Thanks for posting. I will say, I sent this in both thinking it might make an interesting prompt but also as leeds in to a longer idea (which I should start writing).

It's the same society you had before, it's just a lot easier to kill somebody.

2: that's (mostly) what I think now. But I am crazy for initially finding the logic clear -- incentives matter.

Yeah, it's a catchy bumper sticker but it doesn't hold up well at all when matched to actual historical examples.

It's just false. At best what you get is not politeness, but yielding to the guy who you know will shoot you for cutting him off in traffic.

you can't maintain that kind of vigilance all the time.
Yes you can, and people in violent societies do, and subalterns in all societies do, all day every day. It's a shitty way to live but it's totally possible.

No the underlying logic still holds: the point was for people without guns to be intimidated by the people who do have guns, and thus not contradict various manifestations of patriarchal white supremacy. There was never any intention to have white men be polite to, say, women of color, unless, of course, the latter were properly submissive.

I'm not going to say that it's absolutely impossible to go wrong by assuming that conservatism and its utterances are bad faith, but I'm not feeling like I've seen an example yet. It's like dril and ISIS -- you don't have to hand it to the right wingers.

Following 6 & 7 I'll offer a half-baked theory (which is a little too close to an evo-psych explanation for me to feel completely comfortable with it).

I think human's have a somewhat innate sense of hierarchy and, specifically, I'd guess that our brains are good at answering three questions:

1) Who's immediately above me or below me on the hierarchy (and who's above me or below me but far enough away that there isn't really a comparison)?

2) Broadly speaking, what's expected of me, and what can I get away with at my position in the hierarchy?

3) Am I okay with that? How much do the answers to (1) & (2) weigh on me?

As 7 suggests, walking around thinking, "is _everybody_ armed?" doesn't really fit with that psychology.

4, and generally: I think there's a fuzziness of thinking on display here, conflating politeness with agreeablesness or peacefulness or general enlightenment and toplessness. I think that's an error: politeness is obedience to the norms of social interaction. Those norms are arbitrary and can be made consistent with any amount of viciousness (see Calvin Candy for instance). The more hierarchical a society is the more elaborated those norms will be and the more severe will be the costs of disobedience. Some highly hierarchical societies are also pervasively violent (the US, especially southern US obviously is one of these), others aren't (Japan, Germany; where I think you'll find historically the violence didn't go away but was more thoroughly monoplolized by the state).

9 crossed with 7, which says what I'm getting at much more clearly.

Or put more briefly, we're evaluating it as an empirical statement when it's a normative one.

An armed society, an American armed society is a society of people with a chip on their shoulder and looking to start beef, and they will find it. A society of constant feuding.

For an example of 7, think the Ahmaud Arbery murder. The creeps who killed him weren't polite to him because they had guns or they thought he might have a gun. Because they were were white men with guns they thought they were empowered to impolitely interrupt his jog and threaten and interrogate him, and ultimately murdered him for fleeing rather than submissively complying with their impolite harassment.

An armed society is a society where people will avoid angering people who may be armed and have societal permission to use violence. If you're one of the people who has societal permission to use violence, that may look like like a polite society to you, but it's not.

I've spent a bit of time in societies that are, variously, very heavily armed, completely unarmed, very polite and extremely rude, and various stages in between on both axes, and I can't really say I noticed any correlation.

you can't maintain that kind of vigilance all the time.
Yes you can, and people in violent societies do, and subalterns in all societies do, all day every day.

Trust me when I tell you that there is almost no one less aware of what is going on around them at any given moment than the average subaltern.

The slogan is not even wrong.

Serious disputes in the US are legal, economic, or bureaucratic. Neither outcome of a lawsuit, nor an unpleasant takeover or buyout, nor a reorganization or change of responsibilities or profits stemming from some order, none of them can be challenged with a steely gaze, fisticuffs or any kind of personal confrontation.

It is this change, that the individual has lost power except to the extent that they can exert temporary and limited will within a large organization, that has idiots with poor impulse control and high expectations of interpersonal deference, angry enough that they have turned into a swarm of children. The same mesh of prganizations that has turned us all into willing herd creatures also provides us with hospitals and medicine, communication and travel, and affordable idiotic luxuries.

I agree with "Not even wrong." It's just a stupid axiom for idiots to repeat.

"An armed society is a society where people will avoid angering people who may be armed and have societal permission to use violence. "

I'm not sure about this because I don't quite know what "societal permission to use violence" means. If Arbery had been a wealthy white guy jogging who had been held up at gunpoint by three black guys, then would he have acted differently - say, rudely pushing them aside? Because they wouldn't have had "societal permission" to shoot him, would they hypothetical Chet Arbery have felt safer?

I think that 9 might be on to something, though, because I've never been in a society that is heavily armed, non-hierarchical and polite.

Applause for 14.2.
|| Charley! I hope you're all well! |>

This quote is attributable to Robert Heinlein, who also provided solid, actionable insights like "a prison society that is overwhelmingly composed of men will develop a culture that treats the few women exceedingly well" and "if you go back in time, a fun cool thing to do is sleep with your mom".

