In Defense of Anarchy

Anarchy simply means "no king" (an + archy).  it has a grand tradition of peace and prosperity, and so the perfectly good description of a fine milieu has been abused to mean the exact opposite in general use, that is instead of peace and prosperity, the implication of anarchy, people associate anarchy with chaos.    The funny thing is kings, states and such hegemon centered entities bring with them chaos.  The hegemon always presents what must be the finest example of a false dilemma ever devised: hegemon or chaos.  Well, the hegemon is chaos, so in essence chaos v chaos.  Like when the British queried the Irish, indeed everyone, what would your country be like without us ruling you?

Of course, the question was considered between a British overloard and an English speaking colonial subject, and as such harldy represents the colonized people. Preaching to the choir, the British came to believe their own PR, disastrously, as all Hegemons do.

Believing your own PR is probably the worst mistake you can make in human relations.

In the case of the Irish, those who wanted to overthrow the Brits were in fact those who benefitted most from british occupation. They did not want anything to change, they just wanted to be in charge.  And indeed they did get there.  As soon as the Brits quit Ireland, a civil war broke out, to the amusement of the British, and an example for all other colonials.

Anarchists, properly defined are not against heirarchy or order.  Quite the contrary.  they believe in leadership, and rules, but a constant flowing regime with certain aspects:

1. The regime is voluntary, you can participate or not, up to you.

2. It is nonviolent.  It has no sanction for non-participation or malefaction except shunning.

The hegemon needs both, can not work without both.  People need neither, but sadly, we have voters, and in his way people harmed are not victims, but complicit perpetrators in their own degeneration.

We have had working anarchy, relative justice, peace and prosperity, many times in history...  the earliest record is the 400 years after Exodus, there is the Iceland 200 year experience, Carthage may have been, but just not enough information, and the American West 1820s on until the 1870s is a surprisingly good example.

Even when regimes are operating at their nadir, with their requisite "monopoly on violence within a given territory" we still have working anarchistic regimes, which the lawyers call "private law." Lex mercatoria has been around 1000 years, and states find they must comply with this private law if they wish to benefit from world trade.  Try as they might to fight it, anarchy wins.

I am an anarchist because it is the only politics that can approximate, justice, peace and prosperity.

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Aikido For Police and Schools

Of my three original instructors, the only one still alive, Bernie Lau is famous for having a crisis experience regarding the efficacy of aikido in real life.  The crisis involved an encounter trying to arrest a drunk lumberjack.  Lau Sensei felt his actions led to two police officers getting injured, plus the lumberjack winning a excessive force lawsuit against the city.  For a young cop that would be a crisis.

Lau Sensei is legendary for his many martial arts exploits, starting with being recruited into aikido off the beach in Hawaii in 1954 by aikido Chief Instructor Tohei Sensei himself.  He was physically formidable, and for someone in his 70s, still is.  When aikido did not work, he switched to his Goju Kai karate and began delivering punishing blows.  That doesn't work on a drunk lumberjack either.

The crisis story is much longer, but the point is aikido is not designed to be an aggressive, offensive art.  As Lau Sensei himself notes.

Here is an article on aikido gone wrong in application:

It appears the use of Aikido began around 2012 at Buechel after the principal hired Ron Boyd, the Richmond martial arts instructor, to train some staff members at the school, according to JCPS records. Boyd has told the CJ that when properly used, the Aikido method shouldn't result in injuries.
In February 2016, JCPS' director of security and investigations, Stan Mullen, suggested that another look at the use of Aikido Control Training in schools may be warranted.
Mullen pointed to the broken wrist at Buechel as well as the head injury and the broken collarbone at Breckinridge Metro as "three significant injuries directly connected to Aikido," saying the injuries may have been due to improper uses of the technique.

Ouch!

At least three Jefferson County Public School students suffered serious injuries in the last three years after staff reported using a method of physical restraint known as Aikido Control Training, a technique the state Department of Education banned last month from all public schools amid concerns about potential injuries.

You can google the aikido instructor behind the program. I've never met him, he seems a typical aikido instructor, so how could aikido application go so wrong?

