"He told her she already had enough shoes, more shoes than she could wear in a lifetime and it was pointless buying any more."

"She started shouting at him accusing him of being a skinflint and of spoiling Christmas, it was a really heated argument."

Man jumps to his death over the 7th floor railing in a mall in China, in the midst of an argument with his girlfriend. I'm reading the comments at that link and others, and I'd like to note the absence — or near absence — of post-suicide observations about bullying. Why no attacks on the girlfriend? Where's the sympathy of the poor bullied man who lost his life? I'm not even seeing the usual sentimentality about suicide. I'm seeing snark in the form of This is why I don't go shopping with my husband.

Note that the couple were not married, and I wonder what kind of Christmas shopping has one person simply buying presents for herself? I know there's that thing of shopping for others and then not resisting buying something for yourself too, but this is not that. And I know there's the very common practice of a couple shopping together to buy each other presents, perhaps to wrap and exchange in front of the rest of the family. Again, this isn't that. I suspect this has little to do with Christmas and more to do with a man who was in the process of buying sexual access to a woman who was upping the price and putting him into debt.

"I mean, I don’t know why people should hate me because it’s just a photo. I didn’t design the Web site."

"I didn’t make it fail, so I don’t think they should have any reasons to hate me."

So... I guess it's also not okay to hate these people.

"To African Americans on the Dolphins, [Jonathan] Martin was a 6-foot-5, 312-pound oddball because his life experience was radically different from theirs."

"It’s an old story among African Americans. Too often, instead of celebrating what makes us different and learning from each other, we criticize more educated or affluent African Americans for not 'keeping it real.'"

A black WaPo columnist criticizes black football players for siding with their white teammate and not the black teammate (whose parents both went to Harvard, and whose father is a college dean and mother is a lawyer).

ADDED: The Daily News interviewed the Giants' Lawrence Taylor:

"Martin wouldn't be allowed back in my locker room... I understand Incognito may be a bad guy, but all that stuff should have stayed in the locker room. I don't know if I would let Incognito back in the locker room either, but he would be allowed back in my locker room before the other guy would. They are texting each other like two women. I don't understand that.... If you are that sensitive and weak-minded, then find another profession.... That's the way I feel about it. This is the NFL. This is football. This is not table tennis. This is not golf. I don't know how you bully a 350-pound player."...

"If he's calling you n----, there's a whole bunch of black people in the locker room. Call a team meeting," LT said. "You stand up and ask the coach, ‘I want a few minutes,' and ask the coaches to leave." Then you say, ‘I've got to get this off my chest.' That's when people are going to respect you. At some point, you got to be a man. But it's a whole other league now from when I played. Now you got to take your lawyer with you to work. This should have been handled in-house. (Martin) took the dirty laundry out for everybody to see. Everybody is evaluating and investigating unnecessarily."

Taylor said the n-word was tossed around plenty in the Giants locker room. "I have a lot of friends on the team who used the word n---. You know where they are going with it," he said. "If they used it in a derogatory way, then we got a problem. You don't have a problem with just Martin, you got a problem with all of us. That's how you stop that s---."

What if anti-bullying campaigns...

... encourage suicide?

"When I was 19 or 20 I found myself in this position, being pressurised into wearing more and more revealing outfits."

"The lines that I had spun at me again and again - generally by middle-aged men - were: 'You look great, you've got a great body, why not show it off?' Or: 'Don't worry, it will look classy, it will look artistic.' I felt deeply uncomfortable about the whole thing, but I was often reminded by record label executives just whose money was being spent."

Said Charlotte Church.

Rachel Jeantel's inability to read cursive leads to articles about why we're even teaching cursive anymore.

Here's one: "Is cursive writing dead?"

A single sentence, uttered in the trial of George Zimmerman for the shooting of teenager Trayvon Martin, has catapulted an issue into the national spotlight.

When asked if she could read a letter in court, witness Rachel Jeantel, her head bowed, murmured with embarrassment, "I don't read cursive," according to court testimony.

Jeantel was embarrassed, so let's all stop. Let's find everything that some people can't do and feel embarrassed about. And let's ask: Is this really necessary? Is this serving a purpose... other than to make some people feel embarrassed?

Jeantel is an icon not only in the fight to end education in cursive handwriting, but the fight to spare everyone embarrassment. This is the necessary extension of the struggle against bullying, a struggle to control deliberate meanness. But think of all the unintentional things that create emotional burdens for some people. There was a time when sidewalks lacked ramps for wheelchairs, not because anyone was out to make life difficult for wheelchairs, but simply because we failed to notice. Step up — wheel up — and become aware of all the needless barriers out there.

