Bookworm on Nov 17 2009 at 12:04 pm | Filed under: Uncategorized
We’ve got to know how to protect ourselves against thuggery:
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Unfortunately, these people never seem to attack those like me or various other people I know. Also unfortunately, I really can’t use even my partial training [I make no claims that I am fully trained, only that it's astronomically better than being untrained] without being prosecuted for disproportional lethal force. So it wouldn’t matter even if they did attack me.
It wouldn’t be as bad as me pulling out a gun and shooting them in the head while they were on the concrete, but the effects would be similar.
What is different for me, however, is that there is no fear for me. This kind of monkey play is boring, although very entertaining and interesting on a human behavioral level. While most people in such situation would be worried about not getting hurt and staying away from the fight, my primary worry is that I will permanently cripple or kill my attacker when the situation would not warrant it. Actually, I don’t care about whether the situation warrants it or not. I care about legal repercussions.
To a certain extent, their behavior is akin to pirates. The regular military can’t retaliate against pirates, because the pirates then use civilian shields and excessive force must be employed to get to pirates past those shields. But when pirates are attacking, they only attack vulnerable unarmed merchants. The merchants have a legal and moral justification to terminate the pirates, but lack the firepower. If we someone with enough firepower uses it on pirates, then they will be blamed for immoral use of disproportionate force. So violence is like war, each party is looking for an unfair fight that provides them all the advantages and negates all the other guy’s advantages. Q ships would handle this, but excessive enforcement by the police or the President is going to do Zero: just like the O.
For a regular human male, if he sees somebody posturing or being aggressive and he decides to back down, there is a sufficient loss of ego or societal hierarchy for shame or fear or some kind of that nature to manifest itself. If I see somebody being aggressive and I decide to back down or neutralize the situation, I will have done so with the knowledge that I’m saving the other guy a hospital bill. I’m doing him a favor. I’m not accepting a lower social rank, at least not from my perspective. I’m not bowing down to intimidation, at least not from my perspective. I am not doing what I did because I was afraid or coerced or because the other guy ‘beat me up’.
This is a very elemental and important psychological distinction. It is, in its own form, a very potent weapon.
Book is right. Everyone needs to have the adequate training required to deal with these situations and some even more extreme situations. This is a pleasant stroll in the park compared to what my training was designed to make me be able to handle. This isn’t even particularly dangerous, except in so far as any conflict creates danger of a fatality or injury (walking creates a chance to be injured by falling stuff). But, it is still a problem that needs solutions.
First, remove the fear. If you feel afraid seeing such things, it’s cause your mind is stuck trying to figure out uncertain solutions to uncertain future threats. Violence is chaotic, uncertain, and thus dangerous to ordinary perceptions. Fear makes us act irrationally and immediately. Sometimes that isn’t what is best. It’s about safety and control. If you feel safe and know you are in control, you don’t feel fear. It is only uncertain threats and inability to be certain in one’s own safety that creates fear. Fear creates psychological stress, which is what physical intimidation utilizes. Without fear, there can be no physical intimidation. There can only be physical violence.
Intimidation, in a fashion, is like propaganda. It is designed to communicate a message or make you believe what I want you to believe. In an advertisement , iwant you to believe my product is what I say it is. In a physical intimidation or mafia extortion racket, I want you to believe that if you don’t do what I say, you will be unsafe, and if you do what I say, you will be safe.
That’s social communication. Yes, most people would call what you see in the video ‘anti-social’. But anti-social is still social, just not very. It’s still monkeys communicating something to their competitors, like “get off my territory” or “this is my female”.
Violence, in the physical definition of our real world, is simply me wanting to kill somebody and then doing what it takes to get that goal accomplished. Whether I say anything or not, is immaterial because I don’t wish to communicate, except in so far as communication helps me to kill my target. That isn’t anti-social. That is asocial, completely outside of societal norms, any societal norms, even the societies of thugs, crooks, criminals, prison cliques. It’s in the serial killer territory.
It’s preferable to think there’s a moderation level, but just like in politics, moderation just means you are independent of no one, that everyone controls you. Moderation in violence is worst than excessive force and it is worse than inadequate force. There is no moderation in killing. You either get it done, or you fail and someone gets it done on you.
That makes it very hard to defuse a social confrontation, like this one, using violence. But if they attack you, then that choice is out of your hands. You didn’t choose to initiate the fight. But the choice of killing is in your hands. So long as they don’t intend to kill you, you can respond with equal force or you can choose to escalate.
