Christine the Lioness (3122)
Christopher the Pyro (1985)
ProphetJoe the Irreverent (1228)
Trouble the Pirate (600)
Keith the Director (573)
Mara the Peacemaker (530)
eric the Lil' Devil (351)
AJ the Zen Master (305)
Ben the Kingpin (213)
Haas the Addict (187)
Christine 2 the Mercenary (131) Lei the Mercenary (124) Katie the Mercenary (115)
Ben2 the Soldier (56) Christine the Lioness said this
Sigh. Yes, I do get annoyed when he steals flowers out of the vases at restaurants and gives them to me. I’ve told him on several occasions that the flowers are put there to make the table look nice for everyone who sits there. I don’t need to take that flower home. I really don’t see the “thought” in destroying what someone else actually did put effort into (buying a flower and putting it in a vase to make a table look nice).
I’m not sure how many women would think it’s sweet to do that. There are a lot of really sweet things a guy can do for a girl, but stealing something from the restaurant where they just ate isn’t one of them. Christopher does a million amazing things for me all the time. Really thoughtful, cool things that show me in little ways how much he cares about me and thinks about me. But I’ve told him before that it bugs me when he steals stuff and yet he continues to do it and I’m not sure why.
Now with regards to the other stuff in his post… I disagree. I think people are perfectly capable of putting their own agendas and personal beliefs aside to be objective when they need to be. It’s just a lot of people don’t WANT to do that… they’d rather use opportunities to further their personal agendas and so they do. It doesn’t mean they’re not capable of doing otherwise.
People DO notice the things you do and form opinions based on those things. I notice people all the time… I notice when they’re being especially considerate or when they’re being rude. Saying that people are too self-absorbed to notice what you’re doing is really just an excuse to do whatever you want without the constraints of social mores.
And people are motivated by more than just dominance and reciprocity. Sometimes, I just do things to be nice. That’s it. Because I can, and it would be a nice thing to do. I don’t expect anything from it and it doesn’t particularly benefit me to do it. Of course you’d like to believe that if you do a favor for someone, they’d someday do the same for you if you needed them to, but maybe they would, and maybe they won’t. Spending too much time thinking about what might or might not happen, and you miss the opportunity to do the favor.
ProphetJoe the Irreverent mentioned
Is this a continuation of
http://www.chrisvschris.com/why-men-think-women-are-crazy/ ??
Btw, did anyone else notice that Christopher has been commenting a lot lately, but that Mara is missing again — coincidence? I think not… 
Christopher the Pyro said this
Most women would find it very “Robinhoodish”, mainly stealing from the establishment that just stole $$$$ from me for dinner to give to my poor ass liberal gf.
ProphetJoe the Irreverent uttered
Well… my first thought was to say “that’s not going to get you laid tonight Christopher”, but, based on our past conversations, I doubt that’s the case!
Here’s a flower for Christine 
— but I stole it from the icon bar above, sorry. 
Christine the Lioness chimed in with
Ha! They’ve already replaced it on the icon bar… remarkable.
If he thinks Robin Hood would come to mind to even one woman out of thousand, he obviously doesn’t know women very well. We rarely think of Robin Hood. We do, however, think things like… “If this man becomes the father of my children, is he going to teach them that stealing is okay?”
<– Can I have a different one? This one’s dying.
Trouble the Pirate mentioned
“You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else.” ~ A very wise man with soap.
I rather enjoyed that post Chris… Quite possibly the most insightful view you have expressed yet… Christine, as always, very true and very sweet… But you’re still just backing-up Chris’ argument… Let me elaborate…
“I think people are perfectly capable of putting their own agendas and personal beliefs aside to be objective when they need to be. Its just a lot of people dont WANT to do that theyd rather use opportunities to further their personal agendas and so they do.”
…you are arguing semantics, the end-result of both of your statements is the same…
“I notice when theyre being especially considerate or when theyre being rude.”
…id est, when it applies to you…
“Sometimes, I just do things to be nice. Thats it. Because I can, and it would be a nice thing to do. I dont expect anything from it and it doesnt particularly benefit me to do it.”
…the action may be altruistic, but regardless, the very fact that the subject “I” appears 4 times in that paragraph begs that the motivation is egoistic… similar to this statement…
“I quit smoking five months ago. I have tremendous self-control, I quit smoking cold turkey, even though it is an extremely addictive habit, I have managed to break it due to the sheer power of my will, and because it causes cancer.”
Trouble the Pirate remarked
…And on the subject of stealing flowers…
Scenario:
Restaurant owner: That table looks so bare. I know, There’s a shop down the street that will sell me the severed reproductive organs of various captive-raised flora. I hear they airfreight them overnight from Holland in refrigerated containers, to better preserve their alien diseases and microbes in a state of cryo-dormancy. I’m not sure however, some of them could have been harvested from the wild, but it doesn’t matter, either way they are exorbitantly priced for something that may or may-not have cost any money what-so-ever to germinate, or raise. Hopefully the shop owner will also charge me a lot extra to place them randomly into a thin-glass vessel hand blown by Venezuelan street urchins in a manufacturing facility, if he tells me they were carefully arranged for maximum aesthetic value until they rot and stink two days later, that will just make me happier…
Later… *Customer snatches a spray-painted blue Crysanthemum from the bunch and playfully hands to his fair maiden…*
Restaurant owner: Hey! Come back here you… you vagabond… I shall call the authorities at once. Somebody stop him, he has stolen my hard bought property, I am the rightful owner of that piece of plant… Help!