In my time I have taught in K-12 schools, usually in inner city rough neighborhoods.  Indeed, in some schools we were given hazard pay.  Yes, most states allow kids to stay in K-12 schools until they are 21 (not sure anyone ever takes advantage of that opportunity) and I have met elementary kids bigger and stronger than I am.  High school kids can be Goliaths.  Lesson #1 in K-12 education: never get into a power struggle with a student.  You'll lose.  There are no exceptions to this rule.  Yes school districts have their own fully trained and armed cops, and yes, they will come in and handcuff a first grader and take him away, let alone a high school senior.  And I have also taught in Juvie, where the kids are already under arrest.  But when the cops have to be called, it is generally assumed an adult got into a power struggle with the kid, and failed to de-escalate.  (So even if the cops take the kid away, you lost. And the kid knows that too.  He knows he'll be back, you may not.)

Most school districts offer training on how to restrain a child who is about to commit serious property damage (is a student dropping your cell phone in the classroom fish tank serious property damage?) or physically harm another.  But that training is more to protect the school district from a lawsuit than protect the teacher. Most teachers will not intervene in a fight, they just let the students beat each other, mostly because the pugilists' friends end to break it up.  For my part I was able to simple step in between kids and they simply backed off.  Who knows what would happen if one of the kids came after me?

(An interesting lesson from the school self-defense training:  If you are restraining a kid, you are usually safe as long as the target of the kid is out of range.  The kids rage is focussed on his target.  Once the kids attention turns from the target of his rage, to your restraint, then you are in trouble. The kid will now fight you.  You can spot this transference when the kid starts looking at how you have him pinned, when he starts probing how to get away from you.  At this point the advice is ask the kid if it is ok to release him, and do so anyway after say 3 seconds.  This gives the kid power, and shows him respect, which might translate into working with you, instead of fighting.  To me a fascinating tidbit.)

Although many kids want to destroy teachers, a common tactic among teachers is if a kid is getting into it with one teacher, another teacher will walk up and take over as the first teacher simply turns and leaves. The first teacher will get a barrage of insults but if you cannot take that, then you do not belong in a school. What kids do is offer their best effort at all times.  If throwing things and cussing and stealing from you is what they are doing, that is simply their best effort, given their background.  You don't beat up a kid for doing his best.

Teachers do get cold-cocked, as well as administrators.  But given the amount of interaction between civilized teachers and yet-to-be civilized impoverished youth, the ratio of assault to interaction is near nil in schools.

So the application of physical aikido to this setting makes no sense.  Of course tenkan and irimi, on the emotional level, is a constant event.  When a kid makes fun of your receding hairline, or worse, your shoes, he is just probing for a button to push.  If he gets near a button, you simply reply, "you are right to criticize me about my hairline" (tenkan).  Or "what would you recommend I buy when next I have enough money to buy shoes?" (Irimi).

Aikido as a physical event has no place in schools, for the threats do not warrant a martial art response.

As to aikido "not working in real life" the statement is odd. The funny thing is, as a student of Lau Sensei, we learned arrest techniques.  When Lau Sensei built his own dojo in his back yard, his students were mostly cops and military (plus some awesome visiting instructors.)

L to R Wally Jay, James Demile, John Spiers, Bernie Lau, at Lau Sensei's dojo.  Wally Jay taught Bruce Lee, James Demile was one of Bruce Lee's first ten students.

Arrest techniques were a common lesson, although I am no cop. But, having been so specifically and intensely trained,  I've personally made over a dozen arrests in my time,  what we call in the USA "citizen arrests."  It's tricky business as a legal matter, but even trickier as a practical matter.  A kidnapper, a rapist, a second story man?  (Also a chicken $#!+ dine and dasher, and other petty fools who just pissed me off).  The funny thing is, as someone ready, willing and able to mix it up hand to hand, people seem to be pacified once they are placed under arrest.   It's never happened that someone came back swinging at me when I arrested him, so who knows what would happen then?  I can think of maybe four instances of the dozen where I had to pin anyone.

But the fact is I cannot do anything to anyone who does not come at me, because if I am not attacked, aikido won't work.  I need the attacker's energy to fuel an aikido move.  On the other hand, police are obliged to initiate violence to effect an arrest.  You may say that statement is too strong, but today an arrest is an act of violence, with overwhelming force brought to an arrest event.  That is relatively new.  Back in the 1970s when I made arrests, my perpetrators tended to think I was a cop.  OK.  Now they know I am NOT a cop, because I am alone when I make an arrest.  Cops don't do that anymore.  The last two arrestees argued with me, denying my right to arrest them.  In both instances I simply said they were safer with the cops than me, and in those two instances, convincingly. The world has changed.  And again, who knows what would happen if my perpetrator comes up swinging.

