Bully For You

i can be pretty tolerant when it comes to me with people trying to bully me..i can pretty much handle myself very well..
my weakness is when i see my friends or anyone really getting picked on with odds not in their favor..
i don't know what it is but i have a low tolerance for holding back when i see others getting bullied..
even if i don't know the person getting bullied..

does anyone else ever feel like this..like you just can't stand back and not help or want to give these people the edge they need to show these bullies do bleed?

Lol Yeah Equality for Bullies.

I suppose if a person is feeling bullied then the agrivator is a bully to them. Plain and simple.

Ooooo, I'd forgotten a bullying experience that happened over a year ago....

Had been partnered a short time and moved with him to a new sim, where we lived in the sky, as usual. My partner had taken a photo of us when we were at our home location and posted it in his profile. Just before he logged out, a couple friends of ours IM'd and asked if they could come by and visit (unbeknownst to us they were bringing a partnering gift). Unfortunately my partner had to head out to RL, but I went down to ground level to meet our friends and show them the sim we were on before taking them to our sky home.

Right after our friends arrived, a guy also landed right in front of us, walking back and forth, looking a bit lost. I asked if I could help him. He asked if this was where (my Partner) lives. (No house on the landing point would be a bit confusing...lol). I said yes and I was his Partner...could I help him?

He said he had come on behalf of a "friend" who was "frightened" because my partner had been coming to the club where she worked and orbiting her and "the girls." I knew this was ludicrous and asked for her name. She indeed owned an "escort service/sex club" as well as having other similar groups in her profile.

I just knew there was something odd going on. I said I resented him appearing and accusing my partner of something with no proof. He kept saying, "Just tell him to stop" (I was beginning to feel like this guy was one of those goons who comes to break legs of people who don't pay debts.) Indeed, upon examination of HIS profile, he did belong to a group that advertised they were like "private detectives" except the ad was a bit more unsavory in its wording. I told him he would need to speak to my partner. He began yelling, "WHY? JUST TELL HIM TO LEAVE MY FRIEND ALONE OR ELSE."

My male friend stepped in and said, "Obviously the lady has no knowledge of this so you should leave." The "goon" did but with the parting words, "Give him my message."

Of course I was waiting for my partner to log back on later so I could get to the bottom of this. He said he had never heard of the "accuser" or the "goon." Searching through his logs he found one mention of the "accuser's" name - at a well-known jewelry store, but nothing other than she showed up once on his radar. He used to belong to the store group as they regularly gave out group gifts that he then gave to me.

My partner contacted the "goon" and said he'd never heard of this woman, nor the club, never been there and didn't orbit people. The "goon" changed his story from my partner having gone to her "club" and "orbiting the girls" to him meaning the club was the jewelry store where the woman was a model. To "prove" his point, he sent a photo to both of us that only showed the woman on her modeling stand, my partner's name on her radar, and the "Help" box indicating he had hit her with a scripted object. (The location is a no push zone.)

Now let's just "say" that for some bizarre reason my Partner had gone to a crowed jewelry store and orbited one of the models, I would think that other people would notice, AR him...or the model would AR him for sure...and notify the store owner. (None of which happened.)

Knowing how easy it is to manipulate graphics with an editing program, plus certain things in the photo not being consistent, I knew it was a fake.

At any rate, the "goon" told my Partner to stay away from this woman or the next time he would regret it.

This is possibly the most bizarre incident I have had happen in SL. My take on it is that someone my partner used to date or was irked that he was partnered or something similar set this up. One or both of the people were likely alts or alt friends of whoever was behind this and most likely done to make me doubt my Partner.

When I look back on it though...I have to laugh. It was like a B-grade mob movie.

~ ~ ~

It was about 2 weeks later we had a strange woman trap us in a Halloween maze with a yacht...but that's a different story.

Wow. That is a bit too real.

I agree it is the intent behind the action, but we can usually tell the intent.

As for colorful words -- that may be a misnomer. I have known people who use the F word to the extent it has no meaning and becomes about as shocking as the smurfin' word "smurf" in the smurfin' Smurf cartoons. Mearly annoying, ineffective, a failure of language, and colorless. (If The Smurfs were before your time, be thankful -- be very thankful.)

On the other hand my real life self seldom uses swear words and when once I was mad enough to use the F word in public, it quickly cleared a room and had people who knew me almost ducking under tables and behind doors. With me, it still had power.

I'm all for letting words lose some of their power over people though. I am getting a bit off topic however. Sorry.

Yeah I am old enough to remember the smurfs, smurfette was HOT!

