Whoa: Chinese BBS-ers congregate en masse to play out morality on and offline.

It began with an impassioned, 5,000-word letter on one of China's most popular Internet bulletin boards, from a husband denouncing a student he suspected of carrying on an affair with his wife.

Immediately, hundreds joined in the attack. "Let's use our keyboard and mouse in our hands as weapons," as one person wrote, "to chop out the heads of these adulterers, to pay for the sacrifice of the husband." Within days, the hundreds had grown to thousands, and then tens of thousands, with total strangers forming teams to hunt down the student's identity and address, hounding him out of his university and causing his family to barricade themselves inside their home.

The Derby guy sounds scarily like a health teacher I had in high school. She believed (and said on more than one occasion) that rape is always the woman's/girl's fault. That something about a woman/girl drives a man to such a sexual peak that he's forced to rape and this "thing" can be anything from the clothes worn, perfume, or even just a man looking at a woman/girl. And that it doesn't matter the age of the victim, that children being sexually molested is caused by the same thing.

She even said, if I walked down the street and some man grabbed me and raped me I must have done something to set him off.

I never actually thought anyone really believed that until I met her. She wasn't a teacher there very long, I reported her to the principal for those statements and other issues and she was fired.

The kid who was hit was (after the accident) sitting on the curb, holding his head. So he's hurt - but hopefully it's not bad.

That's good to hear. One of the scariest things that ever happened to me was once when I was accelerating up a ramp in a parking garage (in a company pickup truck, no less) and suddenly there was a 4-6 year old boy RUNNING RIGHT DOWN THE MIDDLE OF THE RAMP AT ME. He'd decided to race his father to the car, and was ignoring dad's shouting to hold up.

I slammed on the breaks, but there was still an awful thump. THANK GOD it was just the kid running in to the front of the truck. He still seriously knocked himself for good one, and was crying and scared, but essentially unhurt. The father blamed himself, and that was pretty much that, but after I parked the truck and got in my car (I was doing courier work for a summer), I had to sit there for 15-30 minutes before I could stop shaking and breathe normally.

I've lost count of the number of times my dad has been hit while on his bike. Or rather, they stopped considering it news after the third incident. Two, that I know of, required an ambulance and surgery and whatnot.

I'm preemptively cranky about EVERYTHING today. Woe to my apartment complex if they didn't even enter my apartment today. I'm loaded for bear. And it's making me kind of ill.

Hands elephant gun to sara and sits back to watch the show.

She wasn't a teacher there very long, I reported her to the principal for those statements and other issues and she was fired.

bows down before the awesomeness that is askye

She wasn't a teacher there very long, I reported her to the principal for those statements and other issues and she was fired.

While askye is, indeed, awesome, I have to hold on to a vision of the world where people don't get fired solely for their beliefs, even if they are wrong like a wrong thing. signed, loves being a tenured academic type

JZ - I wish some of my classmates reacted that nicely. Once she was fired a bunch of them told me I was mean and shouldn't have gotten her fired. She was a terrible teacher, she gave us a test that everyone failed because it was supposed to be 3 pages but she only gave us 2 and then graded it with the 3 page key and didn't seem to know there was a problem until students were asking why they failed.

This was a K-12 school so she was teaching that crap to middle school students. They were grateful I did something, they had complained about other issues but had been ignored.

While askye is, indeed, awesome, I have to hold on to a vision of the world where people don't get fired solely for their beliefs, even if they are wrong like a wrong thing.

but if your wrong belief endangers your students, is that permissible?

Sparky -- there was a lot more going on than just that. There was the test everyone failed, the fact she was constantly late to class, often leaving us locked out of the classroom and standing around. She tried to mark people absent because they got up out of their seat during class -- for any reason, such as throwing something in the trash or sharpening a pencil.

With the middle schoolers it was worse -- one of girl somehow hurt herself (I think she was accidentally stabbed by a pencil) and bleeding and the teacher wouldn't give the student permission to go to the nurse.

Plus she was a replacement teacher brought in during the middle of the year, the class I took was a one semseter class. We didn't have a teacher for the first few weeks and then she was fired before the end of the school year.