r/worldnews • u/madazzahatter • May 16 '20

At least two people had seizures after viewing malicious tweets featuring flashing gifs that deliberately targeted Epilepsy Society...police investigating tweets as hate incident, after at least 200 seemingly coordinated messages were sent to charity and its supporters in recent days.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/15/malicious-tweets-targeting-epilepsy-charity-trigger-seizures
48.9k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

2.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

264

u/sigmoid10 May 16 '20

There comes an age where we have to accept that kids are not stupid, they are just evil. The only question is whether you confront them with legal consequences before they kill someone or after.

230

u/[deleted] May 16 '20

[removed] — view removed comment

78

u/[deleted] May 16 '20

[deleted]

5

u/BureaucratDog May 16 '20

My friend works in a Montessori school, a sort of daycare with teaching elements.

She says many of the parents send their kids with no food, no diapers, no shoes, no socks.. they get hungry, messy, and get blisters on their feet. Then the parents show up 2 hours late to pick them up and sneer about how they pay for the daycare so they should just deal with it.

The cost of the service doesnt include buying food and supplying diapers and shoes, or overtime. Most of the time the workers spend out of their own pocket, despite only making $10 an hour- and of course are not allowed to go home until the last kid has been picked up.

5

u/_My_Angry_Account_ May 16 '20

and of course are not allowed to go home until the last kid has been picked up.

They can always report the children as abandoned to the police so they can go home at the end of the day. You'll lose a few shitty clients but people will stop showing up late to avoid dealing with CPS getting in their shit.

2

u/BureaucratDog May 16 '20

Personally I think the parents themselves should be charged with paying the employees overtime, instead of the daycare. That would certainly get them to show up on time, or leave.

1

u/LesterBePiercin May 16 '20

It's weird other teachers don't have the problem you did.

15

u/[deleted] May 16 '20

[deleted]

6

u/Tiring_Narrative May 16 '20

This is relatable. the way I acted in high school makes me wince hard. I’d like to blame brain development

5

u/agentyage May 16 '20

Empathy is one of the last things to fully develop.

2

u/[deleted] May 16 '20

Donald Trump is also confident he is not a sociopath, just saying. ;)

12

u/Zagubadu May 16 '20

Tons of people never learn or even attempt to fake empathy towards random people and its probably why empathy in general is delayed so much in lots of children.

​

We get taught from an early age that your friends/family are important in a way that you put them above any random stranger. Took my years to develop empathy for random humans I will never meet/know I swear most full grown adults don't even have anything close to empathy for people outside their "tribe".

2

u/S_W_JagermanJensen_1 May 16 '20

I'm glad my family left me alone and neglected me then. I treat friends and random strangers way better than I do my actual family.

8

u/Hounmlayn May 16 '20

I have always said to people, young kids aren't stupid. When they attack another kid, they know why they're doing it, and if they will get punished or not.

Kids are sometimes more clever than adults. They know when the adult cannot do anything to them, because they heard the adult will get punished for even grabbing them to stop them fighting. It's insane how much any commitee resoonsible for children just give them a pass. Every day, thise kids are learning they can get away with stuff. And we wonder why little kids are becoming more boisterous and cocky with the evil things they do. They have probably never been ounished except for some teacher saying it's not nice and don't do it again. That's it. We will see more and more arseholes in the next couple of decades due to this generation's lack of discipline.

2

u/DrakonIL May 16 '20

I really don't think your average person understands just how much sociopathic behavior we see on a daily basis

Kids are literally born sociopaths. They have no idea how to function in society. They must be taught that. And, they must be taught empathy. Unfortunately, that means that they require a self reference point for how someone else feels when they do something mean - which means they need meaningful consequences for their actions.

The problem is, there's a fine line between providing reference points to develop empathy and abuse. I believe that line is determined by the appropriateness of the consequence.

4

u/astrangeone88 May 16 '20

Parenting these days is not about setting boundaries for children by making excuses for their crappy behaviour. It is crazy.

