Case #000: Houseman vs Harrington

penny wrote:My second concern is the question of who is potentially on the list of being subject to this archaic barbaric concept of honor? The Prime Minister? The Queen? Can any 'yahoo' simply go on the faxes and goad anyone into a duel? Do words hurt? Do words kill? Honor goaded Summervale into a duel by slapping him. If physical abuse is the only way to goad someone into a duel, then nobody is going to get close enough to goad the Queen. It is obvious that physical abuse is not the only method of impugning someones honor. As a matter of fact, who actually impugned Honor's honor? Summervale or Pavel Young? It was simply a job as far as Summervale was concerned. Dueling was his profession.

But I digress. Is the act of verbally impugning someones honor publically, enough to initiate the need for the impugned to challenge, lest risk to their honor? In which case, one could publically announce appalling “unspeakables” about the Queen. Is the Queen immune from losing her honor; from having to issue a challenge? Regardless of the fact that I think the Queen has some surprises in store for a potential duelist with her weapon of choice. Her sword!

[/quote]First I agree that dueling should not be part of a modern society and I wish it would go away on Manticore and Grayson (though AFAIK those are limited to swords, and only available to Steadholders challenging a Protector's decree).

As to your question, the physical slap was not necessary. (Correctly, or I guess plausibly) accusing Denver Summervale of being a professional duelist was more than enough to force him to challenge Honor. The slap just moved things along and overcame his initial shock.

In that situation declining would have been tantamount to admitting the accusation. If nothing else, refusing to challenge Honor would have ended his career as a professional duelist because his tacit admission to being one would be honorable grounds for anybody else to decline his attempts to duel. (You can't be dishonored by the dishonorable)

However you couldn't just go up to a random person on the street and provoke a duel by accusing them of being a professional duelist (for one thing they've probably never fought a duel). And generally the person who has been offended against is free to ignore the offense, or to back out of the duel, with no real perceived loss of honor.
So you can't count on insulting someone to provoke a duel.
And your claim of dishonor, if you challenge them, must be plausible or believable; else there's no dishonor in refusing the challenge. So just those make it somewhat difficult to randomly challenge key military or government folks.


And then, as tlb mentioned, there are legal limits that prohibit some duels. Two more that the (sometimes drunken) wiki reminds me of are:
1) It is illegal to duel journalists,
2) It is illegal to challenge an opposing party in an existing litigation matter.

And there may be more limits that RFC hasn't had reason to share with us. For example I assume it's illegal to challenge a minor. (Clearly though you can challenge a member of the House of Lords, Pavel was one - so there can't be a blanket ban on any challenge of a government person; but conceivably there could be restrictions on who can challenge a sitting Lord. Or restrictions on challenging cabinet members. We just don't know)

penny wrote:The issues that bother me so much probably stem from my unfair assessment that dueling is simply something that appears to be an archaic throwback to justice, and that it gives me the impression of being barbaric. To be honest with the forum and simultaneously remain true to myself, I personally view dueling as being downright barbaric.

Lots of Manticorans think the same. As far as I remember, even Honor did not like the dueling laws.

"Ah yea, but if she didn't like duels, why did she provoke two of them herself?" - Well, if duels had been illegal, Paul would still be alive, and she would have had no reason to go into those duels.

penny wrote:I always thought that the SL's label of Neobarb is born out of this same a8/rchaic tradition.

I like that one.

penny wrote:Continuing along that line of thought, I was, and remain, shocked that the MBS and its Queen, would allow such an archaic and dangerous tradition to continue! The danger to the Star Kingdom, now Star Empire, is that it allows a Manticoran citizen to legally execute anyone he so desires. Denver Summervale was a professional duelist. Pavel Young hired him. But what if Summervale or either another far more accomplished professional duelist decides to systematically and legally eliminate certain members of the government and navy for his own purposes or political party's benefit?

Maybe her duels (and the fact that no aristocrat can feel safe of her), together with the fact that the majorities in the parliament changed again, could actually bring up a majority to change the laws, now, as the war is over, and Manticore can start to think about other problems again.

penny wrote:An important consideration being overlooked is that Honor could have been killed. Legally. That would have been a huge loss to the war effort; then and in the future. Moreover, what if certain members of political parties are goaded into a duel and begin to die? Same question for key officers of the navy. White Haven could not have defeated Summervale. This archaic law and tradition could “disappear” the Star Kingdom’s best officers faster than Saint Just's regime “disappeared” its officers.

She could have been killed by the assassins hired by Pavel Young. And she could have been killed back on Basilisk Station, in a situation she'd been maneuvered by Pavel Young.