Christine the Lioness pontificated
I didn’t say I notice when they’re being exceptionally considerate or rude to me… I notice when they’re being that way to other people in situations that have nothing to do with me. You’re making some assumptions there. And yes, since I’m speaking from a personal opinion, it’s not surprising that I did use the word “I” four times. I could have just as easily said “one” and made it generic and applicable to everyone, but that would have been presumptuous. You’re trying to attribute semantics to somehow proving Christopher’s theory, which inherently can’t be proven because he’s trying to make generalizations that he’s not able to prove.
And as far as the whole restaurant owner/flower scenario goes… while it was an interesting read, Trouble, it’s irrelevant. The only relevant fact is that when you go into a restaurant, you don’t suddenly own everything in that restaurant. It doesn’t belong to you. Regardless of whether it’s a flower or a steak knife, regardless of whether the owner paid too much for it or got it for free because his daughter’s hooking up with flower store owner, it does not belong to you and it is not yours to take. Ownership of the item isn’t even in question. If you found the flower lying on the sidewalk, then I could buy it a little more. But just because you are allowed to enter the premises as a patron, doesn’t mean that you should (legally or ethically) take things simply because you want them.
On a grander scale, if everyone just decided to take whatever they wanted whenever they went into an establishment, owners wouldn’t be able to operate. Every restaurant would have a bunch of bare picnic tables and plastic utensils. So the fact that most people realize that they can’t just take whatever they want is why we can still go to nice places and they exist at all.
Christopher the Pyro scribbled
Good thing only I’ve decided I can take whatever I want whenever I want…
Trouble the Pirate penned this
“People DO notice the things you do and form opinions based on those things. I notice people all the time I notice when theyre being especially considerate or when theyre being rude. Saying that people are too self-absorbed to notice what youre doing is really just an excuse to do whatever you want without the constraints of social mores.”
I’m not making assumptions Christine… I am inferring based on the way you worded the paragraph above, that you meant yourself as the subject, the very fact that ‘you’ are the one doing the ‘noticing’ makes it about you […your personal experience, as you say], and by extrapolating the conclusion that because ‘you’ notice, then so do others, that is the presumption.
As for the relevancy of my restaurant owner scenario… It was meant to be factious, but with an undertone pointing at the peremptory nature of attributing ownership to something that can be plucked from nature just as freely as it can be from the vase on the table [perhaps more so…]
Had you said ‘one’ as you suggest, that would not have been presumptuous, that would have been speculative…
Mara the Peacemaker commented
Trouble, as always, reading your posts are a delight 
Christine the Lioness thought this
Well, the fact that I — alone– do notice, disproves Christopher’s theory. The problem with making a generalization is that it only takes one person to disprove it.
Trouble the Pirate uttered
…and how’s that straw working out for ya beautiful?
Generalizations are not always the evil thing that some would have us think… I can’t share your opinion that it only takes one person to disprove a generalization. It is just an observation of something ‘in general’… If one observes a vicious congregation of lemmings pelting [NPI] themselves off the nearest cliff, and a few of the little suicidal dudes spin off at 90 degrees avoiding their fate… One can still say that ‘in general’ the majority of Lemmings will all run off a cliff. Then someone in the group will pipe-up that you can’t say that, because three of them didn’t…
At which point it is best to kick the remaining three little fu(kers off the cliff, and pummel the protester with Zest-filled socks until they concur…
[…and yes, I know the whole Lemming/cliff thing is a misconception, but I couldn’t resist using an analogy where cute little rodentia were kicked off a cliff…]
Here, look what Chris wrote… “First: People Mostly Care About Themselves” … notice the important word “Mostly” in there? This is a disclaimer of sorts, that indicates that he is about to elaborate that ‘most people’ in his observation will do what he then goes on to describe… He leaves the wiggle-room that it will not apply to every single one… Maybe he should then have begun every subsequent paragraph with a similar statement, but it is fair to say that going on the general gist that one could ’safely assume’ that the ‘mostly’ would follow on into the other three paragraphs… Pointing out that he is generalizing does not invalidate his theory…
Now… Personally, I am too pragmatic to see any positive value in his action […purloining the petunia], it does not impress you, nor do I feel that it would impress any woman smarter than Lindsay Lohan [and that would be ‘most’ of them], and therefore it is a pointless venture at best… The only thing he will get from it is a ‘rise’ out of you, which I suspect is now his main motivation… And maybe putting one over on “the man”… 
This does not stop me from agreeing with the effigy of his argument… ‘In general’…
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