Negativity police are after me! Help!

I love hypotheticals because there's no end to them.

What if the man she injured was a terrorist who would have killed four million people but couldn't after experiencing knee damage?

Listen to the fools reproach! it is a kingly title!

- William Blake, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"

Query: Did I step into the wrong forum?
Socialogical/Philosophical Forums: Thataway
No: Real Objection
Just: Not the right place

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

They just need to get rid of reputation already or force the name of the reppers to display.

Sam,

A lot of people will be disagreeing with you on that post.

I'm one of them.

If someone breaks into my house to take my belongings, they die.

If someone attempts to do harm to myself, my wife, my child, my dogs or even my evil cat, they die. Yes, my family members' lives outweigh the worth of someone else's life. My dog's life is worth more than some fool that has chosen the thief's life.

That's the extreme case of when I feel it IS my right and duty to play judge, jury and executioner.

It goes wider than that, however. I'm all for vigilante justice. Mostly due to the fact that I lost all faith in our legal system and those that uphold it ages ago.

Quite frankly, Sam, I find that our society has become the pit of uselessness that it is BECAUSE far too many people think like you do. It IS our job as members of the society to police our own. It IS our job to rid ourselves of behaviors that are detrimental to our society. It IS our job to shout down the tinfoil hat brigade and spit on the zealots that would do us harm and attempt to take from us our freedom to live as we see fit as long as we aren't interfering with the way they live.

It's when one chooses to act in a way that interferes with the rights of others that they give up the right to exist freely. As soon as that happens, someone like me will step in to show you the error of your ways.

It is my place to fix the world. At least my tiny corner of it. And for as long as there is breath in my chest, I will continue to fight against those I find wrong the moment they bring their BS into my part of the world.

Replying from the original post, I have to say that you aren't a very negative person. You usually say what is on your mind in a polite way. It is that person's choice to take the critisim as constructive or attack, most of the time, because of the average of the player in CoH, they usually will take it as an attack and get "butt hurt."

So my mantra is care about the opinions of those who matter or generally have something constructive to say. If they don't have anything nice to say just let it go through one ear and out the other and walk away.

-Rep
"So it's fine for Eisregen to crow about his attack on another person, but criticizing that attack and suddenly we're wildly careening off-topic?"

No. Im saying the whole thread seems to have gone off topic.
At least the comment was cohegent and made a point.

Since we are discussing this sort of thing, I'll add my tuppence worth. There's a difference between violence for violence sake (The sort a number of Brit kids in cities seem to break onto the new with fairly frequently) and violence for a reason.

Now, people since time immemorial have used 'for a reason' to their own ends. 'Because I can' fits into violence for violence sake. The two big ones are causing a war in the middle and further-East to this day, which Im going to leave alone but niether of which I agree with.
It's extreme, but the 'Batman' style justice, which Bill Z mentions, is the point where the system is broken, theres not a snowballs chance in hell of things going right unless you fight for them. If the bike rider, using an example that has gone before, had run down my fiance, for example, they'd be looking at GBH for free. The same if someone tried to rob my flat while I was in it.

I could go on, but this is really a philisophical debate, and there really is no right and wrong. It's also immensely thin ice, which I'd rather not walk on while still intact.

So, apologies if I did offend anyone with the 'Offtopic' post, it wasnt aimed at one person. I shoulda put QR to show in general -shrug-

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

I'm confused. People object to Eisregens story but enjoy playing a game where they throw fireballs and lightning at npc's, riddle them with bullets and slice them into bloody little pieces with swords all the while dressed up like costumed vigilantes.


O.o

I can certainly see the points of people who advocate taking action and doing "what must be done." I, however, cannot and will not agree with this. It has been said that all it takes for evil to win is for good men to do nothing, yes. However, it has also been said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Judging from my personal experience - and that's all I really have - I've seen good intentions lead to hell much more often than inaction.

Let me put it bluntly - I'm a wimp, physically. I have always been one. Throughout my life, I have been subject to "mob justice" more than a few times, strong-armed by people who felt they were right and I was wrong for no reason other than because they could beat me up. It has become very, very clear to me that once people take justice into their own hands, person-by-person, the results are never, EVER good. At best you end up with self-righteous bullies, at worst with gang violence.