With all the blackmailing happening in the House of Lords about the declarationn of war, a lot of them didn't care, it seems. Even after the first attack by Haven, when it should have been very clear that the war will come.

Stupid Morons are everywhere.

markusschaber wrote:
With all the blackmailing happening in the House of Lords about the declarationn of war, a lot of them didn't care, it seems. Even after the first attack by Haven, when it should have been very clear that the war will come.

Stupid Morons are everywhere.

And I think we can thank Haven's normal MO for that. Haven had been planning their actions for over 60 years and steadily laying the groundwork for it. Look back to King Roger assassination - they already had prominent Political figures in their employ. add in 50+ more years, they have been lobbying, building political rifts and ossifing positions that entire time. They have created the conditions for the right "Useful Idiots" to rise to power, chosen the right mouthpieces to parrot their propoganda, while building Echo chambers around the "wrong" political thinkers.

What you get are people who, even though not affiliated with your movement in any way, can parrot a position favorable to you and back that position up with facts (Which were carefully seeded over years).

Haven was a master at this and had brought down government after government by slowly erroding political structures, propping up friendly politicians, or just the useful, but useless, dupes, with the odd assassination - er, I mean statistically anomalous accident - of a prominent opposition figure.

The Fleet in the Orbits was merely the last phase - decades of groundwork had been laid to make sure the fleet was accepted with open arms - or the most inept opposition possible.

penny wrote:I always thought that the SL's label of Neobarb is born out of this same archaic tradition.

Probably not specifically out of Manticore having a tradition of dueling -- after all the the League seems to apply to label to everybody beyond the Shell. (And that's if they're feeling generous; otherwise they probably apply if to a fair number of Shell planets too)

That said, traditions like dueling probably reinforce that stereotype. But I suspect it arose more from the number of colonies that had significant technological backsliding -- plus all the STL colony ships that were arriving post hyper-drive and so even their colony's starting tech base was centuries behind the League's.

It's easy to look at a low tech, or regressed tech, frontier world (many of which seem to have abandoned democracy) and think of them as "lesser than", or "uncivilized". That kind of thought is where I'd assume the tag "neobarb" arose from. (And it probably arose long before Jason arrived at Landing)

penny wrote:I always thought that the SL's label of Neobarb is born out of this same archaic tradition.

Jonathan_S wrote:Probably not specifically out of Manticore having a tradition of dueling -- after all the the League seems to apply to label to everybody beyond the Shell. (And that's if they're feeling generous; otherwise they probably apply if to a fair number of Shell planets too)

That said, traditions like dueling probably reinforce that stereotype. But I suspect it arose more from the number of colonies that had significant technological backsliding -- plus all the STL colony ships that were arriving post hyper-drive and so even their colony's starting tech base was centuries behind the League's.

It's easy to look at a low tech, or regressed tech, frontier world (many of which seem to have abandoned democracy) and think of them as "lesser than", or "uncivilized". That kind of thought is where I'd assume the tag "neobarb" arose from. (And it probably arose long before Jason arrived at Landing)

Plus there are pirates and wars out in the frontier while the League is civilized and safe. The frontier, whether it was the colonies in our past or the "newly" settled planets in the Honorverse, are always going to be considered "wild and wooly and full of fleas, never been curried {i.e. combed} below the knees".

Jonathan_S wrote:

penny wrote:I always thought that the SL's label of Neobarb is born out of this same archaic tradition.

Probably not specifically out of Manticore having a tradition of dueling -- after all the the League seems to apply to label to everybody beyond the Shell. (And that's if they're feeling generous; otherwise they probably apply if to a fair number of Shell planets too)

That said, traditions like dueling probably reinforce that stereotype. But I suspect it arose more from the number of colonies that had significant technological backsliding -- plus all the STL colony ships that were arriving post hyper-drive and so even their colony's starting tech base was centuries behind the League's.

It's easy to look at a low tech, or regressed tech, frontier world (many of which seem to have abandoned democracy) and think of them as "lesser than", or "uncivilized". That kind of thought is where I'd assume the tag "neobarb" arose from. (And it probably arose long before Jason arrived at Landing)

Low tech or regressed tech never applied to the MBS, except perhaps when the MBS was first founded. Would the SL have been privy to Manticoran tech in the early era of their founding before WHs? I never agreed that the SL was not aware that the same metric that was applied to other colonies could not be applied to the MBS, at the end of the day. Especially since a much smaller MBS stood up to the much larger Haven, at the end of the day; in spite of Haven having access to SL tech, at times. The only criteria left to paint them, or continue to paint them, as neobarbs, IMO, is their archaic form of justice. I suppose one could argue that old habits and biases die hard. But as far as the MBS, I would tend to think their barbaric form of justice bears more weight than anything else as far as deserving that label. Even moreso than the many other low tech colonies scattered about the galaxy.

