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Interesting. I suppose I'm guilty of conflating politeness and "civilizedness".
by tomjakubowski 8y ago
Interesting. I suppose I'm guilty of conflating politeness and "civilizedness".
- kurthr 8y agoExactly, it can apparently be perfectly polite to threaten to murder someone (shame if anything was to happen to you...), but not polite to use the wrong fork in your salad. I suppose it depends on what you think is polite. On the other hand, I think it's generally true that social solutions come up to problems that regularly present themselves, but we tend to forget about those formalisms that aren't often used. That doesn't imply the social solutions are particularly fair or globally effective. Imagine a situation where you almost never have to worry about another driver cutting you off in traffic, but you know your chance of being shot in a road rage incidence goes up 5x. Is it worth it and does the implied threat really more polite (eg in an emergency) ?