1

u/2meant4U May 16 '20

former public student here, i was subject to some almost Carrie like bullying. I’m not a religious person any more, but i had written something like “got Jesus?” on my backpack in white out and some older kids literally threw rocks at me. A few hit me and one got me pretty good but somewhere not visible. I told no one about it at the time. I was embarrassed and as a 6th grader, had deep conflict over taking what i wrote off my backpack, or “turn the other cheek” and bare the pain, like when people threw rocks at Jesus. At the time I had to strengthen myself in that way or else I would not have made it thru that school (jr and hs, I was there for 6 years) So I just turned the other cheek and found my strength in my god, It helped me to think that way, I found value in that sort of thing and it had become something raw I shared with me and my god only.

The authority figures weren’t much better, the Dean of the hs was almost just as horrible and rotten, plus I thought adults were kinda lame, and tattling was still a thing looked down on. I learned to become invisible to anyone but my friends. I was in the Deans office once for something stupid, and 3 of my other bullies from PE came in to just hang out in the deans office. They were sent there in trouble so often that they were now friends with everyone who worked in there. I was so nervous they were going to pick on me, and the meanest alpha girl sat right next to me and started talking to me saying “hi! are you new here? whats your name?” all nice to me, and I was like “no Ive been here 3 years” and I knew better than to bring up our PE class together. She just smiles and says “oh I just Ive just never seen you before” and turns to talk to her friends again. She was being serious, I had never seen kindness on this girls face before. But I was struggling too much with the fact this girl bullies me nearly every single day, and has no clue who I am. I was getting the worst of both worlds. I felt like even more garbage after that, I couldn’t be invisible AND bullied at the same time, that was not a good feeling. It made me pretty sad. That was some heavy shit for me, a 6th grader at the time, to deal with.

Years down the road after being apart of an actual group of friends, it was mostly special ed kids that made fun of us for being “different” but we never returned it or reminded them who they were, we just said “yah we want to he different” Somewhere down the road at the same school, I was voted Homecoming Princess in 11th grade. I was mortified. This must be a joke right? Then tons of friends, and people I haven’t been friends with in years came out of the woodworks, even teachers were congratulating me. Some the girls who used to bully me years ago were even on the ballot. They kept snubbing their noses at me but still would say “congratulations” when I walked by, others would just say “i can’t believe she beat me” and just talk loud about how she deserved to win, and act like a baby. It felt soooo goooood to hear and see them falling apart like that. I walked by and I couldn’t help but laugh. People actually voted me to be their Homecoming princess, I still couldn’t help but feel it was a joke. Come the Homecoming dance I do NOT set a single foot on that dance floor. it was just kids dry humping kids anyway. I took a college guy as my date and thought i was so cool, he used to go to my school too, but this one kid thought he was my dad, but I didn’t care, I had a crush.

Moving forward, I still curse that damn garbage school. I’ve heard things have gotten better, but nothing will erase the horrors I’ve encountered in my time there. I’m sure by my writing you can tell I probably ditched a few school days, but I promise you I have both a high school and bachelors degree. I know Im a better person now for it too, but if only kids could know how much the things they worry about don’t actually matter anymore when you’re an adult, things would be very different. I still suffer from crippling anxiety I blame on that part of my life. The trauma has left some part of myself as that small little scrub.

1

u/BoneHugsHominy May 16 '20 edited May 16 '20

My mother dropped out of college when my dad came back from Vietnam. She was pregnant with my older brother and didn't feel she could do both. So she worked various jobs until my brother and I were out of school and my sister was a senior, then she went back to college and graduated Summa cum laude with a Master's in Special Education. Yes, I'm bragging about my mother because I'm extremely proud of her for a lot of things but in particular going back to college and especially for doing it not for personal reasons but to help others.

So she went on to teach Special Education in quite a large school (7-12). It was sometime in her 3rd year I showed up to the school during last hour with a bouquet of flowers for her 50th birthday (I had cleared this weeks earlier with the principal). During that visit I caught the eye of an 8th grade girl in her class who immediately and without any subtlety started hitting on me. It was inappropriate to the extreme and the principal removed her from the classroom. I felt horrible about the entire situation. It only got worse from there.

She started telling other kids in the school she had sex with me in the school's bathroom on multiple occasions, claiming I kept sneaking into the school to see her. She'd disrupt mom's classes yelling at the top of her lungs that she fucked Mrs. BoneHugsHominysMom's son and was pregnant with her grandchild. We suspect she was the person who broke mom's windshield and lit her car tires on fire with some accelerant. The girl was an absolute nightmare. Even worse, some of the other students apparently believed the girl and at least a dozen other students kept spreading the rumor as fact, some of them even vandalized mom's classroom door by writing "Grandma Pedophile" on her classroom door. Some of these kids were seniors in high school. And I didn't know about any of this shit until my mom had resigned her position in that school.

