Cyber Bullying :(

I reported each time it happened to me. The person was either short term banned or told to leave me alone, except for once earlier this year which forced me to take stronger action to get the person to leave me alone.

You are right I never should have been forced to take stronger actions by the people not doing their job to curb this very real problem.

yea.

Originally Posted by mauk2 Evil_Legacy became one of my favorite posters with two words. "Kick Rocks." I laffed so hard. Never change, E_L!

The only thing my experiences with emotionally/mentally traumatic events is having a bearing on is my own inability to sympathize with certain actions/reactions. And that doesn't make said actions/reactions necessarily right or wrong. They're just alien to me, and my own experiences are simply an explanation as to why. Similarly, I couldn't sympathize with someone killing theirself because they couldn't stand being surrounded by Euclidean geometry, or someone flapping their arms and shouting "wubble" every time they see the colour red.

That was pretty disturbing.

Ok.........

So you do not know what it is like to self injure, and you have clearly never actually read or heard another's account of what it is like for them to self injure, and yet you're able to come to a conclusion about self injury derived strictly from information in your brain without any need for reference to reality? It's no wonder your conclusions are specious.

Being conscious does not mean being able to rationally choose to do or not do something.

"Stupid" and "crazy" are two different things, and both seem to be extremely subjective judgments.

The actions are the consequence of mental illness. If mental illness did not cause people to act against their own best interests then they wouldn't be illnesses. You might as well say that someone with leukemia is stupid-to-crazy for producing too many antibodies.

I am not saying that having a mental illness is like having cancer. I am saying that having a mental illness means that one's faculties are not functioning properly, and looking at how the person behaves and criticizing that is profoundly ignorant, perhaps even stupid.

Then you do understand she had a reason (even if it was wrong) for not involving the police. You just seem to have difficulty understanding why she didn't behave as you would have in that situation, as opposed to how she behaved.

If you were being brief, you would have said "killed herself because people stalked, harassed, and abused her." Instead, you changed the context entirely into "she killed herself because people didn't like her." I do not know where you live, but in the real world there's a significant gulf between "I don't like you" and "I am going to follow you everywhere you go and take every action I can to ruin your life."

Not comparable. Someone who is self harming and attempting suicide is in need of assistance. A stalker is someone who is likely putting the first person into that frame of mind. Whatever the stalker's cognition, the stalker is the problem, not the victim. If the stalker is irrational or mentally ill, then that can be addressed once he is no longer a danger to his victim(s).

I wouldn't say that teenagers who want those things are shallow. A teenager's brain is still developing and a lot of their behavior is impulsive or irrational even when they are otherwise fine. This applies to those of us who did not fit in and did not care about fitting in. It is simply that behavior reflected interests and priorities. Someone who wants to fit in will try to fit in, but this isn't a matter of sophistication or shallowness so much as what that person prioritizes.

I would argue that being able to fit in is often a profoundly underestimated and undervalued social skill that plays a significant role in one's adult life (that is, the ability to do so or the lack thereof). I do not mean trying to behave like everyone else, but understanding how to be part of a group.

As far as self-esteem goes, I don't think a socially active teenager necessarily has more fragile self esteem. I think their self esteem may be more vulnerable as they value social interactions and belonging higher than someone like yourself, Tenzhi, or myself. More attempts to be social means more opportunities to be rejected.

I've been personally acquainted with individuals who "self injure". And who have taken harmful substances. And two people who have committed suicide. And regardless of their mental state, each of them consciously chose their activity (both activities in a couple of cases). My conclusion is essentially that the behaviour makes no sense. Your rebuttal is to basically agree with that as you continually point out that they're not rational decisions.

And both may be synonymous with "irrational" and the latter of the two goes hand in hand with mental illness.

The two statements carry the same basic meaning. I place more importance on the "she killed herself" part because to me it's the bigger issue. The other things can be moved past, but suicide is final and wasteful and I hate it. And I hate that the passing of this stranger makes me sad.

I wasn't implying that the victim is the problem, but rather questioning whether the stalker is responsible for their actions if they are irrational or suffering from a mental illness.

