So, you’ve been challenged to a duel. What are the rules? (2016)
blogs.loc.gov
blogs.loc.gov
Article in French with a picture of the duel, fought with swords: https://www.lemonde.fr/m-moyen-format/article/2017/04/21/il-...
"le facétieux Defferre ne manquait pas de rappeler qu’il avait visé l’entrejambe de son adversaire pour lui gâcher sa nuit de noces, celui-ci se mariant le lendemain."
Essentially: "I aimed between his legs to spoil his wedding night", as one of the MPs was due to wed the day after the duel.
But I found an english article about it, for those of us whose french is a bit rusty:
https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/69224/how-can-a-t...
It is also an extremely stupid idea that scars are somehow an "authentic mark". As somebody who fought three of those "mensuren": Scars are a sign that you thought you are better than you actually are. It's the embodiment of "Dunning Kruger walks here".
Even when you don't lose in your pro career, these are the ears of an undefeated champion: https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-13f49281504e1359e87fec...
However you can easily prevent your ears from "cauliflowering" after severe ear trauma if you drain the accumulated blood before it dries completely out after 2-3 days.
At some point if you train a lot some soft/protruding parts of your ears will harden a bit and some edges aren't as smooth as before but it isn't really noticeable to other people.
In the past, programmers submitted all sorts of junk code into our version control, what I would today call chatgpt nonsense. At the time it was likely Stack Overflow nonsense. In any case, Code Review Dueling has changed the landscape of our coding. For the past two years, not a single negative comment has appeared on code pull requests. All it took was the deaths of a few unqualified people who lied on their resumes.
This "old is new" methodology has caused programmers and architects to work with other people before ever writing code or designing systems. In our monthly metrics report from the CI (but not CD) pipeline, I also noticed that we no longer import any dependencies from 3rd parties. In fact, IT has shutdown all access to pip, apt-get, and so forth. Everything is custom and has been beautifully designed and coded in-house.
It's absolutely amazing. Even our customers regularly request they be allowed to purchase extra copies of our software, just to give to their children and grandchildren, when they come of age. But before purchasing extra copies, they always call first, since our license lawyers are very prolific, proactive, and protective of our rights.
[1] https://www.livescience.com/25688-human-hands-evolved-fighti...
[2] https://cityhunt.com/conflict-resolution-team-building-activ...
Unless you think that an employer approving of employees killing each other is too far fetched ('it only took a few deaths...').
source: I was one of the people slain in the duels
There has been a duel two weeks ago in Erlangen that violated both these rules [2] - they fought for the honor of their corporation, with sharp swords and without protection. The clusterfuck ended with one minor and one major injury, now police are investigating and politicians are talking about banning duels entirely.
[1] http://www.corpsarchive.de/images/digiarchiv/bghstudnitz.pdf
Roughly: > The Autonomous Antifa Freiburg has released internal chats from that association which give more detail.
How does a local antifa group get access to internal chats of a Burschenschaft?
Or it got leaked on purpose by someone in the Burschenschaft pissed off about the duelers.
Basically the correct mental image is probably private societies in expensive English "public schools" (i.e. what most of the rest of the world would consider private schools: the kind you have to pay for), not US style "Greek houses".
It's worth noting that despite the similarities between völkisch nationalism and ethnonationalism, most Burschenschaften are explicitly opposed to the far right, at least in public statements. If you want to tie them to an anti-democratic movement it's probably more likely to be neo-feudalism (e.g. the Reichsbürger monarchists) than actual neo-nazis. There have been some instances of nazi chat groups within Burschenschaften being found out and members have been running for the far-right nationalist Alternative für Deutschland party however.
EDIT: Also, worth noting, schlagende Verbindungen, i.e. the ones engaging in ritualistic duels with sharp blades, are on the fringe of these groups and also veer to the right of those (I think most "moderate" Christian conservative ones are strongly opposed to the practice). So the entire dueling thing nowadays is a fringe of a fringe of a fringe and most Germans would feel very concerned if you tell them you engage in it.
In the book, the legality of this form of dueling seems to be justified by an absolute need for strength, and the survival of (only) the fittest, in order to adapt to the hostile environment that they live in.
When physical superiority stops being a necessity for the survival of the community, this type of dueling law becomes a problem.
