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Henry had drunk so little that he was still below the drink-driving limit.
But you're right, this is what happens when a high trust society interacts with a low trust one.
I mean if so thats posteriors in the direction that Henry was being very stupid. With drunkenness there is some level of excuse to be made for making a bad decision as you have imbibed a substance that is known to cause impaired decision making. Taunting a sword-wielding gangster while sober is Darwin-Award level behavior. Maybe BC is right and a sizable portion on the native British population is just retarded.
Ehh this is what happens when an honor culture meets a legalistic culture. I don't think high/low trust has anything to do with the outcome of taunting weapon wielding strangers at night.
The assumption behind the law allowing Sikhs to wield these daggers is exactly that they will not use them, even in response to far greater verbal abuse than what Nowak did, or in response to a physical altercation with no weapons.
If it is not a reasonable assumption that Sikhs will act this way, then the law is discriminatory, being biased in favor of a group based on ethnicity.
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The UK has, in the past few decades, generally been a place where you can assume you're not going to be murdered by a man with a sword.
People in the UK have adapted to the social reality that you are not going to be murdered by a man with a sword.
We can call this quokka behaviour, but I think it's quite reasonable to expect -- once your society has established that murder-by-men-with-swords is a completely bizarre and outlandish thing to happen -- that you are not going to be murdered by a man with a sword; any more than you're going to be mauled by a dinosaur or beamed up by an alien.
Calling the guy who was murdered "very stupid" for not expecting to be murdered by a man with a sword, in a culture where being-murdered-by-a-man-with-a-sword is extremely unexpected, is itself Very Stupid, and in rather poor taste.
Calling him "retarded" is also retarded.
Although the weapons are normally improvised, this general type of violent crime is endemic in the rougher parts of the UK and has been for decades, and predates mass immigration. (My wife had a student summer job typing up the indictments in an ethnically homogenous town in northern England).
"If you get lairy with random strangers in the streets around pub closing time, you will probably get beaten up, and might get stabbed" is something streetwise Brits are aware of. "If you get lairy with random armed strangers in the streets around pub closing time, you are a lot more likely to get stabbed" is a logical corollary. The sword is something of a furphy here - the incident looks like a conventional dumbass-on-dumbass post-pub fight until the police spectacularly screw up the response.
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The common talking point about low-trust and high-trust society is a high-truster saying, "Why can't we just have fistfights? Why is everything a fight to the death?" and a low-truster replying, "Of course everything is a fight to the death." Another fun fact: didn't people used to just walk around armed (whether with guns or with swords)? They still insulted each other right?
I suppose you can insist on calling this honor culture and legalistic culture, but i think now we're just arguing over meaningless words.
I have never heard high/low-trust used to describe "Why can't we just have fistfights? Why is everything a fight to the death?" that seems so misattributed that I think you are making it up. I have heard it used to describe things that have to do with... trust.
Fundamentally high-trust societies make anonymous cooperation feel normal. Getting into fist fights instead of death fights literally has nothing to do with that. "Fist fights instead of death fights" can happen in both low-trust and high-trust environments. Making it independent of the high-trust/low-trust axis, and likely orthogonal. Realistically its describing the concept of bounded conflict vs existential conflict.
Honor Culture vs Legalistic Culture is also different. I'll amend legalistic -> dignity/rule-of-law culture, I think that's more precise. An honor culture treats reputation as something that must be individually/tribally defended. Public insults or slights demand a visible response, sometimes including violence otherwise it signals that you are weak. A dignity/rule-of-law culture treats personal worth as more inherent and less dependent on immediate public reputation, so private retaliation is discouraged and serious disputes are expected to move through courts, institutions, or formal procedures and let the state take action.
If you want to say we are arguing over meaningless words, that is your right, however by your standard we should just grunt at each other because anything more complex is just being made up.
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