good manners

Good manners are more important than good laws.

A thousand ideas are screaming in my head at this moment. There is a thread covering economics and full employment of the adult population. When people work 40 or more hours a week, they don’t have much time and energy for other things like, self government. Practicing good manners takes time, and we assume there isn’t enough of it to practice good manners.

I want to communicate with everyone who represents me in government and none of them have time to discuss anything that is important to me with me, so how can they represent me? They can not!

When the state held my grandchildren in foster care, I desperately wanted to speak with the bureaucrats making the decisions, and they used a privacy law to prevent communication. This completely destroys personal power and liberty. Because grandparents united, we were able to get the laws radically changed, and I have the satisfaction of knowing those who preventing discussing my grandchildren with me, know they were wrong. But they do not know how wrong. They do not understand what good manners would have done to correcting a terrible injustice that seriously hurt my grandchildern.

When someone was willing to pay $2000 to resolve a debt I owed, there was no one in the bureacracy in charge of that debt, with whom to speak, so the debt was not resolved, and we all took a big loss. The mobil home that was a source of property tax revenue was destroyed, because it had to be moved, and could not be moved until the property taxes were paid. :laughing: I used a screw driver and hammer to dismantle it and hauled it away in a trash bin. So much for not having a means to communicate with someone has the ability to make discisions.

Our young think we are being modern and effecient, and don’t have a glue what good manners has to do with our personal power and liberty and making things work for the better for everyone. This is sad, because our liberty is so destroyed at this point, it is stupid for us to send our young into war to defend it. Saddam may have been a tyrant, but there is no way Iraqis were as regulated and powerless under the pressures of bureaucracy as we are. Only because our young can not contrast their experience with the past, can they still believe we have the liberty and personal power that our democracy is suppose to be all about.

I write for a newspaper that once had an editor who replied to every letter I sent, telling me of changes I needed to make to be printed. Thanks to her my skills improved and I have been published often. However, the editor who replaced her, doesn’t have time to reply and doesn’t have a clue what good manners would do to empower the people and develop strong ties with the paper. I never know if what I submitted was accepted or not, and if not, why it was not accepted. I have been disenfranchised. How much should we care that newspapers are loosing their readers and may go belly up, when they are the ones who broke the relationship?

We are destroying our country, because we no longer understanding the value of good manners. We are no longer the nation of hope we once were.

I definiatly believe in bringing the power back to the people, and not to caloused beurocracy. We need to depend on the good hearts of people, and not protect ourselves from the bad at the expence of the many.

All I have to ask of the kids: be accountable. Nobody wants or should have to account for your own BS.

Civility is a way of making slaves into meek obedient dogs.

Unlike many I don’t give respect out freely as it has to be earned by the actions of others instead of baseless bankrupt empty rhetoric where people sweet talk one moment only to stab others with a knife in the next.

Actions you can trust where rhetoric you cannot.

The focus of what I said is good manners is important to empowering people, and that point seems totally missed by a couple of you. We are living with tyranny, because those with the power to make decisions, make them without communicating with us and without our consent.

The modern way of doing things is for a handful of people to set policy. From there everyone does as the policy tells them to do. This manifest a mechanical society that crushes individual liberty and power.

What I am saying is not about raising children. I am speaking of the metaphycis of democracy. How it works and why it is worth defending.
Democracy is defended with education not military might, and while the US is spending millions on the military control of the earth, its citizens have virtually no understanding of democracy, and that which manifest or destroys liberty. Good manners is about empowering individuals. It is about liberty.

If parents were not so lazy they would educate their children rather than rely on the dogma of the state.

Good manners does help empower people but, it is also as Joker said an enslavement. If good manners is not accompanied by self worth, pride and education, it creates a meek subservient human. Only you can control what you are going to do and be, the Gov’t cannot dictate that for you. It cannot take away what is not there. And it is the parents/guardians/ mentors that normally instill it. The Gov’t cannot take away what it is not given. If you do not allow it to be takenm they can not control.