To a certain extent, you can also choose to vacate the premises as an option, but that means allowing criminals successful reign of the streets. To a certain point, that becomes counter-productive, especially if your friends aren’t able to resist with sufficient force in the first place. You can run away with the knowledge that you could have won the fight just as easily as you could run away, but there are many people, civilian and military, that believe they have no option but to run away. THey see no other option. Even that guy in the video striking back, is striking back while skipping backwards. He doesn’t want to inflict harm or fatality upon his target. HIs entire body language communicates that. Perhaps the thugs picked up on that and that’s why they kept on attacking. But he ran back to help his buddy. See, you can protect yourself, but can you protect your friends and loved ones? To what point are you going to draw the line here.
I don’t know. All I know is that I’m primarily worried about harming my attacker, rather than the other way around. It’s a mental shift that I think particularly uncommon, although it’s trained not natural.
There’s no magic bullet solution. Knowledge is just knowledge. It doesn’t mean it translates to skill or luck or control of a situation. Training methodologies exist for fighting in the manifold versions. Too many to learn in one lifetime or even 10 lifetimes. What is true, is what is true, however. What is, is. Training methodology is just a way to translate esoteric knowledge to physical human skill sets.
In the end, if you like liberty and hate living your life as a serf or gelded slave in fear of your overlords, then you have to fight. And you have to fight to win, not fight for ‘diversity’ or fight for ‘timelines’. You fight for the people and the ideals that represent the best possible future for people, not slaves, but free men and women. How you do that is not a decision others can or should make for you.
There are many training methodologies, such as pain compliance, that can resolve this situation with no legal repercussions. It makes the thugs give up because you are inflicting abnormal pain on their joints, but not to the point where they will need surgery to put their shoulder/knee joint back together in a semi-functional manner. But if you use pain compliance, the thugs can escalate. Then you’ll be caught with the bag of reacting under RESTRICTED rules of engagement.
Either way, it’s a hassle. It used to be I thought that excessive force solves all problems of such nature, whether in the civil world or in the warfare world. If I only had enough power, I could do what I wish. Of course, as you gain more experience, you start to realize the inherent limitations on power. Just because you have the ability to do something, doesn’t mean it becomes easier. Of course, psychologically, it’s better than being helpless, certainly, because those with power at least have a chance at victory while those that are powerless have no chance at all, except as the gelded slaves of their conquerors.
I’ll tell you what the instructors I’ve learned from told me. There’s no perfect choice or reaction to a fight, any fight. It’s your life, we only give you the options. You get to decide whether to use em or not. If you want to kill, we can teach you how to kill, barehanded, with knife, firearm, or blunt objects. If you want to run away, we can teach you how to assess the odds. If you want to be able to decide whether the criminal just wants your money or your wallet, we can give you a choice so that you can decide whether he does or does not. In the case of no choice, like the Hasan shooting, we’ll give you the best odds you can get and ways of improving those odds if you can. Better than waiting to be executed. If you want to live, you’ll have several options you can try to make sure you live. If you want to protect others, well that’s more tricky.
And in the end, whatever you do or don’t do, it’s going to be on you. Deal with it. And that’s probably more scary than any fight or killing spree I’ve ever seen or heard about. Freedom. It’s ain’t such a easy thing after all.
Entrapment is the legal solution to this, assuming the police wish to prosecute.
They attack us when they outnumber us, and us having cameras particularly stoke their ire. So get cameras, go up into em, and wait for them to attack you.
Then get the film and press charges and put damage lawsuits. You have the evidence. If the police won’t prosecute, civil courts it must be.
I suspect people don’t do this because they’re afraid of being hurt. THey don’t think as the predator. THey see this video and think of themselves as the defender, the victim. You empathize with the prey, rather than the predator.
But if you wish to win, you must think of attacking, not defending. Change your mindset. And while I can understand how the personal risk of such things can turn tea party allies off, it is not impossible to arm them with sufficient training to handle such incidents. They are protesting, after all. They have already taken that risk. Why not take another. Especially if it will strike back at your hated enemies.
Hate and anger is a useful emotion. Not so in peaceful times. But these aren’t peaceful and prosperous times, are they.
Two words: concealed carry.
A gun can defend yourself, if by defense we mean the euphemism of making a person into a corpse. That can definitely solve that problem.
But as for the more ephemeral issues of social and Leftist revolutionary agitation, a gun is not enough. A gun can’t solve the long term issue of ideology and internal enemies. While a vital component of insurgencies, it by itself cannot produce victory.