I can't really say I noticed any correlation

That is my take, though with less direct personal experience to cite.

Interestingly, it seems the specific Heinlein source is a 1948 novel originally serialized in 1942, when he was broadly a lefty. (Though reading its synopsis I can see the seeds of his later self.)

Colt used the slogan, "God created men equal, Col. Colt made them equal"

Which, I think, appeals in a similar way, and is wrong for similar reasons.

(Huh, I copied that quote from here but it has an extra "equal" in it.)

"a prison society that is overwhelmingly composed of men will develop a culture that treats the few women exceedingly well"

According to NAM Rodger, "The Wooden World", this is more or less true as relating to the 18th century Royal Navy ("going to sea is like going to jail, with the chance of being drowned"). Most warships had at least some women on board among a mostly-male crew and they were not routinely abused and mistreated. I'm not sure what other similar societies you might adduce as examples. Prisons are generally single-sex and, of course, mostly inhabited by violent criminals.

conflating politeness with agreeablesness or peacefulness or general enlightenment and toplessness

Heh. I was just thinking about a friend's stories of trade negotiations in Switzerland, the usual go-to example of the polite armed society. She found the Swiss that she dealt with, at least, to be pretty pointedly impolite interpersonally.

I should add, I have seen the argument that being able to attack from range is a specific part of human evolution.

But mammals, by and large, don't use ranged weapons. Except us. Two million years ago, our Homo erectus ancestors exhibited those three evolved changes that provided us the ability to kill from a distance, most likely just by throwing a rock. In the evolutionary sweepstakes, this was like winning the lottery. Imagine how impossible it would have been to kill a gazelle if you had to do so with your bare hands. Even if you had the strength, it would just run away.

...

Dominance in chimps is usually taken by force. Chimpanzee politics are complex, but the bigger, stronger chimps tend to lead, while weaker chimps tend to follow. There are exceptions, and leadership isn't just about size and strength, but it matters. This is true across much of the mammal kingdom, with some exceptions (for example, ring-tail lemurs, hyenas, and bonobos have female dominance that is untethered from physical size). For chimpanzees, if you come at the king, you best not miss.

Humans, with their modified super shoulders, became capable of severing the link between physical size and social dominance. The smallest prehistoric human, with a bit of practice and the right rock, could kill the fiercest, biggest warrior from far away, lurking hidden in jungle.

(the second quote is a little too casual in the assumptions it makes, but I don't think it's completely made up)

Colt used the slogan, "God created men equal, Col. Colt made them equal"

I think it's quoted in Keeley, "War Before Civilisation", that arguments among the Yanomami escalate with the ritual phrase "We are all of us men, there are not some of us tall and others short. I am going to get my arrows." And Keegan in "The First World War" slightly misquotes Carlyle as saying "The rifle makes all men tall" (Carlyle had said "gunpowder" but the point is the same) - previously a well-fed, strong, well-trained, armoured nobleman could easily beat an inexperienced half-starved peasant.

But there's a difference between "militarily equal" and "polite", obviously...

The obvious next step is to give some bows to a couple of chimpanzees.

For science.

28: the Keegan quote is from his "The Second World War".

Trust me when I tell you that there is almost no one less aware of what is going on around them at any given moment than the average subaltern.

No... no, I don't think I will.

25: I think the example Heinlein had in his head in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was convict-era Australia, and "universally observed deference to women in sexual matters" was not the lived experience there as I understand it.

No... no, I don't think I will.

I was assuming (after a quick google) that ajay was referencing the meaning of subaltern as, "an officer in the British army below the rank of captain, especially a second lieutenant."

32: Before anyone goes for their arrows, I'm assuming 14.2 is a joke. Separated by a common language etc.

33/35: OK.

17: Once you're actually being actively threatened with a weapon, I think you're right that "societal permission" doesn't come into it. The impression I got of the McMasters, the perpetrators in the Arbery killing, though, is that they were ready to use their weapons because they didn't think they were acting criminally -- they thought that shooting a black jogger would be regarded as acceptable crime-prevention or something like that, because they were respectable white homeowners. (They turned out to be wrong about this in the end, but that's what they seem to have thought.)

To the extent respectable white homeowners have the belief that they're allowed to use violence expansively in defense of property, people are going to be cautious around them if they seem to be armed.

This is wrong:

Imagine how impossible it would have been to kill a gazelle if you had to do so with your bare hands. Even if you had the strength, it would just run away.

Then you'd run after it. Humans can outrun any other land animal if they keep at it for long enough, including gazelles. We are superb cursorial hunters. See David Attenborough doc here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=826HMLoiE_o

Note that Karohe does not need projectile weapons to kill a kudu. He runs it down until it collapses.

But the idea that you could kill a gazelle by throwing rocks at it just wouldn't pass muster with anyone who's ever seen a gazelle. Good luck getting within rock-throwing range of one of those guys. If you've ever done any kind of survival training, you'll notice that the instructor never at any point suggests catching large animals by throwing rocks at them - however good you are at cricket or rounders, you're going to have to be pretty lucky to get within throwing range and then you've got one throw to get a disabling or killing hit, or it's offski.

