The martial art I started with had its roots in the old unreconstructed break things and kill people philosophy. It was never sportified like judo or kendo. Along with the “perfect” version of a technique, we learned variations and how to fail gracefully; in other words, how to not get fucked up when you screw up. We also learned a bunch of dirty tricks, both to prevent them being done to us, and to use if we had to.
Being attacked without provocation by someone who pursues me when I try to retreat means that I’m in deep shit, and I’ll do damn near anything to him — if I have to — to make sure I’m not going to end up dead or in the hospital.
(One of the guys at my dojo found out that it’s actually harder to gouge an eyeball than you think. He actually stuck his finger in a guy’s eye, squished in between the eye and the socket, and apparently caused no long-term damage. Worked well enough for temporarily pinning him to a car, though.)
I guess I don’t think of a line I am going to cross, or not cross. Good hand-to-hand training teaches someone a set of skills that you do without having to think about it. Thus it doesn’t matter whether it is a life-threatening attack or just a dominance duel like kids do - I am going to follow the same block-hit-clinch-control-throw-control-submit sequence that I have been trained to do.
That is one of the major advantages of hand-to-hand combat training - you have a plan, and some idea of how to execute it. This doesn’t make you invincible, but it gives you an edge that the average, untrained person doesn’t have.
Thus the Combat Meter has, or ought to have, two settings - On and Off. You avoid the fight if at all possible - talk your way out, ignore it, leave, call the cops, some combination of the above. But if you can’t avoid the fight, then you have to win. So Mr. Wino in the OP is going to get treated as if he were life-threatening, whether he is or not. Sorry, but there it is.
Fortunately I haven’t been in a serious street fight in thirty five years, so the matter is more academic than practical at this point in my career.
Depends on if the guy is A) actively trying to kill me, or B) just trying to, as you said, “fuck me up”. If it’s B, you either take your punishment or dish it out. Eye-gouging, throat-punching, breaking bones, or ruining joints is not cool in that situation. If it’s A, then whatever.
How do you know what this is before it’s too late?
I am guessing this is a joke.
Not sure about the movie, but in normal circumstances, with regular people this is true.
Especially when you get old, not in as good shape as you once were and easily winded. The issue I have is that you have no idea what is going to happen in these situations. A guy could just push you and you could trip over a curb, bang your head and you’re dead. A friend of mine from the past, he was always an idiot and not a fighter by any means, punched a guy in the chest once and killed him. The other guy was starting it, but it was no more than a lucky punch. He got off with it and did no jail time, oddly enough he was stabbed in the chest at a party and died. I guess my point is that if a threat is perceived, there may be only one opportunity to act defensively. In most instances average people are stunned by the fight or flight response and either stand there dumfounded or start swinging wildly, neither of which is a good response. On the other hand, people like boxers and mma fighters are used to it and are not generally phased by people swinging at them or being hit.
Dirty? No such thing.
I feel fortunate that I can count all of the physical fights I’ve ever been in on one hand, and those were all in school. Situational awareness and intelligence have always been enough to prevent any physical confrontations.
In the situation the OP describes though, definitely goe for an eye.
From what I’ve been taught by others and observed first hand, if you can jab a finger in one eye, the other one will close in sympathy.
Then kick their feet out from under them, a couple of hard kicks to the head and that’s the end of the fight.
When things like this have happened to me, it was always one of two types of assailant: either a very good, experienced fighter trying to establish dominance in his territory (biker bar, street corner where he’s pimping, etc.), or it was someone on PCP, which is actually worse, because they won’t feel pain until later, so you could work really hard to mess them up, and unless you shut down their spinal column or break a leg, they don’t stop coming.
Downside to going all chimpanzee on a good fighter is that, if he’s better and luckier than you, you turn a beating you might survive into a murder. Also, if you win, you’ll have to answer for every injury the attacker receives … every single one. They’ll count the injuries and recite them to you. You almost always have the legal responsibility to stop maiming someone when they are no longer a threat … if you can end the threat with a damaged knee or a solid head-butt, you look better to the judge and jury than if you bite off his ear, poke his eyes, and generally act insane.
Obviously, I lived through my personal misadventures, but I have a ton of injuries that plague me in my old age. I never blinded anyone, and never killed anybody (that I know of), but for about ten years, I spent every weekend (and way too many weekdays) in biker bars and on related road trips.
One thing, if you decide to commit to fighting dirty, you can’t go back … you’ll receive the same treatment to the full extent of you adversary’s ability. That’s a pretty scary thought.
If someone physcially attacks me, the “gloves comes off” as they say. Nothing is off-limits at that point. I will punch, stab, gouge, kick, bite and anything else to defend myself! And I would likely continue until my attacker was dead and still sleep like a baby that night!