Aikido works, if you are not doing police work.  Our trying to stop a kid from doing his very best in school. If "citizen's arrest" is not police work, then what is it?  I call it anarchy, escaping the chaos of failed government by being the government. Schools are chaotic, and they are a great place to practice anarchy.

If you are a martial artists, especially and aikidoist, you ought to be making arrests.

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Aren't We Supposed to Do That?

A man was arrested for impersonating Jesus.

A man has been arrested for impersonating Jesus Christ after he was spotted walking along a road carrying a huge wooden cross on his back.

Isn't that what we are supposed to do?

We need a theology check on aisle three....

"This, of course, offends believers. Nobody has the right to try on the image of Jesus Christ, who is our sacred lord," he said.

No one could hang from that cross, so they should not have taken him seriously.

The performance artist had an interesting observation:

"This reaction proves that the Bible story was true and that after 2,000 years people have still not changed - we are still cruel and intolerant to our neighbours."

So if you act like Jesus you come to believe in Jesus?

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Conscientious Objectors Replace Police in Detroit

And yield better results in the hardest neighborhoods.

The City of Detroit can no longer bother (or afford) to respond to citizen's pleas for help when they call 911.  So conscientious objectors step in and solve the problem.


If it works in Detroit, why not everywhere else, and get rid of this failed experiment of only the last 150 years or so of "police"?  (This guy reminds me very much of James DeMile. and here…)

The conscientious objectors only got their chance to outperform the police for the last 20 years because of the failure of the Hegemon's social contract.  C'est la vie.

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God and Government

Paul Green has an excellent essay on God and government -

Outside of these principles, no party can rightfully exercise dominion over another, without violation of the original created order. On a small scale, we call those who do so anyway, “busybodies”. When the same behaviour grows in scale and in numbers, the word becomes “government”.
Being a busybody, or “meddler in other people’s affairs” as one translation puts it, is ranked in the Bible alongside the offences of murder and theft, because such violations go hand in hand. It may not often be heard from church pulpits, but it is clearly written in 1 Peter 4:15:
“…let none of you suffer as a murderer, a thief, an evildoer, or as a busybody in other people’s matters“

Give it a read.

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Private Law

A good argument for anarchy:

The fact is that there is no such thing as a government of law and not people. The law is an amalgam of contradictory rules and counter-rules expressed in inherently vague language that can yield a legitimate legal argument for any desired conclusion. For this reason, as long as the law remains a state monopoly, it will always reflect the political ideology of those invested with decisionmaking power. Like it or not, we are faced with only two choices. We can continue the ideological power struggle for control of the law in which the group that gains dominance is empowered to impose its will on the rest of society, or we can end the monopoly.

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Real Anarchists Eschew Violence

The powers that be lie to discredit their real competitors, the anarchists...

Anarchists attack police with petrol bombs after Athens demo
ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Rioting youths have clashed with Greek police in central Athens, damaging vehicles and property, following a demonstration by hundreds of anarchists seeking the abolition of a maximum security prison.

If they throw molotov cocktails, they don't want change, they only want to be in charge.  Real anarchists would never resort to violence, since it only empowers the bad guys in charge.

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Singapore Punches Above Its Weight

Why is it countries around seven million in population, with freer markets, are so safe?

When Lee Kuan Yew died Monday at age 91, the founding father of Singapore did not leave just his legacy as the prime minister whose authoritarian policies shaped a backwater British colony into the world’sfourth-wealthiest nation. He also left Singaporeans with one of the most formidable armies in the world. The tiny island state of 5.4 million, with a land area far smaller than New York City’s, has more fighter jets than Spain, Poland or Sweden. Its army has as many tanks as Italy, which is more than 400 times the size. Its navy boasts the only stealthy ships in the region.  

Too small to attack neighbors, too tough to be attacked.  Purely defensive

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Aikido and Self-employment

If you want to advance in aikido, it takes a lot of training, time on the mats, being thrown down, and getting up.  And throwing down...

This takes time and opportunity.  Being self-employed (or more accurately, customer-employed) allows you to order your time to optimal training.

A paycheck is nice, but if you work at something you love, then the paycheck is not a priority, self-employment is about lifestyle, not personal wealth (although wealth is far more likely among the self-employed.)