Then you'd run after it. Humans can outrun any other land animal if they keep at it for long enough, including gazelles

Yes, IIRC, part of the defensive behavior of gazelle's is, specifically, to blend into a herd so that it's more difficult to single out (and tire out) one individual.

That said, I think early humans did develop thrown weapons, but I don't know what, specifically, they were used to hunt.

Couldn't you fill in the blank:

But mammals, by and large, don't ________________. Except us.

with like two dozen things?

One of them being "copiously menstruate", in fact. (Maybe two other mammal types that resemble us in that way, one of which is bats.)

Where I've seen people effectively throwing rocks at animals, it's been for defense -- a good rock-thrower can effectively discourage a pack of vicious dogs (a situation that arose when I was in the Peace Corps. The locals were effective rock throwers. I was not.)

47: ah, I get you.

Though would even the McMasters have thought of the society they lived in as polite? I think they'd have described it as very dangerous and threatening - full of scary black joggers, etc.

There is a great bit in Neal Stephenson "The Confusion", which is set in the early 18th century in France - a long description of one upper-class character encountering another unexpectedly in a large grand house where both are visiting. It describes how he approaches, how he angles his shoulder, where he puts his hand, how close to the wall he is - all these movements, learned since childhood and completely unconscious, designed to reassure someone else that you are not about to draw the two edged weapons you carry at all times and try to kill him, while at the same time putting yourself in the best possible tactical position should he draw the two edged weapons he's carrying and try to kill you. Upper class France is very polite and very heavily armed, but not in any way safe.

47 s/b 37.

41 is interesting (and unfortunate for an animal that sleeps head downwards).

"Switzerland, the usual go-to example of the polite armed society. She found the Swiss that she dealt with, at least, to be pretty pointedly impolite interpersonally."

The Swiss have a lot of guns but they are actually pretty much all unarmed (at any given moment) - you need a permit to carry a gun around, and they aren't easy to get. The military keep their rifles at home, but without ammunition.

I think they probably thought that being visibly armed would increase how polite society was from their perspective -- that it would make scary black joggers behave respectfully.

Gotcha.

Though would even the McMasters have thought of the society they lived in as polite? I think they'd have described it as very dangerous and threatening - full of scary black joggers, etc.

The white US South self-identifies as the most polite part of the US, and I think in general, the rest of the US agrees with that stereotype. The McMasters and their ilk, in their own minds, were doing their bit to uphold the norms of courtesy and decency that Arbery violated.

A fascist society is a polite society.

Regarding Heinlein, I think it's an important rite of passage for certain types of sheltered adolescents (which is to say: me) to discover how full of shit he was.

He was ahead of his time in writing a coeducational shower scene.

I think we came up with that on set. Just riffing, you know?

The white US South self-identifies as the most polite part of the US, and I think in general, the rest of the US agrees with that stereotype.

I don't know, look how politeness norms are upheld here in Boston: "Dorchester man charged with smashing woman's nose in, trying to run her over after she didn't say 'good morning' to him as she watered her lawn."

(It also emerges that he has previous firearms charges, so that's one point in favor of the armed/polite connection.)

52: I might have read the novelization instead of the novel.

54: You're doing your part!

ajay has mentioned War Before Civilization many times here; just wanted to chime in that it's a great read that gave me a lot of perspective. Great rec, ajay.

Regarding Heinlein, I think it's an important rite of passage for certain types of sheltered adolescents (which is to say: me) to discover how full of shit he was.

Yeah.

53 helps explain why the Cabots talk only to God.

Heh.

So this thread has established that polite doesn't mean courteous in this context, and it doesn't mean deferential. So does it mean anything useful, or is the NRA simply putting nice sounding words together?

They're actively trying to create a county where white men can threaten others implicitly or explicitly.

59: I would characterize consensus of the thread differently, and say that there is general agreement that a polite society, as defined, is one in which people defer to the threat of violence.

61 is properly amended by 60. And I completely agree with Moby, who is not at all prone to typos, that the real work of this project is being done at the county level.

Violence sufficiently connected to hierarchy.

That's who draws the jury.

Two thoughts (in the form of aphorisms):

1. "An armed society is a frightened society"

2. "God created men equal. Alfred Nobel made them equal."

What these gun-nuts don't understand is that fertilizer-filled U-Haul trucks are also cheap to get and unstoppable. They pretend that it'll stop at handguns/rifles, so their advantage will be unanswered. They're wrong.

Aren't they the same people?

pf: "polite society, as defined, is one in which people defer to the threat of violence."

Taking this one step further, the entire point of a government, is to take sole ownership of the application of violence, so that it may be *regulated* and *ordered*, so that it shall not be *capricious*. B/c such capricious violence is bad for complex societies that require
many members to specialize in things other than the instant application of violence to their immediate adversaries. *That* is the real
definition of a polite society: one in which we entrust all violence to the government.

These people don't want a polite society.