Anyway though wasn't a major theme of the back half of that book that this practice was always wasteful and unbeneficial. That there is no situation where a community becomes stronger by losing a cunning leader to merely a stronger fighter. That this was possibly one of the ways their culture had been manipulated to make them fragmented and susceptible to control.
Yes, towards the end of the book Paul convinces the tribe to let go of the old "way" so that they can be as strong as possible for the (imminent) battle. They allow him to become their leader without killing Stilgar, the previous leader.
However, the book makes it very clear that the totally ruthless environment, culture, and way of life on Arrakis (and on Salusa Secundus) is the cause of the Fremen (and Sardaukar) making such vastly superior soldiers.
But of course that only matters over long stretches of time. Putting your infighting ways on hold temporarily when you are gearing up for a massive offensive would always make sense. "Do you smash your knife before battle?" Paul asks in his speech. So I don't think the point is that it "was always wasteful and unbeneficial", but that even if the ruthless duels were good for the tribe's fitness in the long term, right then it was more important that in the short term they needed all the strength they could get.
Yes but it's fiction. That's possibly true within the fictional world of the book because the author decided it would be.
In actual history that view is disproved time and time again and historical consensus view is that societies that are more interpersonally brutal and competitive are not stronger for it. See HN-favorite historian bret devereaux's 40,000 word essay on exactly this subject, using exactly the fremen as the focal point.
Oh I don't dispute whatever it is the historians are saying at all. I was simply arguing about what the themes of the book were, since that was what you were also talking about in your previous comment. Whether the themes of the book are scientific or not I don't know much about at all.
So I guess what you are saying is that Frank Herbert might have a more or less inaccurate take on social/political/historical science, which would not surprise me.
But then people realized you could have someone fight for you if they'd swear that your claim was true (IE, they'd be a witness). If you lost the duel, it would mean that you lied, making it perjury. So your equivalent of a lawyer would be some renowned fighter, undefeated in combat (since if you were defeated, you wouldn't be able to swear in as a witness).
It turned into situation where you'd use the person you hired as a negotiation tool (oh you hired "Bob the Barbarian" as your champion? Let's settle 60/40), so most challenges wouldn't even come down to a fight.
Dueling aside…
> Discredited by the duel with Hamilton, Burr sought to regain political power by a filibustering adventure, which led instead to his indictment for treason
I can't help but think dueling would make politics more honest. I would expect not many to be willing to die to defend their positions if these positions were just paid off by corporations.
People put their lives at risk for very little.
Adding on to what you said - I think it also depends on where you start. If you inherit wealth and/or good opportunities then why risk it, but if not then it would make a lot of sense. After all, lots of people voluntarily enlist in the military, and one factor is not having (m)any other options. (This isn't the only reason, nor is it a factor for everyone)
Plus, dueling / fighting is a skill. If you need people who are good at fighting in order to get legislation passed then the rich will hire skilled fighters to go be legislator-duelists for them.
I'm going to be honest: considering the smorgasbord of possible dystopias, this one sounds pretty rad.
Can we do cyberpunk corpocratic gladiatorial parliament? Anyone?
We might bring back more explicit ideas of classes… but I mean, at least any congressperson would have to be able to challenge any other, right? So we’d have candidates successfully running on “I’ll duel <lightning rod congressperson of the day>.”
I mean, that, on top of all the other reasons the idea of dueling is ridiculous, hahaha.
Duelling was a matter for gentlemen; men of honour. If you have no honour to defend, duelling is inappropriate.
A "gentleman" in England, at least, was a man with land, but no aristocratic title. Aristocrats often duelled, so I guess it's "gentlemen, and men of higher rank" that were thought honourable enough to duel with.
Most politicians deserve only to be horsewhipped.
This not-so-subtly hints at the levels of abuse that average people suffered at the hands of privileged classes.
I think there's something in that; if an insult causes you offence, you are implicitly granting that your abuser's opinion deserves consideration. A true gentleman would rise above it - a man of rank need not concern himself with the views of plebs. Plebs always insult gentlemen; if you horsewhipped them every time, you'd need a new horsewhip every week.
Swords were expensive things, you needed money to own one. And there were many laws restricting who was allowed to carry a sword and who wasn't.
