The Road of Violence

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The Road of Violence

Postby origami_itto on Fri Jun 21, 2019 4:06 pm

Somebody shared this today and I really liked the accompanying text. I was discussing nonviolence and martial arts practice with a training partner just this afternoon.

Marc MacYoung wrote:The reason I came up with the "Road of Violence" model in my book "In the Name of Self-Defense" is to show that violence comes in many forms and degrees. (It's not like a highway sign that says "Violence City Limits, population..." It's the road itself.) People are being violent long before the first blow is thrown –or trigger pulled.

In this regard I'm firmly with those in the domestic violence world who say verbal and emotional violence are part of abuse patterns. If whoever left this sign – who is 'wishing' doom and eternal damnation on complete strangers for not buying into his 'secular religion' -- isn't being physically violent, he/she is being abusive. And that very much means he/she is being verbal and emotional violent.


https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... l-facebook
Last edited by origami_itto on Fri Jun 21, 2019 6:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The Road of Violence

Postby jimmy on Sat Jun 22, 2019 8:52 pm

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Re: The Road of Violence

Postby gzregorz on Sun Jun 30, 2019 12:11 pm

Unfortunately in this society we reward bad behavior, look at the pres.

As a result animal rights activists use extreme measures and get arrested to get attention. My cousin is involved in these organizations and talking to him is like talking to someone in a cult he believes that he is changing the world by rescuing chickens.

Unfortunately, on all sides politically, people take up a cause and go out, get arrested or get into a fight on go back to their social media accounts and are considered heroes by thousands of people they don't even know. Another reason I have nothing or little to do with social media.

Senseless voilence has always been a part of our society and I don't see that ending anytime soon.

Interestingly enough in China because of Tiananmen Square the government realized that they had to allow their people to become economically successful or face a violent backlash as their own history tells them but yet in the States they have us pitted against each other or the other, or the newest immigrant, or the non-Christian or Valenzuela or North Korea or Persia and exploiting us economically.
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Re: The Road of Violence

Postby gzregorz on Sun Jun 30, 2019 12:23 pm

FWIW i only eat meat once a day and usually only a small amount depending on what I have access to. I believe we eat far too much meat and I sympathize with animal rights activists/vegans. But I see these extremists as hurting their cause more than spreading their cause.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... -lies.html
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Re: The Road of Violence

Postby Peacedog on Sun Jun 30, 2019 2:26 pm

My go to for explaining extremist behavior is The True Believer by Eric Hoffer. It gets into the mentality of people attracted to mass movements. Really groundbreaking stuff. Hoffer was talking about the Communists and Socialists in Germany at the time, but the personality type is universal.

https://www.amazon.com/True-Believer-Th ... 151&sr=8-1

As for violence and humankind, no better resource exists to explain the trends in that than The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker. The good news is that if you live in a first world country your odds of dying as the result of violence are pretty minimal versus the pre-history period where it was about 30%.

https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Ou ... 127&sr=8-2
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Re: The Road of Violence

Postby gzregorz on Sun Jun 30, 2019 5:05 pm

Thanks for the recommendations.

I am about to read They Thought They Were Free which seems to cover similar material in how people can gradually be influenced to accept living in society committing atrocities.

First published in 1955, They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Mayer’s book is a study of ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with the name “Kronenberg.” “These ten men were not men of distinction,” Mayer noted, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis.

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.”--from Chapter 13, “But Then It Was Too Late”
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Re: The Road of Violence

Postby Peacedog on Mon Jul 01, 2019 4:22 pm

As someone who dealt with violence professionally at both the tactical and strategic levels I constantly have to remind myself that I had a learning curve on this stuff as well.

Those two books sum up best what I saw on the professional bad guy level and Rory Miller's book Meditations on Violence is by far the best work I've seen on criminals and their motivations.

https://www.amazon.com/Meditations-Viol ... 136&sr=8-4

The big take away from the book: real criminals do what they do intentionally, not as a result of mistakes in life, and they only stop doing it when you make them stop.

Enjoy.
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Re: The Road of Violence

Postby BruceP on Tue Jul 02, 2019 3:21 pm

Yeah, violence in many forms. Swatting, false reports to CPS and law enforcement, and other dastardly means by which someone that's just not emotionally equipped to deal with their own intolerance may attack those with whom they 'disagree'.

ATIP and FOI are helpful.

Where they say, "I hope I'm wrong..." speaks to their intentional, rather than misguided, motive. That people who make those false claims and accusations are actually pleased with themselves points to sociopathy rather than just stupidity.
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Re: The Road of Violence

Postby grzegorz on Thu Jul 04, 2019 1:20 am

Peacedog wrote:As someone who dealt with violence professionally at both the tactical and strategic levels I constantly have to remind myself that I had a learning curve on this stuff as well.