Growing up the way I heard it was that if bad guys believed everyone was armed, they wouldn't commit crimes, because they would believe that other people would stop them. "Polite" here means more "civilized" or "behaving" than "being nice socially.". It's nonsense either way.

65: yes, let's take a look at the track record of the people who tried to achieve political change through VBIEDs. How's the big push for a united Ireland going? The American anarchist movement any closer to overthrowing Wall Street? Surely the black flag of the Caliphate is still proudly flying over Mosul? Have the Zionists been pushed out of either Tel Aviv or Oklahoma City?

No to all of the above, is it? Well, gosh.

The consensus in the thread appears to be that (paraphrasing broadly) actual politeness is connected to respect (and some level of social equality and reciprocity) and that gun culture is too deeply connected to pro-hierarchy worldviews to push for social equality and reciprocity.

So let me ask a different question -- what incentives would you design (if you could) to cultivate a culture of respect? You can argue or evangelize for a worldview of tolerance and respect, but what material structures would nudge people in that direction?

And, ideally, something other than the idea that people often bond in a crisis so we should create crisis situations . . .

70 cross-posted with 67, but that does raise another question. If we believe that there's a connection between a polite society and entrusting the government with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, which direction does causation run? Are high-trust societies more willing to abstain from interpersonal violence, or does a state that strongly enforces a monopoly on the use of violence lead to a high-trust society? I'm betting on the first option.

I don't have any big-picture data to add to this conversation, but I do have an anecdote.

"An armed society is a frightened society"

I was driving recently and someone deliberately rear-ended my bumper at a red light. It wasn't an insurance-scam kind of accident; it wasn't actually an accident. They were just mad that I didn't floor the accelerator 0.1 seconds after the light changed to green.

Pre-pandemic, I would have been mad but not scared. Now, given the number of road-rage incidents that have happened locally, the city's ongoing intense gun violence epidemic, and the major increase in wild, dangerous driving in my neighborhood (people swerving into oncoming traffic to pass in no-passing zones, going left on a red-light, etc.), I was genuinely afraid. I had the shakes for a good 10 minutes afterwards wondering if the person behind me was armed and ready to escalate.

Whereas five years ago, I would have just turned around to look at them and thrown up my hands, like: "What did you want me to do?" and then gone about my day without another thought.

My armed society is a very violent society. Its politeness merely channels much of the violence into formalized legal duels, etc. But not always.

72: I have stopped yelling at people in traffic because the guy who almost crashed into me to merge to an exit ramp got out of his car on the intestate. Fortunately, traffic started moving and he had to choose between getting back into his car or me being able to drive around him.

He may have also noticed that my car was worth maybe $4,000 and he had had newer car.

40 and 41: Cope, cope, menstruate, cope.

I think we should test this hypothesis experimentally. I'm just gonna use this time machine I have, I'll pick a couple of demographically similar countries such as, for example, Canada and the United States, give one of them a shit-ton of guns and the other one relatively few, and then I'll come back to the present and see which society is more polite. BRB!

... in hindsight, I probably should've run that past the IRB first.

76: Try that it in a small town.

Ajay @ 69: Uh, what I meant was, if I end up in a society where everybody goes around well-armed, and I am intimidated by some asshole into not getting something rightfully mine, and enough times, then my recourse is not to buy a gun (which requires *skill* and *reflexes*), but rather to blow his house up with dynamite, torch his house, etc. B/c those don't require skill in the same amounts as using a gun.

Obviously, I don't intend to stick around in such a society, and neither should anybody who has invested in their non-gun skills. Skills in the use of weaponry are (economically-speaking) *completely* dead-weight except when there are large unconquered territories to take and enslave the inhabitants.

Ajay @ 69: Uh, what I meant was, if I end up in a society where everybody goes around well-armed, and I am intimidated by some asshole into not getting something rightfully mine, and enough times, then my recourse is not to buy a gun (which requires *skill* and *reflexes*), but rather to blow his house up with dynamite, torch his house, etc. B/c those don't require skill in the same amounts as using a gun.

Obviously, I don't intend to stick around in such a society, and neither should anybody who has invested in their non-gun skills. Skills in the use of weaponry are (economically-speaking) *completely* dead-weight except when there are large unconquered territories to take and enslave the inhabitants.

Canada and the United States, give one of them a shit-ton of guns and the other one relatively few, and then I'll come back to the present and see which society is more polite. BRB!

As Michael Moore pointed out Canada has a relatively high number of guns (by global standards), even if not as high as the US. Wikipedia has it 7th in the world.

Bowling For Columbine clip (somewhat dated): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-niYj0u_Q8

According to shiv, there's just a massive difference in how guns are treated. Rural Canadians like their shotguns and rifles, given how much of the country is rocks and bears, but as a general rule, there's not nearly as strong a desire for handguns. "We don't have a second amendment", although sometimes one sees Canadian right wingers pick up NRA talking points.

IIRC, there have been studies of crime in the US west during the 19th century that found that towns with gun control didn't have as much homicide as towns without gun control. But rates of other crimes might not have shown much correlation. Many homicides were associated with the presence of drunk young men, a demographic not generally associated with high levels of politeness.

