Ready. Aim. Fire.

Kyle will be taking his apology in the form of a very damn large steak burrito, no spicy stuff. Or small bills, those work too.

When you explain to people what happened, can you make it sound like I was a lot cooler and got a few licks in before you hit me?

I don't know that I think Heinlein was wrong but I don't think he was right either. I think he was kinda thinking too narrowly. Violence is a pretty damn strong authority but it's not an honest one. You hit a guy, he might do what you want once, but he's sure as hell not gonna like you and that's gonna make him not want to do more of what you want.

Unless it's Garrison hitting me, and then that's also totally different because that's learning to fight. Sometimes you gotta get hit to learn to throw a punch.

I forgot where I was going with this.

Oh, right. Fear isn't a good motivator is what I'm saying. Neither is hitting folks.

But I AM serious about the burrito.

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You can probably squeeze more than one out of me. I also asked around about getting you something else when you're ready to talk with me again.

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I can't eat more than one at a time, dude.

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x-icarus.livejournal.com

You already got a steak from me. Greedy bastard.

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Hungry bastard. I mean, technically I am a bastard and all.

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And sometimes you need to be hit over and over again because you forget to watch the guy's eyes when he feints left. Reminds me, I think I'm sufficently recovered from the beating inflicted by the kindergarten corps to continue your hand to hand classes.

As for the Heinlein quote, you're thinking too narrowly about violence. Law is based off of the idea of consequences for what are deemed unacceptable actions. Violence, be it physical, mental or social, are what the consequences are drawn from. You don't simply take what you want when you feel like it. Part of that is evolved from our conditioning that you don't because you will be in trouble. God will hate you. Daddy will yell. All of those things are a violence of a sort. Morals evolve as behaviour becomes more ingrained, so now the idea of simply, say, taking someone elses stuff just because you can is an abhorrent act, but it has developed into such because the first person who got his tribe together to stop it from happening built it on the basis of violent consequences for the actions. It goes from being practical, to being cultural, to being traditional, to being ethical.

That's what two degrees and twenty grand will get you, folks. The ability to blather on a closed journal system about Heinlein. Keep studying, stay in school, yadda yadda...

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I like to think there's more to ethics than fear of reprisal, all the same.

Heinlein was, of course, writing against those quotes; for those of you not familiar with him.

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Now, certainly. Twenty thousand years ago, I have my sincere doubts. Ethics are a human creation (or a divine one, depending on your various faith), and as such, are built into our reactions. You might subscribe to the old Platoian idea of a natural ethos, but I've always prefered psychology to philosophy, where what and how we think has evolved over generations.

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If Ethics are a human creation then there's necessity for them to be one way over another. You could justify anything like that and I think what I learned through all this is that I'm not alright with that. I prefer to think we discover what's right, not create it.

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It's a helpful lie, but it's not really practical. It assumes that there simply is only one true way, and anyone who feels differently is wrong, regardless of cultural, nature or environment. Mind you, I struggle with black and white. Is it right not to kill? Is it right not to kill even if doing so would save ten thousand lives? One hundred lives? A life? The life of someone you care about?

I seriously doubt these things have a single answer. Mind you, I got one of my degrees in psychology, not philosophy, so I tend to take everything as being largely a human creation.

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I don't think any one of us have what it is to be good right. I don't think that means there's no such thing, though. I don't see how I could do the things I do if I thought it was just... preference.

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I never said it was a matter of preference. I said it was a matter of evolution. As we've, well, civilized ourselves, so to speak, our ethical scope has changed along with it. So either we're slowly revealing an ultimate truth, or with each generation, we change and refine what is morally and ethically acceptable and what is not. And different parts of the city, much less the world, have different ethical standards.

So, in the midst of a liberal arts college in Vermont, it would be considered henious and wrong to shoot someone who broke into your house and tried to make off with your television. In a farming town in the midst of Florida, your neighbours would firnly endorse your actions. Are the people in Vermont right and the ones in Florida wrong? Or vice versa? If there is a central truth to discover, one or the other has to be the case. I personally feel it has to be more complex than that.

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Complex, sure. But I still think there's an answer somewhere and it's independent of just our knowledge of it. I mean, if we're refining an idea, we're getting closer to the truth of it, right?

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No, it means it changes with us. And if it does, it means it is linked to our changes. We're not linked to some kind of ultimate truth, or at least, that's what I believe. We make our own truths, and as we do, we find the consensus that works for us at the time.

An answer somewhere, for me, is an article of faith. My faith is mostly with people.

I admit, I do plan for some kind of conversation as a very old man to the ones that give me the garden full of nubile virgins or the mead hall of eternal drunkness, but I blame that solely on poor rolemodels.

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Do you still smell like burnt hair? Because if you still smell like burnt hair then my motivations for you hitting me are not so much.

I dunno, I haven't read Starship Troopers in like, two years and I didn't like it enough to wanna think about it that hard.

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Never read it. Sci-fi's never really been my thing.

And no, I no longer smell like burnt hair.

Dick.

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You got two degrees for twenty grand? Fuck, obviously everyone needs to go up north for school.

Hey, that twenty grand also bought you the vocabulary to make you sound like you're smarter than you are Mountie Man.

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I'm still convinced he's the one who talked me into taking Psych 101. I think he knocked me concussed, talked me into it and then I FORGOT it was his fault because I had a concussion.

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Aye? I'd believe it. He's a bit dodgy, you oughta watch out for him. Who knows what other subliminal messages he might pull. Maybe that's like his secondary mutation or summat. Persuasion via violence/talking people to death.

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x-adrienne.livejournal.com

I thought his secondary mutation was the ability to call Canadian woodland animals into cleaning service? Sort of like Cinderella?

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Hmmm, good point, point. Maybe the "persuasion" thing is a tertiary mutation.

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I fucking hate you. Also, I'm brilliant. You don't understand that in the Great White North, a Mountie has to be cop, judge, forensics; it's like CSI with one actor and snow.

So, like every CBC production.

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You love me! And here I'd just thought you were pretty with decent taste in beer and a gun. I mean, really, the gun is hot enough but you go on talking like that and I'm gonna need some alone time.

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x-adrienne.livejournal.com

And a wolf, yes? Don't you need a wolf?

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x-snowflake.livejournal.com

I don't even know what you just wrote - you should work on coherence - but if you ever wake me up in the middle of the night again they are going to be finding pieces of you all across the globe.

They will still be twitching.

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