Should dueling be legal?
Thursday, April 01, 2010
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10 comments:
Should dueling be legal? Heck, dueling should be mandatory. Then we'd have a real meritocracy.
No. It would open too many cans of worms, frankly.
Combine the worst elements of both the abortion issue and sex issues (was it consensual? is it consensual if one person was drinking beforehand?) and you'll find a lot of grey areas for attorneys for the losers' families to play in.
Normally, I'd say anything that's fun should be legal.
Except that nowadays, nobody has any honor (besides you and me and a few other people who could beat me up) and so stupid thugs would just go around killing whoever they think has dissed 'em.
But then again, that's what they do now, so it wouldn't really be a change, except that if dueling was legal, maybe a good guy would go kill those punks and then we'd all be better off.
But then again, if you went full-hog and legalized it with seconds and letters of offence and witnesses and everything, that could actually work out.
And then the gankers who camp and kill people without notice would still be prosecuted for murder and all is well.
I still think presidential elections should be a boxing match on Pay-per-View, or perhaps a more bloody alternate sport.
But then the Presidency might devolve to mere boxing champs.
So, how bout a rotating method of election, picked at random from a hat by a blindfolded monkey chosen at random from the National Zoo? There's a reason we have a National Zoo, y'know.
So, dueling and boxing are two methods, Scrabble a third, poker, and ooh a week or more of primitive survival in Alaska. Eating nuts and berries and raw fish, and seeing who survives the experience. Talk about exposure!
Of course, actual partisan debate would be one of the rotating alternatives, so the presidents would have to be experienced politicians.
"...you'll find a lot of grey areas for attorneys..."
Yeah, but shortly you wouldn't find so many attorneys.
It would be interesting to study the social history of dueling -- how it became unacceptable and that condemnation became codified into law.
Maybe it died a natural death when people realized an offense to ones honor or a supposed offense weren't worth killing a fellow human being. No I don't guess were there yet.
Did you catch the story on NPR recently about the debate in Kentucky around removing their pledge not to duel in their oath of office?
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124616129&ft=1&f=1003
Ooooh!
That'll get a Neatorama link tonight!
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