If you haven't gone through the Conflict Communications program or read the book, some of the language in here may be hard to follow. The concepts in ConCom were heavily influenced by interaction with criminals because both Marc and I have a lot more experience with criminals than we do with, say, office workers. It also means that most of the examples in the book are from jail. People have already suggested that there should be a business version, and Doc Coray is working on a medical version of the presentation. The principles cross over, but everyone learns better if they can identify with the specific examples.
But one of the possibilities that really intrigues me is nerd rehabilitation.
In case it's not clear, I don't think like most people. No way to tell how much is hard wired and how much is (lack of) early socialization. I was the quiet kid who preferred to run off to the desert alone and climb rocks and crawl through caves. Maybe nature. I was also raised seven miles from the nearest town with no electricity or running water and graduated with a senior class of six people. So when I went to college and actually met large groups of people I was an alien... maybe nature, maybe nurture, but I got along with books way better than I did with people.
I found that people seemed to have no idea what they really thought (measuring their words against their actions) that they were completely controlled by imaginary emotional mine fields. That everyone else had a secret understanding of what one could say and what one couldn't. Silly me, I thought everyone always wanted the truth, otherwise they wouldn't have asked.
I learned the hard way to keep my mouth shut in most situations. And with your mouth closed and your eyes and ears open, you learn stuff. And if you are curious and your brain is wired a little differently, you will make connections. You will get to understand things consciously that the others seem to have been born with. Like the smallest guy on the judo team, if you work hard and smart, you can do with skill what the others do with talent.
This process heavily informed ConCom. Since I wasn't a natural at interacting, I had to work to become conscious. Technical superiority to offset natural inferiority.
In ConCom terms, nerds (I mean socially awkward intelligent people) have a weak or deficient Monkey brain. The limbic system that controls/is emotionality and tribal dynamics doesn't work as well. And in a lot of ways, that's a superpower. When there is a concrete problem, the neocortex is good at solving that... but when the Monkey brain starts worrying about who will get the credit for solving the problem, the neo-cortex shuts down. A weak Monkey keeps the neocortex on the job. Superpower.
But a weak Monkey also means that you don't have an instinctive understanding of how to get along. You assume that being right is far more important than presentation-- because it should be. Obviously. But in a world where most people have very strong Monkey brains, being obviously right is not a superpower, because almost always, the limbic system trumps rationality. And, by the way, everyone rationalizes their limbic responses, so pointing it out doesn't help.
So if you are right, but misread someone's status; or you are right but break one of the tribal protocols in how you present the fact; or if you are right but on a subject where your sub-tribe is 'poaching' (like a tactical guy solving a budget problem) it doesn't matter how right you are. Neurotypicals (non-nerds for our purposes) will have a limbic reaction. And the rational part of their brains will not be able to engage until the tribal part has been mollified.
ConCom makes the underlying tribal processes visible so that they can be understood and even manipulated. It's about making the normally unconscious part of communication more conscious. And if it's more conscious, it becomes a trainable skill. And I think nerds, the ones who are already self-aware enough to understand there are things they don't get, will have a huge edge in applying the skills consciously.
Saturday, March 01, 2014
Friday, February 28, 2014
Brains
Not a zombie post. Just amazed at the sheer amount of not-thinking that happens. How often people go on scripts. How often they use words that do not mean what they believe. How often people see what they were told to see instead of what is right in front of their eyes. And the power of the defense mechanisms that kick in to protect the not-thinking.
And there's no way to know when I am doing it. Sometimes you can see other people's blindspots, but not your own. I may be even more reflexive and non-thinking than the people around me, and frankly, that thought scares me. Like living in the zombie apocalypse but never figuring out that you are one of the zombies.
Efficiency. Efficiency is getting the ideal result with the least effort in the shortest time. So inefficiency is any wasted motion. Ideal result, not maximum result. If I choose to parry a strike, I could push it well away from my center line, but anything past the edge of my skin is unnecessary (wasted motion) and usually leaves a bigger opening for the bad guy. I want to parry so small that the threat isn't even sure he has missed until it is too late to recover.
So, what got me thinking: Simultaneous block and strike came up again. Senior practitioner, good skills. Body blading, evasion, rolling shoulder were all part of his strike. If his strike landed first, it changed my geometry such that, in most cases, my strike will miss it's target.
The ideal goal of a block or parry is not to be hit (there's more that you can do, I'm keeping it simple). If the 'strike' part of simultaneous block and strike took care of that goal, as it almost always will, the block does nothing that is necessary. It is wasted motion. It is inefficient. Follow the logic: if X accomplishes nothing, X is wasted motion. Wasted motion pretty much defines inefficiency.
He could follow the logic chain all the way up to admitting it was wasted motion, but he still insisted it was efficient.
Human brains do this. You are told by the right person that something is efficient (or beautiful or just or...) the word matches to that object and you either ignore what the word means or do some mental gymnastics to keep that noun/adjective pair alive. Martial arts gives us examples, but politics is rife with it-- if you believe in the cause you refuse to see the damage (the working people at a local employee owned store have a cut in take home pay of almost 40% to -involuntarily- bring their insurance in line with the ACA.)
We call things efficient (or whatever) which are not. And we see the inefficiency, the waste, sometimes the damage, right in front of our eyes and refuse to acknowledge it. The defense mechanisms kick in and waste or even injury get redefined, or blame gets shifted.
Pick up a copy of Heuer's "Psychology of Intelligence Analysis" for the best short list of the mechanisms of blindspots I've found so far.
And there's no way to know when I am doing it. Sometimes you can see other people's blindspots, but not your own. I may be even more reflexive and non-thinking than the people around me, and frankly, that thought scares me. Like living in the zombie apocalypse but never figuring out that you are one of the zombies.
Efficiency. Efficiency is getting the ideal result with the least effort in the shortest time. So inefficiency is any wasted motion. Ideal result, not maximum result. If I choose to parry a strike, I could push it well away from my center line, but anything past the edge of my skin is unnecessary (wasted motion) and usually leaves a bigger opening for the bad guy. I want to parry so small that the threat isn't even sure he has missed until it is too late to recover.
So, what got me thinking: Simultaneous block and strike came up again. Senior practitioner, good skills. Body blading, evasion, rolling shoulder were all part of his strike. If his strike landed first, it changed my geometry such that, in most cases, my strike will miss it's target.
The ideal goal of a block or parry is not to be hit (there's more that you can do, I'm keeping it simple). If the 'strike' part of simultaneous block and strike took care of that goal, as it almost always will, the block does nothing that is necessary. It is wasted motion. It is inefficient. Follow the logic: if X accomplishes nothing, X is wasted motion. Wasted motion pretty much defines inefficiency.
He could follow the logic chain all the way up to admitting it was wasted motion, but he still insisted it was efficient.
Human brains do this. You are told by the right person that something is efficient (or beautiful or just or...) the word matches to that object and you either ignore what the word means or do some mental gymnastics to keep that noun/adjective pair alive. Martial arts gives us examples, but politics is rife with it-- if you believe in the cause you refuse to see the damage (the working people at a local employee owned store have a cut in take home pay of almost 40% to -involuntarily- bring their insurance in line with the ACA.)
We call things efficient (or whatever) which are not. And we see the inefficiency, the waste, sometimes the damage, right in front of our eyes and refuse to acknowledge it. The defense mechanisms kick in and waste or even injury get redefined, or blame gets shifted.
Pick up a copy of Heuer's "Psychology of Intelligence Analysis" for the best short list of the mechanisms of blindspots I've found so far.
Thursday, February 27, 2014
Sisyphus Triumphant
You know how sometimes things come together all at once? Yeah, like that. Last two weeks, every spare minute and all writing energy has gone elsewhere and, last night, K and I uploaded two new books. Two.
The Chiron Training Journal is available on CreateSpace. It should be available on Amazon in a day or two.
https://www.createspace.com/4662883
ConCom got uploaded last night and is available in the Amazon Kindle store. That project has been four years in the making. For at least ninety days it will only be available on Kindle. I have to make a decision about whether to publish it in other formats myself, or contract to YMAA.
Time to take a little break. Nah. I don't remember how. But it might be wise to spend the next two days doing some internal recon and setting a course for the next stage of life.
The Chiron Training Journal is available on CreateSpace. It should be available on Amazon in a day or two.
https://www.createspace.com/4662883
ConCom got uploaded last night and is available in the Amazon Kindle store. That project has been four years in the making. For at least ninety days it will only be available on Kindle. I have to make a decision about whether to publish it in other formats myself, or contract to YMAA.
Time to take a little break. Nah. I don't remember how. But it might be wise to spend the next two days doing some internal recon and setting a course for the next stage of life.
Monday, February 10, 2014
The Progression
Recently contacted by an acquaintance about how to attract and retain women to a self-defense studio. His assertion was that the women who left wanted it to be fun, but self-defense was a grim subject, inherently un-fun.
Maybe. But humans are mammals, and all mammals learn best through play. And the math of self-defense training is bad. Spending 1000 hours with multiple minor injuries in a self-defense class to save a night in a hospital is bad math, as is spending $1200 a year on the off chance you can save the $100 in your wallet from a mugger. Training out of fear is always stupid. That might be a blog post later. If you are going to train, train because you love the training.
Setting that aside. For deep self-defense training, there is a progression. First, you must make an emotionally safe place to practice physically dangerous things. And then you must make a physically safe place to do emotionally dangerous things.
When a student comes to you for true self-defense, there may be a history of victimization or abuse. There may be an expectation that the person is easy to victimize because they are physically weak or socially awkward. I'm not talking about the martial athlete dabbling in self-defense or "reality based" training. I'm talking about the people who fit victim profiles. The people who actually need this stuff. The population for whom these skills are not a hobby, but a matter of survival.
In the first stage you must make an emotionally safe place to practice physically dangerous skills. What does that mean? That the student will never be ridiculed or belittled or, most importantly, exploited. You will tell them to get better instead of haranguing them for their failures. They will be bruised and sweaty and bleed, but they will never be embarrassed. Losing is learning, it is not humiliation. (Unless the winner and the teacher are dicks.) And exploiting-- your students are not in your dating pool. No exceptions.
You stay at this stage until the students are formidable. What does formidable mean? It means that they can hurt you. On the level of physical skills, you should be able to win (you are the instructor, after all) but not easily, not without risking serious injury. More importantly, formidability is an emotional understanding. When your students know that they, absolutely, have the physical skills to destroy another human.
This is a qualitative change. In a very real sense the student you have brought to this stage is not the same person who started studying with you.
If the student is ready, and agrees, the next phase is to create a physically safe place to do emotionally dangerous things. You will push buttons. You will re-create personal incidents of victimization. You will summon adrenaline and fear and shame and angst. And you will make it as safe as possible for you, because this is no longer a victim, but a person of formidable skill. And they will learn how many of their inhibitions are imaginary, and how to function under adrenaline, and how to fight someone who knows how to control their emotional state.
Maybe. But humans are mammals, and all mammals learn best through play. And the math of self-defense training is bad. Spending 1000 hours with multiple minor injuries in a self-defense class to save a night in a hospital is bad math, as is spending $1200 a year on the off chance you can save the $100 in your wallet from a mugger. Training out of fear is always stupid. That might be a blog post later. If you are going to train, train because you love the training.
Setting that aside. For deep self-defense training, there is a progression. First, you must make an emotionally safe place to practice physically dangerous things. And then you must make a physically safe place to do emotionally dangerous things.
When a student comes to you for true self-defense, there may be a history of victimization or abuse. There may be an expectation that the person is easy to victimize because they are physically weak or socially awkward. I'm not talking about the martial athlete dabbling in self-defense or "reality based" training. I'm talking about the people who fit victim profiles. The people who actually need this stuff. The population for whom these skills are not a hobby, but a matter of survival.
In the first stage you must make an emotionally safe place to practice physically dangerous skills. What does that mean? That the student will never be ridiculed or belittled or, most importantly, exploited. You will tell them to get better instead of haranguing them for their failures. They will be bruised and sweaty and bleed, but they will never be embarrassed. Losing is learning, it is not humiliation. (Unless the winner and the teacher are dicks.) And exploiting-- your students are not in your dating pool. No exceptions.
You stay at this stage until the students are formidable. What does formidable mean? It means that they can hurt you. On the level of physical skills, you should be able to win (you are the instructor, after all) but not easily, not without risking serious injury. More importantly, formidability is an emotional understanding. When your students know that they, absolutely, have the physical skills to destroy another human.
This is a qualitative change. In a very real sense the student you have brought to this stage is not the same person who started studying with you.
If the student is ready, and agrees, the next phase is to create a physically safe place to do emotionally dangerous things. You will push buttons. You will re-create personal incidents of victimization. You will summon adrenaline and fear and shame and angst. And you will make it as safe as possible for you, because this is no longer a victim, but a person of formidable skill. And they will learn how many of their inhibitions are imaginary, and how to function under adrenaline, and how to fight someone who knows how to control their emotional state.
Saturday, February 08, 2014
Two Projects
Coming up for air. And this is basically a CCA (Crass Commercial Announcement)
Two projects are nearing fruition. The ConCom Manual is in final proofread, the cover is done and the kindle e-book will be available very shortly. There's a whole bunch of writerly stuff involved in the "only kindle for now" decision that I can't disclose yet. Yes, I want a paper copy out and to have it available in more platforms, but that will take longer and may be under a regular publisher.
K did the cover and I like it:
The second project is probably the laziest writing possible, but it's been fun. It's mostly a blank book, designed as a training diary. Some advice and insights, a place to document training and to analyze and connect what you know. It also includes my current lists of Building Blocks, Principles and Concepts.
Mentioned those here. The deal at the time was 'you show me yours and I'll show you mine.' Now you can get the lists without making one first-- though I highly suggest you make your own list. Cross pollinating ideas works best if you have solid ideas to cross.
(Edit) And here's the cover. I didn't know it was finished:
Two projects are nearing fruition. The ConCom Manual is in final proofread, the cover is done and the kindle e-book will be available very shortly. There's a whole bunch of writerly stuff involved in the "only kindle for now" decision that I can't disclose yet. Yes, I want a paper copy out and to have it available in more platforms, but that will take longer and may be under a regular publisher.
