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One of the achievements of Deadwood (the show) was to portray idealized American free speech culture as it might plausibly have “worked.” Swearengen, Bullock etc do communicate and think together but in a mode circumscribed by the ever- present threat of escalation to violence
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It’s a definite improvement over say Arab or Afghan style honor culture speech (which tends far more empty and ceremonial-phatic) but it’s not… statue heads debating in the Polis or even an agora/“marketplace” of ideas-haggling some seem to imagine.
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Honor culture language tends to be very good at 2 modes: trash talk and lyrical poetry. Expect to see a lot more of both on here in coming months.
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“Reasonable” discourse norms tend to be bourgeois. Not much at stake, low upside/downside, meaningful conversation exit options, low cost to disagreement (“this town ain’t big enough for the both of us” is rare in risk-averse suburbia).
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Low on poetry, mockery, and trash-talk, high in insight-porn trading, trying to surprise each other, verbal wit, and reveling in existential absurdity, paradox etc. High-culture version looks more like TED talks than rap battles.
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The best-case outcome here (still hopeful for that) is simply one set of elite-endorsed discourse norms displacing another relatively peacefully. Worst case is of course not much talk, lots of escalation to violent endgames. Internet of Beefs: Ultimate Edition.
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Which set of discourse norms is more epistemologically robust (ie better at slowly discovering more truth and separating signal from noise) across more situations is something each of us has to decide as a leap of faith.
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Going by Deadwood and real examples I don’t think this is true. An armed society is a creative brinkmanship society not a polite one. People get *very* good at pushing insults and mockery right up to the line of violence without crossing it.
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Replying to @vgr
I mean ... an armed society is a polite society
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A good illustration of that is Good Fellas scene “I amuse you?” Joe Pesci scene. Honor culture prizes and rewards verbal dexterity that stops short of violence. To be unskilled at that is to be clueless even if you can shoot faster.
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It is a white-collar educated bourgeois conceit that honor cultures are somehow linguistically inferior. They’re not, they’re just linguistically skilled in different ways. I’m terrible at trash talk and insults for eg.
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(all my direct experience of brinkmanship honor culture language is street Hindi and the examples don’t translate well… I’m better at it in Hindi but still don’t actually enjoy it)
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This is my mental model of American free speech. All brodowns all the time, basically. With varying levels of poetic-lyrical skill in the brinkmanship.
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