Re: What does it mean

On Mon, 29 May 2006 14:25:03 GMT, Ibn al-Hazardous
<ibn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

fre 2006-05-26 klockan 20:15 -0400 skrev erimess:

It may be there are way too many cultural factors. Just within a
fairly short radius of where I grew up, I can see lots of differences
in how people behave, and what they find to be acceptable. And the
differences across this country (let alone going outside of it) can be
drastic. My brother lived in California for a number of years, and
I'm always surprised by the things he tells me about how things were
out there compared to how they are here.

Well, cultural factors are one thing that I set aside from the
discussion. IMHO it is when you do stuff to spite people, that you are a
jerk.

Yes, but you never started out by giving what you considered a
definition of a jerk, just that we'd probably *mostly* agree on what
one is. Doing stuff intentionally to spite people is a different
matter. And then culture wouldn't matter, cause doing something to
"spite someone" is more a reason, not a specific thing. And that
could obviously be different from person to person. You'd have to
know what you were doing is annoying/hurting that person.

If something is just plain normal to you, but not to others, there
can be a lot of misunderstandings. To me, that is quite another issue -
though of course a communication breakdown can _lead_ to hostile jerkish
behaviour.

Oooh, I know that one all too well.


I suspect if I think about a certain group of people, say for instance
a place of employment from about 3 years ago, I couldn't probably
categorize all the people there into 3 groups: those that nearly
everyone thinks is an ass, those that most people either like or are
indifferent to, and those that there is no concensus on. I think the
vast majority of them would end up in the "like or are indifferent to"
category. Which would leave very few people for that "no concensus
on" category. There were a few people that some people thought were
obnoxious or rude or whatever, but that other people liked just fine.
Basically meaning very few people would be in this category where we
couldn't get a concensus. So from that standpoint, you may have a
point.

And it could be that the people you couldn't agree on were simple acting
differently in different situations. Most people do that to some degree.

Well, one person I'm thinking of was a boss, so there were major
different opinions of her. The other boss everyone hated, and *he*
was a major jerk. Even his wife knew he was scewy (though she
obviously saw something in him we didn't). (Actually, he was great
with his kids.) Another person I can think of just talked in such a
way that she sounded like a real prude and a bitch. But if you talked
to her *a lot* you'd find all kinds of most interesting things down in
her, including the fact that she was far from a prude. :-) Sometimes
you just have to get to what's beneath the surface.


If, however, I look at relationships, like people I've known fairly
well -- it always seems to be more a tolerance thing. Like the number
of times I've heard someone referring to someone as a real jerk, or
ass, or whatever derogatory term they use, when I didn't think they
were at all. Or maybe it just has a bit more to do with getting to a
point where your tolerance level has become low enough, that it
doesn't really matter what that other people is really like, or what
anyone else would think of them, the person having been in the
relationship always resorts to categorizing them as a jerk. :-)

Yeah, when you have broken up with someone (ex-spouse or ex-friend), it
is for a reason. Low tolerance levels usually comes in the bargain, even
if it wasn't the direct reason. The unhealthy part is when ex-couples
pretend to be oh-so-good friends IMPO.

Odd -- I don't think I've ever known an ex-couple to pretend to be
friends. They either were or they weren't, and it's always been
obvious which. My neighbor gets along with her ex fairly well.
They're not exactly friends, but get along. Very cooperative about
the kid. Neighbor even gets along with his new wife. She just
doesn't wanna live with him. :-) I've know other couples who didn't
get along so well.


Never mind the laws -- the comment would still work. :-) I'm probably
going to blow up at her one of these days. I've made comments, like
after she said her sister-in-law "should" paint her kitchen in
brighter colors. The word "should" doesn't belong in that sentence.
She says the same things to me. And there's always that "should" in
the sentence. As though color schemes are God's will or something.

You mean you never saw the memo?

Nope. Must've been absent that day.


(But never a complaint that the stereo's too loud. Just that my color
schemes aren't right.)

*EG*

Maybe she's deaf, but a very good lip reader - who has had you all
fooled for years? ;)

Actually, I don't play the stereo loud. :-) She said her daughter can
sometimes hear my TV in her bedroom, but there's been no complaints
that it wakes her up or anything. I hear *much* more noise out of
them. Never heard anyone bang around that way in a kitchen.


Quite frankly, if someone thought I was a jerk for farting in my own
home, even though it is a perfectly natural act, I'd be tempted to do
it loudly on purpose just to annoy the person. :-)

In your home is one thing, on your brother's wedding would be something
else maybe.