K did the cover and I like it:
The second project is probably the laziest writing possible, but it's been fun. It's mostly a blank book, designed as a training diary. Some advice and insights, a place to document training and to analyze and connect what you know. It also includes my current lists of Building Blocks, Principles and Concepts.
Mentioned those here. The deal at the time was 'you show me yours and I'll show you mine.' Now you can get the lists without making one first-- though I highly suggest you make your own list. Cross pollinating ideas works best if you have solid ideas to cross.
(Edit) And here's the cover. I didn't know it was finished:
Thursday, January 30, 2014
The Third Sacred Question
A little over a year ago, I had two identified.
There are three books that I think every adolescent (or adult who missed them) must read to function intelligently in modern society. They are the Three Critical Life Books listed here: http://chirontraining.com/Site/Reading.html
"Think and Grow Rich" by Napoleon Hill suffers from an unfortunate title, is extremely dated... but it lays many things out in cold and usable terms. Hill was given an assignment, by one of the richest and most powerful men of his time, to find out what successful people had in common. What the difference was between success and failure. He came through in spades and every person, every last person who has gotten off their asses and followed his advice, has become a standard deviation better. At least.
"The Richest Man in Babylon" by George Clason also suffers from its period. But it explains how money and wealth work in a usable way. It is an unparalleled pardigm-shifter and will help anyone, even people like me, raised to be poor and understand the world the way poor people are taught to understand it, to compete in the real world. And, if you read it right, to compete without jealousy.
"How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life" by Alan Lakein is the time management book on which every other time management book seems to be based. Others may have played with the nuances, but Lakein is the one who laid out the priniciples. If you are tired of drifting through life and want to take the tiller, this is the book.
The first time I ever heard the phrase "Sacred Question" was in a Tom Brown course. It was a question of exceptional power. A question that, if you asked it, could change defeat into victory and forever make you grow as a human being: "What is the lesson here?"
I love grappling, and one thing I tell students is that it is impossible to lose a grappling match. If you tap your opponent, you have won. And if your opponent taps you, you have learned. And learning in a class is more valuable than winning. What have you learned, or "What is the lesson here?' turns defeat into growth.
The second sacred question I discovered was critical when dealing with criminals. When I was a rookie, a crusty old sergeant told me, "If one of these guys walks up and says 'good morning' you ask yourself, 'what does he want?'". That sounds cynical, but on a deep and useful level, if you can figure out the true motivation, if you can discern what the real problem is (as opposed to the professed problem) you have a super power. So the second sacred question I discovered (but the one I think is most important and therefor the first) is: "What is the goal here?" If I truly know my goal and the opponent's goal (and most people do NOT known their true goal) it is better than Sun Tzu's advice to know yourself and your enemy. It is a game-changer like no other.
Anyway, I've been re-reading Lakein, and he put forward the Lakein Question: "What is the best use of my time right now?" Time is a limited resource. In a very real sense it is all that we truly have and we have a very limited amount. This simple question, applied consistently and maybe constantly, has incredible power to change your life. To change every aspect of your life.
I nominate Lakein's Question as the Third Sacred Question.
--------------------
Edit. I can't believe I typo'ed the title.
There are three books that I think every adolescent (or adult who missed them) must read to function intelligently in modern society. They are the Three Critical Life Books listed here: http://chirontraining.com/Site/Reading.html
"Think and Grow Rich" by Napoleon Hill suffers from an unfortunate title, is extremely dated... but it lays many things out in cold and usable terms. Hill was given an assignment, by one of the richest and most powerful men of his time, to find out what successful people had in common. What the difference was between success and failure. He came through in spades and every person, every last person who has gotten off their asses and followed his advice, has become a standard deviation better. At least.
"The Richest Man in Babylon" by George Clason also suffers from its period. But it explains how money and wealth work in a usable way. It is an unparalleled pardigm-shifter and will help anyone, even people like me, raised to be poor and understand the world the way poor people are taught to understand it, to compete in the real world. And, if you read it right, to compete without jealousy.
"How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life" by Alan Lakein is the time management book on which every other time management book seems to be based. Others may have played with the nuances, but Lakein is the one who laid out the priniciples. If you are tired of drifting through life and want to take the tiller, this is the book.
The first time I ever heard the phrase "Sacred Question" was in a Tom Brown course. It was a question of exceptional power. A question that, if you asked it, could change defeat into victory and forever make you grow as a human being: "What is the lesson here?"
I love grappling, and one thing I tell students is that it is impossible to lose a grappling match. If you tap your opponent, you have won. And if your opponent taps you, you have learned. And learning in a class is more valuable than winning. What have you learned, or "What is the lesson here?' turns defeat into growth.
The second sacred question I discovered was critical when dealing with criminals. When I was a rookie, a crusty old sergeant told me, "If one of these guys walks up and says 'good morning' you ask yourself, 'what does he want?'". That sounds cynical, but on a deep and useful level, if you can figure out the true motivation, if you can discern what the real problem is (as opposed to the professed problem) you have a super power. So the second sacred question I discovered (but the one I think is most important and therefor the first) is: "What is the goal here?" If I truly know my goal and the opponent's goal (and most people do NOT known their true goal) it is better than Sun Tzu's advice to know yourself and your enemy. It is a game-changer like no other.
Anyway, I've been re-reading Lakein, and he put forward the Lakein Question: "What is the best use of my time right now?" Time is a limited resource. In a very real sense it is all that we truly have and we have a very limited amount. This simple question, applied consistently and maybe constantly, has incredible power to change your life. To change every aspect of your life.
I nominate Lakein's Question as the Third Sacred Question.
--------------------
Edit. I can't believe I typo'ed the title.
Monday, January 27, 2014
More Roy
A couple of posts ago, I was thinking out loud about Roy Bedard's contention that people's fascination with violence and killing indicated that there was no internal block to killing inside one's own species. I disagree. Not about whether an internal block does or doesn't exist (more on that later) but about whether fantasy is any indication at all of willingness.
It was brain food, and, as usual, everyone responded to the question they heard.
But Lloyd's response got a few days of thinking.
Lloyd said...
I put down Lucky two years ago. He was our obsessively loving, epileptic, black cat. Kidney failure. We wanted his last days to be good, loving, with us. And when the pain got bad I put him down. What a euphemism. I continued to pet him and while he purred at the contact and sometimes mewled with pain I put the barrel of a .22 revolver under his throat, angled for the brainstem and killed him. It was over in an instant.
So I've been willing, but not eager.
But never ever once have I fantasized about putting down a pet. And there are people who daydream about hunting, but I don't recall, when living on the farm, ever fantasizing about butchering day. With the possible exception of when we culled chickens, because that was headshots only on moving targets with strict instructions not to shoot hens or the designated roosters... challenge.
And that's a thing, because K brought up fantasy and fairy tales as a kind of visualization, but in actual experience those are very different things in my head. You can daydream about hunting big game, and that's fantasy. When it was time to put down Lucky I rehearsed every step in my head because I didn't want any mistakes. Fully visualized, but not fantasy.
There are a couple of reasons people assume that there is a block against killing within your own species. First of all, Konrad Lorenz. It's been close to thirty years since I read "On Aggression" but it's pretty certain that most 'battles' within a species are ritualized and do minimal damage. They can look fierce, but generally both bears walk away. But it's not just about not killing, because if a new male lion takes over a pride it will kill the cubs sired by the previous boss.
Then there's "On Killing." Be careful with Grossman's stuff. If you read his sources, they frequently don't say quite what made it into his books. And if you've ever actually fired a musket, there's a much more logical explanation for the multi-loads than reluctance to fire.
But some of the best evidence for the block comes from the people who freeze. If you debrief enough force encounters you will hear time and again, "I knew exactly what I needed to do, but for some reason, I couldn't make myself move." You will hear that from highly trained and motivated people. I have a much smaller number of debriefs for weapons, but sometimes you will get an experienced hand-to-hand fighter who doesn't go for the gun even when it is absolutely necessary.
So, question number one: Is it a block or a freeze? And is there really a difference?
Next part, and this goes to Erik's point about bell curves. There aren't a lot of things in humans where everybody is either one thing or the other. Almost everything exists on a continuum. And some people simply have less internal blocks to hurting or killing humans than others. Nature or nurture? What if it's all three?
Three?
I've heard through the grapevine that there's a guy doing research on a particular group of traits that appear in certain organizations. Evidently, people who gravitate to certain jobs and do well tend to have unusual bone and muscle density; faster healing rates; and respond to an adrenaline dump without a crash afterwards. (I'd like to know about flexibility, ETOH resistance and a few other traits I've noticed but...) That would be a case for a pretty strong genetic component.
Or it could be pure socialization. One of the most chilling things about Rwanda, if Hatzfeld is correct (he reports a prison of 7000 who participated in the genocide with less than a dozen mental health issues in the whole prison) is the lack of PTSD in the killers. Evidently, if you are raised with a strong tribal identity (where no one outside your tribe is a 'real' person) you can kill with all the emotional; baggage of a farmer slaughtering lambs.
Reverse that, and it means that people can be socialized so deeply that they can't make themselves do a 'wrong' thing even when they desperately need to do so to survive. And by wrong thing, I'm not necessarily talking something as extreme as killing, but people facing victimization who refuse to be rude. To slam a door in a strangers face or yell for help and make a scene.
And there's a subtle socialization, too. As much as everyone says how important it is to stand up for people and not let others be bullied and... I can tell you from personal experience that every time I have done so, I've been punished. Someone I cared about would make a point that doing so was stupid, or look at you differently. It was usually a boss. Like the bus driver fired for intervening in a domestic violence situation. That doesn't mean don't stop doing it, but you have to be very robust against peer pressure to keep standing up.
The third way, of course, is that somewhere in this is a mix. Some people are more resistant to peer pressure and socialization. Some respond to reward better than punishment and vise-versa. But I believe you could take one of those genetically predisposed to be comfortable with violence and raise them in an environment where it simple never worked and they would adapt. And I think a certain percentage of even the most dependent 'pleaser personality' genes raised in a dog-eat-dog environment would rise to the challenge. Because, above all, humans adapt. It's what we do.
To sum up, is there a block? For most normally socialized people, I think it's a good bet. How the definition of people is internalized, though, is a social process. And that changes those lines. And some people have more control over their internal states (not just emotion, but actual thought process) and they will tend to adapt faster, including breaking rules. And some people have never internalized society's rules but just follow them out of either convenience or courtesy.
But I still have no idea what to do with Roy's point about excessive fantasy.
It was brain food, and, as usual, everyone responded to the question they heard.
But Lloyd's response got a few days of thinking.
Ill just leave this here.
Would you be willing to kill a goat at a slaughterhouse?
Would you be willing to kill a goat on a farm?
Would you be willing to kill a goat in the wild?
Would you be willing to kill someones pet cat/dog?
Would you be willing to kill a person?
The inhibition cant be completely about not killing your own species. Everyone ive ever asked with only one exception wont kill the pet, either.
Would you be willing to kill a goat at a slaughterhouse?
Would you be willing to kill a goat on a farm?
Would you be willing to kill a goat in the wild?
Would you be willing to kill someones pet cat/dog?
Would you be willing to kill a person?
The inhibition cant be completely about not killing your own species. Everyone ive ever asked with only one exception wont kill the pet, either.
I put down Lucky two years ago. He was our obsessively loving, epileptic, black cat. Kidney failure. We wanted his last days to be good, loving, with us. And when the pain got bad I put him down. What a euphemism. I continued to pet him and while he purred at the contact and sometimes mewled with pain I put the barrel of a .22 revolver under his throat, angled for the brainstem and killed him. It was over in an instant.
So I've been willing, but not eager.
But never ever once have I fantasized about putting down a pet. And there are people who daydream about hunting, but I don't recall, when living on the farm, ever fantasizing about butchering day. With the possible exception of when we culled chickens, because that was headshots only on moving targets with strict instructions not to shoot hens or the designated roosters... challenge.
And that's a thing, because K brought up fantasy and fairy tales as a kind of visualization, but in actual experience those are very different things in my head. You can daydream about hunting big game, and that's fantasy. When it was time to put down Lucky I rehearsed every step in my head because I didn't want any mistakes. Fully visualized, but not fantasy.
There are a couple of reasons people assume that there is a block against killing within your own species. First of all, Konrad Lorenz. It's been close to thirty years since I read "On Aggression" but it's pretty certain that most 'battles' within a species are ritualized and do minimal damage. They can look fierce, but generally both bears walk away. But it's not just about not killing, because if a new male lion takes over a pride it will kill the cubs sired by the previous boss.
Then there's "On Killing." Be careful with Grossman's stuff. If you read his sources, they frequently don't say quite what made it into his books. And if you've ever actually fired a musket, there's a much more logical explanation for the multi-loads than reluctance to fire.
But some of the best evidence for the block comes from the people who freeze. If you debrief enough force encounters you will hear time and again, "I knew exactly what I needed to do, but for some reason, I couldn't make myself move." You will hear that from highly trained and motivated people. I have a much smaller number of debriefs for weapons, but sometimes you will get an experienced hand-to-hand fighter who doesn't go for the gun even when it is absolutely necessary.
So, question number one: Is it a block or a freeze? And is there really a difference?
Next part, and this goes to Erik's point about bell curves. There aren't a lot of things in humans where everybody is either one thing or the other. Almost everything exists on a continuum. And some people simply have less internal blocks to hurting or killing humans than others. Nature or nurture? What if it's all three?
Three?
I've heard through the grapevine that there's a guy doing research on a particular group of traits that appear in certain organizations. Evidently, people who gravitate to certain jobs and do well tend to have unusual bone and muscle density; faster healing rates; and respond to an adrenaline dump without a crash afterwards. (I'd like to know about flexibility, ETOH resistance and a few other traits I've noticed but...) That would be a case for a pretty strong genetic component.
Or it could be pure socialization. One of the most chilling things about Rwanda, if Hatzfeld is correct (he reports a prison of 7000 who participated in the genocide with less than a dozen mental health issues in the whole prison) is the lack of PTSD in the killers. Evidently, if you are raised with a strong tribal identity (where no one outside your tribe is a 'real' person) you can kill with all the emotional; baggage of a farmer slaughtering lambs.
Reverse that, and it means that people can be socialized so deeply that they can't make themselves do a 'wrong' thing even when they desperately need to do so to survive. And by wrong thing, I'm not necessarily talking something as extreme as killing, but people facing victimization who refuse to be rude. To slam a door in a strangers face or yell for help and make a scene.
