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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MaxKaladin" data-source="post: 2550519" data-attributes="member: 1196">A thought that strikes me (no pun intended) about the whole violence discussion.  It seems to me that this sort of thing is why many cultures developed codes of conduct of various kinds.  On the one hand, they recognized that they couldn't have everyone just running around using violence whenever they felt like it.  On the other hand, they also realized that if there was no means of response to provocation (of whatever kind), it simply gave people a license to say and do whatever they wanted short of physical violence.  They made an attempt to achieve some sort of balance between the two.  I think that balance is what our society is missing.  There is legal recourse for verbal abuse in our society, but the leal processes involved are so expensive and time consuming that they are rarely used and this gives rude people license to be rude since they know they will rarely be called to task for it in any meaningful way.  I am reminded of the worst bullies I had to deal with when I was a kid.  It wasn't the ones who tried to beat me up.  It was the ones who used verbal abuse and other annoyance techniques to make my life miserable.  They had become masters of knowing just where the line between verbal and physical confrontation was and staying just on the safe side of it because they knew they wouldn't be punished in any significant way for verbal abuse (an admonishment to "cut it out" was about the worst they could expect from most adults) and they knew that the punishment inflicted on anyone who resorted to violence was severe enough to make me extremely reluctant to resort to violence to try to stop them.  In effect, the rules designed to protect people from physical violence also served to protect the bullies.  I'm not trying to argue those rules should be done away with, but that they create another problem that needs to be addressed.</blockquote>

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