Following rules: inherently a virtue?

Not sure how to interpret the framing of the question.

I follow rules if they pass the sniff test and if they're easy to follow. If I have to jump through hoops to abide by a decree, I'm less inclined to consider that decree valid. And rules are kind of bogus if they entail someone dying or having their life forever ruined if they follow them.

I don't think following rules is inherently a virtue, nor do I think breaking them is inherently arrogance. Motivation and context matters. Someone breaking rules simply because they don't care or want to cause harm/chaos is a bit of a knob. Someone breaking rules because their family is starving is valuable context. They still broke a rule, but a reason for breaking a rule can change the punishment (if one exists).

I do think if someone is capable they should critically think about the rules they live with. "It's a rule because it's a rule." isn't compelling for me, and I like knowing that the order of things has a reason for it and isn't just arbitrary or built off of some weird pro-suffering slant.
An excellent example of people not following the rules and feeling no remorse about not following the rules goes back to when the GST was brought in during Brian Mulroney's second term.

Most Canadians were used to provincial sales taxes, but to put a country-wide one on top of it was unheard-of. The rules were hard to fathom sometimes, as in if I bought a carton of white milk at a grocery store, there was no tax. But if I ordered a glass of white milk at a restaurant, it was taxed. It's only fairly recently that the GST was taken off of feminine hygiene products, because in the minds of the male politicians, those are "luxury goods" and therefore taxable. It took years of lobbying to make them understand that this stuff isn't a luxury, it's a necessity.

What the GST did was strongly encourage an underground economy, so people could do an end run around this tax. According to some of the politicians, it wouldn't matter who was selling a good or service, they should remit the GST they were supposed to collect to Revenue Canada. In their minds, that included teenage babysitters, and people holding garage sales... and of course these people said, "No way."

I found out the rules regarding this were that if you made $30,000/year, you were required to register and get a GST number. You were expected to collect and remit the tax. So I heaved a sigh of relief that the local SCA branch wouldn't need to worry about GST on top of regular feast ticket costs (although we did have to pay the tax on non-exempt items). A friend taking accounting at the local college jumped on this bandwagon and told me that I should register my craft business (at that time I was selling at several stores around town, at a couple of annual craft fairs, and doing custom orders). I told her I didn't make enough per year to bother... and I'd lose customers if I told them that the $2 item at a craft fair had another 14 cents tacked on (back then the GST was 7%).

There was an upswing in the barter economy, and so there's a lot of buying and selling going on that doesn't see any taxes being remitted. The reason is that some people simply don't consider this to be a tax they're willing to pay. Yes, a whole generation has grown up with it and to them it's just a fact of life. But people like me and the generations older do remember when the amount on the price tag was what you paid, and no extra calculations and extra were on top of it.

That said, earlier this year when I had a problem with one of my Skip the Dishes orders (the solution is always a refund), I had to continue to fight with the customer service agent for a refund not only for the food portion, but also the GST I'd paid. Yes, it wasn't that much - less than $2, but it's the principle of the thing.

If they came to conquer you and lost, then why not just send them home? Why are the only choices for the defeated in this scenario slavery or death? I would say any society that only gives those two options to a defeated enemy probably deserved to be attacked in the first place.
It's common sense (or at least it used to be considered common sense) not to leave the enemy in a position to come back and repeat the behavior that makes them your enemy. Besides, they would have killed some of the people who would otherwise have repaired the damage caused by the war, and their labor would be needed.


On the occasions when I decide not to follow a rule, I'm reminded of a line in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock: "The word is 'no.' I am therefore going anyway." This is what Kirk says to his crew when Starfleet denies him permission to return to the Genesis planet to retrieve Spock's body. I just modify this slightly: "The word is 'no'. I am therefore doing it anyway."