19th century America had a 2nd Amendment, but not in a way we understand.

To be fair to alcohol, it's got other good qualities.

So let me ask a different question -- what incentives would you design (if you could) to cultivate a culture of respect? You can argue or evangelize for a worldview of tolerance and respect, but what material structures would nudge people in that direction?

And, ideally, something other than the idea that people often bond in a crisis so we should create crisis situations . . .

Hawaii is generally pretty polite and respectful. I don't have a general theory of why that's so, but I think that one significant factor is extended families and social networks that (a) involve people at a range of socioeconomic levels, and (b) intersect randomly but frequently. The more likely it is that a stranger is connected to someone whose good opinion you care about, the more potential cost there is to treating them badly.

In "The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein," Farah J. Mendelsohn points out that a lot of the critiques mentioned upthread are present in the subtext of "Beyond This Horizon," the novel where that quote about an armed society being a polite society first appears. I summarized in a Twitter thread from March 2021 at https://twitter.com/DavidEDaveWall1/status/1374564146335780868 . I thought I cited the thread earlier in TFA, but I haven't been able to find it in a search, so I'll copy it here in case the former bird-app further implodes.

@effjayem has some interesting analysis of "Beyond This Horizon," the Heinlein book in which that quote about a polite society appears (pp. 238-242 of "The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein"). This society is not shown as being polite to everyone.

"If we have any doubt whatsoever by this point that the role of guns in this society is to create a hierarchy to which not all can be admitted, and a set of rituals of courtesy that rob many of full agency, it is clarified by Mordan's comment to Felix..." (p. 242).

An armed woman in the story is treated with amused contempt, not the same respect shown an armed man: "Hamilton has broken the rules of his society: he has been neither polite nor respectful to an armed citizen." (p. 240)

Guns are not always effective in the story: "Twice someone has drawn a gun. Twice someone is disarmed." (p. 240)

On the restaurant scene in chapter 1: "Anyone paying attention ought to note ... that there is nothing in this scene ... that supports the argument that an armed society is a polite society. Courteous, yes, but the existence of courtesy is often a ritual of violence." (p. 240)

"Politeness or courtesy, whichever you will, is essentially a transaction between equals: lurking in the small incidents of the book is a strong indication that for those who are brassarded and at the bottom of the heap, the world would look very different." (p. 242)

Reading her analysis, it occurred to me that one of the prime historical examples of an armed society in which courtesy was extended primarily to those the dominant class recognized as peers, accompanied by elaborate dueling rituals was... the antebellum US South.

Heinlein was, as @effjayem acknowledges, a strong supporter of the 2nd amendment. But the larger context of that quote is quite a bit more nuanced than many who quote it seem to think.

Oho: according to this review, David Brin said that John W. Campbell in fact came up with the "armed society" tagline and instructed Heinlein to integrate it into his plot.

And someone else thinks Brin is full of shit on that point.

Speaking of bears, someone was just killed by a bear (probably) in Wyoming. It's not just a Canadian problem.

NickS: "So let me ask a different question -- what incentives would you design (if you could) to cultivate a culture of respect?"

Here's a try: all public interactions are video-recorded, and all people interacting can access the record. When someone is impolite, their target can post that publicly to all that impolite person's peers. In a way, kind of like how modern social media functions to out "Karens" and "Cletuses".

Something like David Brin's idea of the transparent society?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society

Haven't read the book, did read most of that Wikipedia page. Yes, something like that. Mostly, i am reminded that ubiquitous citizens surveillance has solved the problem of sasquatch, uFOs, and police brutality. We know now which is real and which is not. That is at least to start.

Huh. There was a panel discussion of the book 10 years after its publication, and Brad DeLong was one of the panelists: https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/05/cfp-panel-on-th.html

93.2 fuck that, I don't want to live in that kind of society anymore than I want to live in one where everyone is armed.

And I imagine women would like it even less than I do, it's a stalker's paradise.

So the main thing I get from 93 is that you think it's theoretically and logistically impossible to cultivate a culture of respect.

(All my serious answers would involve education, but it can be strangely hard to talk about education. There's often an intense knee-jerk focus on barriers and hostility, IMO to an exaggerated degree.)

80: Chet, guns are point and click. Toddlers in your country successfully kill people with handguns every week. No super skill or reflexes needed.

But you couldn't blow up a house with dynamite. It's a skillful and dangerous job and you'd almost certainly cock it up. Even experienced terrorists blow themselves up accidentally all the time. VBIEDs are even harder to make and deploy - there's a reason why we sent SOF to hunt Iraqi and Irish *bombmakers* not Iraqi and Irish *gunmen* and that reason is that bombmakers are rare and therefore valuable skilled individuals, but gunmen are cannon fodder with cheap weapons.