You are right about swearing too, I am typical working class English, I swaer constantly socially and am crass and sarcastic and fit the general stereotype. However I work in a very professional environment and would never dream of swaering in front of my colleagues in the office. Down the pub at lunch time though it's F this and F that. So self control is important when required. I just dont think it's particulaly required in SL and especially on a forum that seems to completely lack moderation, evidenced by the fact I have never been banned.

I think there is some clash between culture too. Look at my post history, 1 third of them is me just generally being sarcastic and taking the piss out of people (i.e. mocking them in jest). This is standard practice where i am from but doesnt really transend into other cultures. Doesnt stop me doing it though.

we need to invent swear words! and 2 and 3

we can go visit the master of euphemisms

Off-topic I know but,
I must admit I use the F Word with the frequency of that well-known chef - it's partly because I am explosively "up" and very excited when I work. It's in teh arts field so I dont annoy a lot of fellow workers! But I think my generation may be a little more inclined to use it - and maybe we do it a bit in presence of old gaffers (or TOGs ifyou are English and listen to TW on Radio2) just to annoy them.
Anyway, I once heard this at a garage when I was travelling thru UK: "F***! F***ing F***er's F***ing F***ed!" about a piston ring.
It's liek putting chopsticks in your hair - it gets funny glances.

You know, I think how I'd react to bullying in SL would probably be based on location and my mood.

If it happens on my own land and I'm in a good mood, I'd probably start a countdown and then set the land to damage to send them home the fun way. If I'm in a bad mood, I'd simply freeze them, make 'em "wear" some prim clothing/attachments, take photos for future amusement and then eject them. Either way, it'd be onto the ban list they'd go.

If I'm out shopping, I'd most likely just mute the idiot and rezz a seat with a box of popcorn. Nothing gets more entertaining than an idiot who resorts to other tactics to get your attention. Or I'd just TP out. *shrugs*

Even hotter now! You do know that Smurfette grew up to be Mystique in X-Men doncha?

Ok now I'm comprehensively lost. What I understood to be bullying, isn't what people have been describing here: what they have outlined are basic assaults. that's not bullying. A Bully exists in a social context - that is, a group of people - and makes it their business to isolate and exclude someone, to further strengthen their own role as leader and decision-maker on behalf of the group.

None of the anecdotes here cover that situation. I must say I haven't found SL to be as prone to that kind of manipulation as, for example, IRC used to be.

However, I think there are signs of Forumism. This is a term I just invented, because I don't think the term "Bully" helps to explain what this means. I think there's quite a new class of social manipulator out there, who manages their group in private, by way of any one of a gazillion closed or hidden off-SL forums, and when you see groups behaving bizarrely in-world (like the jostling girls in a shop - in England in RL we call these "steamers" then you can pretty much guarantee that a forum, operating as a rabble-rouser or a kangaroo court, is the mechanism behind the bad behaviour.

We need some new terms, or dust off some old ones, to deal with this kind of in-absentia judgement fetish. Recently, the Uk Foreign Secretary David Milliband, commented that there was such a thing as being too much like the court of King Louis XIV at Versailles, where everything was guessed at and hinted and fluttered over, to the point where nobody could do anything because every action was taken as an indicator of this, or that, when in fact it all added up to nothing at all.

Are people whose minds work that way, really "bullies" or just gossips? I don't think Gossip is strong enough to describe their state of mind...

Some invented SL swearwords but if you use them people might think you a bit geeky. Use them if you want to, but I won't!

"Oh megaprims!"
"Linden H. Crash!"
"What the Neko is going on here?"
"Yiffying furries, give me a break!"
"Go poseball yourself!"
"What the lagging Betagrid am I supposed to do, you knocked my lagging wall down now I've got to lagging well rebuild it"

Oh shut your prim hole.

Is it considered bullying to force a guy to wear a pink thong in order to dance with me?

Only if you can get him to cry. =^-^=

After being bullied in a few places by male Avs I created a "big brother" AV. He is very tall and muscular and not particularly good looking with a mean look on his face. I have called for help from him a couple of times since then. He handled the situations for me.

Nehehe... It's the "big brother" types that I target for bullying first. =^-^=

/me clicks the little red triangle.

LOL

no because the word bully comes from the animal bull which is male and we are female heheheh..
now we can be bitches because those are female and Heffering just sounds so weak

Bullying, as in being ordered around by others doesn't bother me, I just do as I please.

There is only one sort of bullying we all need to fear, and this chimes with another current topic....... I mean the type of bully / griefer who makes malicious abuse reports.

You're right, innit? I wonder if other people are gonna get wha' you're saying.

I got called a wanker on this forum for making an innocuous post pointing out that women tend more towards verbosity than men do.

No. You were called a wanker because..........*list to follow.

Thanks Brenda. I go now. I kinda saw the direction that that thread was going.