Taiji in the Park
Meet John. This is a picture of a man who, until last semester, worked with me at a university in Sichuan, China. He is, one might say, at the downward end of a down-on-his luck downward trend which began pretty much as soon as he arrived last September.
But don’t feel too sorry for him. The guy was an alcoholic, and aggressive drunk, threw up on a teachers’ floor, started fights, harassed the female students and generally made a nuisance of himself from the get-go. He messed up his work visa, couldn’t pay the fine, got kicked off mainland China and is now begging outside the McDonald’s on the waterfront in Kowloon, Hong Kong. How are the mighty fallen.
Like this:
Pride Comes Before a Fall
The City of Gloucester, in England, is famously famous for two things. One: it is the source of the first recorded case of flesh-eating virus Necrotising Fasciitus in the UK. Two: it is the home of the notorious serial & child killers, Fred and Rose West.
It’s also, for good or ill, the city where I grew up. It’s not a terrible place, Gloucester. But it’s not exactly Barcelona, either. On the plus side, it has a very lovely harbour – the furthest inland harbour in the country if such facts float your boat (sorry – famous for three things then). And it’s got a rather splendid Cathedral, where scenes from several of the Harry Potter films were filmed (OK, four. Four things).
It’s also, sadly, the kind of place where there is very little to do of a Friday night other than while away the hours in the beer soaked pubs and clubs that pack out one short street on the edge of the city centre; milling about in dark corners, shiny black shoes sticking to the floor, drinking cheap lager with such contemporary classics as ‘Come on Eileen’ and ‘Anything By Bon Jovie’ blasting away in the background. This was the Nineties, but also the West-Country – contemporary music was generally met with the kind of suspicion usually reserved for something squidgy and spidery found in the toe of a seldom worn shoe.
Like this:
How Not to Get Hit – The Movie
Slightly different post today, to mark four weeks until the launch of How Not to Get Hit I’ve put together a wee video which tries to capture the essence of what it is I’m trying to do.
Don’t go expecting any miracles here, OK? I mean, this is my directorial debut and, well, let’s just say I’m not heading off to the Sundance Film Festival any time soon. But it was fun to make and, in that spirit, I hope you enjoy:
Special thanks go to Jane and Joe Evans, who were fantastic sports and for which stardom no doubt beckons (Joe has even just bought himself a motorbike – how Hollywood is THAT?) and Ed Ley, whose gym in Bristol, Absolute Health served as a perfect backdrop for the daft Rocky training montage.
Like this:
Guns For Show, Knives For a Pro
Name the film! Yep spot on, go out and buy yourself a prize it was Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels – a comedy crime caper about a bunch of inept London chancers bungling a robbery. For them, carrying a knife, or a 15th Century antique shotgun, or a black rubber dildo for that matter (it’s not what you think – watch the film) is all in a days’ work. A busy and absurdly complicated day admittedly, but a day nonetheless.
But you’re not an inept, two dimensional movie character trying to fence a shotgun and steal cannabis from a drug dealer whilst being chased by a psychopathic fetishist loan shark, are you? …are you? No – OK, good then. No, your fears and daily dangers are of the more mundane sort. Getting hit by a bicycle, becoming the latrine of a passing pigeon, stubbing your toe, that kind of thing.
Why Self Defence Won’t Work Against Terrorists
This week sees the beginnings of the court case of Anders Behring Breivik, perpetrator of the massacre in Norway last year, that country’s worst atrocity in modern peacetime. Given the subject matter, don’t expect any of the funny in this week’s blog. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn something. The difficult question for me, with my personal safety hat on, is what can ‘self defence’ do against such indiscriminate violence?
Having given this some considerable thought, the answer I keep coming back to is, well, not a lot. No amount of behavioural knowledge, communication skills, training or reality based martial arts can do much against a deranged man with a high-powered rifle, a bomb and a plan.
