Cary,

I've been reading you for a few years now and, unlike those who dismiss your advice as "blather," I rather appreciate the tangential advice you give.

What I'm interested in knowing, however, is why your concrete advice often seems to break down to "you're dealing with a bully...walk away or give in to them."

There are a good many people in this world who shy away from confrontation, who are avoidant. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with that, but your advice seems to assume that everyone comes from this basic place.

There are others, myself included, who thrive more on confrontation, who believe that pushing back when you are pushed is the best way to deal with situations like this.

Often, we will seek advice about bullies not because we are afraid to confront, but because we want a reality check. Pushing back when one is pushed is well and good until you start pushing back when you're NOT pushed, which makes you the bully.

In this case, why should the aggrieved party be the one to leave? Why should she walk away from a job she might otherwise like if she and the other victims of this bullying were to stand and say "enough?"

What guarantees does she have that her new wonderful job over in the magic land where no one is an asshole won't be similarly disrupted by some offensive lout?

How many times shall she be forced to uproot herself for lack of confronting bullies?

And it seems to me that the bully here would be playing into her hands by trash talking her to the others. The others seem to have had their problems too and if they see that someone, anyone, is willing to stand up, well, maybe they'll stand with her.

Or maybe not. Maybe leaving is the best advice for her. But if there's one thing my short life on this earth has shown me it's that you stand a better chance of MAKING a good life for yourself than you do of FINDING one.

-flipside

What makes people think that maternal instincts make someone kinder and more compassionate?

You want to experience a top-to-bottom inside-and-outside ass-whooping?

Threaten a mother and child.

And remember: all those "evil" men who've dominated history were raised by women.

The y chromosome is a biological weapon in a proxy war among women.

Okay, crawling back into my cave now... :)

If you have to tell your citizens not to purposefully inhale fermented sewer gas, perhaps you should invest more in education in general.

Poker punishes you in the long term for making bad decisions, but it can reward bad decisions and punish good ones in the short term.

Becoming a good poker player requires you to overcome your emotional impulses, dedicate yourself to learning and understanding the game, satisfying yourself with good decision making and not on making money (concentrating on making money is a sure way to lose in poker.)

In an age when our leaders invoke the "smoking gun is a mushroom cloud" and we all run in fear without asking "what are the odds that the smoking gun will be a mushroom cloud? is the investment we're making against that contingency proportional to the risk? does our plan make any sense?" we could all do with some education in good decision making.

We often use poker metaphors in politics. "Boy, I'd love to play poker with the Democrats...he's playing a high stakes game...Bush just went all in."

Why, do you suppose, that is? Because we recognize that skill at poker is an apt metaphor for skill at more complex issues.

And why do the various family research councils want to ban poker? Because they prefer mindless sheep to people who understand how things work.

They're denying you education. Don't let them.

Do it for your children's sake. You may not think they see what's going on, but they do.

It will hurt, yes. But it will hurt them more to grow up watching two people play these kinds of sick games with each other.

Get your children out of this fucked up rodeo.

Failing that, start their therapy trust fund today.

This is a classic Rove play. Your opposition suspects you're involved in a scandal, so you tart up easily discreditable "evidence" that seems to support their case. They jump all over it like rabid weasels, then you have your blog army "discover" the conspiracy.

They did it to Dan Rather and they're doing it again.

Dollars to donuts, by the end of the year we'll find out that Scott McClellan didn't REALLY mean that the president LIED and all this breathless excitement on the part of "liberals" just goes to show that they have an irrational, radical anti-Bush agenda that turns molehills of innuendo into mountains of evidence.

Don't jump on this. Step carefully to it. If it's genuine, it won't run away scared.