Don’t get me wrong (and before legions of beleaguered parents jump down my throat) I do not advocate bullying. It’s awful if someone is picked on for no reason, or if the reason is if they’re different, hell I’ve been in that situation and it’s not nice.

However there is another perspective I’d like you to look at and it is also a perspective which I swear by, and that my friends is something called CAUSALITY. Now without sounding like the French guy in Matrix 2, I would like to highlight the emphasis on cause and effect on the reason as to why someone is being singled out. Causality is defined the relation between an event (the cause) and a second event (the effect), where the second event is understood as a consequence of the first.

So with that understanding, please consider these scenarios:

• If someone is being picked on indiscriminately, that is wrong, no question.
• If someone is being picked on because of the way they look, what they believe or if they’re a bit different, that too is wrong.
• But what about the stupid bastards who make it their mission to piss off every single one of their peers by trying to be controversial or just down right irritating just to get a reaction? Like a TROLL for example? What if the effect of this is that they are subsequently alienated or ostracised? Is that bullying? No, of course it’s fucking not. There is something called a consequence, and that must be observed.

Its a similar situation when you have someone griefing other players in a GTA Online free roam session for example; if they run about mindlessly killing every single player on sight, and all the aggrieved players subsequently collaborate together to kill them repeatedly, is that bullying? No, that’s vengeance. Similarly I seem to recall at school there was this lad who went around winding up all the other kids by dry humping the back of their chairs just to get a reaction. He also proceeded to Frisbee a rubber bin lid at a group of kids who were minding their own business. This subsequently hit the Deputy Head Master in the knee causing a massive bollocking, but again, that’s cause and effect. Over time all the other kids turned on him making him an outcast, but I didn’t have any sympathy, because if you follow my prime directive, he fired first. If he left them alone, would he have been picked on? No probably not.

So here’s my question to you; can you honestly, with hand on heart honestly defend someone who has trolled, insulted, offended and intentionally annoyed everyone around them, when as a DIRECT reaction everyone else has now chosen to ignore? No I don’t think you can. I don’t think you can truly defend someone who has absolutely no respect for anyone or anyone else’s feelings whilst overtly displaying a stinking attitude which stems from some kind of self-perceived intellectual superiority. If they don’t understand causality or consequence, then they deserve everything bad that happens to them.

But surely if they’ve insulted you, they’ve been the bully and you’ve been the victim? So how the hell can taking the mature route of simply ignoring them and rising above it be construed as bullying? And furthermore, why on earth would you consciously defend a troll?