Call Me Annoyed

Call me annoyed.

I really dislike waking up and feeling completely out of it, the exact thing that I felt this morning when I rolled out of my metaphorical bed (I don't actually sleep on a bed). My head was woozy, my nose was bunged up, the entire works of an impending cold short of a throat infection of some sort.

The temptation to see the doctor to get instant relief is high, but I feel uncomfortable with the fact that I had been seeing the doctor at a near regular rate of once per week. All for the same stupid thing.

I cannot understand my susceptibility to colds and upper respiratory infections. It's ludicrous actually. I know that I have some allergic rhinitis going on which is controlled with the steroid nasal spray (Nasonex), but ever so often I will get hit with a head cold with an über bunged up nose and a general wooziness in the brain itself.

Perhaps it is time to re-examine the vitamin C hypothesis again.

It has been a rather long time since I last took vitamin C supplements consistently. And during this time period of lull, I think that the cold incidence is a tad higher. However, this is merely an anecdotal observation -- I haven't actually tallied up the number of incidences of the cold during any time period. Medically, there is some light evidence that vitamin C can help prevent the cold, but only in the specific situation of active training under stressful conditions. Perhaps the heat stresses on the body from this rather annoyingly warm ``summer'' can be considered the necessary stressful conditions and all the Aikido training (and perhaps even the venerable 5BX that I had been loathing to do) can be considered under the aegis of ``training''. Which, of course, translates to me taking more vitamin C supplements.

Well, what harm can it do, right? As long as I don't overdose myself and keep within the LD₅₀ of vitamin C (~12g/kg body mass using the rat model), there isn't any harm to be had.

Mundane vagaries of this sort aside, I have been reading on and off various threads on Reddit, and the kind the really gets my goat are those that involve the education system (``schools'') and bullies. As a general rule of thumb, Reddit has a predominantly American bias in terms of the user-submitted content, and on the topic of schools and bullies, it holds true as well. The sad thing of the US system is that of ``zero tolerance'' policies, or as I'd like to call it, the ``let's throw out common sense and judgement in favour of enforcing regularity and uniformity on everyone to avoid lawsuits'' policies. It makes me glad that I have no intention of raising my young in the US.

The prototypal story follows this general template: Alice is a student at a school, and Bob is a bully who keeps picking on her. One day, Alice got too pissed off at Bob and snaps, flailing/fighting/hurting Bob. Then, they both get detention and Alice is told to ``take the blows, not defend herself, and to look for a teacher''. Rinse and repeat unless things get nasty enough that someone gets sent to the ER or when a parent gets pissed of enough to have a showdown with the school administrators.

There are so many things wrong with that picture. The most damning is the dictum of never fighting back and appealling to authority. The problem isn't with the instruction, but lies within the context in which the instruction is provided. ``Appealling to authority'' works only if the said authority is just and even-handed, both of which are neigh impossible to get in the context of the school. Teachers and school administrators have, at best, a primitive notion of what being just means. The varying quality of the teachers is the reason why ``zero tolerance'' policies come about -- in the bid to enforce uniformity (aka Standard Operating Procedures or SOP), the judgement abilities of the teachers are taken out of the equation, making the rules rigid and unfair. Much of the action occurs after the damage is done, with everyone attempting to assign blame after the fact -- there is hardly any incentive for any teacher to actively step in to break up an altercation due to the lawsuit-happy environment.

I don't think Singapore has reached that level of stupidity. But then again, we tend not to have such blatant cases of bullying thanks to the full-scale indoctrination of proper social behaviour (or rather, conformity) that we don't find in the US.

Here's what I think. Violence should not be tolerated as a society -- there are always non-violent means of achieving a goal. It is laudable that schools try to inculcate that value into the young. It is also good to hear child psychologists praise the superior method of talking with one's children as the primary means of discipline, to get them to understand that something they have done is wrong.

However, violence cannot be eradicated completely from human society -- it ought to be allowed, with heavy penalties exacted on those who choose to use them. The reasons for this are pragmatic -- non-violent means of achieving goals assumes an innate intelligence and sentience that befits the status of homo, but there are times where the... person one is talking to refuses to use his/her intelligence and understanding to see the point being discussed. It is at such exasperating times that violence ought to be permitted. That said, there has to be a price for the application of violence, and the person needs to make a judgement on whether the objective is worth the price to pay for the violence enacted.

Back to the bully situation. The primary psychology behind a bully is an extrinsic source of superiority to mask the innate inferiority complex -- a sign of an immature mind, to put it in the bluntest terms. While it is possible for the intellectually advanced to bully others, in the context of the school, that is hardly the case. All the appeals to authority in the world will do little for the victim; but one violent outburst at the bully will make it clear that there is a price to pay for the bully to continue bullying. It's a primal way of settling problems, and I do not claim to agree with it completely, but it is a pragmatic solution of desperation.

That's how modern diplomacy works anyway. Heh.