Oh well, now, that's never going to be an issue because I doubt either
brother will be getting married. :-) Er... no, I would never be tacky
enough to do something stupid like that in public at that type of
event.


Although I'm not
much talented at that (I'd lose the contest) so perhaps burping would
be the more appropriate annoyance method. :-)

Some guys I know, age 4 and 6, recently learned that trick. We pretend
not to notice. :)

LOL. Pretending not to notice is probably good -- they may lose
interest if it doesn't get a reaction. Having two older brothers, we
definitely went through this in my house. They did some interesting
things. The best trick had nothing to do with belching or anything of
the sort. The best trick my brother pulled was throwing a peanut
butter sandwich up to the ceiling, and it stuck. It might be hard to
imagine -- maybe one of those things you have to see -- but that is
probably one of The funniest things I've ever seen in my life. He was
hanging out with a couple of his friends, and at the time I was
nothing but the annoying kid sister. But in this case, it was so
funny that they even included me into their little fun. Long, long
time ago, and me and him still crack up over that to this day. And I
think part of what made it so funny was that it was completely
unexpected -- he was just screwing around. (Our mother was not
amused, of course.)


If I were facing a prison sentence, I might lie too. :-) Of course,
you have to consider the source there. Do you expect someone who is
guilty of a white color crime to be the most honest person on earth?

Well, I never expected him to be honest to his employer. What bothered
me was that he thought he needed to lie to me in order to get sympathy.

The question is, would you have given him any sympathy if he hadn't
lied? (That is, was he right?) Not that that excuses it -- in fact,
I find it a bit irrelevant. Still not an honest person. Although it
does sound like he probably wasn't intentionally trying to be this
type of person, but rather got himself in over his head.


I've seen a councelor -- I loved it. No
matter what I was afraid to say to friends, or how busy they were with
their own stuff, I always knew I had my time with this woman, and that
I could bring up anything I wanted. I wish I could've kept her around
the rest of my life. (She moved. I actually miss her.)

I go to counceling too. It kinda comes with the territory; working the
way I do, they pretty much demand that we se a councelor regularly.

Just out of curiosity, what do you do? I feel like you've said
before, but I don't remember.


Then I guess you'll have to consider me a criminal because I speed.
But I'm not going around hitting kids and killing them. I'm curious
if this is some cultural thing. From what I could tell when I was in
Europe and from what I've heard, over there speed limits are not
enforced the way they are here. (In fact, the drivers overall were
much more terrible over there than here. At least when I was there.)

They are.

So by "speeding" you may mean something you would consider as being
too fast for safety. I mean going over the posted speed limits
sitting around, which a great many of people go over. And as far as
I'm concerned, they're just numbers. They don't have any real meaning
in terms of whether someone can drive safely or not.

Around here, they are usually set at the speed where an accident is less
likely to kill someone.

I'm not sure what they use around here, but it seems more like
something that is less likely to result in an accident to begin with.
Which is why I think it can be very driver-dependent. Obviously they
can't make a different law for everyone, but it's also why I don't get
too serious about things like speed limits, and drive what I'm
comfortable with. There are places that have the same speed limits
(usually based on type of district and type of road), that I don't
drive the same speed cause I'm not comfortable with the same speed.

The one exception is residential areas, and those limits are
definitely set to keep some kind of control when people could be
easily jumping/falling out into the streets, and especially with kids
around. Sometimes their brilliant solution to that is speed bumps,
which makes me crazy. They're wrong -- people still speed between the
bumps. Plus some of them really wrack up your car even if you're
going 1/2 mile an hour. The ones in my neighborhood aren't bad on the
car as long as you actually do slow down.


Even the law
makers can't decide an appropriate speed limit and there is no
"innate" appropriate speed limit. I'll drive 70 (mph) when the speed
limit is 65. But the speed limit was 75 years ago. Obviously they
thought that was OK. Then suddenly dropped them all to like 50-55,
and have now raised some up to 65. I heard recently about some state
that either is discussing, or maybe did, raise some back up to like
70. See, it's just a number. And my mother should've never even been
on a highway going at the lowest limit of 50 because she wasn't a good
driver. Actually, she was afraid of driving, and it hurt her driving.
So I don't consider how breaking this particular law says anything at
all about anyone. And if I'm on the highway going 65 and crash into
something, I'm likely to be just as dead as if I'm going 70. (And if
I felt unsafe going that speed, I wouldn't. I go what I'm comfortable
with, not what someone in some government department somewhere thought
was safe for me. Sometimes I'm going slower than the limits.)

