I am continuously amazed at how cleanly Virtue and Vice line up along party lines in America.
Disclaimer: I grew up in Bridgeport, and was involved in the city’s politics in a minor way. To a first approximation, every low-level politician is a small time crook and grifter. The higher they rise in city and state politics, the more they owe the bigger crooks and grifters. This is independent of whether they have a D or an R next to their names in the list.
They show compassion for the poor and downtrodden when they are pandering for their votes. They truckle under to the powerful and the rich when they are begging for campaign funds. Sometimes some legislation gets passesd that actually helps people, but that is usually as a side effect to lining someone’s pockets.
It may be unfair of me to extrapolate my local political experience to the national stage, but I find it very difficult to believe these characters improve as they gain more influence, and I absolutely disbelieve that moral or ethical alignment follows party membership. Which is why I find these hyper-partisan threads so amusing.
In my opinion, it’s split. Financial-only conservatives are generally okay with bullying up to light assault. Social conservatives are more likely to hate bullying, despite the fact that’s the more progressive choice. It’s a "think of the children thing.
A certain level of bullying is necessary for the training of military personnel, and I believe conservatives deeply approve of the kind of personality, ethos and world view that trained military people represent. So I think “deep down in places they don’t talk about…”
Conservatives are more able to adapt and overcome the small stuff - and more importantly recognize and determine (not always, but more often) which problems are mere annoyances and those which are truly threatening and harmful.
I guess this thesis is no sillier than the thread topic, but the list of inessential problems that conservatives take very seriously is a long one.
As opposed to when you weighed in with your opinion, right?
(Which was not very different than my own repsonse btw.)
I don’t think our responses were similar at all. I described a difference in how conservatives and liberals might view bullying and how to deal with it; you said conservatives are better than liberals. I said nothing like “Conservatives are more able to adapt and overcome the small stuff,” which is silly, and I said nothing about conservatives being better at determining which problems are “threats” and which are “mere annoyances.” The absurdity of that comment is hard to express in words and a list of counterexamples would lead to a hijack of the thread, so I’m going to skip it.
You see, because Im of those who have the ability to determine the difference between mere annoyance and real threat, I offer you a shrug and move along to something worth investing further thought.
A meta analysis of the available literature by Cook et al. in 2010 concluded that bullies are more likely to commit criminal offences, have psychiatric problems, difficulties in romantic relationships and be substance abusers. Victims have problems such as depression, psychosomatic complaints and suicidal ideation. Victims of bullying in school are more likely to be bullied in the workplace. Victims that in turn bully themselves are more likely to carry weapons, be incarcerated and be hostile and violent.
Care to point to the mere annoyances?
Your post is neither a threat nor an annoyance. It’s a generalization that probably can’t be sustained by facts, so I regard this as just an excuse to avoid having to back it up. Having pointed that out, I’m happy to drop the tangent.
As was yours, Marley.
Good day.
Point out what?
You might as well have cited a study on the long term effects of ingesting lead paint.
Give me a scenario and I’ll take a stab at it. 
You’re accusing me of non sequitur because I thought your post may actually have relevance to the topic at hand?
Citing a litany of disturbing problems and asking me to choose which ones to stick in a “aww hell those aint so bad” fantasy catagory wasn’t a sincere approach.
If you have a real question I’d be happy to answer you.
Then why make your initial post if you’re unwilling to “recognise and determine” which problems are mere annoyances? The only evidence offered so far suggests that bullying is not a “mere annoyance”. Why not provide a guide to delineating between mere annoyance and threatening and harmful?
My gist was not everything is bullying.
Some people know how to deal with assholes better than others (when to be tolerant, and when to take action), what can I tell you? I feel there a differences between liberals and conservatives regarding who handles the problems better by themselves.
The problems you listed can be real, but it doesnt have anything to do with what I was getting at.
…and how you define “bullying”.
To expand on this just for a second, I was going to say yesterday that I see the word “bully” thrown around recklessly today but was too tired to go looking for cites. Conveniently today one just plopped in my lap, Tom Cruise’s phone may have been hacked and hops on the trendy band wagon - throwing out the word bully…
Ok, that’s a start, thank you. Would it be fair to say you think that phone hacking (an indictable offence under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000) is a “mere annoyance”? Do you think the majority of conservatives would agree? What do you think would most conservatives classify as “threatening and harmful”?