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Notes -
Turning to some good news:
Article link
This is a WSJ article about the rise in justified homicides in the US in recent years. Much of it is about "Stand Your Ground Laws." I'd be interested to hear the thoughts of the more lawyer-brained Mottizens on those kind of laws and their proliferation over the past decade or so.
On the culture war angle, this article is maybe the starkest example of "erosion of trust in society" that I've come across. A few of the anecdotes are pretty hair raising. They're cherry picked, I know, but the idea that a kid loses his father over an argument about a a fence and a property line made me sad. The "road range" incident they cover in detail seems like it was unfortunate but when one guy levels a gun at another, there's only one reasonable reaction.
Violence must be tightly controlled for a society to function. This is something that's bone deep in humans. We've developed methods of conflict resolution that fall short of violence for our entire existence as a species. Even within the context of violence, there are various ways of controlling it. Duels and so forth. Even informal ones; basic Bro code dictates that when one guy falls down in a fight, the other one backs off.
But this article hints at the idea that people are zooming past any of that to full lethality. It's impossible to compile the stats to determine if that's actually the case or not, but the larger point remains; in a society with plunging basic trust, you're going to see levels of interpersonal violence spike. How should state laws governing violence respond to this? Stand Your Ground is something I generally still support, but my mind could be changed if simple Bad Neigbor fights end up with more orphans.
I'm pro second amendment and pro self defense, but the one thing that makes me pause is the attitude evinced by a lot of pro-SYG arguments that any physical attack justifies lethal retaliation. I strongly believe that we, the men of today's America, don't do enough mutual combat, and that mutual combat exceptions to law should be expanded rather than retracted.
The historical norm was that boys and men got into fights. No normal male got to adulthood without getting into a scrap, and this might be punished lightly by parents or other authority figures, but the law ignored it unless it reached an extreme. It was understood as a normative value that there was a difference between punching and deadly force or the use of a firearm, and that boys should get into a few scraps in their lives. Instead today we have an attitude that ever getting into a physical fight is rare, and where it does happen it is acceptable to persecute any party to the fight.
In old cowboy movies, which set the moral tone for America from the 20s to the 70s, it was standard that two cowboys would get into a fistfight while wearing guns on their hips, and the one that went for his gun first was the bad guy, who would be prosecuted for murder if he killed the guy punching him. This is corroborated in well researched books and first hand historical accounts as the standard in the old west. A SYG standard that allows you to kill someone for punching is antithetical to the cowboy code.
Instead we've replaced traditional ethics with a feminized world where all physical contact is treated as a deadly threat, where boundaries are set such that all fighting is illegal and both morally and physically dangerous because of that boundary. We're raising our boys to act like scared old women.
Boys getting into fights in school has seen an unprecedented decline in the past thirty years
This is an entire human experience, universal to males in the past, now rare. Symptom or cause of the feminization of society, you decide, I lean towards both. Zero tolerance policies towards violence have been a disaster.
There's always somebody in these conversations who talks about weird edge cases. You could get pushed and fall over and crack your skull open, you could get killed by one punch because there was some blood clot in your brain waiting to burst onto the scene. I ask these people: how did our ancestors ever manage to live? They must have been dying left and right from unlucky punches. That doesn't seem to be the case, it's an almost unattested to phenomenon before modernity.
The rare possibility of physical violence is a good thing for social regulation. So much of obnoxious behavior we see today is the result of its lack. Over expansive definitions of self defense that effectively make any form of physical violence a justification for homicide will make this worse, not better.
As @FtttG said, those deaths are mostly from people falling and hitting their head on concrete after getting punched, so it makes sense it was more uncommon in pre-modern, more rural times.
But regardless, I think you're romanticising the past. Even if they couldn't easily slip and die from slipping on asphalt, our ancestors absolutely died left and right from stupid, violent deaths. Just look at the homicide rate over the last 750 years. Or further back, how 21% of men in Amazon hunter-gathered tribes died violent deaths.
Getting in a fight (outside of the well-regulated environment of combat sports, although even then some like boxing are needlessly dangerous), has absolutely no benefit and is associated with impulsive, low-IQ criminals, drug addicts and drunks for a reason. What do you get from escalating it to a violent fight that words couldn't express? And you have no guarantee, especially if it's a stranger, that your opponent won't suddenly pull a knife (or a gun) and kill you.
What obnoxious behavior do we see today that would be fixable by violence from random citizens? If you're talking about say, mental ill or drugged addicted homeless people roaming many western urban centers, if the government's solution is to let anybody punch them as opposed to putting them in mental hospitals or homeless shelters, that would be to me an abject failure of government and I would not feel the least bit safer. Vigilantism is never a good thing and is a sign the police and authorities are a failure.
Street harassment generally, but all forms of obnoxious public behavior which are performed with the full knowledge that if a citizen hits you, it's a huge headache even if everyone ultimately agrees you were at fault.
It used to be well understood that a bum or a vagrant or a drunk catcalling your wife or girlfriend or daughter or sister was ample justification for you, as a man of honor, to smack him good and hard. Bums and vagrants and drunks learned to keep their mouths shut. Now they feel no need to restrain themselves, no citizen is going to risk a felony arrest, becoming a felon over it. Or a civil lawsuit that will drain their bank account.
The problem with this being that if one is already a felon, or broke, the threat is much less, so you are free to act. We live in a society where a huge number of punishments used to keep people in line, things like credit scores and bankruptcy and even felony convictions, matter far more to one tier of citizens than they do to another. The result is to enable the worst parts of society while restraining the best parts.
This goes back to so many things that we talk about on themotte. Why do women feel no need of a man for protection? Because it's not like the average PMC male offers much protection anyway. Why do men feel so helpless? Because they are forced to endure obnoxious behavior without helping themselves.
How can we bemoan the loss of honor, while this thread is full of criticism of honor cultures and the violence they lead to?
Because honor cultures are objectively awful. The states where honor culture dominates, like the Middle East, tend to be poor, violent and oppressive places to live. I personally have no desire to live in a society where men are quick to resort to physical violence when their feel their honor threatened, and I'm happy blood feuds, honor killings, and even schoolyard fights are no longer accepted or commonplace.
The reason why "respectable" men don't beat up street harassers isn't just because of the legal risk, but because you might very well end up losing. Even if you're in peak physical condition and a trained martial artist, what if the vagrant pulls a knife? What if you win this time, but he comes back with 5 of his buddies? What's the point of risking potentially a life-changing, even fatal injury, because of what, a comment? The risk of escalation is too great compared to just walking on, ignoring the catcall, or just sticking to more middle-class areas.
And what if a woman is walking alone? Needing a male chaperone seems like social regression, it's a good thing that women don't need to rely on an individual man for protection. I'd much rather have a well-trained police force and justice/health system that is allowed to do its job.
We're talking about interactions that take half a minute at most. What good is a police force supposed to do? Are you gonna assign a cop to every unchaperoned woman? Flood police departments with complaints about "that man on the street who catcalled me"? How do you actually visualize effective deterrence of lowlifes from harassing people?
Honor culture has its flaws, but its benefits are that low-inhibition lowlifes are going to have their own "what-ifs" to consider when they think of marring someone's day with comments or worse. In my opinion, it's not the respectable men who must stick to middle-class areas. It's the disrespectable men who must stick to low-class areas, and if they do wander outside, they should behave properly.
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