And there's a subtle socialization, too. As much as everyone says how important it is to stand up for people and not let others be bullied and... I can tell you from personal experience that every time I have done so, I've been punished. Someone I cared about would make a point that doing so was stupid, or look at you differently. It was usually a boss. Like the bus driver fired for intervening in a domestic violence situation. That doesn't mean don't stop doing it, but you have to be very robust against peer pressure to keep standing up.
The third way, of course, is that somewhere in this is a mix. Some people are more resistant to peer pressure and socialization. Some respond to reward better than punishment and vise-versa. But I believe you could take one of those genetically predisposed to be comfortable with violence and raise them in an environment where it simple never worked and they would adapt. And I think a certain percentage of even the most dependent 'pleaser personality' genes raised in a dog-eat-dog environment would rise to the challenge. Because, above all, humans adapt. It's what we do.
To sum up, is there a block? For most normally socialized people, I think it's a good bet. How the definition of people is internalized, though, is a social process. And that changes those lines. And some people have more control over their internal states (not just emotion, but actual thought process) and they will tend to adapt faster, including breaking rules. And some people have never internalized society's rules but just follow them out of either convenience or courtesy.
But I still have no idea what to do with Roy's point about excessive fantasy.
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
3 Tropes
This will be a rant about the state of my country/world. Feel free to walk away.
According to Nielsen, the average US citizen watches 34 hours of television a week. I have read that most Americans aren't readers, but all of my friends are obsessive readers. Yet, within that crowd, I'm the odd man out because I read almost exclusively non-fiction. The obsessive readers I know are reading fiction.
Subtract sleep, commute time, dead time... some people have more interaction with imaginary worlds than they do with the real world. Almost everyone has more intense interactions with imaginary worlds than with their daily grind. And as such, consciously or not, people are influenced to believe in how the world works by imaginary, scripted drama.
So three tropes, brought to you by Hollywood and popular fiction, that I see becoming accepted wisdom in the real world. Perilously.
The Cult of the Passionate Amateur. The new rookie comes on the team and he's just so much better and smarter than the grizzled veterans that they become resentful. Or Castle hires a mercenary to find his daughter and says, "I'm coming with you." Or the plot line of "True Grit." In entertainment, being a passionate amateur is a superpower. In real life...we'll get to that.
Arguably, there are good reasons for it in Hollywood. Working with professionals is high-speed and there are a lot of communication shortcuts. It is a good idea to have a naive character. For plot logic, it gives the experienced people an excuse to explain things to the audience by pretending to explain to the amateur. But, since the amateur is the one the audience identifies with, if you want the audience to give you or your advertisers money, you are probably going to wind up making the amateur the star. The hero.
It probably doesn't hurt that most of the writers, themselves, are passionate amateurs with no direct experience and damn little skill in what they are writing about.
How does it work in the real world? Let me ask you this. You're going in for back surgery. Do you want the surgeon who has done seven thousand similar surgeries or the kid fresh out of school who has never actually done a surgery but is really into it? You tell me.
Amateurs helping with hostage rescue are about as successful as amateur surgeons.
Even worse-- passion. People do not think clearly under emotional stress. How smart are you when you're in love? Or angry? Passion is worse (look at marriages destroyed for momentary passion.) "Chief, he killed my brother! You can't take me off this case!" Are you out of your friggin' mind? Not only could any good defense attorney destroy the prosecution on that relationship alone, but people obsessed with revenge are not thinking rationally. And rational thinking solves problems. Not passion.
Effect in the world? Emotion seems to be considered to have validity equal to rationality. Feelings equal or trump facts. Irrational fears trump science. And, the people doing it, fear-mongeriong by spreading bullshit, thinks it's okay. If the cause is worthy, it is worth lying about. And they are spreading the lies to people who react to the emotion and don't fact check.
The Virtue of the Unprepared. I blame MacGyver for this one (and a hat tip to Kathy Jackson of the Cornered Cat for pointing this out.) MacGyver was an eighties TV character who did dangerous jobs but didn't like guns so with his trusty swiss army knife would do some kind of field-expedient explosion or something in every show to save the day using household chemicals and bits of trash...
Get this. He had a dangerous job. Where people would try to kill him and blow him up. And because he didn't like guns he purposely denied himself the right tools. This is not genius, this is blatant stupidity. And somehow it became a virtue. I'm all for thinking out of the box, and creativity, and having a basic knowledge of simple chemistry and engineering in case you need to get rid of a stain or pull a car out of a mudhole and you don't have the right equipment...
But to deliberately deny yourself the right equipment? In the real world, that's just stupid. And, through MacGyver (he's the most obvious, but in every episode of the A-team I saw they got captured or trapped without their toys and had to make things) stupidity has become a virtue.
Let me put it in surgical terms again. Who do you want to operate on your back? The guy with the right equipment, or the one who says, "I don't like knives. What we'll do, see, is I'll improvise a scalpel from a tin can..."
Dreamers. This really contributed to me tossing fiction many years back. The trope runs like this (it was endemic in fantasy fiction, I hope that has changed):
The sweet, gentle dreamer child is always running off to read books and be alone and daydream about making the world a better place. Her mean, narrow-minded, rough and calloused family are always trying to stop her from day dreaming. If the family isn't out fishing or farming, they are trying to force her to become just like them. Then, one day, a magical creature comes by and recognizes the deep wonderfulness of the dreaming child and takes her away to be trained as a special person, elevated well above her parents where she can become a hero...
Leaving aside all the family issues in this, WTF? You have a family living a hard life-- and if you've ever subsistence farmed, it's a metricfuckton of manual labor. I can only imagine that fishing from small boats would be worse--hard, cold, wet and dangerous. And they have one kid who is just pure lazy. Living off the labor of others, contributing nothing unless forced to, ranting that being forced to contribute to keeping herself and her family fed is a horrible injustice and beneath her. Crap, am I talking about the fictional trope or modern protesters?
If humanity is a body, the dreamers are the fat cells. They are the soft underbelly of society. The ones the shark can eat first before it tears into something useful. Maybe good for emergency food supply.
This is not a rant against dreaming. Dream big, go for it. But dreaming without sweating is worthless. Dreams and sweat combined? Cool. The Dream is damned and dreamer too if dreaming's all that dreamers do. To quote myself.
But, somewhere, somehow, the people raised with this trope not only believe that fantasy is just as effective as labor in making people's lives better. They honestly believe it is morally superior. That doing nothing works. That making unexecuted plans is just as much a contribution (and without the possibility of error, that's a nice bonus) as doing something. "Visualize World Peace" How's that working for you?
Surgery again. Do you want the lady who has put in the years and hours of medical school and residency? Or the one who has been daydreaming about how cool it would be to do the exact same thing without pain? Especially if some magical animal told her she's special?
According to Nielsen, the average US citizen watches 34 hours of television a week. I have read that most Americans aren't readers, but all of my friends are obsessive readers. Yet, within that crowd, I'm the odd man out because I read almost exclusively non-fiction. The obsessive readers I know are reading fiction.
Subtract sleep, commute time, dead time... some people have more interaction with imaginary worlds than they do with the real world. Almost everyone has more intense interactions with imaginary worlds than with their daily grind. And as such, consciously or not, people are influenced to believe in how the world works by imaginary, scripted drama.
So three tropes, brought to you by Hollywood and popular fiction, that I see becoming accepted wisdom in the real world. Perilously.
The Cult of the Passionate Amateur. The new rookie comes on the team and he's just so much better and smarter than the grizzled veterans that they become resentful. Or Castle hires a mercenary to find his daughter and says, "I'm coming with you." Or the plot line of "True Grit." In entertainment, being a passionate amateur is a superpower. In real life...we'll get to that.
Arguably, there are good reasons for it in Hollywood. Working with professionals is high-speed and there are a lot of communication shortcuts. It is a good idea to have a naive character. For plot logic, it gives the experienced people an excuse to explain things to the audience by pretending to explain to the amateur. But, since the amateur is the one the audience identifies with, if you want the audience to give you or your advertisers money, you are probably going to wind up making the amateur the star. The hero.
It probably doesn't hurt that most of the writers, themselves, are passionate amateurs with no direct experience and damn little skill in what they are writing about.
How does it work in the real world? Let me ask you this. You're going in for back surgery. Do you want the surgeon who has done seven thousand similar surgeries or the kid fresh out of school who has never actually done a surgery but is really into it? You tell me.
Amateurs helping with hostage rescue are about as successful as amateur surgeons.
Even worse-- passion. People do not think clearly under emotional stress. How smart are you when you're in love? Or angry? Passion is worse (look at marriages destroyed for momentary passion.) "Chief, he killed my brother! You can't take me off this case!" Are you out of your friggin' mind? Not only could any good defense attorney destroy the prosecution on that relationship alone, but people obsessed with revenge are not thinking rationally. And rational thinking solves problems. Not passion.
Effect in the world? Emotion seems to be considered to have validity equal to rationality. Feelings equal or trump facts. Irrational fears trump science. And, the people doing it, fear-mongeriong by spreading bullshit, thinks it's okay. If the cause is worthy, it is worth lying about. And they are spreading the lies to people who react to the emotion and don't fact check.
The Virtue of the Unprepared. I blame MacGyver for this one (and a hat tip to Kathy Jackson of the Cornered Cat for pointing this out.) MacGyver was an eighties TV character who did dangerous jobs but didn't like guns so with his trusty swiss army knife would do some kind of field-expedient explosion or something in every show to save the day using household chemicals and bits of trash...
Get this. He had a dangerous job. Where people would try to kill him and blow him up. And because he didn't like guns he purposely denied himself the right tools. This is not genius, this is blatant stupidity. And somehow it became a virtue. I'm all for thinking out of the box, and creativity, and having a basic knowledge of simple chemistry and engineering in case you need to get rid of a stain or pull a car out of a mudhole and you don't have the right equipment...
But to deliberately deny yourself the right equipment? In the real world, that's just stupid. And, through MacGyver (he's the most obvious, but in every episode of the A-team I saw they got captured or trapped without their toys and had to make things) stupidity has become a virtue.
Let me put it in surgical terms again. Who do you want to operate on your back? The guy with the right equipment, or the one who says, "I don't like knives. What we'll do, see, is I'll improvise a scalpel from a tin can..."
Dreamers. This really contributed to me tossing fiction many years back. The trope runs like this (it was endemic in fantasy fiction, I hope that has changed):
The sweet, gentle dreamer child is always running off to read books and be alone and daydream about making the world a better place. Her mean, narrow-minded, rough and calloused family are always trying to stop her from day dreaming. If the family isn't out fishing or farming, they are trying to force her to become just like them. Then, one day, a magical creature comes by and recognizes the deep wonderfulness of the dreaming child and takes her away to be trained as a special person, elevated well above her parents where she can become a hero...
Leaving aside all the family issues in this, WTF? You have a family living a hard life-- and if you've ever subsistence farmed, it's a metricfuckton of manual labor. I can only imagine that fishing from small boats would be worse--hard, cold, wet and dangerous. And they have one kid who is just pure lazy. Living off the labor of others, contributing nothing unless forced to, ranting that being forced to contribute to keeping herself and her family fed is a horrible injustice and beneath her. Crap, am I talking about the fictional trope or modern protesters?
If humanity is a body, the dreamers are the fat cells. They are the soft underbelly of society. The ones the shark can eat first before it tears into something useful. Maybe good for emergency food supply.
This is not a rant against dreaming. Dream big, go for it. But dreaming without sweating is worthless. Dreams and sweat combined? Cool. The Dream is damned and dreamer too if dreaming's all that dreamers do. To quote myself.
But, somewhere, somehow, the people raised with this trope not only believe that fantasy is just as effective as labor in making people's lives better. They honestly believe it is morally superior. That doing nothing works. That making unexecuted plans is just as much a contribution (and without the possibility of error, that's a nice bonus) as doing something. "Visualize World Peace" How's that working for you?
Surgery again. Do you want the lady who has put in the years and hours of medical school and residency? Or the one who has been daydreaming about how cool it would be to do the exact same thing without pain? Especially if some magical animal told her she's special?
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
My Happy Place
In a good place.
A little sore, tweaked and various joints have been stressed. Just right. Two days of of talk, but also rolling on concrete and punching people in armor and playing with blades of various lengths and configurations. The knee is healing well enough. Better than I expected. Trouble with joints is that you can't truly test their limits because you find the breaking point by, well, breaking them.
Working short power strikes from the clinch with a big, fit, Muay Thai guy. Close contact flow with a good Silat player (who also cooked curry. Nice.) I think most of the tweaks come from the footwork with the long blades.
Fencing (this wasn't collegiate or European fencing, it's just the word I like to use for bladed dueling with safe weapons) is a microcosm of many things. Not everything. There are limits on people applying Musashi to business, for instance, and a lot of dueling strategy and tactics are counter-productive or suicidal for ambushes. But fencing reflects a lot of being human.
It's both extremely physical and extremely mental. I think it was Aldo Nadi who said a prima donna ballerina didn't have the flexibility to be a world-class fencer. And (Olympic) fencing is the fastest sport in the world. It requires immense explosive speed. I measured once at the end of practice in college and my right thigh was two inches bigger around than my left.
And mental, too. I was a better technical fencer left handed. By better, I mean that there were people I could rarely score on right handed that I could take left handed. (And, yes, before the fencing snobs start talking about the natural left hand advantage, let it go. That's not what was going on.)
Right handed, I relied on my speed and reflexes. I was fast, but reflexes are predictable and, as Marc says, speed and strength are false gods. Left handed, I didn't trust my speed, precision or reflexes. So I fenced smart. And there were certain people I could beat with my brain that I couldn't beat with talent.
The sword player was really good (Hi, Maija!) and most of my big take-aways were from working with her:
-Getting in for the kill is not enough, you have to get back out before you get killed right back. Doublekill is a bad definition of a win.
-Just because a feint works, doesn't mean it works. I was using a head feint to the knee shot, but her natural parry for the head shot put her blade in the perfect position to slash my arm as I dropped for the knee. Just because something worked (the feint did draw the block) doesn't mean it worked to my advantage.
