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Old 03-21-2012, 12:37 AM   #26
Benjamin Green
Join Date: Jul 2010
Posts: 43
Scotland
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Re: Dangerous Situations

Quote:
Alic Xie wrote: View Post
It's bad that I learned that violence and aggression doesn't work for self defense?
Well it's certainly bad you learned force doesn't work for self-defence, considering all the times I've used it and its worked fine.

Quote:
Alic Xie wrote: View Post
What should I have learned from that experience then?
Don't escalate a dominance contest to a survival contest, unless there's something very valuable that you cannot attain by other, less risky, means.

Fighting back against bullies isn't about winning - though of course that's desirable - it's about making it cost the other guy something. If you'd fought them with your fists and lost, they'd still have been hurt, especially had you picked one of them and focused all your efforts on him, and that would have helped persuade them to stop. However, if your first move is to escalate the issue to the point where their only choices are to back off or to try to kill you, you may not like what happens.

Quote:
Alic Xie wrote: View Post
That I should make sure to stab the guy next time?
Stabbing a guy in the middle of a school is stupid. If you think the situation justifies lethal force, then you just go and do it. You don't wait for them to come for you, chances are by the time they do it will be too late.

You, however, were not in a situation where lethal force was in any way justified.

Dangerous situations.... In my experience most of the dangerous ones are too well documented for you to learn much that's new from them. You don't learn how to drive from nearly crashing, you don't learn how to shoot from picking up a gun in the middle of a fight.... Combat just puts the edge on things, and keeps the nonsense that people who've never been in a fight waffle on about down to a reasonable level. There's very little nonsense when you can just step out the door and tell someone to prove it, or when your experience of the problem the suggested solution is meant to apply to is such that you can see it obviously wouldn't.

The rest of it's just stuff you learn about how people respond to things emotionally, and a slight sharpening of the 'something's about to go down' instinct. I don't think I could break that down into encounters.

Some people just can't take the idea that fighting's a gamble, that they'll never be good enough to be assured of victory. They tend to take even worse the news that if they habitually use violence to solve their problems they're going to end up meeting people who are better at violence. True misery is the people I've seen who end up dwelling on those sorts of things.

Some people end up going off the deep end. Some people like it just enough to be good at it.

Personally I feel sort of like I'm floating when I'm in a fight, this incredible feeling of calm - you think incredibly quickly in those times. Though it's more becoming aware of your options than verbally thinking it. If I'm nervous beforehand, or preoccupied with something that drops out of the picture immediately once my instincts start calling out for attention.

But, equally, I've seen people go completely to pieces. It's hard to tell which way a person's going to go, though history and general attitude tends to be a fairly good indicator. The guy who says, 'Well in a fight I'll...' and coldly believes it. The quiet guy sitting at the back of a group, planning what he's going to be doing in a few moments? They generally do quite well if you get them in a fight or into combat. It's the people who go, 'I'm not sure,' or who say 'I'd do X' but doubt it deep down in their hearts, who tend to get messed up by it. If someone says 'I'm not sure I've got what it takes....' the answer is probably, 'no.'
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