The Dude abides… {B{í=
Ritalin
Karma: 1,095
The pre-ecclesiastical Jesus of Nazareth is referenced as a Dude avant-la-lettre (as are Sidhartha, Laozi, Epicurus, Heraclitus, and other counter-culturals that gained a cult following). Not to be confused with Jesus of North Hollywood, who is the opposite of a Dude.
Also, again with the smileying. :-(
Nah, he’s no hero, he’s just a selfish man. But, of all the characters, he is the only one who is honest about doing nothing, while every other character on the film (and many, many people in Real Life) go to great lengths to sustain the illusion of activity and productiveness.
Dudeism? What in the world are they blathering about?
It turns out Dudeism is a thing. Wikipedia summarizes it best:
The Dudeist belief system is essentially a modernized form of Taoism purged of all of its metaphysical and medical doctrines. Dudeism advocates and encourages the practice of “going with the flow”, “being cool headed”, and “taking it easy” in the face of life’s difficulties, believing that this is the only way to live in harmony with our inner nature and the challenges of interacting with other people. It also aims to assuage feelings of inadequacy that arise in societies which place a heavy emphasis on achievement and personal fortune. Consequently, simple everyday pleasures like bathing, bowling, and hanging out with friends are seen as far preferable to the accumulation of wealth and the spending of money as a means to achieve happiness and spiritual fulfillment.
I thought it’d be worth bringing to attention here, because if there’s one adjective that would not apply to the online LW community, it’s “laid back”. Note that many of us are lazy, but we struggle with laziness, we keep looking for self-help and trying to figure out our motivation systems and trying so hard to achieve. Other urges and “sufferings” we struggle with are the need to fit in, the need to make sense of the world, the need to be perfectly clear in thought and expression (and the need to demand that of others), and so on and so forth.
How much could we benefit from being more laid-back, from openly and deliberately saying “fuck it”? From doing what we actually want to do without regard for what’s expected of us?
The thoughts on this post aren’t very well-articulated, and perhaps I’m misjudging LW completely, but, um, you know, that’s just, like, uh, my opinion, man. Obviously, it’s open for debate; that’s what we’re here for, yes?
How about rephrasing it as a “right to a chance to live again”?
They are two sides of the same coin. “The right to circulation” tells people “you can go wherever you want”, and tells States “you can’t demand a travel permit every time someone wants to move”. “The right to live” tells people “you may go on living if you want” but also “you can’t stop people from living if they don’t consent to it”. The freedom to do something restricts another person’s ability to stop you from doing that.
What’d be the difference between that and an ethical injunction?
Further research among the second journal’s older issues shows that it treats at least two of the other “loves” (romance, family), and support networks in a general sense, but In five issues I’ve yet to find a single article about friendship as such. The one time it’s mentioned in a title it’s in relation to romance: “Creating positive out-group attitudes through intergroup couple friendships and implications for compassionate love.”
It’s like they take friendship for granted!
Understanding how rights work:
This topic still confuses me greatly. Let’s take the example of the “Right to Life, Liberty and the Security of Person”. Can a “Right to Cryogenic Treatment” be argued from there? Would that, in turn, simply entail that I get to sign up for cryogenic treatment without obstacles and cannot be forbidden from doing so (for instance, cryo is illegal in France), or could it be spun otherwise?
Could you expound on that “time-tested ethical injunctions” thing? I understand the concepts separately, but not how they go together, nor how they relate to “rights” as in “La Déclaration des Droits de L’Homme et du Citoyen”, the “Bill of Rights”, or the “UN Declaration of Human Rights”.
It just occured to me.. is there such a thing as Friendship Research? There’s a lot of research on eros, sexuality and romance, and on family relations, storge, and on general altruism, agape, but what about plain old Friendship/Phileo?
I’ve been giving some thought to your “official rights to X result in governments taking ineffectual measures that result in people not getting X”. I think it can be argued that if the measures stop people from getting X, they are vulnerating people’s rights to get X in the first place, and are therefore “illegal”. Does that make sense?
I also consulted my brother on this, who actually studies Law. His answer amounted to a very harried “It’s a fracking mess. only experts can ‘sort of’ make sense of it.”
… A thought just occurred to me. Just thinking out loud here. Do “fundamental rights” matter in the same way that religious dogma does? I mean, do they operate in a similar way, in terms of their tangible consequences on people’s daily lives? Ecclesiastical Law. International Law. The Vatican. The UN. Dogma. Inarguable principles. Doctrine. Rampant hypocrisy and yet immense respect and authority. Saint vs. Merchant interactions.
Maybe I’m missing a vital difference, but the more I’m thinking about this, the more there seems to be a parallel of sorts...
Oh. One of those idioms, like when knights say they got into a duel because of philosophical differences. Well, I think my point still stands, that anger is the “bluff” that makes weapons function as deterrent. “No one in their right mind would initiate violence over a small slight; it’s not worth the trouble. But maybe I’m wrathful enough that I’ll do it anyway. Do you want to take that chance?” I understand that MAD functioned under a similar framework, of pretending very hard that your country might be just “crazy” enough to launch a first strike, and made a point of being very first-strike-capable.
As for the rest, I already know that truth resists simplicity. I find all of this very confusing, and lots of nuances elude me, but I haven’t given up on understanding it all yet. I can’t possibly be satisfied with the way things are presented on their face.
That is hardly ‘plain and simple’; in fact, it is ambiguous. Do you mean “I cannot discern a meaning to this sentence” or “I understand this sentence, and I evaluate it to be false”?
As for “fair criticism”, try for something that, if it were said to you in that position, you would reply to it with a ‘fair enough’/‘you make a good point’.
Anger is indeed the kind of situation where caution and forethought stand a good chance of being thrown to the wind. Which is allegedly why in Open Carry towns people are remarkably polite and civil to each other.
Point is, adult people can kill each other even with a slap to the face. A simple fight can leave you with wounds that will cripple you for life. Not to mention possible mental and social consequences. Violence is a crapshoot.
But, yeah, it’s a huge overstatement; there’s a mutual assurance of destruction, there’s just a risk, and by “destruction” I mean “consequences that you cannot afford”/”it will ruin your life” rather than “your body will be annihilated into non-existence”.
Well, stop it. I handle harsh criticism well as long as it’s fair, but I’m no good at dealing with teasing, mockery and facetiousness. That kind of stuff really trips me up.
Point is, yeah, taking stuff away by force is easy if you’ve got force on your side, but there’s a mountain of reasons both small and big, both rational and not, that securing consent and consensus is more practical in the long term.
Even Genghis Khan understood that it was better to tax the Chinese cities as a renewable resource than to destroy them, kill everyone, and turn everything into pasture. Although it took some persuading; the man had momentum.
Obviously if I see you draw your sword I will draw mine. The point of having a sword in the first place, however, is that you dare not put us both in a situation where you might die.
Cases of MAD (or at least MRD) are extremely common in Real Life. They’re the reason adults stop using violence in the extensive way they used to as children; even a simple fistfight is liable to end in death for one of the fighters. And that’s not withstanding any Leviathan that make it suicidal to shoot first, second, or ever.
And will you stop it with the smiley faces? It doesn’t add anything to your argument and it comes of as cheeky, which is to say, self-satisfiedly disrespectful.
No, I did not. The implication isn’t that the size of the stick is immaterial, but that sticks, like swords, are for having, not using. Once you draw your stick, you don’t have many options and they’re all bad ones. This is especially true in cases of Mutually Assured Destruction, where both agents are very careful not to wrong each other, because they both know and respect each other’s destructive power.
Because there’s a grain of truth in it that extends far beyond its admittedly limited scope.