Those two books sum up best what I saw on the professional bad guy level and Rory Miller's book Meditations on Violence is by far the best work I've seen on criminals and their motivations.

https://www.amazon.com/Meditations-Viol ... 136&sr=8-4

The big take away from the book: real criminals do what they do intentionally, not as a result of mistakes in life, and they only stop doing it when you make them stop.

Enjoy.




Prison is an interesting one.

In my experience many of those who have been are not necessarily very different than those on the outside.

Just look at the crooks running the country who should be in prison. In fact many have already ended up in prison.

Thanks, I will check out your book. The more voilence I have seen the more I can understand why the old TMA guys looked down on combat sports for example. In my experience most fights are decided in a second and mindset is everything. Some can flick the switch while others cannot.
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Re: The Road of Violence

Postby origami_itto on Thu Jul 04, 2019 7:53 am

I guess I should be clear and honest in saying that violence was a big part of my life growing up and even into adulthood. Professionally for a while. I've never really had a problem with dealing with it or acting when I needed to. You either move or you get hurt, not a hard decision for me, I'd rather hurt the other guy.

Even now I don't think I'd have a problem using violence were it appropriate to solve a problem, which of course sometimes it just is.

But just thinking about it abstractly in cold blood I can say unequivocally that I have no desire to ever harm another human being in any way if I can avoid it. I don't know how strong that inhibition is, haven't had to violate it since I realized it was there. Even going back a decade to security work the goal was to dominate and control without damaging.

If I thought somebody was a credible threat to my safety, sure, I have no problem putting them down by any means necessary. Short of that, restraint and (to them) overwhelming force that removed the option of committing violence was sufficient.

So there was a path that led me to my current mindset, exposure to and acceptance of certain ideas and practices, and the even stronger mellowing effect of age, I suppose. I know that my perspective now is far removed from my mindset of twenty years ago.

So by the same token what I'm seeing is behaviors and ideas that can drag minds in the other direction. Starting from a place of compassion and unity perhaps and winding up hating people and wishing harm on them, even wishing to be the perpetrator of that harm. It's a addictive, slippery slope that represents the worst in us. And yes, I'm taking about people on your wing of the political Looney bird, etc. I'm even talking about you particularly, sometimes. I've definitely had the thought that six judiciously applied bullets could make the world a much better place, sure.

Working with the vets is making me even more aware of this mental landscape. Certain words and ideas and images can have drastic affects on their composure and focus. Do we really need violent imagery to practice forms for health? I'm working on teaching the saber without mentioning cutting anatomy. It is challenging. It occurs to me during this exercise that the poetic names and images of postures may also be serving the purpose of cultivating non violence.

But it's a martial art, right, so it has to be about violence, right? Does it? Necessarily? Supposedly Yang Luchan was famous for never hurting his opponent. Yang Ban Hou... Not so much, so that shows there's room for diversity in practice.

I've taken to calling my Taijiquan a healing art, and the martial/combat aspect as conflict resolution. I don't want to hurt my opponent, I want to prevent them from hurting me and end the conflict with as little damage to them as possible. Physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.
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Re: The Road of Violence

Postby grzegorz on Thu Jul 04, 2019 10:12 am

Great post!

Thanks Oragami, my path has been very similar. I too have voilent tendencies floating around in my brain unfortunately too sometimes these demons seem to direct themselves towards self harm but perhaps that is better than dealing with demons that see others as the "enemy" because they "disagree."

Unfortunately the powerful want us to see each other as the enemy while the corporations keep our wages low, py nothing in taxes and exploit us blaming our problems on a child from Guatemala while out here in Cal these billionaires will buy up 5 big family sized homes only to knock them down to build their one home compound.

This is why I speak up. It's really "you versus me", it's really all of us getting screwed and some of "us" have been tricked into believing it's other middle and working class people who are the problem because "we" have forced to bake them a cake. Oh God forbid! Time to bust out the AK!

Just between you and me (Oragami) Mike Malloy's "political commentary" somehow lets me blow off a lot of steam with all his profanity. Can't quite figure it out but I think it serves as a reminder that I am not alone in my rage and anger in what has become of my country which celebrates liberating nazi and concentration camps some 75 years ago only to have their own today.
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Re: The Road of Violence

Postby grzegorz on Thu Jul 04, 2019 10:34 am

This is what's happening to our housing in California. Someday it will probably happen everywhere lots of families want to live. I am glad they got their tax breaks...

Watch "WhatsApp Co-Founders Buy Out Blocks Of Homes In Silicon Valley" on YouTube

https://youtu.be/JcINtWvatoo
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Re: The Road of Violence

Postby fuga on Sat Jul 06, 2019 11:32 am

Great thread, especially with all the reading recommendations.
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