Dalrock’s been on a bit of a roll the last few days discussing violence. He launched the topic on Saturday with a discussion of our modern society’s schizophrenic double standard that, on the one hand, men shouldn’t be violent at all but, on the other, they should be immediately ready to stand up and defend the “helpless” women and children around them. The entire post is one of Dalrock’s best, but today I’m going to riff on only a few pieces of it.
I’ve framed this deliberately as the choice of using (or at least displaying) deadly force or not, because there is a common misconception that one can use just a little violence in these kinds of situations. In reality this is seldom true. Threats of violence only work if you are ready to back them up with real violence. The manager in the video understood that any use of violence to deter the two women doing the beating would almost certainly have provoked a direct attack against him; if that happened he would have been forced to either take a beating like the transvestite, or risk legal and career jeopardy by striking the woman and girl in self defense.
As a 15+ year student of the martial arts I have to say that this is a point that my instructor (and later myself, as an instructor) harped on over and over and over: Violence Always Escalates. Specifically (although my sensei never quite phrased it this way), violence always escalates until one party’s will to fight is overcome. One huge problem, as Dalrock points out, is that it’s always difficult and often impossible to know what this point is before you initiate violence. Another problem is that you may engage in violence only to find that your opponent has a much higher threshold for it than you do. But even if he doesn’t it’s very easy to find yourself in a situation in which everyone would’ve been much better off if you’d just avoided the fight altogether.
Indeed, Dalrock’s post details several great examples of this. But to recap very concisely, every time violence begins, no matter how small the altercation at first seems, there is a non-zero possibility that it will end with death and/or serious bodily harm to at least one party. Dalrock notes this point as well (quoting from Delusion Damage):
Most men learn in the schoolyard that there’s a point beyond which it’s not wise to annoy people, but women can sometimes get through their 12 years without acquiring that wisdom.
The only change I would make is to replace the word “sometimes” with “often.” Dalrock correctly ties this in with the Slutwalks, which brings me to my own point of view on the subject. Every time I hear of the Slutwalks, a movie scene flashes through my mind. The movie is Die Hard With A Vengeance, a mediocre movie that falls far short of the brilliance of the original. But it does contain one memorable scene that I’ll never forget. The terrorists have threatened to do something or other awful (see? mediocre enough that I can’t even remember) unless the hero, John McClane, strips down to his skivvies in Harlem wearing a sign that says “I hate niggers.” The entire premise of this scene is that it is a very, very stupid thing to do, and that he’s likely to get himself seriously injured or killed doing it. Indeed, that seems to be one of the terrorists’ goals.
Let’s think about this scene for a minute, and how it might have played out of Samuel L. Jackson’s character hadn’t been there to save our hero’s bacon. This is America. We have the first amendment protecting freedom of speech. McClane has every right to do this very, very stupid act. And indeed, it’s not like he’d be pulling the trigger on himself. Could you legally call it suicide? Would his assailants be legally absolved of responsibility from popping a cap in his white ass? Absolutely not. Legally and morally it would clearly be murder. There is no self defense – McClane is peacefully promoting his message. There’s no threat. And let’s not forget that McClane is a cop, so it’s not just killing an ordinary citizen, either.
And yet there’s no doubt that this is a profoundly stupid thing that he’s done (or been pushed to do). So stupid that many people would call it suicide, and not entirely in a metaphorical sense. And ultimately this is the entire point that those who defend and organize Slutwalks are missing. While it certainly wouldn’t be McClane’s fault if the Harlem gangbangers kill him, it would be well within his power to prevent.
There are going to be those who immediately claim that this scenario is nothing like a woman walking through a seedy part of town at the wrong hours dressed like a slut. Those people are wrong. There is, perhaps, a difference in degree. But there is no difference in kind. No, a woman who’s doing that isn’t necessarily asking for it. If we found the rapists afterward and had sufficient evidence, I (were I a jurist) would still vote to convict. Nevertheless, it’s a profoundly stupid thing for the woman to do. Even though the rape that comes isn’t directly her fault, she could easily have prevented it. Sadly, the distinction between these two points is often lost on a modern audience to caught up in their own “rights” to clue themselves in to the real world.
To switch gears briefly at the end, there’s one other topic that Dalrock left out of his otherwise brilliant piece: violence at the state level. In this case I’ll use our recent intervention in Libya as the case in point. As noted above, we can’t use just a little violence to solve the problem. This intervention was destined from the beginning to escalate much larger – and indeed, it’s already escalated above what was originally described. It will escalate even more, and at the end of the day there’s no guarantee that “our side” will turn out to be the actual good guys, even if they win. Sometimes there are no good guys. Mark my words: the intervention in Libya will escalate further before it’s over – or Qaddafi will stay in power.
Modern westerners, and especially our “elite leaders” (as Dalrock says, women of either sex) are so disconnected from violence on a daily basis that they no longer understand anything about it. How could Qaddafi possibly hang on to power when the US and Europe are pounding on him? Because we haven’t escalated the conflict past his willingness to fight and there’s no compelling evidence that we’re willing to.
The net result is that western nations, especially the US, are getting drawn into conflicts that we shouldn’t be involved in because we’re massively underestimating the amount of violence needed to be successful. As with several of the individual level encounters that Dalrock describes, we’ve forgotten that there are people out there who are much more willing to fight than we are and if we let a conflict devolve into violence it will require rather a lot of it to remove their resolve – very possibly much more of it than we’re willing to dish out.