ADDED: When I learned cursive — in the late 1950s in northern Delaware — the word "cursive" was not used. We just called it "writing," "handwriting," or — I think — "manuscript" or "script." Consequently, the word "cursive" has always seemed strange to me.

I hear the ugly words "cur" and "curse," but, looking it up in the (unlinkable) OED, I see the etymology is connected to the Latin for "run" — cursīvus — and the idea is: "Written with a running hand, so that the characters are rapidly formed without raising the pen, and in consequence have their angles rounded, and separate strokes joined, and at length become slanted."

The word "cur" — meaning a low-quality dog — goes back to Middle Dutch, Swedish and Norwegian.

Middle English curre corresponds to... Norwegian (widely-spread) dialect kurre, korre ‘dog’, etc. The latter is generally associated with the onomatopoeic verb Old Norse kurra to murmur, grumble, Swedish kurra to grumble, rumble, snarl, Danish kurre to coo, German obsolete and dialect kurren to growl, grumble, murmur, coo....

So hear the grrrr in "cur."

The word "curse," the OED says, has unknown origin: "Late Old English curs, of unknown origin; no word of similar form and sense is known in Germanic, Romanic, or Celtic."  (Of connection with cross, which has been suggested, there is no trace.)"

Interesting to see that people have imagined that "curse" had to do with "cross," even as I imagined that "cursive" had to do with "cur" and "curse." What words have influenced your understanding of other words? Isn't that something that happened to you a lot when you were a child? Did you ever find it emotionally difficult to learn about something because you made an imaginative connection like this? Would "cursive" be easier to learn if we called it "script"?

"In the time it would have taken him to go get a teacher, could that kid’s throat have been slit?"

"She said yes, but that’s beside the point. That we 'don’t condone heroics in this school.'"

Via Instapundit, who says:

IF YOU WANT TO RAISE MEN WITHOUT CHESTS, YOU HAVE TO START EARLY... This sort of behavior by “educators” needs to be stigmatized and punished, with names named. But bear in mind that “Sir John A. Macdonald junior high school does not ‘condone heroics,’” and that its principal’s name is Michael Bester, from whom we can be fairly certain to expect nothing in the least bit heroic, ever.

The school seems to hold the belief — often seen amongst strict gun control advocates — that the traditional role of self-defense and the defense of others ought to be relocated in government personnel. The police might not arrive the minute you need them, and yet it still seems best to train people to stand down and shelter in place. If only everyone were nonviolent, wouldn't that be nice?

IN THE COMMENTS: Mitchell the Bat said:

This is nothing new. When I was in grade school, anybody who got into a fight got punished. Period. That was the 1960's. Some students saw the policy as a convenient justification for pussing out. That was probably the whole idea, all along. That and the teachers and school principal didn't have to make any adjudicatory decisions that might get them criticized. That was probably the whole idea, all along, as well. 

Suddenly, I'm seeing this as the cause of the bullying problem. Everyone knows that the way to stop the bully is to hit him. To forbid self-defense is to empower the bully. The bully knows you pussies will keep doing what you're supposed to do.

"Monona parents whose children repeatedly bully others can now be ticketed by police and fined in municipal court."

The Wisconsin State Journal reports:

Monona Police Chief Wally Ostrenga... thinks the parent-liability clause will be used sparingly, if at all, and only in cases where parents are obstructive or uncooperative. He hopes the mere threat of a ticket will be enough....

The broader ordinance prohibits any person age 12 or older from engaging in bullying, subject to similar municipal fines. The ordinance defines bullying as “an intentional course of conduct which is reasonably likely to intimidate, emotionally abuse, slander, threaten or intimidate another person and which serves no legitimate purpose.”

Ironic that bullying is defined to include threats and the police plan to use the ordinance to make threats. But the ordinance refers to threats that serve no legitimate purpose. But is there a legitimate purpose to threatening to make parents pay $114 if they don't take action to control the teenagers who express themselves in a manner that the authorities have decided is too hurtful?

“Sometimes you’ll knock on someone’s door and they won’t want to talk to you — their kids are perfect, they could never do anything wrong,” Ostrenga said. “This is for those times when we get the door slammed in our faces.”

So the purpose is, admittedly, to pressure parents to talk to the police. The people who have been declining to speak with the police will now have to pay for the privilege.

Parents who are making a good-faith effort to address a child’s behavior would not be ticketed, he said.

City Attorney William S. Cole called the tactic “a tool of last resort” and said he believes it would withstand a court challenge.

I guess there is such "a court" here in Dane County — where Monona, like Madison, is located — and I would feel much more intimidated, emotionally abused, and threatened if I didn't believe — speaking of beliefs — that court would be reversed on appeal.

