Time and Distance is really it’s own thing and critical to everything. Not just self-defense, but every last damn thing. One internet warrior years ago said, quite pretentiously, “When one can control space and time, one is unbeatable.” Or words to that effect. Well, duh. Distance is not the same as space. Understanding distance is … [Read more…]
PROCESS PREDATOR: For the Process Predator the act of violence is the reason itself. The crime is the goal. The rapist, the serial killer, the ritualistic torture murderers are process predators. The Process predator requires time and privacy for what he intends to do. One of the reasons that home invasion crimes are so brutal … [Read more…]
Most, if not all animals have a ritualized combat between males of the same species to safely establish dominance. Snakes coil around each other and wrestle. It can look like mating to the uninitiated. Deer and elk lock antlers and push and fence. Rams slam their horns, reinforced with massive blocks of bone, into each … [Read more…]
The Group Monkey Dance (GMD) is a show of group solidarity. There are two levels, at least. In the lowest level an outsider is discouraged from interfering with group business—it is a way of establishing territory. Families are tight-knit groups. Domestic violence incidents are acts within the group. Sometimes, when the police intervene, both … [Read more…]
Most of the people reading this will be comfortable products of comfortable homes with significant education and socialization. This is the norm in North America, where I happen to be writing. The norm is so powerful and pervasive that it can be very easy to believe that the values of middle-class Americans are universal. They … [Read more…]
If a young Threat brutally beats a foreign tourist in a random explosion of violence… it wasn’t random. It was just a surprise for the onlookers and the victim. In a marginal society, like the criminal subculture, a reputation for violence is a very valuable thing. If people think you are crazy, apt to … [Read more…]
Defending common territory is the hallmark of any group, whether an army, a tribe, or a troop of monkeys. Humans have expanded this idea and symbolized it in that many are willing to fight and die for intangibles – a flag, patriotism, a place in heaven. Just because the territory being defended or invaded is … [Read more…]
The list won’t be exhaustive, and I wish all of the things on here were simple and had simple solutions. Most martial arts training isn’t effective for SD purposes. Some of it is on the teaching end, and some of that is on the learning end, and some is in the culture. That last sentence … [Read more…]
There are three natural strategies for dealing with predators: Hide, run and fight. There are two more for dealing with your own species: Posture and Submit. Both occasionally work cross species. The three natural strategies mimic the Freeze-Flight-Fight. Freezing is natural. We evolved in a world where predators key on motion. It is a form … [Read more…]
In some ways this all comes close to the Intent-Means-Opportunity triangle. An immediate threat has to have all three. Most of the time, you are the resource, the source of intent. the threat is his or her own means and the terrain and your behaviors supply the opportunity. But that’s kind of simplistic. Social and … [Read more…]