-Great distancing saves enormous energy. If you can read when you are out of range, you don't need to defend and won't fall for feints. The finer you can read this, the less energy you waste. (I've known this for years, and I think it is the one skill that helped me hold my own.)
- This is a hard one to put into words. If you aren't careful you can come up with solutions that only work if the problem wasn't the problem. Grrrr. Specific example. I have long arms, am fairly fast and most people don't think about their legs, so one of my favorite targets in any weapon class that allows it, is the lead knee. Maija is also fast, sneaky and very aware of her legs, so I'd get the cut sometimes but almost always at the cost of a slash to my extended arm, back or head. I couldn't get out fast enough. After a little thought, I would feint to the lead knee and slash up to catch/cut her counter slash first. And it worked, or at least it felt like it worked...until I realized (and there's really no 'I' in this, we were both brainstorming constantly) that it wasn't solving the problem. The problem was how to cut the lead knee without getting countered. The thing that worked involved NOT cutting the knee. It was a tactic, but it wasn't a solution.
Also (out of blades and into infighting, now) there are some things that have to be taught by feel and you have to learn to feel them. One of the big guys was putting me on my base in a clinch, especially from behind. His grip and weight were making my structure stronger. A slight hand movement immobilizes the spine and robs the core of power, but a profound difference in feel is a very small difference by sight.
Wiring differences-- and this is something I'd like to actually experiment on. We had a very effective technique for taking down (without injuring) a threat who was in a cell doorway, ready for us. Part of the technique is in the approach. For some people. For a lot, there is a full beat hesitation between the approach and the technique. That can be deadly. The experiment would be to see, first, if some people do or do not have the hesitation the first time. Second, to see if the hesitation disappears with practice, experience, both or is robust. Hmmm.
Infighting by feel; time; and efficient motion. This could probably be a book. Time is something I've been wanting to write about and got closer to the words this weekend. One of the things with the one-step is that almost every martial artist I see has offense, defense and footwork in three separate boxes in their head. So they have a tendency to block, move and strike. In order. Taking three beats to do what they should do with one. Infighting can bring this to another depth with a single motion defending, unbalancing, collapsing structure and possibly doing two different types of damage to different places.
That probably seems like a lot, but it isn't. Sometimes in the tangle you can turn and drop your shoulder in a way that locks his elbow and forces him towards the ground, the turn also puts your knee into the back of his and your near hand can do anything from grab testicles to an inner elbow smash into the cervical spine. And that's not even using your off hand. And the motion is about as complicated as shrugging.
But to get here, you need to be able to feel targets and structure and motion. And (this is huge, and goes back to sword people who aren't aware of their legs) knowing your own body well enough to not forget that your fist is over his liver while you are twisting into his knee. And your other hand is coiled to clip him under the ear. One body twist powering three different strikes but all still a single motion. (My benchmark, BTW: Good jujutsu means the person can hurt you three different ways with a single motion.)
Good weekend.
A little sore, tweaked and various joints have been stressed. Just right. Two days of of talk, but also rolling on concrete and punching people in armor and playing with blades of various lengths and configurations. The knee is healing well enough. Better than I expected. Trouble with joints is that you can't truly test their limits because you find the breaking point by, well, breaking them.
Working short power strikes from the clinch with a big, fit, Muay Thai guy. Close contact flow with a good Silat player (who also cooked curry. Nice.) I think most of the tweaks come from the footwork with the long blades.
Fencing (this wasn't collegiate or European fencing, it's just the word I like to use for bladed dueling with safe weapons) is a microcosm of many things. Not everything. There are limits on people applying Musashi to business, for instance, and a lot of dueling strategy and tactics are counter-productive or suicidal for ambushes. But fencing reflects a lot of being human.
It's both extremely physical and extremely mental. I think it was Aldo Nadi who said a prima donna ballerina didn't have the flexibility to be a world-class fencer. And (Olympic) fencing is the fastest sport in the world. It requires immense explosive speed. I measured once at the end of practice in college and my right thigh was two inches bigger around than my left.
And mental, too. I was a better technical fencer left handed. By better, I mean that there were people I could rarely score on right handed that I could take left handed. (And, yes, before the fencing snobs start talking about the natural left hand advantage, let it go. That's not what was going on.)
Right handed, I relied on my speed and reflexes. I was fast, but reflexes are predictable and, as Marc says, speed and strength are false gods. Left handed, I didn't trust my speed, precision or reflexes. So I fenced smart. And there were certain people I could beat with my brain that I couldn't beat with talent.
The sword player was really good (Hi, Maija!) and most of my big take-aways were from working with her:
-Getting in for the kill is not enough, you have to get back out before you get killed right back. Doublekill is a bad definition of a win.
-Just because a feint works, doesn't mean it works. I was using a head feint to the knee shot, but her natural parry for the head shot put her blade in the perfect position to slash my arm as I dropped for the knee. Just because something worked (the feint did draw the block) doesn't mean it worked to my advantage.
-Great distancing saves enormous energy. If you can read when you are out of range, you don't need to defend and won't fall for feints. The finer you can read this, the less energy you waste. (I've known this for years, and I think it is the one skill that helped me hold my own.)
- This is a hard one to put into words. If you aren't careful you can come up with solutions that only work if the problem wasn't the problem. Grrrr. Specific example. I have long arms, am fairly fast and most people don't think about their legs, so one of my favorite targets in any weapon class that allows it, is the lead knee. Maija is also fast, sneaky and very aware of her legs, so I'd get the cut sometimes but almost always at the cost of a slash to my extended arm, back or head. I couldn't get out fast enough. After a little thought, I would feint to the lead knee and slash up to catch/cut her counter slash first. And it worked, or at least it felt like it worked...until I realized (and there's really no 'I' in this, we were both brainstorming constantly) that it wasn't solving the problem. The problem was how to cut the lead knee without getting countered. The thing that worked involved NOT cutting the knee. It was a tactic, but it wasn't a solution.
Also (out of blades and into infighting, now) there are some things that have to be taught by feel and you have to learn to feel them. One of the big guys was putting me on my base in a clinch, especially from behind. His grip and weight were making my structure stronger. A slight hand movement immobilizes the spine and robs the core of power, but a profound difference in feel is a very small difference by sight.
Wiring differences-- and this is something I'd like to actually experiment on. We had a very effective technique for taking down (without injuring) a threat who was in a cell doorway, ready for us. Part of the technique is in the approach. For some people. For a lot, there is a full beat hesitation between the approach and the technique. That can be deadly. The experiment would be to see, first, if some people do or do not have the hesitation the first time. Second, to see if the hesitation disappears with practice, experience, both or is robust. Hmmm.
Infighting by feel; time; and efficient motion. This could probably be a book. Time is something I've been wanting to write about and got closer to the words this weekend. One of the things with the one-step is that almost every martial artist I see has offense, defense and footwork in three separate boxes in their head. So they have a tendency to block, move and strike. In order. Taking three beats to do what they should do with one. Infighting can bring this to another depth with a single motion defending, unbalancing, collapsing structure and possibly doing two different types of damage to different places.
That probably seems like a lot, but it isn't. Sometimes in the tangle you can turn and drop your shoulder in a way that locks his elbow and forces him towards the ground, the turn also puts your knee into the back of his and your near hand can do anything from grab testicles to an inner elbow smash into the cervical spine. And that's not even using your off hand. And the motion is about as complicated as shrugging.
But to get here, you need to be able to feel targets and structure and motion. And (this is huge, and goes back to sword people who aren't aware of their legs) knowing your own body well enough to not forget that your fist is over his liver while you are twisting into his knee. And your other hand is coiled to clip him under the ear. One body twist powering three different strikes but all still a single motion. (My benchmark, BTW: Good jujutsu means the person can hurt you three different ways with a single motion.)
Good weekend.
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Talkin' with Roy
Got a chance to talk to Roy Bedard, yesterday. He's a good man, good thinker. Doing a hellacious amount of research to apply sports psychology to understanding violent encounters. He doesn't take things on faith and he makes me think. Things I very much value in my friends. Just wish we saw each other more than every other year or so.
He made a statement that got me thinking. And there may not be an answer to this. "I don't believe there is a psychological block against killing."
The psychological block against killing within your own species probably came from Konrad Lorenz's work ("On Aggression") and other experts (maybe that should be 'experts') have run with it. It's become accepted wisdom in this field. Roy spent a long time as a cop and has been working as an expert witnesses in a good number of self-defense cases, so he deals with an unusual number of people who have killed. As always, there's sampling error, but his reasoning:
"If there was a psychological block, it wouldn't be such an attractive thought." We've all spent enough time with martial artists who fantasize about levels of violence they would be shattered to actually use. We've seen epic violence as a mainstay of cinema and fiction forever. If this was a truly horrible thought it seems odd to think about it so much...
Not sure I agree. Actually, I'm fairly sure I don't agree, but if good people only said stuff I agreed with it wouldn't make me think, right?
My data from working the jail is that some people run to a fight and some don't. Most freeze, a few run away. But we never found anything that could predict who would do what in their first fight. No level or type of training (one guy with extensive full contact experience always froze; the biggest coward I ever worked with was a former marine; and one of our most fearless and aggressive was an untrained single mom who only took the job for the security.)
In the early '90s (and I don't think this has been done since, which is kind of sad) the Oregonian (our local paper) sent a survey to all sworn members of the Portland Police Bureau. 238 responded. One of the questions was "Over the last two years, how many times do you believe you could have shot someone with full justification, but chose not to?" Only 14% said zero. Crunching the numbers, these officers would have been justified to take a life a total of 476 times (and only 28% of the officers responded to the questionnaire, so that number might be tripled). Yet over those same years, only 22 officers discharged their firearms in the line of duty. Even without the tripling, over 95% of the time, the officers bet their lives on NOT shooting.
That might be apples and oranges, maybe, because there is no way of knowing whether the decision not to fire was based on an inborn reluctance, or fear of punishment (Arwohl and Christensen go heavily into what thoughts go through an officers mind in a deadly force encounter, and far too often they were distracted by thoughts of Internal Affairs and litigation) or how many rationally decided to gamble on another way because they believed it would work.
I bounced this off K. (Here's some advice, gentleman. Marry someone who is smarter than you.) K thinks that a lot of our fascinations, from some of the really dark stuff in fairy tales (if you've only seen the Disney versions, you need to read some of the old stuff) to movies, are specific mechanisms to prepare to deal with things we don't want to do. Fantasizing is a close cousin of visualization. And we may need a lot of visualization to break our social boundaries.
Maybe. Don't take any of this as answers. It's just brain food. Think about it. Going to pick up Roy for dinner in an hour or so. The conversation will continue.
He made a statement that got me thinking. And there may not be an answer to this. "I don't believe there is a psychological block against killing."
The psychological block against killing within your own species probably came from Konrad Lorenz's work ("On Aggression") and other experts (maybe that should be 'experts') have run with it. It's become accepted wisdom in this field. Roy spent a long time as a cop and has been working as an expert witnesses in a good number of self-defense cases, so he deals with an unusual number of people who have killed. As always, there's sampling error, but his reasoning:
"If there was a psychological block, it wouldn't be such an attractive thought." We've all spent enough time with martial artists who fantasize about levels of violence they would be shattered to actually use. We've seen epic violence as a mainstay of cinema and fiction forever. If this was a truly horrible thought it seems odd to think about it so much...
Not sure I agree. Actually, I'm fairly sure I don't agree, but if good people only said stuff I agreed with it wouldn't make me think, right?
My data from working the jail is that some people run to a fight and some don't. Most freeze, a few run away. But we never found anything that could predict who would do what in their first fight. No level or type of training (one guy with extensive full contact experience always froze; the biggest coward I ever worked with was a former marine; and one of our most fearless and aggressive was an untrained single mom who only took the job for the security.)
In the early '90s (and I don't think this has been done since, which is kind of sad) the Oregonian (our local paper) sent a survey to all sworn members of the Portland Police Bureau. 238 responded. One of the questions was "Over the last two years, how many times do you believe you could have shot someone with full justification, but chose not to?" Only 14% said zero. Crunching the numbers, these officers would have been justified to take a life a total of 476 times (and only 28% of the officers responded to the questionnaire, so that number might be tripled). Yet over those same years, only 22 officers discharged their firearms in the line of duty. Even without the tripling, over 95% of the time, the officers bet their lives on NOT shooting.
That might be apples and oranges, maybe, because there is no way of knowing whether the decision not to fire was based on an inborn reluctance, or fear of punishment (Arwohl and Christensen go heavily into what thoughts go through an officers mind in a deadly force encounter, and far too often they were distracted by thoughts of Internal Affairs and litigation) or how many rationally decided to gamble on another way because they believed it would work.
I bounced this off K. (Here's some advice, gentleman. Marry someone who is smarter than you.) K thinks that a lot of our fascinations, from some of the really dark stuff in fairy tales (if you've only seen the Disney versions, you need to read some of the old stuff) to movies, are specific mechanisms to prepare to deal with things we don't want to do. Fantasizing is a close cousin of visualization. And we may need a lot of visualization to break our social boundaries.
Maybe. Don't take any of this as answers. It's just brain food. Think about it. Going to pick up Roy for dinner in an hour or so. The conversation will continue.
Sunday, January 12, 2014
Wow
The ConCom manual is finished as of this morning. Not finished, technically. Still need to flesh out the bibliography, check some facts and see what note I left myself, do the internal links for the e-book... but the rewrite is done.
Oh, and hire my lovely wife to do the cover and the interior design. She's good at that. I get the special friend rate, but even without that she's affordable: Wyrd Goat Press Cover Art
Changing the title to: ConCom, the Next Generation of Conscious Communication.
Coming up for air. And feeling a little pumped.
Oh, and hire my lovely wife to do the cover and the interior design. She's good at that. I get the special friend rate, but even without that she's affordable: Wyrd Goat Press Cover Art
Changing the title to: ConCom, the Next Generation of Conscious Communication.
Coming up for air. And feeling a little pumped.
Monday, January 06, 2014
0/-0;+/- Part 2
Open and closed systems.
Let's go back to Monopoly. It's a classic zero-sum game. But it can absolutely be played in either a closed or open system. In a closed system, nothing exists beyond the game. The other players are faceless, meaningless. You can play as ruthlessly as you want, you can cheat, and all that matters is who wins and who loses.