The state loves well mannered people that have no pride, education or self worth. They fear the well mannered educated proud confident human.

So true. So, so true.

In order to properly apply good manners, a prerequisite, is common sense. Again, something else severely lacking these days.

If by using good manners, I empower you. How are you enslaved?

Whoo are you mistaken about what the government can not do. Our laws most certainly can deprive citizens of what is there, and the government can take away our children without pressing criminal charges and without a trail by jury.

Who creates the culture and how? I can’t even find a school principle who has time to talk about the importance of education for democracy, so I know I am not the one shaping the culture. Many parents are home schooling their children, because they do like what public education is doing to children. At least one city mayor will not send his children to public schools. Now if well off people send their children to private schools to protect them from what is happening in public schools, the poor parents have how much control over what happens to their children?

Well mannered, educated, confident people are the government. I think you need to rethink the enemy and our values. What is being said here is very interesting. Actually, very alarming. Thank you.

Common sense seems to be defined by Nietzsche, not the philosophy that was basic to democracy. I am alarmed by all the anti-social comments in this forum, excluding the quote, because it seems an observation, not an anti-social statement.

I see a lot of fear of what the next guy will do, if the individual appears weak. In a society where good manners are not valued, there will be more weak people than strong ones. Devaluing the importance of good manners, while valuing an appearance of strength, is “Lord of the Flies” mentality. That is when people elect people people like Bush for president, and think attacking countries like Iraq is a good idea.

Have we become less civilized and more barbaric?

civilized? when did we become “civilized”?!?

-Imp

As soon as we started to pretend that moral dimensions existed seperate from us, cults were formed to force everyone in compliance with such wild imaginative whims.

Here is one of the rules

The language of the Gods, what we call Greek mythology (methology), advanced western civilization. Athens was the mother of western civilization, father of the sciences and parent of democracy.

There are distinct differences between civilizations and barbaric nomades.

We should be able not only to distinguish a difference between civilized or barbaric, but also a difference between western and eastern civilizations.

distinguish all you like. your claim that we are (or ever have been) “civilized” is an error.

-Imp

Calling out on the rules, funny stuff.

But back to the point, I have to agree with Impenitent, using “barbaric” to describe a people, or “civilized”, is chilling. At it’s root, it’s used to de-humanize…not ethical.

Your beloved greeks coined the term, it just means “doesn’t speak greek”. Which is funny, because we now say “it’s all greek to me”. But note, it just means speaks a different language. They use to call their slaves that

But it gets better.

You mean that people who lead simple, moral/ethical lives, off the land, enjoying the fruts of their labors, working to provide for themselves and each other, caring for their children, are “barbarians”? Yes.

OK, so what are these “distinct” differences? I know.

Definitions:
Barbarians - people content not to label others as inferior
Civilized - people ready and willing to label people as inferior for their own gain, or to demonize them to justify slavery, conquest, or genocide.

That’s why those words send chills up presumably “our” spines.
Either someone is just, or unjust. Or right, or wrong. Just because they speak a different language, or have other customs, or live simply, does not necessarily convey any information about their ethics, morals, or correctness.

-Mach

It is the incredible dishonesty of political talk.

They would wish to gain your respect or atleast your obediance through abuse, attacking anything that you do which they feel they can successfully get away with subverting, and all the while, they pretend to be victims, as they claim the right to control the way you live your life and express yourself. That, in essence, is the way that taking-offense, in and of itself, is a form of mind-control over other people. That is also why all racial minorities and the female sex in america have extreme favoratism in the media and law systems during “victimization” claims of even the slightest or most fantasy-oriented degrees… Inequal rights, within the scream for total equality.

“Civilized” is the idealism of the Englishmen.
They set up laws of conduct and politeness even during times of war…

good manners - do to others what you would have done to yourself -
good civilization- do to others what you would have done to yourself -
good laws - do to others what you would have done to yourself -
good morals - do to others what you would have done to yourself -