Would someone define "professional duelist?"

penny wrote:Would someone define "professional duelist?"

Easy, someone paid to kill people by tricking them into a duel. Obviously they need to be very good at shooting people in order to make a profession of doing this. A prime example is Denver Summervale, as noted in OBS:

Chapter 14 wrote:. It had been a business transaction, nothing more, he told himself, and knew he lied. Oh, it had been business, and the money his secret sponsor had slipped him had cleared his debts . . . for a time. Until the next time. But the sensual thrill of knowing, even as Scott crumpled, that his bullet had blown his target's aristocratic heart apart—that had been his true reward. And the reason it had been so easy to accept the next assignment, and the next.
Yet in the end, the very people he hated with all his soul had won. "Professional duelist," they'd called him, when all the time they'd meant "paid killer." And they'd been right. He admitted that here in the quiet, empty room. But he'd killed too many of them, even when his sponsors would have been willing to settle for a wound. The blood taste had been too sweet, the aura of fear too heady, and finally the Corps had had enough.
He'd killed a "brother officer"—as if the uniform a dead man wore should matter! He wasn't the first serving officer to do so, but there were too many bodies in his past, too many families that owed too many debts. They couldn't try him for murder, for duels were legal. He'd faced his opponent's fire, and they couldn't prove he'd accepted money for it. But they'd all known the truth, and they could bring up his entire record: his gambling, his women, the adulterous affairs he'd used to lure targets onto the field, the arrogance he'd let color his relations with senior officers as the terror of his reputation grew. And that had been enough to find him "unfit to wear the Queen's uniform"

penny wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Probably not specifically out of Manticore having a tradition of dueling -- after all the the League seems to apply to label to everybody beyond the Shell. (And that's if they're feeling generous; otherwise they probably apply if to a fair number of Shell planets too)

That said, traditions like dueling probably reinforce that stereotype. But I suspect it arose more from the number of colonies that had significant technological backsliding -- plus all the STL colony ships that were arriving post hyper-drive and so even their colony's starting tech base was centuries behind the League's.

It's easy to look at a low tech, or regressed tech, frontier world (many of which seem to have abandoned democracy) and think of them as "lesser than", or "uncivilized". That kind of thought is where I'd assume the tag "neobarb" arose from. (And it probably arose long before Jason arrived at Landing)

Low tech or regressed tech never applied to the MBS, except perhaps when the MBS was first founded. Would the SL have been privy to Manticoran tech in the early era of their founding before WHs? I never agreed that the SL was not aware that the same metric that was applied to other colonies could not be applied to the MBS, at the end of the day. Especially since a much smaller MBS stood up to the much larger Haven, at the end of the day; in spite of Haven having access to SL tech, at times. The only criteria left to paint them, or continue to paint them, as neobarbs, IMO, is their archaic form of justice. I suppose one could argue that old habits and biases die hard. But as far as the MBS, I would tend to think their barbaric form of justice bears more weight than anything else as far as deserving that label. Even moreso than the many other low tech colonies scattered about the galaxy.

Would someone define "professional duelist?"

I think you're overthinking how much thought a League citizen puts into labeling someone neobarb. They're out beyond the rim of civilization (aka The League) so they're all lumped together as "neobarbs".

It's a derogatory stereotype - and those don't exactly need to be accurate to be used; and I'd bet that most SL folks don't need to, or care to, know anything about the accuracy of the assessment. They'll think of systems out that far and neobarbs whether accurate or not (for that particular system). (And when the systems or their citizens do something to annoy the person from the SL; that makes then "uppity neobarbs". Insults and derogatory terms have no need to be literally true or make logical sense )


As for "professional duelist" -- that would be a criminal (as it is illegal to be paid to duel someone).

Specifically one with the skills to win duels and who lets it be known discretely through the underworld that they're willing to (in exchange for lucrative off the books compensating) entrap the chosen target into such a duel. (And to, if requested, or in Denver's case because he wants to, to kill said target during the duel)

Presumably they charge significant amounts of money for this as there are only so many lifetime duels they could plausibly have in their "career" before it become obvious that they're a habitual duelist. Just that being known might be enough to allow their targets to begin declining duels without any significant loss of perceived honor.

penny wrote:Low tech or regressed tech never applied to the MBS, except perhaps when the MBS was first founded. Would the SL have been privy to Manticoran tech in the early era of their founding before WHs? I never agreed that the SL was not aware that the same metric that was applied to other colonies could not be applied to the MBS, at the end of the day. Especially since a much smaller MBS stood up to the much larger Haven, at the end of the day; in spite of Haven having access to SL tech, at times. The only criteria left to paint them, or continue to paint them, as neobarbs, IMO, is their archaic form of justice. I suppose one could argue that old habits and biases die hard. But as far as the MBS, I would tend to think their barbaric form of justice bears more weight than anything else as far as deserving that label. Even moreso than the many other low tech colonies scattered about the galaxy.