And what I notice is that everyone talks as though they'll never, ever do something wrong at all. That's not realistic. No-one is a saint. And even on the off chance someone is, what guarantee do you have you won't run afoul of someone else's vision of what's right and get on his bad side, anyway? I don't want to walk the streets fearing I'll do something wrong and I'll be jumped by the Overwatch and handed down disproportionate retribution. I don't want to worry I'll get beaten into a pulp for accidentally running into someone on the street. And I cannot, in good conscience, do this to people if I don't want it done to me. Frankly, all this talk of vigilante justice really, really scares me in a big way.

I don't agree with letting people be judge, jury and executioner, because I don't trust people in general to make the right call. In fact, I agree with having law enforcement taken OUT of the hands of ordinary people. This is not the Wild West where everyone carries a gun and only those who can shoot the fastest or have the most followers are right. It's easy to support vigilante justice if you assume empowered people will only do good and justice. That isn't the case. In fact, I guarantee you that empowering people to pass down their own justice will see a resurgence of all the old hatreds we like to think we've forgotten. They still exist, and the only reason people don't enact them is because they aren't allowed to exercise that power.

Granted, I don't include protecting yourself or other people from immediate or long-term danger in this. Obviously, if someone's coming at you with a knife, you're not going to try to let him be, you'll want to save yourself and your friends, and if breaking his face is what it takes, then so be it. But I'm not talking about high-level crime and violence. I mean the small stuff, like shouldering people in the street, riding your bike on the sidewalk, cutting in line and so forth. I don't believe in specifically going out of your way to make people feel lousy and actually hurting them just to make a point. Chances are, you're going to end up hurting someone who didn't deserve it.

And I still cannot agree with "deserved" violence. No-one deserves to be hurt. I will agree that sometimes where it's unavoidable, such as the above-mentioned protection from danger, but I will never agree with the notion of enjoying hurting another person for ANY reason. The moment you hurt someone out of malice, you become as bad as they are, and I am not open to accepting justification on this point. I simply am not. I simply never, ever see problems as a case of "us vs. them," personally, so I cannot accept arguments about how "they" deserve it, when I know I can so very easily fall into "their" category and suffer the same ruthless, unfair treatment "we" so cavalierly preach must be done to "them."

And another thing - I never advocated ignoring things because "they're not my problem." I advocate ignoring things because they are not a SERIOUS problem. "What-ifs" aside, I was witness to a drama scene on a bus a couple of moths ago, when a girl was asked to remove her foot off a floor plate, it's difficult to explain, exactly. Except she made a BIG problem out of it as to how DARE they tell her to do that when other people are doing it and the bus isn't clean otherwise so why is this important and so on and so forth. At some level, she might have even been right, but it doesn't change the fact that she was asked to do a simple thing, and she turned it into an epic. I've been yelled at by people for very simple mistakes, myself, and somehow they never seem to accept "Oops! I didn't mean to!"

It is not my place to drive culture and courtesy into the heads of strangers, specifically since I'm more than positive my view of culture and courtesy isn't exactly objective. Unless is becomes a real problem, elbowing people in the chest over it is the worst case of tempest in a teapot I can think of without going into extraordinary events.

Now, I can't speak about the US, as I've never been there (and this is NOT a dig at Americans, believe me), but I've found the people I've delt with here are a LOT more polite and open to requests if you don't treat them like garbage and demand they fall in line. Animosity only breeds more animosity, and unless you want to go to war with everyone you antagonise, it simply isn't the right way to go. Not as far as my experience has shown me.

*edit*
Here's a good example of why I'm afraid of this. This is from a couple of years ago, and demonstrates the absurd idea some drivers have of how people should drive. I came into the left, fast lane of a main road, but wasn't moving very fast because I was looking to make a U turn in about 100-200 feet, but some guy with a fast car was riding my bumper, honking a lot. Never you mind I was at the speed limit, because I was in the left lane, I was expected to floor it. Typically I just ignore angry drivers, but this guy speeds up, passes me from the right, reaches out of his window and slaps my right side mirror closed. I'm fairly sure that if we'd both stopped, he'd have pulled out a baseball bat and smashed my windshield. All of that because drivers in my country are idiots and believe that speed limits don't apply to them. This kind of behaviour is something I want to DISCOURAGE as much as I can.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

You scare and sadden me, Sam. But it appears that the feeling is mutual, so I'll leave it at that.

That said: