Where do you think they're getting the examples?
Parents, teachers, and many others today are worried about bullying and its effects on victims. Bullying has always been with us, but for a variety of reasons it has become orders of magnitude worse than ever. The question is, who encourages it?
Parents and others to whom children look for encouragement and direction encourage bullying when they don't speak out against it and don't do anything to protect children from it. Older children do when they become bullies themselves -- and making bullying seem glamorous to younger children. And then there's the media.
The media are ubiquitous, all-pervasive in the lives of most of us, especially now that a majority of Americans spend a great deal of their lives either online or watching television. And the media tend to be not merely heavily, but egregiously biased toward one camp or another, no matter what the issue under consideration is. If the issue is X-rated material on prime-time television, liberal media (in this case, most of the media) are for it, while conservative media (not so many) are agin it -- but it is the forms the expresson of their positions take that is of interest here. The liberal media act like top-clique high school juniors or seniors in their treatment of the conservative position and the conservatives themselves, using ad hominem arguments rather than anything rational to try to intimidate those defending the conservative position or simply agreeing with it into giving up and going away. And the conservative media, mostly on the Internet and the World Wide Web, rant away helplessly at the liberals rather than present truly rational reasoning and facts to support their position. Emails from the latter come to one's inbox with enough exclamation points in them and their subject lines to sink the Titanic; the sneers in the liberal news broadcasts and HuffPo articles online are so rich and reeking of malice they'd sicken Satan himself. Message: If you're dominant, attack those who aren't -- including children -- with every social trick you know, and do anything you can to maintain your position, from outright lying and ad hominem attacks to the worst cruelties you csn imagine; if you aren't dominent, become hysterical, rant and rave, and retaliate as viciously as you are attacked.
And so it goes for every single issue. And the media are wealthy and looked up to -- and wealth and power have their own glamor. As long as the media are considered authorities on virtually everything, as they are now by so many, bullying will be far worse than it would be if the media were reduced to a class of informational utilities, useful, but not seen by the public as having some ultimate form of raw power and authority.
Parents and others to whom children look for encouragement and direction encourage bullying when they don't speak out against it and don't do anything to protect children from it. Older children do when they become bullies themselves -- and making bullying seem glamorous to younger children. And then there's the media.
The media are ubiquitous, all-pervasive in the lives of most of us, especially now that a majority of Americans spend a great deal of their lives either online or watching television. And the media tend to be not merely heavily, but egregiously biased toward one camp or another, no matter what the issue under consideration is. If the issue is X-rated material on prime-time television, liberal media (in this case, most of the media) are for it, while conservative media (not so many) are agin it -- but it is the forms the expresson of their positions take that is of interest here. The liberal media act like top-clique high school juniors or seniors in their treatment of the conservative position and the conservatives themselves, using ad hominem arguments rather than anything rational to try to intimidate those defending the conservative position or simply agreeing with it into giving up and going away. And the conservative media, mostly on the Internet and the World Wide Web, rant away helplessly at the liberals rather than present truly rational reasoning and facts to support their position. Emails from the latter come to one's inbox with enough exclamation points in them and their subject lines to sink the Titanic; the sneers in the liberal news broadcasts and HuffPo articles online are so rich and reeking of malice they'd sicken Satan himself. Message: If you're dominant, attack those who aren't -- including children -- with every social trick you know, and do anything you can to maintain your position, from outright lying and ad hominem attacks to the worst cruelties you csn imagine; if you aren't dominent, become hysterical, rant and rave, and retaliate as viciously as you are attacked.
And so it goes for every single issue. And the media are wealthy and looked up to -- and wealth and power have their own glamor. As long as the media are considered authorities on virtually everything, as they are now by so many, bullying will be far worse than it would be if the media were reduced to a class of informational utilities, useful, but not seen by the public as having some ultimate form of raw power and authority.