The game is completely different in an open system (and, in real life, almost everything is an open system). You play this game with your friends. They will continue to be your friends after the game... maybe. Because if you cross certain lines in the game, it will affect your friendships.
Systems are open along the time line. Things that happened before will affect how you deal with the present situation. In a closed system you would not be able to watch videos of your opponent before a fight. You would not know your friend's strengths and weaknesses before the Monopoly game.
At the other end of the time line, each fight alters your reputation, which affects all of your future fights. The personality that comes out in a competitive game informs your friends how you deal with competition, lets them know if, in other areas of your life, you are a poor loser or a gracious winner.
In a closed system, gathering intelligence is quick, spur-of-moment stuff. Spotting tells in a poker game with strangers. In an open system, gathering intelligence, especially reading people and relationships becomes a habit. You cannot know in advance which details will be critical at crunch time, but you can pick up a lot.
Time is linear. There is also a breadth (for want of a better word) to open/closed. In the real world, things are rarely only one thing. My third chess game with K was a flat-out seduction. (Hmmmm, the Czech mate puns). Ring fighting happens in a venue where if it's not exciting, people don't make money. Self-defense happens in a world with laws and, more physically, in a context where almost everything also has social or relationship implications. In other words, someone trying to get you to a secondary crime scene may be less of a physical problem (how do I take him out) than a social problem (how do I draw attention?). Social dynamics, communication, terrain, history... in complex systems, almost everything can be manipulated.
So how does strategy change? In a closed system, the 'win at all costs' mentality makes sense. Much of our ethics, sportsmanship for example, recognizes that this is an open system. In a closed system, you can cheat (or not cheat but be a dick) and no one knows or reacts. In an open system, either no one wants to play or people line up to teach you a lesson.
In a closed system, you only need to master one set of simple rules. In an open system, the more variables you can see and manipulate, the more you can do. (The seduction chess match, btw, is the only time I've ever won a game against her. She was playing a closed system, I wasn't.)
Just as some people mistakenly think things are zero-sum and play or fight accordingly a few live like it was a closed system. Very few things are. I find it most often in high functioning autistics. The rules of Monopoly, as an example, are easy to grasp, clear-- but they don't realize it is a bonding experience as well. So they stay within the rules but burn friends and honestly don't understand why performance at one thing affects the other.
Hmmm. Come to think of it, I always thought budget meetings were a waste of time because it was just a number I could send by e-mail... that was probably a planned bonding experience as well.
Let's go back to Monopoly. It's a classic zero-sum game. But it can absolutely be played in either a closed or open system. In a closed system, nothing exists beyond the game. The other players are faceless, meaningless. You can play as ruthlessly as you want, you can cheat, and all that matters is who wins and who loses.
The game is completely different in an open system (and, in real life, almost everything is an open system). You play this game with your friends. They will continue to be your friends after the game... maybe. Because if you cross certain lines in the game, it will affect your friendships.
Systems are open along the time line. Things that happened before will affect how you deal with the present situation. In a closed system you would not be able to watch videos of your opponent before a fight. You would not know your friend's strengths and weaknesses before the Monopoly game.
At the other end of the time line, each fight alters your reputation, which affects all of your future fights. The personality that comes out in a competitive game informs your friends how you deal with competition, lets them know if, in other areas of your life, you are a poor loser or a gracious winner.
In a closed system, gathering intelligence is quick, spur-of-moment stuff. Spotting tells in a poker game with strangers. In an open system, gathering intelligence, especially reading people and relationships becomes a habit. You cannot know in advance which details will be critical at crunch time, but you can pick up a lot.
Time is linear. There is also a breadth (for want of a better word) to open/closed. In the real world, things are rarely only one thing. My third chess game with K was a flat-out seduction. (Hmmmm, the Czech mate puns). Ring fighting happens in a venue where if it's not exciting, people don't make money. Self-defense happens in a world with laws and, more physically, in a context where almost everything also has social or relationship implications. In other words, someone trying to get you to a secondary crime scene may be less of a physical problem (how do I take him out) than a social problem (how do I draw attention?). Social dynamics, communication, terrain, history... in complex systems, almost everything can be manipulated.
So how does strategy change? In a closed system, the 'win at all costs' mentality makes sense. Much of our ethics, sportsmanship for example, recognizes that this is an open system. In a closed system, you can cheat (or not cheat but be a dick) and no one knows or reacts. In an open system, either no one wants to play or people line up to teach you a lesson.
In a closed system, you only need to master one set of simple rules. In an open system, the more variables you can see and manipulate, the more you can do. (The seduction chess match, btw, is the only time I've ever won a game against her. She was playing a closed system, I wasn't.)
Just as some people mistakenly think things are zero-sum and play or fight accordingly a few live like it was a closed system. Very few things are. I find it most often in high functioning autistics. The rules of Monopoly, as an example, are easy to grasp, clear-- but they don't realize it is a bonding experience as well. So they stay within the rules but burn friends and honestly don't understand why performance at one thing affects the other.
Hmmm. Come to think of it, I always thought budget meetings were a waste of time because it was just a number I could send by e-mail... that was probably a planned bonding experience as well.
Saturday, January 04, 2014
0/-0;+/-Part 1
I've been wanting to write about this for some time. Don't know if I can pull it off in a single post. The note I left myself was, "write about strategy in zero-sum vs non-zero-sum and closed vs open."
Probably have to define those terms. For my purposes, a zero-sum game is one in which the resources are limited and finite. Closed means that only the particular scenario is involved, there are no ramifications for for the future or impacting relationships with the world.
Monopoly (tm) is a zero-sum game. There is only so much property, only so much play money and at the end of the game there will be one winner and everyone else is a loser. Fighting is largely a zero-sum game-- one winner, one loser. But not truly, because sometimes there are two losers. Of the seven basic strategies, fighting is the only one that offers the possibility of a catastrophic win.
Momopoly can be either a closed or open game. So can fighting. More later.
In a zero-sum game, there is no win-win. Every advantage for you is a disadvantage to others. Every time you lose a little ground, your opponent gets stronger and your chances decrease. When faced with this situation, there are two basic strategies-- you can play to win, or you can play not to lose. Playing to win is trying to maximize your advantages and hurt the opponent as much as possible. To increase your abilities and decrease his or hers. Playing not to lose is the strategy of conserving your resources, not falling for traps, getting the opponent to waste energy and resources.
There's always a balance, of course. And the more complex the game the more opportunities there are. So a defensive player can see a sweet opening and switch to offense and a generally offensive player can fortify and rest when they find a lull. Sometimes the strategy is based on personality. This is very much so in Monopoly, because the opponents start with equal resources. Ideally, in competition fighting, weight classes and such are an attempt to balance out most things except for personality.
In reality, though, the strategy chosen is almost never chosen based on personality, but on initial resources and stakes. Those who have more tend to play not to lose. Sometimes, near the end of the Monopoly game, the smartest thing to do is to get sent to jail and just let other people land on your property and pay you. The more skilled fighter frequently waits for the rookie to make a mistake. There is always a chance, no matter your edge in skill or power, that the rookie will get lucky or you will get unlucky. So the person with the edge tends to keep it.
Conversely, when you are behind the eight-ball, you have less to lose by taking chances. Desperate people tend to be aggressive (or submissive, in an open system).
Stakes matter a lot. Except for compulsives, people tend to gamble more when the stakes are low. It is easier to roll dice for betting 1 dollar to win 10 than to wager a paycheck at the same odds. People buy a 2 dollar Powerball ticket with ridiculous odds who would think twice about risking their savings even if the odds were much better. Even if, objectively, the odds were slightly in their favor. There is a study on violence comparing chimps and hunter-gatherer humans. Evidently, both like odds of 5-1 in their favor. Less than that, they peacefully coexist. At 5-1 they massacre. When your own life is on the line, 5-1 odds in your favor seem like the minimum...
That's all zero-sum. Very little in life is a zero-sum game. Money isn't. Wealth isn't. (That's one of the things that bugs me is how few people realize that and how many political arguments are based on the false assumption that economics is zero-sum. Ahem.) Teaching isn't. I can give you all of my knowledge and don't lose a bit of it (I'll lose that to age in time.) Not to get all wishy, but love isn't either. No one needs to love you back. Personal energy? The more you give, the more you have.
In a non-zero-sum game, cooperation and synergy take center as strategies... but be careful. If your opponent thinks it is a zero-sum game, these strategies make you vulnerable. Your attempts to build a trading partner might be used to build an army.
Probably have to define those terms. For my purposes, a zero-sum game is one in which the resources are limited and finite. Closed means that only the particular scenario is involved, there are no ramifications for for the future or impacting relationships with the world.
Monopoly (tm) is a zero-sum game. There is only so much property, only so much play money and at the end of the game there will be one winner and everyone else is a loser. Fighting is largely a zero-sum game-- one winner, one loser. But not truly, because sometimes there are two losers. Of the seven basic strategies, fighting is the only one that offers the possibility of a catastrophic win.
Momopoly can be either a closed or open game. So can fighting. More later.
In a zero-sum game, there is no win-win. Every advantage for you is a disadvantage to others. Every time you lose a little ground, your opponent gets stronger and your chances decrease. When faced with this situation, there are two basic strategies-- you can play to win, or you can play not to lose. Playing to win is trying to maximize your advantages and hurt the opponent as much as possible. To increase your abilities and decrease his or hers. Playing not to lose is the strategy of conserving your resources, not falling for traps, getting the opponent to waste energy and resources.
There's always a balance, of course. And the more complex the game the more opportunities there are. So a defensive player can see a sweet opening and switch to offense and a generally offensive player can fortify and rest when they find a lull. Sometimes the strategy is based on personality. This is very much so in Monopoly, because the opponents start with equal resources. Ideally, in competition fighting, weight classes and such are an attempt to balance out most things except for personality.
In reality, though, the strategy chosen is almost never chosen based on personality, but on initial resources and stakes. Those who have more tend to play not to lose. Sometimes, near the end of the Monopoly game, the smartest thing to do is to get sent to jail and just let other people land on your property and pay you. The more skilled fighter frequently waits for the rookie to make a mistake. There is always a chance, no matter your edge in skill or power, that the rookie will get lucky or you will get unlucky. So the person with the edge tends to keep it.
Conversely, when you are behind the eight-ball, you have less to lose by taking chances. Desperate people tend to be aggressive (or submissive, in an open system).
Stakes matter a lot. Except for compulsives, people tend to gamble more when the stakes are low. It is easier to roll dice for betting 1 dollar to win 10 than to wager a paycheck at the same odds. People buy a 2 dollar Powerball ticket with ridiculous odds who would think twice about risking their savings even if the odds were much better. Even if, objectively, the odds were slightly in their favor. There is a study on violence comparing chimps and hunter-gatherer humans. Evidently, both like odds of 5-1 in their favor. Less than that, they peacefully coexist. At 5-1 they massacre. When your own life is on the line, 5-1 odds in your favor seem like the minimum...
That's all zero-sum. Very little in life is a zero-sum game. Money isn't. Wealth isn't. (That's one of the things that bugs me is how few people realize that and how many political arguments are based on the false assumption that economics is zero-sum. Ahem.) Teaching isn't. I can give you all of my knowledge and don't lose a bit of it (I'll lose that to age in time.) Not to get all wishy, but love isn't either. No one needs to love you back. Personal energy? The more you give, the more you have.
In a non-zero-sum game, cooperation and synergy take center as strategies... but be careful. If your opponent thinks it is a zero-sum game, these strategies make you vulnerable. Your attempts to build a trading partner might be used to build an army.
Thursday, January 02, 2014
Find and Make
Welcome to 2014 everybody.
One of those thoughts that's so core it is rarely conscious, and one of the ones that crosses over all aspects of life and survival. Beginners make things. Skilled beginners are skilled at making things. Lazy pros find things.
The most important principle of joint locks is the concept of 'gifts.' If you are strong enough and willing to get punched a lot, you can close on a threat, grab his hand, and try to force the one wristlock you've learned. If you're strong enough and don't get too concussed, it might even work.
To try to set up the lock-- "If I flick at his eye his hand will come up and I'll just turn my hand, catch his..." is more advanced, but on the same scale. It's dependent on both being more clever than the opponent (which is rarely true under assault-- surprise and adrenaline tend to do wonky things to the tactical side of your brain) and the opponent following the script perfectly. That's why I use opponent instead of threat, because it only tends to work if both people are playing nice and following the same protocols. In other words, combinations tend to work much better in martial arts studios than in the wild.
And someone who is really good just sees the lock (or strike or takedown) that is already set up in the threat's body and just finishes it.
Grappling is the easiest to see. Beginners try to get through on muscle and, sometimes, speed or flexibility-- but they gas out. And lose.
Good grapplers are playing chess, knowing that the natural resistance to move X will be defense Y which sets up finish Z.
But the best aren't doing this anymore. They know that there is no way the opponent can move that doesn't have a gift. Everything their opponent does is an opportunity. The mind and body are both more relaxed (one of the keys, by the way if you want to run a line).
In striking arts, amateurs try to set up their favorite combinations and moves. The best have a strike for whatever opening appears.
Everything. Obviously I'm thinking of the jointlock video, but in the post on independence, Michael said that firecraft was a more important consideration in certain climates than shelter. I've spent some time there, and occasionally needed a fire badly. From relatively bitter experience I know you have to get out of the rain and the wind to have any hope of getting a fire started. Do you make a shelter first? Nope, but you find shelter first. And it's reflexive enough to anyone who has actually done it, that we don't think about it.
Even driving. I know some crappy, dangerous, aggressive drivers. They go for any gap they can, push to get a few car lengths ahead. It does take some skill to shoot for the gaps that they do. Some skill, not much. These guys are literally relying on the reflexes and good graces of others to stay alive. But the best driver I know (a former rally driver) moves through traffic seamlessly. He makes better gains faster than the aggressive drivers...and no one notices. He doesn't tailgate to create gaps, he moves into available bubbles that are moving slightly faster that the aggressive drivers don't even see.
The more I get into this the more it seems that everything is about learning to see.
One of those thoughts that's so core it is rarely conscious, and one of the ones that crosses over all aspects of life and survival. Beginners make things. Skilled beginners are skilled at making things. Lazy pros find things.