It's 50 km/h outside our house, but it is quite usual with people
driving 100 - which is a factor in my attitude. When my kids get big
enough to have to cross the road on their own - I am probably going to
stand there day and night, waving my scimitar.

:-) You don't really have a scimitar, do you?

I'm trying to remember how to do that math in my head, but that sounds
fast for some place a kid could be crossing a road. The limits I
mentioned above are for the *highways*. And nobody's crossing the
highway. At least, I've rarely seen anyone make an attempt to cross
one. And out on the highway, if you hit someone, they're dead whether
you're going the lowest limits they've set or the highest. So it's
not really mattering in that sense. (Supposedly, the actual number of
accidents dropped when they dropped the speed limits -- I'm not sure
whether the severity of the accidents changed much.) Now, we have
people speeding around this neighborhood -- couldn't tell you how fast
-- and yeah, that ticks me off. This is all residential, where all
the front yards are about 2 feet, meaning people are close to the road
just by being in their front yard. And there's of course kids around
who aren't paying attention. And cars parked on the road, making it
harder for anyone to see down the road easily. Where I grew up in the
suburbs, everyone had huge front yards, and you could see quite a ways
down the street so it was obvious if a car was coming.


But just in general, I think it's *necessary* to distinguish between
less and more important laws. Just as an example, getting a ticket at
a parking meter cause one doesn't put their appropriate quarter in for
parking a half hour. That *isn't* going to kill some kid. If you
don't pay those fines, they'll put a warrant out for your arrest.

Around here they don't. You get a bill from whatever company owns the
parking space, if you don't pay the bill they do the same stuff as
anyone else waiting for an overdue bill. They leave it to some
enforcement service to get their money.

Well, around here, the city owns the parking space. At least the ones
on the street. There's private lots. As for the private lots,
there's the pay-in-advance (one price all day) and if you don't,
they'll just tow you. And there's the kind you pay as you leave, and
unless you wanna crash through the wooden gate, you're stuck til you
pay.


You *can't* treat a parking ticket the same way you do a rapist.

*That* is emphatically not what I meant.

I was giving drastically different examples on purpose. You're the
one that said you can't go around separating different rules into
categories. Obviously, you can, cause I just did. :-)

And really, I'm not really quite sure what you *do* mean. You're the
one who first equated speeding with crimes, which I don't consider to
be a crime. Although if you're only referring to something which
results in damage that we'd consider criminal, I completely agree.
But that's not how I define speeding -- I define it as going over a
posted speed limit. Which I don't find to be a big deal since it's
just a number. I most definitely separate different types of laws.


If
you do, then you either charge the rapist a $20 fine, or you throw the
person with the traffic violation in jail for 20 years. And a rapist
is a true criminal. Do you really want to put someone who didn't pay
a parking ticket in league with them?

My meaning was kinda the other way around: Unless the person you live
with is a child molester or a rapist, I might actually understand how
you can live with a criminal. And I'd be amazed if you were able to dig
out someone who has never broken a law.

In a way, that's kind of the point. If most people have broken some
kind of law (especially traffic laws), then obviously most of us don't
see anything terrible about that, and obviously most of us are
distinguishing that some laws just aren't as important. I live by my
own laws. And fortunately for everyone around me, my laws are pretty
moral and ethical. In fact, there are *legal* things I wouldn't do.
I do realize that it'd be total chaos if everyone got to make their
own laws -- which is why I said it's good that my own laws are pretty
good anyway. :-) I'm not really someone they need to worry about -- I
mean, I don't need a law that says I can't steal. I'm not gonna do it
anyway because I respect someone else's property. (I'm more likely to
pay attention to contract law, simply because that's an area where
people could disagree but both be ethical and right. And something
has to say who wins.)


But I do have a problem with people thinking that some laws are ok to
violate.

I have this interesting stance on this issue. I don't think "rules
are meant to be broken," but I do certainly think rules are meant to
be questioned. If I think a law has no meaning, and the person
breaking it isn't doing anything wrong, I don't actually have an issue
with it. And yes, I realize that's asking for a judgment call. But
just think about it -- if no one had ever questioned laws, we'd all
still be in the dark ages. And even though most laws are probably
generally good, I think there are some that need to be changed. I
especially don't like the ones where the government wants to be my
mommy.