99: agreed. Education, parenting, advertising, media representation. Same way you build a culture of, I don't know, liking football or not dropping litter.

lurid keyaki: If you look back at my original proposal, it wasn't that everybody be able to see what GWB was eating when he "choked on a pretzel". But rather, that everybody effectively be wearing Google Glass, and be able to share their record of any untoward interaction, with identification of any other participants. Yes, this is still going to be problematic for women. But it also comes with the ability to out men who are stalking, etc. There are always going to be behaviours outside the norms of society, that aren't crimes (yet, or maybe ever). If "politeness" is anything, it is a proscription against those behaviours, and the only way to do so, is to employ the power of social disapproval.

If we don't believe that that will work, then we really don't believe in society, and sure, I guess, everybody should go armed to the gills.

Ajay: a truck full of fertilizer doesn't take any skill to drive. And I remain on my point: if we devolve into a society of warlords and gun-toters who enforce their will by extrajudicial means (which is what "an armed society is a polite society" means), then it won't remain an industrial society, a society with infrastructure, at all. B/c oppressed people will buy the means to destroy all the infrastructure around that warlord's house. A truck full of fertilizer parked in his driveway, in short. Why hasn't it happened already? Because most of us still believe we can be a society where the government has a monopoly on violence.

a truck full of fertilizer doesn't take any skill to drive.

Yeah, you're not really being serious now are you.

What, that's not an extra you can just sign up for at the local Ryder rental center? Surely if capitalism means anything it's that you can pay someone else to assemble the diesel, fertilizer, and detonator and you just need to do the driving.
72- Asshole driving is surely one of the worst post-pandemic trends. I was in traffic the other day and the black pickup truck behind me was staying a foot off my bumper, honking when I didn't move as soon as the car in front of me moved. There was nowhere else for him to go! It was stop and go traffic! Also people just ignoring red lights- I think the new rule is if people saw a light when it was green they think they're allowed to go through. I think it's also highly correlated with the rise of license plate "protectors." They have to make those illegal soon, right? They serve absolutely no purpose but to make enforcement of traffic laws harder, and it's obvious that people who buy them are the most aggressively illegal drivers. (This is a saiselgy hobbyhorse i happen to agree with.)

Asshole driving is surely one of the worst post-pandemic trends

I would be really interested to know if this is being reflected in accident figures, etc. The pandemic coincided with me moving from London to a much smaller and nicer town, so I can't really speak from my own experience. I haven't driven (or cycled) in London post-pandemic.

re: 105

I've definitely noticed what seems like a rise in anti-social driving* (and also e-bikes** as a tool of anti-social non-driving behaviour) in London post-pandemic, but ... I'm cycling a lot more and driving a lot less, so it's possible that driving hasn't gotten appreciably worse but I've noticed it more.

* and the fact that people don't park anymore. They'll just stop in the middle of the road, stick the hazards on, and block an entire street for 10 - 15 minutes while waiting for someone, when there's a parking space you could stick a truck in literally beside them.
** specifically Lime/Bolt rental e-bikes, and Deliveroo fuckwits.

The e-bike thing is a total open goal on the part of the local authority, too. In some of the surrounding council districts, they enforce geofencing of the bikes, so while you can ride them anywhere you can only park them in designated areas. Ealing have done that for bits of Ealing district (which is very large) but not in the specific bit I live in, so every pavement is littered with these bikes. When I come into our street, I have to stop (often) because there'll be one of those fucking bikes literally lying in the middle of the road. When I encounter people riding them, about 60% of the time the bike is hacked (clicky noise from the broken lock) or being ridden by some masked and balaclava wearing teenager, riding it on the wrong side of the road, or at 20 mph on the pavement.

I'm massively in favour of measures that get people out of cars and onto bikes, but making the bikes a massive hazard, fucking everywhere, is not the way to do it.

Ajay: many years ago, a Hamas commander was quoted as saying something like "the suicide vest is the F-16 of the poor and dispossessed".

Of course I'm serious. It takes skill and reflexes to use a handgun. It takes a lot less skill to plant a bomb. And even less skill to drive up a truck filled with fertilizer and diesel. Of course, the best option is to decamp for more civilized climes. But if that option is proscribed ....

106: I had noticed a lot more e-bikes on my occasional visits down south, including one just lying in the middle of a busy road, so that makes sense.
The EU is reporting that traffic deaths in 2022 were still below pre pandemic levels https://transport.ec.europa.eu/news-events/news/road-safety-eu-fatalities-below-pre-pandemic-levels-progress-remains-too-slow-2023-02-21_en but 2022 wasn't entirely post-pandemic and I wonder how the rate per million miles travelled looks, rather than the rate per million inhabitants.

108: look, I don't expect much, but you're from Texas, surely you should at least have a basic understanding of a) large trucks and b) handguns.

102.1 what an utterly bleak dystopian vision. I'd much prefer our current armed society than that hellish existence, at least we can work towards saner gun control even under our ruling SCOTUS regime. I believe that Chetan's gone and invented the torment nexus
https://twitter.com/alexblechman/status/1457842724128833538?s=46&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ

And of course this ignores the fact that current systems of public surveillance cameras do little to deter violent crime, they just make it somewhat easier to deal with after the fact.