The most important principle of joint locks is the concept of 'gifts.' If you are strong enough and willing to get punched a lot, you can close on a threat, grab his hand, and try to force the one wristlock you've learned. If you're strong enough and don't get too concussed, it might even work.
To try to set up the lock-- "If I flick at his eye his hand will come up and I'll just turn my hand, catch his..." is more advanced, but on the same scale. It's dependent on both being more clever than the opponent (which is rarely true under assault-- surprise and adrenaline tend to do wonky things to the tactical side of your brain) and the opponent following the script perfectly. That's why I use opponent instead of threat, because it only tends to work if both people are playing nice and following the same protocols. In other words, combinations tend to work much better in martial arts studios than in the wild.
And someone who is really good just sees the lock (or strike or takedown) that is already set up in the threat's body and just finishes it.
Grappling is the easiest to see. Beginners try to get through on muscle and, sometimes, speed or flexibility-- but they gas out. And lose.
Good grapplers are playing chess, knowing that the natural resistance to move X will be defense Y which sets up finish Z.
But the best aren't doing this anymore. They know that there is no way the opponent can move that doesn't have a gift. Everything their opponent does is an opportunity. The mind and body are both more relaxed (one of the keys, by the way if you want to run a line).
In striking arts, amateurs try to set up their favorite combinations and moves. The best have a strike for whatever opening appears.
Everything. Obviously I'm thinking of the jointlock video, but in the post on independence, Michael said that firecraft was a more important consideration in certain climates than shelter. I've spent some time there, and occasionally needed a fire badly. From relatively bitter experience I know you have to get out of the rain and the wind to have any hope of getting a fire started. Do you make a shelter first? Nope, but you find shelter first. And it's reflexive enough to anyone who has actually done it, that we don't think about it.
Even driving. I know some crappy, dangerous, aggressive drivers. They go for any gap they can, push to get a few car lengths ahead. It does take some skill to shoot for the gaps that they do. Some skill, not much. These guys are literally relying on the reflexes and good graces of others to stay alive. But the best driver I know (a former rally driver) moves through traffic seamlessly. He makes better gains faster than the aggressive drivers...and no one notices. He doesn't tailgate to create gaps, he moves into available bubbles that are moving slightly faster that the aggressive drivers don't even see.
The more I get into this the more it seems that everything is about learning to see.
Saturday, December 28, 2013
Shout Out
David Silver at YMAA just sent the preview DVD of the Jointlocks video. Damn. I think we knocked it out of the park.
Don't want to get into the video too much. It's important, I think, because it takes one of the building blocks of martial arts (locks) which are reputed to be difficult and complicated and shows how you can get untrained people improvising under stress in an hour. If the world goes the way I want, there will be viewers, experts in their own specialties, who will go, "Shit! We're teaching X wrong! I can teach it ten times as fast if I think about it differently!"
We train to fight ruthlessly and efficiently. Why not teach with equal efficiency?
But that's not what this post was about. There are some good people in the video, people who I miss.
Bill Giovannucci. Haven't seen Billy G. in a while. Missed him on my last two floats through Boston. On the rare occasions when he comments here, I recognize his posts immediately because of the depth. He's smart, though he hides it behind a rough and tumble Boston accent. He's skilled. You'll see that on the DVD, especially when you realize that his art is about hitting not locking...and speaking of hitting, he gave me one of the best smashes of my life. An extraordinary brother, and missed.
Teja Van Wicklen of Devi Protective Offense. A cool kid. If you look close, during the lock flow drill, she can't help but to throw in some brutal, sneaky strikes.
Chris Thompson who now runs Just Train in Rhode Island. Skilled, smart, with a vision. He's one of the next generation of martial artists, the ones who will change everything for the better. Both a thorough (physical skills) badass and a supremely nice and thoughtful guy.
Mike Migs, who I get together with in Boston when I can. Clear thinker. Smooth and effective martial artist. And we can talk about stuff that would horrify most of the world. While giggling.
Tia Rummler is one of my 'handlers' in Boston. My wife trusts her to make sure that I eat real food and get enough sleep and don't pick fights with neighborhoods. She is also the one who introduced me to storytelling as a way to sharpen your intuition about people.
Alexander Bandazian and Eric Testern were the two I barely knew when we filmed, but both had a great attitude, good skills. Maybe we'll see each other again and have a narghila at Habibi's.
Dr. Lisa Coaray is one of my other handlers, and the one who arranges Toby's seminars in New England. Smart, tough, and totally and continuously underestimating how awesome she is... you'll see her on TV soon. No kidding.
Jeff Burger is the man in Boston. Good friend, smart as hell, and one of the people I would most hate to have seriously gunning for me. If you're in the area and you want someone who really knows, look up Jeff.
Erik Kondo offered to let us use his place. "Not Me! Self Defense" has a headquarters in Massachusetts that includes a danger room, and he let us use it. Erik (along with Billy G. Jeff Burger, and Jake Steinmann) are part of my East Coast Brain Trust, the people I go to for insights and reality checks.
Anyway, I saw the video and was impressed (and I really, really hate watching instructional videos, so that says a lot) but I was mostly homesick for old friends.
So, old friends, snuggle up by the fire with someone you care about and have a wee dram in my memory. And I'll do the same for you.
Don't want to get into the video too much. It's important, I think, because it takes one of the building blocks of martial arts (locks) which are reputed to be difficult and complicated and shows how you can get untrained people improvising under stress in an hour. If the world goes the way I want, there will be viewers, experts in their own specialties, who will go, "Shit! We're teaching X wrong! I can teach it ten times as fast if I think about it differently!"
We train to fight ruthlessly and efficiently. Why not teach with equal efficiency?
But that's not what this post was about. There are some good people in the video, people who I miss.
Bill Giovannucci. Haven't seen Billy G. in a while. Missed him on my last two floats through Boston. On the rare occasions when he comments here, I recognize his posts immediately because of the depth. He's smart, though he hides it behind a rough and tumble Boston accent. He's skilled. You'll see that on the DVD, especially when you realize that his art is about hitting not locking...and speaking of hitting, he gave me one of the best smashes of my life. An extraordinary brother, and missed.
Teja Van Wicklen of Devi Protective Offense. A cool kid. If you look close, during the lock flow drill, she can't help but to throw in some brutal, sneaky strikes.
Chris Thompson who now runs Just Train in Rhode Island. Skilled, smart, with a vision. He's one of the next generation of martial artists, the ones who will change everything for the better. Both a thorough (physical skills) badass and a supremely nice and thoughtful guy.
Mike Migs, who I get together with in Boston when I can. Clear thinker. Smooth and effective martial artist. And we can talk about stuff that would horrify most of the world. While giggling.
Tia Rummler is one of my 'handlers' in Boston. My wife trusts her to make sure that I eat real food and get enough sleep and don't pick fights with neighborhoods. She is also the one who introduced me to storytelling as a way to sharpen your intuition about people.
Alexander Bandazian and Eric Testern were the two I barely knew when we filmed, but both had a great attitude, good skills. Maybe we'll see each other again and have a narghila at Habibi's.
Dr. Lisa Coaray is one of my other handlers, and the one who arranges Toby's seminars in New England. Smart, tough, and totally and continuously underestimating how awesome she is... you'll see her on TV soon. No kidding.
Jeff Burger is the man in Boston. Good friend, smart as hell, and one of the people I would most hate to have seriously gunning for me. If you're in the area and you want someone who really knows, look up Jeff.
Erik Kondo offered to let us use his place. "Not Me! Self Defense" has a headquarters in Massachusetts that includes a danger room, and he let us use it. Erik (along with Billy G. Jeff Burger, and Jake Steinmann) are part of my East Coast Brain Trust, the people I go to for insights and reality checks.
Anyway, I saw the video and was impressed (and I really, really hate watching instructional videos, so that says a lot) but I was mostly homesick for old friends.
So, old friends, snuggle up by the fire with someone you care about and have a wee dram in my memory. And I'll do the same for you.
Sunday, December 22, 2013
Independence
Malc asked about first steps in acquiring the skills to be independent. First steps, always, are to make a list of what those skills are. What do you need to be independent? If you are really interested in this, stop reading now, make your own list, then come back. What follows is my 'first thoughts' list.
The big four for survival are shelter, water, fire and food. They are in that order for survival because exposure, generally, will kill you quickest and preserving heat is more efficient in the short term than manufacturing heat. Thirst kills you second quickest. Fire is a tool and, among other things, can make water and food safer. (There is a debate in the survival community about whether fire is more important than water since unboiled water may not be safe). Most of us can go much longer without food than we realize.
These four have very different levels for different situations and time scales. Pure wilderness survival, dropped into a pristine wilderness with few or no tools requires one set of skills, and unless you have a time machine you will really have to work to find that situation. Surviving if your car goes off a road in a blizzard or if the power and water gets shut off to your apartment (blackout and riots, yay!) are different. Weathering a storm for a few days is different than trying to recreate civilization from scratch (time machine or portal, again).
The principles of shelter, water, fire and food (SWFF) are universal, but sometimes it can be hard to find someone who can teach the principles without their perspective creating blindspots (e.g. so into nature that they won't use litter for natural tools or so into he-man survival that they don't admit sometimes you wait for help.)
Aside-- One of the most important exercises is to live at this subsistence level for a time. For however long it takes you to be confident you could last forever. Then you realize how little you really need, and the people (I'm thinking advertisers, but also peer group) who make a living from creating hungers lose power.
And time frame-- wildcrafting food and medicine can take days, but growing it can take months. A garden, even a little one, eases you dependency. If it's more than a few days, waste management becomes a critical skill as well.
So, shelter, water, fire, food. And waste management.
I'd add medicine and defense as critical skills. Readers of this blog probably have their own ideas of defense, but I'll add this: For any likely disaster (say you live in an earthquake or tsunami zone) you should have a 'defend in place' plan and a GOOD (Get Out of Dodge) plan. The GOOD plan must include where you are going. Never run away, always run towards. And you must have a plan (and skills) for defending in place and a plan (and skills) for defending on the move.
For medicine, advanced first aid is a minimum. Go for EMT. There are some excellent home health and medicine books, including Werner's "Where There is no Doctor" and Sehnert's "How to be your own Doctor (Sometimes)". There are limits-- you won't handle a burst appendix by yourself-- but independence like most things is a path more than a destination. It's percentage points.
At a more generic level-- literacy. Including scientific literacy and forensic debate. If you want to know how you are being manipulated you have to understand what science _is_ (the scientific method, not just technology) how statistics works, and the common logical fallacies.
Statistics and trig are, IMO, the two most useful maths. Some geometry.
Critical thinking is huge, but like breathing and walking, everyone thinks they're already natural masters and most can't be objective for shit.
With more room and time, I'd love to matrix this out. For instance, take shelter. At the basic level of skill, it's building a debris hut or burrow. At the basic level of understanding it's knowing that if power is lost you move your whole family to one small room so that the body heat will keep the living space comfortably warm. At the journeyman level, you are learning to repair or build all the things that make a modern house and at the master level, you can build your own home to your own specs...but can be happy living in a debris hut.
Okay, sources.
For survival skills I've played with Tom Brown's School and the Maine Primitive Skills School. Good skills, but they definitely come with a philosophy that may not be your cup of tea.
My favorite is Toby Cowern. He's smart, he teaches you how to think instead of telling you what to do. His skills cover wilderness (which he practices north of the Arctic Circle) to urban, disaster and even some combat. He only gets to the United States about twice a year, but he's experimenting with on-line and video courses. http://www.treadlightlytraining.com/
Local colleges will have EMT training and there is always the Red Cross. If you're rural, you might be able to volunteer for a local Fire Department and get some good training and experience. Not just in fire suppression and First Aid-- the ICS (Incident Command System, how I was taught to plan operations) was pioneered by FDs.
There are more resources out there than ever before. One more. FEMA has created Community Emergency Response Teams and I hear the training is good:
http://www.fema.gov/community-emergency-response-teams
The big four for survival are shelter, water, fire and food. They are in that order for survival because exposure, generally, will kill you quickest and preserving heat is more efficient in the short term than manufacturing heat. Thirst kills you second quickest. Fire is a tool and, among other things, can make water and food safer. (There is a debate in the survival community about whether fire is more important than water since unboiled water may not be safe). Most of us can go much longer without food than we realize.
These four have very different levels for different situations and time scales. Pure wilderness survival, dropped into a pristine wilderness with few or no tools requires one set of skills, and unless you have a time machine you will really have to work to find that situation. Surviving if your car goes off a road in a blizzard or if the power and water gets shut off to your apartment (blackout and riots, yay!) are different. Weathering a storm for a few days is different than trying to recreate civilization from scratch (time machine or portal, again).
The principles of shelter, water, fire and food (SWFF) are universal, but sometimes it can be hard to find someone who can teach the principles without their perspective creating blindspots (e.g. so into nature that they won't use litter for natural tools or so into he-man survival that they don't admit sometimes you wait for help.)
Aside-- One of the most important exercises is to live at this subsistence level for a time. For however long it takes you to be confident you could last forever. Then you realize how little you really need, and the people (I'm thinking advertisers, but also peer group) who make a living from creating hungers lose power.
And time frame-- wildcrafting food and medicine can take days, but growing it can take months. A garden, even a little one, eases you dependency. If it's more than a few days, waste management becomes a critical skill as well.
So, shelter, water, fire, food. And waste management.
I'd add medicine and defense as critical skills. Readers of this blog probably have their own ideas of defense, but I'll add this: For any likely disaster (say you live in an earthquake or tsunami zone) you should have a 'defend in place' plan and a GOOD (Get Out of Dodge) plan. The GOOD plan must include where you are going. Never run away, always run towards. And you must have a plan (and skills) for defending in place and a plan (and skills) for defending on the move.
For medicine, advanced first aid is a minimum. Go for EMT. There are some excellent home health and medicine books, including Werner's "Where There is no Doctor" and Sehnert's "How to be your own Doctor (Sometimes)". There are limits-- you won't handle a burst appendix by yourself-- but independence like most things is a path more than a destination. It's percentage points.
At a more generic level-- literacy. Including scientific literacy and forensic debate. If you want to know how you are being manipulated you have to understand what science _is_ (the scientific method, not just technology) how statistics works, and the common logical fallacies.
Statistics and trig are, IMO, the two most useful maths. Some geometry.
