Friday, September 09, 2005

Dangerous Laws and Rules

First please refer to the comments given by Shirin to my previous post and my answer there and also to Shirin's latest post.
1. Shirin you have every right to follow your rules. No arguing with that; but the moment you want others to follow you or the moment you keep judging others, not in the privacy of your thoughts, but in the public you need very strong grounds to first base your arguments and then to develop it into a convincing argument. Self-conviction, however enthusiastically presented, does not necessarily breed conviction in others.
2. Did you know your two pet rules can be so vastly used that even a fascist would enjoy to adopt them? Now imagine a racist puts fire to a minority's house. If he is asked: 'would you like the same done to you if you were a minority?' and he says yes, then what would happen? Your second question is even vaguer and more dangerous: how can you be sure if what you do does not 'hurt' anybody? How do you know that your difinition of 'hurting' is the same as others? (For example when you take illigal drugs, however innocent it may seem to you, you are, in effect, hurting billions of people by helping a very big and international illegal trade of drug gangs and drug dealers who take lives, rape women, do whatever it takes to run their filthy business. Are you not hurting others then?) Who is the judge of this hurting? You? What if others feel hurt and you don't? Or what if a rapist thinks the woman is actually enjoying it?
3. Please correct me if I am wrong: you do not live by rules out there, you live by your own rules. You say you may even pull the trigger and mass murder some rapists. (It is really funny: you give yourself the right to kill rapists but feel 'appalled' when rapists are whipped or stoned! I cannot understand the standard.) Well, if law cannot stop you from murdering other people how can you expect X or Y not to pirate a Video or a software for whatever code of rules they may have. What is going on? Is this all the premise you are building your argument on? What kind of world would it be when every body is allowed to play the game with his own set of rules.

9 comments:

Shirin said...

What a convincing argument. I thank you my premenstrual friend for showing me the errors of my ways. But please, as I said before as well, ‘Chill’ I’m worried if you continue like this you will have some sort of heart attack or something and I will never forgive myself if that happens. Hang on a minute, there actually isn’t a law about that, is there? So I shouldn’t really care. Sorry I think I need a bit more practise with the new rules. Well have a nice weekend anyhow. And please take it easy.

Anonymous said...

Hi Shirin, I really do not know what the big deal is. You do not tell me what is wrong with refuting your way of reasoning. You just make things worse like this:
1. Your patronising all-knowing all-honest tone stand in such a bad contrast to your violent menstrual language (please excuse my using it, I learnt it from you and feel not honoured at all at this education.)
2. Irony bites, and it bites hard; but if it does so it must have first hurt the one who uses it. So I am really sorry if I had hurt you. I really am; I did not mean it.
3. Sarcasim, though, usually betrays the user. I am sorry you were forced to use it so abundantly. I really thought I was trying to reason, not to prove you a fool. If you have taken it that way, the fault is not in my intention though it may be in my uneducated language and my plain way of thinking. I am not really that sophisticated.
4. I just wonder why you have taken things so personal. You could reason back. And please you do not worry if I had any heart attack or any thing of that kind that would be first because of hurting a fellow Iranian not being insulted by her. God knows I am telling the truth, more than that I have no more to say.

Shirin said...

Please read the following in a calm and courteous way.
Look I really was not trying to be sarcastic when I made that comment. I did make a joke there but I only did it to make you laugh and I seriously thought that the next time I visited your site, you would have made a joke as well and we would both laugh and that would be the end of it. If I have offended you by calling you premenstrual, then I apologies. It’s just that we use that word a lot, for when someone is feeling emotional. Even my male friends use it and sometimes say, ‘I feel very premenstrual today’ and we all know exactly what they mean by that. But obviously you did not find it funny or appropriate so I’m very sorry. As for you not being all that pleased about learning this word, I just wanted to tell you that this is not a bad or dirty word of any kind and knowing it and knowing what it means is defiantly a good thing.
Now a little something about my post. Now that I think about it, it was wrong of me to put your name on the top like that. I can see how when you saw that you must have thought that everything I had said there was directed toward you, when as a matter of fact it wasn’t at all. The fact of the matter is that, maybe pretty stupidly, but as you may have guessed yourself as well, I am quite proud of my rules and I had wanted to write a little something about them for a long time and when I saw the comment about laws and rules thing (not your thing, I’m talking about the anonymous comment), I thought yes here’s my chance now to write what I wanted to write. The reason I put a link to your blog on the top was purely and simply because you had done it before and I had thought it was a nice thing and so I thought of doing it for you too. But putting your link up there obviously made it look like I was saying all those things to you and criticising you personally.
Now about, ‘You do not tell me what is wrong with refuting your way of reasoning.’ I really don’t know what more I can say about this. I have already said, ‘What a convincing argument.’ But you chose to take that as sarcasm. The truth is that I understand perfectly what you are saying and your argument is very valid and had I been saying that I think everyone should live by my rules, then after reading this, I would turn around to you and say, ‘yes you have a point, I take what I said back.’ But I have never said that I think everyone should do what I do or anything like that, I’m simply saying this is how I live my life and I am happy with it just as I have said I like Baghali-polo or watching movies. In my opinion there was never an argument there even to begin with. It was just me saying how I felt about something and then you explaining your side of things as well and that was that.

Anonymous said...

Let go my friends, don't try to make each other angry. Be mature friends. You are not kids any more I hope.

Shirin said...

Anonymous dear, I really don’t know what you are trying to do here. Behrooz and I had a problem. I’ve apologised. It’s all sorted. I don’t understand how you saying ‘don't try to make each other angry’ is going to help anyone here. I’m just worried that it might make Behrooz think that I was trying to make fun of him again or something. So Behrooz please ignore that comment.
Anyway I just came back to say that I have taken your name off from the top of my post and so now it’s just me rambling on about stuff for no reason without being hurtful to anyone I hope:-)
PS You never did tell me what a Griggs store was!

Anonymous said...

Hi Shirin, thank you so much for the comment, I so much needed it. I really had a bad feeling both for myself and for inadvertently hurting you. So all is now sorted. Thanks also for the premenstrual thing; I found it a very strong word and you say it is not. So, that's it. Thanks again.
Sorry anonymous but I did not find your comment: "You are not kids anymore, I hope" a mature one. Neither do I like the patronising tone of it, though you may have had good intetions.

Anonymous said...

Behrooz - Hi buddy :) I'm glad things are clear here. Cheers :)

Privacy said...

You make great pointSS! I think its fascinating to see how the peoples perspective of laws change w/respect to what is accepted socially. (X, or marjuanna is ok, but herion is bad?!!) And of course the argument that "we are not hurting anyone," yet they fail to see the bigger pix (u mentioned).
;-)
Death penalty: You know how much $ we could use towards medicine/school instead of keeping those w/life sentences in prison?... Ok- I'll stop here!

Anonymous said...

i'm glad my little comment did what it supposed to do.ofcourse i have and i had good intentions. now you are angery with me and not with each other any more, at least I hope that you're not; and it's ok because after all i'm nobody, i'm anonymous.
i just wanted to bring this to your attention that one should not write to others when she is angry, i'm saying this to myself.Be good guys.