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bryanrasmussentoday at 7:40 PM2 repliesview on HN

there are incredibly wide swathes of society which go on about modern decadence and have outsized respect for violence as being somehow ennobling. As an example some people think the tough guys of the past who killed each other over women's handkerchiefs were real men and possessed of emotions more potent than those of the girly men that exist nowadays. This is not necessarily what was being claimed, just that there are claims like that so not sure why anyone crossing similar regions needs to be thought an LLM.

That said >it makes no sense to say that artists don't have emotions today that can compare to...rowdy Venetians beating the shit out of each other.

The rowdy Venetians beating the shit out of each other came from a society with strict rules about honor and dueling, and they dueled over honor.

So I'm not sure if the artists of today do have emotions that compare to the particular emotions that were very common in a society with duels for honor that had a significantly different economic and educational system than our own.

Sure we're all humans, but we're not all exactly the same despite that.


Replies

goodmythicaltoday at 8:24 PM

>The gang members beating the shit out of each other come from a community with strict rules about honor and fighting, and they fight over honor.

Are you so certain that there are no longer groups with strict rules that feature individuals who enact violence upon each other over those rules?

Hell, they'll even fight over a lady wearing the wrong color, and fight in attempts to get ladies to wear their colors rather than the rivals'.

The act is perhaps less frequent, but I have no idea to the historical prevalence of such behavior as opposed to the prevalence of its existence in the media of the time. For instance, I am sure that there were not all that many people rescuing fair maidens from towers, but it crops up in the art of the time fairly often.

But, the prevalence of the behavior is not really at issue so much as the particular emotions which I think still exist given the example of gang members killing each other over women just as the Venetians of old did.

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bryanrasmussentoday at 7:48 PM

as an example - the Theme of Hamlet https://medium.com/luminasticity/the-theme-of-hamlet-3926a88...

sometime around the mid to late 1700s people started getting the idea that Hamlet was all about how he was a vacillating guy who could never come to a decision because the play's stated reasons for doing things were no longer believable, that is to say The Character Hamlet had significantly different emotions and opinions on things that we cannot understand or accept as stated.