Especially since which those laws are tend to be very much
related to social standing here in Sweden. (I read about the Enron
trial, someone getting convicted to 185 years in prison. That can't
happen here. I'd say 2 years in an open institution + 2 years on
probation is probably what he'd have gotten in Sweden.)

Wow. Well, of course, you have to wait and find out whether that 185
years holds up -- there is a little thing known as parole. I never
heard the sentence, but about the conviction. (I wasn't paying close
attention cause I'm tired of hearing about it.) They usually reserve
sentences like that to murderers and such (i.e. two life sentences or
something) -- I think someone is being made an example of.

Things sometimes around here can be social standing. But many times
it's just whoever has the sneakiest lawyer. That is also not the kind
of law I think it's OK to break. I'm not into unethical behavior --
like I said, I wouldn't do certain things that are legal. When I say
laws are to be questioned, I certainly don't mean in that sense --
like it's OK for some people and not others. I usually mean things
that I think are just downright stupid laws or unfair ones. And they
do exist -- they've existed forever. And there are some people who I
think are more interested in the law itself than the issue that
created the law. I'm more interested in *why* the law exists.


Well, really, in that particular instance (and in a lot of cases I can
think of), it's more a man/woman issue. As far as I can see, this
female was acting like a typical female. Her way was right, his was
wrong. And for many woman, that seems to be the only evidence they
need -- it's their way.

Heh, I tend to view exactly that point of view as immature. And there
sure are immature guys too. <:)

It *is* immature. And yes, I've seen guys act this way. But I've
seen it out of women a lot more. Guys usually have other ways of
acting immature. :-)


Odd that you should say that. I have a tendency towards *not* putting
up with such behavior, but in the end, somehow I always end up being
the "bad guy." (I'm just supposed to be quiet and polite, and sit
back and "take it.") But I've always felt that letting people get
away with stuff is exactly what makes them continue to act that way.
And I'm not talking about the normal everyday faults and problems we
all have.

I'm afraid one can't expect to be treated nicely for pointing out (real)
flaws in other people's behaviour. It's just that it seems to be the
right thing to do sometimes.

Oh, I didn't even necessarily mean pointing out a flaw. I'm actually
not likely to do that with someone I don't know very well. I mostly
mean like simply not putting up with certain behavior. Just an
example that pops into my head. A few years back, I had this student
that would come to my open accounting labs at school. She seemed to
have this issue with thinking she was the only person who existed on
the face of the earth and had to have my attention right this second.
Normally, if someone comes in and I'm working with someone, and they
try to interrupt, I can politely say, "I'm sorry, I'll be about
another 10 minutes with this person and then I'll be with you," and
most people accept that. (Although I sometimes see people getting
antsy and staring at me, and I just ignore them.) But this girl, no.
She wanted attention NOW. She wouldn't even wait until I finished a
sentence. She'd come in, pull out her book/homework/whatever, and
just start talking to me, saying whatever she was having issues with,
right in the middle of a sentence with another student. And the only
thing that worked with her was to *very firmly* state in no uncertain
terms that I was working with someone else right now and she would
have to wait her turn like everyone else, and that she was not the
only student I had. I had to get on the verge of rude with her. And
even then, she'd make a big deal about getting restless in her chair,
and flipping pages around in her book, and sighing loudly. (I came
close to telling her if she didn't like the way the labs were run, she
didn't have to come.) I got some very weird looks about the way I
talked to her -- but it was the only way to handle her, and it was the
only way to not let her get away with the way she acted. We're
obviously supposed to treat the students professionally, but there are
times you simply can't let someone act like that. And yet, *I'll* be
the one who gets the weird looks for talking to her in such a manner.
I mean, not from everyone. But certain ones. And no weird looks at
her for acting that rude to me (and the other students) to begin with.
I just don't get that. Obviously other people were letting her get
away with it, and I don't think they should've.

My former boss would sometimes purposely give the "difficult" students
to either me or some of the other tutors who didn't put up with crap,
just for the very reason that we wouldn't put up with the crap.
That's how she *wanted* us to treat them. Interestingly, I've had
students who would jump from tutor to tutor, not liking any of them
and giving them all a hard time -- and then I come along and don't let
them get away with their crap, and they stick with me.
--

Erimess Dragon
-==(UDIC)==-

d++e+NT++Om UK!1!2!3!A!L!
U+uCuFuG+++uLB+uA+ nC+nH+nP+nS++nT-xa4

Never compare yourself to the best others can do,
but rather to the best you can do.
.