Jonathan_S wrote:I think you're overthinking how much thought a League citizen puts into labeling someone neobarb. They're out beyond the rim of civilization (aka The League) so they're all lumped together as "neobarbs".

It's a derogatory stereotype - and those don't exactly need to be accurate to be used; and I'd bet that most SL folks don't need to, or care to, know anything about the accuracy of the assessment. They'll think of systems out that far and neobarbs whether accurate or not (for that particular system). (And when the systems or their citizens do something to annoy the person from the SL; that makes then "uppity neobarbs". Insults and derogatory terms have no need to be literally true or make logical sense )

If the League were so aware of Manticore's technology, then perhaps they would have been more cautious about getting into a shooting war. They were not impressed by standing up to Haven, that was just another sign of being a neobarb. Here is an exchange from Shadow of Saganami:

Chapter 9 wrote:"I know Ragnhild has relatives in the shipping industry, but I don't know about any of the rest of you. I can tell you this, though—Uncle Stefan isn't the only person I've heard talk about how much some of the Solly freight lines hate us. And Frontier Security thinks of us as a bunch of neobarbs with delusions of grandeur. You mix that all up into a single ball of snakes, and God knows what you'll get out of it! Just don't expect it to be good."
"Leo's got a point," Ragnhild said, her expression more worried than it had been. "We're used to thinking of the Star Kingdom as a star nation, a military and economic power, and it is. But compared to the League, we're tiny. It wouldn't take much for some overconfident, greedy, bigoted Solly—wouldn't even necessarily have to be an OFS stooge, either—to do something outstandingly stupid."

-- skip --

"If you were the captain of a Queen's ship in Silesia, and a Manticoran merchant or merchant skipper told you he'd been robbed, or cheated, or mistreated, or threatened by a Confederate Navy captain, how would you react?"
"But—" Aikawa began, only to be cut off by Helen.
"Paulo's right," she said, although it irritated her to admit it. "The situations probably wouldn't be at all the same, but that's exactly the way it would seem to an SLN skipper. Because Leo's right about how the Sollies think of us. I've been to Old Earth and seen it myself. In some ways, it's even worse than for the 'neobarbs' who don't have such close contact with Sol." She grimaced. "You know my dad was still in uniform when we were there, right?"
Heads nodded, and her grimace turned even sourer.
"Well, we were at a party one night, and I overheard this woman—I found out later she was a Solly assemblywoman, no less—pointing Daddy out to one of her friends and saying 'Look at that. He looks just like he belongs to a real navy, doesn't he?'"

"Neobarb" is an interesting term, Admiral Sir Edward Janacek, First Lord of Admiralty, uses it when referring to the Graysons in War of Honor.

Jonathan_S wrote:
I think you're overthinking how much thought a League citizen puts into labeling someone neobarb. They're out beyond the rim of civilization (aka The League) so they're all lumped together as "neobarbs".

It's a derogatory stereotype - and those don't exactly need to be accurate to be used; and I'd bet that most SL folks don't need to, or care to, know anything about the accuracy of the assessment. They'll think of systems out that far and neobarbs whether accurate or not (for that particular system). (And when the systems or their citizens do something to annoy the person from the SL; that makes then "uppity neobarbs". Insults and derogatory terms have no need to be literally true or make logical sense )

The Song "Yankee Doodle" comes to mind. It was a derogatory song, referring to the backwards clothing and lifestyles of the Americans by the Britons during the Revolutionary war. Feathers on clothing had gone out of style years earlier in Britain and current fashion followed then Italian norms (and thus called in slang "Macaroni"). So, by donning feathers on clothing and calling it the height of fashion, An American was showing how behind the times we was, while he rode on his poor, undersized pony (without even riding in a carriage) to the "Big City". We Americans adopted it as a matter of perverse pride.

As Carley Simon said, "you're so vain - you probably think this song is about you." I guess we did....

However, That's the same sentiment as the Britt's, just in different setting. Helen referred to it in reference to her disdain for the Sollies - At a diplomatic dinner, Anton showed up in his Navy Captain's mess dress with full medals, and Helen heard a random Sollie woman standing near her say something to the effect "Look at that overpuffed Neobarb officer in his fancy uniform - you would almost think he's serving in a "real" navy."

Any body else want Italian?