Greetings:
Back in the last ’60s, when I began my basketball travels throughout the Bronx and more distant parts of New York City, my father called me aside one evening for one of his Denis-me-boy-o counseling sessions. He had become aware of my travels indirectly and, among other things, wanted to impart some of his youthful experience from the Great Depression. What he taught me was this; when traveling in the more distant and less refined areas, a good thing to bring along is a broadsheet newspaper like the San Francisco Comical, I mean Chronicle, or the New York Times. When unfolded as for reading and then rolled along the longer dimension and then folded in half, the newspaper becomes about an 8-inch limb extender with a rock on the end (the fold) that can be assembled in seconds. A useful tool which rarely has to be applied more than once per person. Better to light a candle than curse the darkness that has descended on this land.
The stick with a rock lashed to the end. Once, it was the nuclear weapon of the human species.
Who knew that a newspaper could still be useful?
Another simple self-defense weapon is the credit card: bend it to form two triangles (from opposite corners), work it until it breaks. Voila…you have two knives to insert between your two forefinger knuckles, with which to do great damage.
I don’t favor complicated ad hoc implements. Not only do they have structural weaknesses that won’t allow the sustainment of great force, they are also complicated to grasp. Last thing one needs is to spend valuable time aligning particular objects in one’s hand correctly, whether it be two sharp pieces of plastic or a few hard but loosely a fixed keys. At the same time, however, humanity has always tried to figure out a better way to do things utilizing our environment. The moment we figured out that we couldn’t kill a sabre tooth tiger barehanded, we started looking for rocks to hit it from a distance, and when that didn’t work out with much certainty, we took a stick and started swinging it. And then we learned that if you attach a rock to the end of the stick, it’d be better than either one added together (although they didn’t know what adding was). This as given humanity an instinct that to survive, one needs some tools from the environment to give oneself an edge. Now that we have progressed to decadence in civilization, it’s important to look back and integrate what the species has learned.
If you watch the video in the original post, you can see that the use of a sign was utilized with great intent. Great enough that the sign shattered; perhaps the stick as well. Those kind of make shift implements to extend your range or force of strike, like the bottle or the pool cue, are rather unreliable. Either they don’t do anything against the target, because the force is splintered by the tensile weakness and inadequate leverage of the object, or it kills someone because you hit them with a lucky shot. This is kind of like Russian roulette.
I don’t like the odds of that.
Let’s take something of a subjective nature. What is “great damage”? Any sharp edge can penetrate through the skin and create a cut at the upper level of the fat which surrounds the muscles. With a sharper blade, a heavier blade, or really hard work, you can penetrate deeper to get at veins, arteries, nerves, muscles, and organs.
This will stop anybody that would normally be stopped by pain. If a bully feels pain, sees his victim fighting back, or feels the odds are now against them, there is a high to certain chance the bully will attempt to retreat. It doesn’t work on those that aren’t stopped by such things because they have chosen not to be. Pain, is after all, a stimuli that still gives you a choice. It’s just a very persuasive argument not to do that which causes more pain.
Knives use the same principles to cause damage that anything else uses. Take a blunt force impact with bone or wood as an example. The difference is that except of doing damage with a sharp edge, you do it with blunt force trauma. Instead of bleeding from the skin to the outside, you get internal bleeding. Instead of a nicked or cut portion of the human anatomy, you have a crushed anatomical feature that is now just as broken as if a knife stabbed it or cut it. The same principles apply in either case. Kinetic force is applied to a target, translated, and then set up so that the energies are all expended in the target. For a knife, the target is what the edge or point hits, which being very small translates enormous kinetic force from the handle/user, thus creating a break in the target material. Blunt force trauma from any object or human body part uses the same principles, except spreading the force over a broader area. Thus it requires greater force to penetrate as deep as the knife would have with lesser force. The force will translate into the body as a shock wave, but not break the skin. Usually because the compression limit of skin is better than your heart or liver’s ability to compress in on itself. Not to mention hematoma for the brain.
Humans beings figured this out either through experimentation or science. They started refining these things, like adding weight to the tip of a big sword to make it cut through armor better. They changed the curve and shape of a steel sword to make its utility different. They changed the composition of steel to make edges maintain sharpness and to have a better edge in general. They added a huge ball of metal spikes to a club, thus crushing plate armor (translating enough force to dent the armor and rupture internal soft organs) rather than attempting to cut through very strong steel.
