Fighting Words, Not Fighting Words

General
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So, it is suggested that I do not understand the fighting words doctrine.

To which I must respond that the problem is that you are thinking of the fighting words doctrine, not the fighting words doctrine. 🙂

Or, to clarify:

Under American law, the fighting words doctrine is a highly circumscribed, restricted list of insults direct that are so very likely to promote an immediate affray that they are not protected by the First Amendment.

Under Imperial law, the fighting words doctrine is a highly circumscribed, restricted list of insults direct that are so very likely to promote an immediate affray that the speaker of them1 does not get to complain, sue over, or initiate criminal proceedings about what happens next, on the grounds that they knew perfectly well what they were asking for and thus consented to the painful and bloody consequences.

And a mutually-agreed-upon ass-beating ain’t a breach of the Empress’s peace, y’see. Unless you insist on involving bystanders, causing property damage, or frightening the horse-analogs.

 

  1. Or, for that matter, their estate.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://eldraeverse.com/2015/12/04/fighting-words-not-fighting-words
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So I’m a bit confused by this and how it fits under Imperial freedom of speech laws. Okay the Imperial government isn’t directly forbidding or punishing freedom of speech by exercising legal penalties on the speaker but seems like it is indirectly suppressing freedom of speech by saying “we’re allowing whoever you insulted to hurt/kill our and we’re not going to do anything to punish them”. What happens if someone wishes to express their belief about some with a statement like “your mother was a pig-fucking whore who gave birth to a chicken-fucking whore aka you.” or maybe not those exact words but words to a similar degree of contempt and disrespect, who honestly believes those words, and does not consent to getting punched in the face? How does that person who so sincerely abhors another person express those beliefs without having to give up their right to not be physically assaulted for expressing such things in a public forum?

It seems an odd exception to the eldraeic principle that you are responsible for all of your own actions and self-control is the most important virtue a sophont can have, except for if someone says something very insulting to you face then you can pummel them without consequence. I’m sure you have a good answer, you are very good at providing good answers, but it seems somewhat perplexing in the absence of a good answer.

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On the fighting words doctrine itself, you may have missed the note that it relates to “a highly circumscribed, restricted list of insults direct” which are sufficiently extreme as to lead immediately to an affray. This is merely the legal application of the maxim that one shouldn’t issue orders one knows won’t be obeyed.

(Everyone knows that saying something like, for example, “you wear a collar![1]” is simply a discourteous way to involve someone else in your suicide, and the law acknowledges that it can’t change that.)

On the greater question of freedom of speech: on the one hand, the Imperial governance does not infringe upon the freedom of speech (save in the exceedingly limited case of books which write you back), per Section III Article IV of the Charter; and Imperial society in general maintains a much stronger free speech culture than we do and will not punish you for having or expressing unconventional or unpopular opinions. At most, it won’t invite you to the better sort of parties any more.

However, you are guaranteed freedom of speech, not freedom from all possible consequences of speech, and if you weaponize your words - which is essentially what an insult is - then you are expected to understand that people can and will fight back.

What happens if someone wishes to express their belief about some with a statement like “your mother was a pig-fucking whore who gave birth to a chicken-fucking whore aka you.” or maybe not those exact words but words to a similar degree of contempt and disrespect, who honestly believes those words, and does not consent to getting punched in the face?

Then you’re someone who doesn’t know how the game is played. If you have truth on your side, use it. If you don’t have truth, use subtlety. And if you don’t have either, for the love of gods, shut the hell up. Practice the gentle art of the cut, that socially acceptable form of hostility.

You just violated propriety and social harmony in a big way, are already one step behind for discourteousness, crudity, and lack of self-possession, and handed whoever you just insulted a hand-written invitation to avenge themselves upon you in a manner that will probably lead to them gaining reputational assets. This was, not to put too fine a point on it, a Bad Move.

(And for goodness sake, don’t start bringing people’s relatives into your insults. Doing that grossly multiplies the number of people who have sustainable causes of action against you. Your target’s grandmother doesn’t play.)

But you don’t get punched in the face. This is a civilized society.

You are told that “I cannot imagine what I have done to deserve this abuse, but my second and my barrister are at your disposal, sir”.