What work ought you do?  You've heard that to be self-employed you need passion.  This is true, but it is only one-half the equation.  Passion means "to suffer."  There is no other meaning.  the winning combination in work is to experience suffering in something you love to do, like anything at all, and then work on a solution to the problem that causes you to suffer.  If, and here is the winning part people leave out, you find JOY while working on the solution to the problem that causes you to suffer, then you have the winning combination, passion and joy at the same time, as your lifestyle.

Happiness depends on family, and it can come and go.  But you are in charge of joy, but it cannot be had directly, you must find it by passing through passion, suffering.  Now you know why so few people get to the joyful, self-actualized life.

You have already experienced this.  You wanted some defense, some martial art, but not a violent one. There was your passion, and working on it, twisting, falling, rolling, etc, hurt.  But to make progress was joy, and you keep coming back.

So, now.  What else causes you to suffer (passion) that you find joy working on?  And people will pay you to share you efforts?

Get self (customer) employed.  There is not a single one of us not meant to be thus.  Or stated positively, we are all meant to be self-employed.

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Why Ferguson?

John Gibson has a late night talk show devoted to the premise that people of African heritage are inferior, and their problems are all their fault.  But maybe not...

“Yes, all the time. It is something I see a lot of, whether it was from deputies, supervisors or undercovers and even investigators. It’s almost like you have no emotion with it, that they attach the bodies to it, they’re going to be out of jail tomorrow anyway; nothing is going to happen to them anyway. One of the consequences of the war on drugs is that police officers are pressured to make large numbers of arrests, and it’s easy for some of the less honest cops to plant evidence on innocent people. The drug war inevitably leads to crooked policing — and quotas further incentivize such practices. It doesn’t help that your higherups all did the same thing when they were on the road. It’s like a neverending cycle. Like how molested children accept that as okay behavior and begin molesting children themselves.”

Read the article here where the officers note people of African heritage are particularly selected for false arrest.  Abuse people, then blame them.

I've heard these stories about Seattle for the last 40 years.  From cops.

Not nice.

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Live By the Sword...

Die by the sword...

It is not uncommon for the powers that be to 'take care" of extreme elements before striking a peace deal.

The trail of ISIS terror leads painfully, inexorably and unmistakably back to the United States and its allies. ISIS was a creation of the West and its failed policy decisions. Now ISIS is being used as the excuse for further military adventurism in the Middle East.

David sent Uriah into battle to get rid of him, and thus it will ever be...

Theoretically, these battles are good for the Militia, as the Junta spends reserves there quite aimlessly.  That has made the punitive battalions (volunteer units made up of activists/neo-nazis/released criminals) suspect that the Junta command deliberately drives the southern battlegroup into a meat grinder. (That is one version – that they are agents of the Kremlin – another, because that is how Poroshenko gets rid of radical elements). 

Then comes this... an American with the ironic name of Douglas MacArthur McCain gets killed fighting for ISIS this week.

When the Soviets were assured of victory in the east, they advised the Polish underground to rise up against the nazis, in anticipation of the Soviet liberation of Poland.  The cream of Polish talent and leadership rose up against the nazis, and the Soviets sent no help.  The Soviets never had any intention of doing so.  The nazis wiped out the cream of Polish talent, couple of hundred thousand people, and finally came in a year later, to a country devoid of leadership.

Die by the sword.  Violence never works, whether in making change, or in making government.

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Gandhi on Anarchy

Gandhi on Anarchy, in 1942:

 "Anarchy is the only way. Someone asked me if there would be anarchy after British rule. Yes, it will be there, but I tell the British to give us chaos."

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Jesus as Promised Land Anarchist

It is pretty clear that Jesus was a "Promised Land Anarchist", referring to the 400 years after exodus, when Israel had no king.  Note his reference to the Father, not Himself, and Solomon, Israel's glorious king, as not to be esteemed.

Matthew 6, KJV

25Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment? 26Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? 27Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature? 28And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: 29And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 30Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? 31Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? 32(For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. 33But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

34Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

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Eastern Wisdom

The first answer is good, and then listen to his reply to the second answer, after, you will note, checking his iPhone.  Excellent.


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Erasmus on Peace

David Swanson has an essay on Ersamus on Peace:

Kings, writes Erasmus, start wars to seize territory when they would be better off improving the territory they have now.  Or they start wars out of a personal grudge.  Or they start wars to disrupt popular opposition to themselves at home.  Such kings, Erasmus writes, should be exiled for life to the remotest islands.  And not just the kings but their privileged advisors.  Ordinary people don’t create wars, says Peace, those in power impose wars on them.