The thing is, now that we live in a decadent society, we live under limits. Much of the tools we could wield, are now restricted. Whether it be the firearm or the nuclear bomb. You are prevented from utilizing it except under specific scenarios. So that engenders an instinctual need to find replacements that can be used without such limitations. But at the same time, those replacements are never going to be as good as what humanity originally intended for war because anything intended for war is restricted. So we’re left with our original ability, the human mind’s ability to make a tool out of anything in order to solve the problem of a living threat. And our first immediate tool is our body, one step away from the brain. Unlike a credit card or a key, you’ll never lose your body, unless a limb gets amputated. But then I think you have more serious problems than you can’t use that limb anymore.
I think one of my comments is in moderation here, Book.
thx
Form follows function.
Everything humans do with something is based upon the function we intend for it to have. For the Left, the function is absolute dominion over humanity. For conservatives, it is liberty and individual worth. Thus the form of the Left follows the function of the Left. The form of conservatives follow the function of conservatives. And the function itself is only a means to an end, that end being not the function itself, but the goal that function is supposed to achieve.
I am reminded of these basics after reading a manual on Medieval sword fighting developments, that I had shelved previously.
The rapier, the cut and thrust sword, the two handed swords, maces, halberds, knives, and so forth, all had a specifically designed function with a form that follows that function. War creates ingenuity because it stokes the creative genius of individuals in crafting better ways to kill motivated by the incentive of self-preservation and social rewards.
If you want something that will cut, you create a tool designed with such a function in mind. But that’s not what I see in America. What I see is people having to make do with inferior materials and inferior construction techniques because the superior manufacturing methods and the superior materials are restricted from use. This is not just a 2nd Amendment or self-defense issue of the right to life. This is the limitation of the creative genius of the human mind, for when the human mind is prevented from creating the best tools to kill, it will also be prevented from creating all the other tools one uses to live. This is how technologically controlled dystopias prevent change through preventing technological advancement.
It used to be John Brown started tinkering and inventing a better functioning bullet catapult. Where are the current generation’s John Browns? If a Russian individual can invent the AK-47, which is used world over, where are the individual American inventors? Maybe some are off studying Global Warming.
American society does not tolerate the idea of firearms because American society can’t even tolerate the idea of getting rid of racism, for that would decrease the bank accounts of Sharpton, Obama, Reid, Pelosi, Dodd, and so forth. Obviously the idea of arming slaves to fight in the war of 1812 or the Revolutionary War was unthinkable, because getting rid of slavery was unthinkable. Form follows function.
American society does not tolerate edged weapons, but it cannot prevent a black youth from being beat to death by a two by four in Chicago’s Obamafied streets. The Left thinks they can control the human creative output. They won’t stop at firearms or healthcare or knives or eminent domain. Their goal is to control all, and in controlling all, they believe they can stop people from even thinking about how to use a two by four to get better results than bare fists. They think they can lease the creative output of the human mind for their plantation purposes. And they certainly have an opportunity and chance, for as seen in North Korea, all he creative output there exists to serve the Dearly Beloved Leader of NK.
To a certain extent, there is no single American society. Or rather there is one greater American society, but that generality makes it meaningless. In that general gray mush, you have small sub-societies that really define themselves with their identity. The Southern societal template vs the Berkley societal template, for example. The urban vs the rural. The sub-urban vs the urban. The elites in DC vs the other capitals of states. The mass murderers of the rest of the world vs our mass murderers. I mention the last because the Left have strong affinities for these foreign entities, as if they were related in some fashion.
The Left have dedicated themselves, heart and soul, to the destruction and transformation of America for their self-stated goal of universal dominion. Until there is a counter-force that dedicates itself to the destruction of the Left, the form of resistance will never be effective enough to create the function desired. Because even if people want the goal of a better America, first the must fulfill the function of a destroyed Left. Without that function, the form does not follow. Making an aesthetic mess of both the Republican party as well as anti-Democrat partisans.
The police were called in to a tea party this weekend in Palo Alto. So, in addition to self-defense, tea partiers should learn the law, including the Pruneyard decision:
http://thecitysquare.blogspot.com/2009/11/tea-party-breaks-out-in-palo-alto.html
Also, tea partiers should learn to spot Democrat infiltrators such as appeared at Saturday’s Farmer’s Relief Tea Party in San Jose:
http://thecitysquare.blogspot.com/2009/11/farmers-protest-in-san-jose.html
NIce object lesson