Belt_Up

Krystal Locke made a good post in another thread (here IIRC) about the difference between a fight and an attack. How often do you get into a fight that you can't back down from? Most situations you can just not start doing the man dance, and most others can be de-escalated. Some cannot. Sometimes someone will attack you and there will be litte to no posturing/swearing/insulting, because it's not two parties getting themselves worked up, it is one party who has already made the decision to punch your lights out. How often this happens is really difficult to answer, and I have yet to see any facts. Most people settle for vague generalities, or recount stories of their experiences. This is fair enough, as far as it goes, but the plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data' and such tales cannot be used as a basis to expand your own knowledge.

Even a cursory glance at rape/sexual assault/domestic violence statistics should firmly disabuse you of that notion. Most people, in public, are not violent. That's about as far as you can take sweeping generalities.

Good! However, one day you may glance at someone, or brush shoulders with someone, and they will use it as an excuse to lamp you. Or their girlfriend will smile at your handsome young visage and they will take offence and decide your handsome young visage needs some radical alterations. Not your fault, but how could you possibly avoid it?

I don't think it's possible. We are a violent species.

As for the goal of aikido being to avoid violence altogether, I'm not sure. I thought the point was, when confronted with violence, to blend and neutralise it with little or no harm to the attacker and the defender? Avoiding violence altogether would simply mean running away whenever faced with violence, which is not always an option.

No-one should have it coming unless they physically assault someone. Differences should be resolvable with non-physical means. The fact that they are often not tells you something important. I find it odd that on the one hand your opinion is that society is mostly safe (I happen to agree) and then you go on to say that certain people who do certain things at certain times are asking for it. Some of us live in rough areas, some of us travel at odd times, some of us have lightweight friends who go home early on nights out on the town. A lot of it is beyond our control. None of it means we deserve a kicking. It's a bit "women who wear short skirts are asking to be raped."

Looking at the crime rate for Richmond here, it says 1,530 violent crimes annually, from a population of 200,000+. It's not likely someone will, unprovoked, decide to murder you, but low-probability events happen with regularity given large enough sample sizes.