"A Brooklyn teacher got so fed up with a notorious 8-year-old class bully that she taught him a lesson in street justice..."

"... having him stand in front of the class while his latest bullying victim 'hit him back' for all the abuse. The kid clocked his tormenter — and the bully cried like a baby. 'Well, that’s what you get,'the teacher told the wild child, according to Department of Education documents."

"Terrorists want large, splashy attacks on specific sorts of targets that have high emotional resonance..."

"... for both the victims and the people on your side who you hope to recruit, or tap for money.  This helps explain why Al Qaeda was so obsessed with the Twin Towers, a place that — until they fell — most New Yorkers regarded as a rather ugly landmark containing some so-so office space.  To a terrorist group looking for publicity, on the other hand, it had immense symbolic value: the tallest building in America's biggest city, with the hubristic name of 'World Trade Center.' That's why we don't get high-frequency, low-intensity attacks on crowded spaces near some Texas town that no one in Abottabad [sic] has ever heard of.  When attacks on those places happen, they tend to be the provenance of local lunatics for whom the nearby mall, or primary school, has some immense symbolic emotional importance."

Says Megan McArdle. This reasoning suggests that if only we'd avoid prideful spectacles we could deflect the Qaeda crowd. But there will always be local lunatics, and it's impossible to avoid all the tiny targets like schools and shops that every town has....

Adam Lanza was bullied while he attended Sandy Hook Elementary and his mother Nancy considered suing the school for turning a blind eye to the abuse, an unnamed Lanza family member told the New York Daily News.

“Adam would come home with bruises all over his body,” the relative told the Daily News. “His mom would ask him what was wrong, and he wouldn’t say anything. He would just sit there.”

Know your local lunatics. And for God's sake don't torment them. Don't create them out of whatever raw material you find around. Here's a pressure cooker. What can we put in it?

Now, these local lunatics tend to show their faces. It's a showdown. They die or get captured quickly. We know who did it.

On 9/11, every building I saw seemed shockingly vulnerable. I wondered if all buildings would come down. How deceptively solid these things seem, but there are people in the world who would destroy everything anybody builds. And yet so many buildings have remained standing all these years. I didn't think it would work out this well. Terrorists in my town bombed a minor spectacle of a building 40 years ago, but since 9/11, the building have held up.

After 9/11, I obsessed about what the terrorists would do next and, naturally, I thought of the things that would hit me and the people I knew. I pictured a day when 100 suicide bombers, one by one, in 100 different college towns stepped into a crowded café or movie theater or sports event and blew up. But that never happened. McArdle's theory suggests why. That's local-lunatic level. Too lowly for the Qaeda-type brand.

But is a crowd waiting at the finish line of the Boston Marathon such a spectacle? Are crappy pressure-cooker bombs the mark of a prideful organization that once commandeered 4 jet planes and piloted 3 of them into major landmarks?

We don't yet know who the Boston bomber is or even whether it's bomber or bombers. Using McArdle's reasoning, one wonders who fixates on the Boston Marathon. Do the people in Abbottabad care about our lengthy footraces? And why target the spectators? Or was the first bomb, planted in the spectators, supposed to make the runners run toward the second bomb? That's an evil trick, but hardly anything that seen from the other side of the globe could look like glory.

"It is disgusting and despicable the way that certain media constantly harass the pregnant Kim Kardashian."

"It's enough that they persistently project a negative focus on women's physical shapes; but a public bullying and attacking of a pregnant woman because of her growing shape is just lower than low."

ADDED: "Could Kim Kardashian, whose dubious fashion choices have made her pregnancy curves look even larger than life, be teeing herself up for a deal with Weight Watchers?... Kim has drawn ridicule for strutting around in tight-fitting couture maternity wear, including sky-high heels, snug dresses and A-line skirts...."

"Why should they be forced to deal with the news that a male teacher they have always known as Mr Upton will henceforth be a woman called Miss Meadows?"

So wrote Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn in an article headlined "He's not only in the wrong body … he's in the wrong job."

The school's headmaster had written to the parents telling them that Nathan Upton "has recently made a significant change in his life and will be transitioning to live as a woman" and would be called Lucy Meadows.

Now, Upton/Meadows has been found dead:

Helen Belcher, director of TransMedia Watch (TMW), which monitors media coverage of trans issues, stressed on Friday that while the circumstances surrounding Meadows's death were unclear, "we know that Lucy suffered a huge amount of monstering and harassment by the press when she was very vulnerable around Christmas. That level of press attention could not have helped her mental state one bit."

"Monstering," according to an Urban Dictionary definition from 2010, is "The art of abusing people. Of ambushing them with questions, following them with questions, hounding them with questions, driving them to their fucking graves with questions. It’s sort of being like a photographer, except no ones' killed any royalty doing it…yet."

