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Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

theguardian.com

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Re: Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

#481

Post by ImJamal »

stevetron wrote: post #475
armchairhacker wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put them in work programs. If they can’t be productive, put them in mental institutions. To be clear, abuse in these programs should be prevented as much as feasible, and there should be an opportunity for any kid who demonstrates redemption to get back in school. It’s a bad solution, but I don’t know any which is better. Keeping them in society is worse for innocent people (and doesn’t seem to usually benefit them e…

> Put them in work programs. If they can’t be productive, put them in > mental institutions. That was how NAZI-Germany and USSR (communist) governments 'solved' their problems. In the USA, we had this president named Ronald Reagan who solved the mental institution problem: he closed all the mental institutions and expelled the patients so the patients live on the streets. That's really gave us a new influx of homeles…

I'm a bit confused. Are you saying Hitler and the communists were right for putting people in mental institutions or Reagan who didn't?

Re: Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

#482

Post by FireBeyond »

dmoy wrote: post #446
joenot443 wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can any Americans confirm this? Were your high school sports games televised and commentated?

Really depends on where, and what sport. If you're in an urban school in a big city, maaayyybe some of the basketball games depending on the specific school. E.g. if your school has people who everyone knows are going into the NBA draft, sometimes the more important games get put on television with commentators. If you're in a suburban/rural school and it's (American) football or maybe baseball, quite possibly yes as…

> https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-largest-high-school-...

Absolutely, there are three high school football stadiums with capacities over twenty thousand, in Ohio and Texas.

Re: Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

#483

Post by cortesoft »

naasking wrote: post #99
quiet35 wrote: post #78

I see at least 2 issues with the physical punishment: - it will only make the bullies taking their revenge on vulnerable ones with even more cruelty. And they will plan it carefully to be hard/impossible to prove. It will lead to the escalation, not to the resolution - the power will be abused, it's inevitable. I would be so scared to be in a class where "teacher" has the power to harm me physically! (to clarify: I a…

> it will only make the bullies taking their revenge on vulnerable ones with even more cruelty. And they will plan it carefully to be hard/impossible to prove. It will lead to the escalation, not to the resolution Bullies are generally not very intelligent. Deterrents absolutely do work if applied consistently. A society that applies corporal punishment at multiple levels, as Singapore does, strongly ingrains the ide…

> because there's always someone with a bigger stick.

This is certainly not true. Someone has the biggest stick, and if they abuse that power, it can be horrible.

Re: Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

#484

Post by rayiner »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #413
rayiner wrote: post #381

It’s a tragedy that scholars don’t study Singapore more to understand what it did right. When my dad was born in what was then Pakistan, Singapore (then part of Malaysia) was a poor country. Today it’s rich but the subcontinent is still poor. The best thing all these so-called “humanitarians” could do to improve the human condition would be to study Singapore to understand how that model can be translated to all the…

The secret is maintaining a permanently impoverished underclass without labor rights or a path to citizenship! Much to learn here, indeed.

Cheap foreign labor flocks to Singapore because it's much richer than the countries around it. But that's not how it got rich in the first place. Singapore had a restrictive policy on foreign workers until the 1980s. But by that point its GDP per capita was already almost as high as the UK's: https://emergenteconomics.com/2012/03/12/718/

And insofar as Singapore has such a policy now, the rest of the world should take notes. Creating wealth from poverty within a few generations is miraculous, and the system that achieved that should be emulated.

Re: Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

#485

Post by bonesss »

rdtsc wrote: post #452
sybercecurity wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zero tolerance can lead to a new type of bullying: state sponsored. I remember a younger colleague who talked about her school experience, this was just at the start of zero tolerance because there was a belief that bullying caused school gun violence. Bullies quickly found out it was easy to just report "weird" kids as potential shooters and let the school torment them with investigations.

> Zero tolerance can lead to a new type of bullying: state sponsored. Absolutely. The more of a victim you're perceived the more attention and the more punishment the bully gets. If the system overreacts, bullies would be stupid not to use the over-reaction in their favor. One of the kids at my daughter's school figured it out and was getting others in trouble by falling down then telling the teacher so and so pushed…

So, what you’re saying is, HR department behaviours start long before HR department employment.

