yeah that's true. it's at least a little risky to do something like that. but it's also hard to resist.

 

the only way to out jerk a jerk is to be a man and not let someone provoke you. i mean do you really want to be the bigger jerk. it takes a lot of self-control not to be provoked though. but assuming the other person is *truly* a jerk, trying to out-jerk him is not going to work.

 

Why? As for me, I don't feel it is my responsibility to police the actions of strangers. When you think about it, why should you let them control your life and your actions any more than they already have? Go on about your way and let the rude people have their own hard life.

 

Well said.

 

Because people do have some control over your life. You can let it not effect your happiness, but they definitely impact your life. Take, for example, the guy who is smoking a truly foul-smelling cigar in a movie theater. Say, for whatever reason, that the managment of the movie theater doesn't care enough to take action (or, more likely, the 19 year old dropout manager is too scared of the cigar smoker to ask him to stop). There may be other seats available in the movie theater, but he's in the middle of the good seats. To move would be to diminish your view of the movie. He's presenting you with a choice of either suffering from the smoke or taking a worse seat. Not only that, there are probably others around you who are also finding the smoke irritating and are considering the same choice.

This guy, on the other hand, is having a great time because, hey, he likes cigars, and he gets to sit in the best seats! Better yet, other people move away from him, so he doesn't have to share an armrest. As long as he experiences no negative feedback, he will continue to act in this way that benefits him but harms others. At every movie he goes to, he wil disrupt and diminish the enjoyment of others.

Now, there are four ways to react. One is to get mad and accept the unfair choice he's presented you with. The second is to react in some kind of immature manner - i.e., challenging the guy to a fight, throwing a Coke at the back of his head, keying his car, whatever. The third is be sufficiently at peace with the universe to be truly indifferent to your own suffering, to be able to cough and wheeze, or strain your neck to see the screen, and yet genuinely not let it affect your inner peace. The fourth is to deal directly but politely with the situation.

I take it you're advocating the third approach. Certainly preferable to either of the first two, but you're forgetting the other people around you. If you truly don't think you have any moral responsibility (I'm not talking about legal obligations here) to others in society who are suffering and whose suffering you can allieviate with relative ease, I suppose 3 and 4 are equally good. I happen to believe (as do most of the religions that stress inner peace) that people do have some ethical obligations to others. If I can improve the life, even a tiny bit, of everyone who ever has to sit in a movie theater with the cigar man, without more than a 3 sentence conversation, I should.

Honestly, I think 99% of the people in the world (or at least this country) are well-intentioned, decent folks. If we would just use our rights to free speech to peacefully point out when others are harming/inconveniencing people for no good reason, we'd all be better off.

 

Yipes.

99%??..........hardly

 

I stand by it. Notice I didn't say considerate, intelligent, rational, thoughtful, generous, insightful, enjoyable, or any other of the thousands of adjectives I wish described more people. I just think that very very few people are actively evil, Snidely-Whiplash-moustache-twirling characters (though I do know one or two of those). Most of the bad stuff we see around us is a result of thoughtlessness on the part of others, or the result of an improper calculation as to how much an action will hurt someone else - more failures of empathy than actual antagonism.

To put it another way, for most of the bad acts in this society, the perpetrator thought they were "justified." They're wrong, but not intentionally evil. (Doesn't mean that the law shouldn't punish if it's illegal).

 

You should have taken off your shoe and beaten the mercedes a hole with it.

 

Back in the day when I was driving my sister's '96 4dr civic, some stoke in a Camaro SS (kinda knew the basterd) double parked. So I took the liberty of sqeezing my little POS in there. I get called down to the dean's office and he tells me he going to have to take away my $50 parking permit (w/ no ****ing refund) for parking like a jag off. When I got to the parking lot later that day, I found out the stroke in the SS got off with a warning b/c the dean liked his car.