Generally, a conflict is resolved with words and arguments. Only when that doesn't work, it's taken before a judge, where it's still resolved with words and arguments, but with a neutral and binding arbiter deciding who's right. After that, the conflict is resolved. No violence necessary. Only when one party violates that already legally binding resolution, come a lot more steps before violence may come in, but at no point do the people involved in the conflict themselves have to resort to violence.
There's nothing admirable about having to resort to violence. It's a sign of failure.
We’ve literally tested this theory and it did not.
> I would expect not many to be willing to die to defend their positions if these positions were just paid off by corporations.
Willingness to risk death for material gain is not, historically, hard to find among humans, and, anyhow, corporations and other interests groups already use the tactic of mass propaganda to build genuine belief in their desired positions and then funding candidates that are true believers, including to the point of being willing to lie about details to advance the broader cause that has been defined that serves the interest group sponsoring the propaganda; the fact that a position is ultimately corporate propaganda doesn’t mean that the politicians see it as just that (even if they recognize it as a lie, they may see it as a lie useful to advance something else they deeply believe in.)
Often, when some company as a whole does something bad, there is a crowd that yells "jail time for the CEO", and this is the reason I think it is not the solution. If CEOs risked jail time for every bad thing the company does, it would select for scapegoat CEOs more willing to risk jail time (or even death) than more honest/competent CEOs.
Note that like with anyone else, if the bad thing is question is a crime and personal responsibility is established, the CEO can go to jail, it has already happened. I am more thinking about company-wide problems, like labor law violations, anticompetitive parctices or misuse of personal data where everyone involved in the company is a little bit responsible: management for giving orders, employees for following them, the board for choosing that management, investors and customers for supporting that with their money.
this is literally 50 % of fascist ideology
In the musical the first step to having a Duel is to go across the river to Jersey, as it’s legal there (“everything is legal in Jersey”)
Another interesting part is that a doctor attends, and turns his back during the duel itself, in order to provide plausible deniability.
It was declining in the North (where it occurred), not so much in the South and elsewhere. The last notable political duel in the United States might be the Broderick-Terry duel in San Francisco in 1859.
Andrew Jackson fought in at least two, killing a man in 1806, and was later president.
Apparently, Mark Twain only narrowly escaped dueling with a rival newspaper editor (!) in 1864.
Given the accounts of folks taking bullets to the torso and surviving, it's hard to avoid concluding that dueling perhaps only continued because of the relative inefficacy (lower energy & accuracy) of firearms of the era. Jackson took a bullet to the CHEST and survived, as noted.
Came here just for the Hamilton reference tbh.
The show is in lots of ways built around those three duels, which makes sense given that the elephant in the room of any story about Hamilton and Burr is their ultimate duel.
The first duel, in December of 1778, is between Laurens and Charles Lee, who was challenged by Laurens for running down General Washington's leadership after being relieved of command for his failure at Monmouth. What makes this an inescapable part of the show, IMO, is that Hamilton was Laurens' second and Burr was Lee's. (Charles Lee took a bullet in the duel, but it wasn't apparently serious -- he lived until 1782, and probably died of tuberculosis.)
The second, famously, was between Hamilton's son and George Eacker, in 1801. (Eacker, too, died of TB, in 1804.)
Obviously, the final one was between Hamilton and Burr, in the summer of 1804.
The Duelists, 1977
France, 1801. Due to a minor perceived slight, mild-mannered Lieutenant d'Hubert is forced into a duel with hot-headed irrational Lieutenant Feraud. The disagreement ultimately results in scores of duels spanning several years.
There is also Ridley Scott's recent 'Last Duel', which is set farther in the past, in mediaeval France.
But that (his) first film (!) is exquisite imo. (Thanks for the Conrad heads-up.)
> In 2010 in the case of the State of Iowa vs Christopher Spates, the Supreme Court judge Justice Ternus states that Iowa only considers the mutual combat law if two combatants agree to the use of deadly weapons, so you can see how different the law varies from state to state.
https://law.justia.com/cases/iowa/supreme-court/2010/05-0883...
I wonder if the state would actually adhere to that judgement again.
Mutual combat laws apparently exist in many U.S. states - Texas, unsurprisingly, is one of them too.
That is not correct.
