Jinn

I'm a mixed basket on this one. On the one hand, I think rules are wonderful things when they:

Thank you Ben, well said.

I think they bring a lot of order to otherwise unordered things that could quickly dissolve into chaos. A forum like this would be horrible if people were free to call me a cocksucking dillhole and tell me I'm a this or that just for disagreeing. I've been in forums like that, and while they were amusing in adolescense they quickly.. became less amusing. Rules are necessary to keep things the way "we" like it.

On the OTHER hand, I absolutely hate authority. In all forms, I've always had a problem with authority. Psychologists have said that most of the time this comes early in childhood when you don't think the authority is being fair or that you are more able than the authority. I definitely know when it happened for me.. when a teacher in elementary school would be making absolutely ridiculous rules without being able to justify their "spirit." If you ever justify a rule with "because I said so" I'll be very apt to want to punch you in the face.. on the spot. Unless you can justify the reason for the law and what it will accomplish, I will not respect it. I had far too many "authorities" who were far more ignorant than myself trying to influence my behavior. I will not be told how to do something by someone too inept to do it themselves. This was manifested (and still is) in many ways, but in elementary school it was computers. I was "against the rules" to do certain things on the computers, because the teacher didnt know what it did. So the justification was that my teacher was too ignorant to figure out what it did. This is not a valid reason for a rule. If you're stupid, educate yourself. Likewise, this "spirit" is far more important to me than the actual rule. If there is a rule against drunk driving, telling me that I "shouldn't drink and drive because the law says so" is ridiculous and will only make me angry. Telling me its there to protect the citizens from undue harm at the hands of a driver with bad reaction time, that I'll agree to. I can understand wanting to be safe, and I can understand not wanting to be hit by a drunk driver. The same applies to speed laws. If someone tries to justify it by saying that I shouldn't speed becuase the sign says so, I'll tell them to get fucked and put the pedal to the floor. If they tell me its to protect the citizens from reckless drivers, and to protect me from putting myself in a dangerous situation.. sure I'll take that. As such, however.. if I'm meeting with the spirit of the law and not the letter of the law, I will do so. In the above situation, if I were not being reckless and not endangering myself.. but speeding, I would be okay with it. I would also be quite angry if someone enforced the letter of the law on me for driving 5 miles over on an otherwise empty highway. That deviates from the REASON for the law, and simply wishes to enforce a law in a situation it doesn't apply to. They are the first examples that come to mind, but there are plenty more.

So, I guess the moral of the story is that you must make a rule that has

but ALSO, make sure that the law is being enforced for a valid reason and not simply because of its existance. Laws DO NOT apply to all situations. They are designed to prevent a certain behavior in a limited set of situations, and are not always applicable.

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"I'm typing on a computer of science, which is being sent by science wires to a little science server where you can access it. I'm not typing on a computer of philosophy or religion or whatever other thing you think can be used to understand the universe because they're a poor substitute in the role of understanding the universe which exists independent from ourselves." - Willravel