If not - when do you stand on bullying? Just keep taking it?

If it is - then … well read on … is Chris Rock America?

Take #1: Will Smith’s assault on Chris Rock violated the law—so if Rock wants to press charges against Smith, Smith should face punishment. But Rock provoked Smith with a cruel joke about his wife, and he shouldn’t have made the joke.

Take #2: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine violated international law—so Ukraine’s armed resistance to it is justifiable, as are sanctions and other forms of punishment. But America provoked Russia with NATO expansion and various other policies that America, if in Russia’s shoes, would have found unacceptable—and America shouldn’t have done that.

I don’t have any polling data to back this up, but my sense is that if you espouse the first of those two takes you won’t get much blowback. In fact, you may be credited with unusual balance, prudence, even Solomonic wisdom.

But if you espouse the second take—and here, though I have no polling data, I do have relevant personal experience, since I’ve been espousing a version of it for weeks—you do get a fair amount of blowback.

Read The Whole Thing

Post Script

I am not saying Rock or America was bullying - but its surely in the spectrum?

“The Economist estimates zero excess deaths among the elderly in New Zealand, for instance, and gives the whole region an excess-mortality range of negative 31 to positive 37 per 100,000 residents, meaning it’s possible fewer people died there than would’ve had we never even heard of SARS-CoV-2.”

and …

“The U.S. drove an unprecedented vaccine-innovation campaign in 2020, which empowered much of the world to turn the page on the pandemic’s deadliest phases, then, in 2021, utterly failed to take advantage of its power itself. But what is perhaps even more striking is that American vaccination coverage isn’t just bad, by the standards of its peers, but getting worse. About two-thirds of Americans have received two shots of vaccine, a level that is in line with Israel and not far off from the U.K., though below many other wealthy countries. (And even in the U.K., vaccination was more effectively directed toward the old.) But over the last six months, the country has had an opportunity to make up that gap with boosters and has simply not taken it. Only 29 percent of Americans have had a booster shot of the vaccine, which puts us behind Slovenia, Slovakia, and Poland and means that less than half of those people happy to be vaccinated a year ago have chosen to get a third shot through Delta and Omicron. Booster campaigns seem like an obvious opportunity for easy public-health gains, yet remarkably few Americans seem to think it’s worth the trouble. Why? For everything we think we know about the pandemic and how people have responded to it, that one remains a maddening mystery.”

Read The Article (Apple News)

Sad.