>...Since Lincoln was challenged by Shields he had the privilege of choosing the weapon of the duel. He chose cavalry broadswords "of the largest size." "I didn't want the d—-d fellow to kill me, which I think he would have done if we had selected pistols," he later explained. For his own part, he did not want to kill Shields, but "felt sure [he] could disarm him" with a blade. At six feet, four inches tall, Lincoln planned to use his height to his advantage against Shields, who stood at a mere five feet, nine inches tall.
>The day of the duel, September 22, arrived and the combatants met at Bloody Island, Missouri to face death or victory. As the two men faced each other, with a plank between them that neither was allowed to cross, Lincoln swung his sword high above Shields to cut through a nearby tree branch. This act demonstrated the immensity of Lincoln’s reach and strength and was enough to show Shields that he was at a fatal disadvantage. With the encouragement of bystanders, the two men called a truce.
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/abraham-lincolns...
While duels have been outlawed, I don't think we have really replaced the necessary role they play in managing disputes and incentivising a self organizing social correction in a way that rewards virtue and has consequences for dishonesty.
Ironically, the main thing that maintained social order in small groups up until recently was humor. It wasn't mere cutting remarks either, it's a subtle understanding of power dynamics in a group that lets humor equalize and revert to shared values. The unspoken rules of humor were pretty close to those of Code Duello, particularly regarding punching down, and accepting when you had been beaten - then moving on once order was re-established.
Duels provided a similar reversion to a shared understanding of order and values. These rules are still around in an implied way, where boys involved in sports or group activities tend to learn a variation of them, and someone who fights without an understanding or respect for them is considered just a criminal and not trustworthy, tough, or masculine.
Every boiling pot needs to relieve pressure. People need an outlet for their frustrations. Wars are far rarer, quite impersonal, and harder to shake off (as is the uniform). Even fistfight by consenting adults can get you in trouble. So many turn to crime.
Maybe there is room for a middle layer between anger and crime, between consenting adults with clear rules.
As far as I know there is almost no pre-qualification required for a private sparring session and even the qualification to be a professional is a very low bar (IIRC it is primarily a matter of eyesight, since you can't wear glasses in the ring).
It was also not uncommon for either or both combatants to simply fire their pistols into the air. Again, honor was generally deemed to be satisfied if this happened. This took some courage if you were the first one to fire into the air, as you were still required under the code to stand there and let the other guy take a shot at you if he so chose.
I'd guess the big danger for duelists would have been damage to internal organs or deep wounds becoming infected. Bullets could do this, as could the smallsword, a purely thrusting weapon which would have been the sword used in the 18th century. McBane (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_McBane) wrote of the difference between cutting and thrusting swords "the smallsword kills, yet you might take fifty cuts and not be disabled".
If McBane was telling the truth he certainly managed to get away with a large number of duels, though.
https://scholars-stage.org/honor-dignity-and-victimhood-a-to...
They can still commit crimes like usual.
They could even duel now, but don’t.
The actual problems of gang violence are endemic - poverty, trauma, systemic racism, underfunded education, poor nutrition, easy access to guns, lack of role models, the romanticizing of criminality in pop culture, to name a few. Nowhere on the list will you find "lack of clearly defined rules for setting order of initiative."
We do.
But other people reject that system.
And we (in the universal sense, in this case) also have a system of resolving that dispute, and it’s, in practice however much it gets gussied up in theory, to borrow a phrase, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”.
In fairness to your argument, I don’t think gang violence is a problem that can be reduced to zero, and think that there’s probably a low level equilibrium point that’s optimal for both parties (civil and non-civil society, for lack of better terms). So I’m probably not the audience for a total libertarian solution to the issue.
You can see a list of some US duels (and the participants involved) here [1]. The article also has some interesting backstory.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_duels#United_States
Looked at another way, traditionally only the upper class dueled, and that didn’t change when the capitalist class displaced the feudal aristocracy as the upper class.
[1] https://historyengine.richmond.edu/episodes/view/3655
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dueling_in_the_Southern_United...
[3] https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/31/4/race_crime_and_c...
Probably not. While a small part of gang violence deals with situations that might otherwise be handled by duels, a lot of it is more like war between factions which don’t happen to be states. Duels aren’t going to replace turf wars, even if they are legal.