Toddlers in your country successfully kill people with handguns every week.

Are we sure it's not one very adept toddler? They never seem to give a name.

SENIOR RUSSIAN GANGSTER: "That rattle you stole belonged to Tiny John Wick."
JUNIOR RUSSIAN GANGSTER: (blanches Slavically)

"He killed a man with a pacifier. A fucking pacifier!"

When I think of armed societies that are impolite, I think of Israel. Israelis complain a lot about how rude Israelis are, but I think it's also something they are kind of proud of - contrasting it with Americans that they perceive as being polite in a way that is phony. Anyway, I don't think arms have anything to do with it.

I presume Chetan probably read that Mike Davis book, and to be polite, if I wanted to hear about the history of Los Angeles with special attention to racism, I'd ask the famously sweet-natured beardie professor who spent a long and respected career preaching revolution from the University of California, Riverside*, while if I wanted practical advice on car bombs I think I'd turn to Ajay first.

On politeness, it's interesting that the aphorism has been adapted from *not* saying "An armed society is a polite society, and that's dandy, we need more of that" to pretty much saying that. In context, an armed society is one where people go armed and society tolerates both that they do so, and that they sometimes use or threaten to use weapons in private beefs**. As quite a few people have said upthread, a lot of societies that tolerated that kind of behavour were also very keen on rituals of courtesy, and it's a classic insight that the whole point of the courtly rituals was to regulate the violence. That implies a lot of the politeness is insincere, bowing and scraping in front of any asshole for fear of him pulling out his pigsticker, and it's also a pretty common observation that courtly culture was absolutely obsessed with duplicity and intrigue. Anyone who's spent time in an environment where you have to watch out because a fight might break out at any time knows it's exhausting and generally bad for you, too. There are plenty of reasons why you might say that as a descriptive statement rather than a prescriptive one.

(*ASTERISK: He did apparently get shot at during his involvement with SNCC so he wasn't quite as much of a campus chickenhawk as I may have implied. Politeness!)
(**DOUBLE ASTERISK: I suppose it's possible to think of a society where people go armed but using a weapon in a private beef would be very badly thought of and severely punished, you'd have to check it into the armoury at the beginning and end of every day and account for all live rounds or empty cases....it would be a bit like being in the army, and I'm not sure they're especially *polite*.)

I was about to make a point rather like 117.last - that's what I was getting at upthread by saying that I'd never been an armed, polite, *non-hierarchical* society. I'd say the army is pretty polite, by the standards of other organisations I've worked in, but the hierarchy has a lot to do with that. There are very clear, explicit, enforced rules about what your place is, and as long as you stay within these guiderails people will treat you well. It also means that there's a certain degree of directness. People will tell you "you're wrong, don't do that" in so many words, which they wouldn't in a civilian organisation - but I would not necessarily count that as rudeness.

Outside the army, Britain is I think unusually fond of indirectness in social situations - the army's closer to how people talk in, say, France, Switzerland, Netherlands. See here for semi-comic example https://www.labourmobility.com/anglo-dutch-translation-guide/

There is also massive social pressure (as well as explicit rules and draconian punishments) to display obsessively safe weapon handling at all times. An ND won't just mean a fine, it will mean extreme ridicule and mockery.

It reminds me rather of aviation, which I also have a bit of experience in - status and kudos don't come from being a risk-taking, hot-shot, rule-breaking pilot, but from being an incredibly careful, competent, knowledgeable pilot.

Israelis are pretty direct in my limited experience, and I wonder if it's a conscious rebellion against a tradition that's seen as having gone too far the other way. It is in China. I've never met ruder people on average in any other country, and I've been told (by Chinese and Taiwanese friends) that this was a sought result of the Communist revolution; traditional Chinese manners were seen as elaborate, effete, hidebound etc, and proper revolutionaries were blunt.

Are Israelis direct and blunt because they're trying to distance themselves from what they see as a long Jewish tradition of being talkative, discursive, and terrified of giving offence? As in the firing squad joke:

...three Jews are about to be executed by firing squad. The sergeant in charge asks each one whether he wants a blindfold. "Yes," says the first Jew, in a resigned tone. "OK," says the second Jew, in a quiet voice. "And what about you?" he enquires of the third Jew. "No," says the third Jew, "I don't want your lousy blindfold," followed by a few choice curses. The second Jew immediately leans over to him and whispers: "Listen, Moshe, take a blindfold. Don't make trouble."

Also, of course, people in the army *are generally unarmed*. You don't go around everywhere carrying a live weapon. Unless you're on ops or on the range, you will be unarmed - and those two examples make up, at the absolute maximum, about 10% of your army career.

I've wondered how much Communist bluntness (across much of the world) traces back to Marx just being a blunt and abrasive person. You can see in their letters that that wasn't Engels's natural style but he partially adopted it over time.

To the extent that the military is more polite (which I think it is, keeping in mind the number of young men) as you say it's not driven by guns, it's driven by the knowledge that if you get caught being too much of an asshole you will face discipline.