Yes the stalker and bullies are responsible. If it weren't for their conscious choices to pursue and persecute the victim, this tragedy would not have occurred.

Actual laws were broken, which included distribution of child pronography, and physical assaults. People need to go to prison for what they did to that poor girl. Sadly the bullies will be ignored and the stalker may never get caught.


Edit: And in case anyone thinks about making a what if justification. It's not relevant. "What if's" have nothing to do with what actually happened. Stick to the facts.

"Not rational" and "makes no sense" do not mean the same thing. Irrational behavior can make sense if you understand that it has an actual cause, and is not strictly random. Suicidal behavior and self injury are both irrational, but they make sense if one understands the kind of duress that causes it.

For example, someone who is delusional and believes the US government is monitoring his every move and plans to kill him for some arbitrary reason is certainly acting from irrational beliefs and ideas of reference. However, his behavior makes perfect sense if one accepts that to him his delusions are very real.

No, both are not synonymous with irrational. Both are vernacular, and tend to be extremely subjective judgments. They are not clinical nor are they objective terminology. They are primarily judgmental statements. "Stupid" is often used to simply mean "that person did or said something I would not do or say, or something I disagree with." Crazy is used similarly. Neither has any objective value.

Why do you hate that it makes you sad? The fact that it makes you sad means you can almost certainly rule out sociopathy or psychopathy.

I do not hate that this situation affects me emotionally. I hate this this situation happened at all.

In such a situation the question is not relevant, only the matter of preventing the stalker from continuing to act is relevant.

I haven't been debating whether Amanda was responsible for her actions, however. I was debating whether you were accurately representing what her actions were.

The very definition of "rational" is "sensible", ergo "not rational" is "not sensible". They do, in fact, mean the same thing.

Nonsense can only make sense if you're capable of viewing it through the proper irrational lens.

On an aside, apparently rational people choose to purposefully injure themselves all the time and *that* makes just as little sense to me.

"Stupid" means 'lacking in common sense or intelligence' and "crazy" means 'mentally deranged'. Both definitions of which could fall under the umbrella of "irrational".

As for subjective judgments, psychological evaluations themselves tend to involve a professional but subjective interpretation of perforce subjective data.

Wherever I go, strangers walk up to me and share their pain as if I were some sort of bartender on walkabout that occasionally doubles as a hug dispensary. I might be a much happier person if I could remain completely disaffected by such things.

That, at least, is something we agree on. No one deserves to have that kind of thing happen.

That representation apparently being that I think she was responsible for her actions, as conscious choice would imply.

The other side of that being that you seem to claim that the actions are not made by choice due to mental illness and thus are beyond reproach.

That's exactly what I would say. To me, mental illness is a flimsy excuse for heinous acts such as torture and murder.

No, that's not the definition of rational. The definition of rational is "having reason or understanding." Or " relating to, based on, or agreeable to reason." It has some math-related definitions as well.

I also explained - logically - how they do not mean the same thing.

Now that is nonsense. Mostly because it is completely tangential to my point. It is utterly irrelevant, because what I described was not nonsense. Mental illness isn't nonsense.

These are not objective standards, however. And they are vernacular terms lacking any objectivity at all.

Drawing a connection between the subjectivity of psychological evaluations and the use of "stupid" and "crazy" is nonsense. Psychological evaluations range from short interviews to long, involved administration of various tests. There isn't a single category to draw from. Further, the people making these evaluations have spent years studying the conditions they diagnose, evaluate, and treat. Stupid and crazy are two words that are primarily used to dismiss the validity of another person's behavior, contributions, or even personhood.

Maybe, but doubtful. Psychopaths don't tend to know what happiness is, either.

I never thought we were in disagreement over the major point. It was the judgment of Amanda's actions as something that they were not.

I never said they were beyond reproach. I said your perception of those actions is wrong because you do not understand those actions.

Mental illness does not deprive you of choice, but it makes different choices seem rational and necessary. Without understanding this, anything said about actions taken by a mentally ill person are pretty useless, and serve more as a reflection of the speaker's biases than any kind of useful, logical, factual information.