier, who both knows more than I do and has more to worry about, doesn't bother securing his wireless, since it's really not the security vulnerability that it's made out to be.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/01/my_open_wireles.html

But most important, I worry that a lot of the structure of IT, and especially IT security, tends to foster an individualistic and cautious outlook that needs the balance of the considerations of fostering community. Of course, offering security advice is a service to the community, but it's worth arguing for something that explicitly supports an open community, now and then.

False. A communist economy is by definition one in which there is no state. That's how Marx and Engels defined it.

You may not like this idea. You may not believe it is possible. But it is the definition of communism.