I don't apply this most of the time, just the times when following the rules would be detrimental to me in some way, or if following the rules is something I'm not able to do easily at that particular time. An example of this goes back to jaywalking. I don't have a lot of energy sometimes, and some of our city blocks are insanely long. So there are times when I jaywalk because where I want to go is across the street, but I don't have the energy to go the the end of the block, cross the street, and make my way back to the middle of the block. I simply make sure the traffic isn't going to be a problem, and jaywalk. And if the cops are around... well, I've seen them jaywalk, too, and not because they were chasing someone. They did it for their own convenience.
 
Yeah, this response actually segues perfectly into what I was going to say next, which is that if everything is functional in this sense then functionalism is an unfalsifiable theory. It's exactly like intelligent design: if there is really no cultural phenomenon that doesn't serve what I'll call a rational/material function, then there is literally no way even in principle to test whether functionalism is accurate, which means that it cannot be any use as science.
I'm not assuming the premise "everything is functional in this sense." The conclusion (or falsifiable prediction) is that cultural stuff generally has some useful purpose, whether for individuals or for the durability of the broader culture.

Anyway, this does make testable predictions. We'd predict there's some vehicle for selecting and spreading cultural practices that are "beneficial" or "fit." And we could point to preferential imitation as the vehicle: someone engages in a behavior that improves health, other people notice that and imitate them, the process repeats, and eventually the practice is a feature of the "culture." That's testable in practice and principle. If you showed this doesn't actually happen very often, that'd be pretty bad for the theory. As for the "civilization" point: do ideologies tend to help coordination? In principle, you could point to some civilization that uses pheromones instead.

Also, I'm not sure it's super useful to take "cultural evolution" (or "functionalism"?) as an entire theory that stands or falls together. Instead, they lend themselves to formalisms that we can use to make predictions. So we assume there's some unit of social information ("meme") and then we could make predictions about how memes spread. Does info flow among humans via "preferential attachment"? The experiment: are a lot of human networks scale-free?
My answer would be that that empire itself is best seen as part of the fallout from the larger Utopian project of liberalism.
I looked forward in time. I saw 14 million futures.
In how many does this discussion derail the thread with a liberalism vs socialism debate?
All of them
 
Maybe that's why we don't run them around and motivate them so much?

Weed is legalizing, tobacco is in retreat?

But since when would the depressed and dormant who would be sent be the ones deciding that they be sent?

0:55 - 1:40

Spoiler :
 
Maybe that's why we don't run them around and motivate them so much?

Weed is legalizing, tobacco is in retreat?

But since when would the depressed and dormant who would be sent be the ones deciding that they be sent?

0:55 - 1:40

Spoiler :
How does America produce young men like that?
 
How does America produce young men like that?
Loyalty to each other and courage under fire are produced in young men by the fairly simple process of gaffling up a bunch of them and shipping them to some far side of nowhere place where they will invariably get shot at.
 
Loyalty to each other and courage under fire are produced in young men by the fairly simple process of gaffling up a bunch of them and shipping them to some far side of nowhere place where they will invariably get shot at.
So then to answer the interviewee’s question and Farm Boy’s point about who decides for the devil’s workers ITS TIME TO PROTECT DEMOCRACY AND OUR ALLIES WORLDWIDE
 
So then to answer the interviewee’s question and Farm Boy’s point about who decides for the devil’s workers ITS TIME TO PROTECT DEMOCRACY AND OUR ALLIES WORLDWIDE

I think our leaders are learning there is a down side to that. In LA most of the street gangs who used to scurry like rats before the armed might of the most dangerous gang in town, the LAPD, now have plenty of military veterans who understand tactics and also have that courage under fire and loyalty fully instilled. They still are in full retreat when confronted by the Blue Thug Crew, but it's an organized retreat. Keep providing them with battle tested veterans and one day the LAPD isn't going to rule the streets any more.
 
Hmm those wars didn’t address the idle hands problem tho.
 