500 years later and nothing has changed.

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Anarchist As Victim

I was making a presentation on nonviolence and anarchy when in passing I disdained "worker violence for change" with the idea that employment was voluntary, so why would anyone need to employ violence for change?

Well!  That did not go over well.  The audience asserted that the workers had no choice, no alternatives, so they had to do the work available, and thus violence was the only option.  Anarchist as victim.

Odd that, an anarchist depending on a boss for employment.  Seems to be an internal contradiction.  The anarchist answer to exploitation is migration, but of course we no longer have open borders, or, in other words, we have outlawed freedom.

I don't buy the anarchist as victim idea.


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Dorothy Day Anarchist

Anarchist Dorothy Day left no corporate structure for the Catholic Worker Movement she founded, all association is voluntary, so it really matters not at all when putative "followers" misrepresent Day for whatever reasons.  Let's hear Day:

Roosevelt will be elected on the platform of Cake and Circuses. During the depression years the relief checks flowed in, and now during the war years the government checks come regularly on the first of every month. The millions who are thus bought and paid for do not want any change. They are afraid of change. Mothers of six children cash their $180 stipend every month and go on a binge of department-store buying, movies, … candies, radio, and even sometimes a car. It’s amazing how much you can get in the way of luxury if you just do without the necessities. [Quoted in an article in the summer 1999 issue of the St. John’s Law Review.]

Ouch! Fairly standard anti-state, pro-freedom anarchist thought. Now let's hear from Tom Cornell, a writer for the Catholic Worker blog today:

No anarchist of sound mind holds either that government does not exist or ought not exist, etymology notwithstanding. Anarchists want more government, if that means the Department of Labor defending the right to organize, the Department of Agriculture helping to initiate producer cooperatives, sponsoring farm support and surplus food distribution programs, and much less government if it means the State Department, and the so-called Defense and Justice departments; more anti-trust legislation and enforcement, more environmental protection, more OSHA; immediate access to federal courts for every labor organizer punished for organizing. 

His blended definition of anarchist is wrong and right, an act of dishonest writing.    So any anarchist, such as Dorothy Day, cannot be of sound mind (unless they accept Cornell's crazy definition.)    Tom Cornell is flexible enough to say words do not mean what they mean (anarchy) and flexible enough to say "an entity with a monopoly on violence is OK as long as its policies reflect my personal preferences."  No wonder the Catholic worker movement has no appeal to people of good will.

There are plenty of people today who benefit personally saying "Well, when Jesus said this, what he really meant was..."

Cornell also has this to say in his essay:

Dorothy Day liked the shock value of the term "anarchist." 

You see, she was just a clown, going for cheap shock value.  A sort of Catholic Lenny Bruce.

I'd love to hear from Tom Cornell, on a particular topic.  Does he presently depend on government checks for his ... no check that, he is unlikely (from reading his writings) to be accurate...  does he receive any monetary compensation from the government?

And this is why we have no anti-war, pro-peace, pro-labor movement.  They've been bought off, just as Day described.

Happily there is no corporate "Catholic Worker Movement" so I am free to state without fear of contradiction that I am the Catholic Worker Movement in the USA, and the people associated with Tom Cornell and his website are not.  If you want real contemporary source of Catholic Worker thought and critique, grounded in the social teachings of the Catholic Church, I am the source.

I wonder if Dorothy Day would disagree with me?

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The State Putatively Provides Order

But concentrating power brings chaos.

They found that those 873 exonerated defendants spent a combined total of more than 10,000 years in prison, an average of more than 11 years each. Nine out of 10 of them are men and half are African-American.
Nearly half of the 873 exonerations were homicide cases, including 101 death sentences. Over one-third of the cases were sexual assaults.
DNA evidence led to exoneration in nearly one-third of the 416 homicides and in nearly two-thirds of the 305 sexual assaults.
Researchers estimate the total number of felony convictions in the United States is nearly a million a year.
The overall registry/list begins at the start of 1989. It gives an unprecedented view of the scope of the problem of wrongful convictions in the United States and the figure of more than 2,000 exonerations "is a good start," said Rob Warden, executive director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions.
"We know there are many more that we haven't found," added University of Michigan law professor Samuel Gross, the editor of the newly opened National Registry of Exonerations.
Counties such as San Bernardino in California and Bexar County in Texas are heavily populated, yet seemingly have no exonerations, a circumstance that the academics say cannot possibly be correct.
The registry excludes at least 1,170 additional defendants. Their convictions were thrown out starting in 1995 amid the periodic exposures of 13 major police scandals around the country. In all the cases, police officers fabricated crimes, usually by planting drugs or guns on innocent defendants.

