mererdog

It can. It does not always. It does not automatically. Etiquette is a tool. It is a powerful tool. Powerful tools are dangerous. You have to wear protective clothing, keep your workspace free of hazards, and know where the exits are. And take off your rings. No one needs to lose a finger. Etiquette is artificial. This means it is inherently imperfect. A little regular maintenance helps to ensure everything is running correctly. Checking your work for flaws is usually best practice. What? Now you want me to apologize because you called me fat? How is that fair?

The same things we use to bind a bunch of disparate "I"s into a cohesive "We" are used to build sharp divides between "Us" and "Them." The more brightly we highlight the similarities between Us the more starkly we contrast the differences with Them. As a good rule of thumb, the more homogenous a society, the more marginalized its minority members and alien visitors, and the less the majority will notice (or care about) that marginalization.

First, are the line breaks intentional? Its a completely unimportant question, but also completely on topic. Nawmean? Anyway, I think the word "we" is problematic, in context. Social norms tend to be great for some and horrible for others. Customs like "Don't look a white man in the eye" are obviously racist and designed only to subjugate, but there are a lot of more subtle things at play. A handshake may as well be an assault to many germophobes and people with PTSD. "Sir" and "Ma'am" disrespect those with nonstandard gender identities. Saying "bless you" when some people sneeze makes them very uncomfortable and leaves them with no idea how to respond. Even a perfectly innocent "please" or "thank you" can have the same effect as a slap in the face to those used to being subjected to hostile sarcasm or passive aggression. Essentially, what I'm saying is that by standardizing our interactions through formality we fail to pay due respect to the individuals we are interacting with. Most of the time, it won't cause actual problems. Most of the time, we won't notice when it does cause problems. But the normal, unthinking, habitual reliance on etiquette trains us to treat the needs and desires of the person in front of us as less important than an arbitrary set of rules. It becomes a sort of twisted social contract where we assume that as long as we stick to the script no one is allowed to complain about what we say or do. Which causes people with legitimate greivances to get treated like crybabies or jerks. Which is unfair to those of us who are actual crybaby jerks. And I'm still pretty sure you called me fat.

There are plays where no one speaks and films where no one does anything else. I saw a stage production with a thirty-foot tall fire-breathing dragon and a different stage production that had actual robots and holograms. Even with the best plays, I have difficulty forgetting that I am sitting in a chair watching a play, partly because of the inherent participatory nature of being in that kind of audience (even applause is participation). A good movie will draw me into a more immersive experience where I get a sort of mental tunnel vision and thoughts of the rest of the world fade away for a while. Then there's going to a live Rocky Horror Picture Show screening... A sort of best of both worlds experience, complete with having strangers throw food at you.

Are you calling me fat?

I thought we had all agreed to define it as "An item, area, system, energetic state, or made-up thing that James Brown was the godfather of." Really, though, if we can't all come together behind that, what hope is there for the children?

How do you know that they don't know? You know, as distinct from simply believing that they don't? And doesn't deciding that no one else knows make it impossible to fairly weigh new information that contradicts the conviction?

I tried to become a materialist, but I failed the physical.

And the personal pronouns. I spoke to my feelings, my motives, and my tactics. I intentionally avoided any version of "we should."

There is no true meaning. The words all have multiple meanings, like pretty much any word older than a couple decades. There is a very good chance that if you ask four self-proclaimed agnostics what the word means, you'll get four different answers, all of them equally correct.

I haven't seen the poster. I did work enough construction as a yoot to see similar things hapoen, though. It was amazing how often plumbers and architects would seem about to come to blows. I only ever worked for the one contractor, and I've never asked anyone with broader experience whether its a common thing. Now I'm curious. First thing in the morning seems an appropriate time for that, so thank you.

It was. The people who put It together were fairly open about it. The book is a separate and distinct thing from the pieces used to build it. The reasons for making a brick don't tell you the reasons for building a house, eh?

Wouldn't that be the case if you <b>had</b> read it yourself? The whole point of the book is to provide an authority. The whole point of going to an authority is so you don't have to figure things out for yourself. Or am I missing part of the equation?

Read it again. Pay attention to the context of the words "call him on his ** in a manner that could actually be productive."

Yesterday, I was around some people I had just met who were having a conversation about religion. I was asked the question "What do you believe?" My response was a near-instant "Not a whole lot." It got a good reaction.

The end result is the same. Note that in your very next post you suggest that Bernie Madoff should be tortured and worse. If you respect black men you don't lynch black men. If you respect basic human rights you don't violate basic human rights. Yet the important question is not what others deserve. The important question is whether my actions are having a positive or negative effect on the world around me. When I put someone in a bad mood, chances are good that some innocent third party will have that bad mood taken out on them. When I treat disrespectful people disrespectfully, I teach them that they were right to be disrespectful. Growing up in the Old South, I met a lot of overt racists. They weren't the cardboard cutout cliches you see in movies. They were overwhelmingly ordinary people, asside from the one set of grossly assinine beliefs. It is hard for me to assume that the racism cancels out all the good these people will do in their lives. I have trouble losing all respect for a fireman who literally saves lives every day, simply because I find out he is extremely stupid on one issue. Clearly, I would lose a lot of respect for him, but hopefully not so much that I lose the ability to call him on his ** in a manner that could actually be productive. Because one thing I have watched happen more than once is people overcoming their own racism and figuring out how to be more fair and just in how they see others- and therefore in how they treat others. But I have never seen it happen as a result of the racist being treated with spiteful antagonism.

This is why I tried to draw a distinction between respecting someone and treating them with respect. Just as anger is not an excuse for violence, lack of respect is not an excuse to treat people disrespectfully. Although it should go without saying that opinions on what qualifies as disrespectful treatment will vary widely...

I think that respect is a feeling, and talking in terms of how people "should" feel is kinda pointless. The notion that people deserve you to feel a certain way is sort of a weird notion, no? But just as certain acts will make me angry at you, certain acts will make me respect you. "Earned" is a bad way to put it, but its hard to move away from phrasing that common...

The argument from authority and the argument against the person are both informal fallacies of relevance. The truth of a claim simply cannot be determined by examining the qualities of the person who made the claim. No one always lies and no one always speaks the truth. A healthy respect for expertise is necesssarily coupled with a willingness to get second opinions and do our own research. A healthy suspicion of authority is necessarily coupled with a willingness to listen to the people who may know something we don't... which is basically everyone...

For the sake of further muddying the waters, let me say that I think everyone deserves to be treated with respect even though not everyone deserves to be respected yet.

Amen.

Atheism is defined by what we are not rather what we are. As a result, two random atheists are not really that likely to share any common interests. So any athiest club or organization will really be organized (officially or not) around something other than atheism. In my experience, a self-described "athiest group" is usually really a "let's complain about religious people group." That sort of thing attracts guys who enjoy bragging about how big the chip on their shoulder is. Its an inherently unhealthy thing, I think.

I am an agnostic. I am also a nontheist. I think of myself as an athiest.

Anti-intellectualism is a bad thing. Worse, I think, are the authoritarianism and elitism that lead people to think that a plumber can't have knowledge of physics or that a doctor is more likely to be right than a nurse. The mistaken conflation of "uneducated" and "ignorant" that goes along with the conflation of "poor" and "uneduated."

I think of myself as an atheist. It just seems simple and direct.