Critical thinking is huge, but like breathing and walking, everyone thinks they're already natural masters and most can't be objective for shit.
With more room and time, I'd love to matrix this out. For instance, take shelter. At the basic level of skill, it's building a debris hut or burrow. At the basic level of understanding it's knowing that if power is lost you move your whole family to one small room so that the body heat will keep the living space comfortably warm. At the journeyman level, you are learning to repair or build all the things that make a modern house and at the master level, you can build your own home to your own specs...but can be happy living in a debris hut.
Okay, sources.
For survival skills I've played with Tom Brown's School and the Maine Primitive Skills School. Good skills, but they definitely come with a philosophy that may not be your cup of tea.
My favorite is Toby Cowern. He's smart, he teaches you how to think instead of telling you what to do. His skills cover wilderness (which he practices north of the Arctic Circle) to urban, disaster and even some combat. He only gets to the United States about twice a year, but he's experimenting with on-line and video courses. http://www.treadlightlytraining.com/
Local colleges will have EMT training and there is always the Red Cross. If you're rural, you might be able to volunteer for a local Fire Department and get some good training and experience. Not just in fire suppression and First Aid-- the ICS (Incident Command System, how I was taught to plan operations) was pioneered by FDs.
There are more resources out there than ever before. One more. FEMA has created Community Emergency Response Teams and I hear the training is good:
http://www.fema.gov/community-emergency-response-teams
Saturday, December 21, 2013
Fingerprints and Scars
A friend, the brilliant, funny, Wendy Wagner, recently wrote a post on growing up poor:
I want to riff on that here.
How you grow up leaves traces, whether you call them scars or fingerprints. My parents were working poor, and some of my earliest memories are listening to my parents argue about whether or not we'd have money for food. They always waited until late at night, until they were sure we were asleep... but we never were.
When dad decided to go into business for himself, things tightened up again. And when he decided to liquidate and move to the middle of nowhere to prepare for the end of the world... let's just say there weren't a lot of jobs. Just enough to keep our heads above water, most of the time. And because we were expecting nuclear war or economic collapse or the ice age or the population bomb (just some of the apocalypses that were promised to us in the 1970's) we were also living with no electricity or running water, growing or hunting most of our own food.
Just as Wendy writes, that left fingerprints, but the way it marked our lives was very, very different. She was honest about her pain. Mine was minor-- kids will notice if all of your sweaters are homemade, and if your pants came from the discount rack and the legs aren't quite the same color. If you bathe once a week (36 extra buckets of water to pack from the creek on bath day) they notice. The only spending money I had was from returning my dad's beer bottles to the store, and I could always feel the proprietor snickering over how much dad drank. My only source of income, until I learned how to polish stones, is tied with deep embarrassment, and that colors my attitude to money to this day.
But I always had the desert and the cliffs to run to, to be alone.
I think the biggest factor in how Wendy and I processed our childhood was in our attitude towards assistance:
Wendy: Some memories of my childhood are indelible: the wonderful texture of the paper they used to print food stamps on, back when food stamps came in little coupon books and each increment was printed in its own color. The taste of government cheese, salty and waxy and melty and gooier than any cheese I’ve eaten since.
My dad told us we were on our own. No one would help us and we wouldn't accept it if they offered. "You get hungry, you go kill something." I remember waking up from delirious fever dreams, a 106 temperature and looking at the ice forming on the boltheads on the inside of the camping trailer we lived in.
If we were hungry, we hunted, fished or went and slaughtered a chicken. I never got into hunting or fishing for fun. It was food. When I found a wart (only time in my life) I knew a doctor was out of the question-- I pulled it out with a pair of pliers. My mom had told me that warts have roots and seeds, and I was afraid if I cut it, I'd leave the roots.
I was able to go to college because my older brother, in the Air Force, and my grandmother both died. The wills left enough money to clear some debt and pay for one year of college. Where Wendy writes about her insecurity in fitting in, I knew I didn't fit and it was defiance bordering on arrogance: This place had ten times the wild food of the desert where I was raised. I learned how to butterfly a gash when I was thirteen. You can't starve me, I don't need your doctors and you can't beat me in a way I'll stay down-- you think I need you? Yeah, I was a dick, and it was just as much insecurity as anything Wendy experienced. But I never had a feeling of dependence... and I would look at all the other kids in college, kids who seemed rich to me, and I would listen to all their needs and desires, all the stuff they felt they couldn't live without and, yeah, I felt contempt. A huge amount of contempt.
I found growing up poor, and especially working to create a middle class life, powerful. I think without that experience, it's likely I would have been lazy, complacent, self-satisfied. I feel that necessity made me stronger, tougher, more resourceful. It was a bad environment to be delusional in, and honed an ability to see what the real problem was, and that lack of food always trumps social bullshit. I like who I am, and have few regrets.
Tuesday, December 17, 2013
Your Nature
It's in your nature to fight. It is in your nature to be strong. It is in your nature not to be a victim. We are the products of 4 billion years of bloody evolution, where the victims were eaten. Everyone dies, we aren't immortal, but we don't die easily. Not naturally.
Fighting, self-defense, whatever you want to call it, is one of the most natural things in the world. Competence at it is your birthright. We do a disservice, I think, when we teach it as if it is complicated, as if it is something that needs to be learned. Not that you can't improve, learn and train. It is complex and nuanced to be good... but it is not complicated. That's a thought for another time.
But in the end, this is not about "forging warriors." This is about rehabilitating a predator so that it can take its natural place in the world. This is your nature.
Not fighting, the fear (not of fighting, fighting hurts, it is wise to fear it) of trying and learning, the insecurity is not nature. It is conditioning.
We are a large population of effective predators. Individually, not impressive. But teamwork is a power multiplier like no other and we are, often, better than wolves at working together. But unlike wolves, we're shitty at getting along. IMO, our teamwork was learned behavior, for wolves it is their nature. Without the genes to get along, we created rules, and we instilled those rules into our children from the first day. That's conditioning.
So when your student can't pull the trigger or can't grab a face, that student is not fighting his nature, he is fighting his conditioning.
There are two immediate implications of this, at least in my mind.
I walk in peace with you because I respect your strength. I see your nature, even if you have been blinded by your conditioning. The Hindu greeting "Namaste" I have been told translates: "The divinity in me recognizes the divinity in you" (seems unlikely, that's a pretty small word for two nouns, a verb and two locations). We walk in peace, you and I, because the animal in me recognizes and respects the animal in you. Negotiation and cooperation are preferred to testing who is the wilder.
The second: I understand that people need to be trained from a very young age to get along. But training makes it a choice and conditioning removes choices. And it seems that more and more effort is going into making people more and more passive. Who wanted you to be a victim so badly that they convinced you passivity was normal? Who feared your animal nature so much?
Take your power.
-----------------------------------------------------
This grew out of a conversation yesterday with Kathy Jackson, the Cornered Cat. Kathy's a great instructor and great people. She has the magic power of making me think.
We were attending a weapon retention program designed by Don Stahlnecker of the Firearms Academy of Seattle. Good stuff. Best civilian program I've seen. (LEO weapon retention focuses more on holster retention, since officers open carry).
Fighting, self-defense, whatever you want to call it, is one of the most natural things in the world. Competence at it is your birthright. We do a disservice, I think, when we teach it as if it is complicated, as if it is something that needs to be learned. Not that you can't improve, learn and train. It is complex and nuanced to be good... but it is not complicated. That's a thought for another time.
But in the end, this is not about "forging warriors." This is about rehabilitating a predator so that it can take its natural place in the world. This is your nature.
Not fighting, the fear (not of fighting, fighting hurts, it is wise to fear it) of trying and learning, the insecurity is not nature. It is conditioning.
We are a large population of effective predators. Individually, not impressive. But teamwork is a power multiplier like no other and we are, often, better than wolves at working together. But unlike wolves, we're shitty at getting along. IMO, our teamwork was learned behavior, for wolves it is their nature. Without the genes to get along, we created rules, and we instilled those rules into our children from the first day. That's conditioning.
So when your student can't pull the trigger or can't grab a face, that student is not fighting his nature, he is fighting his conditioning.
There are two immediate implications of this, at least in my mind.
I walk in peace with you because I respect your strength. I see your nature, even if you have been blinded by your conditioning. The Hindu greeting "Namaste" I have been told translates: "The divinity in me recognizes the divinity in you" (seems unlikely, that's a pretty small word for two nouns, a verb and two locations). We walk in peace, you and I, because the animal in me recognizes and respects the animal in you. Negotiation and cooperation are preferred to testing who is the wilder.
The second: I understand that people need to be trained from a very young age to get along. But training makes it a choice and conditioning removes choices. And it seems that more and more effort is going into making people more and more passive. Who wanted you to be a victim so badly that they convinced you passivity was normal? Who feared your animal nature so much?
Take your power.
-----------------------------------------------------
This grew out of a conversation yesterday with Kathy Jackson, the Cornered Cat. Kathy's a great instructor and great people. She has the magic power of making me think.
We were attending a weapon retention program designed by Don Stahlnecker of the Firearms Academy of Seattle. Good stuff. Best civilian program I've seen. (LEO weapon retention focuses more on holster retention, since officers open carry).
Friday, December 13, 2013
Perception Controls Possibility
What you see controls how you think. And how you think controls what you can see. Lots of people are shopping for the holidays right now and I can bet that someplace in the world a busy executive, a teenager and a retired cop are all walking through the same mall... but they aren't walking in the same world.
What you see completely controls what you can do. You can't solve a problem you can't see. You can't implement a solution you can't imagine. And it's not just what you see, it's how you see it.
What you see completely controls what you can do. You can't solve a problem you can't see. You can't implement a solution you can't imagine. And it's not just what you see, it's how you see it.
A chair is for sitting in. If all you see is a chair, the only affordance in that chair
is sitting (and lounging and snuggling… but all chair stuff). If you see it as
a shape, you have the additional affordances of all the things you can do with
flat surfaces. See it another way
and it is a flotation device; or a ladder; or a collection of fabric, wood and
metal that can be deconstructed…
The more you perceive, the bigger the world and your possibilities increase. The more you look for things, the less you see. Narrowing your focus narrows your mind. We all know the one-trick-pony-professional-victim who can construe any statement as proof of oppression. Looked at one way, they're annoying as hell. They are just as or even more into oppressing others as the people they rail against. Looked at a little different, they are sad little people looking so hard for ugly--creating it if they can't find it-- that they will never see beauty.
The first drill I ever learned for this was from a survival class in '81 or '82. The drill was to come up with twenty uses for a spoon that had nothing to do with scooping or eating. It was hard at first. I think it took most of the hour for most of us to make or lists. Now I sometimes pick random items and it's rare for it to take more than five minutes to come up with twenty things.
This even applies to abstract things and to people. Being able to come up with a hundred different answers to a question is cool. Coming up with a hundred different ways to interpret or alter the question is an order of magnitude more powerful. Want to be rich? I live in a house that's warm and dry; I can get cold drinks from the fridge and hot water falling from the sky (a shower) on demand. My food today came from at least two continents and originated in at least three. No Roman emperor had this luxury. I am typing this on a machine that no government in the world could have obtained 35 years ago. I am richer in material things than the the entire US government was a century ago. My life is awash in things unobtainable.
That's just material riches. At what point in history did it become possible to read both Lao Tzu and Marcus Aurelius?
That was abstractions. What about people? How you label a person controls what you perceive and controls your affordances, your possibilities. If K was my wife it creates a relationship that comes with roles and scripts. She is undoubtedly my wife. She is also the best thing the universe has ever created and somehow I am allowed to be in her presence. 'Wife' means certain comforts and annoyances. 'The best thing in the universe' makes it easy to be madly in love for a quarter of a century.
Is someone your enemy? Or a human being who believes you are part of his wealth of problems? Is that your student? Or a companion on this journey?
And yourself. What labels do you put on yourself that artificially control your behavior? Are they necessary? Do you have to be you? (The answer is 'no' by the way, but people get very uncomfortable with the fact that they are constantly changing.)
In the interaction, sometimes conflict comes up because of incompatible labels. I see most protesters as whiny, entitled punks. They see themselves as champions of the underdog du jour. If you are having trouble with your significant other, quit seeing her as your wife or girlfriend for awhile and find out how she labels herself. Try working from there.
The ideal is to just see, without the labeling. That's hard. But it maximizes possibility.
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
Golden Oldie: Want to Start Your Own System?
Years ago, I was a regular on the Budoseek BBS. Good people, good knowledge, but when I was in Iraq I found I didn't have time for on-line forums, and when I got home I found I didn't miss them. Signal-to-noise ratio and time investment...
I wrote this there years ago:
I've already made my feelings pretty clear about people awarding themselves incredible rank and starting their own style. In general I consider it an ego trip- someone who can't be the big fish creating his own puddle. I was challenged recently to describe what would convince me that a self-awarded rank was legitimate. Here are my initial thoughts.
1) If your style has any tournament component you should have been and/or trained at least one national champion. More, if the tournament circle is small.
2) If it is called a combat style, it must be tested, and that is hard. Perhaps 100+ uses of unnassisted, weaponless uses of force as either a cop, corrections officer or bouncer. Alternatively, a history of cops, etc who have previous experience with martial arts seeking you out and staying with you for more than one year. Many people hold seminars for LEO's then claim that they teach DT's while the officers that attended the class under orders feel nothing but contempt.
3)Designate and document all the skills your students must master from the lowest rank to the highest. If any of the high ranks are honorary, award yourself the highest real rank. If your style is worthwhile, as students mature and take over the ryu they will vote you the honorary rank, just like Kano.
4)Figure out how long it would take for a good student to achieve the rank you award yourself and be sure you have studied at least twice that long. If it would take a student longer to get to where you are than it took you, the style stunts students, it does not teach them.
5)Obviously, the art must have significant, preferably profound differences from all other arts you have studied.
6)If you are breaking off from another organization you must maintain loyalty to those that taught you- you owe them much. If that is impossible your maturity level may be too low for instructor status, much less master. At the very least maintain dignity.
7)If you are breaking away you must be better at both the art and teaching than anyone else in the old organization, especially if the technical differences are minor.
8)Please, if you choose to use a foreign language to describe or rank your art at least make the effort to use a real word and translate it correctly. Then live up to the terms you use. For instance, if you choose to call yourself an ancestral style at least have one parent to child transmission of leadership in your history.