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Politics and Change

In the Brothers Karamazov,  Dostoyevsky deals in part with the problem society and freedom.  One of the brothers relates a poem he wrote that imagines Jesus returns during the Spanish Inquisition and the Inquisitor explains to Jesus that God gave people freedom but they want bread and security, so the Inquisitors give it to them, good and hard.

This is a reworking of 1 Samuel 8, in fact I wondered if Dostoyevsky had ever read that passage, but this is only a character speaking.

I once noted to an aspiring politician who wanted my vote because we needed "change" that every politician says the exact same thing upon entering, but so far nothing has changed.  How would he feel if this was true for him too?  "That would be sad."

They go in saying the Capitol is a cesspool but decide in time it is a hot tub, and a party one at that.  In time they all decide that the people want to be oppressed, given "a king to fight their battles for them."  hence all of these odious elements and practices they inflict on us by law.

Now that is some consolation when pursuing a life of graft, bribery, whoring, substance abuse and whatever else is par for the course in politics.  You are just giving the masses what they want.

But here is the problem:  when a genuine person arises that begins to lead people to a more just and peaceful, genuine society, he is murdered by the very people who insist the masses want to be oppressed.  Gandhi, King, X, and so on. What they claim is a sad compromise becomes an existential imperative.

It may be a satisfying conceit to claim as a politician to be doing the peoples' will, but if and when the people express a will contrary to hot tub ethics, their response is vicious, like a cokehead in a hot tub.

And change is upon us.  A new hit movie has the FDA as the villain, Robert Redford has a movie out in which his solo sailboat runs into a loose shipping container on the high seas and he is in for the struggle of his life (get it? rugged individualism, crashes into materialism, and the existential crisis of systems breakdown and even some disaster prep thrown in... something for everyone).

No one wants this system.  those who have done well want it to end first, so they can avoid any "justice" rough or otherwise.  Those not doing well, want to drag it out hoping for justice.  Between the two of them, they both want violence for change.

Not much we can do about where we are headed, more a question of how we'll behave when we get there.

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Knock Out Punch

Our minimum wage laws assure that the marginally employable are certainly unemployed, where they tend to get into mischief.  I am certain that the tensions rising are being engineered, from Oprah's infelicitous comment about "racists need to die" and Obamacare being a disaster, and so on.  It is classic change the topic and "blame the black guy" all in one.

I like the crisis du jour is called the "knock out game."  In martial arts, we practice in dojos, like a gym, as in any other fun sport.  I think is important on the street is to meet threats with the attitude of "game on."  I think it is important to train with your adrenalin flowing, cause in a real confrontation, the andrenalin is flowing.  And when it is game on, you can play evenly.

Of course in this game we get cold-cocked, so it is not very sporting.  And it does not do much good for me to advise situational awareness since I have the gift of ADD and the situational awareness of a
meerkat.  Offense needs room, so when I feel threat I close in on it because defense works best in a  tight quarters.  I meet many new and interesting people this way.

Racism is ugly, but it can only be supported by th State.  The only place I can recall where I met raw, murderous racism has been in Hong Kong, my second favorite city.  Hong Kong has the same range of people as any other city, including the madly racist.  The difference is in Hong Kong none of them have the power to act on their impulses, so life goes on peaceably in spite of how some people can be.

With power comes the leverage to act on racism, and no place more so than working for the State.  I personally know at least one person who joined law enforcement to "beat the shit out of n------"  Lucky he retired before youtube.

Hong Kong has a State, but it does not haver the power to keep racism alive.

This "knock-out game" is not somewthign new, we have a term for it, cold-cocked.  Old activity.

And a group of people coming at some unsuspecting fellow and doing him wrong is nothing new.

http://www.gateschili.org/webpages/popup_info.cfm?photoslideshow=14136&staffdir=cwhite

We are social beings, but not socialist beings.  If we get rid of too much state we can allow people to flourish and at the same time deny the misanthropists the leverage to do their thing.

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