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In reply to the discussion: Bully calls news anchor fat, news anchor destroys him on live tv [View all]caseymoz
(5,763 posts)The guy was rude, he was an ass, but he wasn't a bully. Recasting that term the way she does here is no service for anyone.
Why? Because a bully is term we've used mostly to describe behavior in children, behavior which is criminal when done by adults. I mean, what do child bullies do to other children? To be accurate, they do things like assault, nonstop harassment, mob incitement, slander, liable, theft, property destruction, and extortion. Between adults, almost all of these are felonies. Adult bullies aren't like this guy. They're more like the Ku Klux Klan.
My point: if an adult is a bully, you don't give him a talking-to, you call the damn police. You can't compare what he did to what bullies actually do. Criticism that you can laugh off and get away from is not bullying. It becomes bullying-- and to an adult, a matter of harassment-- when it's not a just few words, when you can't get away from it, when you have to face it weekly, daily or monthly, or when it carries a threat.
Moreover, obesity is actually a health problem. You might see bulimia as a poor misguided way to try to prevent it, but if we had a better health system in this country, maybe harmful self-treatments wouldn't be the option young people would take?
I don't like how a real health issue, one that's killing people-- and one that's going to cause many, many deaths and untold years of suffering-- has now been recast as an issue of bullying, which it clearly isn't.
The idiot who wrote her is misinformed. Obesity is often not something a person can successfully treat themselves. Above a certain weight, the brain's mechanism for regulating diet and mass actually becomes damaged. So, they do need some sort of help, which isn't now forthcoming. However, if we're going to make merely noting it into the equivalent of a felony, how are we ever going address the issue? Definitely not by "bullying" people into avoiding it.
A bully isn't merely annoying; a rude person like him does not come near the heinousness of bullying. Especially when the physical feature he mentions only once, is a serious medical problem, actually, to be accurate, an illness.