I grew up with a violent alcoholic father who stumbled home drunk around 2-3am on weekend nights. And he came home to an extremely pissed off wife waiting to push every one of his buttons and start a fight. And in 20 years of marriage, he never landed a single good punch on her! But if he even attempted to take swing at her, she tore into him with everything she had! She didn’t stop until he went down AND stayed down! She would use anything she could get her hands on to fight him- Baseball bat, lamps, iron fire pokers, 2-liter Cokes, a dining room chair, an iron skillet, literally ANYTHING she could get her hands on! We had swinging ‘saloon’ doors between our kitchen and dinging room (it was built in 1971, so the decor was hideous) and once she yanked one of those doors off it’s hinges (about 3-4 feet tall and weighed 20lbs or so). She nailed him right over the head with it and it shattered into toothpicks! Luckily it was louvered rather than solid or it might have killed him.
My protective instincts kicked in when I was about 10 years old and I fought him just as hard as she did. Eventually, I started waiting on the porch half the night with my loaded .22 rifle. When I was 12, I accepted the fact that I would probably end up shooting and killing him to protect me and my mom at some point. I was fully prepared to do that on several occasions if absolutely necessary, but each time I ended up using the other end of the gun instead. A solid oak gun stock planted on the forehead or between the eyes will knock a man out cold for hours and leave a nasty BLACK bruise that won’t go away for weeks! I realized that I would much rather ‘mark’ 'him with my version of a scarlet letter for the world to see than to put him down like a rabid dog…why kill when you can maim and humiliate???
The only time I totally lost all control and fought him with the intention of killing him was when I was 14. My grandfather (his father, who I adored) waited up half the night sitting on the carport (they lived next door to us). He was going to make my dad spend the night at their house instead of coming into our house and starting a fight. My mom heard him arguring outside with my grandpa and ran out to see what was going on and I was just a few steps behind her. She started screaming at my dad and that turned into punching and kicking him. When he tried to hit her back, my grandpa intervened and my dad punched him and knocked him to the ground. My grandpa was in his mid 70s and had suffered three strokes and two heart attacks at that point. When I saw that he couldn’t get up and couldn’t move his left leg, I realized that dad had seriously injured him…
It took two deputy sheriffs, my sister’s boyfriend, my mom and one of our neighbors to finally pull me off him! He spent three days in the hospital and had a total of 12 fractures or broken bones (including one cheek bone, collar bone and a concussion) and he had to have two reconstructive surgeries on his face. When he came home from the hosptial after three days, my mom and I had moved out and he was served with divorce papers the following week! Based on the reports filed by the two deputies involved, the county juvenline court required a full psychological examination on me and any subsequent therapy or treatment necessary based on that assessment.
Three different shrinks evaluated me because the first two were confused by the results of their owns tests and interviews. Each of them asked me if I would respond the same way if I had it to do over again and my response was “Without hesitation!” They asked me if I would have felt guilty if I had injured my dad irreparably (brain damage, long-term coma) or killed him and I told them my conscience would have been clear. At that point, in almost any other case, they would label me as a budding sociopath or psychopath. But by every other measure they used, I had no identifiable psychological condition or mental deficiency. I demonstrated a clear and strong understanding of right and wrong and I was actually very caring and compassionate toward others. Their concenscus was that, after years or seeing him try to hurt my mom and fighting to protect her, seeing him hurt my frail grandfather pushed me over the threshold. At that moment, I felt that either my dad had to die or my mom, granda and myself would lose our lives. They also asked me if I thought I would ever attack my father again and I told then no. He actually entered a rehad facility immediately after leaving the hospital, my mom had filed for divorce and we had restraining orders in place to keep him away from me and mom and my dad was now terrified of me! As a condition of the divorce agreement, he had to relinquish all parental and custodial rights to me (at my insistence). Unless he tried to physically harm me or my mother again, I would never lay a finger on him again.
It probably sounds like I had a pretty fucked up childhood and I suppose I did in a lot of ways. But I never felt like a victim or felt sorry for myself. Even as an infant and toddler, I never showed any sort of affection for my father. I remember being as young as five years old that I felt only contempt and hatred for him and saw him as the enemy. I never felt anything remotely close to love for the man. My older sister was his clearly his favorite because she was an athletic superstar, but I was thankful for that because it kept him away from me!
And unlike so many stories of this sort, this one has a somewhat happy ending. I didn’t speak to my dad for 22 years. My grandpa died in 1998 and my grandmother became increasingly feeble in the years after he died. My dad had moved out of the area and went months without calling or visiting his mom.
By 2005, my sister was going by to check on her daily, buy groceries, pay bills and take her to doctor appointments (in addition to working full-time and having a familly of her own. In 2007, I moved back to the area to help my sister. I lived 30 minutes away, so my sister just called or stopped by for a quick 5-10 minute visit every day. But I handled the shopping, paying bills and taking her to all doctor appts and dealing with medical insurance issues.