Now, the monstering turns to Littlejohn:

[F]ormer Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell... tweeted: "I hope journalists are doorstepping Dacre, Murdoch and Littlejohn for their reaction to Lucy Meadows' suicide. The Mail really is scum."
Jennie Kermode, chair of TMW, said: "What we want to come out of Lucy's death is for people in the media to think about what they are writing and the way they are writing it...."

A culture of sexual abuse at NYC's elite Bronx High School of Science.

Students against students in the under-supervised boys' locker room.

[E]mail from [he athletic director, Marion] Dietrich reveals that school officials have known about the behavior for at least three years and that bullying students had gotten so out of hand that Dietrich assigned coaches to patrol the boys’ locker room.

The "bullying" in question was serious sexual assault, which you can read about at the link.

"In addition to striking himself with a rock... [Kyle] Wood also admitted..."

"...  that he struck his head on a mirror at his apartment and ran into a doorknob. He said he was the only one who knew that the attack was made up."

Obstruction charges filed against a Madison Republican campaign volunteer. Previously discussed here.

7-year-old Wilson Reyes "deserved to be cuffed," said his purported victim....

... Seth Acevedo. “He acts like an animal.... People are trying to say, poor Wilson, but he’s nothing but a big bully.”

Yikes. Quite aside from the way the police handled this case, why is the press naming and showing photographs of these 2 young boys? Acevedo is pictured — in the NY Daily News — with tears running down his chubby cheeks and his mother caressing and comforting him.

“I would have handcuffed him, too,” snapped the boy’s mother, Janet Ramos.

Reyes's mother is shown wearing bright pink pants with the words "kiss" and "flirt" written all over them.

Meanwhile, lawyer for Reyes is talking about suing the city and the police department for $250 million.

CORRECTION: To put the right woman in the kiss pants.

ADDED: The original NY Post piece has the headline, "Cops handcuff and interrogate boy, 7, for hours over missing $5: family." Key word: family. The police side of it is: “We responded to a 911 call of a robbery and assault . . . Eventually, [Wilson] was taken back to the precinct and placed in the juvenile room.... He was charged with robbery. The allegation was that he punched the kid and took his money. He took the money forcibly. The kid came into the precinct a little bit after 3 p.m., and he was out by 7:45 p.m. . . . That’s standard for a juvenile arrest."

Student with a shotgun fires up to 20 rounds and is disarmed by the teacher.

How did the teacher do it?

The teacher, Ryan Heber, was struck in the head by a pellet but was not seriously injured and refused treatment, authorities said....

Police said a school supervisor helped Heber distract the assailant. There were no security guards or police immediately on hand to help them: The school's armed police officer was not on duty....

Ryan Heber... said he was fine, but too exhausted to relate his experiences.

Here's a more recent story, saying that the teacher talked to the shooter:

Science teacher Ryan Heber calmly confronted the teenager after he shot and critically wounded a classmate, whom he claimed to authorities had bullied him for more than year at Taft Union High School.

"I don't want to shoot you," the teen gunman told Heber, who convinced the teen gunman to drop his weapon, a high power shotgun.

"This teacher and this counselor stood there face-to-face not knowing if he was going to shoot them," said Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood. "They probably expected the worst and hoped for the best, but they gave the students a chance to escape."

IN THE COMMENTS: Lots of questioning of "20 rounds."

"Are gun owners now going to be stigmatized like sex offenders?"

Asks TalkLeft.

I think it's an attempt at intimidation. I wonder if any of those whose addresses were published are immediate family members of federal officials or employees, and covered by 18 USC Section 119, which prohibits publishing home addresses for intimidation. Or if the internet publication of home addresses of gun owners can be considered cyber stalking, cyber-bullying, harassment or invasion of privacy under state laws? Just because the information is available under a FOIA request, does that mean it can be publicly disseminated? I'm sure they checked with their lawyers and felt like they were on safe ground, but I hope somebody sues them.

This incident reminds me of the mailings that went out last spring showing the names and addresses of residents in one's neighborhood and whether they'd voted in recent elections. At the time, I called it "incredibly creepy":

This is an effort to shame and pressure people about voting, and it is truly despicable. Your vote is private, you have a right not to vote, and anyone who tries to shame and harass you about it is violating your privacy, and the assumption that I will become active in shaming and pressuring my neighbors is repugnant. 

In a second post on that topic, a commenter, The Drill SGT, pointed to some social science research on the effectiveness of manipulating social pressure with this sort of information about what neighbors are doing. Apparently, if this sort of thing works, they'll be plenty more of it.

Get ready.