You are now dangling from the tines of a most uncomfortable Morton’s fork. Your options are the following:

(a) Accept the duel, and risk being gutted like a fish (literally);

(b) Accept the lawsuit - not that you have a whole lot of choice in the matter if you refuse the duel - and risk being gutted like a fish (metaphorically);

(c) Make your very best sincere formal public apology to your target, to witnesses, and to society in general, and accept the fish-guttingly painful social costs of your fuck-up;

(d) Flee into exile[2], knowing that Society will be using you as an instructive example of what not to do for as long as memory remains; or

(e) Endure a life of shame, disgrace, and misery as someone with no place in polite society any more, which is particularly awkward considering that the Empire doesn’t have an impolite society. Being a daryteir has rules, and you can’t break them without consequences. This is your personal hell now[3]. Climbing back out of it will not be easy.

tl;dr If you thought the Curia was merciless, it’s got nothing on the Way.

  1. To steal a perfectly cromulent example from one of the later Dune books. ↩︎

  2. If your family really likes you otherwise and isn’t determined to garden its public face, you may end up a low-budget remittance man. If you’re, say, an Amanyr or a Sargas, you won’t even make it to the starport before the disownment catches up with you. ↩︎

  3. And your grandmother is very likely to be its devil-in-chief. ↩︎

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Given the sheer variety within the galaxy, I’m sure somewhere there is a culture where collars are high fashion and seen as a mark of skill at crafting, and where they’re absolutely boggled at the concept that anyone could use them for something as foul as slavery.

And that every visitor guide to the greater Worlds makes sure to flag this prominently for Imperial visitors. Underlined. In bold. Nobody desires unfortunate misunderstandings.

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To expand on and clarify this a little, as I’ve thought of a way to do so: on Earth, two things that never coexisted were a dueling culture and the notion that truth is a perfect defense to defamation - back in the days of Earthly dueling culture, you weren’t supposed to say bad things about your social peers or superiors even if they were true.

In Imperial culture, truth is a perfect defense to defamation, and defamation, not insult per se, is cause for a duel. In short, if you can back up your words with truth, you can assert it, refuse the duel, keep your honor, and gain reputation by so doing.

So as long as you are speaking the truth, the Imperial dueling culture doesn’t impair your freedom of speech one bit. If you’re not, or are just throwing out insults without backing them up, then it would by current US standards, but “the freedom of speech is not and cannot be the freedom to deceive” has been a black-letter legal maxim there since sometime before the year 0, so it doesn’t by theirs.

Thus, for example, proper investigative journalism survives pretty well under these conditions, but yellow journalism gets stabbed. A lot.

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Couldn’t happen to people (using the term loosely) more deserving of it.

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I’d argue that the beings behind yellow journalism should always be considered people, for if they were not people that could implicitly absolve such beings of responsibility for their actions, as only people have true moral and ethical responsibility for their acts. As such those entities which publish such things are people, horrible people, but people nonetheless, because they are responsible for the things they do and do not deserve to insulted in such a manner that even remotely implicitly absolves them of their actions. People who are scum deserve to be treated as both people and scum always, never merely scum. Being merely scum is an improvement of status they are undeserving of.

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I am reminded of that quotation from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe:

“The people! The things!”

“The things are also people.”

“Oh, yes… The people! The also people!”

It may or may not be true that in certain OIP field offices, there is a sign pinned up on the notice board reading, in its entirety, “the scum are also people”.

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I had to use the search function to figure out that “OIP” probably is a reference to the “Office of Investigation and Pursuit”. You’re free to use whatever terms you wish especially given you’re the creator of the site and all the lore within it, but personally I think you should either not use acronyms for such a relatively obscure aspect of the Eldraeverse or use an acronym but also include the full term in something like say parentheses(like this). Especially because a large amount of the site, posts, and lore are inaccessible to the search function due to the slow transfer of data to the new site framework and thus accessibility to the search function. I had no idea what OIP meant and if the search function hadn’t turned up results I would still be clueless. For the sake of newcomers and the otherwise ignorant, it might be best to avoid abbreviations that don’t make sense to those not already in the know.

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A note: It has come up in a number of recent conversations hereabouts, I believe.

A second note: The search function on this site works just fine, in the interim, and has almost all the same data.

But really, I must regretfully inform you that, thunder your jeremiads as you may, I have been living with this universe and ADHD cohabiting in my head for thirty years or so now, and between them there is not even the sprinkling of a snifter of a possibility that it will ever occur to me when posting that other people might not be familiar with the same things that I’m familiar with. Inconvenient as it is, brain just won’t do it. Sorry.

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