It's been years, but I think the sentiment holds up.
I wrote this there years ago:
I've already made my feelings pretty clear about people awarding themselves incredible rank and starting their own style. In general I consider it an ego trip- someone who can't be the big fish creating his own puddle. I was challenged recently to describe what would convince me that a self-awarded rank was legitimate. Here are my initial thoughts.
1) If your style has any tournament component you should have been and/or trained at least one national champion. More, if the tournament circle is small.
2) If it is called a combat style, it must be tested, and that is hard. Perhaps 100+ uses of unnassisted, weaponless uses of force as either a cop, corrections officer or bouncer. Alternatively, a history of cops, etc who have previous experience with martial arts seeking you out and staying with you for more than one year. Many people hold seminars for LEO's then claim that they teach DT's while the officers that attended the class under orders feel nothing but contempt.
3)Designate and document all the skills your students must master from the lowest rank to the highest. If any of the high ranks are honorary, award yourself the highest real rank. If your style is worthwhile, as students mature and take over the ryu they will vote you the honorary rank, just like Kano.
4)Figure out how long it would take for a good student to achieve the rank you award yourself and be sure you have studied at least twice that long. If it would take a student longer to get to where you are than it took you, the style stunts students, it does not teach them.
5)Obviously, the art must have significant, preferably profound differences from all other arts you have studied.
6)If you are breaking off from another organization you must maintain loyalty to those that taught you- you owe them much. If that is impossible your maturity level may be too low for instructor status, much less master. At the very least maintain dignity.
7)If you are breaking away you must be better at both the art and teaching than anyone else in the old organization, especially if the technical differences are minor.
8)Please, if you choose to use a foreign language to describe or rank your art at least make the effort to use a real word and translate it correctly. Then live up to the terms you use. For instance, if you choose to call yourself an ancestral style at least have one parent to child transmission of leadership in your history.
It's been years, but I think the sentiment holds up.
Saturday, December 07, 2013
Not Invisible
While I was distracted from the blog, I wasn't idle. It might be a good time to post some links. Interviews and the like.
http://existanew.com/2013/11/22/meditations-on-violence-and-life-a-podcast-interview-with-rory-miller/
An interview with Aaron and Beau fro Exist Anew (and you know I gave then shit about their name before the interview started). Fun, and if I ever decide to publish the manual on enlightenment for non-wusses, the last bit will be a preview.
http://www.martial-secrets.com/2013/11/27/rory-miller-the-mind-of-the-criminal-and-the-outlaw-124/
Kris caught me a half asleep. And he'd left a couple of messages which I'd interpreted to mean there was something wrong. Had completely forgotten that he wanted to do an interview when I had a break from traveling.
Gila Hayes, of the Armed Citizen's Legal Defense Network (a great resource for anyone interested in SD, btw) did a review of the Logic of Violence DVD:
http://www.armedcitizensnetwork.org/our-journal/299-november-2013?start=12
Did an "Advanced People Watching" course at the Lloyd Center Mall and Kathy Jackson (the Cornered Cat and one of my favorite people-- my go to for the crossover between WSD and the firearms world) did a write-up:
http://www.corneredcat.com/at-the-mall/
Interviewed by Matthew Apsokardu in June:
http://www.ikigaiway.com/2013/interview-rory-miller-detentions-specialist-and-conflict-expert/
And Matt linked to an interview that David Silver did last year. Evidently, saying I hate people because they are stupid pretty much defines my worldview:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQn5HljpK_A
Sam Harris asked my opinion on a couple of questions that somehow turned into a roundtable interview on SD and the law. In my opinion, the best piece was left out of the final edit. One of the examples that came up, the FaceBook common wisdom (as is often the case) had nothing to do with actual facts... it struck me as a good point to check your sources, especially if they seem to make your point too well.
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/self-defense-and-the-law
http://existanew.com/2013/11/22/meditations-on-violence-and-life-a-podcast-interview-with-rory-miller/
An interview with Aaron and Beau fro Exist Anew (and you know I gave then shit about their name before the interview started). Fun, and if I ever decide to publish the manual on enlightenment for non-wusses, the last bit will be a preview.
http://www.martial-secrets.com/2013/11/27/rory-miller-the-mind-of-the-criminal-and-the-outlaw-124/
Kris caught me a half asleep. And he'd left a couple of messages which I'd interpreted to mean there was something wrong. Had completely forgotten that he wanted to do an interview when I had a break from traveling.
Gila Hayes, of the Armed Citizen's Legal Defense Network (a great resource for anyone interested in SD, btw) did a review of the Logic of Violence DVD:
http://www.armedcitizensnetwork.org/our-journal/299-november-2013?start=12
Did an "Advanced People Watching" course at the Lloyd Center Mall and Kathy Jackson (the Cornered Cat and one of my favorite people-- my go to for the crossover between WSD and the firearms world) did a write-up:
http://www.corneredcat.com/at-the-mall/
Interviewed by Matthew Apsokardu in June:
http://www.ikigaiway.com/2013/interview-rory-miller-detentions-specialist-and-conflict-expert/
And Matt linked to an interview that David Silver did last year. Evidently, saying I hate people because they are stupid pretty much defines my worldview:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQn5HljpK_A
Sam Harris asked my opinion on a couple of questions that somehow turned into a roundtable interview on SD and the law. In my opinion, the best piece was left out of the final edit. One of the examples that came up, the FaceBook common wisdom (as is often the case) had nothing to do with actual facts... it struck me as a good point to check your sources, especially if they seem to make your point too well.
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/self-defense-and-the-law
Friday, December 06, 2013
Holding on to the Edge of the Pool
Verner wrote:
Sometimes I wonder, why do we bother with martial arts anyway? For sport and fun, OK, but for combat? Why would you want to learn an art that worked for someone else sometime in the past, possibly under different circumstances, legally, ethically etc... Not to mention all the useless shit you have to buy (gi, belt, hakama you never use utside the dojo) While combat is complex, it's not complicated. There are just systems trying to distrupt or destroy other systems. Combat is governed by anatomy and physics. Those do not change. Why is combat an art, not science? Maybe because carrying the legacy of the samurai/ninja/viking/whatever has much appeal to the monkey?
Complex versus complicated is something I desperately want to riff on. Later.
Why are people driven to study something that worked in the past? Possibly because the other option is to study something that didn't work in the past. Something that has never worked.
Which would you prefer: "According to the old legends, Sir Hackemup used these tools and these tactics to survive against insurmountable odds at the Battle of Last Man Standing."
Or: "We had a committee meeting with the University's Departments of Physics, Medicine, Kinesiology, and biology departments and we're pretty sure the best way to survive a close quarters ambush is to..."
There's no right or wrong answer to that (though I personally love it when scientists and historians agree.
Here's the deal with self-defense in a mostly civilized world and it's the same deal as trying to keep soldiers sharp in periods of extended peace, or keeping survival skills up when you are warm and comfortable... anything that you want to improve, you know must adapt, and yet you will not have a chance to test. Like home surgery.
I can tell you how to build a fusion generator, or how to fix a car, or how to amputate a leg, or how to defend yourself from rabid ferrets. But if neither of us have actually done it, we have no way to know if the instructions are effective or utter fantasy. And if I have done it for real and you haven't, we can have confidence that the instructions will work and absolutely no idea if they will work for you or if you can pull them off when you need to.
Self-defense is:
1) a high risk endeavor
2) with a very limited amount of actual knowledge (unethical to design proper academic experiments on fear and danger; statistically insignificant number of accurately reported incidents; witnesses under stress are notoriously unreliable)
3) that will never be personally tested by most students or instructors (and even fewer will have enough real encounters to get past the adrenaline effects and see accurately)
4) that people on a very deep almost Freudian level tend to tie their personalities around (how many people self-identify as 'warriors' who have never put their lives on the line, much less under orders?)
Reasons 1 and 4 are the drives. People want to know. They want to know they are good. They want to know they are safe. They want to know they have it. Reason 3 is why that desire will never be satisfied. #2 is the reason there will never be a certain answer.
When people have this big a need that can't be satisfied except at extreme personal risk, they seek outside validation. Lineage. Or pseudoscience. Or scientific studies that if you squint a little look like they might validate what you want to believe.
They want to swim in the deep water, but they need some kind of reassurance. They hold onto the side of the pool.
Sometimes I wonder, why do we bother with martial arts anyway? For sport and fun, OK, but for combat? Why would you want to learn an art that worked for someone else sometime in the past, possibly under different circumstances, legally, ethically etc... Not to mention all the useless shit you have to buy (gi, belt, hakama you never use utside the dojo) While combat is complex, it's not complicated. There are just systems trying to distrupt or destroy other systems. Combat is governed by anatomy and physics. Those do not change. Why is combat an art, not science? Maybe because carrying the legacy of the samurai/ninja/viking/whatever has much appeal to the monkey?
Complex versus complicated is something I desperately want to riff on. Later.
Why are people driven to study something that worked in the past? Possibly because the other option is to study something that didn't work in the past. Something that has never worked.
Which would you prefer: "According to the old legends, Sir Hackemup used these tools and these tactics to survive against insurmountable odds at the Battle of Last Man Standing."
Or: "We had a committee meeting with the University's Departments of Physics, Medicine, Kinesiology, and biology departments and we're pretty sure the best way to survive a close quarters ambush is to..."
There's no right or wrong answer to that (though I personally love it when scientists and historians agree.
My wife and I were talking about doing some minor home surgery. I was, really. K has a very non-scientific attitude about such things.
"We have professionals with the proper equipment right here in town," she said, "Why would you even consider doing such a thing yourself?"
"Because if we didn't have access to professionals, I'd have to do it myself and it's only practice if you don't need to."
Here's the deal with self-defense in a mostly civilized world and it's the same deal as trying to keep soldiers sharp in periods of extended peace, or keeping survival skills up when you are warm and comfortable... anything that you want to improve, you know must adapt, and yet you will not have a chance to test. Like home surgery.
I can tell you how to build a fusion generator, or how to fix a car, or how to amputate a leg, or how to defend yourself from rabid ferrets. But if neither of us have actually done it, we have no way to know if the instructions are effective or utter fantasy. And if I have done it for real and you haven't, we can have confidence that the instructions will work and absolutely no idea if they will work for you or if you can pull them off when you need to.
Self-defense is:
1) a high risk endeavor
2) with a very limited amount of actual knowledge (unethical to design proper academic experiments on fear and danger; statistically insignificant number of accurately reported incidents; witnesses under stress are notoriously unreliable)
3) that will never be personally tested by most students or instructors (and even fewer will have enough real encounters to get past the adrenaline effects and see accurately)
4) that people on a very deep almost Freudian level tend to tie their personalities around (how many people self-identify as 'warriors' who have never put their lives on the line, much less under orders?)
Reasons 1 and 4 are the drives. People want to know. They want to know they are good. They want to know they are safe. They want to know they have it. Reason 3 is why that desire will never be satisfied. #2 is the reason there will never be a certain answer.
When people have this big a need that can't be satisfied except at extreme personal risk, they seek outside validation. Lineage. Or pseudoscience. Or scientific studies that if you squint a little look like they might validate what you want to believe.
They want to swim in the deep water, but they need some kind of reassurance. They hold onto the side of the pool.
Tuesday, December 03, 2013
Knowing Full Well
This may be the longest stretch of not writing on the blog since it started. Mea culpa. That doesn't mean I haven't been writing. Eleven lessons and counting on a class that starts today (one more day to sign up) on Real Villains for a writer's group.
The class will be a challenge. Like in a lot of fringe areas of life, the 'common wisdom' is ridiculously wrong; what most people 'know' are politically-driven platitudes; and these incredibly un- or ill-informed beliefs are passionately defended. There's some information that would rock their world that I can't directly share because of confidentiality issues and NDAs... but they will get a close look. Hope they're ready.
The basic distinction between infatuation and love is that with infatuation, you have to explain that every pimple is really a beauty mark and in love, you can see the blemishes without your feelings changing. Those infatuated must actively stay blind, because they fear what they will feel if they see the truth.
You see this in martial arts, of course. I've seen an instructor with a scripted knife defense that would have cut his own throat with a real blade...and their students blindly repeating the technique. Seen an instructor explain that falling over by flinching was inevitable and physics, though he could only make it work on his own students. Seen people who were toyed with convincing themselves they won. Watched countless martial artists deny their personal experience and accept a ridiculous truth... "Attacks always come from two long steps away" "No one can hit hard enough to hurt you at close range" "Anyone who uses a knife will become tool dependent and forget that they can use their other hand and feet so it's okay to tie up all your weapons on one of his"...and so on.
My circle of friends are probably not the people you'd invite over for tea and crumpets. Some are what R calls, "Our kind of broken." I like them, that's why they're my friends. But I like them knowing full well who and what they are. Not all are bad asses, and not all the ones who think they are really are. Some have knowledge that far outpaces their understanding or skill. All are trustworthy, if you know their parameters.
And some of them don't like each other. "How can you put up with...?"
It's easy. None of my friends are perfect, and so I can love them anyway, flaws and all.
But I hit a wall on this, sometimes, in training. What do you do with good skills that come from horseshit? Most of the time it's not a problem-- generally, if you find an art with 2000 years of history that was invented from pure imagination in the last half century, the art tends to not be all that useful anyway. It's easy to walk away.
But what about effective arts taught by frauds? Or what if it is the second or third generation away from the fraud who conned them and the present generation of instructors don't even know it's a fraud?
And (ran into this recently and am still puzzling over it) a group breaks away from their founder because of integrity issues but continues to teach not just the effective technique but also the bullshit philosophy of the founder?
Example-- most of the "Zen" I have seen written about in the US isn't just about the heretical offshoot of the heretical offshoot of Buddhism, but the misinformed, 1970's hippy idealized imaginings of what zen was supposed to be. If someone wrapped effective stuff in this imaginary trappings...
The INTJ part of me doesn't care. As long as the parts I need work, the fairy tales people tell themselves don't matter to me. But part of me cares, for two reasons. One is that too many people swallow the fantasy with the substance. Two- if someone can study X for a lifetime and somehow avoid noticing that everything around it is based on historical lies, how can I trust them on the base issues either?
Knowing full well who and what they are, I can usually take the useful and leave the useless. But it bothers me.
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