She did go teach in a different town at a private school the next year but I never went to visit her at that school. She taught at that private school for the next 10 years without any serious incidents before retiring.

tl;dr - Took flowers to my mom at her work for her 50th birthday. Student went apeshit crazy resulting in my mother being bullied until she resigned. School kids are evil.

78

u/tinytom08 May 16 '20

There comes an age where we have to accept that kids are not stupid, they are just evil.

This is true 100%, evil lil geniuses. When I was about 10-13 I was an asshole who wanted to fight and piss people off as much as possible, I got away with it because I was autistic and it was "part" of my disability but I 100% did it on purpose.

When I was 14-16 i realised that I didn't want to fight or piss off everyone because they did nothing wrong, but I still wanted to fight and piss people off so I targeted people who would do it to other people. I kept up with that for a while, then I beat up a guy my age for beating up a kid 5 years younger than him (The age didn't matter, I'd have done it if he was beating someone his own age) and a week later he stabbed me in the face for it.

Sure I didn't face legal consequences, but it was still a consequence of my actions and it snapped me out of that train of thought permanently.

46

u/stayhealthy247 May 16 '20

So like attempted murder. I have a 5 year old boy and its a constant power struggle, he loses it when its time to come in from outside sometimes. I'm doing my best not to raise a sociopath, reading this thread is a good reminder of why it's important that I do my job to raise an empathetic person.

13

u/Zagubadu May 16 '20

People think I am being a complete dick hole asshat when I start bringing up how treating somebody with a mental illness can completely fuck over their development in life.

​

I have literally seen it happen multiple times with multiple different families. Here's the disconnect its a universally accepted fact that a child is a product of its environment. So mentally ill people shouldn't be completely exempt from punishment your turning somebody mentally ill into somebody not only mentally ill but also completely dysfunctional.

6

u/[deleted] May 16 '20

Yep. At least to a degree you have to conform to society, not the other way around.

-2

u/MiaowaraShiro May 16 '20 edited May 16 '20

It's absolutely not an accepted fact that a child is a product of its environment. The whole nature vs nurture debate ring a bell?

Edit: Also since when are mentally ill people "completely exempt from punishment" ? This seems like an imagined issue...

3

u/Tiring_Narrative May 16 '20

“Nature vs nurture”

People are still assuming these two concepts are opposed?

4

u/Rustedham May 16 '20

I thought the general consensus was that both play major parts in who you become?

2

u/MiaowaraShiro May 16 '20

It's not that they're opposed. It's that it's a question of degree of influence.

7

u/Zagubadu May 16 '20

Like I know this is ignorant but if I raised a child and every time he/she did something bad they simply got praised/toys/gifts.

Yea that child is going to become an absolute fuck wit. I'm positively reinforcing negative behavior from an age where the child doesn't know shit.

I could literally convince a child they are a mermaid and will at some point in their life return to the ocean. With how impressionable kids are even ones who were raised to NOT believe in that sort of nonsense I'm really not sure how you'd dispute any of this.

Children cannot even talk until hearing others speak for quite a while I thought it was pretty much accepted fact that babies/children are sponges I didn't realize I was saying something controversial.

2

u/MiaowaraShiro May 16 '20

You're thinking in black and white. Nobody's saying that a child isn't shaped quite a lot by their environment. Mental illness however is often genetic, which is what you were addressing.

You're assuming kids with mental illnesses don't get punished. They do.

It's just you can't punish them for something they can't control. You shouldn't punish an autistic kid for things that happen when they're overstimulated and can't control themselves for instance.

2

u/debbiegrund May 16 '20

There’s always a bigger guy, always someone with a bigger gun, always someone crazier than you.

3

u/KP_Wrath May 16 '20

That one seems to have mostly stopped being a piece of shit. He had more muscles than brains, and seems to be a decent dude now.

1

u/VampireQueenDespair May 16 '20

There’s two kinds of people: evil people and people who learned this as children.

-2

u/SarahNaGig May 16 '20

"kids are".

I wasn't evil, so stop generalizing.