Re: Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

#486

Post by mantas »

almostjazz wrote: post #425
mantas wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's lots and lots of jobs where physical strength makes a fuckton difference. I don't see construction workers, garbage people or figherfighters using exoskeletons yet. Also, ask women how their mood and abilities swing during their cycles. Both menstrual and life cycle with menopause and stuff. Some have it easy, but many women I know have quite big swings in both cases. And yet modern society requires one to pe…

There are women construction workers, garbage people, and firefighters. There are much better reasons why these fields have disproportionately fewer women than a biological barrier to the required level of strength. I am interested to hear what career or societal role you think a women cannot or should not do because of menstrual related mood swings. Because it clearly isn't President of the United States or billiona…

There're always exceptions. But so far what I see it's 100-to-1 if not worse. And I'm not at all surprised that women ain't exactly keen of lugging around heavy weights. Especially due to damage it can do to women-specific health. Or reduced abilities abilities after childbirth for many women. Of course nowadays many women don't care about their reproductive health nor give births, so maybe we don't need societal norms around this anymore?

I don't think that women cannot or shouldn't do something. I see they don't exactly enjoy to suck it up and do the job regardless of their body needs.

We as a society used to tell boys to „man up“. Now that's frowned upon (and that's good). But now we started to tell girls and women to „man up“ and ignore their cycles. And both are just as bad. At least we should give teenage girls and young-to-middle-age women few extra days off school/work in a month. Scheduling might become a nightmare with irregular cycles though. Dealing with menopause for significant portion of women is awful too. But I've no idea how modern economy could deal. Besides giving them much more lax during that period in life. But on the other hand, if they get same pay, it's quite natural that their colleagues wouldn't be happy about it.

Re: Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

#487

Post by everdrive »

I've never seen a bullying program which acknowledged that there were multiple types of bullying with different causes:

- Some Stephen King-styled cretin who is just big and dumb and wants to hurt people.

- Kids vying for status in an unhealthy way and trying to cut people down.

- That weird "smelling blood in the water" problem that happens when a group of people come across someone who is just _too_ weak and their biology just seems to rev them up.

- A weird kid who is socially maladjusted and thinks they're being bullied, but actually it's just that no one likes them.

Re: Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

#488

Post by madaxe_again »

andsoitis wrote: post #444
madaxe_again wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That the apartheid regime and its proponents were not terribly nice people. Sorry if that’s a controversial stance these days.

Stereotyping all Afrikaners with that brush is despicable.

I’m sorry, calling Dutch colonists colonisers is despicable? Well, I suppose not just Dutch colonists, they did have their population bolstered by a lot of Austrians and Germans escaping war crime prosecution in the 40’s.

Anyway. In the early 90’s, in the U.K.? They were coming over for one reason only. The Afrikaner masters were always racist, always fans of collective punishment and bizarre corporal punishments.

Re: Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

#489

Post by dmoy »

FireBeyond wrote: post #482
dmoy wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really depends on where, and what sport. If you're in an urban school in a big city, maaayyybe some of the basketball games depending on the specific school. E.g. if your school has people who everyone knows are going into the NBA draft, sometimes the more important games get put on television with commentators. If you're in a suburban/rural school and it's (American) football or maybe baseball, quite possibly yes as…

> https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-largest-high-school-... Absolutely, there are three high school football stadiums with capacities over twenty thousand, in Ohio and Texas.

Oof wow, that's bigger than I realized. I knew there were a lot of big ones (10k+), but I didn't realize there was US highschool football being played in stadium bigger than the smallest EPL stadiums.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised given a lot of college stadiums are 50k+ capacity.

Re: Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

#490

Post by rayiner »

kbbgl87 wrote: post #397
mark_l_watson wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I worked in Singapore for a short while and I was so very impressed by the people and the government. Singapore is a great place. It is breathtaking to see a government govern in the interests of its people. I live in the USA and we have two institutions, the democratic party and the republican party, that do little except cater to special interests.

I remember when I was younger there was a TV series showing the differences between how things are done in Singapore and my home country. The show showed how efficient, clean, organized, fair Singapore is. An example, how they prevent traffic jams by providing licenses to roads which forced people to find and organize ride shares. Fast forward to a few years ago, I had the privilege to fly there for a few days on vac…

Singapore can undoubtedly be brutal to some. But it's surrounded by countries where that brutal existence is the norm for almost everyone. My dad tells stories like that about his village in Bangladesh. He has a hard time denying my kids treats when they ask. When he was a kid, one of his cousins had asked for his favorite meal and his parents told him they'd have it the next day. But he got a fever and died overnight. That's a common story in Bangladesh, and it used to be a common story in Singapore. But in my dad's lifetime, Singapore became richer than Europe, while Bangladesh is still mired in hopeless poverty.

The poverty and dysfunction in Asian countries feels inescapable and permanent. My dad wanted to take my kids to see his village, but they overthrew the government last year so those plans are on hold indefinitely. I have no confidence that Bangladesh will ever be a place I want to take my kids. Singapore somehow managed to escape that trap. If it took a brutal, regimented society and economy to achieve that, then so be it.

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