Modern wars just don't make casualties like they used to.:shake:
 
Insufficient casualties?
Insufficient participants to unite rather than further divide a population. The idle hands are avoiding military service similar to how they’re avoiding everything else.

Some people are sick of being idle and know military is an option; that’s a minority. Some people are desperate and that’s not idleness. Some people are very interested In being military in the first place, also not idleness.

The rest are posting on reddit, and a few right here.
 

Purpose doesn't really matter once the idle young slacker is in BFE getting shot at. They might feel the need to defend the people who stuck them there rather than having their conscience nattered by acknowledging they are in the service of evil, but they'll still shoot back just the same even if they don't.
 
Not their purpose. They aren't the ones that sent themselves there.
 
Not their purpose. They aren't the ones that sent themselves there.

That was the point. No matter what the purpose of the people who send them is, once they are there the result is the same, in so far as the production of courage under fire and loyalty to your fellows goes. You may go to war on some idiot's whim, but once you are there you fight the war in self defense.
 
I'm not so sure it's simply an idiot's whim. Offensive wars of conquest seem to have societal stretch goals. Some of the justifications are better than others, but.
 
I'm not so sure it's simply an idiot's whim. Offensive wars of conquest seem to have societal stretch goals. Some of the justifications are better than others, but.

Yeah. I admit that "an idiot's whim" even when I was saying it sounded like cover for something far closer to outright evil.
 
I was thinking more in breadth and scope than in concentrated severity?
 
I feel that my perspective was misinterpreted, I've never talked about blindly following all rules. I feel a better way of phrasing the question from my point of view is "What do you do when democratic decisions don't go your way?"

I'm talking more about agreeing with how society functions: we come together and we pass laws, and then we're expected to follow those laws. I'm not talking about overthrowing dictatorships, I'm talking about normal behavior set up by our society so our society can function like we want it to.

Obviously there are going to be extreme circumstances where the law really is wrong: slavery, oppression, etc. But this conversation didn't come up because of those. It came up about deciding you don't want to pay for something but want it anyway, so is it okay for you to just take it? I feel it's very dishonest to say something like "Because slavery is wrong, anything goes!"

I was talking about my refusal to pirate software, or evade paying taxes, or break traffic laws. I don't believe violating these rules is a "moral victory" that's comparable to freeing slaves.

I believe rather violating these types of rules are motivated out of greed, laziness, and general selfishness, and then people try rationalizing them with silly scenarios. I feel it is morally and ethically wrong to say "I don't agree with how our society has agreed to do this, so I'm just going to do whatever I want for myself."

Maybe you think your taxes are too high? Maybe you feel prices of goods are too high? Maybe you feel copyright laws are too restrictive? I think that since we're living in a Democracy, you have avenues to try to change that, but just because the rest doesn't agree with you that doesn't mean you get to just do whatever you want anyway. Those rules are there to make sure things function properly.

I find the idea of anarchy abhorrent, and I'm scared by people who advocate for anarchy. I feel that's very out of touch with reality, because in anarchy the strong prey upon the weak, but our society protects people. If you think things are inequitable now, just try to imagine how it'd be a thousand times worse without our governments and social structures.

Yes, if you're starving I'm not going to judge you for stealing food, but I sincerely hope you'd be doing that as a last resort ... after asking your friends and family for help, and trying to get aid from the many help organizations that are out there. If anyone here is literally going without food, please contact me privately and I will help you.

I'd hate to imagine being in a position myself where I am starving, and I don't know what I'd do. I can certainly say I'd beg long before I'd steal, I'd have to be absolutely at the very end of my rope, and I'd still be more likely to forage than take.

For myself, I have my own moral code, where I detest dishonesty in any form, and it feels like this to me. I hate plagiarism and everything like that, I hate exploiting loopholes. I don't even like playing computer games with mods, because I feel like I'm cheating.
 
I don't even like playing computer games with mods, because I feel like I'm cheating.
Hey, now you're goin' overboard there, lady. ;)
 
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