Whatever tech you work on, I guarantee you it's filled with incomprehensible, arbitrary rules, and weird edge cases that make no sense to someone outside your field.
> And also not giving a shit — especially if it’s only verbal — deprives bullies of their get-offs, which is a good thing.
And we all know how children (and, indeed, all human beings on the face of the earth) are famed Zen masters, capable of controlling their emotional responses perfectly.
Also it's utter horseshit that ignoring a bully makes them go away. I don't know where you got that idea from. A bully escalates until they get a response or whatever else they want from you; a casual reading of history would teach you that. You either have to fight off a bully (or at least inflict enough damage to make it not worth their while), have an authority figure intervene, or the bully has to change from within.
> Or you propose to reeducate all bullies overnight, maybe in specialized facilities like, ehm, concentration camps?
Ah Godwin's law strikes again.
It definitely is. I resent every bit of it. Every time someone points at those edge cases and how they are unfixable here and how this other tech has fixed it and forgotten about it decades ago, I feel real bad, like my teeth are being pulled.
But there is one crucial bit of my tech I prefer: it usually doesn't put you onto a maintenance treadmill wherein if you fail to keep up with the ecosystem for a month, random bits of your application start falling off.
> And we all know how children (and, indeed, all human beings on the face of the earth) are famed Zen masters, capable of controlling their emotional responses perfectly.
How dare you replace my strawmen with strawmen of your own!
But then, I'm in favor of burning this candle from both ends: yes, you need to be able to stand up for yourself; also, bitter words shouldn't be things that incapacitate you and get you into depression. I guess none of us are born with this skill, but it sure can be learned.
Also, there are bullies and there are bullies, so some will fuck off once you show you're not that easy a target, so you only get to fight the few nastiest ones. Hopefully it's a duck the size of a horse problem vs two dozen duck-sized horses problem.