This post tries to look at why and, in doing so, hold a mirror up to such acts in the hope of bettering your understanding of when it can help.
Terrorists don’t care about hurting you
In your common, every day assault, you nearly always play an active role – either by your behaviour or your lifestyle. And with responsibility comes control – we can change the signals we give off, the places we go to, the people we mix with – and make our lives a little safer.
Not so the terrorist. In fact one of the most terrifying things about terrorism is that it’s not personal. It doesn’t matter who you are; old or young, man or woman, parent or child. Terrorism is not born out of a desire to harm specific individuals, but of a desire to harm an entire society. This is, in fact, the point – terrorists want us to live in fear all the time, not knowing where the next attack will come – they want us to feel our very lifestyle is the reason for their violence.
Terrorists aren’t violent through emotion, they’re violent through idealism
Most types of violence and aggression are born of a desire bring about harm; to damage another person in some way. Most of the time, this is driven by the base, animalistic urges of anger, sex or territory. All of the time, your attacker must raise their emotional state to a level where they are able to justify their attack. By the time violence actually occurs, it has been a long and complicated psychological path to get there – even if this path was invisible to you. Once you understand this path to violence, though, you can use tactics and techniques to slow its process and even remove the threat entirely.
Not so the terrorist. The terrorist feels no anger toward their specific, but to the society they belong to. As such, it is not possible to use reason to return them to a rational state. You, the victim, are not the target – you are a tool, a means to an end, a sacrifice that must be made. To achieve this outlook, you have been thoroughly de-humanised by your attacker – emotional appeals will hold no purchase.
Terrorists don’t want t fight
A fight implies a level of exchange between parties, either physical or verbal, wherein each party vies for advantage. People engaged in fights do so with one objective – to win the fight. There is always another option – not to fight. Self defence is not fighting. Self defence is preservation and any violent act committed in its name should be to reduce risk and escape – not to gain advantage, as this then becomes attack, not defence.
Not so the terrorist. They have no interest in ‘winning’ a fight with their victims, and so their violence cannot be nullified by refusing to meet them on their own terms. Attacks are selected and planned to minimise all risk to the terrorist. Locations, timings and methodology are all designed to ensure success with minimal risk to the terrorist – or worse, that the terrorist intends to become a martyr ad so has no consideration for personal risk.
This is not true of more casual violent crime, or even muggings / sexual assaults, where it is always possible to make the attacker feel fear and manipulate their own sense of self-preservation, gaining the advantage.*
*Of course, there’s always the exception to any rule – in this case being the Scottish passer-by who, during a failed terrorist attack at an airport, pulled a still-on-fire terrorist from his bomb packed car and punched him in the head whilst he was still on fire. Welcome to Scotland.
So I’m buggered then?
Not quite. Let’s not forget that your statistical risk of becoming victim of a terrorist attack is about 1 in 3 million each and every year.
Terrorism is designed to make us fear own very society, our ideology and our way of life. Terrorists want us to live in fear because of not who we are as individuals, but who we are as a collective. Our best defence against this tactic is to prove that it won’t work – thus, hopefully, removing its’ validity.
Don’t give them what they want – fear, subordination, to win, to have a reward for their actions. That doesn’t mean you have to beat them – just play a different game. This is the one true rule of terrorism, muggings, assaults, sex crimes, hate crimes, or any other kind of violence. Remove the reward for violence and, for the most part, you remove the violence itself.
A Flock of Starlings
A very happy Easter to all my readers in the West; I hope your commemorations of the resurrection of Christ through the medium of chocolate egg laying rabbits met with great success. As you might expect, over here it China it all passed us merrily by without even realising what weekend it was. That’s not to say that there were no celebrations though – no, in China the Spring Equinox is still celebrated with a national holiday, but over here it’s called the ‘Sweeping of the Tombs Festival’. Doesn’t have quite the same ring to it I know but when you think about it, which I have, it’s not so different.
