I can’t agree with this.

Sparring and fighting are fun. As long as both parties are involved in it consensually and it’s regulated, I don’t see the problem.

The difference of course is that animals can’t consent; humans can.

But this is just stupid.

The only way to get good at self defense is to spar – which is a form of fighting. Not no-holds-barred, knock out type of fighting, but fighting nonetheless. The closer to real fighting without injuring one another the better, too.

Therefore her position is self-contradictory.

I’m no fan of violence for its own sake. But I believe that humans contain a core of violence in their very genes. I don’t believe in the liberal conception that everything is due to social conditioning only.

Fighting and watching people fight most likely has the effect of reducing violence and propensity to violence in non-ritual scenarios.

It’s also the most grueling form of exercise I’ve ever participated in. Never have I been so bone tired as when sparring and fighting.

It’s great to believe in a world where violence – especially for women – isn’t a real possibility.

However, we do not live in that world.

The conventional wisdom promulgated successfully now by Windows 8 defenders is that Windows XP was a terrible OS for the first two years after its release and was widely hated.

Nice bit of historical revisionism, but I was there. Windows XP was very much appreciated and many people looked forward to it and were not disappointed. After the vast failure of Windows ME, the stability and ease of use of XP was a major relief.

Being the first consumer release of the NT kernel to the masses, XP brought a lot of changes, nearly all of them good.

People didn’t care much for the Fisher Price interface, but unlike Windows 8’s Metro interface, it was easy to change.

Interesting how things become common knowledge that are utterly, utterly false. It happens in politics, too, but rarely do I get to see it so close up.

Though I think identity politics has achieved many good and even some great things, compared to the alternative of making structural systemic changes I think it is a failure. And this I don’t believe is a false dichotomy, either.

Of course the Right does not support identity politics, not per se, but far prefers it to the alternative, which in a short time would eliminate them nearly completely as a social movement and diminish them greatly as a political one.

Which is to say that in the cabals and cliques of the Right Wing, identity politics and the adherents thereof are seen as a benign and tractable opponent, whereas mass movements like union organization and a more-effective Occupy are viewed as extremely dangerous and to be avoided at all costs.

So by “allowing” and lightly parrying and sometimes even encouraging identity politics, the Right avoids what it sees as a greater evil – that of mass revolts, true labor organization and their (in that scenario) unavoidable political defeat.

Identity politics serves – not by design, but inherent in the nature of its discourse – to divide what should be naturally-aligned groups, just as slave-owners and aristocratic whites during the Jim Crow era managed to align socially and economically poor whites with rich whites rather than poor whites with poor blacks, who by rights and lack thereof should have been natural allies.

I don’t begrudge the actual achievements of identity politics. But I do think it’s time to build on those and then to integrate coalitions. This creation of a true mass movement is more likely by far to change the world as compared to the current practice of estranging and alienating all but a tiny coterie with call-out culture and the busy and overbearing policing of other’s identities which serve only to prove your own credibility and authenticity.