(no subject)

[randomness]

Why is it that well-meaning people fail to understand when people have issues, even emotional landmines, about certain subjects, and still keep banging on about them.

Are they simply clueless? Do they not listen? Or is it that they say things so they can hear themselves talk? What?

Comments

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

It sounds like you've been present at a lot more fistfights than I, though, so we may just be talking in parallel here.

That's certainly possible. My dive bar days are well behind me, though. My strategy was to look like I wasn't worth bothering with, and it generally worked fairly well, even if some of the guys I tended to go out drinking with appeared to *enjoy* getting into bar fights. Never did understand that attitude, myself, but they tended towards larger and louder-mouthed than me.

(Fortunately no one ever came up with anything more than a knife.)

hopefully it wouldn't end in you getting hit too much more often.

Well, the optimal outcome is me getting hit *less* often. But I grant that a society where women were more willing to stand up for themselves is a good one. Ideally, we get there by deciding random violence is less useful to anyone rather than encouraging women to hit people more.

[holmes-iv.livejournal.com]

Well, there's always the Heinlein theory, wherein the implied threat of violence all around you makes you generally less willing to initiate it. But when closely examined, some of Heinlein's brilliant ideas do end up, at the very least, being kind of easy to make fun of.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

At the very least.

As an aside, Larry Niven wrote a short story set in LA whose conclusion was that anarchy wasn't stable; it broke down into violent chaos too easily. I guess living there in the period between the 1965 Watts and the 1992 riots may have informed his thinking on the subject.