One of my favorite things is reddit advice threads where someone is being mistreated financially by their spouse and then it comes out that he's in the military and everyone is like "this is your lucky day, if he were a civilian you'd be screwed, but contact his CO and everything will get fixed fast."

"Germans are assholes" can explain lots of this.

120: I think it's probably just extremism. If you're a revolutionary, you'll quite like the idea of overthrowing the conventions of society. Fascists are much the same; look how they talk. Politeness, and humour for that matter, aren't really their native languages.

123: Italian fascists were specifically very obsessed by this, to the extent of trying to abolish the polite form of address in Italian and make everyone say "voi" instead of "lei". (Nazi Germany didn't try this although they did like using Fraktur script for everything so how would you tell.)

Are communists blunt or are slavs blunt? I don't associate bluntness with say Chinese communists, and the fascist Russians are still blunt.

125: extremists are performatively blunt and coarse - Chinese in my direct experience, Russian and Italian fascists from their reported speech. Il faut epater le bourgeois, after all.

I would not say that the Ukrainians, Moldovans, Poles or Czechs I have met are particularly blunt.

I really have a hard time keeping track of which people I know is Ukranian and who is a Russian-speaking Jewish person born in the Ukraine. Apparently this is easy if you understand last names better.

I hear people talking in a Slavic language sometimes. I can tell which language so I don't know if I should shout at them about Putin or not.

Sorry for the extra article there, it wasn't intentional.

I really have a hard time keeping track of which people I know is Ukrainian and who is a Russian-speaking Jewish person born in Ukraine.

Both these people are Ukrainian, assuming the latter had at least one Ukrainian parent.

As a capitalist-educated American, I was taught that the market made good manners and the lack of one is why there was so much Communist bloc rudeness.

131: What if both their parents are also Jews born in Ukrainian SSR? (Not sure if that's long enough ago that you'd expect Yiddish as the native language.)

I'm not asking about citizenship (which doesn't really help, the one guy I know is definitely ethnically Ukrainian has a Russian passport because he was in graduate school in Moscow at the time of the split and so Russian citizenship was more convenient and he wasn't expecting a war 30 years later), or residency (everyone in question lives in the US) my point was that I was thinking "the Ukrainians I know are blunt" and then realized that perhaps cultural stereotypes of communication style are different for ethnic Ukrainians and Jews from Urkraine.

That was me. And of course Zelenskyy and the war has caused an upsurge in Ukrainian nationalist sentiment among diaspora Jews with Soviet roots, but that doesn't necessarily translate directly into changes in cultural behavior.

the rise of license plate "protectors." They have to make those illegal soon, right? They serve absolutely no purpose but to make enforcement of traffic laws harder, and it's obvious that people who buy them are the most aggressively illegal drivers.

I loathe those things so, so much. It is absolutely correlated with aggressive driving IME.

And a hearty second to 107. In DC there are entirely too many Lime scooters just abandoned in the middle of the road and/or sidewalk -- I had to pull one out of the way just the other day. I cannot comprehend the thought process (or lack thereof) at work.

121: How do you find these threads? I'm not familiar with this particular genre.

What town in Central MA is acceptable for commuting is one I now know even though I'm still east of there.

Eastern Europeans and frankness - I just had to take the train in to pick up a keyboard for my laptop. My employer won't repair the laptop or replace it, so I got a Dell keyboard for an old HP.

The IT guy is Albanian, and we had a very frank discussion about how shitty our employer is getting. I think he's not exactly capitalist but a little bit paranoid. They are rejiggering the benefits so that the lowest paid employees pay less for the mid-tier plan, and higher -paid folks pay more, but they are very cagey about how they explain it which makes me think that the highest paid people are just getting raises and the middle-tier folks are getting screwed somehow.

But they've gotten across the idea in people's heads that you should pay less for insurance if you make less...sign me up for Medicare please

Asshole driving is surely one of the worst post-pandemic trends.

I've noticed this sort of thing. I've tried not to draw any conclusions about it because in 2020 I started working from home full-time and got a car. On the one hand, I'm getting out a lot less; on the other, I'm doing it differently. I couldn't ignore the possibility that it was always like that and I just never noticed. How scientifically rigorous of me.

|| In another episode of 'everything Trump touches dies' district court judge Reggie Walton has vacated the court martial of Bowe Bergdahl. https://ecf.dcd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show_public_doc?2021cv0418-25 |>

Basically, the military judge applied for an executive branch job, misled Bergdahl's team about that, and included his opinion denying Bergdahl's motion to dismiss for Trump's public pronouncements as his writing sample in his application. Which might have been ok if Trump hadn't made such a big deal about what an awful person he thinks Bergdahl is.

House hearings today on whether the US government has had football-field-sized alien spaceships in its possession for the last few decades and been keeping them a secret, or, alternately, hasn't.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2023/jul/26/ufo-hearing-congress-david-grusch-whistleblower-live-updates

They keep them in Ohio, outside Dayton.

The government also is keeping secret the shrink ray they use to hide the ships in innocuous cupboards. They only look like toys.