Classic! Are you that bloke…. NO… I can imagine the look of confusion! The thing with skanks is that they are fairly predictable… and the mind is more than likely strained from some sort of concoction.. you may get a few extra seconds of confusion with these sorts with the right choice of reply! Well played.
MMmm, predictable? Perhaps to a certain extent. But which part of the drug's arc are you encountering? There's the basic underlying nature of a person and then different drugs have different personalities of their own too and these can slowly take over. Someone nodding off on smack sometimes wouldn't be able to fight their way off the sofa but someone strung out and /or using alcohol (and whatever else) to to smooth things out will be different.
This was a gamble for me and wasn't any kind of guarantee of outcome but I would always go for lying/ acting etc any day over the multi - dimensional risk to me posed by physical conflict which was the point of this series of articles. This particular guy was well prepared for that - but that's another story.
Blimey. A horseman we respects asks people, when they are describing some sort of explosive behaviour from a horse, “did it come out of the blue or were there warning signs?”. He always thinks there were warning signs. The question is designed to find out how aware the human was of the build-up to the explosive behaviour. If the human says “oh, no, absolutely no warning, completely out of the blue” he knows there is work to be done on their perceptions, and removing their filters. A more aware horse-person might be able to give a detailed account of innumerable small behaviours from the horse that made them aware that all was not well and that a catastrophic loss of calm might ensue.
If things had turned out differently with the Junkies that night, it would have seemed to those women that the attack was completely out of the blue.
If they had been facing in the other direction, would they have picked up on what was going on, I wonder?
Or, does the fact that they were happy to stand with their backs to the main road indicate that they had such low expectation of anything bad happening that they wouldn’t have picked up on the potential danger of the situation?
It’s interesting to ponder how much our perception of safety is down to not noticing ill intent and potentially bad encounters.
And I suppose it can go the other way, seeing threat everywhere, like the woman who said to me that *every single man* she passes in the street, she is *certain* they are going to attack her. Even though she has never actually been attacked (which is an astonishing statistic in itself).
Accurately reading the warning signs is a key point I’m getting from this series, as well as the usefulness of manipulative behaviour.
To read warning signs, a person must first be able to admit that the possibility of bad things happening exists. There are then a series of other hurdles to get over it seems before they are open to the idea of being responsible for their own safety. There is then the danger, as you correctly point out, of going so far the other way that you have confirmation bias everywhere of threat which we tend to see socially as negative.
BOTH states, however, are on the same continuum and are therefore similar unhealthy extremes with their own specific attached problems.
For me there’s been a bit of shift recently. Having grown up in quite a rough place and being, let’s say, “hassled” a lot, when I moved to a rural location my perception of risk reduced (quite accurately I think) massively, certainly in terms of random stranger encounters. I’ve never lost sight of how very horrible people can be, but I think I decided the chances of shit happening were very low in our rural idyll. And as is so often the case, it was someone we knew who turned out to be super dodgy (very unstable ex-army who lived with us for quite some time, and it took us a little while to realise how dangerous he was and it was *very* difficult to extricate him from that situation) Where I live now is, I think, objectively considerably safer than where I grew up, but I think the idea of a “safe” place to live is flawed. It surely isn’t too cynical to say that wherever there are people there’s the possibility of violence, because wherever there are people there’s also the possibility of extreme loveliness.
Kids today are taught not to engage with strangers at all, and it seems to me that’s a mistake. Mine were always very open and bold, and I feel it opened up the possibility to discuss encounters and explain body language and signs and for them to notice and listen to what they perceived about people in different scenarios.
Classic! Are you that bloke…. NO… I can imagine the look of confusion! The thing with skanks is that they are fairly predictable… and the mind is more than likely strained from some sort of concoction.. you may get a few extra seconds of confusion with these sorts with the right choice of reply! Well played.
MMmm, predictable? Perhaps to a certain extent. But which part of the drug's arc are you encountering? There's the basic underlying nature of a person and then different drugs have different personalities of their own too and these can slowly take over. Someone nodding off on smack sometimes wouldn't be able to fight their way off the sofa but someone strung out and /or using alcohol (and whatever else) to to smooth things out will be different.
This was a gamble for me and wasn't any kind of guarantee of outcome but I would always go for lying/ acting etc any day over the multi - dimensional risk to me posed by physical conflict which was the point of this series of articles. This particular guy was well prepared for that - but that's another story.
Blimey. A horseman we respects asks people, when they are describing some sort of explosive behaviour from a horse, “did it come out of the blue or were there warning signs?”. He always thinks there were warning signs. The question is designed to find out how aware the human was of the build-up to the explosive behaviour. If the human says “oh, no, absolutely no warning, completely out of the blue” he knows there is work to be done on their perceptions, and removing their filters. A more aware horse-person might be able to give a detailed account of innumerable small behaviours from the horse that made them aware that all was not well and that a catastrophic loss of calm might ensue.
If things had turned out differently with the Junkies that night, it would have seemed to those women that the attack was completely out of the blue.
If they had been facing in the other direction, would they have picked up on what was going on, I wonder?
Or, does the fact that they were happy to stand with their backs to the main road indicate that they had such low expectation of anything bad happening that they wouldn’t have picked up on the potential danger of the situation?
It’s interesting to ponder how much our perception of safety is down to not noticing ill intent and potentially bad encounters.
And I suppose it can go the other way, seeing threat everywhere, like the woman who said to me that *every single man* she passes in the street, she is *certain* they are going to attack her. Even though she has never actually been attacked (which is an astonishing statistic in itself).
Accurately reading the warning signs is a key point I’m getting from this series, as well as the usefulness of manipulative behaviour.
To read warning signs, a person must first be able to admit that the possibility of bad things happening exists. There are then a series of other hurdles to get over it seems before they are open to the idea of being responsible for their own safety. There is then the danger, as you correctly point out, of going so far the other way that you have confirmation bias everywhere of threat which we tend to see socially as negative.
BOTH states, however, are on the same continuum and are therefore similar unhealthy extremes with their own specific attached problems.
For me there’s been a bit of shift recently. Having grown up in quite a rough place and being, let’s say, “hassled” a lot, when I moved to a rural location my perception of risk reduced (quite accurately I think) massively, certainly in terms of random stranger encounters. I’ve never lost sight of how very horrible people can be, but I think I decided the chances of shit happening were very low in our rural idyll. And as is so often the case, it was someone we knew who turned out to be super dodgy (very unstable ex-army who lived with us for quite some time, and it took us a little while to realise how dangerous he was and it was *very* difficult to extricate him from that situation) Where I live now is, I think, objectively considerably safer than where I grew up, but I think the idea of a “safe” place to live is flawed. It surely isn’t too cynical to say that wherever there are people there’s the possibility of violence, because wherever there are people there’s also the possibility of extreme loveliness.
Kids today are taught not to engage with strangers at all, and it seems to me that’s a mistake. Mine were always very open and bold, and I feel it opened up the possibility to discuss encounters and explain body language and signs and for them to notice and listen to what they perceived about people in different scenarios.