On Thanksgiving 2011, I went to pick up my Nana to bing her to my mom’s (her former daughter-in-law) to have lunch with us. I found her laying in the hall floor where she had fallen trying to get back to the bedroom from the bathroom. She had vomited massive amounts of blood in the toilet (and all around it) and in the hall after she fell. I called 911 and my sister and I both stayed at the hospital for the next 42 hours until they had ran every possible test and the doctor came to speak with us about the results. She had a grapefruit-sized tumor in her stomach and it had already eaten through the front wall of her stomach which caused the bleeding and vomiting. It was malignant, inoperable and 1% of the radiation necessary to slow it down would be immediately fatal! Best case scenario, she had 10-12 weeks to live.
My sister quit her job and I took an indefinite leave of absence the following Monday. We moved in with Nana (her onlly request thru all of this was to let her die at home if at all possible) and we spent every single night and day there until she died on 02/08/2012. A few days before Christmas 2011, my dad and step-mom showed up with their suticases full and ready to stay for the duration along with us. My initial instinct was to demand that he leave because we had always taken care of her and the last thing I should be forced to do was spend the next few weeks/months under the same roof with him! But I bit my tongue, chewed up a few 10mg Valium and managed to maintain some semblance of civility without actually being nice to him.
(This is the part where my Bible-thumping relatives give all the credit to Jesus…but in the words of Kathy Griffin, Jesus can suck it…I worked very hard to fight back decades of anger and hatred and did so without any alleged ‘divine assistance’)…
A week or so after dad showed up, I caught myself talking to him and being nice before I even reallized it! To my utter disgust, he misinterpreted my accidental kindess as sincerity…and the most horrific moment of my life was when I realized that I actually was SINCERELY being nice to him???
Long story short, the man actually had changed into a person that I actually found quite likable! Over the last 18 months, I have been slowly and cautiously getting to know this new person inhabiting my bio-dad’s body and I really like him…I never dreamed I would say it, but I think I actually love him! He has profusely and tearfully begged me to forgive him for the past and I told him that I forgave him years ago (mostly true). When I was diagnosed with four bleeding stomach ulcers at the age of 27, I had to decide between hangingn on to all the pain and hurt from the past or potentially having parts of my gastro-intestinal system surgically removed and/or dying from the condition. I actually had to thinkn about it because I had never forgiven anyone for anything prior to then…
He and I aren’t BFFs by any stretch, but I try to go by and visit him and my step-mom every two or three weeks. I usually enjoy their company and they seem to feel the same. What amazed me most was that he admitted (confessed?) his sins and asked me to forgive him for all of them. He also said that he was thankful that I beat him within an inch of his life because it was the wake up call of a lifetime and he realized that he was at rock bottom. He saw how much his own son hated hiim and how much pain he had caused for his his wife, my grandparents and me. If he had never acknowledged all of it and asked for my forgiveness, I would have cut him off again after Nana died and never spoken to him again. But seeing the agony he felt and the genuine remorse and regret in his words…that was what I needed to truly forgive him and for the healing to begin…(and Jesus was busy with some silly mess in the Middle East at the time so he obviously had no part it it)
There are gradations between ‘alls well’ and ‘absolutely ludicrous violence’, you react to the threat thats presented to you. If someone comes at you with a knife I have absolutely no qualms morally or otherwise with that person behing shot dead, although even then you’re shooting to remove the threat not kill the person (or at least you should be if you’re not a goddamn psychopath), if someones coming at you fists flailing wildly then not so much.
As you say it can be disturbingly easy to seriously injure or kill someone in a fight even if that isn’t your intention.
Good post Sir Galahad and I agree with most of it…but I kind of thought a Knight would be committed to fair play anyway? Chivalry and all that…
In the situation in the OP, whatever it took. No issues about fairness, the other person removed any pretence I may have about fighting fair by attacking me so I will use any means I possibly can to seriously fuck them up and get away.
Even though my first reaction would no be smashing their head with a rock, if it doesn’t end with a couple of punches and “fuck you”, then there’s no point in holding back until one of us cannot continue or they decide to run away.
Years ago, there was this girl online who stood me up twice to a meeting. She just likes the feeling. So I opened a new account using her picture and her cell numbers, advertising herself as “personal services provider.” She got a lot of calls and even accidentally met a couple who recognized her through her pictures.
Although I think it’s awesome that you’ve outted yourself as someone who does asshole things (possibly illegal) online, is there a reason you posted this in this thread about fighting due to self defense?
PS: Maybe she stood you up because she had some sense that you do vile things to people when you feel slighted? A therapist might be more beneficial than slinging your nonsense here.
She’s just one of several hits and misses I’ve had over the net, if you know what I mean. What singled her out was the fact that she’s a b|tch on purpose. I’ve been stood up quite many times, which is the girl’s prerogative, no matter how inconsiderate and frustrating it can be. But this one deserved what she got. So this isn’t self defense but plain getting even.
For those who did show up and some had sex with me on that first meeting, yeah I did vile things, but with consent.
